Pig, bronze; Ancient Roman. "Better a Socrates satisfied than a pig satisfied," wrote John Stuart Mill. But in our hedonistic times, that is not exactly a popular sentiment. Most people would rather be happy than wise and philosophical (not that there is an actual contradiction).CAMEO OF THE SOUL
Two months after her death
I dream I try to order a medallion
showing her profile like a coin,
On my way back from the engravers,
I meet Schlotzky, non-stop on his cell phone.
At home my mother, pale, in bed,
“I met Schlotzky,” I say, not knowing
what to say. “He used to travel
in an armored train,”
she replies, a light like dawn
kindling in her face —
I wake to a world full of Schlotzkys,
not Trotsky at white heat
writing Revolution Betrayed.
Beware of the Schlotzkys,
the trivia that kill the soul,
my mother came to warn me,
my mother who used to say,
Better to read one book
about someone great
embraces me, soft as unforgotten
snow. Like a spirit of fire
that etched my own spirit, the sun
also rises, burning a path toward home.
~ Oriana
*
VIRGINIA AND LEONARD WOOLF
There are so many takes on the Virginia-Leonard Woolf story that they could consume “Modern Love” for a year. Leonard was androgynous and Virginia preferred women, and yet they married. Leonard was a caretaker and Virginia was fragile, and so they stayed together, she stayed, for the longest time, alive. Leonard was controlling and Virginia felt caged, and yet Leonard allowed Virginia her love affair with Vita and Virginia never doubted that her marriage would go on. Virginia set type, and Leonard machined the pages, and the one of them plus the one of them equaled their famous Hogarth Press. They quarreled and they made up; they fretted and survived; they needed space from each other and missed each other; and when we see them in the pages of Virginia’s diaries, they are sitting together, walking together, reading together, printing together, enduring another war together, heading out for tea after a storm.
What passes for love, what happens between lovers—isn’t it all dandelion seeds brushed loose by a breeze and smoking a trail to the sun?
And yet—what happens between a writer and the other people in her life will leave its mark on the work itself. There will be more or fewer pages, greater or lesser risks, differing degrees of happiness, variant measures of self-worth. We may write alone, but we don’t live a writer’s life alone. Lovers, friends, workshops, teachers: How do we choose? What are the consequences?
*
When Virginia married Leonard she married her eventual editor, business partner, and legacy builder. He was a civil servant by trade, an accountant by disposition, management-minded. He was, as Virginia Woolf’s great biographer Hermione Lee describes him, “a tense looking young man, dark, thin, slight, long-faced, with a handsome sardonic mouth, strong blue eyes, and trembling hands.”
Virginia was, by all accounts and the photographs that support them, a slender beauty. She’d received proposals from other men before she met Leonard. She wasn’t precisely sure about saying yes to Leonard when (encouraged by his friend Lytton Strachey) he asked the marriage question. She had, as she expressed in a letter to Leonard, dated May 1, 1912, questions:
“You seem so foreign. And then I am fearfully unstable…. I sometimes feel that no one ever has or ever can share something—It’s the thing that makes you call me like a hill, or a rock. Again, I want everything—love, children, adventure, intimacy, work…. So I go from being half in love with you, and wanting you to be with me always, and know everything about me, to the extreme of wildness and aloofness. I sometimes think that if I married you, I could have everything—and then—is it the sexual side of it that comes between us? As I told you brutally the other day, I feel no physical attraction in you.”
Historians and biographers will say what they will, but most of what passed between Leonard and Virginia over the course of their long marriage would only ever be known to them. What we do know, from the accounts both left behind, is how supportive Leonard was of Virginia’s writing. He was her first reader, her quasi-agent, her editor, her companion, her champion. His intelligence mattered, his opinions. She believed what he told her. He knew what to say.
His commitment to her work—to sharing his impressions, to easing her anxieties, to encouraging her radical departures, to fixing her spelling and adding apostrophes, to putting the Hogarth imprimatur upon the work that she created, to keeping her well—was substratum and substructure, the certain, solid ground to which she’d return after all the time she’d spend feeling dangerous with the thoughts inside her head.
Consider this progression from the pages of her diaries:
July 26, 1922
On Sunday L. read through Jacob’s Room. He thinks it my best work… He calls it a work of genius; he thinks it unlike any other novel; he says the people are ghosts; he says it is very strange.
January 23, 1927
Well Leonard has read To the Lighthouse and says it is much my best book and it is a “masterpiece.” He said this without my asking.
May 31, 1928
L. takes Orlando more seriously than I had expected. Thinks it in some ways better than the Lighthouse.
July 9, 1931
“It is a masterpiece,” said L. [about The Waves], coming out to my lodge this morning. “And the best of your books.”
November 3, 1936
Miracles will never cease — L. actually liked The Years! He thinks it so far—as far as the wind chapter—as good as any of my books.
I’m not suggesting that Leonard loved every line that Virginia wrote (they quarreled, for example, over her Roger Fry biography). I’m not even suggesting that Leonard always told the truth (he wasn’t so sure about The Years, but he told her what she needed to hear in the moment she needed to hear it). And certainly I’m not suggesting that Virginia would not have written without Leonard; she was writing before they met; she was a born writer. I’m also, finally, not writing into myth that the marriage of Leonard and Virginia was a study in extreme one-sidedness. She read his work, too. She listened when he spoke. She brought him her famous steaming bread.
Leonard, to Virginia, was a stabilizing force—a refuge, a sanctuary—to which, after the wide-eyed wilderness of forging something new, wrestling the beast, finding the word, she could return. He held her raw first drafts in his hands and held them still. He left his seat by the fire to enter the landscapes she wrote while she went outside to breathe real air. He eased the dervish of her anxieties, tamed her paranoia, helped silence the words that stormed through—her hunch that she was a fraud, her certainty she’d written her last book, her supposition that her reputation was dissipating.
*
What do we expect from the people with whom we trust our work in its in-progress stages? That best friend, that teacher, that lover, that neighbor, that student who is no longer a student, those who look up when we enter a room so that we might read from our blotted, ragged pages.
Will we be strengthened by the tendered proposition or silenced by it, engaged by the appraisal or enraged by it, feel exposed by the judgment, or seen? Will we want, more than words, the implied agency of the cup of tea, the blanket rearranged across our loose limbs, the gift of the dinner we didn’t make? And how will we repay the sympathetic and contributive attention we have, if we’ve been lucky, received?
What we don’t articulate to ourselves, we won’t articulate to others. What we don’t hope for, we won’t shape. We won’t find, or dismiss, the right writing group, the accommodating workshop, the ruthlessly brilliant vs. tender-hearted, urgent vs. peaceable, intense vs. easy-on-us teacher. We won’t ask the right friend the right question. We won’t summon the courage to tell our lover, out loud, All I wanted was for you to tell me to keep going.
What we write and how we write it will bear the watermarks of those we listen to, and how we listen, and what we do with what we’ve heard.
Choose well.
https://lithub.com/what-passes-for-love-on-the-marriage-of-leonard-and-virginia-woolf/
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LEONARD WOOLF WASN'T GAY
This man, of whom it was said would "always be the most intelligent person in the room", gave up his own life and ambitions to nurture what he saw as Virginia's genius. He loved her more than he loved himself and some of the most moving pages of this book are in the aftermath of her death when Leonard was bleakly and inconsolably alone. This is why it is immensely satisfying to learn that within 18 months he had fallen in love again.
Trekkie Parsons was 38 when he fell in love with her. He was 62 but love made him an ardent youth once again. She was an artist, a feminist and married to Ian Parsons, a publisher who later bought the Woolfs' Hogarth Press. Trekkie remained married to her husband but she also remained "married" to Leonard for the rest of his life in an arrangement that suited them all. The last happy and productive third of his life was spent with a woman who wasn't "bony and brainy". Glendinning is discreet in her judgments but she does allow herself this: "Trekkie, like Virginia, loved to be loved. She also knew how to love, and to care for the people she loved."
If you thought you knew the last word on the Bloomsbury narcissists, this understated, warm and scholarly biography will offer more than you might imagine. Leonard Woolf was always terribly attractive to women and even all these years after his death his biographer — and reader — comes under that spell.
With a compassionate eye and a spirited admiration, Glendinning writes about a man who deserves far more attention than he has had. It also opens up the wider, anguished question posed by Henry James, that of whether art is "life" or life is "art".
https://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/books/leonard-woolf-a-life-20061121-gdovmi.html
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THE PARENTS’ REVOLT AGAINST “WOKE”
~ America’s public schools, since their creation, have repeatedly become a locus for our nation’s most divisive fights over politics and civil rights, whether the subject be evolution, segregation, sex ed, or school prayer. After all, it is in its classrooms—in social-studies curricula and civics lessons and mandatory-reading lists—that the country wrestles with how to tell its story to new generations, how to teach kids what’s right and wrong, true and false. And the decisions that society makes about what children ought to learn, or ought not to, have the power to shape culture and the future of democracy.
Thus today we see fights over how to discuss racism in schools, with progressives championing lessons that connect the stain of slavery to modern inequities, conservatives demanding instead that children be taught “not to see color,” and plenty of debate somewhere in between. We see fights over whether first-graders should be allowed to check out picture books featuring LGBTQ characters, whether teens should be made to read literature with graphic depictions of sex, whether the Ten Commandments should be posted inside classrooms. The recent wave of activism targeting schools has sometimes seemed unprecedented in its ferocity and scale. But of course, these types of debates are not new. They fit into a long tradition of reactionary movements seeking to shape what children in America learn.
Early in the 20th century, Christian fundamentalists waged a crusade to stop the teaching of human evolution in public schools, culminating most famously with 1925’s Scopes “monkey trial,” in which a high-school teacher in Tennessee was charged with violating a new state law banning evolution lessons from classrooms.
With the United States on the precipice of entering World War II in the late 1930s and early ’40s, groups such as the Daughters of the American Revolution and the American Legion waged a successful nationwide campaign against popular social-studies textbooks written by the progressive educator Harold Rugg; they argued that the books—which raised questions about the unequal distribution of wealth in the U.S. and advocated for civil rights for African Americans—were “subversive.” Attempts to force schools to integrate in the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s were met with riots and racist protests.
While researching my book on the latest political wars over public education, I came across a 1981 New York Times article that sounded as if it might have been printed this year. It described a coalition of suburban residents who, “armed with sophisticated lobbying techniques,” were fighting to “remove books from libraries” and replace history syllabi with “texts that emphasize the positive side of America’s past.” The article documented efforts by parents’ groups across the country to “cleanse their local schools of materials and teaching methods they consider antifamily, anti-American and anti-God.” Here was a tale of conservative activists waging a national assault on school lessons more than four decades ago, though that earlier generation applied a different label to the threat it perceived than activists do now: secular humanism.
