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AMERICA
America I’ve given you all and now I'm nothing.
America two dollars and twentyseven cents January
17, 1956.
I can't stand my own mind.
America when will we end the human war?
Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb.
I don't feel good don't bother me.
I won't write my poem till I'm in my right mind.
America when will you be angelic?
When will you take off your clothes?
When will you look at yourself through the grave?
When will you be worthy of your million Trotskyites?
America why are your libraries full of tears?
America when will you send your eggs to India?
I'm sick of your insane demands.
When can I go into the supermarket and buy what I
need with my good looks?
America after all it is you and I who are perfect not
the next world.
Your machinery is too much for me.
You made me want to be a saint.
There must be some other way to settle this argument.
Burroughs is in Tangiers I don't think he'll come back
it's sinister.
Are you being sinister or is this some form of practical
joke?
I'm trying to come to the point.
I refuse to give up my obsession.
America stop pushing I know what I'm doing.
America the plum blossoms are falling.
I haven't read the newspapers for months, everyday
somebody goes on trial for murder.
America I feel sentimental about the Wobblies.
America I used to be a communist when I was a kid
I'm not sorry.
I smoke marijuana every chance I get.
I sit in my house for days on end and stare at the roses
in the closet.
When I go to Chinatown I get drunk and never get laid.
My mind is made up there's going to be trouble.
You should have seen me reading Marx.
My psychoanalyst thinks I'm perfectly right.
I won't say the Lord's Prayer.
I have mystical visions and cosmic vibrations.
America I still haven't told you what you did to Uncle
Max after he came over from Russia.
I'm addressing you.
Are you going to let your emotional life be run by
Time Magazine?
I'm obsessed by Time Magazine.
I read it every week.
Its cover stares at me every time I slink past the corner
candystore.
I read it in the basement of the Berkeley Public Library.
It's always telling me about responsibility. Business-
men are serious. Movie producers are serious.
Everybody's serious but me.
It occurs to me that I am America.
I am talking to myself again.
Asia is rising against me.
I haven't got a chinaman's chance.
I'd better consider my national resources.
My national resources consist of two joints of
marijuana millions of genitals an unpublishable
private literature that goes 1400 miles an hour
and twenty-five-thousand mental institutions.
I say nothing about my prisons nor the millions of
underprivileged who live in my flowerpots
under the light of five hundred suns.
I have abolished the whorehouses of France, Tangiers
is the next to go.
My ambition is to be President despite the fact that
I'm a Catholic.
America how can I write a holy litany in your silly
mood?
I will continue like Henry Ford my strophes are as
individual as his automobiles more so they're
all different sexes.
America I will sell you strophes $2500 apiece $500
down on your old strophe
America free Tom Mooney
America save the Spanish Loyalists
America Sacco & Vanzetti must not die
America I am the Scottsboro boys.
America when I was seven momma took me to Com-
munist Cell meetings they sold us garbanzos a
handful per ticket a ticket costs a nickel and the
speeches were free everybody was angelic and
sentimental about the workers it was all so sin-
cere you have no idea what a good thing the
party was in 1835 Scott Nearing was a grand
old man a real mensch Mother Bloor made me
cry I once saw Israel Amter plain. Everybody
must have been a spy.
America you don't really want to go to war.
America it's them bad Russians.
Them Russians them Russians and them Chinamen.
And them Russians.
The Russia wants to eat us alive. The Russia's power
mad. She wants to take our cars from out our
garages.
Her wants to grab Chicago. Her needs a Red Readers'
Digest. Her wants our auto plants in Siberia.
Him big bureaucracy running our fillingsta-
tions.
That no good. Ugh. Him make Indians learn read.
Him need big black niggers. Hah. Her make us
all work sixteen hours a day. Help.
America this is quite serious.
America this is the impression I get from looking in
the television set.
America is this correct?
I'd better get right down to the job.
It's true I don't want to join the Army or turn lathes
in precision parts factories, I'm nearsighted and
psychopathic anyway.
America I'm putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.
~ Allen Ginsberg
Oriana:
There are so many things I love about America, starting with its size and miles and miles of highways through nothing into to nothing (Nevada, Nebraska), including its wildness and craziness, including Allen Ginsberg. I took a poetry workshop with him as one of the instructors. He didn't teach poetry; he taught fearlessness.
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THE COLLAPSE OF LATIN GRAMMAR
The complete collapse of Latin's complex grammar wasn't a deliberate reform—it was a slow phonetic accident. Everyday Romans simply got lazy and started dropping consonants at the ends of words.
The most significant casualty was the final -m. In Classical Latin, this letter was crucial because it marked the accusative case, identifying the direct object of a sentence. Once a word like rosam eroded into rosa in everyday speech, the line between the object and the subject began to blur.
Compounding this was the collapse of Latin vowel length. Classical Latin relied on the duration of a spoken vowel to signal meaning. For example, a short "a" often meant the subject (puella, or "the girl"), while a long "a" signified the ablative case (puellā, meaning "by, with, or from the girl"). As the empire expanded and absorbed diverse populations, the subtle phonetic distinction between long and short vowels collapsed. Suddenly, dozens of distinct grammatical endings sounded exactly identical to the listener.
With the ends of words eroding, spoken sentences became hopelessly ambiguous. To clarify relationships between words, speakers naturally started leaning on prepositions as a structural crutch. Instead of relying on a fragile dative case ending to say "to the father" (patri), speakers began using the preposition ad combined with the noun (ad patrem), a combination that eventually evolved into phrases like the Spanish al padre or the French au père. Similarly, the preposition de was increasingly utilized to explicitly state possession, replacing the old genitive case.
Cicero
Alongside the rise of prepositions, sentence structure had to become strictly locked. Classical Latin could afford highly flexible, poetic word order because the noun endings served as permanent name tags for a word's function. Once those tags wore off, a strict Subject-Verb-Object sequence became mandatory just to tell the actor from the acted-upon. What began as simple phonetic corner-cutting in the streets of ancient Rome ultimately reshaped the grammatical foundation of half of Europe. ~ SepiaGlyphs, Quora
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‘LUCK’ AND ‘HAPPINESS’
From Roman freedom to Viking happiness, the iconic words in the Declaration of Independence reveal thousands of years of humans wrestling with how to live well together – and the power of language to put those ideas into action.
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."
When Thomas Jefferson drafted these words in the Declaration of Independence, two things were on his mind. One: he needed to find "terms so plain and firm as to command their assent" by the colonies, as he later explained, and justify independence from Great Britain. Two: beyond the practical purpose, he wanted the text to be "an expression of the American mind, and to give to that expression the proper tone and spirit called for by the occasion".
250 years ago, Congress approved the Declaration on 4 July 1776. But the meaning of those seemingly simple terms – "created equal", right to "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness" – continue to provoke debate.
"These phrases seem always to be running automatically in the American background, rather like software," says Michael Ditmore, professor of English at Pepperdine University in Malibu, US, and the author of Texting the Nation: Agencies and Actions in the Declaration of Independence. "Still, considered purely in their textual wording, we hardly agree on what they mean or obligate us to," he adds.
A closer look at the origins of these words reveals that we're not the first to wonder about their meaning. From pre-Roman cultures to the Vikings, an extraordinary range of civilizations grappled with concepts like "liberty" and "happiness" – and in the process, coined the words that ended up declaring America's independence. 
The words used in the Declaration of Independence have a rich history and originate from distant cultures
A 'mongrel language'
Let's start with the brief phrase "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness".
"This iconic line is actually a great demonstration of what a mongrel language English is," says Tom Birkett, a professor of Old English and Old Norse at University College Cork in Ireland.
"Life" is rooted in Old English, a language brought to Britain by Germanic tribes from around AD400-500. "Liberty" and "pursuit" are Latin-rooted, then evolved into French and arrived in Britain with the Norman French conquest in AD1066.
And then there is "happiness": a word echoing with distant voices telling stories of trolls, battles and seafarers.
"Happiness has an interesting etymology, as it comes from Old Norse happ, meaning 'fortune' or 'good luck'," says Birkett. "When 'happy' is first attested in Middle English it means 'fortunate', or 'blessed by good luck'."
Old Norse, a Scandinavian language, was spoken by Viking raiders and Scandinavian settlers who brought the word to Britain from around AD800 onwards. Happ appears, for example, in the nickname of the Norse explorer Leif Erikson, who was also known as "Leif the Lucky", Leif heppni Erikson. He was a member of an early voyage to North America in the 11th Century, and saved a group of shipwrecked sailors – which may have partly inspired his nickname.
One way to interpret "happ" is as something fixed and fated, which can't be controlled. It still echoes with that meaning in English words such as "hapless" – luckless, unfortunate – and "happen" – to occur by chance. 
But over time, the English meaning of "happy" and "happiness" gradually shifted from "favored by fortune" to "glad, pleased, content". In the 17th and 18th Centuries, the Enlightenment movement, with its ideals of human rights, fundamentally challenged the idea that one's fortune was fixed or divinely steered: instead, human reason and action took on a central role.
By the time the Declaration was drafted by Thomas Jefferson, with inspiration from the Virginia Declaration of Rights, "happiness" had acquired many layers of meaning. And in the Declaration, its pursuit was presented as a human right – one that was central to the new United States.
"The document was both political and philosophical, asserting the 'separate and equal station' of the new United States among the nations of the Earth, while also laying out the philosophical underpinnings for that assertion," says Carli Conklin, an associate professor of law and constitutional democracy at the University of Missouri, US, and the author of The Pursuit of Happiness in the Founding Era: An Intellectual History.
"As both Thomas Jefferson and fellow drafter John Adams stated, the Declaration was not asserting anything new. It was not intended to do so," says Conklin. "These ideas were commonplace in Enlightenment Era discussions about politics and law, with many of these ideas stretching back millennia. "What was new was "the opportunity to practically apply these principles in the formation and establishment of a brand new government in the new United States", she says.
The punchy phrasing hid a lot of ambiguity, however.
That's because on a practical level, the text had to be easy to agree to, says Ditmore: "It had to speak with a voice and sense common enough across 13 competing, edgy – and in-development – colony states to seal agreement for the publicity of independence." As a result, its phrasing was seemingly clear, and easy to endorse, but actually, left a lot of room for conflicting interpretations, he says.
Those interpretations have only widened since then. For example, how we think of happiness has changed over time, says Conklin.
"Our general understanding of happiness today does not seem to be as rich or as expansive as the understanding of the concept in the founding era," Conklin says. "To the founders, to be happy was to experience a state of well-being or human flourishing."
The founders distinguished between what they called "fleeting and temporal" happiness, and "true and substantial" happiness, she explains. To pursue true happiness was to live a life of virtue, she says: one of wisdom, justice, courage, moderation, industry and benevolence.
