Kandinsky: For and Against, 1927*
IMAGINATION IS THE MOST EROGENOUS
terrain: alpenglow peaks,
the reddening river of dawn,
the lake sheeting silver,
the aspen’s silent chimes of leaves.
In the dusky cabin,
your sleeping body gleams.
When we make love,
we must be bigger than we seem,
our arms cradling continents —
yet even more I like
the crumpled bird of your sex at rest,
reminding me we really are
defenseless. I like your mouth
on my breast, the greedy human
mouth that wants to suckle
on the universe — that cannot forgive
Adam and Eve for not having eaten
of the Tree of Life.
How can religions claim one
creator, when obviously it takes
two —two lovers stitching dawn
into world and story.
And the shimmering
trees climb the hills.
~ Oriana
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ATHENS AND SPARTA
Prologues to big books of history can be notoriously phlegmy things in which authors boozily attempt to dispose readers in their favor for the upcoming journey. They seldom include anything noteworthy, which makes a claim by popular historian Adrian Goldsworthy in the prologue of his new book, Athens and Sparta: The Rivalry That Shaped Ancient Greece, all the more astounding. He opens by mentioning that while he was researching an earlier book, 2020’s Philip and Alexander, he kept looking for “a fairly recent and accessible history of what had come before – essentially how the Greek world had come to be as it was when Philip was born c. 382 BC.”
He looks for such a book and comes up empty. “I could not find one and do not believe that one has been written since then,” he writes, “something covering the whole period, rather than just part of it, was lacking, so it seemed a good idea two fill this gap.”
What he’s talking about here is Classical Greece. The long 5th century, roughly from the fall of the last Athenian tyrant to either the birth or the death of Alexander the Great. Goldsworthy, author of a dozen well-received histories of the ancient world, seems to be saying there was no “fairly recent and accessible history” of Classical Greece until he needed one and decided to write it.
As mentioned, astounding. True, slippery words like “fairly recent” and “accessible” allow for some equivocating, but does it allow Goldsworthy to dismiss Tarn, Bury, Grote? Surely the works of titanic Ancient Greece scholars like these are “accessible” to Goldsworthy, who must have old friends at his alma mater of Oxford, or at least a London Library card? They aren’t “fairly recent,” but they’re not generally older than, say, Mommsen, Lessing, and Gibbon, all of whom crop up in Goldsworthy’s bibliography right alongside half a dozen 21st-century books covering the same subject. Or for that matter, what about Will Durant’s humble 1939 The Life of Greece, which sold more copies than all the others combined and must occasionally appear in Welsh charity shops?
This opening note creates a little frisson of doubt that feels utterly alien in connection with such a solid scholar as Goldsworthy, like hearing a college professor confidently proclaim that the main significance of President Kennedy’s assassination was that a presidential assassination was at that point unprecedented in US history. No matter how good the rest of the course is, you’ll inevitably wonder what else that professor might have missed.
The rest of the course, in this case, is the remaining 600 pages of Athens and Sparta, which is generally excellent. Goldsworthy kicks off his story in the mists with Homer, brings it forward through Solon and company, eventually hinging the book around the half-way point at the Hot Gates, the well-known fight between the handful of soldiers under Spartan King Leonidas and the nearly-limitless forces of Xerxes, king of Persia. Goldsworthy naturally dramatizes the moment at Thermopylae:
The Persians made no headway, so as the day drew on, Xerxes committed the Immortals to the attack, but these did no better than the rest as all the advantages still lay with the defenders. There were losses on both sides, but the Persians suffered far greater casualties and inevitably had difficulty bringing back their wounded. The Greeks were better protected by their shields, helmets, and armor and, since they held their ground, could evacuate their own injured. The first day of the attacks ended in utter failure for Xerxes’s men, and the second day went no better than the first. Leonidas and his men were being worn down, but only slowly and at dreadful cost. At this rate they could hold out for many days.
Nothing flashy or dramatic, certainly, but this isn’t a flashy or dramatic book. The prose throughout is reserved and authoritative, although occasionally it can get tangled in itself: “The Athenians offered protection against the Persians or any other potential aggressors – which included the Athenians, at least in the long run,” goes one such passage. “When enthusiasm for the alliance wavered, fear of retribution deterred most of the allies from breaking away, at least most of the time.”
By the conclusion of the story, when Philip II “united Macedonia and created a state and a military system unlike anything seen before in the Greek world,” Athens and Sparta have gone through testy dominance-jockeying, outright hostilities, and the bitter acrimony of mutual decline. It’s a familiar story (because, as mentioned, it’s been written up so many times over the centuries), and Goldsworthy tells it with skill and a pleasing amount of supporting discussion in the End Notes
https://openlettersreview.com/posts/athens-and-sparta-by-adrian-goldsworthy
opening of the review in New Criterion
Great ancient cities seem to fall into contrasting, even opposed pairs: Athens and Jerusalem, Rome and Jerusalem, and of course Athens and Sparta. In the focal period of Adrian Goldsworthy’s new book Athens and Sparta—the Classical period of the fifth and fourth centuries B.C.—there existed some one thousand Hellenic cities scattered around the Mediterranean and Black Seas, some seven hundred of them concentrated in the Aegean heartland of mainland Greece, the islands, and the western Asiatic seaboard. Altogether they constituted Hellas, the Hellenic world, and the Greeks called themselves Hellēnes, not Graecī (whence our “Greeks”), which was the Romans’ deliberately diminishing collective term for them. So why single out just Athens and Sparta?
Most of those thousand or so were poleis— cities, city-states, or citizen-states, most of the time fiercely independent. Their watchwords were freedom and autonomy, and their primary allegiance was felt toward themselves and only secondarily and nebulously to any concept of shared Hellenicity. Most were small—so small that “city” is often only a courtesy title. But two stood out head and shoulders above all the rest, and together they contribute by far the largest portion of our Hellenic heritage. One excelled in size of domestic territory controlled, and therefore in especially military power; the other in size of its citizen population, extent of urbanization, and development of its (often high) culture.
The former city was Sparta, really a cluster of settlements in the Eurotas Valley of the southern Peloponnese, whose home territory of Lacedaemon (the state proper, in political terms) extended to about three thousand square miles but whose adult male citizen population of warriors and ex-warriors never rose much if at all above nine thousand. The latter city was Athens, focused in both a topographical and a more broadly spiritual sense on the looming rock of its Acropolis (literally “high city”), and extraordinarily urbanized as regards its central city and its port city of Piraeus, the two linked by three “Long Walls” constructed in the middle to late fifth century B.C. In comparison to Sparta’s, Athens’s home territory of Attica was relatively modest, only some one thousand square miles, but within that compass the adult male citizen population at its peak in the 430s could have reached as high as sixty thousand—thanks to a unique combination of military (specifically naval) and commercial power.
Size matters, of course, but it’s far from being everything. It’s in the matter of quality, both of nature and of culture, that the two polities were so much more often contrasted than likened, let alone equated. Hence the “rivalry” of Goldsworthy’s subtitle, an emulation of the mind and spirit as much as (or perhaps more than) of sheer physical might. Indeed, under some rubrics—politics and high culture prominent among them—the two could be seen and represented as polar opposites, and it’s that dynamic that Goldsworthy seeks to explore and to expand upon in this substantial work. How best to do that?
Goldsworthy states explicitly, over halfway through the main text of this beautifully produced book, that it’s one particular episode or phase or manifestation of their rivalry that is his book’s “main focus”: the “story” of how Athens’s rise to imperial power between 478 and 431 B.C. prompted the great Atheno-Peloponnesian War of (on and off) 431 to 404, culminating in the defeat of Athens by Sparta (with not a little financial help from the next-door Persian empire, once a deadly adversary of both Greek cities).
https://newcriterion.com/article/greek-havoc/
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LOW GERMAN AND STANDARD GERMAN
If a northern German says Water instead of Wasser, they aren’t using slang. They are speaking a language that completely escaped a massive ancient linguistic earthquake.
The stark differences between Low German (Plattdeutsch) and Standard German (Hochdeutsch) come down to geography and an event known as the High German Consonant Shift, which occurred roughly between the 3rd and 9th centuries. During this period, the pronunciation of certain consonants mutated in the southern, mountainous regions of the Germanic-speaking world—the geographic "High" lands. Hard sounds like "p," "t," and "k" evolved into softer fricatives or affricates. For instance, the word for "make" shifted from maken to machen, and "sleep" went from slapen to schlafen.
However, this phonetic wave lost its momentum as it rolled north toward the flatlands—the "Low" lands near the North and Baltic Seas. Because the shift never reached the north, Low German retained the older Germanic consonants. This is why Low German often sounds remarkably close to English and Dutch, which also bypassed the shift.
For centuries, Low German was a language of immense prestige and power. During the Middle Ages, it served as the lingua franca of the Hanseatic League, a vast commercial and defensive confederation that dominated maritime trade across Northern Europe. Treaties, trade agreements, and legal documents from London to Novgorod were written in Low German.
The decline of Low German and the rise of Standard German began in the 16th century, spurred by the invention of the printing press and Martin Luther’s translation of the Bible. Luther wanted his Bible to be understood by as many people as possible, so he used an East Central German dialect—a High German variety—that blended several regional traits. The massive success of Luther's Bible effectively standardized written German around this southern, consonant-shifted dialect.
As the economic power of the Hanseatic League waned, southern German states gained political and cultural influence. Courts, schools, and churches across the north gradually adopted the new Standard German to remain relevant in a unifying linguistic landscape. Low German was slowly pushed out of formal writing and administration, becoming a language reserved for everyday spoken life in rural areas. Today, the distinct sounds of Low German serve as a living acoustic map, preserving a linguistic border that was drawn over a thousand years ago. ~ SepiaGlyphs, Quora
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ANNIE DILLARD
Annie Dillard's work was shaped by a central duality: the tension between fertility and destruction in the natural world. She saw that tension everywhere, even in the act of writing itself. Speaking to NPR's Weekend Edition in 2016, she said, "Once you write about something, you've destroyed it. You no longer have the memory. You only have the memory of what you've written."
Perhaps because of her awareness of that destructive power, Dillard was always determined to pare away everything extraneous in her work. One of her best-known titles, The Writing Life, was only a little over 100 pages long. She didn't write about the simple life. She wrote about how complex life becomes once you eliminate distractions and pay attention to what's left.
While working on her first novel, The Living, about settlers in the Pacific Northwest, she lived for a time on Puget Sound without electricity or running water.
"I thought this would be terribly difficult, but in fact you spend much less time on the 'fussing' in life than you do when you have those things," she told WHYY's Fresh Air in 1992.
She had already learned to live simply while writing her best-known book, the naturalist classic Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. In it, she tells of a year she spent in Virginia's Roanoke Valley, observing the lives and deaths of the creatures there. Reviewing it for The New York Times, Eudora Welty wrote, "As the episodes begin, we can imagine an appealing young woman standing alert in a meadow, dressed in shirt and pants, holding her field glasses and provided with a sandwich: she is waiting to see, being very patient and still. By the chapter's end, we realize or suspect we are watching a dervish dancing."
Pilgrim was a huge success, drawing comparisons with Thoreau's Walden. When it won the Pulitzer, Dillard had to ward off even more of the "fussing" she hated.
"The press called me ... and said, 'What are you doing right now as you hear that you have won the Pulitzer Prize?' " she recalled on Fresh Air. "And I said, 'I'm washing spinach.' And they said, 'Don't you know that this means you need never wash spinach again?' And I thought, and probably said, 'Sure, I do. I don't like sand in my spinach.' And I've been washing spinach ever since. And I think about it ever since. Did they think I was going to go hire a maid? I love to cook."
Dillard played baseball for years — she said she'd been told she had "a boy's arm." She gave it up in her 50s, when she discovered that her new potbelly kept her from snatching up ground balls as effectively. Later in life, though she wrote less (for publication, at least) she channeled her creativity into painting.
Dillard taught generations of would-be writers the importance of trimming away excess, and yet she didn't see writing as a miserly practice. She saw it as a chance to think and feel lavishly.
She called her 2016 essay collection The Abundance, after a passage from the Quran that she'd copied down in her journal. "They will question thee concerning what they should expend. Say, 'the abundance,' " she read on NPR's Weekend Edition in 2016. "That's what writing's about. Don't save something good for a later place. Don't hold back from your students, from the poor. ... If you spend it, it will fill up — from behind, as it were, like a well. Empty it. You'll be OK.”
She kept on emptying her own cup, with 12 books of fiction, prose and poetry. In the 1987 memoir An American Childhood, she described how the social tensions of the time lurked under a veil of ordinary life. In the 2007 novel The Maytrees, she wrote of decades of love and friendship shared by an artistic couple on Cape Cod. Mornings Like This, from 1995, combined phrases found in old books into new poems. "A good trick should look hard and be easy," she wrote about the project. "These poems were a bad trick. They look easy and were really hard." 1989's The Writing Life remains a much-used text in writing programs everywhere, and yet she described it as “embarrassing."
Dillard won many awards — including the National Humanities Medal in 2014 — and became one of the best-known literary writers in the country. She saw multiple books hit The New York Times Best Sellers list, even two nonfiction works. She awed and inspired readers and fellow writers for decades. And for decades, she cleaned her own spinach.
https://www.npr.org/2026/09/16/1138680574/annie-dillard-dead
KHRUSHCHEV AND TRUMP: SIMILARITIES AND ONE HUGE DIFFERENCE
Trump's unhinged, rambling performance at the UN the other day — his blabbering about annihilating Iran, among all the other vile, outrageous nonsense spewed forth by him there — was bizarrely resemblant of Nikita Khrushchev's insane braying rant from the same General Assembly podium 66 years ago.