Rooted in 17th- and 18th-century Enlightenment thinking, secular humanism, as it was originally understood, refers to a belief system that rejects religion as the basis for morality and emphasizes the need to test dogma with science, to pursue justice by opposing discrimination, and to focus on improving conditions here on Earth rather than looking to the afterlife. But in the 1970s and ’80s, it was redefined by white Christian conservatives—much like the term critical race theory, decades later—as a catchall to describe any lesson or book they found objectionable. If a text mentioned the struggle for women’s rights, it was secular humanist; if it mentioned the racism of the Jim Crow era, it was secular humanist.
Also much as in today’s fights, the battles over secular humanism, which occurred in the years immediately following the civil-rights movement, were a response to evolving social norms around gender, race, and sexuality. And just as the protests for racial justice following the police murder of George Floyd in 2020 incited school-board conflicts in communities with rapidly changing demographics, many of the battles a generation ago emanated from predominantly white but diversifying suburbs, where angry parents formed groups with such names as Young Parents Alert and Guardians of Education. Portraying teachers, textbook writers, and school bureaucrats as liberal foot soldiers in a shadowy scheme to indoctrinate their children, these citizen activists described their cause as one of good versus evil, a framing that stoked passions—and sometimes violence.
The simmering right-wing movement against secular humanism exploded into national view in the spring of 1974, when white fundamentalists launched a political attack on the public school system in Kanawha County, West Virginia. The district had introduced new multicultural textbooks as required by a recent state mandate. Months of protests were led by Alice Moore, a white school-board member and preacher’s wife who argued—while explicitly invoking the dangers of secular humanism—that new language-arts textbooks would teach students “ghetto dialect” instead of “standard American speech.”
Picketers carried homemade signs, including one that read I have a “Bible,” I don’t need those dirty books. Angry parents were soon joined by members of the Ku Klux Klan. An elementary school’s entrance was defaced with a swastika. Arsonists attacked schools with firebombs and Molotov cocktails, vandals cut the fuel lines of school buses to keep them from running, and the county board-of-education building was blasted with 15 sticks of dynamite.
The unrest largely died down after six months, but the school board made a concession. All future textbooks in Kanawha County would have to “encourage loyalty to the United States” and “not defame our nation’s founders”—provisions strikingly like those sought by the GOP today. In states such as Texas and Oklahoma, legislators have passed laws requiring that students be taught a “patriotic” version of America’s past and banning texts that depict slavery as central to the nation’s founding.
There are also parallels in the financing of these movements, with support then and now drawn from a large network of conservative think tanks and activist groups. The campaign against secular humanism was backed by national organizations including the Heritage Foundation, Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority, Pat Robertson’s National Legal Foundation, and the antigay, anti-feminist crusader Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagle Forum. Some of those same organizations remain involved today, joined by dozens of emergent activist groups, such as Moms for Liberty, No Left Turn in Education, and the 1776 Project PAC.
Some aspects of the right’s new playbook appear to have been copied from history—including its campaign to leverage school-board conflicts to push for a conservative reinterpretation of foundational rights. With help from conservative law firms, parents filed lawsuits in the 1970s and ’80s claiming that secular humanism was itself a religion, and as such should be barred from schools or balanced with Christian perspectives. Others in the movement simultaneously sought to overturn the principle of Church-state separation that was the basis for that argument. Insisting that America’s founding was grounded in biblical principles, activists demanded that educators present Christianity in a favorable light, that children be taught to respect the United States and its military, and that men and women be depicted in “traditional” gender roles in classroom reading assignments.
Although many of these demands were denied by local and state education boards, Christian conservative groups scored major victories throughout the 1980s—largely through targeted lawsuits and local pressure campaigns—before the movement’s power and momentum began to wane, in the ’90s. The biggest win from that era may have come in 1984, when Congress passed a law that included an amendment written by Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah, prohibiting the use of federal funds for the teaching of secular humanism. Hatch failed to clearly define the concept, however, leaving confused educators to guess at which ideas were or were not allowed in classrooms. As one of Hatch’s aides would later concede, the senator’s amendment was meant mostly as a “symbolic thing.”
A similarly vague warning is being broadcast to educators across the country today, leading many to change the way they teach. A recent survey by Rand found that two-thirds of teachers nationally reported choosing to limit instruction about political and social issues, including racism and LGBTQ topics. Even in states and school districts where Republicans haven’t adopted laws or policies restricting lessons on race, gender, and sexuality, educators say their fear of political attacks has caused them to avoid subjects and lessons that might stir backlash.
Now, in many classrooms, dark chapters of America’s history are being softened or skipped. Some students are being taught a distorted narrative about our nation’s past and present, and books challenging that depiction are being pulled from shelves. All of this is helping shape what a new generation of Americans believes about our country—exactly the effect that anti-secularism activists fought for decades ago.
As it turns out, secular humanism itself may be experiencing something of a rebound as a boogeyman. On a recent reporting trip to Virginia Beach, where I was covering a live taping of a pro-Trump, Christian-nationalist television program, I listened to a young political strategist named Luke Ball bemoan the failure by his parents’ generation to teach children what is good and right. “We replaced Christianity with secular humanism in our classrooms,” Ball said. He then proceeded to blame the philosophy’s insidious influence for much of what the Christian right believes is wrong with the country today—pro-Palestine protests on college campuses, LGBTQ pride flags fluttering outside the White House, drag queens reading to children.
But there was still time to turn things around, Ball said. Conservatives just needed to look to the past and learn from their history.
*
“COMMUNIST DEMOCRACY”
Leon Trotsky, in his book The Revolution Betrayed, thought that Stalin’s Soviet Union would eventually collapse because of its lack of 'democracy'. What did he mean by communist democracy?
Communist democracy sounds like an oxymoron (actually, a similar one exists — Chinese Democracy).
The communist ideology dictates that the communist party alone is to oversee all government institutions, as invented by Lenin, not Stalin. Such one-party dictatorship cannot be called a democracy. The only way to get elected is to become a communist party member. This is the theory and practice of communism.
Moreover, making a successful career in the USSR was not achievable without a party membership. An exceptionally talented academic, for example, could become a head of a department, and that would be his career ceiling. But to become an institute director, one had to apply for the party membership.
Some claim that anyone could become a party member. Well, this is a stretch, at best.
Party membership imposed certain obligations on the candidate:
Loyalty. Any communist swore the oath to have the party as his primary loyalty. That meant even above their family, friends and relatives. In Stalin times, such choices had to be made frequently: a communist was obliged to denounce any relative accused of crimes against the regime, or even publicly condemn them.
Ideological alignment. A communist was required to become a communist — that is, to accept all beliefs and dogmas of the communist doctrine, without doubt. That included, abandoning any and all religions, as officially, Soviet communists were atheists. In fact, they preached Lenin, though.
Following the party line. A communist was obliged to attend a multitude of mandatory assemblies. Most of these were boring lectures on the progress of building of Communism in the USSR, evil plans of the World Capitalism, etc. But sometimes, when some member of that particular committee (usually, at workplace) committed something out of line (such as marital infidelity) that was discussed in great detail. Each communist, a member of the assembly, was expected to condemn the offender, and to tell him off. Such public shaming was a norm in the USSR.
Unanimous voting. Any vote at any level of the party was an imitation of the collective approval for a decision, that was already made behind the scenes by a couple of senior comrades. Everyone was expected to raise their hands in unison, approving the decision. Anyone objecting was in trouble.
Indoctrination. A communist was expected not only to be an ideal believer in Marxism-Leninism, but to actively promote it, and convert everyone around. Members of their family were expected to be as devoted to the ideology as a random regional committee propagandist.
Such total obedience and mind transparency have nothing to do with democracy. It is a dictatorship, but not necessarily personal (as that of Stalin), but collective, when a small group of ideologically motivated people decide everything for the rest.
And that group accepted members out of loyalty to that group, not the country or people.
Certainly, in the latest decades of the USSR, the communist ideology became somewhat weaker, and more relaxed. Most communists used the Orwerllian doublethink. Only a few sincerely believed in the dogmas; most party members were moved by other motives, such as career, greed, personal loyalties, etc. The Soviet moral norms, in fact, were as hypocritical as one can imagine.
One more thing — in his criticism, Leon Trotsky uses a typical communist trope: any existing or past implementation of communism is called “impure”, “corrupt”, claiming that only they know how to make it properly. Such demagogy was repeated by all Soviet leaders since after Stalin: “my predecessor has perverted the Leninist dogmas; I will return to them”.
Khrushchev was the first to promise this, following the partial condemnation of Stalin’s repressions (Not all victims were pardoned, not a single executioner, investigator or judge was punished for clear abuse of justice).
Brezhnev accused Khrushchev of “voluntarism”, promising to return to the “Leninist Norms”.
Gorbachev accused his predecessors of “stagnation”, dogmatism and “misinterpretation of Leninist Norms”, promising to restore them.
That is, for every Soviet leader, the Leninist Norms were nothing more than their own interpretation of them. And probably it was so for Leon Trotsky. ~ Timofey Vorobyev, Quora
Halvor Saether:
Apparently Trotsky got more concerned with ‘democracy’ only after he was ousted using the same authoritarian mechanisms he had worked ardently to implement.
Timofey Vorobyev:
Absolutely. Typical for the Bolsheviks — the system has eaten him.
As Ukrainian historian Pavlo Praviy (Bondarenko) stated, Trotsky was a good military strategist and a brilliant speaker, but a lousy bureaucrat. Stalin, OTOH, was a master of the bureaucratic games. While Trotsky was appealing to the masses, Stalin convinced those in power, middle to high party ranks, to support him.
Halvor Saether:
In the end Trotsky was far to self-indulgent to ride the lightning he had collaborated to create.
Toms Thomas:
The Duma was possibly the most useless political body ever created anywhere — all their ‘votes’ were near 100 % unanimous.
Timofey Vorobyev:
Capitalism is not a political system, but simply a free market economy. There would be no Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk under Communism — only Gosplan, which would state that a worker needs only one pair of pants per year. And factories, producing one pair per abstract worker, all oversized or undersized, not to mention the quality.
Selwyn Rodda:
Communism IS A STATELESS, CLASSLESS SOCIETY where FULL DEMOCRACY is achieved. Please read some books, dude. And it has NEVER been achieved anywhere. Why? Because elites everywhere are greedy and utterly immoral and will kill anyone genuinely threatening their power and privilege.
Timofey Vorobyev:
Communism, as described in these books of yours, comrade, is as real as a perpetual motion machine.
And stop lecturing me here, dude, as you are repeating the same mantra described in my post: Nobody except me (my party) can implement communism correctly. The fact that you are personally attacking me indicates that you have no arguments. As you comrades always do: the best argument of a commie is a 7.62 Mauser pistol, provided the opponent is unarmed, tied down and faces the wall.
Because nobody can implement it at all. Because it does not work.
*
TRYING TO DENY UKRAINE’S EXISTENCE
“You don’t even exist!” Characters in Russian fiction are always insulting each other in this way. They call each other zeroes, nothings, nonentities. The hero of Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground feels profoundly insulted when someone he hopes to annoy by standing in his way simply moves him aside like a piece of furniture. “I could even have forgiven blows,” the underground man explains, “but I absolutely could not forgive” his acting as if it was not a person in his way.