"As John Adams wrote in a letter to his wife, Abigail, the founders believed 'the virtues that make for a happy private life make for a happy public life', as well," says Conklin.
While the idea of a right to the "pursuit of happiness" might seem far removed from the happ in Old Norse sagas, there is a subtle echo of voyages, quests and human persistence in both contexts – along with the idea of an uncertain outcome.
"The Declaration does not include a right to attain happiness," Conklin points out. "It contains only the right to pursue."
How exactly might one pursue happiness, then?
One clue is in the other rights – to life and liberty, Conklin says: "The founders most frequently talked about liberty as a status – a status from which one could exercise their reason and free will toward action," she explains. "The right to pursue happiness, then, was the right to determine and then to take that action – to exercise one's reason and free will in active pursuit of one's own well-being."
That meaning of liberty – as a state that allows you to actively shape your life – may sound very modern. But as with "happiness", the ancient roots of "liberty" reveal how humans have wrestled with the idea of freedom, and what it means to be free, for a very long time.
Freedom and heartbreak in Roman-era Britain
"Liberty is a rather old word," says Philippa Steele, a research professor in the Faculty of Classics at the University of Cambridge. It is built on an Indo-European root "which surfaces in numerous languages across Europe and Asia with a meaning connected to 'people'," she explains.
English has been heavily influenced by Latin and French, which gave us the word for Liberty.
This ancient word appears in Greek as eleutheria, in Latin as libertas, and many related, but lesser-known languages. In all cases, it generally related to personal freedom, she says.
The word, and Latin terms more generally, arrived in Britain several times.
One of its oldest appearances on British soil is on a 2,000-year-old tombstone from a Roman-era settlement. The stone was put up by a widower, Barates, for his late wife, Regina. The Latin inscription refers to Regina as a "liberta", a "freedwoman": liberta, or libertus for men, was the Roman term for freed, formerly enslaved people.
Latin lived on in Britain for some time after the Romans left. But many of the Latin-rooted words used in English today, including "liberty", were re-introduced later, with the 1066 Norman French invasion – French being a descendant of Latin.
"Liberty", also spelled "libertee" and "libertie", appears in various English texts from around 1300AD onwards. It refers to freedom from serfdom, but also, the freedom to do certain things.
This historical link between the word liberty and freedom from enslavement then meets a painful twist in the Declaration of Independence: an early passage condemning slavery, and describing enslavement as a crime against liberty, was deleted from the draft. And Jefferson, as well as other founders, enslaved people themselves. "They did not apply these rights to all people, in practice," says Conklin.
Steering the ship
Other words in the Declaration also carry long histories of people trying to express complex ideas, for example, through metaphor. One of them is "government", as in: "it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government".
"It comes from Latin via Old French,” says Steele, but the Latin verb gubernare is a borrowing from [the Greek word kybernao]", meaning, to steer a ship. She adds that this Greek root also lives on "cybernetics", and other words that feature "cyber".
And then there is the document's title: "Declaration comes from a root related to light and brightness: claro quite literally means "illuminate", and a declaratio is an act of making clear," says Steele.
While it drew on ancient words, the Declaration also marked a linguistic beginning: one of American English as a distinctive voice. That shift became more pronounced in the early decades of independence.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20260625-the-ancient-words-in-declaration-of-independence-and-how-they-arrived-in-english?utm_source=firefox-newtab-en-us
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THE AMERICAN DREAM: JUST BARELY SURVIVING
Sixteen years ago, Abdi Nor Iftin was a Somali refugee living in one of the roughest slums in Kenya when he found out he had won the lottery of a lifetime. Out of nearly eight million applicants in 2013, he had been one of the lucky 50,000 granted a US visa through a scheme known as the diversity visa scheme that the US government had begun in the 1990s.
Abdi had long dreamt of moving to America. He was so obsessed, his childhood friends even nicknamed him "Abdi America" after he learnt to speak English by watching Hollywood movies. "My whole life I have been in love with America — the best country in the world, the dreamland, the land of opportunity," he told the BBC in 2014.
That year, Abdi, now 41, arrived in the US, settled in a small town in Maine, got a job installing insulation and became a US citizen. But now, his hopes have run up against reality. He lost his job at a refugee resettlement agency this year, and consequently his health insurance.
On the eve of the United States' 250th birthday, Abdi, like many Americans, is feeling uneasy about the future of his country.
"I feel like the American Dream is alive, but not well," he told me.
Meanwhile, Luke Mullen, a 24-year-old actor from California, told me he's planning on moving to Canada because of a lack of film opportunities in Hollywood, of all places.
"Wealth is getting consolidated in this country and as that happens, the opportunities are dwindling," he said.
Survey after survey taken ahead of the 250th anniversary of America's founding shows many Americans feel the "American Dream" the promise that anyone in the United States can create a bright future for themselves — is fading.
A recent poll from the Associated Press-NORC found that only a third of the public believes the American Dream still exists. The sentiment is the same across many surveys. One recent study from the Pew Research Center, shows that most Americans say the country's best days are behind it.
America's 250th birthday also comes at a moment of deep polarization and partisan divide.
So what does it mean if the Dream — a brand exported around the world in movies, music and pop culture — feels out of reach?
'Not a dream of motor cars'
In those early days after the Revolutionary War and well into the 21st Century, what became known as the Dream enticed millions of immigrants to this shiny new nation full of hope, optimism and individualism. Factory workers, farmers, gold diggers, frontiersmen flocked to the US with the belief that they could create a new identity — an "American" — unshackled from the class systems of Europe.
Historians will tell you that the Dream never included everyone — certainly not Native Americans, slaves, or even women. Nevertheless, the idea of the American Dream persisted.
The concept of the American Dream dates back to the founding of the US, but the phrase wasn't popularized until later, in The Epic of America, a book published in 1931 during the Great Depression.
In it, the historian James Truslow Adams wrote: "It is not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable."
Over the years, the slogan has evolved. These days it's often associated with entrepreneurialism, social mobility and, above all, economic opportunity.
"It has always been about doing better in life than before," says Cyril Ghosh, author of The Politics of the American Dream: Democratic Inclusion in Contemporary American Political Culture. "For some people, the better in life is simply not being persecuted by the Church of England.
"It's not only about materialism. It's about security. It's about doing better than a previous station. That's what it's always been about."
Abdi had grown up in Somalia, hiding in dugouts to avoid getting shot by the militant group al-Shabab.
"Freedom was a huge priority. Living the next day, breathing next day, was a big, big issue, and I really wanted that," he said, explaining why he had wanted to move to the US.
Researchers say first-generation immigrants, like Abdi, are often more upbeat about the potential of America.
"Many are coming from less wealthy nations. And so they really are going to end up doing better than if they had not emigrated," says Elizabeth Suhay, author of Debating the American Dream: How Explanations for Inequality Polarize Politics.
"Immigrants, for the most part, are more likely to say that they are achieving the Dream, or they've achieved it," said Mark Hugo Lopez, director of race and ethnicity research at the Pew Research Center who has specifically looked in-depth at attitudes among Latino immigrants.
They also tend to be, Lopez said, more optimistic about the prospects for their children.
American Dream interrupted
The American Dream has always been a sell for immigrants. However, fewer of them are coming these days.
President Trump has made curbing immigration a cornerstone of his presidency, after campaigning on a promise to carry out the largest mass deportation program in history.
During his second term, Trump has not only clamped down on the number of immigrants illegally entering via the southern border; he has blocked some legal pathways to come to the US, including the diversity visa program that Abdi used.
But today it's not just that the US is welcoming fewer immigrants, it also appears a record number of people may be leaving.
One suggestion is that many Americans who grew up in the US don't think the country has held up its end of the bargain — that if you work hard and you play by the rules, you should have a decent, comfortable life.
Last year, in a historic reversal, the number of Americans moving to Ireland was higher than the number of Irish moving into the US. The US government doesn't track the number of Americans voluntarily leaving the country, so there aren't official statistics, but reporting suggests it's not just Ireland.
A record number of Americans are applying for UK citizenship, and The Wall Street Journal reported that the number of Americans arriving to live and work in nearly all of the EU's 27 member states is rising.
Why are people leaving? Some point to current US politics, others to healthcare costs and the overall standard of living. In most cases it is likely to be for a variety of reasons, some of them personal.
For Luke Mullen, it's about job prospects.
The actor, who starred in the Disney show Andi Mack as a teen and has now become more involved with writing and production, says he has more opportunities for film projects these days in Vancouver, Canada than he does in southern California. Vancouver is covered by new government tax credits to try to help it compete with Hollywood and become a major movie hub.
The American Dream has been sold around the world, in part, through American cinema and in many ways, Hollywood epitomizes the idea of making it in America. However, for Luke it's more complicated — he says it seems there were more opportunities in the past. In the last few years, spending from big studios on Hollywood films and TV has stagnated or dropped.
He said: "I can't even imagine growing up in the 90s and the boom of TV and the rom coms and all all those projects, but especially right now we're seeing just a total, total cost-cutting effort to make it harder and harder to get projects made, take less and less risks and hire less people."
He recently became a Canadian citizen thanks to a change in Canadian law last December.
"My process in becoming a Canadian citizen is very much tied to the fact that I can't get these things made here that I've been working on for years and [I'm] passionate about," he told me.
And so he's intending to move to Canada. Though, he wants to be clear, not forever.
"I'm never gonna abandon America. This is my home and I think it's worth fighting for still. There's so much that we need to do to make it better in this country," he said.
Aspiration versus reality
These days, the consensus among sociologists and political scientists is that financial success has increasingly become a central tenet of the Dream – the belief that my children or grandchildren will have a better life than me.
"Roughly speaking, the American Dream is the idea that if you work hard, you ought to achieve a comfortable life, what we might call a middle-class lifestyle — a house, healthcare, the ability to take care of your kids, a car, college," said Suhay.
Statistics also suggest that over the last 50 years, the idea that every generation will do better than the one before has been eroded.
Research by the Harvard University economist Raj Chetty found that among children born in 1940, 90% of them grew up to earn more than their parents. Today, only half of children born in the 1980s are on track to do better than their parents economically.
This perception of economic abundance spread in the 1950s with the post-WWII boom, perhaps best symbolized through the growth of single-family homes adorned with white picket fences. The Dream became particularly popular in political rhetoric, Ghosh says, in the mid-60s with the civil rights movement and more expansive immigration policies.
"It is a core part of America," said Suhay. “Almost everybody agrees that this is an important ideal. But… we have huge debates about whether or not the United States actually delivers the American Dream.”
So when did the Dream start to fade?
The Dream started to decline some 50 years ago, beginning in the 1970s, with globalization and wage stagnation, according to Mark Rank, co-author of Chasing the American Dream: Understanding What Shapes Our Fortunes.