Khrushchev, who, as the former First Secretary of the Communist Party of Ukraine between 1938-1949, was deeply implicated in Stalin's murderous spree during those terrible years, was a massively uncouth, ignorant, crude, coarse, and entirely and gleefully shameless man — very similar to Trump in more ways than one.
Yet he also had the inner fortitude (and political acumen), three years after Stalin's death, to denounce "the greatest genius of all time," shatter Stalin's cult of personality, reveal to Soviet people and the entire world the sheer astounding scope of Stalin's crimes, bring back from the Gulag hundreds of thousands of innocent, unjustly "repressed" people, and usher in a period of relative liberalization in the public sphere of the Soviet society — the so-called Khrushchevian “thaw."
Trump, on the other hand, has done absolutely nothing to redeem the vast waste of his life. He has not done anything at all in his entire eight decades on earth for anyone other than himself, his family, and his crooked, grifting cronies. He is a man with no redeeming qualities. ~M. Iossel, Facebook
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JULIAN THE APOSTATE
Ahhh, Julian. Maybe the most misunderstood, tragic, and criminally underrated emperor of the Later Roman Empire. More bookish than Hadrian. As well-trained a soldier as Trajan. Better-educated than any “barracks emperor”—and even some of the aristocratic ones. Fluent in Greek and Latin. And as we all know, Julian was doggedly pagan—hence his title of “Apostate.”
Let us examine the time period in which Julian lived—the mid-4th century—before we assess his influence. Diocletian’s reforms had saved the empire from the Crisis of the Third Century; Constantine had undone Diocletian’s Tetrarchy, founded a new capital upon the old Greek city of Byzantium, and begun the process of Christianizing the empire; and Constantine’s three sons had all died, leaving Julian the sole ruler of the reunited empire.
Trained in the classics, enamored of Hellenism, and disgusted by the hypocrisy of Christians like his uncle Constantius II (who slaughtered Julian’s entire family and most of his own to consolidate his power), Julian secretly converted to paganism in his youth. Upon his accession, Julian began instituting a series of much-needed (from his perspective) reforms.
One of the first things Julian did upon reaching Constantinople was kick the palace’s gigantic household staff to the curb. Julian fancied himself a philosopher in the style of the ancient Greeks: ascetic and humble. Diocletian’s reforms had put the once-approachable emperor, or princeps, onto a high and unreachable pedestal.
Gigantic doors and legions of slaves and plenipotentiaries now separated the jewel-bedecked emperor from the common man. Julian was appalled to discover that the palace barber dressed in fine silks, conducted himself like a rich aristocrat, and—in addition to his hefty salary—received 20 times the daily ration of bread and animal fodder a typical Roman commoner would receive.
Another thing Julian attempted was to promote town councils throughout the empire. The reforms of Diocletian and Constantine’s relocation of the capital had created a large bureaucracy in Constantinople. Every country boy tired of breaking his back in his father’s field and wanting silk robes, a soft bed, and his own eunuch pulled up his stakes and headed for the capital. Roman administration was suffocating under a heap of minutely specialized, overpaid bureaucrats. Julian cut away the deadwood, firing large numbers of officials and devolving their powers upon municipal governments—a truly revolutionary bit of decentralization. It would not last.
Julian’s most famous—or perhaps I should say, infamous—act was to prohibit Christians from teaching the classics. Julian, much like his pagan forebears, saw Christianity as a dangerous disease. Despite Constantine’s conversion and much of the Roman nobility Christianizing over the preceding decades, paganism was far from gone. Many Roman citizens were still making sacrifices to the old gods in the 4th century. Christianity was, at this stage, little more than a fad that the Roman upper crust indulged in.
Banning Christians from teaching the classics—which Julian justified by writing that Christians who did not believe in the old Roman pantheon couldn’t effectively teach Homer and other pagan Greek authors—may not seem like a big deal. But since the classics formed such a cornerstone of Roman education, Christians were now effectively barred from being teachers.
Only pagans, henceforth, would sculpt young Roman minds. If Julian’s edict (which, by the way, was the closest our young philosopher-emperor ever got to persecuting Christians during his reign) had been left in place, Julian might have succeeded in eradicating Christianity altogether. The history of the Byzantine Empire—and Europe, and the world—would be very different.
So you see, dear reader, Julian’s life and reign could best be summed up in one word: “almost.” He almost got purged with the rest of his family. He almost didn’t become emperor. He almost managed to extirpate Christianity from the Later Roman Empire. He almost returned the imperial palace and bureaucracy to pre-Diocletian levels of sanity. But because his reign lasted just shy of 20 months—he got a Persian spear in his gizzard in June 363, near Samarra—and his successor, Jovian, was a devout Christian, Julian’s reforms were quickly undone.
If the dude had one lasting influence on Roman/Byzantine history, it was to become a punching bag for Christian historians and theologians who condemned his quixotic adherence to paganism and his unfair singling-out of Christians during his brief reign. Julian’s legacy in the Byzantine Empire is particularly complex; Byzantine historians and scholars admired his classical education and mastery of Greek, but obviously couldn’t cotton to his heathen beliefs or his contempt for Christians (whom Julian dismissively called “Galileans”). This despite Julian’s Christian upbringing, and the fact that his attitude toward the followers of Christ was way more tolerant than any of his Christian-persecuting predecessors’ (Domitian, Septimius Severus, Valerian, Diocletian). ~ Andrew T. Post, Quora
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RESIDENTS OF WEIMAR FORCED TO TOUR BUCHENWALD
In April 1945, about 1,200 people from Weimar were persuaded to gather in their finest Sunday clothes and go for what they thought would be a short walk.
Some even brought sandwiches in case the outing turned into pleasant afternoon meeting or lecture.
Instead, American soldiers forced them to make long march to Buchenwald.
Along the way, most people quietly whispered and laughed, convinced that the rumors about human experiments taking place in the nearby camps were all lies.
Once they passed through the gates, all the laughter stopped.
A thick, bitter smoke filled the air with an unpleasant smell. Rough looking soldiers led the trembling and confused visitors past huge piles of human bones that had been thrown out behind the ovens.
Their confusion ended as hundreds of people gasped in horror.
The soldiers led them farther into the large camp and brought them to several display tables.
There, on white cloth, were human heads that had been shriveled and dried, along with decorative lampshades made from human skin.
At that moment, the veil of ignorance was torn away from these unsuspecting people.
Women cried out and covered their faces, while men collapsed to the ground, dry heaving or falling unconscious.
Thousands of real, living survivors, some as hollow eyed and skeletal as the dead, stood staring at them from within the camp.
The Americans made everyone stay and look until every one of these Germans had shed tears of grief for their countrymen.
Once every emotional defense they had was broken down by what they had seen, the people were sent back to their homes, where those images would continue to haunt them for the rest of their lives. ~ Rory Fletcher, Quora
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SPENDING THEIR KIDS’ INHERITANCE?
After decades of being blamed for everything from the demise of pensions to the price of housing, Boomers are now being castigated for spending the money that their children were (apparently) counting on inheriting.
Indeed, there’s been a lot of talk about the so-called “Great Wealth Transfer” — and lately a fair amount of consternation that Boomers might actually spend some of that wealth before they die.
Which got me wondering: How much did the Boomers actually inherit from their parents?
Turns out, for most, not all that much.
Back in 2011, researchers at Boston College’s Center for Retirement Research took a specific look at that question. They estimated that about two-thirds of Boomer households would ultimately receive an inheritance.
And that median expected inheritance was ... (just) $64,000.
Now, $64,000 is certainly nothing to sneeze at. But neither is it the kind of generational windfall suggested by much of the current discussion about the wealth Boomers are now supposedly “obligated” to leave behind.
And remember that was the median among those expected to receive an inheritance.
Roughly one-third weren’t expected to receive any … at all.
An Inheritance ‘Average’?
Federal Reserve data provides some additional perspective.
Looking at inheritances received between 1995 and 2016 — a period during which many Boomers would have been receiving inheritances from their parents — more than half, 55%, were worth less than $50,000. Another 30% were between $50,000 and $250,000.
Only about 6% exceeded $500,000, and just 2% topped $1 million. But those million-dollar inheritances accounted for roughly 40% of all the dollars inherited.
In other words, a relatively tiny number of enormous inheritances can make the overall inheritance “pie” look a whole lot bigger than the slice received by a typical family. And remember, even then they weren’t all that big.
So, what’s got everyone so stirred up?
As it turns out, Cerulli Associates — a credible source, but one whose projections often seem to run on steroids — recently estimated that an astonishing $124 trillion will transfer through 2048. Of that, $105 trillion is projected to go to heirs, while $18 trillion will go to charity.
Which means they estimate that nearly $100 trillion is expected to come from Boomers and generations older than them in what has been dubbed (drumroll, please) the “Great Wealth Transfer.”
But hold on a second. More than $62 trillion — half of that entire projected transfer — is expected to come from high- and ultra-high-net-worth households that comprise … just 2% of all households.
At this point you should be saying to yourself, “could this be (yet) another one of those situations where an enormous aggregate number tells us considerably less about the experience of a typical American than the click-baiting headlines suggest?
Great Expectations?
But wait — there’s more!
Not all that wealth is heading directly to Millennials and Gen X.
Cerulli further estimates that some $54 trillion will first transfer “horizontally” between spouses, with more than 95% of those assets going to women. Nearly $40 trillion is projected to move to widowed women in the Boomer and older generations before eventually moving on to heirs or charities.
Which means the Great Wealth Transfer isn’t really a single transfer at all. And it certainly doesn’t mean that there’s a $124 trillion check waiting to be divided among America’s children.
Yet that enormous number seems to have helped create some enormous expectations.
We’ve seen stories about “SKI” — Spending the Kids’ Inheritance — and Boomers “indulging” in travel, second homes and experiences rather than preserving their assets for their children. There’s even a growing presumption that parents should transfer wealth sooner, when their children can make better use of it.
Honestly, my wife and I have done some of that with our kids. But there’s something odd about treating an inheritance as though it were an obligation — particularly when the generation supposedly “shirking” that obligation largely built its own wealth without receiving anything remotely comparable.
To be sure, Boomers benefited from some extraordinarily favorable economic circumstances: decades of rising home values, a remarkable bull market in equities, relatively inexpensive higher education (RELATIVELY, mind you) and, for some (though not most, mind you), traditional pensions. Timing matters, and they (we?) had some pretty good timing.
But they (we?) also saved, invested, paid mortgages, raised families — and accumulated much of the wealth we’re now discussing over decades. We did it despite wars, gas lines, stagflation. And let me point out, spending a fair amount of that on the kids now chomping at the proverbial bit of a potential inheritance.
Our parents generally didn’t leave us fortunes. Nor did we expect them to.
‘Will’ Power
None of this is an argument against leaving an inheritance.
Nor is it an argument against helping children or grandchildren while you’re still around to see the impact. Indeed, there are compelling reasons to do so if your circumstances and retirement security permit it.
But retirement planning has always had an awkward uncertainty at its core: You don’t know how long you’ll live, what markets will do, what inflation will be, or what health and long-term care might cost. And nobody wants to be a financial or physical burden on their kids if they don’t have to.
Telling retirees simultaneously that they must make their money last for an unknowable lifetime — and that they should feel guilty if there isn’t enough left over afterward — seems like an interesting, if conflicted, set of expectations.
So perhaps before criticizing Boomers for spending their children’s inheritance, we should remember how much inheritance most of them started with.
For a lot of them — most of them — the answer was pretty simple.
Not much.
An inheritance is a wonderful thing to receive.
It just shouldn’t be a retirement plan. And it shouldn’t undermine one, either.
https://www.asppa-net.org/news/2026/8/spending-their-inheritance/
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EVERY YEAR HUMANS SPEAK LESS AND LESS
Silent retreats are all the rage; hotel guests are embracing ‘hushpitatility’. But won’t this leave us more isolated?
Are we becoming too quiet? As a joyless, intolerant shrew, my kneejerk answer is a predictable “if only” (writing this on a train full of happy holidaymakers isn’t helping). But am I wrong? I find myself confronted with evidence that people are taking the expression “say less” literally. A study recently reported in the Atlantic found that daily spoken word counts declined by around 300 every year between 2005 and 2019. A sample group of 2,197 participants, aged between 10 and 94, wore devices that randomly recorded them as they went about their lives; each year, they spoke on average 338 fewer words than the year before. For under-25s, the decline was even steeper: 451 fewer words.
Even I can see that’s worrying. Spending time with other people is good for our brains, health and mood, while, as the US surgeon general put it so starkly in 2023, “lacking social connection can increase the risk for premature death as much as smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day”.
But silence is seen as a desirable self-improvement tool; healthy even. “Silent walking” is a wellness hack, we’re noise cancelling like never before, and Hilton’s trend report this year has introduced me to the horrid concept of “hushpitality”. Claiming “sometimes the best travel companion is silence”, Hilton reported on the (depressing) rise of digital and AI-enabled tools – virtual check-ins, text communication, bots – that allow travelers to “protect their peace”, and quoted a survey in which 57% of US travelers said they’d be interested in a silent or quiet retreat. We seem convinced we need quieter lives, but maybe we actually need more chat?