Of course there is something paradoxical about telling someone he doesn’t exist, for whom is one telling it to?
It is a commonplace that Russians are intuitive existentialists. The title of Gogol’s novel Dead Souls refers to people who exist only on paper, while the well-known story about the “Potemkin villages” that Catherine the Great’s lover constructed to hoodwink her refers to empty façades concealing nothingness.
And so it is not surprising that, in his recent interview with Tucker Carlson and in his 2021 article “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians,” Vladimir Putin keeps assuring Ukrainians they don’t really exist. Ukrainians and Russians are not two neighboring peoples, he insists, but “one people—a single whole.” Russia and Ukraine “are parts of what is essentially the same historical and spiritual space.”
If some people do not agree, that is simply “the result of deliberate effort by those forces that have always sought to undermine our unity.” Always: Russian history is a struggle against those who from time immemorial have sought to “divide and rule” by pitting “the parts of a single people against one another.” This fraught view of a Russia always fighting for its very existence implies that any Russian regarding Ukrainians as a separate people is treasonous.
“To have a better understanding of the present and look into the future,” Putin explains, “we need to turn to history.” To justify his war, he offers a long and convoluted narrative about the Eastern Slavs going back to the ninth century. Most Americans find it hard to appreciate such an argument because they cannot imagine anyone not sharing their assumption that the state exists to ensure the welfare of its citizens. What else could it exist for?
Russians, by contrast, typically reason that individuals come and go but Russia remains. Russia is more important, and more real, than all Russians living at any given moment. If Americans think only of themselves as individuals, Russians believe that American shallowness confers an enormous advantage on Russia because individualists are unlikely to make great sacrifices, let alone die, for their country—as Russians so readily do.
So how does Putin narrate Russian history to show that Ukrainians are really just Russians? When the Russian state was established by the Varangian (Viking) king Riurik, and when Prince Vladimir (Volodymyr to Ukrainians) chose to baptize his people into Eastern Christianity, the Eastern Slavs were one people whose capital was at Kiev. They called themselves the “Rus” and spoke a language that, as Putin reminds us, is traditionally called Old Russian. Of course, it might as well be called Old Ukrainian or Old Byelorussian, since it is equally the ancestor of all three, but of course Russia has come to be the dominant force in the region. [My school in Warsaw called it "Old Church Slavic."]
The Eastern Slavs living under Mongol rule for two centuries developed differently from those Slavs who continued as a part of Europe. Muscovy experienced no high Middle Ages or Renaissance but instead adopted Mongol forms of authoritarianism. As Ukrainians tell the story, these developments created two distinct cultural identities; as Putin recounts it, they initiated the enslavement of Western Russians under the rule of various Western powers, especially Austria, Lithuania, and Poland.
In Russian-nationalist discourse, Poland represents not only a rival power but a treasonous one, a Slavic country that became Catholic and identified with the West. President Putin established the holiday of November 4, “Unity Day,” which celebrates the expulsion of Polish invaders in 1612 and the preservation of Russia’s distinct civilization from the ever-corrupting Western influence.
In 1596, when Poland dominated much of Ukraine, the Union of Brest created the Uniate Church, which, while maintaining the Slavonic rite, switched allegiance to Rome. Putin regards this union as just another Western plot to divide the Russian people.
The year 1654 is also crucial to Putin. Ukrainian Cossacks under Hetman (leader) Bogdan Khmelnitsky had revolted against Polish rule but could not contend with the Polish army. They turned to Orthodox Moscow for help. In 1654, at Pereyaslav, Khmelnitsky swore allegiance to the Russian tsar (this is what Russians emphasize) who agreed to allow Ukrainian Cossacks their autonomy (as the Ukrainians point out).
For Ukrainian nationalists, Cossacks have acquired mythic status as heroic freebooters, symbols of adventure and anarchic liberty. That is how Gogol represents them in his novella Taras Bulba (1835) and Ilya Repin portrays them in his painting Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks (1880–91), which depicts a motley crew of warriors joyfully penning an obviously insulting letter to the Turkish Sultan.
Under Russian rule, Ukrainian autonomy repeatedly diminished. The Hetmanate was abolished in 1764, and serfdom was extended into Ukrainian lands. Putin is not in the habit of quoting Alexander Herzen’s famous comment that “the unfortunate country [Ukraine] could not withstand that fatal avalanche rolling from the north to the Black Sea and covering everything . . . with a uniform shroud of slavery.”
Nationalism, the dominant ideology of nineteenth-century Europe, inspired Ukrainians to establish a literature based on a distinct formal language. The first literary work in Ukrainian appeared in 1798, after which a great deal of folklore was collected. Ukraine’s greatest poet, Taras Shevchenko, born a serf, began to publish his poetry in 1840. He was arrested and banished to Siberia in 1847, and his complete works could not appear until 1907.
Russian policy was usually aimed at suppressing separate Ukrainian identity. An edict of 1863 declared that no Ukrainian language existed—it was merely a dialect of Russian—and banned books that were “religious and educational” along with “books generally intended for elementary reading by the people.”
Ukrainian newspapers and schools were suppressed. In 1876, a decree confined Ukrainian-language publication to historical documents, and Ukrainian musical and theatrical performances were proscribed.
While vaguely acknowledging that the Russian government tried to suppress the Ukrainian national movement, Putin insists that we be “mindful of the historical context.” This “context,” as almost always, includes the danger of foreign intervention to divide the Russians. In this case, “these [Russian] decisions . . . were taken against the backdrop of . . . the leaders of the Polish national movement to exploit the ‘Ukrainian issue’ to their own advantage.” But how could the Poles have “exploited” the issue of Ukrainian identity if a sense of that identity did not actually exist? Putin never seems to appreciate that it is not for Russians but Ukrainians to decide whether they are a separate people.
Putin explicitly identifies the Soviet Union with the Russian Empire, which it largely paralleled territorially. By so doing, he can present Soviet expansionism as the historically justified recovery of ancient Russian lands. Nevertheless, Putin rejects the Soviet approach to nationalities, which he portrays not only as a historical mistake but also as a betrayal of Russia: “One fact is crystal: Russia was robbed.”
In Bolshevik theory, nationality would disappear as people came to identify instead by class. The working class has no homeland! All the same, Lenin and Stalin recognized that a transitional period would be necessary during which Bolsheviks could exploit nationalism to advance their power. “We would be very poor revolutionaries,” Lenin declared, “if . . . we did not know how to utilize every popular movement against each separate disaster caused by imperialism in order to sharpen and extend the crisis.”
Accordingly, the USSR took the form of supposedly autonomous republics with the right to secede at any point—a right that was entirely empty, since all republics were “sovietized,” that is, governed by Communists chosen by and subservient to Moscow. National cultures were to be “national in form, socialist in content,” an accurate description if we understand that in Soviet thinking content is everything and form is nothing.
In Putin’s view, Bolshevik nationality policy “planted the foundation of our statehood the most dangerous time bomb, which exploded the moment the safety mechanism provided by the leading role of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was gone.”
Instead of one Russian people, the Bolsheviks falsely “secured at the state level the provision of three separate Slavic peoples: Russian, Ukrainian, and Byelorussian.” Still worse, the Bolsheviks drew the boundaries of Ukraine to include “lands of historical Russia,” and in 1954 Khrushchev, “in gross violation of legal norms that were in force at the time,” transferred Crimea to Ukraine. Yet since Soviet law entirely rejected the notion of limiting the power of CPSU, it isn’t clear how any decision it undertook could violate, let alone grossly violate, legal norms.
*
As Putin tells the story, it was the Ukrainian government that ignited the present conflict. They did so, he sometimes argues, at the behest of Nazis. At other times, he argues that Western powers, suffering from an entirely irrational “Russophobia,” called the shots in order to exploit Ukrainian national resources and, of course, weaken Russia.
Not everything Putin says is groundless. Since the Maidan revolution of 2014 did overthrow a democratically elected government, he has a point in calling it a “coup.” Putin can also cite various Ukrainian laws that discriminate against Russians or Russian speakers. For example, a 2021 law ensures the cultural integrity of “indigenous peoples,” which it defines as “an ethnic minority within the Ukrainian population that possesses a distinctive language and culture; has traditional, social, cultural, or representative structures; considers itself native to Ukraine; and does not have its own state identity beyond Ukraine.”
The last phrase excludes native Russian-speakers, who represent about a third of Ukraine’s population. Putin also makes a reasonable case that Crimea is not really Ukrainian since, according to the 1989 census, only 25.8 percent of its population was Ukrainian. And Ukraine has indeed dispensed with elections during wartime and brought all media under state control.
Henry Kissinger pointed out that Ukraine might serve “as a bridge between Russia and the West, rather than as an outpost of either side.” It is arguable that many in the West have sought to use Ukraine for their own ends, setting up a bulwark against Russia, one that is subservient to Western aims and working as a NATO staging post.
But much of what Putin says is tendentious at best and designed to reinforce Ukraine’s status as just such an outpost. He complains that “local oligarchs . . . robbed the people of Ukraine and kept their stolen money in Western banks,” but that, after all, is precisely what Russian oligarchs have done to Russia.
Putin represents the 2014 Crimea referendum, conducted under Russian occupation and resulting in a 97 percent vote to join the Russian Federation, as entirely legitimate. By the same token, he describes the local populations of Donetsk and Lugansk as defending themselves from Ukrainian mass murder, without mentioning the many “little green men” (Russian soldiers in generic green uniforms to conceal their Russian origin) Putin sent to prosecute and control the 2014 war. “Russia has done everything to stop the fratricide,” he claims.
Putin, of course, omits the Russian bombing of civilian populations and infrastructure, the massacre at Bucha, and the abduction of tens of thousands of Ukrainian children, presumably to be brought up as Russians. Since Russian law prescribes that foreign children can be adopted only with the consent of their homeland, these Ukrainian children were granted Russian citizenship.
To appreciate Putin’s arguments, and his confidence that most Russians will agree with him, one must grasp that in Russian national mythology, Russia has never, absolutely never, fought an unjust war. On the contrary, it has always sacrificed its own interests for the sake of others.
As the eighteenth-century poet Gavriil Derzhavin wrote:
What an honor from generation to generation
For Russia, its glory indelible.
The universe saved by her
From the new hordes.
Asked to define their own national character, very few Americans would think of their identity as warriors, as Russians typically do. In his 1898 book War in the History of the Russian World, Nikolai Sukhotin, the director of the Russian General Staff Academy, calculated that Russia had spent 353 of the past 525 years—two-thirds of its history—waging war. The Russian Orthodox Church has canonized warriors as saints simply for their military successes. Each war is really a part of one long war, every conflict is existential, and all enemies are now Nazis, which is why the excuse of “denazifying” Ukraine could seem plausible.