"It's become much harder to attain the American Dream — this idea of an economic bargain that if you work hard and you play by the rules, you should have a decent, comfortable economic life," he said. "That idea of each generation doing economically better than the past generation is a key component of the American Dream. And that had been the case up until about the 1970s," he says.
And experts say that in the subsequent years, the Dream began to experience a prolonged decline as socioeconomic inequality increased.
Then, some experts say, there was another tipping point: the financial crisis of 2008 and the aftershocks that meant home ownership and job stability were increasingly out of reach.
And many Americans never recovered that economic optimism. Despite this, American wages remain much higher than ones in the UK, and across much of Europe.
Irrespective, wide partisan divides persist over whether the Dream is achievable. Surveys show more Republicans still appear to hold the faith, as do older Americans. Young adults seem particularly cynical. One poll found only a fifth of adults aged 18-29, people like Luke, think the Dream remains a possibility.
That being said, the Dream has never been entirely about financial success. For many, it's a dream of freedom and individual rights that trace back to America's founding documents, such as the Bill of Rights.
And in that vein, it's worth noting that many black Americans have long thought the Dream was a myth built upon lofty rhetoric from the Founding Fathers that didn't mesh with the reality of American slavery and segregation.
Black people have long been more cynical about the Dream
Martin Luther King Jr described America as manifesting a "schizophrenic personality" long before the nationwide disillusionment with the Dream began.
"In a real sense America is essentially a dream — a dream yet unfulfilled," he said in a 1960 address in North Carolina. "Slavery and segregation have been strange paradoxes in a nation founded on the principle that all men are created equal."
Reniqua Allen-Lamphere, a writer who's researched black attitudes toward the Dream, described the concept as one of America's "most enduring myths".
"Black folks have their own experiences with the American Dream partially because so much of their experience has been fighting for literal freedom," she told me. And, yet she added "the American Dream is a part of me — that hope for a better day, even though I find it hard. I find it really hard."
Keeping the Dream alive
One nugget that stood out to me as I dug through all the various polls of the last several months was a survey conducted by The Times that suggested, despite the overall pessimism about the Dream in this moment, "61% of poll respondents said they believed in the concept".
Brandon Patty, a 44-year-old clerk and comptroller in St John's County, Florida and a Navy Reserve commander, is one such American who believes passionately that the Dream is alive and working. "I'm just honored to kind of be a part of it," he told me. "Even just by God's grace, being born here, and being a part of American experiment".
"When I hear the phrase 'American Dream', it means to me that the opportunities are limitless — that in America, you can go from nothing and find your way… it's something that is intrinsic as an American in many ways."
Brandon was the first in his family to graduate from college, the first in his generation to graduate from high school.
"I'm 44 now, and, candidly, I'm living it," he said, he said of the Dream.
Gonzalo Schwarz, president and CEO of The Archbridge Institute, a public policy think tank, agrees that it's important to focus on the positives of living in America.
The Archbridge Institute's own polling found that majorities across various demographic groups agree that the American Dream is alive and well. The organization says this is because it has a different methodology and asks more direct questions than most other polls, which it says are more conceptual in nature.
"If we focus only on the negative aspects and on the share of people who believe the Dream is out of reach, we risk making the demise of the American Dream a self-fulfilling prophecy," Schwarz says. “We should step back, take a longer-term view, and be inspired to rekindle the American Dream as a beacon of hope for America's next 250 years.”
For Mark Rank, the sociologist who's written about this, the Dream, even if more conditional than before, is still alive.
"If you say it's no longer alive... You have ripped out a key component of America's identity," he says. "I think there are questions about it, and there is uncertainty about it." But the way he sees it – in the spirit of American optimism, these questions are a chance to rethink how the US can ensure the Dream remains accessible to everyone for the next 250 years.
Back in Maine, Abdi said his brother Hassan, who couldn't immigrate to the US because of visa restrictions, instead recently became a citizen of Canada. "My brother says they have better healthcare," he tells me with a laugh.
Despite the setbacks, Abdi says if he had to do it all over, he would still choose the US. “I guess it's my first love.”
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx2vpz2qee5o
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ILLEGIBLE BENEFITS
The costs of transformative innovations are immediately clear; it’s the long-term gains that are the hardest to understand
Before 1846, the scope of what a surgeon could attempt was bounded by what a conscious patient could endure in minutes. Patients were held down by assistants or strapped to the operating table (my mother’s tonsillectomy in early 1960s Sicily was still performed more or less this way), and the surgeon’s reputation depended on the economy of their movements, because every second of the procedure was a second of conscious agony. Robert Liston could amputate a leg in under 30 seconds, because he had to. Operations were confined to the body’s surface, to amputations and the drainage of abscesses and the excision of superficial tumors, because no patient could withstand sustained work inside the thoracic, abdominal or cranial cavities.
When ether and chloroform arrived, some of the most respected figures in American and British medicine argued that rendering patients unconscious was a grave clinical error. John Pollard Harrison of the Medical College of Ohio, then vice-president of the American Medical Association, wrote in 1849 that ‘pain is curative – the actions of life are maintained by it – were it not for the stimulation induced by pain, surgical operations would more frequently be followed by dissolution.’
Charles Meigs, who held the chair of obstetrics at Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia, treated labor pains as a desirable, salutary and conservative manifestation of the life force. Other surgeons pointed out that conscious patients confirmed the surgical site, assisted in decisions during the operation, and provided real-time diagnostic feedback that would be lost under anesthesia. Safety concerns intensified as reports accumulated, culminating in the Royal Medical and Chirurgical Society’s 1864 committee report, which catalogued 123 chloroform deaths. In the early years, the opposition to anesthesia was widespread and grounded in the best available clinical evidence.
What none of these critics could have told you was that anesthesia would make possible open-heart surgery, organ transplantation, neurosurgery, and the entire architecture of modern surgical specialization. The benefit was not a more comfortable version of what surgeons had been doing. It was the appearance of a possibility space whose contents were inconceivable from inside the surgical practice of 1846.
Cases of this kind have a particular structure. An innovation arrives whose costs are perfectly legible, since they are visible against the baseline of the practice it is reorganizing and can be measured with the practice’s existing instruments, while its most profound benefits depend on practices, institutions and concepts that do not yet exist at the moment of evaluation.
Serious critics with domain expertise document the costs, often correctly, since costs of that kind are precisely what the evaluative vocabulary they have inherited is built to measure. There is no possible evaluation in the critical moment that could capture the benefits, because the vocabulary that would describe them is itself one of the things the innovation is going to bring into being.
Take dating apps. Eli Finkel and others have shown that app-mediated dating can produce choice overload, weaken commitment formation, and reduce the development of relationship skills that older modes of meeting cultivated more naturally. The empirical literature on loneliness, declining marriage rates among the young, and the collapse of casual in-person romantic initiation is now substantial. The critics are documenting real things, and their evidence is solid in just the way Harrison’s evidence on anesthesia was solid.
What this evidence cannot capture is the set of effects that have emerged through the existence of the apps themselves and that nobody arguing about Tinder a decade ago could have specified. Public space itself has been quietly transformed, since the existence of an alternative channel for romantic initiation has weakened the normative status of an in-person approach to the point where women navigate streets, cafés and workplaces in ways that would have been unrecognizable in 1995. Some of what used to be ambient harassment in physical settings has been redistributed onto platforms where it is at least more controllable, since digital interactions can be filtered, blocked, reported and audited in ways that street and workplace harassment cannot.
The more profound effects go beyond that. Using a formal matching-theory model and state-level data on broadband adoption as a proxy for online dating, the economists Josué Ortega and Philipp Hergovich in 2018 showed that online dating is consistent with the rapid increase in interracial marriages in the United States over the past two decades. Since people used to marry within their existing social graphs, and those graphs were racially segregated, any channel that connected strangers across graphs would be expected to produce social integration, even at modest adoption rates.
Drawing on a nationally representative longitudinal dataset, the sociologist Michael Rosenfeld and colleagues showed that, from around 2013, the most common way for American heterosexual couples to meet was online, and, by 2017, about 65 per cent of same-sex couples met that way, while breakup rates and relationship satisfaction do not differ meaningfully between app-met and friend-met couples once you take into account how long the couple has been together.
Other emergent effects, less easily quantified but well documented, are equally hard to specify in advance. A 2024 survey from the Trevor Project reports that roughly three-quarters of LGBTQ+ young people go online to connect with others because they find it difficult to do so in their daily lives, and a similar proportion say they can be their complete selves online, with both rates rising still further among transgender and nonbinary respondents. Meanwhile, only about half of those same young people find their school to be gender-affirming and only a little over a third say their home is.
The peer-reviewed work consistently finds these online spaces especially important for rural young people without access to an offline community. The proliferation of fine-grained sexual and relational identities depends on infrastructure that lets people with rare combinations of traits find each other across continents rather than within local social graphs. Dating apps are a useful contemporary case because the relevant timescale is short enough that we can see new practices coming into being, but the structure they exhibit has played out repeatedly across the long history of innovations of this kind; looking at the pattern at greater historical depth makes its contours easier to see.
Take the phonograph. The American composer John Philip Sousa, writing in Appleton’s Magazine in 1906 from the absolute centre of his musical authority, argued that the phonograph would destroy amateur musicianship. He was empirically right about the disappearance of the parlor piano over the following half-century. But the recording studio as a creative instrument, as well as sampling, multitrack composition and entire genres that exist only because they are compositionally inseparable from recorded sound were all unsayable in 1906, since they depended on practices, technologies and aesthetic categories that the recording medium itself had to bring into being before anyone could describe what they would amount to.
The pattern is also visible in the infrastructural cases, where the displacement is more diffuse. When gas engineers in the 1880s argued that early electric lighting was inferior to gas, they were correct about the comparison they were making. What the comparison could not capture was that the infrastructure being built to deliver electric light, the generators and transmission lines and distribution networks, would in time become the substrate on which a much wider electronic civilization would be built, including telephony, radio, computation and broadcasting. The path from electric lighting to a transistor is long, runs through inventions and disciplines that did not exist in 1885, and would not have been predictable from inside the 1880s lighting debate.
The argument is actually older than any of these cases. In the Phaedrus, Plato had Thamus warn that writing would corrode memory, and the warning was not wrong about what it was looking at, since the displacement of memorized oral traditions by written records is a real cultural transformation. What Thamus could not warn against, because the words for it did not yet exist, was the cumulative scholarship that depends on stable written reference, the formal logic that requires symbolic notation to be developed at all, and the empirical science whose evidentiary practices are inseparable from the long-form documentary record that writing alone makes possible.
The same pattern is now being argued about in real time around AI, and the mechanism the critics are documenting is the one Thamus already feared. When a tool reliably performs a cognitive operation, the internal capacity for that operation tends to weaken with disuse, and the contemporary version of the worry has empirical support that goes well beyond the Phaedrus.