It’s further evidence that knowing what’s good or bad for us has become baffling, labyrinthine, probably impossible. Lettuce is potentially deadly now and New Scientist informs me lightbulbs are “wrecking your metabolism” (doubtless soon darkmaxxing influencers will be promoting cave living). So, should people wear their headphones more or less, and is silence something to gorge on, or enjoy in moderation? Maybe we need a version of Michael Pollan’s brilliantly simple dictum on food – “Eat food, not too much, mostly plants” – but for talking. How about: “Speak words, mostly in person, not too loud (and never on speakerphone)”? I’m open to other – quietly voiced – suggestions.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/aug/17/every-year-humans-speak-less-and-less-thats-bad-news-even-if-you-hate-mindless-chit-chat
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ABRAHAM AND ISAAC; A PREQUEL?
Adam Kirsch points out the Christians noted that Isaac carried the wood for the sacrifice the way Christ carried his cross. That particular parallel is not terribly convincing, but it does remind me that according to Christian doctrine, God the Father demanded the sacrifice of his son Jesus, and no ram appeared in time; the killing was carried out, though JC later was referred to as the Lamb of God. The last-minute sparing of Isaac makes the Old Testament god the father almost kind and merciful, while Christianity is founded on an atrocity -- a bloody human sacrifice.
Isaac no doubt suffered from PTSD all his life, and maybe his vision started failing soon after he saw the knife in his father's hand, the blade about to plunge into him.
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THE URFA MAN, THE OLDEST LIFE SIZED STATUE OF A MAN EVER DISCOVERED
In 1993, while digging up a road in Turkey construction workers hit something unusual. When they cleared the dirt they saw a face emerging from underneath. Unknowingly they had discovered something that was about to broaden our understanding of the early human history.
The Urfa man is almost 6 feet tall, carved from a single block of stone with the most striking feature being its black eyes which are made of Volcanic glass that seems to stare right back at you. It also has no mouth and no feet, for reasons not fully understood which makes it even stranger.
The most astonishing thing about the Urfa man is its age. It is around 11,000 years old which means it predates the pyramids by some 6500 years. It was also discovered just 15 kilometers away from the famous Gobekli Tepe.
The Urfa man currently sits in Sanliurfa Archaeology and Mosaic Museum in Turkey with only few people even knowing about its existence.
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SOME SURPRISING DEVELOPMENTS SINCE ABORTION BAN IN SOME STATES
1. The number of abortions continues to rise
You might have guessed that when more than a dozen states banned abortion, there would be fewer abortions happening in those states and that the overall number of abortions would go down.
That's not what has happened. The number of abortions nationally has increased each year since the national right to abortion was overturned.
Part of the reason is that access has become easier in states that support abortion. Policy changes have allowed more residents of those states to have abortion access without barriers like waiting periods or parental permission requirements. These lowered barriers have helped people who live in restrictive states to travel for care.
"Shield laws" have also emerged as a major force in the abortion access landscape. States that support abortion access have created legal shields to allow clinicians to provide abortion to residents in states with bans, even without patients traveling. Clinicians can prescribe medication abortion via telemedicine — online or over the phone. Pills can then be mailed or picked up at local pharmacies.
That's led to the surprising fact that the number of abortions in states with bans have actually increased in recent years, as telemedicine abortion has grown. And this has not escaped Justice Alito's notice.
"What is at stake is the perpetration of a scheme to undermine our decision in Dobbs," Alito wrote in a recent dissent related to abortion pills, "which restored the right of each state to decide how to regulate abortions within its borders."
2. Anti-abortion politics have gotten complicated
President Trump is pulled in two directions on the issue of abortion. His appointees to the Supreme Court overturned Roe vs. Wade, a huge victory for conservatives, but he and his administration have become notably quiet on the issue in this midterm year. Why? The coalition that elected Trump in 2024 included independent voters, who support abortion rights.
Meanwhile, anti-abortion politicians and activists want to see more action to restrict abortion, like reviving the Comstock Act. That's the 19th century law that says you can't use the mail to send "obscene" materials including pornograpy and "every article or thing designed, adapted, or intended for producing abortion." If enforced, it could create a de facto national abortion ban without requiring Congress to pass a new law.
Last month, Justice Clarence Thomas asserted in his dissent to the abortion pill case that the Comstock Act was in force and that drug companies manufacturing and distributing FDA approved medications were therefore engaged in a "criminal enterprise."
And states are also actively pursuing more restrictions, including bills that would charge women who get abortions with homicide. Texas passed a law that allows private citizens to sue out-of-state prescribers of abortion pills for $100,000. Louisiana scheduled mifepristone and misoprostol, the two medications used for abortion, as controlled substances.
Louisiana also is suing the Food and Drug Administration, aiming to force the agency to roll back the rules change that allowed telemedicine access to mifepristone. That case is likely headed for the Supreme Court. If the justices decide the case in Louisiana's favor then mifepristone would no longer be available via telemedicine nationally. Other lawsuits against mifepristone are also pending.
3. Supporters say abortion pills are "unstoppable"
Abortion rights advocates are pushing beyond the status quo, too. Researchers at University of California San Francisco recently published a study examining the feasibility of making abortion medication available over-the-counter in the U.S., no doctor's appointment or prescription needed. A Planned Parenthood affiliate started offering abortion medication to patients who aren't pregnant, to keep at home in case they need it. And telemedicine abortion providers have contingency plans to be able to continue sending misoprostol alone through the mail even if access to mifepristone is restricted.
The post-Roe era has seen some closures of brick-and-mortar reproductive clinics that offer abortion, in part because Republicans in Congress withheld millions of dollars for Planned Parenthood and other organizations that provide abortion in 2025. Efforts to maintain access to in-person abortion care include training more primary care physicians to offer abortion, and turning to health facilities like urgent care clinics to fill in gaps.
In the meantime, the use of medication abortion continues to grow. "Abortion pills are everywhere, they're safe, they're effective, and they're pretty much unstoppable," Elisa Wells of Plan C, a website about medication abortion, told NPR last month. "The genie is out of the bottle."
4. Privacy and stigma around abortion are evolving rapidly
Abortion was legal for nearly 50 years under a right to privacy based in the constitution. In the first trimester, according to the majority opinion in Roe, "the abortion decision and its effectuation must be left to the medical judgment of the pregnant woman's attending physician."
Ironically, since that right has been revoked, women can have abortions in far more privacy than was possible under Roe. Patients can fill out an online form and have abortion pills delivered to their homes, avoiding protesters that still gather outside some reproductive health clinics. At the same time, people embrace talking freely about the experience, eschewing shame, with hashtags like #ShoutYourAbortion.
Some women who have shared their own painful stories about being denied medically necessary abortion and miscarriage care have become public figures. Samantha Casiano, whose story was first reported by NPR, was pregnant for months knowing that her baby wasn't going to survive, and went on to testify in court and be featured in a documentary about the consequences of Texas' abortion ban.
As more and more people have shared their stories, that's had a snowball effect — it empowers more people to speak out. Kate Cox appealed to the Texas Supreme Court for access to abortion while pregnant. Her picture was in the news as she was living through a pregnancy complication and seeking help. In the end, Texas denied her request, and she traveled out of state for an abortion.
Still, the increasingly online experience of seeking abortion also opens up new privacy issues. Just months after the Dobbs decision, police in Nebraska used Facebook messages to bring felony charges in a successful case against a woman who gave her teenage daughter abortion pills. And many Americans track their periods in apps that have raised concerns among privacy experts.
https://www.npr.org/2026/06/25/nx-s1-5869560/abortion-dobbs-roe-rights-restrictions-anniversary-update
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THE RUSSIA-UKRAINE WAR IS BECOMING INCREASINGLY ROBOTIC
The war in Ukraine has become heavily robotic, transitioning from aerial drone surveillance to a massive reliance on ground-based robots.
Scale of the Robotic Effort
Logistics and Evacuations: Unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) have performed over 50,000 logistics and evacuation missions, carrying heavy supplies like rations, ammo, and even evacuating wounded soldiers from dangerous kill zones.
self-propelled gurney
Frontline Goals: Ukraine's premier forces, like the Third Army Corps, aim to replace roughly one-third of their frontline infantry troops with these ground robots.
Production Boom: Ukrainian domestic manufacturing scaled up dramatically, delivering 15,000 UGVs to frontline units in 2025 alone, up from just 2,000 in 2024.
Direct Combat: Robots aren't just for moving supplies; they are increasingly mounted with machine guns, anti-tank mines, and rocket launchers to act as remote turrets, kamikaze strike vehicles, or air-defense units.
Prisoner Captures: There are documented instances of Ukrainian remote-controlled ground robots holding positions independently and even forcing Russian soldiers to surrender.
Limitations and Realities
Vulnerabilities: Ground robots face rough terrain, battery limits, and heavy attrition from enemy FPV (first-person view) drones and mines. A single frontline brigade can lose several ground machines a day.
Control and Jamming: Most units still rely on human operators using game-style controllers and signals vulnerable to electronic jamming, though early AI integration is helping them navigate basic terrain independently.
Not Fully Autonomous: While the technology is shifting warfare toward automation, human operators still make the critical command decisions, and robots primarily support—rather than fully replace—infantry teams.
Russia is actively matching Ukraine's robotic expansion, deploying a massive variety of unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) on the frontline. While Ukraine has captured headlines with domestic tech startups, Russia relies on a mix of state-backed defense factories, modified foreign weapons, and decentralized volunteer production.
Ukrainian defense data shows that the scale of Russian ground robotics has surged significantly, with Ukrainian forces striking over 3,000 Russian ground robots using drones between January and September 2026 alone.
The Russian military uses at least 20 different types of ground robots. ~ Quora
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UKRAINE’S GROUND ROBOTS AND THE ECONOMICS OF SURVIVAL
In August 2024, special forces from five Ukrainian military intelligence units crossed the Black Sea to raid Russian-held Kinburn Spit. The commandos of these units — Chimera, Aratta, Stuhna, Paragon, Terror, and the Siberian Battalion — landed, fought, destroyed equipment, and withdrew. Two years later, in July 2026, Ukraine returned, but left the soldiers behind. Instead, an uncrewed surface vessel carried a ground robot across the water and released it onto the shore.
The robot, equipped with a Wolly 7.62 remotely operated combat module, featuring a machine gun and an AI-assisted targeting system, rolled onto shore and engaged targets. A robot delivers a robot — this is probably the first known combat mission of this format in the world, according to the fighters of the 123rd Brigade who carried it out.
Operations like this make headlines, but most robotic missions will never do so. In the 3rd Assault Brigade, which fields a dedicated ground-robot battalion, roughly 19 of every 20 ground-robot tasks involve logistics or evacuation; combat accounts for only 2 percent. Khartiia, which conducted Ukraine’s first fully robotized operation using ground drones in late 2024, reports the same pattern: logistics remains the platforms’ most important role.
Third Army officers say ground robots cut paperwork. They let junior officers decide how to carry out a commander’s intent. Moreover, they gave a battle captain a shared real-time picture from which to coordinate units directly, rather than waiting for approval to move up and down the hierarchy.
By Aug. 20, 2026, Ukrainian ground robots had undertaken more than 100,000 frontline missions. One robot sortie roughly every three and a half minutes, day and night. It is the robotization of the final miles of the military supply chain. This is not militarized drone warfare, as the fleet primarily absorbs labor rather than increasing lethality. That labor equation is important, but it is not the part of Ukraine’s experience that transfers most readily.
The Last Mile
Large trucks can deliver supplies to rear distribution points, but ammunition, water, food, batteries, generators, and construction materials must still reach dispersed positions. The loads are transferred to progressively smaller vehicles – first pickups, then all-terrain vehicles or motorcycles, and finally soldiers on foot. Each transfer reduces carrying capacity and creates discernible patterns that Russian reconnaissance can detect.
Drone warfare forces units to scatter and fortify their positions, while their need for batteries, electronic-warfare equipment, and construction materials increases, making the supplies harder to deliver. Heavy aerial drones now deliver almost all food, ammunition, and water to some zero-line positions. Casualty evacuation presents the same problem in reverse. A wounded soldier must travel back through the kill zone before reaching an ambulance or stabilization point. There are documented cases of soldiers being required to walk as far as 25 kilometers (15 miles) to reach or leave their positions.
A very revealing robotic evacuation was recorded near Pokrovsk in March 2026. Ukrainian commanders assessed a route as too heavily mined and exposed for a conventional vehicle. A Bizon ground robot traveled approximately 12 km (7.5 miles) each way, over 12 hours to retrieve the casualty. It was struck by a first-person view drone and briefly lost communications, but the wounded soldier survived.
Ground robots entered this system at its narrowest point: between the last location conventional vehicles can reach with tolerable risk and the positions that still require physical connection to the rear. They are not invulnerable; mines, first-person view drones, small-arms fire, broken communications, and difficult terrain destroy them frequently. But losing one doesn’t cost another casualty, nor does it mean another trip through the same contested ground.
The Economics of Exposure
One Ukrainian soldier remained trapped near Russian positions for 33 days. Six ground robots sent to retrieve him were destroyed; the seventh completed a 64-kilometer mission and brought him back alive. By traditional attrition metrics, the operation looks disastrous, but compared with repeatedly sending rescue teams through the same drone-covered terrain, the exchange was justifiable.
In the 21st Unmanned Systems Regiment, ground robots now handle up to 90 percent of its deliveries. In the 3rd Assault Brigade, monthly robotic deliveries increased from 30 tons in January 2025 to 300 tons a year later. The brigade also reports that all battlefield evacuations of wounded and fallen soldiers are now conducted by robots.