Putin’s most preposterous historical reconstruction, offered in the Carlson interview, concerns the origin of World War II. According to Putin, Poland was responsible for its own tragedy when the Germans invaded on September 1, 1939. That is because in 1938, when Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia to annex the Sudetenland, Poland took the opportunity to seize a bit of Czech territory it claimed. As Putin tells the story, “in 1939, after Poland cooperated with Hitler—it did collaborate with Hitler, you know”—Hitler went on to demand that his Polish ally surrender the Danzig [Gdańsk] corridor separating East Prussia from the rest of Germany, and when Poland refused, the Germans invaded. In short, Poland precipitated its own destruction while the Soviet Union always behaved “honestly.”
This amazing account omits the real precipitating event, the Hitler–Stalin (Molotov–Ribbentrop) non-aggression pact of August 23, 1939. The treaty’s secret protocols, revealed at the Nuremberg trials but obvious enough from the start, gave the USSR the Baltic states and Finland, while dividing Poland. And so, on September 17, 1939, the USSR also invaded Poland, with the two partitioning powers stopping at a predetermined line and avoiding conflict with each other. For the next two years (that is, for about one third of the war), the USSR was a German ally. Although Poland had ignominiously gobbled up a piece of helpless Czechoslovakia, that had nothing to do with the German (and Soviet) invasion.
In much the same way, Putin omits the reason so many Ukrainians (and other Soviet ethnicities) joined an army under General Vlasov ready to fight alongside the Germans and, later, the victorious Western allies. Why, asked Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, for the first time in Russian history, were there so many traitors? “Marx has eloquently described the poverty and suffering of the working class in England,” so why, Solzhenitsyn asks, did England produce no army of traitors, while “in our country [there were] millions?”
The reason is not far to seek: the Soviet war on the countryside from 1929–32, which was focused primarily on Ukraine. According to the authoritative history of this “war” (in which only one side was armed), Robert Conquest’s Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror Famine, more people died because of that Soviet policy than did in the entirety of World War I. Conquest begins his four-hundred-page study by observing that “in the actions here recorded about twenty human lives were lost for, not every word, but every letter, in this book.”
The final stage of this war was an artificially created famine. All grain was removed, no food was allowed in, and the population was left to starve over the winter. People were prevented from fishing in the rivers or gathering bits of grain left in the fields. Idealistic young Bolsheviks enforced the famine. At the same time, Ukrainian cultural institutions and churches were suppressed.
Is it any wonder that people from families who survived the famine would have joined any anti-Soviet power that presented itself? “Who was more to blame [for that], those youths or the gray Fatherland?” Solzhenitsyn asked.
And is it any wonder that there have been, as Putin repeats, five waves of NATO expansion? Poland pressed for admission, precisely because it (like other countries pleading to join NATO) had just escaped Russian domination and foresaw the possibility—or inevitability?—of a future threat. There is a reason, after all, that while Germany has long avoided meeting its NATO commitment to spend 2 percent of its GDP on defense, Poland has far exceeded it—and even exceeds the American percentage.
Putin claimed to Carlson that he would invade Poland only if Poland attacked Russia first. That was precisely the excuse the USSR gave for invading Finland on November 30, 1939: that Finland, a country of about three million, had invaded the USSR, with one hundred fifty million.
Russia has a history of expansion, under tsars, Soviets, and Putin. Ideology just provides an up-to-date excuse. Russian expansionism is conventionally dated to Ivan the Terrible’s conquest of Kazan in 1552. If we trace Russia’s (the USSR’s) boundaries in 1952, we can calculate that, on average, Russia added territory the size of Belgium every year for four hundred years—not including the Eastern European puppet states then under Soviet rule. Today the question remains why a massive state with a dizzying array of demographic, economic, and ethnic problems would try to expand its territory even further, especially into a well-defended nation such as Poland, but it is surely a possibility.
It is easy to miss the significance of a point Putin repeats in the Carlson interview: the world balance of power is changing rapidly. The United States and its allies are growing ever less powerful. In 1992, Putin explains, “the share of the G7 countries in the world economy amounted to 47 percent, whereas in 2022 it was down to, I think, a little over 30 percent.”
Calculated by purchasing-power parity, he points out, China is already a larger economy than the United States. Most significant, Putin boasts that “We are now ahead of everyone—the United States and other countries—in terms of the development of hypersonic strike systems, and we are improving them every day.”
Could this shift in the power balance explain Putin’s increasingly aggressive stance? Why would Putin incur bad publicity by killing the opposition leader Alexei Navalny, when Navalny was already in a remote Arctic prison camp? Perhaps because, after developing weapons capacity in secret, and watching the United States allow its military to be hollowed out, Russia is ready to act more aggressively than ever, alone or in concert with China and Iran.
But what has Putin to gain by that? If one considers only the well-being of a country’s citizens, the question is a fair one. But if one’s primary goal is national power, the question answers itself. The fact that few Americans understand this way of thinking makes Russian ambitions all the more frightening. ~
Gary Saul Morson, the Lawrence B. Dumas Professor of the Arts and Humanities at Northwestern University, co-authored, with Morton Schapiro, Cents and Sensibility (Princeton).
https://newcriterion.com/article/narratives-of-russian-history/
*
THUGLAND
~ Western critics display an endless fascination with “the Russian soul,” the “spirit of Russia,” or what Lesley Chamberlain, the author of Motherland: A Philosophical History of Russia, calls “Russia as Motherland and Otherland.” Whenever Western intellectuals seem disillusioned by our “bourgeois” values, by technological progress, or individualist pursuit of personal goals with no overarching moral imperative for society as a whole, they turn to Russia as an alternative. The horrors of the twentieth century, of course, make such an alternative more than a bit suspect. Communism was a disaster, and post-Communist Russia, as Garry Kasparov has observed, is now little more than Thugland, the best guide to which is the novels of Mario Puzo.
In fact, there is a great deal to learn from the Russian experience, both negative and positive. When Time magazine named Einstein as the “Man of the Century” just past, they clearly had it wrong. Surely the most influential person of the twentieth century was Lenin, the inventor of totalitarianism, a system that dominated some dozen-and-a-half countries and more than a third of the world’s population. It caused deaths running into nine figures. Without Lenin there would have been no Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot, Castro, or Kim Il Sung. One question Russian history evidently raises is: what led to, and might again lead to, the ideological tyranny that made the twentieth century the bloodiest in world history?
https://newcriterion.com/article/thugland/
Oriana:
The rest is behind a paywall. But I couldn’t resist the criticism of Time magazine’s “wrong choice” of Einstein as the most influential man of the twentieth century — “Surely the most influential person of the twentieth century was Lenin, the inventor of totalitarianism, a system that dominated some dozen-and-a-half countries and more than a third of the world’s population.”
And the current depredations of Russia in Ukraine and several small countries such as Georgia and Chechnya do establish it as THUGLAND — a term no one else has yet dared to use. Russia has been called a Mafia state and a criminal state, but Thugland has a brutal honesty entirely free of euphemism and appeasement.
And that’s the word I’d like the readers to remember: THUGLAND.
It’s as stark as the residential blocks:
Apartment block, Halichnaya Street, St. Petersburg
*
WHY EUROPEANS BECAME SO POWERFUL
~ The explanation I have heard that makes the most sense is a bit of luck that resulted in a lot of education.
Several things came together with fortuitous results in Europe.
One was language, or more particularly, alphabet. The European countries mostly made use of a Roman alphabet of 26 letters that were combined to form all the necessary sounds when writing. This might not seem very significant, but we’ll come back to this later.
The second was papermaking. In fact, the Chinese invented it in the first century. The craft s-l-o-w-l-y made its way from China through the Middle East to Europe. The Chinese used paper to record many things, but it was a rather laborious effort because the language used thousands of complex “hanzi” that combined many elements of the spoken language into a single character. In the Middle East, the Arabic language proved much easier to write, and the Middle East became a center of commerce and a storehouse of knowledge.
By the year 1000 C.E., papermaking reached Europe, which was a great boon to the spread of knowledge because until then the Europeans were writing on parchment. Parchment is processed sheep skins, and a single book might reguire 100 animal skins and a year of processing just to obtain the blank pages on which to write. Books were something that could be afforded only by the very rich, and were mostly held by the church. Priests spent long hours writing books, and embellishing them with “illuminated” texts because each page had such high value. Paper suddenly made books a commodity that most people could afford.
Which brings us to the third element: The invention of the printing press and movable type. Up to this point, all writing was done by hand. Scholars laboriously copied books by hand to create additional volumes. The problem for China was that their written language depended on tens of thousands of Hanji.
The problem for the Middle East was that their written language used an artful script that overlapped and merged symbols.
But in Europe, the Roman alphabet was perfectly suited to the new technology. Nice neat individual characters. Even though there were differences in the various languages, the alphabets used the same 26 letters.
Minus the elaborate hand-drawn “illuminations”, European books could be easily reproduced and distributed.
The result was a boom in general knowledge and education. Even the “common man” learned to read. Ideas and invention flourished. Science and technology advanced much faster with an educated populace, and Europe became a powerhouse that literally ruled the world. ~ Jim Grupé, Quora
Edmund Pickett:
The development of cheap paper made classical music possible. Think how much paper J.S. Bach used in a week. He couldn’t have afforded that with parchment.
Paul Irving:
Printing with movable type wasn't new, but it was much more useful when a language was written with a small number of characters.
I’m not sure why it didn't take off in Korea after the invention of Hangul: a phonetic script with relatively few characters, adopted when a medieval king wanted to spread literacy. It was promulgated in 1443, & Korea had movable type, including metal type from at least 1377 (there’s a surviving Korean book from that date).
Movable metal type’s documented from 1193 in China, & porcelain type from earlier, but China only used ideograms, so its advantages were limited.
There are medieval European documents mentioning the use of movable type in China. Dunno if Gutenberg was aware of them. His lead alloy seems to have been his own idea, & his press a significant advance on earlier methods.
Another answer about the sources of European power:
It’s very simple. It’s about 3 things: Energy, Money, and Information.
You need the energy to transport things, back when people used animals, they had to eat grass and they could grow old, get sick, or worse, moody. When the Industrial Revolution happened now machines could eat steam then later coal and oil, while they could also get sick and worn down, they didn’t complain as much as animals and they also didn’t get sleepy. Since coal and oil are much more plentiful than grass, and machines can be made faster than cows and horses breed, in this round obviously machine wins, especially in scalability.
There are now many more of them than horses and cows, and now you don’t need to train them for years anymore. An idiot could be taught how to light up a cannon — much better than training horses and knights for war or training archers, and cannons with deadlier effects on flesh and bones than regular old arrows. Now cannons didn’t get invented during the Industrial Revolution, but instead of creating one, you now have the ability to create 50 of them thanks to coal power.
Second is money, which is all there is to it, for some people at least. But whether you like or hate it you can't deny that it’s important. The fact that there are now large-scale private banks forming instead of regular old coins controlled by the governments means plenty more money because money is essentially just debt, so when you have more banks you will have more money by default (you will have to pay later but that’s not important since money can now exponentially increase in the hands of people). Imagine instead of 1 gold coin you now have 10, now with 10 gold coins (all from debt) you can invest in anything you want and if they turn profitable you might even get 100 gold coins total in a few years if your investment/endeavor succeeds. Capitalism is basically about large-scale debt. It can turn a country with nothing much to offer into a powerhouse (Netherlands), with the price of becoming a world gambling spot.