People who know they can look up something on Google develop weaker memory for the information itself, and habitual GPS users show measurable decline in hippocampal-dependent spatial navigation. Large language models automate cognitive operations of considerably greater scope than route-finding or trivia recall, and there is no principled reason to expect the same mechanism will fail to scale.
A growing body of evidence suggests that this is exactly what is happening. For a 2025 preprint, the research scientist Nataliya Kosmyna and colleagues monitored brain activity during essay writing, and found that participants who wrote with ChatGPT showed significantly weaker neural connectivity than those who wrote unassisted, with the effect persisting when those participants were later asked to write unaided.
The AI researcher Hamsa Bastani and colleagues ran a field experiment with nearly 1,000 high-school students and found that those given a standard AI tutor performed 17 per cent worse on the final unaided exam than those given no AI at all, while a version of the same tool designed to scaffold learning rather than supply answers produced no such deficit.
In a randomized trial of software engineers learning a new Python library, the AI researchers Judy Hanwen Shen and Alex Tamkin reported that those who used an AI coding assistant scored substantially lower on debugging and conceptual-understanding questions. And research by Elena Hayoung Lee and colleagues found that passive AI use, in which participants copied AI output directly, undermined their confidence in their own abilities and their sense of meaningfulness in the work, while active collaboration, in which they drafted first and refined with AI, preserved both qualities.
These are serious findings, and the people who produced them are doing careful work. They are also the AI debate’s version of Harrison on anesthesia, looking at the most comprehensive evidence base available to them while being unable to see the most important thing that will happen next. AI exhibits this legibility asymmetry in extreme form, and it is plausibly the most thoroughgoing case of it the world has yet seen.
CAN THE SKILLS LOST DUE TO INNOVATION BE RECOVERED IF NEEDED?
When the US Navy dropped celestial navigation from the curriculum after GPS made it redundant, it took roughly a decade for the vulnerability to become salient, as awareness grew that GPS could be jammed, spoofed or disabled in a first strike. The subject was reinstated in 2015, and recovery was possible because the US Merchant Marine Academy at Kings Point, New York had continued teaching it, instructors who retained the skill still existed, and the textbooks were still there.
The principle the US Navy learned, and that the aviation industry arrived at independently, is that recovery requires preserved redundancy somewhere in the system, an institutional locus where the displaced capacity continues to be cultivated, so that the trade can be reversed if it looks worse in retrospect than it did in advance.
The most important assessments of these technologies will be made retrospectively, by people working with concepts we do not yet have. The question is how to govern in the meantime, when costs are legible and the benefits that matter most depend on practices we have not yet built. Uniform restriction is a bet that we already know what AI-augmented professional competence will look like, placed at a time when the evidence strongly suggests we do not.
Managed experimentation, with recoverable costs contained by institutional design and the burden of proof on those who would foreclose rather than those who would explore, is a different kind of bet, and the asymmetry I have described gives us reason to prefer it.
Harrison could tell you with precision what anesthesia would cost. He could not have told you about open-heart surgery, because the practices from which such a thing could be imagined did not yet exist. Measurability and importance are not the same thing.
https://aeon.co/essays/what-we-cant-measure-about-ai-yet?utm_source=Aeon+Newsletter&utm_campaign=ed9c3eb172-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2026_05_15_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_-49ad69cbc2-838110632
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THE PUZZLE OF TED BUNDY, A SERIAL KILLER
Psychology experts have been studying the infamous serial killer for several years.Those experts include Thomas Widiger.
"There has long been a fascination with psychopaths. Many of the more popular fictional characters exemplify psychopathy," he said. "These persons often exemplify true evil and one is drawn to view that, like one slows down to observe a traffic accident or enjoys watching a violent or horror movie."
Bundy's mental health and psychiatric state have long been called into question. Widiger, a professor in the Department of Pscyhology at the University of Kentucky, has been on a quest for answers.
As a serial killer, was Bundy unique?
Bundy was particularly interesting, because he was charming and articulate. Many wondered, how could a clean-cut law student with no criminal record be responsible for dozens of murders?
He didn't fit the profile.
Bundy was also able to evade law enforcement. He was arrested, jailed on a charge of murder and then escaped — twice.
While the facts of the case are captivating, Widiger says Bundy was not unique in being a serial murderer.
"He was, for the most part, emotionally stable. A trait common to all psychopaths is the ability to be deceptive — to lie with ease. The classic phrase in psychopathy literature is that they wear 'a mask of sanity,'" he explained. "There is probably a serial murderer some place in the United States at any given moment. They can be very difficult to catch because there is no personal connection between them and the victim."
What do we know about Bundy's mental health?
Bundy received a mental health evaluation when he was on trial for the Florida murders. In fact, he was interviewed by Hervey Cleckley, who is considered to be the "father of psychopathy." He diagnosed Bundy as a psychopath.
By definition, psychopathy refers to "social predators who charm, manipulate and ruthlessly plow their way through life — completely lacking in conscience and feeling for others. They selfishly take what they want and do as they please, violating social norms and expectations without the slightest sense of guilt or regret."
Psychopath is a personality trait that falls under "antisocial personality disorder." People with antisocial personality disorder have a long-term pattern of violating the rights of others without any remorse.
Widiger says Cleckley's analysis is mostly accurate. "However, Bundy would also be diagnosed with necrophilia, paraphilia and sadism more precisely."
According to Widiger's research, Bundy had the following traits:
antagonism (deceptive, manipulative, callous, exploitative and arrogant);
extraversion (engaging and assertive);
high conscientiousness (skilled, competent, thoughtful, organized and diligent); and
low neuroticism (glib charm and fearlessness).
What does it mean to define Bundy as a "successful" psychopath?
Widiger has come to the conclusion, there are “successful” psychopaths — people who have the core characteristics of a psychopath (that is, the traits of antagonism), yet somehow manage to succeed in exploiting others while avoiding punishment.
"I would consider Ted to be a successful psychopath, because of his traits of high rather than low conscientiousness."
Though Bundy was executed more than three decades ago, Widiger believes continued research is a useful tool for learning more and dealing with predatory psychopaths.
https://psychology.as.uky.edu/psychology-researcher-unravels-serial-killer-ted-bundys-mental-health
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AN EXCELLENT YOUTUBE VIDEO ABOUT TED BUNDY, NARRATED BY HIS FEMALE COUSIN
I wish all women could see this video. What a warning.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQtzXKpnf5c
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RUSSIA’S ADVANCE COLLAPSES IN UKRAINE, 40,000 TROOPS KILLED IN JUNE
Brutalist memorial in Donetsk
Russia’s armed forces are aiming to capture the remaining 20 percent of Ukraine’s partially occupied eastern Donetsk region by the end of the year, having – according to Kyiv – failed to meet 14 previous deadlines.
At Russia’s current rate of advance, President Vladimir Putin’s forces will need 5,150 days, or 14 years, to complete the task – in addition to the 12 years Russian-aligned forces have already been fighting to seize Donetsk from Kyiv’s control.
The Institute for the Study of War says that’s because Russian territorial gains have collapsed this year even as casualties have risen, according to the Washington-based think tank, which uses geolocated, open-source information to estimate territorial control.
Russian forces seized 2,190 square kilometers (845 square miles) of Ukraine in the first six months of 2025, compared with 622 sq km (240 sq miles) so far this year, the ISW said.
That translates to a rate of advance of 1.03 sq km (0.39 sq miles) a day this year versus 16.6 sq km (6.4 sq miles) a day in the first six months of 2025.
Those figures worsen dramatically if Russian infiltrations, which do not amount to firm control of territory, are removed from the equation and Ukrainian counter-advances are included.
In that case, Russia’s net gain in the first half of 2026 is just 97 sq km (37 sq miles), according to ISW figures.
“If Putin wants to send another million of his soldiers to keep fighting against this wall, then these million Russians, who have not yet been mobilized into the Russian army and are queuing for gasoline, should think about what awaits them next,” said Ukraine’s president.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy was referring to the 1.4 million Russian casualties since the war began, estimated by the Center for Strategic International Studies on July 1.
Ukraine’s military estimated that Russia suffered another 39,490 casualties in June alone, far outstripping its estimated recruitment capacity this year of 24,000-30,000 a month.
That means Russia’s casualties have risen to catastrophic levels of 1,298 per square kilometer taken in June, compared to 68 casualties per square km in June 2025, said the ISW.
Why is the tide turning?
Zelenskyy has attributed Ukraine’s success this year to “a series of decisions” made last year to increase drone production and develop domestic long-range missiles.
Ukraine has used those resources to disrupt supplies of fuel and ammunition to Russian frontlines – a strategy its Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov called “Logistical Lockdown”.
On June 25 , Zelenskyy announced a 40-day campaign of mid and long-range strikes “against the aggressor state aimed at compelling it to end the war”.
Mid-range strikes have targeted Russian logistics, including warehouses, resupply convoys and bridges.
Those attacks increased from 210 in May to 303 in June, assessed the ISW.
Over a period of just two days, July 1-2 , Ukraine destroyed 12 electricity substations in southern Crimea, as part of its ongoing campaign to make the peninsula unusable for military operations.
The commander of Ukraine’s Unmanned Systems Forces, Robert ‘Magyar’ Brovdi, said his forces struck a Russian target on or behind the frontlines every 52 seconds in June.
“50,147 military targets were destroyed/damaged,” he wrote on his Telegram messaging channel.
Zelenskyy said those short and mid-range capabilities will increase further this month as battalions “will receive additional resources”, he said.
Russia suing for peace – on its terms
Almost a year ago, during Putin’s meeting with US President Donald Trump in Alaska, they reportedly agreed to force Ukraine to hand over Donetsk.
Zelenskyy flatly refused when presented with the proposal.
In the intervening year, the military situation has changed dramatically, with Russia now on the back foot.
Russian officials appeared to advertise their readiness for another US mediation based on what was discussed in Anchorage.
“US proposals were discussed and accepted by the Russian side in Alaska,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov told Kremlin newswire TASS on June 26 .
“We would welcome [US mediation], we remain open to these services and to the process of peaceful settlement itself,” said Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov on the same day.
At the same time, Russia has signaled its opposition to direct Ukrainian proposals, ostensibly believing it will have a more sympathetic interlocutor in Trump.
In responses to Vesti reporter Pavel Zarubin, Putin revealed he had turned down two separate proposals from Kyiv, one for a ceasefire on long-range strikes and another for a ceasefire in the northern Ukrainian regions of Sumy and Kharkiv, as well as the southern regions of Mykolaiv and Dnipropetrovsk, allowing the war to continue along its main fronts – Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhia and Kherson.