Ground drones let supplies move in smaller loads over multiple routes. For casualties, the robot’s job is to cross the exposed ground so a stretcher team doesn’t have to. Sustained operations require vehicles that units can replace quickly, repair near the front, and operate through standardized controls and components. Effectiveness is measured through completed missions, tons delivered, casualties extracted, repair time, and, mainly, hours of human exposure avoided. The fleet still needs people – just fewer of them in the kill zone itself. Every destroyed robot costs equipment and operator time. If it has already completed a casualty evacuation, however, the loss may still be worth it.
A 2024 Ukrainian General Staff model estimated that the systematic use of ground robots could reduce personnel losses in supported units by up to 30 percent. But that result belongs to Ukraine’s particular war: a manpower-constrained army, a positional front, and repeated supply routes under constant drone surveillance. A casualty-averse military may seek the same trade; an expeditionary force faces a harder test, because its spares, repair teams, communications, and recovery capacity must travel with the fleet. What transfers is the system behind the result — common standards, shared data, trained operators, forward maintenance, and procurement tied to verified use.
Where Ground Robots Reach Their Limits
While aerial drones fly over shell craters, clay, undergrowth, and ruins, ground robots must cross them. Ukrainian platforms that perform well on test ranges frequently encounter their hardest terrain for the first time in combat. This makes local modifications essential. A vehicle suited to an urban zone may fail in dense woodland.
The battlefield has also expanded faster than the means of communication. Many early ground robots were designed around a control range of two to five kilometers. Supply and evacuation routes now reach 15 to 20 kilometers through the kill zone, sometimes even further. With typical speeds of up to 15 kilometers (9 miles) per hour, a single mission may require hours of uninterrupted control. Units alternate among radio, Starlink, fiber-optic cables, and aerial relays according to distance, terrain, and electronic warfare conditions. A broken video link can leave a vehicle stranded in a crater or on an exposed road.
Since mid-2026, Russia has fielded dedicated jamming systems, including the “Volna Kupol Garant” array, to flood the satellite frequencies that Ukrainian Starlink terminals rely on. This interference targets drones operating far behind the front lines, but it also affects any ground robot that depends on the same connection. Starlink’s uplink capacity is frequently insufficient for the continuous video stream from combat uncrewed ground vehicles, even without enemy interference. Control of the link is becoming as consequential as control of the ground the robot crosses. Russia’s emerging Rassvet constellation could narrow Ukraine’s communications advantage. Once it is fully operational, it could allow for online control of aerial drones throughout Ukraine, so Ukraine should start creating electronic-warfare systems to counter it.
These conditions define the practical agenda for autonomy. The majority of so-called autonomous systems adhere to predetermined pathways or evade trivial hurdles, while operators keep the power to make important decisions. Current priorities center on navigation without GPS, identifying hazards and potential threats, and the ability to continue or return after losing communications. Each function lightens the workload of operators and allows a crew to manage more missions.
Survivability creates another tradeoff. Mines immobilize platforms, while first-person view drones exploit their visible and thermal signatures. In a late-2025 interview, Maksym Vasylchenko, co-founder and CEO of Tencore, said that one brigade working with the company had reported losing two to five ground robots per day. Additional armor increases weight, heat, and cost; lighter platforms sacrifice protection. Ukraine has largely accepted higher attrition in exchange for mobility and rapid replacement.
Ground robots perform best on repeatable missions with known routes and bounded decisions: resupply, evacuation, and minelaying. Dynamic assault requires more resilient communications and greater autonomy. Ukraine’s breakthrough has come from matching imperfect machines to missions they can execute at scale.
What’s Next?
The Ukrainian campaign has shown that the pivotal battle is no longer just about brute force or land, but about who can keep an integrated system operating at the edge of the battlefield while moving people out of the most dangerous areas. Several implications follow for Western planners.
First, the U.S. Army has activated Mission Autonomy, an integrator that will connect existing systems into taskable packages of capability. Its three priorities are combat engineering, fires, and logistics, with autonomous resupply and casualty evacuation falling under logistics. Its leadership calls the model “acquisition in reverse,” starting with the battlefield problem and developing requirements alongside industry’s proposed solutions, rather than specifying every detail first. But Future Combat Systems and Robotic Combat Vehicle stalled on cost or survivability, and at its own Detroit rollout, one attendee with years of Army robotics experience asked whether this is only another reset. A system built to buy 40 of something over ten years cannot buy 4,000 of something that will be obsolete by spring.
Second, NATO’s smaller eastern-flank states have little territory or manpower to spare. Robotic resupply should promptly move into doctrine. For small armies, keeping people out of the kill zone is a condition of survival.
Third, planners need to consider how far an unmanned fleet can remain controllable and recoverable under electronic attack. Two constraints of the robotic depth stand out: connectivity and operator attention. The CEO of Ark Robotics estimates that no more than 1 percent of technological systems used in combat are truly autonomous. Today, each additional drone generally requires another operator. Large fleets will therefore need software that allows one person to supervise several aerial and ground systems at once. The Kyiv School of Economics Institute identifies the near-term priorities: automatic switching among communications channels, navigation without GPS, and automation of routine tasks such as routing, loading, and unloading.
What matters is not the robot itself, but the chain that starts in orbit, moves through spectrum, software, navigation, and forward repair, and ends at the trench. The depth at which that chain still works will determine the true value of the fleet.
https://warontherocks.com/ukraines-ground-robots-and-the-economics-of-survival/
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WHY ARE WE SO FASCINATED WITH WOMEN KILLERS?
On 20 June 1893, in New Bedford, Massachusetts, a packed courtroom waited with bated breath for the jury to return its verdict following a grueling double-murder trial. Against a backdrop of intense media interest, they had heard the prosecution argue that the accused had hacked to death their own parents with a hatchet, had burned their clothing to hide evidence of blood, and had done so out of hatred. The question the jury was asked to answer was simple – was Lizzie Andrew Borden guilty of murdering her father and stepmother? Jurors took just one hour to reach a decision: not guilty.
Why, after 130 years, are we still enthralled by the Borden murders? Part of the answer, I think, speaks to a wider obsession with female killers (or alleged female killers in Borden’s case) and the way in which society ties itself in knots to try to explain, excuse or justify violent women. Statistically, globally and historically, homicide is a largely male crime – in terms of both perpetrators and victims. Female killers are rare: they represented just 7% of convicted homicide suspects in England and Wales between 2019 and 2022. It is precisely this rarity that sees homicides with female perpetrators (or alleged perpetrators) disproportionately sensationalized, mythologized and forced into recognizable tropes – the femme fatale, the wrongfully accused, the passive victim or the monstrosity.
That is not to say there isn’t some truth in each of these ideas. But very often a female perpetrator of a violent crime will also trigger or become the face of wider societal debates about crime, punishment, justice and womanhood. History is littered with examples.
The execution of Marie Manning in 1849, alongside her husband, for the murder of her lover, Patrick O’Connor, was followed by tens of thousands of Londoners, including Charles Dickens, and spawned close to 2.5m broadsheet sales. The shock of seeing a woman hanged triggered a nationwide debate about the ethics of public executions (they were abolished in Britain less than 20 years later). So notorious did Manning become that Madame Tussauds created a wax model of her, dressed in the black satin dress the killer supposedly wore at her execution. The statue remained in its chamber of horrors until 1971.
Similarly, the trial of the chocolate poisoner, Christiana Edmunds, forced Victorian society to confront the idea that a single middle-class woman could intentionally cause indiscriminate harm. When an attempted plea of insanity failed and she was found guilty of the murder of Sidney Barker and attempted murder of Mrs Beard, she was sentenced to death. But the home secretary stepped in, asked for her to be reassessed and granted her a reprieve. She spent the rest of her days at Broadmoor psychiatric hospital.
As the historian Jill Newton Ainsley attests, “Declaring her insane and therefore not responsible for her actions provided a bizarre and unprecedented crime with a relatively simple explanation.” This reluctance to acknowledge women’s agency when it comes to violent crime plays out in statistics too. Newton Ainsley has shown that between 1832 and 1901 women were twice as likely as men to be granted an acquittal on the grounds of insanity – even when charged with similar crimes.
For very different reasons, the acquittal of Beatrice Pace in 1928 captured public attention. She had been accused of murdering her abusive husband by arsenic poisoning, only to become the poster girl for wronged women. Upon her acquittal, newspapers reported emotional scenes where “women clasped one another by the hands and some cried”. Hundreds of women later wrote to her expressing their well wishes for her future. A few decades later, in 1955, after shooting her abusive lover, David Blakely, five times with a revolver, there was no such sympathy for Ruth Ellis at her trial. She was found guilty of murder, but her subsequent execution shone a spotlight on the ethics of capital punishment.
Perhaps the most chilling manifestation of female violence in the 20th century comes in the person of the child killer Myra Hindley. Despite conducting the crimes alongside Ian Brady, the criminologist Mark Pettigrew has noted that the press coverage of Hindley, with the infamous mugshot, far exceeded that of Brady. Additionally, her unsuccessful parole attempts opened a wider debate about whether “life” should mean life. More recently, the case of the convicted murderer Lucy Letby has become deeply political with regard to whistleblowing, medical care and the role of expert witnesses.
When it comes to this latest iteration of the Lizzie Borden story, the Netflix show appears to make a connection between Borden and 20th-century serial killer Aileen Wuornos, who received her own Hollywood treatment in a film starring Charlize Theron, also called Monster. This seems designed to, as the publicity materials state, tap into a “legacy of female rage” and provide an “exploration of why women kill”. From the opening episode, the show takes a highly sexualized and graphic approach to the story of the killings.
Was Borden guilty? We may never know. What we do know is that there were four people in the Borden household on the morning of 4 August 1892: Andrew Borden, Abby Borden, Lizzie Borden and Bridget Sullivan. By lunchtime, Andrew and Abby were hacked to death; Abby’s body was abandoned face-down on a bedroom floor and Andrew’s lay on a blood-drenched sofa. The brutal reality is that this was a horrific crime – whether a result of “female rage” or not.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/sep/20/lizzie-borden-myra-hindley-fascinated-female-killers
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LINDSAY CLANCY’S CASE IS A RORSCHACH TEST
Clancy’s case became a referendum on mothers, healthcare and the status of women
Most family annihilators are men. It’s a grim fact that such incidents are common enough to have a discernible pattern. The massacre is carried out by a husband and father, often one who is on the verge of bankruptcy or divorce; typically, it forms the finale of a long reign of domestic violence terror.
About half the time, the perpetrator kills himself after slaughtering his family. Gun use is common – a large number of what are termed “mass shootings” in the United States are in fact family annihilation killings, in which a man turns his weapon on his family members. Other times, the killer uses knives, or fires.
This kind of killing does not always make the news. When it does, news organizations often run family photos, in which the killer smiles on a beach or beside the Grand Canyon with his arm around the wife and children he will later shoot or strangle.
In this context of pervasive and normalized male domestic violence against women and children, the Lindsay Clancy case was always going to attract outside attention. Because in that case, when three Massachusetts children were strangled of their family home in January of 2023 – Cora, who was five, Dawson, who was three, and Callan, who was just eight months old – the killer was their mom.
As is fairly common for family annihilators, Clancy attempted suicide after killing her children. But Clancy survived. Injuries left her paralyzed below the waist. At her murder trial, which lasted an unusually long six weeks and concluded in a hung jury on Friday, she rolled to the defense table each morning in a wheelchair.
The mistrial means that Clancy – along with her children’s father, their grandparents, and everyone else who loved them, to say nothing of the state – will now face the possibility of being subjected to a second trial. All because of a hung jury.
Eleven of the 12 jurors accepted the argument put forward by Clancy’s defense, that Clancy, who does not contest that she killed her children, was suffering from an acute case of postpartum psychosis, and hence could not be held legally responsible for their deaths. But according to notes that the forewoman of the jury sent to the judge, one juror, a man, expressed “reasonable doubt” about Clancy’s culpability under the law, but refused to apply that doubt as is legally required.
That this lone juror who wanted to convict Clancy was male is relevant, because the Clancy case itself became, in the distorting ways that such stories tend to when they are witnessed en masse through social media, a referendum on motherhood, mental health care and the status of women.
Some mothers have expressed deep sympathy for Clancy’s postpartum mental health crises, citing resonances with their own experiences and a hope that the case can bring greater attention to the rare but acute and debilitating kind of postpartum mental suffering that Clancy seems to have experienced; others say that medical neglect of the condition, and of the experiences of postpartum women more broadly, create the conditions for tragedies like that of the Clancy family.
Some on the misogynist right, meanwhile, have seized upon Clancy’s actions and the support she has received as evidence that women are congenitally evil, disposed to violence, untrustworthy and unfit for public life.
Your opinion on the Clancy case will probably largely depend on whether you believe her defense team’s claim that she was suffering from postpartum psychosis that was severe enough that she experienced the kind of delusions, hallucinations, paranoia, rapid shifts in mood, and other departures from reality that would render her not responsible for her own actions. In other words, do you think she was really ill, or do you think that she killed her children in cold blood, and is lying?
The facts suggest that she isn’t. Clancy had a history of postpartum psychological distress following the births of her first two children, in 2017 and 2019. She was prescribed medication after those births, and seems to have been a loving and attentive mother to them for years.
But following the birth of her third child, a little boy named Callan, in 2022, reports suggest that Clancy began to experience something different, and much more serious, than her previous bouts with postpartum anxiety.
She couldn’t sleep, wasn’t eating, and would experience bouts of sudden, acute terror. Going back to her job as a nurse in a labor and delivery unit seemed impossible; she could barely function. She sought help again and was diagnosed with anxiety.