Also, now people can own more things. Instead of land now you can own a “business.” Lots of people have no idea how transforming this is, instead of just dealing with patches of dirt now you are dealing with complex social structures based on law, contracts, and future predictions (and machines).
Lastly, information. When people are being taught how to read and have enough things to read about (books) instead of just the bar signs, suddenly they are able to absorb information at a faster rate, before this no one really knew the value of those gruesome childhood lessons about reading and basic maths with your screaming parents could be so useful on a societal scale, now people have so much potential instead of being just a regular old peasants, warriors, nobles. The society literally explodes in complexity after this, creating the middle class.
Imagine asking 2 groups of people to cut down a mountain in 50 years, both group has 10 people. Group 1 has 7 stone-cutter and 3 whatever, group 2 has the same thing. But now over the course of several decades, group 2 was able to grow into 30 people and have 20 stone-cutters (that can read and constantly improve on their previous techniques and lessons), while group 1 has only grown to 12 people and only have about 8 stone-cutters doing the exact same thing with little improvements. In other words, book power.
*
THE REIGN OF KHRUSHCHEV
Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev famously overcompensated with corn cobs.
Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev denounced Stalin’s Cult of Personality and even threw his dead body out of the mausoleum in the Red Square. Millions of the Soviets hoped that he was going to deliver a new democratic age free of fear and oppression.
Khrushchev, following Stalin’s example, rapidly consolidated power in his own hands, becoming the first secretary of the Central Committee and the head of government in the mid-1950s. In Russia, a national leader is unfortunately expected to behave like a tzar whose every whim is a command.
Khrushchev stopped listening to his advisors and would respond to criticism: “Enough! I’m tired of these talks. I don’t want to listen.” As a consequence of his megalomania, he made some major mistakes that ultimately caused the collapse of the communist experiment.
He suppressed the Uprising in Budapest in 1956 with tanks for daring to build “democratic socialism” with fair elections, workers’ self-government, and free press. He built the infamous Berlin Wall and carried out The Novocherkassk massacre to put down a workers’ strike protesting against shortages of food with a rain of bullets.
It was under Khrushchev that the Cuban Missile Crisis broke out drawing the USSR into an arms race with the United States. He built all sorts of secret military command posts, airfields, bunkers, and launch silos for nukes, and every second engineer in the country worked for the “defense industry.”
The arms race ultimately ruined the Soviet economy. Years later, Putin and his KGB morons picked up that lost course to throw the Russian economy under the bus to develop and manufacture arms for an endless war against Collective West.
Putin also copies Khruschchev who wanted to “catch up and outrun America” in that he claims that Russia has caught up with the developed economies backing it up with made-up data.
Khruschchev launched a “corn campaign” in a cold climate and the crops produced low yields. He attempted to develop “virgin lands” that failed due to issues with logistics.
Putin is often dubbed “American spy” because he’s seemingly doing his best to ruin Russia, but the same moniker could be applied to Khrushchev for in the absence of intellect, he tried one awful idea after the next and no one dared to tell him “nyet.”
Khrushchev is credited with re-housing millions of the Soviets from wooden barracks into five-story prefabricated housing. It was Western German technology that they discarded and the number of floors was specifically chosen as the maximum without the necessity to install elevators.
The housing was low-quality, with super cramped rooms, low ceilings, and awful design. They were meant to last 20 years, but they’re still standing. Thanks to Westerners’ invention of home appliances, Soviets could also now have a fridge in the kitchen and a TV set in the bedroom that doubled up as the living room.
Khrushchev is mistakenly credited with transferring Crimea to the Ukrainian SSR, but nothing could be further from the truth. It was a collective decision made by the Politburo at the meeting of the CPSU Central Committee on January 25, 1954. Malenkov was the chairman, and the decree on the transfer of Crimea bears Voroshilov’s signature. Khrushchev only endorsed an extract from the protocol.
Thus, Khrushchev became the mediocre version of Stalin for the gentler times.
He pulled his fair share of nasties. He launched a smear campaign against Nobel Prize winner Boris Pasternak trying to force him out of the Soviet Union saved only by the international resistance of the Indian Prime Minister J Nehru and Western writers like Hemingway, Steinbeck, Graham Greene, Aldous Huxley, and Somerset Maugham.
Khrushchev ordered to throw into Gulag national footballer legend Eduard Strelstov because he didn’t want to play for the Dinamo club and outshone the Soviet premier. “Lock up him for a long time. The hardest forced labor,” ordered Khruschev. Strelkov missed the Football World Cup that millions of the Soviets watched expecting to see Strelkov play.
The culmination of Khruschev's personalized rule that ended up in a palace coup was an incident with a twelve-year-old mentally ill boy who killed his sleeping parents with an iron.
Khrushchev was informed about this incident and ordered: “Shoot the boy.” Without a trial or investigation and in violation of the Criminal Code.
The future premier Leonid Brezhnev tried to take advantage of Khrushchev's good mood to cancel the order to shoot the boy. He went to Khrushchev, and five minutes later came out pale as a ghost, “Never contact me with such requests again,” he said.
The mentally ill child was shot. ~ Misha Firer, Quora
*
CAN RUSSIA END THE WAR WITHOUT TAKING ODESSA?
Odessa is a key objective for Putin’s war.
He needs Odessa for the invasion of his next victim-Moldova. The invasion plans for Moldova were revealed by Lukashenko in 2022.
Invasion of Moldova will be incredibly hard without a land bridge across Ukraine.
Putin is bombing Odessa now to soften her up.
Russia might end the war without capturing Odessa only if things are going poorly and he is looking for any way out.
If things are going well, he will insist on Odessa to set up his next invasion. ~ Brent Cooper, Quora
Cathedral in Odessa after being hit by a Russian missile
Odessa Opera Theater in 1941, and 2022
Odessa before the 2022 war
*
SHOULD WE BE KEEPING PETS?
~ It was a Tupperware tub of live baby rats that made Dr Jessica Pierce start to question the idea of pet ownership. She was at her local branch of PetSmart, a pet store chain in the US, buying crickets for her daughter’s gecko. The baby rats, squeaking in their plastic container, were brought in by a man she believed was offering to sell them to the store as pets or as food for the resident snakes. She didn’t ask. But Pierce, a bioethicist, was troubled.
“Rats have a sense of empathy and there has been a lot of research on what happens when you take babies away from a mother rat – not surprisingly, they experience profound distress,” she says. “It was a slap in the face – how can we do this to animals?”
Pierce went on to write Run, Spot, Run, which outlines the case against pet ownership, in 2015. From the animals that become dog and cat food and the puppy farms churning out increasingly unhealthy purebred canines, to the goldfish sold by the bag and the crickets by the box, pet ownership is problematic because it denies animals the right of self-determination. Ultimately, we bring them into our lives because we want them, then we dictate what they eat, where they live, how they behave, how they look, even whether they get to keep their sex organs.
Treating animals as commodities isn’t new or shocking; humans have been meat-eaters and animal-skin-wearers for millennia. However, this is at odds with how we say we feel about our pets. The British pet industry is worth about £10.6bn; Americans spent more than $66bn (£50bn) on their pets in 2016. A survey earlier this year found that many British pet owners love their pet more than they love their partner (12%), their children (9%) or their best friend (24%).
According to another study, 90% of pet-owning Britons think of their pet as a member of their family, with 16% listing their animals in the 2011 census.
“It is morally problematic, because more people are thinking of pets as people … They consider them part of their family, they think of them as their best friend, they wouldn’t sell them for a million dollars,” says Dr Hal Herzog, a professor of psychology at Western Carolina University and one of the founders of the budding field of anthro-zoology, which examines human-animal relations. At the same time, research is revealing that the emotional lives of animals, even relatively “simple” animals such as goldfish, are far more complex and rich than we once thought (“dogs are people, too”, according to a 2013 New York Times comment piece by the neuroscientist Gregory Berns). “The logical consequence is that the more we attribute them with these characteristics, the less right we have to control every single aspect of their lives,” says Herzog.
Does this mean that, in 50 years or 100 years, we won’t have pets? Institutions that exploit animals, such as the circus, are shutting down – animal rights activists claimed a significant victory this year with the closure of Ringling Bros circus – and there are calls to end, or at least rethink, zoos. Meanwhile, the number of Britons who profess to be vegan is on the rise, skyrocketing 350% between 2006 and 2016.
Widespread petkeeping is a relatively recent phenomenon. Until the 19th century, most animals owned by households were working animals that lived alongside humans and were regarded unsentimentally. In 1698, for example, a Dorset farmer recorded in his diary: “My old dog Quon was killed and baked for his grease, which yielded 11lb.” However, in the 19th and 20th centuries, animals began to feature less in our increasingly urban environments and, as disposable income grew, pets became more desirable.
Even as people began to dote on their pets, though, animal life was not attributed any intrinsic value. In Run, Spot, Run, Pierce reports that, in 1877, the city of New York rounded up 762 stray dogs and drowned them in the East River, shoving them into iron crates and lifting the crates by crane into the water. Veterinarian turned philosopher Bernard Rollin recalls pet owners in the 1960s putting their dog to sleep before going on holiday, reasoning that it was cheaper to get a new dog when they returned than to board the one they had.
More recently, however, several countries have moved to change the legal status of animals. In 2015, the government of New Zealand recognized animals as sentient beings, in effect declaring them no longer property (how this squares with New Zealand’s recent “war on possums” is unclear), as did the Canadian province of Quebec. While pets remain property in the UK, the Animal Welfare Act of 2006 stipulates that pet owners must provide a basic level of care for their animals.
Pets are also property in the US, but 32 states, as well as Puerto Rico and Washington DC, now include provisions for pets under domestic violence protection orders. In 2001, Rhode Island changed its legislation to describe pet owners as “guardians”, a move that some animal rights’ advocates lauded (and others criticized for being nothing more than a change in name).
Before we congratulate ourselves on how far we have come, consider that 1.5m shelter animals – including 670,000 dogs and 860,000 cats – are euthanized each year in the US. The number of stray dogs euthanized annually in the UK is far lower – 3,463 – but the RSCPA says investigations into animal cruelty cases increased 5% a year in 2016, to 400 calls a day.
“Can I stick my dog in a car and take him to the vet and say: ‘I don’t want him any more, kill him,’ or take him to a city shelter and say: ‘I can’t keep him any more, I hope you can find a home for him, good luck’?” says Gary Francione, a professor at Rutgers Law School in New Jersey and an animal rights advocate. “If you can still do that, if you still have the right to do that, then they are still property.”
Crucially, our animals can’t tell us whether they are happy being pets. “There is an illusion now that pets have more voice than in the past … but it is maybe more that we are putting words into their mouth,” Pierce says, pointing to the abundance of pets on social media plastered with witty projections written by their “parents”. “Maybe we are humanizing them in a way that actually makes them invisible.”