“It’s clear why this proposal is being made,” Putin said. “Because our retaliatory strikes deep into Ukrainian territory are far more powerful, devastating, and – to put it bluntly – destructive, leading to truly serious consequences for the (Kyiv) regime.”
Ukraine’s long-range strikes during the past week succeeded in damaging Russia’s Ufa, Nizhegorodsky, Slavyansk and Yaroslavl oil refineries, the Volga and Vyatka cable-laying ships under construction in the Kerch Strait, the Beloomut, Minyayevo and Dubna satellite communications centers near Moscow, the Titan-Barrikady ammunition manufacturer in Volgograd, the Saky military airfield in Crimea and a research institute manufacturing aircraft and missile parts in the Penza region.
Money problems for Putin and the people
Putin has put a brave face as the military flags and public sentiment sours, saying Russia is “standing firm”
As for the economy, Russia relies on oil exports for a quarter of its budget revenues, according to recent analysis, but market analysts say those oil exports have been decreasing.
From January to May, oil revenues fell by 30 percent compared to the same period last year, said Ukrainian Presidential Commissioner for Sanctions Policy, Vladyslav Vlasyuk.
That’s despite the temporary US waiver of sanctions on Russian oil during the Gulf war that began on February 28 . The waiver expired on June 17.
Ukraine attributes the fall in exports to its systematic strikes on Russian oil terminals and pumping stations, which have made the loading of tankers dangerous and difficult.
As Ukraine struck Russian refineries, Russia has sought to export more of its crude oil and to import refined petroleum products to keep its economy afloat.
Fuel shortages were reported in most Russian regions in June, with videos of Russians arguing over who gets to refuel their car being posted on the internet.
Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak attempted to reassure Russians on June 26 , saying “we have sufficient fuel on the market” and that demand had been artificially boosted by 20-30 percent due to “quite a lot of hype”.
Novak said the “system’s logistics links are currently being restructured” and “rebalancing the market will take some time”.
Putin, too, attempted to gloss over the supply problems, saying that Russia had reserves of 1.7 million tonnes of gasoline, which he said was “down a mere four percent from the same period last year”.
Russia has banned the export of diesel, heavily used by the armed forces and Putin extended the ban on June 26.
Industry sources told Reuters that Russia imported 60,000 tons of refined petroleum products from India and intended to import 400,000 tons a month from various countries.
Below is just one of many videos showing Russian refineries on fire after Ukrainian attacks:
SCOTLAND WAS THE 'MURDER CAPITAL OF EUROPE'. THEN IT STARTED TREATING VIOLENCE LIKE A DISEASE
In the early 2000s you were more three times more likely to be assaulted in Scotland than in the US. But when the Scottish authorities started looking at violent crime as a public health problem, levels plummeted and the country now ranks among some of the safest in the world.
~ It was no ordinary day in court. There was no jury, no witnesses or defendants at Glasgow Sheriff Court on 24 October 2008. Instead, in front of the judge, who was dressed in full regalia, were 85 rival gang members from the east end of Glasgow, Scotland's biggest city.
For decades, the area had been plagued by territorial youth gangs, organized crime and fights over drugs and weapons, with knife crime an almost daily occurrence.
Despite their ongoing feuds, the assembled gang members fell silent as they were addressed in turn by a range of speakers. A mother described seeing her son's unrecognizable face after a gang-related machete attack at age 13. An American basketball player recalled losing his brother to gun violence. Doctors and surgeons described brutal lacerations and permanent disfigurements.
The message was clear: the violence has to stop.
"If I was the chief constable [of Strathclyde Police], I probably wouldn't have let us do that," reflects Karyn McCluskey, co-founder and former director of the Scottish Violence Reduction Unit (SVRU), a specialist unit set up by the police in 2005 and extended into a nationwide initiative the following year by the Scottish government. The unit was behind the unusual spectacle of that day.
"He must have thought we were bonkers," she says. "That day, we had police horses at the court, boats going up and down the [river] Clyde, because it was a really risky thing to do. But there was a permissiveness around trying to do something."
That something seemed to work. The gang members in attendance were given a number to call afterwards for support if they wanted to end their involvement in violence; after 10 similar sessions attended by 473 young people, almost 400 of them had called it.
The courtroom intervention was the first of what would be called Scotland's "self-referral sessions", part of the country's efforts to curb record rates of violence which plagued the nation, and particularly Glasgow.
Between 2003-2005, the city had the highest murder rate of any in Europe. The United Nations declared Scotland the most violent country in the developed world, with Scots almost three times as likely to be assaulted as Americans. Newspapers were routinely filled with reports of gruesome murders and bloody gang fights.
Over the following decade, the homicide rate would fall by 56% in Glasgow and 38% in Scotland more widely. Violent crime as a whole declined by almost a third across the country between 2006 and 2015. Today the number of homicides in Scotland is at its lowest level in over 20 years. Numbers of serious assaults and attempted murders have undergone a similar decline.
While the statistics hide the individual stories of tragedy and horror of any violent crime, it is still a remarkable turnaround.
Scotland now ranks somewhere in the middle of European countries for murders, with lower levels per capita than the likes of Sweden, France or England and Wales. How did a nation once beleaguered by knives, gangs and slayings make such a decisive change?
In short, it changed the way it saw violence as a problem – shifting it from being solely a criminal justice issue to one that was also about public health.
"Scotland had the image [in the early 2000s] of the hard, drunk man and a particular reputation for gang activity and knife crime that had been there for generations, all the way back to 18th-Century razor gangs," says Will Linden, deputy director at the SVRU and one of its first employees. In 2003, Linden was working as a police analyst under McCluskey, then Head of Intelligence Analysis for Strathclyde Police, when their department was asked to produce a report on reducing homicide figures.
"When we looked at the data, there was a realization that most homicides were almost happenstance," Linden says. "They weren't preplanned or connected to organized crime, it was usually just a couple of people getting involved in a fight where one pulls out a knife and stabs the other. We started to see that you couldn't have a strategy for dealing with homicide without looking at violence in its entirety and not just at policing.”
The crisis in Glasgow was such that the Chief Constable leading the force at the time, William Rae, gave McCluskey and her colleague John Carnochan, deputy head of the Criminal Investigation Department, almost free reign to try and solve the problem. Rae set up the team that would become the Violence Reduction Unit within the police force but on its fringes, enabling the force to simultaneously take credit for successes and distance itself from failures.
"We got a bit of latitude and we were allowed to fail," says McCluskey, "There was a recognition that when something is so terrible, you have to reinvent everything."
Karyn McCluskey was the co-founder of the Scottish Violence Reduction Unit that largely credited with reducing country's appalling murder rate
From its outset, the SVRU took a public health approach to violence, characterizing it more like a disease than a crime. They chose to focus on prevention and intervention rather than responding after the fact. McCluskey likens this approach to dealing with measles: treating those already infected, vaccinating groups at particularly high risk and working to prevent contagion in the wider community.
It was a decision that was instrumental in the success that followed.
In its simplest guise, a public health approach to tackling violence starts with gathering evidence to identify and understand the problem, before examining the factors that put people at risk and those which protect them.
Nearly two thirds of all violence happens to just 1% of Scotland's population. Risk factors include being a young man from a socially deprived area, as well as things like unemployment, poverty and growing up in an unstable family environment.
Factors that appear to protect against violence include staying in education and having strong parental relationships.
Interventions – everything from initiatives like the one in the Sheriff Court, to peer support groups, educational programs and partnerships with social work, doctors and teachers, are then developed to reduce risk and increase protection. These are tested, implemented and scaled up where they are successful – and then the cycle begins again.
But many of the ideas implemented by the SVRU were borrowed from elsewhere in the world. The idea of tackling violence as a public health problem began in the US in the 1970s. It was then adopted by World Health Organization in 1996 when it declared violence a major worldwide public health problem.
Key to the SVRU's approach, however, was taking what had been learned elsewhere and applying it to Scotland's unique situation.
Its self-referral sessions mentioned near the start of this article were modeled on a gang violence program in Cincinnati, Ohio, which itself came out of the Chicago Project for Violence Prevention. The latter similarly took a public health approach to violence in a city which had experienced a dramatic rise in homicides, more than half of them related to gang activity.
No knives
Public campaigns underlining the wider harm caused by knife crime were part of the strategy employed.
"What we became really skilled at was the implementation of other ideas within the specific context of Scotland," says Linden. "You can't just lift something that works in Chicago or Finland and lay it down in Glasgow, or something that works in Glasgow and lay it down in Edinburgh. You have to understand the scale and nature of your own problem in order to make it work."
For the SVRU, this meant getting out of the police station and into hospitals, schools, social work departments, youth work and communities. Dentists were trained to intervene – recognizing violence-related injury, documenting it as such and signposting patients to sources of help while they were still in the chair. And education chiefs were convinced to stop excluding pupils: in 2022/23, there were fewer than 12,000 exclusions in Scotland compared to a high of almost 45,000 in 2006/7.
As the word spread, others got on board. In 2008, Christine Goodall, an oral surgeon, and two colleagues established the charity Medics Against Violence. When Goodall began her career in maxillofacial surgery in the late 1990s in Glasgow, services were overwhelmed with patients suffering facial trauma as a result of violence. Decades earlier, the city had even given its name to one such injury: the "Glasgow smile", a wound caused by slashing a victim's mouth to their ear.
In the early 2000s, the NHS worked with the SVRU on initiatives such as providing alcohol support within trauma clinics. These worked well, says Goodall, "but I started thinking there was probably more we could do".
"If you're only talking to patients who already have injuries, you're kind of shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted," she says. Medics Against Violence established an education project in schools and a "Hospital Navigators" program, where trained support workers intervene when patients with injuries from violence turn up at an emergency department. Both still exist today.
There was also wider culture change as the SVRU's work reframed the debate about violence into discussion around public health, says Alistair Fraser, a professor of criminology at the University of Glasgow. There was a "growing chorus" of support for the approach as health leaders, educators, community organizations and the early SNP government got involved.
"What I think you saw was the SVRU changing the terms of the debate and people all starting to sing from the same hymn sheet," says Fraser.
The changing conversation on violence reduction mapped helpfully onto other emerging frameworks around childrens' rights and wellbeing, Fraser says. It also tapped into Scotland's enduring vision of itself, helped by the establishment of the Scottish Parliament in 1999, as a uniquely caring, welfare-oriented and egalitarian country.
Scotland's success at reducing violence has now become an example that is admired worldwide. Scotland's closest neighbors were also paying attention.
Since 2019, VRUs have been established in 20 police force areas across England and Wales with the support of the SVRU. This includes London, which accounted for almost a third of all knife offenses in England and Wales last year. Early evaluations have found a reduction in the most serious forms of violence in areas where a VRU operates.