Later, she would speak to other mental health practitioners, too. A series of providers issued her a stunning array of psychiatric medications. As her sleeplessness continued, Clancy was prescribed increasingly powerful tranquilizers.
More than a month before she killed her children, Clancy reported that she had begun to hallucinate. She kept seeking help, saying that she was thinking of killing herself; she told both her mother and her husband that she feared she would harm her children, though she had never mistreated them before.
Clancy briefly checked herself in to inpatient treatment, but left after just a few nights. The Clancys seem to have thought that longer-term hospitalization was out of the question. After all, she had kids to take care of. Soon, she was hearing voices.
Those who are most outraged by the Clancy case, and by the sympathy that a homicidal mother has received, are disturbed by the unnaturalness of a woman killing her children, disturbed by what they fear is a secret core of hate and depravity in women that could be unleashed at any time.
But if I were a psychoanalyst, I might say that the right wing that imagines all women as potential Lindsay Clancys is projecting their own guilt: on some level, they know that what our culture asks mothers to do is unsustainable, cruel, and often quite literally maddening.
Because to me, what is most haunting about the Clancy case is how ordinary and unsurprising all the failures were that led to her break.
She was failed in ordinary ways by providers who saw a woman living in relative comfort and assumed her suffering could not be very serious; she was failed in ordinary ways by a community that understands motherhood to be a state of variously mild and acute suffering, and has so normalized women’s disappearance into the family that they can barely see the mother for the baby.
She was failed by the expectation that women will persevere through their own suffering, even their most disturbing and agonizing moments, to care for their children; she was failed by the trivialization of women’s lives, and by the blithe assumption that the so-called “baby blues” were mere neurotic episodes, not psychotic breaks requiring serious clinical interventions. Her children were failed, too.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/sep/07/lindsay-clancy-case-rorschach-test
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MORE MEN THAN WOMEN ARGUE THAT LINDSAY CLANCY SHOULD BE FOUND GUILTY OF MURDER
Guilt: A YouGov survey indicates that 51% of men believe Clancy should be found guilty, compared to 41% of women.
Insanity: Conversely, 26% of women believe she should be found not guilty by reason of insanity, compared to only 15% of men.
Roughly 33% of overall respondents remained uncertain about the verdict. (google)
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DEBORA-FRANCIS WHITE; THE REAL SHOCK IN THE LINDSAY CLANCY CASE IS THAT THE CHILD KILLER ISN’T A MAN
‘Family annihilation’, where a spouse kills their partner and offspring – and often themselves – is an overwhelmingly male phenomenon. But masculine violence is too common to be big news, writes the Guilty Feminist.
Lindsay Clancy, the parent from Massachusetts awaiting trial on charges of killing her three children, has become one of the biggest news stories of 2026. It’s a real tragedy and one that’s hard to look at. It has polarised the internet to the extent that men have left comments on unrelated posts of mine on social media, asking me to defend the position they assume I must have:
“Would you be condemning a man who killed his children? Why do you make excuses for a woman?”
“There are women campaigning to protect Clancy as a victim of postnatal psychosis. How do you feel about that, when she’s a child killer?”
I had made no comment about Clancy at the time, but as a feminist with a profile, I was expected to answer these questions. I can understand it. I’d also like every man with a platform to comment every time a man kills his family, but I rarely see them do that and I don’t think it occurs to most men that they should. Perhaps because the vast majority of killing in the world is done by men, it feels less gendered when another news story comes out about a homicide. It’s the default that a killer is a man, so what does it have to do with another man? Feels arbitrary. When a woman kills, it’s a gendered issue.
According to the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, about 90% of homicides worldwide are committed by men. When women kill, they mostly kill former or current intimate partners, overwhelmingly in self-defense or after prolonged abuse. In short, if men stopped killing, killing would stop.
There is only one exception to this. While men are more likely than women to kill their children, women are just as likely as men to kill their baby or infant. This was not what I expected to see in the stats, and it shocked me.
Women are most likely to take the life of their baby while postpartum. If a mother kills her baby in the first 24 hours it is usually driven by extreme panic
The US National Library of Medicine tells us “filicide follows similar patterns throughout the western world”. Men are far more likely to be responsible for family annihilation – that is, to kill all their children and their current or former partner. Frequently in these cases they take their own lives too. The Centre of Applied Criminology at Birmingham City University presented a paper about this in 2013 and found four different motivations for men who committed family annihilation.
The self-righteous killer blames the mother of his children for the breakdown of the family.
The disappointed killer believes his family has let him down or has undermined or disrupted his idealized vision of family life. For example, the children are not following his traditional or religious values.
The anomic killer sees his family as an advertisement of his economic success. If he perceives himself to be an economic failure, his view of the family changes.
The paranoid killer fears an external threat from (for example) social services or the legal system, believing they will side against him and remove his children.
Professor David Wilson, one of the paper's three authors, and founder of the Centre of Applied Criminology at Birmingham City University, said: "The family annihilator should be seen as a specific category of murderer, for a crime which appears to be increasing … To begin solving this problem the role of gender must be recognized, acknowledging that it is mainly men who will resort to this type of violence."
In all cases, the killers seem to suffer from the perception that their masculinity is undermined. The murders appear to represent a final desperate attempt at taking on a “masculine role”.
Women, on the other hand, are most likely to take the life of their baby while they are postpartum. If a mother kills her baby in the first 24 hours it is usually driven by extreme panic and concealment of an unwanted pregnancy. Often she is extremely young and in critical social isolation. The mothers in these instances often did not seek prenatal care. Often she is the only one who knows about the baby.
When women take the life of their baby some time between the first week and the first year, severe postpartum psychiatric disorders, either depression or psychosis, play a major role. The mother is often suffering from extreme maternal mental illness, delusions, or hallucinations in which her reality is heavily distorted.
This is why women have come out in numbers to campaign for Lindsay Clancy.
Her former mother-in-law, Susan Clancy, testified under oath that Lindsay was "begging for help" before killing her three children, who were aged five, three and eight months. This was verified by other witnesses who testified that Clancy's mental health had deteriorated after the birth of her youngest son.
The defense attorney asked if Lindsay Clancy had been "interested at all times in trying to get better and see doctors", and Susan Clancy replied: "Very much so."
"She was begging for help," she said, and described her as “a very nurturing, very loving" mother.
Many women have begged for help in postpartum trauma and have been failed by the system. Some women find it difficult to even ask for help because they know they are “supposed to be” nurturing and maternal without question. They feel they will be seen as monstrous for even admitting to feelings of alienation from their offspring. Often the media narrative plays into these ideas.
Michael Haight killed eight members of a single family (three adults and five children) in Utah in 2023. He was described in his obituary as a "doting father" who "cherished" each of his children and "lived a life of service”. There is a trend, when men commit familicide, for headlines to passively state "family found dead" or describe the killer as (for example) a "beloved local football coach.” The murderer's name is often withheld for several paragraphs. If the killer is a woman, she is usually named immediately. Her crime leads the story, rather than her role in her family or community.
According to the US National Library of Medicine, “stories of maternal filicide or infanticide are reported in sensational terms using lay accounts to provide context and explanations further entrenching common misconceptions. Reviews of media representations of women who kill have shown that women are systematically categorized into mad or bad and that this categorization shapes the legal responses of the justice system.”
None of this encourages women to speak up and get help; and we must remember that Clancy did ask, and was not heard. What can be done?
A systematic review of 45 studies in The Lancet Public Health in 2022 found that longer, paid parental leave is, unsurprisingly, associated with fewer depressive symptoms and less psychological distress among new mothers. The Policy Center for Maternal Mental Health also reports that about one in five American mothers experience postpartum depressive symptoms and that mothers who return to work before 12 weeks postpartum face a higher risk. It is important to remember that the US is the only developed nation with no guarantee of paid parental leave.
Removing the stigma around teen pregnancy and abortion and having significant societal safety nets, along with better education around postpartum depression and excellent state-funded or mandated parental leave, is a clear pathway to significantly reducing women killing their infants.
Unpicking the expectations of masculinity, ingrained deeply in a society that has led men away from therapeutic conversation and into a landscape where violence is shrugged off as a norm, is a much larger and more complex job. I do have sympathy for men who are fearful and fragile because of generations of violence and repression that has preceded them. But I also think it’s the job of men to start meaningful conversations and create proper architecture to make real change. Governments need to do more. Men in our communities need to do more.
I’d like to reverse the question asked of me on social media recently: “There are women campaigning to protect Clancy as a victim of postnatal psychosis. How do you feel about the fact that men are not campaigning to change societal expectations of men and get them help when they need it? Can you come to the aid of the men in your community? Can you help them understand that stigmas kill, and that mental health and anger management must be your collective priorities?”
If this were done, we might one day live in a world where it is just as shocking to hear that a man has killed his family as it is when we hear that a woman has done so.
https://www.thenerve.news/p/deborah-frances-white-column-lindsay-clancy-murder-trial-children-male-violence
Oriana:
I’ve noticed that it’s the male commenters who recommend life without parole or even death penalty for Clancy. Women are more likely to recommend mental health treatment — something Clancy begged for, but was only given drugs instead. I get the impression that some men value only the children, with zero empathy for the overwhelmed mother. Men see children as precious, sometimes in contrast to how they see mothers. And we need to ponder the fact that when it comes to killing own children, it's almost always the father. One difference is that then they turn on the gun on themselves. Women often mess up their suicide attempts — in this case, the window wasn't high enough above ground.
Men tend to be vastly more successful at killing themselves. Otherwise we'd see a lot more trials of "family annihilators."
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THE LINSAY CLANCY TRIAL IS ACTUALLY ABOUT WOMEN, THE MEDICAL SYSTEM, AND ITS INABILITY TO HELP US
Conventional medicine failed Lindsay Clancy. Yeah, I know this has been said before, probably by thousands of people. But it goes deeper than that.
The medical system does not believe our symptoms. About anything. Or it believes that our symptoms are the product of personal weakness.
And it has no clue how to treat us.
Not our PPD.
Not our autoimmune conditions.
Not our anything-that-affects-mostly-women.
When I say the medical system, I mean all conventional doctors, male and female.
I am a woman in my mid forties with autoimmune conditions. I have been reading books by women like me who suffer from illnesses that affect mostly women.
One thing common in all these books is that all of these authors were dismissed by the medical establishment. Lindsay Clancy requested help. She requested to be hospitalized. Instead, she was left home alone with 3 children on a dangerous cocktail of more than a dozen psychoactive drugs.
The medical system should be on trial here, not Lindsay Clancy. She should be locked up in a mental hospital, forever, as far as I'm concerned. But she should not be on trial for murder.
The medical system should be on trial for manslaughter of 3 children.
https://www.reddit.com/r/TwoXChromosomes/comments/1v85lej/the_lindsay_clancy_trial_is_actually_about_women/
snarky spice
I’m suffering from postpartum depression right now and it’s hell trying to find a therapist/psychiatrist that can actually help and spend time. The psychiatrist by nature just checks in on you once a month for 15 mins and if you tell her you’re still depressed she just says “okay we’ll increase your dose, mama!” Exaggerating here but not much. It’s entirely unhelpful and cold.
KarlMarxButVegan
I went through something similar. I begged everyone for help that never came. I got it straightened out myself eventually, but I'm still traumatized and don't trust my support system the way I once could.
frespipcked12
I HIGHLY recommend the book “Good Moms Have Scary Thoughts” for any women in the midst of postpartum. My mom got it for me when I had postpartum rage with my daughter and it was very helpful!
Practicing_human
Nuclear families are not the ideal, and we’ve normalized them to the detriment of all of us. The village is a better model. American moms have it extremely hard.
CraftyGeekMama
If you have not seen it, I highly recommend the documentary "When the Bough Breaks." It will break your heart but it will also open your eyes to just how many ways our healthcare system continues to overlook women's postpartum health. The subject is still so taboo and so many people really do not understand what women can go through postpartum. We have to keep talking about this. We have to keep learning. And most importantly, we have to keep believing women when they tell us something isn't right.
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WHY COUPLES ARGUE
In one longitudinal study, psychologist John Gottman and his team observed couples' disagreements in an initial assessment, and four years later. They found that 69% of the time the couples were still arguing over the same type of issues they had debated those four years earlier.
Other studies have revealed a similar pattern, with certain core issues such as money coming up in conflicts across households and even across cultures. Disagreements over money, in particular, cause the most persistent and heated rows. Unequal division of housework is another cause of tensions, and can raise the likelihood of divorce.
In itself, disagreement isn't necessarily a bad sign. It can just be a natural part of learning to understand and respond to each other's needs. And both happy and unhappy couples argue.
The crucial difference between happy and unhappy couples is how they behave towards each other, research suggests – during and also outside of arguments.
Four behaviors that can 'kill a relationship'
Cole cites four specific behaviors that signal your relationship may be headed for a break-up, according to studies: criticism, contempt, defensiveness and stonewalling (which means withdrawal from a conflict by refusing to engage).
"Those four behaviors will kill a relationship," says Cole. But, she adds, "they are fixable, if the couple wants to fix them." (Read on for specific tips.)
In fact, it's not just the relationship that's at risk: separate research has shown that persistent criticism from one's partner significantly predicts an earlier death.
Arguments involving these kinds of behaviors, along with aggression and hostility, are known as destructive – and can ultimately raise the risk of divorce.
However, constructive arguments, which focus on mutually resolving issues with respect, curiosity and kindness, can strengthen your relationship.
One key factor is responsiveness: the feeling that your partner listens, supports and understands you. Experiencing your partner as responsive is not only associated with greater marital satisfaction, but can even buffer inflammation and boost physical health and longevity.