If you accept the argument that pet ownership is morally questionable, how do you put the brakes on such a vast industry? While he was writing his 2010 book, Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat, Herzog was studying the motivations of animal rights activists and whether it was emotion or intellect that pushed them towards activism. One of the subjects, Herzog says, was “very, very logical”. After he had become a vegan, eschewed leather shoes and convinced his girlfriend to go vegan, he considered his pet cockatiel. “I remember; he looked up wistfully. He said he got the bird, took it outside, let it loose and it flew up,” Herzog recalls. “He said: ‘I knew she wouldn’t survive, that she probably starved. I guess I was doing it more for myself than for her.’”
Although Pierce and Francione agree that pet ownership is wrong, both of them have pets: Pierce has two dogs and a cat; Francione has six rescue dogs, whom he considers “refugees”. For now, the argument over whether we should own animals is largely theoretical: we do have pets and giving them up might cause more harm than good. Moreover, as Francione suggests, caring for pets seems to many people to be the one area where we can actually do right by animals; convincing people of the opposite is a hard sell.
Tim Wass, the chair of the Pet Charity, an animal welfare consultant and a former chief officer at the RSPCA, agrees. “It has already been decided by market forces and human nature … the reality is people have pets in the millions. The question is: how can we help them care for them correctly and appropriately?”
If the short history of pet ownership tells us anything, it is that our attitude towards animals is prone to change. “You see these rises and falls in our relationships with pets,” says Herzog. “In the long haul, I think petkeeping might fall out of fashion; I think it is possible that robots will take their place, or maybe pet owning will be for small numbers of people. Cultural trends come and go. The more we think of pets as people, the less ethical it is to keep them.” ~
THE NEW OLD CATHOLIC CHURCH
~ It was the music that changed first. Or maybe that’s just when many people at the pale brick Catholic church in the quiet Wisconsin neighborhood finally began to realize what was happening.
The choir director, a fixture at St. Maria Goretti for nearly 40 years, was suddenly gone. Contemporary hymns were replaced by music rooted in medieval Europe.
So much was changing. Sermons were focusing more on sin and confession. Priests were rarely seen without cassocks. Altar girls, for a time, were banned.
At the parish elementary school, students began hearing about abortion and hell.
“It was like a step back in time,” said one former parishioner, still so dazed by the tumultuous changes that began in 2021 with a new pastor that he only spoke on condition of anonymity.
It’s not just St. Maria Goretti.
Across the U.S., the Catholic Church is undergoing an immense shift. Generations of Catholics who embraced the modernizing tide sparked in the 1960s by Vatican II are increasingly giving way to religious conservatives who believe the church has been twisted by change, with the promise of eternal salvation replaced by guitar Masses, parish food pantries and casual indifference to church doctrine.
The shift, molded by plummeting church attendance, increasingly traditional priests and growing numbers of young Catholics searching for more orthodoxy, has reshaped parishes across the country, leaving them sometimes at odds with Pope Francis and much of the Catholic world.
The changes are not happening everywhere. There are still plenty of liberal parishes, plenty that see themselves as middle-of-the-road. Despite their growing influence, conservative Catholics remain a minority.
Yet the changes they have brought are impossible to miss.
The progressive priests who dominated the U.S. church in the years after Vatican II are now in their 70s and 80s. Many are retired. Some are dead. Younger priests, surveys show, are far more conservative.
“They say they’re trying to restore what us old guys ruined,” said the Rev. John Forliti, 87, a retired Twin Cities priest who fought for civil rights and reforms in Catholic school sex education.
Doug Koesel, an outspoken 72-year-old priest at Blessed Trinity Parish in Cleveland, was blunter: “They’re just waiting for us to die.”
At St. Maria Goretti, once steeped in the ethos of Vatican II, many parishioners saw the changes as a requiem.
“I don’t want my daughter to be Catholic,” said Christine Hammond, whose family left the parish when the new outlook spilled into the church’s school and her daughter’s classroom. “Not if this is the Roman Catholic Church that is coming.”
But this is not a simple story. Because there are many who welcome this new, old church.
They often stand out in the pews, with the men in ties and the women sometimes with the lace head coverings that all but disappeared from American churches more than 50 years ago.
Often, at least a couple families will arrive with four, five or even more children, signaling their adherence to the church’s ban on contraception, which most American Catholics have long casually ignored.
They attend confession regularly and adhere strictly to church teachings. Many yearn for Masses that echo with medieval traditions – more Latin, more incense, more Gregorian chants.
“We want this ethereal experience that is different from everything else in our lives,” said Ben Rouleau, who until recently led St. Maria Goretti’s young adult group, which saw membership skyrocket even as the parish shrank amid the turmoil.
They are, Rouleau said, happily out of touch with a liberal city like Madison.
“It’s radical in some ways,” Rouleau said. “We’re returning to the roots of the church.”
If this movement emerged from anywhere, it might be a now-demolished Denver football stadium and a borrowed military helicopter carrying in Pope John Paul II.
Some 500,000 people descended on Denver in 1993 for the Catholic festival World Youth Day. When the pope’s helicopter landed just outside Mile High Stadium, the ground shook from the stomping.
The pope, whose grandfatherly appearance belied an electric charisma, and who was beloved both for his kindness and his sternness, confronted an American church shaped by three decades of progressive change.
If the church is often best known to non-Catholics for its opposition to abortion, it had grown increasingly liberal since Vatican II. Birth control was quietly accepted in many parishes, and confession barely mentioned. Catholic social teaching on poverty suffused churches. Most priests traded in their cassocks for plain black shirts with Roman collars. Incense and Latin became increasingly rare.
On some issues, John Paul II agreed with these liberal-minded Catholics. He spoke against capital punishment and pushed for workers’ rights. He preached relentlessly about forgiveness – “the oxygen that purifies the air of hatred.” He forgave his own would-be assassin.
But he was also uncompromising on dogma, warning about change and cracking down on liberal theologians. He urged a return to forgotten rituals.
Catholics “are in danger of losing their faith,” he told crowds at the final Denver Mass, decrying abortion, drug abuse, and what he called “sexual disorders,” a barely veiled reference to growing acceptance of gay rights.
Across the nation, fervent young Catholics listened.
Newman Centers, which serve Catholic university students, became increasingly popular. So did FOCUS, a traditionalist organization working on American college campuses. Conservative Catholic media grew, particularly the cable TV network EWTN, a prominent voice for increased orthodoxy.
Today, conservative Catholic America has its own constellation of online celebrities aimed at young people. There’s Sister Miriam James, an ever-smiling nun in full habit who talks openly about her hard-partying college days. There’s Jackie Francois Angel, who speaks in shockingly frank detail about sex, marriage and Catholicism. There’s Mike Schmitz, a movie-star handsome Minnesota priest who exudes kindness while insisting on doctrine.
Even today, surveys show most American Catholics are far from orthodox. Most support abortion rights. The vast majority use birth control.
But increasingly, those Catholics are not in church.
In 1970, more than half of America’s Catholics said they went to Mass at least once a week. By 2022, that had fallen to 17%, according to CARA, a research center affiliated with Georgetown University. Among millennials, the number is just 9%.
Even as the U.S. Catholic population has jumped to more than 70 million, driven in part by immigration from Latin America, ever-fewer Catholics are involved in the church’s most important rites. Infant baptisms have fallen from 1.2 million in 1965 to 440,000 in 2021, CARA says. Catholic marriages have dropped by well over two-thirds.
The shrinking numbers mean that those who remain in the church have outsized influence compared with the overall Catholic population.
On the national level, conservatives increasingly dominate the U.S. Catholic Bishops Conference and the Catholic intellectual world. They include everyone from the philanthropist founder of Domino’s Pizza to six of the nine U.S. Supreme Court justices.
Then there’s the priesthood.
Young priests driven by liberal politics and progressive theology, so common in the 1960s and 70s, have “all but vanished,” said a 2023 report from The Catholic Project at Catholic University, based on a survey of more than 3,500 priests.
Today’s young priests are far more likely to believe that the church changed too much after Vatican II, tangling itself up in America’s rapidly shifting views on everything from women’s roles to LGBTQ people.
“There really aren’t very many liberals in the seminaries anymore,” said a young, recently ordained Midwestern priest. He spoke on condition of anonymity because of the turmoil that engulfed his parish after he began pressing for more orthodox services. “They wouldn’t feel comfortable.”
Sometimes, the shift toward orthodoxy happens slowly. Maybe there’s a little more Latin sprinkled into Mass, or an occasional reminder to go to confession. Maybe guitars are relegated to Saturday evening services, or dropped completely.
And sometimes the changes come like a whirlwind, dividing parishes between those thirsting for a more reverent Catholicism and those who feel their spiritual home has been taken from them.
“You’d leave Mass thinking, ‘Holy cow! What just happened?’” said another ex-parishioner at St. Maria Goretti, whose family eventually left the church, describing the 2021 promotion of a new pastor, and a sudden focus on sin and confession.
Like many former parishioners, he spoke only on condition of anonymity, worried about upsetting friends still at the church. Diocesan clergy did not respond to requests for interviews.
“I’m a lifelong Catholic. I grew up going to church every Sunday,” he said. “But I’d never seen anything like this.”
The new outlook has spilled across America.
In churches from Minnesota to California, parishioners have protested changes introduced by new conservative priests. In Cincinnati, it came when the new priest abandoned gospel music and African drumming. In small-town North Carolina, it was an intense focus on Latin. In east Texas, it was a right-wing bishop forced out by the Vatican after accusing Pope Francis of undermining church teachings.
Each can seem like one more skirmish in the cultural and political battles tearing at America.
But the movement, whether called conservative or orthodox or traditionalist or authentic, can be hard to define.
It ranges from Catholics who want more incense, to Latin Mass adherents who have brought back ancient prayers that mention “the perfidious Jew.” There are right-wing survivalists, celebrity exorcists, environmentalists and a handful of quasi-socialists.
There’s the Catholic news outlet railing against the Vatican’s “wicked entourage,” and the small-town Wisconsin priest who traces COVID-19 to a century-old prophecy and warns of looming dictatorship. There’s the recent “Catholic Prayer for Trump,” a $1,000-a-plate dinner at the former president’s Mar-a-Lago resort, featuring a string of conspiracy theorists.
Yet the orthodox movement can also seem like a tangle of forgiveness and rigidity, where insistence on mercy and kindness mingle with warnings of eternity in hell.
Looming over the American divide is Pope Francis, who has pushed the global church to be more inclusive, even as he toes the line on most dogma.
The orthodox movement has watched him nervously from the first days of his papacy, angered by his more liberal views on issues like gay relationships and divorce. Some reject him entirely.
And the pope clearly worries about America.
The U.S. church has “a very strong reactionary attitude,” he told a group of Jesuits last year. “Being backward-looking is useless.”
You can find this new vision of Catholic America at Latin Masses in Milwaukee, the pews crowded with worshipers even at noon on a weekday. It’s in conferences held in California wine country, at reinvigorated parishes in Tennessee and prayer groups in Washington, D.C.
And it’s at a little Kansas college built high on a bluff above the Missouri River.