Today, the SVRU remains part of Police Scotland and receives £1.1m ($1.45m) in funding from the Scottish Government each year.
When Kelly, 30, became a parent, she struggled with her mental and physical health. She had grown up in a difficult home environment and found it difficult to manage stress and regulate her own emotions – all risk factors for violence. The BBC has changed Kelly's name at her request to protect her identity.
In 2024, recognizing the need to make her family home feel calmer, Kelly joined a nursery peer support group run by the SVRU as part of its early intervention work, designed to reduce intergenerational cycles of violence.
"I felt really isolated before joining the group," she says. "I often felt overwhelmed. My confidence was low and I spent a lot of time at home, which started to affect my relationships with my partner, my children and others around me."
But over time, things began to change. "The group helped me understand how my past experiences were affecting both me and my family," she recalls. "I started to process things I hadn't dealt with before… I can see now how breaking those patterns can help create a more positive environment for my children.”
The group has improved Kelly's relationships with her partner and her own mother, she says. Her home feels more supportive and she has become less isolated after forming connections with other parents. Now, she hopes to get back into work and wants to contribute to supporting others in her community.
There is still more work to do: a 2024 study found that reduction in serious violence had slowed in recent years, in part due to a lack of "safe spaces" for young people.
Jimmy Paul, the SVRU's director since 2023, also highlights the dangers of social media, the lasting effects of the Covid-19 pandemic and the fact that nearly one in four of Scotland's children grow up in poverty.
"There's more we can do and we believe violence is preventable and not inevitable, so we need to focus on that as we face these new challenges," says Paul. He points to ongoing long-term work in schools, partnerships with homelessness charities and efforts by the SVRU to use data to identify particular areas of concern where they can intervene. “We've still got that role to play as a catalyst for the 'growing chorus' and helping others see their role in violence reduction.”
McCluskey is now chief executive of Community Justice Scotland, a non-departmental public body which is funded by the Scottish Government but independent and evidence-driven. She agrees and points out people in their 30s and 40s now make up the majority of those accused of murder in Scotland rather than teenagers and young adults. It's a trend that might require new interventions. But she is also keen to acknowledge how much has changed.
And, she says, while the names of many people affected by violence in various ways will stay with her forever, she has lost count of how many people's lives have been changed by Scotland's violence reduction movement.
Sometimes, McCluskey says, she walks down the street in Glasgow and spots someone she first met years ago when they were embroiled in violence.
"I might catch their eye, but they don't engage," she says. "Then they'll text me at night and say, 'look, I've got a different life now: I've got a new partner, I've got a kid, I've got a job'," she says. "So we don't say anything in that moment. We just look at each other and acknowledge that we were part of something together.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20260626-how-scotland-changed-the-way-it-tackled-violence
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THE MYTH BEHIND LONG PRISON SENTENCES
When a judge hands out a prison sentence there are four main factors that go into the decision: retribution, rehabilitation, safety and deterrence
Does spending ‘100 years’ behind bars actually help deter crime? BBC Future explores the impact of long prison sentences, and looks at how Norway is taking an opposite approach.
In December 2017, a Thai man named Phudit Kittitradilok was convicted of swindling 2,400 people out of 574 million baht (£13 million) in a Ponzi scheme that promised high return investments.
He was sentenced to a staggering 13,275 years in jail – an amount of time longer than the entire Neolithic era. But in actuality, thanks to Thailand’s penal code that limits prison sentences, Kittitradilok will only end up serving 20 years.
Still, there’s something about the idea of a long prison term that gives the impression that justice is being served. And while Kittitradilok’s case was mostly optics, plenty of people around the world really do spend their whole lives behind bars.
For example, Terry Nichols, one of the accomplices in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, was given 161 life sentences with no possibility for parole.
But does a long prison sentence actually keep the streets safer? We considered the evidence.
Prison’s purpose
When a judge hands a sentence to someone who’s about to go to jail, there are four main factors that go into the decision. There’s retribution (punishing the person for doing something wrong), rehabilitation (correcting problematic behavior), safety (keeping threats out of the community) and deterrence (making sure both they, and others, are scared off of breaking the law in the future).
Some people – mostly criminal prosecutors, especially in countries like the US – believe that a long prison sentence checks all these boxes.
For instance, law bosses like US attorney general Jeff Sessions have been pushing for even harsher sentencing to keep violence and drugs off the streets. Advocates for tougher sentences say that long terms are more fitting punishments. They believe that it gives prisoners time to think about what they’ve done wrong, and that the thought of going back into prison is a motivator to stay on the straight and narrow.
But having prisoners serve long sentences can overcrowd prisons. It’s also extremely costly to tax payers. In a 2016 report released by the New York University School of Law, for instance, it was estimated that the US could save $200 bn (£147 bn) over 10 years if 40% of the country’s inmate population was reduced.
Research shows that long prison sentences don’t really work on several fronts. In addition to being somewhat arbitrary (why 13,275 years?), there’s not a lot of evidence to suggest that the threat of prison time actually deters ex-prisoners from committing crimes.
Criminals seem to value the future less than non criminals, one study found, meaning that long sentences can seem “arbitrary”, and work to deter only up to a point.
Education played a role too, with lesser educated criminals seemingly less put off by a harsher sentence.
Studies also show that reoffending remains high. A 2009 study found that in the US, after three years in prison, 67% of the prisoners were rearrested for a new offense, 46.9% were reconvicted for a new crime, and 25.4% were resentenced to prison. In the UK, almost 70% are reconvicted within a year of release.
One reason is because many criminals think they won’t get caught… even after they’ve been caught once, experts say. The threat of a long prison sentence does not therefore deter them from a criminal lifestyle.
As a result, while most reasonable people can agree that criminals must be held accountable for their crimes, how long people should spend locked up divides opinion. Perspectives differ spectacularly depending on who you ask, and where.
Findings compiled by the Justice Policy Institute in 2011 found that sentencing times for the same crime wildly vary across the globe. For example, in 2006, being convicted of robbery landed suspects in jail for an average of 16 months in Finland, but 72 months in Australia.
Assault? Fifteen months in England and Wales, 60 months in the US.
The US, in particular, is a near all-encompassing case study of what happens in a place with long prison sentences.
In the US, the number of prisoners has quadrupled since the 1970s – and now, as prison terms get longer, people are spending even more time in prison. Most prisoners are incarcerated for drug or violence-related offenses.
Today, the US leads the world with more than 2.2 million people currently in prison, a system that costs the states $56.9 bn (£42 bn) per year.
“There’s a trend to say there’s really no sentence that’s too long when it comes to violent offenses,” says Ryan King, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute’s Justice Policy Center in Washington. “That’s been a dominant force in our criminal justice system for over 40 years.”
Most prisoners in the US are locked up for drug or violence-related offenses.
He points back to the late 1960s, a turbulent time in US history. The country was in the throes of the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement, which led to protests and riots. In turn, that led to unrest and fear among the population. Politicians capitalized on that anxiety. And they still do.
From that period the US saw an absolute explosion in prison population: from 200,000 in 1974 to more than 1,500,000 in 2002.
“It’s the lead on the 11 o’clock news. It is a key talking point for politicians running,” says King. “They can always go back to, ‘I’m gonna be tough on crime and keep you safe.’ A lot of these themes are really resonant in 2018.”
The US also has some of the longest prison sentences in the world due to its cultural values including an extreme emphasis on personal responsibility, religious belief in good and evil, and the idea that a community has the moral imperative to stamp out bad deeds. It may be little surprise that a common US argument in favor of long prison times is the old maxim “if you can’t serve the time, don’t do the crime.”
“As a cultural matter, the US is dedicated to the idea of individualism – that people are accountable for their actions,” says Christopher Slobogin, director of the criminal justice program at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee.
Other societies might contextualize crime as more situational. But in the US, there’s a stronger sense that it stems from bad decision-making. “It ties into religious reasons,” Slobogin adds. He posits that “Americans are much more likely to believe there is such a thing as evil, and [that] we need to punish it.”
King says countries like the US needs to look at alternatives – more violence prevention so that crimes aren’t committed and people don’t end up in jail in the first place. “I don’t mean hiring more cops and prosecutors,” King says. “Relying on police coming in is a reactive response.
Term alternatives
So, are there alternatives to letting prisoners stew for decades? Norway shows some promising results. There, capital punishment was abolished in 1902 and life sentences in 1981. The maximum prison sentence is 21 years.
Like many prisons in Scandinavian countries, meanwhile, Norway’s eight-year-old Halden Prison takes a laissez-faire approach to incarceration that may shock many in nations with more hard-driving systems. It’s described as a maximum-security prison. But at Halden, cells and the commissary look like IKEA and Whole Foods, there are no barred windows or security cameras, and unarmed guards befriend the prisoners.
It’s an extreme example, but there are many similar “open prisons” across the country.
Thomas Ugelvik, a criminology professor at the University of Oslo, says that these open prisons are cheaper, built on prisoner trust and, in some ways, may be tougher to do time in: more responsibility is expected of the prisoners. It’s almost like freedom, but the inmates still have sentences to serve.
These Norwegian prison sentences help lead to rehabilitation, something not always seen in long prison sentences. Research shows it has among the lowest rates of reoffending in the world – 20% compared to 67% in the US over two and three years of leaving prison, respectively. Even more surprising perhaps is that the average prison sentence length in Norway is only eight months.
Still, there’s a caveat. “Officers will expect more of you in an open prison,” Ugelvik says. “You have to go to work or school, exhibit the right positive attitude. Also, you can escape any time you want to, so in an open prison, you have to choose to stay every day. You have to live with temptation.”
Ugelvik adds that there’s no real perimeter security in such places and that often, prisoners have been transferred there from a more high-security facility. The threat of being shipped back there if you act out is a successful deterrent, he says.
Low security isn’t for everyone, though, and when the system takes a chance on someone, it’s a result of strict risk assessments. The belief, Ugelvik says, is that prisoners thrive on trust.
“When you have spent time in high security and get a transfer to a more open regime, it feels like the system trusts you at least a little bit,” he says. “You have to be able to put your own imaginary walls around yourself in a low-security prison, and most prisoners, most of the time do that successfully.”
Harshest penalty
Another misconception is the idea that the most severe punishment – the death penalty – might deter the worst crimes.
US president Donald Trump said in April 2018 that he wanted the death penalty for drug dealers. (King says this is likely for retribution, as research has shown that capital punishment isn’t an effective deterrent).
“With the current crisis of the heroin and opioid epidemic [in the US], we’re once again seeing the executive branch trying to make it about the severity of the sentence – so that if we’re going to give the death penalty, maybe you won’t engage in this crime,” says Ashley Nellis, a professor and senior research analyst at the Sentencing Project, a Washington-based non-profit that pushes for criminal justice reform.