Kindness and cooperation can also build long-term goodwill. One 20-year-study of married couples showed that shared decision-making and equally shared housework were associated with greater marital happiness and lower conflict.
How couples argue may even affect their sleep: destructive arguments are associated with bad sleep, while constructive ones are associated with good sleep, research has found.
Rebuilding empathy
If you're in the midst of an unhappy relationship, it may feel near-impossible to switch from bitter, hostile arguments to kind and supportive ones. But a large body of evidence shows it's possible – for example, with the help of therapy.
Research suggests that couples therapy has a positive impact on 70% of couples who do it. It can help improve relationships issues, boost relationship satisfaction and prevent relationship distress, strengthen emotional intimacy, but also help improve individual emotional or physical health problems.
"Empathy has been eaten away from most couples who get to the point of therapy," says Jay Lebow, a couples therapist and clinical professor of psychology at the Family Institute at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, who has co-authored a wide-ranging review that found that couples therapy is effective. He adds that one challenge in therapy is: "How do we rebuild our empathy?"
There are a number of signs that suggest the therapy is working, he says.
"One of them is [clients improving their] speaking and listening. That sounds easy enough, but when you're in a distressed relationship, it becomes very hard to listen," he says.
Working on the relationship is also about "being able to take that step back and ask the question, what's going on between us, rather than, what are the problems I have with my partner?" he says.
'Tell me more'
There are two specific signs that give Cole hope in her sessions with couples – signs that this couple is going to make it, and will work through their issues, she says.
One is a partner saying to the other: "I can see why you would feel that way." To Cole, this is a sign that the partner is what she calls "accepting influence" from the other. "By that I mean they can take in each other's perspective as valid, even though it might be different from their own," she explains.
The other tell-tale sign is: "Is there any curiosity about one another? If there is, there is some hope there," she says. Even if they disagree with what the other is saying, "they would say something like: 'Tell me more about that, how did you come to believe that?'"
If people work on their problems, "the evidence is pretty strong that you get good outcomes", Lebow says.
Sharing dreams
When it comes to resolving gridlocked conflict, understanding each other's dreams and goals can help, says Cole.
She gives the example of a couple who came to therapy because of recurring arguments over money. Both had grown up in poverty. But this had shaped them in very different ways. The wife's focus was on being financially secure and independent, through saving and careful budgeting. The husband wanted to spend his hard-earned money on nice things, and enjoy the feeling of fitting in with the rest of society, and no longer being cut off by poverty.
This led to endless rows over spending.
"They fought about those things all the time. And they never got down to the reason they were fighting," says Cole.
In therapy, they listen to each other talk about their painful experiences of growing up poor, and how this had shaped their goals in life. They learned to compromise, and agreed on how much money they would set aside to save, and how much they would be free to spend.
"They did work it out. But they had to understand what was so important to each one of them, before they could be open to accepting influence from each other and working towards a compromise that included both of their dreams," says Cole.
"They did work it out. But they had to understand what was so important to each one of them, before they could be open to accepting influence from each other and working towards a compromise that included both of their dreams," says Cole.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20260924-what-really-helps-save-a-relationship
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STAR TREK IS TURNING 60 – AND THE VISION IT PROMISED FEELS MORE DISTANT THAN EVER
The US’s deployment of weaponry in space marks the latest backward step from the show’s optimistic conception of the future
Who among us doesn’t dream of space in their youth?
OK, maybe some of us. Like the ones with lives. While you were out playing hopscotch with little Jimmy and Susie, I was locked in my room mainlining episodes of Star Trek or the weird, sanitized version of Aliens that aired on broadcast TV. Fantastical science-fiction adventure seemed to offer more than playground games and actual human connection. Spaceships over relationships.
Star Trek, celebrating its 60th anniversary this month, offered a utopian vision of the future. Highly competent scientists traveling the galaxy solving moral and ethical quandaries with grace and intelligence. It was a vision of Earth that had overcome greed and selfishness to pursue a more peaceful world Kirk and Spock. Picard and Data. These were characters that were ethical, witty and heroic. Better that than little Jimmy burning ants with a magnifying glass.
The Alien franchise, on the other hand, was the complete opposite. In the second film, Aliens, which coincidentally is turning 40 this year, the characters are mostly brain-dead killing-machine soldiers and venal corporate stooges. This one sounds a bit more familiar, doesn’t it? The entire known universe is controlled by a diabolical company whose only aim is profit at the expense of the average person. Both Star Trek and the Alien films offered the requisite thrills and whiz-bang action to titillate a young boy like myself back in the 1990s, but they were also diametrically opposed visions of what the world might look like when I became an adult.
Would it be along the lines of a lush beige carpet and colorful pajamas or a soaking wet murder machine covered in KY Jelly grinding the working class into the ground? It took a few decades, but I think I found my answer.
The US air force announced on Monday that it had deployed weapons into space, thumbing its nose at the unwritten rule that space is for peace, not for war. The US rationale is, well, everyone else is doing it! Officials point to the increased militarization of space, including a 2024 Biden administration report claiming Russia was developing the capability to detonate nuclear weapons in space to disable or destroy orbiting satellites, which are crucial pieces of global infrastructure.
The air force secretary, Troy Meink, referred to the deployment as “on-orbit space control weapons capable of defending the joint force against hostile adversary action”. He wouldn’t say what they were, what they could actually do, or even what they look like. Which is always so comforting when futuristic space guns are involved. Is it a giant laser beam? Missiles? A claw that can grab satellites out of the sky? A large hammer? A Trump-shaped robot gollum that could swallow the International Space Station with the ease and gusto of the real person chowing down on a Big Mac? My imagination, stoked by years of sci-fi television, is running rampant. At the very least, I hope it has a series of blinking lights all over it. And an off-switch.
Back in the 1980s, when Star Trek was at its creative peak, the idea of weaponizing space was considered such a joke that President Reagan struggled to amass a consensus around his Strategic Defense Initiative (derisively nicknamed “Star Wars”), which would have created a US orbiting missile deterrent. But now, Donald Trump is making fantasy space battles a key element of his rapidly deteriorating legacy. The US space force, his absurd brainchild, presented new uniforms that look like they were leftover from a Paul Verhoeven movie. If one wants to conquer a lifeless galaxy full of dirt, rocks and little else, one must be wearing the shiniest black boots possible. Also a hat.
The space force uniforms are certainly light years away from the ones on Star Trek, where everyone wears bright colors that immediately make the viewer think they’ve accidentally stumbled onto a rather unique discotheque. The Star Trek creator, Gene Roddenberry, made sure that the phaser weapons depicted on the show had a non-lethal stun setting. I think if anyone proposed a non-lethal weapon for the US space force, they’d be A) fired immediately and B) called woke to their face (and on Fox News in front of millions of people).
Looking back six decades at the world Star Trek was born in, there was optimism in the world, mixed in with the chaos of political assassinations, riots, a war in Vietnam, and the ever-present threat of nuclear annihilation. The idea of going to space and landing Apollo 11 on the Moon was inspiring to a world that needed more cheering up than Ed Sheeran trying to find an opening act for his tour. Star Trek posited that life on Earth might be bad now, but fear not, the good guys would win in the end. Humanity would overcome itself.
Countless modern scientific achievements – cellphones, tablets, the internet, medical advancements – can be attributed to Star Trek beaming ideas of benevolent futurism into homes around the globe for 60 years. But did society actually learn anything from Star Trek? The Federation and the Klingons made peace in the film Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, but could their real-world analogues – the United States and Russia – be any further apart? Of course, if you know anything about the future-history depicted on Star Trek, you know utopia doesn’t occur until after a global nuclear holocaust, in case you want to be even more depressed today.
Star Trek’s impact is immense, especially for a TV show that only lasted for three years and often deployed styrofoam rocks, wobbly models, and dodgy rubber aliens in its design. That impact is a testament to the writing, acting, and film technique that grabbed millions of people and changed their lives.
But I’ve never been more pessimistic about humanity achieving the beautiful dream of Gene Roddenberry. With every fascist-looking spacesuit or space laser, I feel like we’re progressing backwards, step by step. Given the proliferation of pandemics, climate change, species extinction, and contaminated food supplies, I’m more apt to wake up expecting to have an HR Giger-inspired genetic abomination gnawing at my face. At least my years staring at my TV screen alone prepared me for what’s to come.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/sep/20/star-trek-air-force-weapons
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MALE FACIAL HAIR (OR LACK THEREOF) IN EAST ASIANS AND NATIVE AMERICANS
East Asian and Native American men didn't fail to evolve facial hair. Their ancestors lost it 30,000 years ago as a bizarre genetic side effect of a completely different survival trait.
While Caucasian populations largely retained the ancestral human trait of widespread facial hair, the smooth faces of East Asian and Native American men trace back to a mutation in the EDAR gene, specifically a variant known as EDARV370A. Emerging in central China, this mutation acts as a biological "package deal" that alters multiple physical traits simultaneously—a phenomenon geneticists call pleiotropy.
Evolution did not necessarily select for a hairless face. Instead, the EDAR variant was likely favored for a different advantage bundled within that same genetic package. Along with reducing facial and body hair, the mutation produces thicker head hair shafts, distinctively shaped incisors, and a higher density of eccrine sweat glands. Anthropologists theorize that these extra sweat glands provided a survival advantage in the humid environments of prehistoric East Asia, improving the body's cooling efficiency during endurance hunting and gathering. The reduction in facial hair was simply a physiological side effect that came along for the evolutionary ride.
This genetic divergence is strikingly visible when observing historical figures of different ancestries side-by-side. When the Hunkpapa Lakota leader Sitting Bull stood alongside the American frontiersman William "Buffalo Bill" Cody in 1885, the physical contrast—the heavy facial hair of the Caucasian Cody versus the naturally smooth face of the Native American Sitting Bull—was on full display.
Instead of selecting for a hairless face directly, evolution favored this mutation for an entirely different survival advantage.
The Survival Trait
The EDAR mutation essentially acts as a "turbocharger" for ectodermal development (the tissue layer that forms your skin, hair, teeth, and glands). While anthropologists still debate the exact primary driver, the leading theories for why it was heavily selected for survival include:
Thermoregulation (Sweating): The mutation dramatically increases the density of eccrine sweat glands. In the humid, prehistoric environments of East Asia, having more sweat glands allowed for incredibly efficient body cooling during endurance hunting and gathering.
Alternatively, some scientists theorize that during the brutal cold of the last Ice Age in Beringia, more active sweat glands on the hands and feet prevented frostbite by keeping moisture moving, while less body hair prevented sweat from freezing against the skin.
Nutrient Transfer: The mutation alters the branching structure of mammary ducts. In sun-scarce, sub-arctic environments where Vitamin D was incredibly low, this adaptation may have helped mothers transfer critical nutrients and fats to infants more effectively through breast milk.
The Side Effects (The "Package Deal")
Because the EDAR gene controls a whole suite of features during embryonic development, selecting for the survival benefit meant the entire genetic package came along for the ride. The side effects of that single mutation produced the distinct physical hallmarks shared by East Asian and Native American populations today:
Sparse Facial and Body Hair: The mutation altered follicle density and distribution, drastically reducing body and facial hair.
Thicker, Straighter Head Hair: It significantly increased the diameter of individual hair shafts, resulting in the coarse, straight hair typical of these populations.
Shovel-Shaped Incisors: It altered tooth morphology, giving the front teeth a distinct "scooped" or shovel-like shape on the back side.
Other Glandular Changes: It resulted in smaller mammary fat pads (smaller breasts on average) and changes to sebaceous glands.
Oriana:
East Asian women also have no facial hair and very little body hair (e.g. on their legs), and usually small breasts.
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BEFORE ISLAM, DID ANCIENT MIDDLE EASTERNERS EAT PORK?
Long before Islam, ancient Middle Easterners regularly ate pork. The taboo that eventually ended the practice didn't begin with theology—it began with sweat glands.
Wild boar roamed the region, and pigs were among the first animals domesticated in the Near East around 8500 BCE. Archaeological digs in Mesopotamia show that early Sumerians and Babylonians regularly consumed pork. Administrative records from the ancient city of Ur even detail specialized pig butchers and large-scale pig farming.
In ancient Egypt, pork consumption varied heavily by class and era. Working-class farmers kept and ate pigs, but priests and the elite eventually developed a strong aversion to them, associating the animal with Set, the god of chaos. In the Levant, the most famous pre-Islamic ban was the Jewish dietary law outlined in the Torah.
However, not everyone in the region abstained. Excavations of ancient Philistine cities like Ekron show that pork made up nearly a fifth of their meat intake, forming a sharp contrast with neighboring Canaanite and Israelite settlements where pig bones are virtually nonexistent.
Anthropologists argue that the growing taboo against pork across the broader Middle East was driven by environmental economics. Pigs are forest-dwelling animals that need shade and large amounts of water to cool down because they cannot sweat. Unlike sheep, goats, and camels, which thrive on desert scrub and provide secondary products like milk, wool, and transport, pigs compete directly with humans for grain and water while offering only meat in return.
By the time Islam emerged in 7th-century Arabia, pork was already a rarity in the region. Nomadic tribes could not herd pigs across the arid landscape, as the animals would quickly perish in the heat. The subsequent prohibition formalized a dietary reality that the local ecology and centuries of shifting cultural norms had already established. ~ KitchenSense, Quora
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COULD ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE HELP WITH EARLY DIAGNOSIS OF SCHIZOPHRENIA?