At first glance, nothing seems unusual about Benedictine College.
Students worry about unfinished essays and the complexities of dating. They wear cutoff shorts on warm autumn afternoons. Football is huge. The cafeteria food is mediocre.
But look deeper.
Because at Benedictine, Catholic teaching on contraception can slip into lessons on Plato, and no one is surprised if you volunteer for 3 a.m. prayers. Pornography, pre-marital sex and sunbathing in swimsuits are forbidden.
If these rules seem like precepts of a bygone age, that hasn’t stopped students from flocking to Benedictine and other conservative Catholic colleges.
At a time when U.S. college enrollment is shrinking, Benedictine’s expansion over the last 15 years has included four new residence halls, a new dining hall and an academic center. An immense new library is being built. The roar of construction equipment never seems to stop.
Enrollment, now about 2,200, has doubled in 20 years.
Students, many of whom grew up in conservative Catholic families, jokingly call it “the Benedictine bubble.” And it might be a window into the future of the Catholic Church in America.
In a deeply secular America, where an ever-churning culture provides few absolute answers, Benedictine offers the reassurance of clarity.
“We don’t all agree on everything, obviously,” said John Welte, a senior majoring in economics and philosophy. “But I would say everyone has an understanding of, like, truth.”
“There are certain things you can just know in your mind: This is right, and this is wrong.”
Sometimes, people here quietly admit, it goes too far. Like the students who loudly proclaim how often they go to Mass, or the young man who quit his classics course because he refused to read the works of ancient Greek pagans.
Very often, talk here echoes the 13th-century writings of St. Thomas Aquinas, who believed God could be found in truth, goodness and beauty. Sometimes, they say, that means finding God in strict tenets about sexuality. Sometimes in the haunting beauty of Gregorian chants.
“It’s a renewal of, like, some really, really good things that we might have lost,” said Madeline Hays, a pensive 22-year-old senior biology major.
She takes the church’s rules seriously, from pre-marital sex to confession. She can’t stand modern church architecture. She’s seriously considering becoming a nun.
But she also worries about poverty and America’s wastefulness and the way Americans –including herself – can find themselves slotted into the political divide without even knowing it.
She wrestles with her belief in an unerring Catholic doctrine that can see good people, including some of her own friends, as sinners.
Yet she doesn’t want change.
“The church wouldn’t be the church if it changed things it had set down as, ‘This is infallible doctrine and this will not change through the ages,’” she said.
They understand that in Benedictine’s small, mostly closeted gay community. Like the young man, once deeply religious, who suffers in silence as people on campus casually throw around anti-gay slurs.
He’s thought many times of leaving, but generous financial aid keeps him here. And after many years, he’s accepted his sexuality.
He’s seen the joy that people can get from Benedictine, how some will move back to Atchison after graduation, just to stay close.
But not him.
“I don’t think I’ll come back to Atchison – not ever.”
For decades, the pews at St. Maria Goretti were filled with the families of plumbers, engineers and professors from the University of Wisconsin, just a couple miles up the road. The church is a well-kept island of Catholicism tucked into the leafy residential streets of one of America’s most liberal cities.
Like so many other parishes, it had been shaped by the ideals of the 1960s and 1970s. Poverty and social justice became tightly interwoven with sermons and parish life. Gay people felt welcome. Some of the church’s moral absolutes, like the contraception ban, became forgotten dogma.
Change arrived in 2003 with a new bishop, Robert C. Morlino, an outspoken conservative. Many liberals remember him as the man who lambasted the message of acceptance in the modern hymn, “All Are Welcome.”
His successor, Bishop Donald J. Hying, steers clear of public battles. But in many ways, he quietly carries on Morlino’s legacy, warning about “the tangled thinking of Modernism.”
In 2021, Hying named the Rev. Scott Emerson, a onetime top Morlino aide, as pastor of the Madison church.
Parishioners watched — some pleased, some uneasily — as their spiritual home was remodeled.
There was more incense, more Latin, more talk of sin and confession.
Emerson’s sermons are not all fire-and-brimstone. He speaks often about forgiveness and compassion. But his tone shocked many longtime parishioners.
Protection is needed, he said in a 2023 service, from “the spiritual corruption of worldly vices.” He has warned against critics – “the atheists, journalists, politicians, the fallen-away Catholics” – he said were undermining the church.
For some, Emerson’s changes were welcome.
“A lot of us were like, ’Hey, more confession! Sweet!” said Rouleau, who ran the parish young adult group. “Better music!”
But the parish – which in mid-2023 became part of a two-church “pastorate” amid a diocese-wide restructuring – was shrinking fast.
For decades, many traditional Catholics have wondered if the church would – and perhaps should – shrink to a smaller but more faithful core.
In ways, that’s how St. Maria Goretti looks today. The 6:30 a.m. Friday Mass, Rouleau says, is increasingly popular among young people. But once-packed Sunday Masses now have empty pews. Donations are down. School enrollment plunged.
Some who left have gone to more liberal parishes. Some joined Protestant churches. Some abandoned religion entirely.
“I’m not a Catholic anymore,” said Hammond, the woman who left when the church’s school began to change. “Not even a little bit.”
But Emerson insists the Catholic Church’s critics will be proven wrong.
“How many have laughed at the church, announcing that she was passé, that her days were over and that they would bury her?” he said in a 2021 Mass.
“The church,” he said, “has buried every one of her undertakers.”
https://apnews.com/article/catholic-church-shift-orthodoxy-tradition-7638fa2013a593f8cb07483ffc8ed487?utm_source=pocket-newtab-en-us
*
Switzerland has banned the burqa on its streets by referendum, and refused to make Islam official as a religion.
THE PARENTS WHO WANT ONLY DAUGHTERS
~ Amy Yin always envisioned having at least two daughters. She spent her 20s working as an engineer and founding a startup in San Francisco. When she wasn’t working, vacationing with friends, and spoiling her cats, Amy dedicated herself to helping other women take charge and launch high-powered careers. Now 32, she’s bringing that same energy to her family planning. She has frozen her eggs and, when she’s ready, will undergo IVF so that she can select the sex of her future children. “I think I’ll raise really powerful women who are going to be rock-star leaders,” Amy told me, without hesitation.
In vitro fertilization is invasive, grueling, and expensive. One round costs an average of $20,000. Only 15 states require that insurance plans offer any kind of coverage for it—and even then, the coverage is usually minimal. The treatment is often a last resort for those who are eager to be parents but who face one roadblock or another when it comes to conceiving; some couples are struggling with fertility issues, some couples are the same sex, and some people are single and making a go of it on their own.
Having a baby via IVF first requires creating an embryo in a Petri dish. Embryonic testing can reveal secrets like genetic disorders. That allows it to serve as a screening tool for parents who carry genes for rare diseases. Such testing also lets parents know the sex of their prospective children. It essentially allows patients to pick whether they will have a male or female baby.
Sex selection was once controversial in the U.S. and is banned in almost every other country. Many Americans unaware of the process still assume that it’s that way. In reality, it has now become a standard part of IVF here. For some, the option to sex select is a perk of an otherwise exacting process. For others, it’s the whole point of doing IVF in the first place.
Over the past two decades, enterprising clinics have attracted thousands of fertile customers like Amy, who are so invested in selecting their kid’s sex that they’re willing to undergo weeks of shots, submit to surgery, and risk rare but life-altering complications. Jeffrey Steinberg, the founder of the Fertility Institutes in Los Angeles, figures that elective IVF for sex selection rakes in an estimated $500 million annually for clinics. (He puts it at about 5 percent of the $8 billion market.) But its growth potential is unlimited, Steinberg told me: “The market is the size of the human race.”
Two things are true about America’s blazing-hot fertility industry, a sector that is largely unregulated and increasingly owned by private equity firms and hedge funds: It serves a real need—for many prospective parents, access to these technologies is vital. And yet, it is fueled in part by consumer whims. You can have a baby when it suits your career, thanks to egg freezing (or at least you can try). You can sequence your embryos’ genomes for $2,500 a pop and attempt to maximize your future child’s health (or intelligence, attractiveness, or height). At Steinberg’s clinic, you can even select eye color. There is a vast disparity between who gets to use IVF—many struggle to access the technology at all because of the cost and, now, political restrictions—and who is using it to create designer families.
These patients are seeking not just choice. Many, like Amy, want daughters. The ability to act on that desire—an option mostly unheard of in the rest of the world—has sparked a small but growing trend in American family planning. It has expanded the concept of reproductive choice and bodily autonomy to for-profit procedures that will alter future generations. It speaks to a crisis in boys and lopsided expectations for daughters. And even among the people who are opting in, it’s creating concerns about the degree of control some parents are attempting to wield over a baby’s destiny—and whether they can ever really exert that control at all.
*
Lexi and her husband, both software engineering managers at major Bay Area tech companies, have always wanted girls. (Lexi asked to be identified by a pseudonym because her parents are unaware of her plans.) Lexi, who is 32, longs to replicate the close relationship she has with her mom; her husband values traits “more associated with girls,” including empathy, social skills, and kindness. But they had no plans to act on their preference—that is, until they learned that their companies would foot the bill.
Lexi’s husband was more excited than she was: All he needed to do was masturbate into a cup. Lexi’s immediate thought was, I don’t know if I want to put my body through that in order to guarantee a girl. A fertility work-up suggested that the couple would have no trouble conceiving the old-fashioned way.
Still: Lexi did really, really want a girl. She craved a close friendship with her future child, one that would last into old age. That seemed possible only with a female child. “I was just like, How do I convince myself to do this”—to undergo the discomfort and hassle of IVF—“if this is what we want to do for our family?” she said.
Eventually, a double date with fellow techies swayed her. Their friends, too, had no known fertility issues and were creating embryos to select sex and potentially use a gestational surrogate. “They normalized it,” Lexi said.
I spoke to 15 women (and a couple of men) who are planning on doing IVF so that they can have a daughter. Being bullish on IVF is not just about sex selecting, several told me.
Procedures that appear scary and unnatural to many can feel novel and exciting to science-obsessed computer nerds: IVF can seem “safer” than conceiving via intercourse because it’s monitored by scientists.
“We spend so much time micro-optimizing so many things in our lives, even micro-optimizing how much time we spend at the grocery store,” Guthrie Ginzler, Amy’s partner and a software product manager, told me. Why not optimize having a baby, from the exact timing of conception to the shape of the chromosomes?
Trends spread among hyperconnected peers. I know both Lexi and Amy through my own former career as a software engineer and have met multiple people influenced by their plans.
Case in point: A month after the double date, Lexi was stabbing needles into the fat around her navel, ripening her eggs for extraction.
Three rounds of treatment in, Lexi showed me her IVF spreadsheet. It resembles a software project tracker, except instead of deliverables and deadlines, it documents the amount of eggs that are harvested at each retrieval, the number of fertilized eggs that have developed into healthy blastocysts, and the number of embryos that contain two X chromosomes. (Lexi and her husband want two kids, both girls.)