“But if you don’t think you’re going to get caught in the first place, it doesn’t really matter,” she says.
Of course, the most heinous crimes are a slightly different matter. It is hard to argue against a long sentence for a serial killer or rapist – especially for the family members involved. This is perhaps where the punishment angle of prison plays a stronger role in the eyes of the public.
That being said, violent crimes are the minority of all crimes. “The problem is, the image we get from television is that there are a lot of serial rapists and killers – fortunately, they are a minority,” says Marcelo Aebi, criminology professor at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland.
When it comes to drug offenses at least, the best way to overcome the downsides of long prison sentences may be to look at the issues that resulted in prison time. The hope here is that it could prevent people from entering into the criminal world.
That’s why Nellis explains that the criminal justice system doesn’t have to be the only response to illegal behavior, “particularly for non-violent drug and property offenses. Usually there’s an underlying addiction. We can address the addiction with a more evidence-based approach – one that deals with prevention and intervention and treatment, rather than a criminal justice system, which has [little] expertise on drug addiction at all. We can make a bigger impact.”
Life in prison is an extreme punishment, and in the grand scope of crimes, drug offenses might not warrant such extreme measures, especially as research shows that the threat of such long sentences doesn’t actually deter people from committing these crimes.
Societies and politics also differ from country to country, so implementing a Norway-esque system will have different results in different places, especially as much depends on the help available while incarcerated.
Therefore, when it comes to getting out of prison quickly, even in a country with eight-month terms, some of it is still up to the individual.
“Of course, motivation is key, and no one believes that you can force someone into positive change if they don’t want it themselves,” says Ugelvik.
“They reach out a hand, but prisoners have to choose to grab hold of that hand for it to work.”
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20180514-do-long-prison-sentences-deter-crime
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FOR LIFE EXPECTANCY, MONEY MATTERS
‘You might expect two or three years of life differential … but 10 or 15 years … it’s an immense difference’
For low-income people, the darker colors on the bar and related map indicate the lowest life expectancy — fewer than 74.5 years. The lighter colors indicate a life expectancy of more than 77.8 years.
Being poor in the United States is so hazardous to your health, a new study shows, that the average life expectancy of the lowest-income classes in America is now equal to that in Sudan or Pakistan.
A Harvard analysis of 1.4 billion Internal Revenue Service records on income and life expectancy that showed staggering differences in life expectancy between the richest and poorest also found evidence that low-income residents in wealthy areas, such as New York City and San Francisco, have life expectancies significantly longer than those in poorer regions.
While those differences can be chalked up, in part, to healthy behaviors — low-income residents in New York City smoke and drink less, exercise more, and have lower rates of obesity than the poor in other cities — it’s unclear what other factors might contribute to the difference, said David Cutler, the Otto Eckstein Professor of Applied Economics and a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
“It’s not an overwhelming correlation with medical care or insurance coverage,” he said. “It’s not that the labor market is getting better — it’s not correlated with unemployment, or the expansion or contraction of the labor force, or how socially connected people feel. The only thing it seems to be correlated with is how educated and affluent the area is, so low-income people live longer in New York or San Francisco, and they live shorter in the industrial Midwest.”
Among men, that gap is 15 years, roughly equivalent to the life expectancy difference between the United States and Sudan. For women, the 10-year difference between richest and poorest is equivalent to the health effects from a lifetime of smoking. The study is described in a paper published in the Journal of the American Medical Association online on April 11.
“This paper really has two missions,” said Cutler. “One is to present this data, but the other is to create this data set so it can then be used by policymakers and researchers everywhere. This data has never been looked at with this level of granularity before.
The richest men in America live 15 years longer than the poorest men, while the richest American women live 10 years longer than the poorest women.
Previously, we could say what life expectancy was like in Massachusetts as compared to Michigan, but the problem is that Massachusetts is much richer than Michigan, and we know mortality varies with income,” he continued. “What we wanted to do was compare the same people in both cities — a shopkeeper in Detroit with a shopkeeper in Boston, not a biotech executive. That’s what we can do with this data that people haven’t been able to do previously.”
Cutler and his co-authors, including former Harvard Economics Professor Raj Chetty, now at Stanford University, collected federal tax records from 1999 through 2014, and sorted people into 100 percentiles according to income. By matching that income data with death records, the researchers were able to calculate the mortality rate and subsequent life expectancy at age 40 for each income level.
While researchers have long known that life expectancy increases with income, Cutler and others were surprised to find that trend never plateaued.
“There’s no income [above] which higher income is not associated with greater longevity, and there’s no income below which less income is not associated with lower survival,” he said. “It was already known that life expectancy increased with income, so we’re not the first to show that, but … everyone thought you had to hit a plateau at some point, or that it would plateau at the bottom, but that’s not the case.”
Cutler and Chetty then examined how life expectancy changed over time, and found that while life expectancy has increased for the wealthiest, it has edged up only slightly for low-income Americans.
“The increase has been approximately three years at the high end, versus zero for the lowest incomes,” Cutler said. “This is important, because it has major implications for Social Security policy. People say, ‘Americans are living longer, so we ought to delay the age of retirement,’ but … it’s a little bit unfair to say to low-income people that they’re going to get Social Security and Medicare for fewer years because investment bankers are living longer.”
When they laid the data over maps of the United States, Cutler and Chetty again found unexpected results, with low life expectancy concentrated not in the Deep South, but across the Midwest Rust Belt.
“What emerges strongly is that there is a belt from West Virginia, Kentucky, and down through parts of southern Ohio, through Oklahoma and into Texas — it’s not a story of the Deep South,” Cutler said. “The variability in where high-income people live longest is not as large and is much less geographically concentrated. You don’t see this same type of belt — it’s scattered all over.”
Going forward, Cutler, Chetty, and their co-authors have made the data publicly available in the hope it will spur further research into whether certain public policies or other economic indicators are associated with longer life expectancy. Cutler believes it also underscores some worrying truths about economic disparity in the United States.
“These differences are very, very troubling,” Cutler said. “The magnitude is startling. You might expect two or three years of life differential — which is roughly what we would get by curing cancer — but 10 or 15 years … it’s an immense difference. We don’t know exactly why or what to do about it, but now we have the tools to ask those questions.”
https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2016/04/for-life-expectancy-money-matters/
Other details:
Rural Disparities: Rural counties face the sharpest disparities. Working-class Americans living in small rural counties with a median income of $30,000 can expect to die up to 10 years earlier than those in $100,000 suburban/urban neighborhoods.
State & City Differences: Where you live impacts your odds. For low-income individuals, life expectancy tends to be highest in affluent, highly educated metropolitan areas (e.g., California, New York) and lowest in areas with fewer municipal health expenditures and higher rates of smoking or obesity (e.g., Nevada, Oklahoma, and parts of the Midwest). (source: Google)
TOP ONE PERCENT VS THE BOTTOM ONE PERCENT
“The gap in life expectancy between the richest 1% and poorest 1% of individuals was 14.6 years (95% CI, 14.4 to 14.8 years) for men and 10.1 years (95% CI, 9.9 to 10.3 years) for women.
Second, inequality in life expectancy increased over time. Between 2001 and 2014, life expectancy increased by 2.34 years for men and 2.91 years for women in the top 5% of the income distribution, but increased by only 0.32 years for men and 0.04 years for women in the bottom 5% (P < .001 for the difference for both sexes).
Third, life expectancy varied substantially across local areas. For individuals in the bottom income quartile, life expectancy differed by approximately 4.5 years between areas with the highest and lowest longevity.”
“Geographic differences in life expectancy for individuals in the lowest income quartile were significantly correlated with health behaviors such as smoking (r = −0.69, P < .001), but were not significantly correlated with access to medical care, physical environmental factors, income inequality, or labor market conditions.”
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4866586/
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HEALTH AND ALCOHOL
Studies of alcohol’s effects on health have offered contradictory findings, with some suggesting a glass of red wine a day is beneficial and others saying even a drop of booze is too much.
A new review attempting to clarify the risks finds more than 60 diseases, based on the World Health Organization’s International Classification of Diseases, are 100 percent attributable to consuming alcohol. But the review also finds that some of the damage can be slowed or reversed by cutting down or quitting drinking.
Sinclair Carr, a Harvard Kenneth C. Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences doctoral candidate in the Department of Epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and the first author on the study, worked with a team to review a range of studies on alcohol and challenge their potential assumptions and biases. In an interview edited for clarity and length, Carr and senior author Jürgen Rehm of the Institute for Mental Health Policy Research at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, discussed their findings.
Rehm: This study is an update to a series of reviews that inform global assessments — such as the Global Burden of Disease Study and the WHO’s Global Status Report on Alcohol and Health — which aim to quantify how much risk factors like alcohol and tobacco contribute to the global burden of disease and injury. It became clear that there wasn’t enough evidence about the various risks of alcohol, so we began to look at two different dimensions of alcohol that are relevant for health: the average level of drinking (i.e., how many drinks per day, week, etc.) and the patterns of drinking (i.e., the different occasions during which one consumes alcohol). We’ve been doing updates of this review roughly every seven years, but the hope was that this update would reconcile some of the classic epidemiological practices with the newer approach of Mendelian randomization.
Carr: This new wave of Mendelian randomization studies (which use information on people’s genes) has been important to the field. They have really changed the perspective on some of the potential health risks of alcohol, particularly for heart diseases and ischemic stroke. Many Mendelian randomization studies found no association between alcohol consumption and risk of these diseases, but conventional observational studies did show an association, one that suggests a little consumption might lower your risk. This is where that idea of “a glass of red wine a day is beneficial for your heart” came from. More recently, people have questioned whether this potential protective effect is actually true given the contradictory findings across study designs. We hoped this new review would provide clarity.
Could you give an example of a bias?
Carr: An association between alcohol and health that suggests a benefit of drinking in moderation might be explained by something other than alcohol consumption itself. Perhaps it wasn’t the alcohol causing the improvements in health, but rather other factors, like being a bit wealthier, having a better diet, etc. For example, take ischemic heart disease, the condition where the different study designs disagree most. We reviewed the Mendelian randomization studies on it and learned that many were not as free from bias as is often claimed.
What were your main takeaways from the review?
Rehm: There is no safe level for alcohol consumption with regard to cancer, period. Any amount of alcohol consumption increases your risk for several types of cancer. But on the other hand, the risk isn’t necessarily there for other diseases. Take breast cancer, which is the most studied cancer. Having one glass of wine every other day increases the risk of breast cancer but is also potentially protective for heart disease.
We cannot say that there is risk-free drinking, but we also cannot say that low amounts are clearly harmful. Basically, the increased risk of one disease could be canceled out by the reduced risk of another.