AI may help pick up subtle differences in the speech of people with the mental health condition better than human psychiatrists
Schizophrenia is tough to diagnose. Patients may present with hallucinations (sometimes), social withdrawal (maybe) or delusions (not always). More generally, they just sound unlike themselves. Clinicians rely on their expertise and subtle cues to determine how different patients’ speech is, along with which symptoms appear over time, to justify leaning toward schizophrenia rather than another mental illness. This leads to delays in diagnosis. Americans with psychotic disorders—more than three million of whom have schizophrenia—receive a diagnosis a year and a half, on average, after their first symptoms appear.
Researchers are now investigating whether artificial intelligence could improve diagnosis and care by listening to and analyzing what clinicians can’t hear or quantify, even if the software is working off just a few minutes of conversation. A.I. won’t make its grand entrance into the clinic tomorrow. But it’s being hailed as the new frontier in psychiatric care, one that could enable early, accurate detection and personalized monitoring of illnesses based on indistinct symptoms.
“We have the tools to do that with the kind of precision that we have never had before,” says Thomas Insel, a psychiatrist and neuroscientist who led the U.S. National Institute of Mental Health for 13 years and founded and advised on several mental health startups.
Schizophrenia is a disorder that interferes with people’s perception of reality, their thinking and their emotional regulation. It affects about 23 million people worldwide and is usually diagnosed between the late teens and early 30s. No one knows what causes it, but research suggests it could be a combination of genetics, environment, brain chemistry and substance use.
Clinicians stress the importance of detecting the disorder as early as possible, because the longer it is left untreated, the poorer the response to treatment and the greater the risk of brain tissue loss, worsening symptoms and suicide. But psychiatrists often make errors.
Part of the problem is that diagnosis currently depends on subjective assessments. Based on what a patient says and how they say it, clinicians fill out one of several different rating scales to rank the severity of symptoms and arrive at a diagnosis. But the process is difficult to standardize, and clinicians’ scores for a given patient can differ by 30 to 50 percent.
Artificial intelligence could help to automate the process, making diagnosis both speedier and more accurate. “For the first time, we could have a way of saying objectively, how delusional is this? How loose are these associations? How incoherent is it?” says Insel.
Psychiatrists view speech as a solid marker to evaluate someone’s mental state, because it can indicate disordered thinking, a hallmark of schizophrenia. People with disordered thought tend to move erratically from idea to idea—a chaotic path that A.I. could help to identify.
Clinicians also know that schizophrenic patients sound different. Their tone can be more monotonous or robotic; they can take longer pauses. And the volume of their voice can lack contrast compared with that of healthy people who speak louder or quieter depending on the context and content of the conversation. But these differences are hard to use for diagnosis, especially in the early stages.
A team of researchers in the Netherlands wondered whether A.I. could help. They selected audio recordings of people who had previously been diagnosed with schizophrenia by psychiatrists, then used software to measure 88 features, such as loudness, length of pauses, vowel pronunciation and intonation. They then used these measures to train an A.I. program to distinguish people with and without schizophrenia.
When the team tested their A.I. using audio files from new patients it had not heard before, it differentiated schizophrenic patients from healthy controls with 86.2 percent accuracy and could even distinguish between different subtypes of the illness.
People with schizophrenia often have distinctive speech patterns. Dutch researchers found that the speech of people with the mental illness tended to be more fragmented, with bursts of syllables separated by longer pauses. Their speech is also somewhat more variable in loudness than that of healthy people. AI may one day offer a convenient way to assess these differences.
The approach isn’t especially useful for the clearest cases, says study co-author Alban Voppel, a researcher now at McGill University in Montreal who studies the use of A.I. in psychiatry. But A.I. could help to detect patients in early stages or at high risk of becoming schizophrenic, and to predict relapse. “There are hopeful signs that we can pick up on very subtle things and things that psychiatrists find much harder to detect or harder to predict,” he says.
Sunny Tang, a psychiatrist and researcher at the Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research near New York City, took a different approach. Instead of studying the sounds of speech, her team looked at its content. They built a type of A.I. called a machine learning model to assign a mathematical address, similar to the address of a house, to each word in a transcript of a patient’s conversation. By looking at the constellation of addresses, Tang’s program can tell whether a sentence stays in the same general neighborhood or leaves town and returns again, indicating disorganized thinking. In this way, Tang says, she can measure “how the meaning flows in the course of what somebody says.”
When Tang provided transcripts of speech by people with and without schizophrenia, she found that the A.I. could distinguish the two groups with 87 percent accuracy. Clinical raters, who assessed patients without the A.I., were only 68 percent accurate.
People with schizophrenia are known to wander from topic to topic as they speak. To quantify this, researchers used artificial intelligence to map the conversational “neighborhood” explored by those diagnosed with the condition and healthy people in response to a prompt. The two groups differ in measurable ways, they found.
Beyond diagnosis, clinicians may eventually be able to use A.I. for routine monitoring of the severity and progression of a patient’s symptoms over time. Such tracking helps clinicians provide more precise and responsive care by evaluating whether a treatment is producing the desired effects and detecting early signs of relapse.
Today, such monitoring requires clinicians to meet with patients regularly, at a huge cost of time and money. A.I. could potentially provide the same care for a fraction of the cost, and it could enable the process to be done remotely. “You can have someone speak into an app or a device for a couple of minutes and give a fairly competent, confident rating on this person’s psychosis,” says Tang, who is hoping to have a tool ready for clinical trials in 2030.
Much work remains before A.I. diagnosis is ready for the clinic, however. For one thing, artificial intelligence is only as good as the data it’s trained on—and there are serious deficiencies in that data. Many studies use small groups of people who are not representative of the population as a whole, according to a survey of studies using A.I. to make psychiatric diagnoses. “We need bigger samples, more diverse samples,” says Jeffrey Girard, a psychologist at the University of Kansas who led the analysis, published in the 2026 Annual Review of Clinical Psychology.
Another problem is that people can speak more slowly not because they are mentally ill, but because they are older or speaking a second language. People may also sound different in stressful contexts such as an emergency room, or under the influence of medications or physical illness, notes Sandra Just, a clinical psychologist at UiT the Arctic University of Norway.
This creates a “research-to-practice gap” where voice markers can do well in studies but poorly in the real world, says John Torous, a psychiatrist and informaticist at Harvard’s Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. He has helped the National Alliance on Mental Illness to evaluate A.I. tools in mental health.
Ideally, doctors would know what a patient usually sounds like to see if their speech has changed. But collecting such baseline data would involve identifying people at high risk of schizophrenia, then recording their calls, asking them to engage with an app daily or keeping track of clinical interviews—even if they currently show no symptoms.
Doing that raises sticky ethical issues around privacy and security. “This is a really complicated problem,” says Brita Elvevåg, a cognitive neuroscientist at UiT the Arctic University of Norway who has studied speech patterns for nearly 30 years. “How can we preserve personal privacy now that we’re starting to use technology? It worries me that people don’t necessarily take that into consideration.”
Because of all these limitations, researchers don’t see A.I. becoming a schizophrenia diagnostician anytime soon. “It’s a tool—it’s not a panacea,” says Vijay Mittal, a researcher and clinical psychologist at Northwestern University. “It’s early days, and there’s a lot of excitement, [but] there needs to be a lot of caution.”
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/could-artificial-intelligence-help-with-early-diagnosis-of-schizophrenia-180989486/
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IS DEPRESSION CONTAGIOUS?
The contagious nature of bacterial or viral infections like strep throat or influenza is well understood. You’re at risk of catching the flu, for example, if someone near you has it, as the virus can be spread by way of droplets in the air, among other modes of transmission. But what about a person’s mental health? Can depression be contagious?
A JAMA Psychiatry paper published earlier this year seemed to suggest so. Researchers reported finding “an association between having peers diagnosed with a mental disorder during adolescence and an increased risk of receiving a mental disorder diagnosis later in life.” They suggested that, among adolescents, mental health disorders could be “socially transmitted,” though their observational study could not establish any direct cause.
It makes some intuitive sense. Psychologists have studied how moods and emotions can spread from person to person. Someone howling with laughter might be contagious in the sense that it makes you laugh, too. Similarly, seeing a friend in emotional pain can evoke feelings of despair—a phenomenon termed emotional contagion.
For more than three decades, researchers have investigated whether mental health disorders, too, may be induced by our social environment. Studies have found mixed results on the extent to which friends’, peers’ and families’ mental health can impact an individual’s mental health in turn.
The JAMA Psychiatry study—conducted by researchers at Finland’s University of Helsinki and other institutions—analyzed nationwide registry data on 713,809 Finnish citizens born between 1985 to 1997. The research team identified individuals from schools across Finland who had been diagnosed with a mental disorder by the time they were in ninth grade. They followed the rest of the cohort to record later diagnoses, up until the end of 2019.
The study found that ninth-grade students who had more than one classmate diagnosed with a mental health disorder had a 5 percent higher risk for developing a mental illness in subsequent years than students without any classmates with diagnoses.
The risk was particularly high in the immediate year after exposure: Students with one diagnosed classmate were 9 percent more likely to receive a mental health diagnosis, while students with more than one diagnosed classmate were 18 percent more likely to receive a diagnosis. The risk was greatest for mood, anxiety and eating disorders. Increased risk was observed after adjusting for an array of possible parental, school- and regional-level confounders like parental mental health, class size and area-level unemployment rates.
These results might seem like compelling evidence for social transmission of mental health disorders, but other researchers—such as Eiko Fried, a clinical psychologist at Leiden University in the Netherlands—have suggested that the Finnish team may not have controlled for all relevant confounders. Fried brought up living in a poor neighborhood, which increases depression risk, as an example of a confounder in an email to Undark. “These kids end up in the same schools, and you get an aggregation of depression in those schools. This now looks like social contagion, until the confounder—neighborhood—is taken into account.”
The researchers did control for neighborhood employment rates and educational levels, but it’s possible they still didn’t account for other influential contextual factors. To the extent that these shared factors are insufficiently measured, estimates of correlated outcomes risk pinning causality on the wrong variable. In a post on X (formerly Twitter), Fried said it might be more plausible that hidden confounders explain what’s going on, rather than social contagion.
In response to an email query laying out critiques of potentially confounding variables, the lead author of the Finnish study, Jussi Alho, underscored the utility of using classrooms as a point of reference by pointing to another potential influence: The tendency for people to seek out or be attracted to those who are similar to themselves.
“In our study, we mitigated this self-selection bias by using school classes as proxies for social networks,” he explained. “As institutionally imposed social networks, school classes are well suited to research, as they are typically not formed endogenously by individuals selecting similar others as classmates. Moreover, school classes are arguably among the most significant peer networks during childhood and adolescence, given the substantial time spent together with classmates.”
By Alho and his co-authors’ reckoning, as they write in the paper, the strength of the Finnish study lies in the fact that the social networks being investigated were not chosen independently by the research subjects. At the same time, Alho allowed that critics have a point: “We cannot fully rule out residual confounding,” he wrote in an email to Undark, “due to unmeasured or inaccurately measured covariates in our study.”
These confounders are a persistent problem dogging this line of research. A 2012 study published in the journal Health Economics, for example, examined the mental health status of college student roommates over their first year, testing for possible “contagion among people who are placed together largely by chance.” The authors described the study as a natural experiment, which they argued would be able to produce, in their words, “unbiased estimates” of “causal effect.”
The researchers found “no significant overall contagion of mental health and no more than small contagion effects for specific mental health measures” like general psychological distress, depression and anxiety. Even in this case, though, the mild contagion effect could be attributable to unmeasured factors, such as the students sharing comparable social environments and upbringings. After all, they’re attending a school they might have selected for based on similar academic interests or extracurricular skills.
All these possible influences make it hard to know what’s driving what. Are the mental health issues spreading between people in social networks? Or are some other unknown factors merely creating that impression?
Whatever the answer, such personal exposures may be driving a different sort of contagion: public awareness. Generalized anxiety disorder, for example, first appeared as a diagnosis in the third edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) in 1980. The condition causes “excessive, frequent and unrealistic worry about everyday things,” according to the Cleveland Clinic’s Health Library.
By the time a fourth edition of the DSM and its updated generalized anxiety disorder diagnostic criteria came out in 1994, the disorder had “morphed from a rarely diagnosed condition into a disorder with a lifetime prevalence reaching up to 5 percent in a community sample,” according to a 2017 paper on the history of the diagnosis. Data from a 2016 Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality report on anxiety in children indicates that childhood anxiety occurs in approximately one in four children ages 13 to 18, while the lifetime prevalence of severe anxiety disorder in that age group is 5.9 percent.
What’s causing these rates is potentially better awareness among both patients and clinicians. Or, it could result from an umbrella of other factors like evolving diagnostic criteria and improved access to treatment. But as Alho and his colleagues suggest in their paper, it’s possibly also driven by knowledge and acceptance of mental health disorders gained through social networks. After all, being exposed to a peer with a mental disorder, the researchers noted in their study, may well aid in “normalization of mental disorders through increased awareness and receptivity to diagnosis and treatment.”
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/is-depression-contagious-180985310/?itm_source=related-content&itm_medium=parsely-api
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DOES METFORMIN EXTEND HUMAN LIFESPAN?
The Targeting Aging with Metformin (TAME) trial aims to investigate whether repurposing metformin can help slow biological aging and delay multiple age-related chronic diseases.
Could metformin, the decades-old, generic medication used to treat type 2 diabetes, also be used to slow down biological aging?
The Targeting Aging with Metformin (TAME) trial, led by the nonprofit American Federation for Aging Research (AFAR), aims to answer this crucial question.
The nationwide, multi-center trial will span 14 leading research institutions across the U.S. and follow 3,000 participants, ages 65 to 79, who do not have diabetes.
Conducted as a double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled trial, half of the participants will receive a standard daily dose of metformin at 1,500 mg/day, while the remaining will receive a matching placebo.
The trial, if it manages to secure funding, will take 6 years in total, with “aging” or multi-disease delay as its main goal. It is important to note that using metformin for longevity is off-label and not FDA-approved for anti-aging.
The review paper on the trial and metformin’s longevity potential on a wider scale appears in the journal Aging.
Medical News Today spoke to two experts — David Cutler, MD, board-certified family medicine physician at Providence Saint John’s Health Center in Santa Monica, CA, and Diego Barardo, PhD, longevity scientist and director of R&D at NOVOS — to discuss metformin’s potential in our pursuit of understanding human longevity.
How metformin may influence aging
As a first-line treatment for type 2 diabetes, metformin is a safe, low-cost drug. It works by improving insulin sensitivity, reducing glucose production in the liver, and activating the AMP-activated protein kinase (AMPK) cellular pathway, which helps regulate energy balance, sugar, and fat metabolism.
A 2024 study, published in the journal CellTrusted Source by researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, found that metformin decelerated aging in male monkeys’ brains by approximately 6 years over a 40-month treatment period.
Potential mechanisms by which metformin could promote longevity include:
1.metformin may activate AMPK by improving mitochondrial health and enhancing autophagy, the process by which the body gets rid of dead or dysfunctional cells
2.metformin may modulate gut bacteria, increasing the abundance of beneficial strains such as Akkermansia muciniphila, and reducing inflammation
3. metformin may influence epigenetic aging markers -- in other words, alter which genes are turned up, turned down, or turned off completely.
“Metformin acts on a biochemical and cellular level to alter mitochondrial function, inflammation, insulin action, and epigenetic factors to alter basic cell physiology. These mechanisms could, in theory, have profound anti-aging effects,” Cutler said.
When asked how metformin can potentially slow aging, Barardo explained as follows: “Metformin appears to influence several interconnected systems involved in aging, especially nutrient sensing, cellular maintenance, and inflammatory signaling.”
“One proposed route involves AMPK, a cellular energy sensor, and mTOR, which helps regulate growth and protein production. In experimental settings, metformin can activate AMPK and reduce mTOR signaling, potentially favoring maintenance processes such as autophagy—the recycling of cellular components,” he told MNT.
“Human trials also show changes in gut bacteria and some of their metabolites. These are plausible contributors to its wider effects, but neither finding establishes a longevity benefit,” he pointed out.
More evidence in humans needed
However, despite this potential, Cutler said the current evidence on metformin’s potential longevity benefits was mainly observational or from animal models such as worms and mice.
“There is a plausible and increasingly interesting case that metformin may slow some aspects of biological aging, but the evidence is not yet strong enough to say that metformin extends human life span,” he said.
“Changing a pathway involved in aging is not the same as proving that a treatment slows aging in a person,” Barardo chimed in.
Why we can’t call metformin an ‘anti-aging’ drug yet
Cutler said stronger evidence is needed before this medication is seen as a viable longevity-enhancing drug for the general public. However, he singled out a specific group of people for whom studies have shown metformin can be beneficial.
“[In] diabetics who take metformin, there is good evidence of improved age-related measures like heart attacks, strokes, heart failure, and death. But whether this is due to the diabetes-controlling properties of metformin or its presumed anti-aging properties is not clear,” he said.'
Cutler said more comprehensive studies are needed to confirm these findings for wider populations.
“The studies would need to be prospective, identifying participants first rather than looking back after the findings are known. Participants should be randomized, rather than simply comparing those who take the drug to those who don’t,” he continued.
“Ideally, studies should be placebo-controlled; half on metformin and half on a known useless pill. And the studies should be blinded, in that neither the participants for the scientists know if they are taking the metformin drug or an inert placebo (double-blinded),” he said.
Currently, medical experts do not recommend metformin for healthy individuals for longevity and warn against self-prescribing. Cutler said it is too premature to recommend that everyone use metformin for its purported longevity benefits.
“Metformin has been used for diabetes for almost a hundred years. It is generally safe, well-tolerated, cheap, and effective for treating diabetes and preventing diabetic complications. However, due to its known risks and the unknown benefits in those without diabetes, it is not advisable for healthy people to take metformin for the purpose of improved longevity,” he warned.
“I would not recommend that an otherwise healthy person start metformin solely for longevity outside a clinical trial. That is different from its use for diabetes or for diabetes prevention in selected high-risk people. Someone already taking it for a medical indication should not stop because the longevity question remains unsettled,” Barardo said.
“For healthy people, my main concern is not that metformin is unusually toxic. It is that even a generally safe medicine needs to show enough benefit to justify taking it for years,” he added.
Cutler underscored that, as with all drugs, metformin can also have harmful effects.
POSSIBLE NEGATIVE SIDE EFFECTS OF METFORMIN
“The negative effects include common GI side effects like nausea and diarrhea. Less commonly, but more seriously, is the occurrence of vitamin B12 deficiency caused by metformin. This can lead to anemia, neuropathy and even cognitive decline,” he said.
“Very rarely, a serious condition called lactic acidosis can be caused by metformin,” he continued, adding that people with significant kidney or liver dysfunction are not advised to use metformin.
https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/tame-trial-common-diabetes-drug-extend-human-life-span-aging#Why-we-can-t-call-metformin-an-anti-aging-drug-yet
Oriana: BERBERINE LOWERS BLOOD SUGAR MORE SAFELY THAN METFORMIN
The first time I read about metformin, it was just beginning to be perceived an anti-aging drug. Lab animals given metformin lived significantly longer -- almost as long as calorie-restricted animals. Blood glucose tends to rise with age, causing a cascade of harmful effects; lowering blood glucose seems to be the most essential step for anyone who wishes for a long and healthy life.
Lowering of blood glucose can be achieved either with carbohydrate-restricted diets or with metformin (or a metformin-mimic such as berberine).
Fortunately, we do have something even better and safer than metformin: berberine. Berberine is classified as a supplement, so it doesn’t require a prescription and is fairly inexpensive. Given the benefits, it’s priceless.
Those benefits go beyond lowering blood sugar (though some stem directly from the lower blood ssugar). Berberine fabulously improves one’s lipid profile (most people refer to it as “cholesterol,” but it goes beyond that). Occasionally someone is resistant to the hypoglycemic (blood glucose lowering) action of berberine, but so far I haven’t met anyone who wasn’t impressed with berberine-caused improvement in blood lipids, without diet change. And persons resistant to the hypoglycemic effect sometimes achieve it by experimenting with raising the dose and/or taking it with each meal rather than only first thing in the morning and at bedtime, etc. It take experimenting to discover what works best.
A friend of mine was already taking metformin when she decided to try berberine. To her delight, berberine enhanced the effects of metformin, and added additional benefits (confirmed by blood tests).
But everyone is different — hence the need for cautious experimentation at first. Side effects are rare, but they do happen. Berberine, like CoQ10, is an unusually potent supplement, and needs to be treated with utmost awareness — it can be life-changing for some, is beneficial for most, partly beneficial for some (e.g. it beautifully improves their lipid profile but not blood glucose) — and have undesired side effects for a few people. Side effects are rare, but, let’s face it, they do happen to someone (so far, I have met only one person who wasn’t able to continue with berberine, just as some people can’t tolerate metformin).
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KEY FINDINGS ON BLOOD SUGAR AND LONGEVITY (AI OVERVIEW)
Centenarians consistently show lower, more stable fasting blood glucose levels and better metabolic control starting decades before reaching age 100.
Key Findings on Blood Sugar and Longevity
Lower Baseline Levels: Studies tracking exceptionally long-lived individuals (such as the Swedish AMORIS cohort) find that future centenarians maintain glucose values in the lower half of normal ranges throughout their sixties, seventies, and eighties,
Avoidance of Metabolic Drift: While typical aging features a gradual upward drift in blood sugar and progressive insulin resistance, centenarians preserve cellular insulin signaling and avoid chronic spikes.
Reduced Glycation and Stress: Tighter glycemic control limits protein glycation and lowers oxidative stress, which helps protect against cardiovascular and tissue damage.
Prevalence of Diabetes: Population-based studies show that only a minority of centenarians (roughly 10% to 12.5% depending on the cohort) have a known diagnosis of diabetes mellitus, meaning most escape or delay the condition entirely.
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DOES TIME-RESTRICTED EATING HELP WITH WEIGHT LOSS?
With time-restricted eating (TRE), the time window people consume food varies by person. Some people use windows of 8, 10, or 12 hours to eat, and then fast for the rest of the day.
TRE typically does not require calorie counting or restricting specific foods, which may make it an easier weight-loss approach for some people. It may not be appropriate for everyone, though, so people should consult with their healthcare providers first.
Prior research hows that TRE can help some people lose weight, but the researchers wanted to determine whether eating-window duration influenced weight loss. They pooled data from five prior TRE studies to take a closer look.
The participants ate over a period of at least 14 hours per day before the trials began.
Of the 124 participants included in the analysis, 95 were assigned to TRE, and 29 served as controls. Eleven participants were assigned to an 8-hour eating window, 59 to a 10-hour window, and 25 to a 12-hour window.
The participants in the control groups either continued their usual eating habits or received brief nutritional counseling and written healthy-eating guidance.
The trials lasted 3 to 6 months, and the participants used a mobile app to track their food and drink intake. They submitted timestamped pictures of their meals and snacks on the app and also added a text description of what they had.
The researchers measured weight, blood pressure, fasting glucose, triglycerides, and HDL cholesterol. They calculated LDL cholesterol in four of the five trials.
8-hour eating window linked to greater weight loss
Overall, participants in the TRE groups shortened their daily eating windows by about 4 hours and lost an average of 4.8 pounds during the study period.
Participants in the 8-hour group lost approximately 3.7 pounds more on average than those in the 12-hour group. They also lost significantly more weight than participants in the control group.
In the unadjusted analysis, however, researchers did not find a statistically significant difference between the 8- and 10-hour groups. The control group experienced some average weight loss, but the change was not statistically significant.
When the researchers examined the eating windows participants actually achieved, they found that shorter windows were associated with greater weight loss. However, this association weakened after they adjusted for age, sex, and BMI.
When looking at cardiometabolic outcomes, the researchers could not establish a consistent association between eating-window duration and improvements in most measures, including fasting glucose, HDL or LDL cholesterol, and triglycerides.
Participants in the 10-hour group had a greater reduction in systolic blood pressure than those in the 12-hour group, but this was the only significant cardiometabolic difference they found.
The analysis had several limitations, though, including lack of data on participants’ calorie intake, the small number of participants, and the relatively short follow-up period.
Additionally, the five trials the researchers analyzed were not all randomized controlled trials, and participants were not randomized directly into the different eating-window groups.
Larger, longer studies needed on Time Restricted Eating
Cheng-Han Chen, MD, a board-certified interventional cardiologist and medical director of the Structural Heart Program at MemorialCare Saddleback Medical Center, spoke with Medical News Today about the study.
Chen, who was not involved in this research, said that the small sample size, differences among the trials, and short follow-up periods may explain the limited cardiometabolic findings.“We are still in the early stages of understanding the potential health effects of time-restricted eating,” Chen said.
He added that larger, longer studies are needed to determine who may benefit and whether TRE improves health beyond weight loss.
Chen advised people with type 1 diabetes, hypoglycemia, a history of eating disorders, as well as those who are pregnant or trying to conceive, to consult a healthcare professional before trying TRE.
Mir Ali, MD, a bariatric surgeon, bariatric medicine specialist, and medical director of MemorialCare Surgical Weight Loss Center at Orange Coast Medical Center, likewise not involved in the study, also shared his thoughts about its findings with MNT.
He noted that the 8-hour group lost more weight than the 12-hour group but said that the modest difference and small sample size mean the results are “not entirely conclusive.”
“Time-restricted eating can be beneficial, but there is considerable individual variability regarding its effectiveness and the optimal fasting duration,” Ali pointed out.
He added that a larger group experiencing more substantial weight loss may be needed to detect consistent cardiometabolic improvements.
Ali warned that conditions such as diabetes may make TRE “less feasible or even contraindicated.” He advised people to discuss their individual health factors with a healthcare professional first.
https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/168-intermittent-fasting-best-for-weight-loss-but-not-for-blood-pressure-control#Larger-longer-studies-needed-on-TRE
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ending on beauty:
BREAD AND SALT
In late amber
afternoon, the streets ascend
on the scent of fresh-baked bread.
She brings home a sun-round loaf.
Under the saw-toothed knife
the crust crackles, resists;
I beg for the “heel,” I eat
the moist, steaming, almost breathing
bread, like the flesh of the earth.
In the salt mine near Krakow,
I linger behind, trying to lick the walls.
A white, slippery Saint Barbara
blesses the underground chapel.
At the spa with the salt towers,
the fountain of Hansel and Gretel,
known to me as Jaś and Małgosia —
two lost children huddled
under a dripping stone umbrella.
The towers are wooden pyramids
dripping brine through a five-story
scaffolding of birch twigs.
We stroll around the towers,
inhaling the salt breeze.
Breathe! Grandmother reminds.
It’s meant to cure
everything. We watch
a bride and her groom
greeted at the door
with bread and salt —
the street dances with shadows,
the bride and the groom
lost in the lucky light.
~ Oriana
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