What we are doing as epidemiologists is creating a conceptual picture for a population. You, as an individual, have way more information. If you know your grandfather, father, grandmother, and mother all died of heart disease, what’s best for you may be different from someone else whose family members died of cancer.
Did the type of alcohol matter? So, for example, a glass of red wine versus a shot of whiskey.
Rehm: No. Alcohol is alcohol is alcohol. There is no scientific evidence that type matters.
What did you find in terms of slowing or reversing the effects of alcohol and health?
Carr: You can slow down or reverse the damage, depending on the type of disease or injury, although most of the evidence we have comes from people who were drinking heavily. The most obvious examples are some of the acute risks of drinking, like drunken driving accidents, which disappear once you stop.
There is also evidence that you can reverse some physical damage. For example, we know from randomized trials that when you cut down your consumption, you can lower your blood pressure, which is a major risk factor for heart disease. For brain damage, you may reverse some of the shrinkage of the brain when you stop drinking. Cancer risk may also decrease after stopping drinking. The problem with many chronic diseases is that some of the damage, like in the liver, is not reversible. However, reducing or stopping drinking can slow the disease’s progression.
What did this review reveal about what we still need to learn?
Carr: There is a lot of room for improvement in research on alcohol and health. Ideally, we would have randomized trials, which are considered the gold standard to assess causal effects; it’s clearly unethical to make people drink, but trials could ask people to stop or reduce their alcohol consumption and study the effects. If a trial is not feasible, it is helpful to specify the trial we would like to run and use observational data to emulate it. This forces us to define the question precisely and helps avoid major biases that have plagued the literature.
How do you hope these findings will empower individuals to have agency over their own health?
Carr: We hope the main effect is better information. People make their own decisions about drinking, and they should, but those decisions should be informed by a clear understanding of the potential health effects of drinking. For example, many do not know that alcohol increases the risk of several cancers. Since some harms appear to partly reverse when people cut down or stop, reducing can be worthwhile even after years of heavy drinking.
The aim is not to tell people what to do, but to give them an accurate picture of how drinking may affect their health, so they can decide for themselves. That said, this picture is still far from complete. Many important questions remain unanswered, and we clearly need better-designed studies, along with appropriate methods, to attempt to answer them.
https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2026/06/a-clearer-picture-of-drinking-and-disease/
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IT’S GOOD TO BREAK A SWEAT, BUT DON’T SWEAT THE DETAILS
What’s important is the total amount of movement.
Your body doesn’t care how you move, as long as you move.
That was the message delivered Thursday by panelists at the Chan School in conversation about the benefits of staying active and the excesses of “no pain, no gain.”
Though studies of the health effects of physical activity are often conducted with a focus on specific exercises, Meagan Wasfy, Harvard Medical School associate professor of medicine at Mass General, said that the development of wearable fitness monitors has enabled researchers to see the impact of a greater variety of activities. The results have been clear.
“The heart — and also the whole body — doesn’t know what shoes you have on your feet,” said Wasfy, an MGH sports cardiologist and echocardiographer.
Wasfy’s co-panelists at the event, “Reframing Exercise,” were Mia Sanchez, a marathoner who studied environmental health at the Chan School; Brooke Forde, an Olympic silver medal swimmer and project coordinator at the Chan School; and I-Min Lee, a professor of epidemiology at the Chan School and of medicine at Harvard Medical School.
Sanchez and Forde spoke about their transitions from competitive to casual exercise. One thing they learned? Exercise doesn’t have to hurt.
“I was able to stop and reflect on my ‘why’ of exercise and how I could find that balance,” Sanchez said of an enforced pause due to a stress fracture. “Then, moving on from college into graduate school, there wasn’t as much time for that high-intensity training that I was used to for so long. But I was able to find love for not only running but other forms of exercise, like going outside and playing soccer or volleyball with my friends.”
For those looking to slim down, panelists said that staying active can help with weight maintenance, but that it’s not, on its own, a great way to shed pounds. Even so, research has shown that among people with obesity, those who exercise are healthier than those who don’t.
For anyone starting an exercise regimen, physical activity is most beneficial when it is regular and habitual, Lee noted. Also, your hard-charging past won’t save you today.
“It appears that what you currently do is more important than what you did in the past,” Lee said. “Harvard athletes who play a lot of sports when they’re in College but become couch potatoes actually don’t do as well as people who did no sport in college but are currently physically active.”
Panelists endorsed the government’s recommendation of 150 minutes of moderate physical activity per week as a good starting point for most people. Another popular guideline is 10,000 steps per day, which dates to a study done in the 1960s. Here, the group offered caveats.
For older adults, they said, citing more recent data, the cardiovascular and cancer benefits start to taper at 6,000 steps. (Which doesn’t mean you should stop: The social or psychological benefits may continue to mount.) For sedentary adults, health gains begin to accrue almost right away, even at 500 to 1,000 steps. For them, walking a half-hour or an hour provides significant benefit.
“What’s important is the total amount of movement,” Wasfy said. “What’s important for the health benefits is the total dose. The details don’t matter quite as much.”
https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2026/06/its-good-to-break-a-sweat-but-dont-sweat-the-details/
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DECLINING SPERM QUALITY
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 say.
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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JUST FIVE MINUTES OF EXERCISE A DAY
Small increases in physical activity as part of our daily lives can bring long-term benefits to our health.
Some mornings I really struggle to go out for a jog, but I force myself because I know it will be good for me. The protective effect that exercise can have not only the body, but our brain, memory and general wellbeing is something I've spoken to researchers a lot about recently.
But what has also become clear is that we don't need to be doing intense workouts to see benefits.
New research shows that even small increases in activity can have a powerful impact on health and longevity. Just five minutes of moderate activity each day – such as brisk walking, cycling or climbing stairs – could prevent around one in ten premature deaths, which could help millions of individuals live longer.
While this doesn't mean that just doing five minutes of exercise is enough to ensure you stay healthy, it is an indication that compared to doing nothing, this small increase in physical activity can bring improvements to overall health. For those who are already pretty active or relatively fit, doing five minutes more exercise will have a smaller effect.
But it shows the power of doing even just some very basic forms of exercise.
Muscle strengthening activities are beneficial for our health and longevity
"Physical activity is something that is really beneficial for preventing high stress rates and high burnout rates," says Nicole Logan, an assistant professor of kinesiology from the University of Rhode Island in the US. "We know that physical function, muscle strength, muscle quality, bone strength, these are really good predictors of later life mortality. So living longer and living healthier for longer.”
Increasing lifespan
The new research involved a large-scale analysis of data from 150,000 adults in the UK, US and Scandinavia.
"It was surprising that very small changes in physical activity of five minutes per day have such a large impact on reducing the risk for premature mortality," says Ulf Ekelund, lead author of the research and a professor of physical activity and health at the Norwegian School of Sport. The findings reveal the health benefits of doing five minutes of exercise across the whole population rather than on an individual level, he says.
Adults should still strive for the World Health Organization's recommendation of 150 minutes of moderate-intensity exercise a week, Ekelund says. But the study shows that those who might struggle to go to the gym or join a sports club, can still benefit from adding more movement into their lives.
Reducing inactivity was also found to be beneficial. Cutting daily sitting time by 30 minutes was linked to a 7% reduction of early death across the population. This is especially important because physical inactivity is a leading cause of chronic disease and an earlier death.
Ekelund says that consistency is key. "Start slow and gradually build up the amount," he says. The activity should be tailored to the individual's preferences and ability."
Exercise snacking
The study builds on many others that show how long-term health benefits from exercise do not require us to radically change our lifestyle. Simply adding movement into our daily life can have an outsized effect.
Muscle strengthening activities have also been shown to be beneficial. One US study found that individuals in their 60s and 70s who combined aerobic exercise with muscle-strengthening activities lived longer and had a lower risk of dying compared to those who did no exercise.
Other recent work shows that "exercise snacking" – which consists of short bursts of activity spread throughout the day – can improve heart health. A large authoritative analysis of existing research found that among older adults, it also helped with muscular endurance. Uptake was high too, with over 82% of participants continuing to take part, most likely because exercise snacking is easy to "integrate into daily routines", the authors note.
Unlike a gym session, these "snacks" can be spread throughout the day as part of your normal routine. This can include anything that gets your heart rate up – be it vigorous hoovering, dancing to a song in your kitchen or running up and down your stairs faster than normal.
As Marie Murphy, professor of exercise and health at Ulster University in the UK, told the BBC's Just One Thing podcast, smaller chunks of exercise increase how often we are stimulating our metabolism.
"When we stop exercising, our metabolism keeps going a little bit quicker while we recover," she said. "You still have that metabolic mill turning."
Benefits of habit
Research shows that people respond positively when they are made more aware of the health benefits of exercise snacking, and that it could help address barriers to exercise.
Simple prompts can make a difference. Signs encouraging people to take the stairs instead of the lift or escalator, for example, can lead to more of them to do so.
According to Amanda Daley, professor of behavioral medicine at Loughborough University in the UK, it's these small shifts that build meaningful change over time. "We just have these unconscious ways of doing things that mean that we're more likely to do it," she says. "You take the stairs because that's you've learned. It's a habit."
Similarly, Daley suggests that a simple way to decrease sedentary behavior is to park the car at least five minutes from your destination. She calls this type of approach "snacktivity" and in a small study, she and colleagues found that participants were receptive to the idea, finding it easier to implement than longer bouts of exercise.
Or take walking. We can benefit from fewer steps in a day than is commonly believed, as the BBC has previously reported. One step-count study found that taking 2,517-2,735 steps per day reduces cardiovascular risk by 11% compared to taking only 2,000 steps.
When it comes to how you exercise, there are numerous options. You could go rock climbing, join a dance class or try some something a little more vigorous like high-intensity interval training, which can improve blood sugar control and blood pressure, as well as reducing body fat.
I've certainly had sore arms when carrying food shopping home instead of taking the car. But it seems that discomfort can be worth it.
So next time you're waiting for your pasta to boil or watching TV, perhaps include a set of squats, leg kicks or press ups. These little "exercise snacks" all add up. They are certainly "snacks" you won't ever need to feel guilty about.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20260515-why-only-five-minutes-of-exercise-could-help-millions-of-people-live-longer
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ending on beauty:
The problem with Brooklyn is a lamentable dearth
of palazzos — no views of snowy mountains from the side
windows, no cloud
floating white and ocher out over the sea.
No gondoliers.
Yet there are fiddlers and guitar players,
and fishes of lawyers
and blind men, sailors, water sellers, ice sellers, flower sellers.
The parks overflow with drummers and dogs,
with rabbis and more rabbis, and I’ll tell you what.
Each one has at the very center
of his chest, a beating heart.
Hearts beating back the night in its long black coat.
~ Jeffrey Levine, a stanza from A Midsummer Night’s Basho
Brooklyn Bridge by Joseph Stella
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