They are not stopping at IVF: They have signed with a surrogacy agency and are waiting to get matched with the woman who will carry and birth their elder child, buying them more time to rave, travel, and “self-actualize” without worrying about a pregnancy. Their companies will foot $75,000 of the roughly $150,000 surrogacy fee. No one involved in making this happen for them has challenged or even asked about Lexi and her husband’s motivations. Lexi described her clinic’s attitude as “This is business as usual, and we get money from you.”
It’s impossible to pin down how many patients choose IVF purely for sex selection and how many are picking girls; as with most aspects of fertility care, this is something clinics are not required to report. The vast majority of clinics offer the service, with many listing it on their websites. Even when intended parents don’t begin fertility treatment intending to sex select, they often discover this option along the way. In fact, several people I spoke to for this story told me that their clinical intake forms asked for the “preferred gender” of the child they hoped to have. For many American couples desperate to conceive, the ability to pick feels like a silver lining of a process that is otherwise arduous in terms of both money and emotional health, says Sharon Moayeri, the founder of OC Fertility in Newport Beach, California.
Moayeri’s clinic does not prominently advertise sex selection—it’s fourth in a menu of services on the website—but she estimates that up to 15 percent of patients arrive without any fertility issues. I spoke to a doctor at the medical center at the University of California San Francisco who said their sense was that a low number of patients come in only for sex selection. They did, however, easily point out several examples of parents who, once they’re already there, are more likely to request girls: single mothers by choice, same-sex couples, and families with a history of autism. Steinberg, whose Fertility Institutes markets this service aggressively, estimates that 85 percent of patients are there purely for “gender selection.”
Old debates around sex selection focused on the wish for sons. Today in America, that preference is often reversed. One study found that white parents having a first child picked female embryos 70 percent of the time. (Parents of Indian and Chinese descent were more likely to pick boys.)
Anecdotes back this up, with message boards filled with moms dreaming of a “mini me.” A 2010 study showed that American adoptive parents were 30 percent more likely to prefer girls than boys and were willing to pay $16,000 more in finalization costs to ensure a daughter. (Agencies have since stopped sharing those costs, after criticism of the differential pricing across gender and race.) Close looks at demographic data suggest that families with daughters tend to have fewer subsequent children than do families with sons, indicating a sense that a daughter is what makes a family complete.
In fact, according to most of the doctors I spoke with, the majority of parents selecting for daughters already have sons, a situation fertility clinics call “family balancing.” Denise, who requested that I use just her first name, works in tech and has four boys who like pink and glitter, will wear nail polish, and enjoy My Little Pony. But Denise still wants a daughter—a child with whom she can feel an even greater sense of “relatability.” Her husband can understand some of her sons’ experiences in ways she can’t, she explains. She also hopes her husband will treasure the “precious moments” possible only between a father and his daughter.
*
Over the past two decades, enterprising clinics have attracted thousands of fertile customers like Amy, who are so invested in selecting their kid’s sex that they’re willing to undergo weeks of shots, submit to surgery, and risk rare but life-altering complications. Jeffrey Steinberg, the founder of the Fertility Institutes in Los Angeles, figures that elective IVF for sex selection rakes in an estimated $500 million annually for clinics. (He puts it at about 5 percent of the $8 billion market.) But its growth potential is unlimited, Steinberg told me: “The market is the size of the human race.”
Two things are true about America’s blazing-hot fertility industry, a sector that is largely unregulated and increasingly owned by private equity firms and hedge funds: It serves a real need—for many prospective parents, access to these technologies is vital. And yet, it is fueled in part by consumer whims. You can have a baby when it suits your career, thanks to egg freezing (or at least you can try). You can sequence your embryos’ genomes for $2,500 a pop and attempt to maximize your future child’s health (or intelligence, attractiveness, or height). At Steinberg’s clinic, you can even select eye color.
There is a vast disparity between who gets to use IVF—many struggle to access the technology at all because of the cost and, now, political restrictions—and who is using it to create designer families.
These patients are seeking not just choice. Many, like Amy, want daughters. The ability to act on that desire—an option mostly unheard of in the rest of the world—has sparked a small but growing trend in American family planning. It has expanded the concept of reproductive choice and bodily autonomy to for-profit procedures that will alter future generations. It speaks to a crisis in boys and lopsided expectations for daughters. And even among the people who are opting in, it’s creating concerns about the degree of control some parents are attempting to wield over a baby’s destiny—and whether they can ever really exert that control at all.
I spoke to 15 women (and a couple of men) who are planning on doing IVF so that they can have a daughter. Being bullish on IVF is not just about sex selecting, several told me.
Procedures that appear scary and unnatural to many can feel novel and exciting to science-obsessed computer nerds: IVF can seem “safer” than conceiving via intercourse because it’s monitored by scientists. “We spend so much time micro-optimizing so many things in our lives, even micro-optimizing how much time we spend at the grocery store,” Guthrie Ginzler, Amy’s partner and a software product manager, told me. Why not optimize having a baby, from the exact timing of conception to the shape of the chromosomes? Trends spread among hyperconnected peers. I know both Lexi and Amy through my own former career as a software engineer and have met multiple people influenced by their plans.
Case in point: A month after the double date, Lexi was stabbing needles into the fat around her navel, ripening her eggs for extraction.
Three rounds of treatment in, Lexi showed me her IVF spreadsheet. It resembles a software project tracker, except instead of deliverables and deadlines, it documents the amount of eggs that are harvested at each retrieval, the number of fertilized eggs that have developed into healthy blastocysts, and the number of embryos that contain two X chromosomes. (Lexi and her husband want two kids, both girls.)
They are not stopping at IVF: They have signed with a surrogacy agency and are waiting to get matched with the woman who will carry and birth their elder child, buying them more time to rave, travel, and “self-actualize” without worrying about a pregnancy. Their companies will foot $75,000 of the roughly $150,000 surrogacy fee.
No one involved in making this happen for them has challenged or even asked about Lexi and her husband’s motivations. Lexi described her clinic’s attitude as “This is business as usual, and we get money from you.”
It’s impossible to pin down how many patients choose IVF purely for sex selection and how many are picking girls; as with most aspects of fertility care, this is something clinics are not required to report. The vast majority of clinics offer the service, with many listing it on their websites. Even when intended parents don’t begin fertility treatment intending to sex select, they often discover this option along the way. In fact, several people I spoke to for this story told me that their clinical intake forms asked for the “preferred gender” of the child they hoped to have. For many American couples desperate to conceive, the ability to pick feels like a silver lining of a process that is otherwise arduous in terms of both money and emotional health, says Sharon Moayeri, the founder of OC Fertility in Newport Beach, California.
Moayeri’s clinic does not prominently advertise sex selection—it’s fourth in a menu of services on the website—but she estimates that up to 15 percent of patients arrive without any fertility issues. I spoke to a doctor at the medical center at the University of California San Francisco who said their sense was that a low number of patients come in only for sex selection. They did, however, easily point out several examples of parents who, once they’re already there, are more likely to request girls: single mothers by choice, same-sex couples, and families with a history of autism. Steinberg, whose Fertility Institutes markets this service aggressively, estimates that 85 percent of patients are there purely for “gender selection.”
Old debates around sex selection focused on the wish for sons. Today in America, that preference is often reversed. One study found that white parents having a first child picked female embryos 70 percent of the time. (Parents of Indian and Chinese descent were more likely to pick boys.)
Anecdotes back this up, with message boards filled with moms dreaming of a “mini me.” A 2010 study showed that American adoptive parents were 30 percent more likely to prefer girls than boys and were willing to pay $16,000 more in finalization costs to ensure a daughter. (Agencies have since stopped sharing those costs, after criticism of the differential pricing across gender and race.) Close looks at demographic data suggest that families with daughters tend to have fewer subsequent children than do families with sons, indicating a sense that a daughter is what makes a family complete.
In fact, according to most of the doctors I spoke with, the majority of parents selecting for daughters already have sons, a situation fertility clinics call “family balancing.” Denise, who requested that I use just her first name, works in tech and has four boys who like pink and glitter, will wear nail polish, and enjoy My Little Pony. But Denise still wants a daughter—a child with whom she can feel an even greater sense of “relatability.” Her husband can understand some of her sons’ experiences in ways she can’t, she explains. She also hopes her husband will treasure the “precious moments” possible only between a father and his daughter.
All the moms I spoke to were looking to add a little estrogen to their brood because they feel they could never have the same connection with a son as they could with a daughter. But some were blunter about their preferences.
Grace, a 31-year-old who works in human resources (I’m referring to her by her middle name), told me, “When I think about having a child that’s a boy, it’s almost a repulsion, like, Oh my God, no.”
Grace and her FAANG (Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google) engineer fiancé are freezing embryos to preserve their fertility—and to ensure they avoid that “Oh my God, no” scenario. After she turned 30, her fiancé wanted to make embryos right away. Grace wasn’t particularly eager to kick off the kid-having process: “I don’t like kids. I don’t want kids anytime soon. Especially one that’s a boy.” But she also thinks that her feelings around kids may change—and she wants to be able to dodge the possibility of becoming a “boy mom” if they do.
What’s so bad about boys? “Toxic masculinity,” said many women I spoke to, even those who were, sadly, already boy moms. For many, going through all the trouble to ensure a girl feels like a social good. Amy’s partner, Guthrie, believes that because oldest children tend to be more successful, if everyone did sex selection we could squash inequality by manipulating birth order.
“Maybe one of our best chances at trying to destroy the glass ceiling is to have women first,” said Guthrie. Among the moms I spoke to who already have boys, many want to give their sons sisters to make them into better men. They believe that girls can do anything—a conviction that often comes with the subtext that boys are incapable of doing their own laundry, calling their moms, expressing empathy, or even really being part of the family as they get older. “I don’t know a guy who has a strong relationship with his mother or his father,” Grace told me.
The perception is that boys are trouble—or at least are susceptible to a particular kind of trouble. There’s been a heavily reported-on crisis of masculinity, with men lagging in almost every metric that matters to success-obsessed Silicon Valley. Men are less likely to finish high school, graduate college, and have children. One study found that 60 percent of young men are single, compared with 30 percent of young women, who are more likely to be in a queer relationship.
To many, the prospect of raising a girl just feels as if it will be easier. She’s far less likely to commit a mass shooting or to idolize Andrew Tate. She’s also, points out Moayeri, less likely to be diagnosed with autism. Although a man striving to make as much money as possible might feel capitalist and gross, a woman who does the same is a #girlboss—a beloved trope among millennials making their way in an industry in which only 23 percent of technical roles are filled by women. A daughter, if you squint, can have all of the achievements with none of the baggage.
Moayeri’s clinic does not prominently advertise sex selection—it’s fourth in a menu of services on the website—but she estimates that up to 15 percent of patients arrive without any fertility issues. I spoke to a doctor at the medical center at the University of California San Francisco who said their sense was that a low number of patients come in only for sex selection. They did, however, easily point out several examples of parents who, once they’re already there, are more likely to request girls: single mothers by choice, same-sex couples, and families with a history of autism. Steinberg, whose Fertility Institutes markets this service aggressively, estimates that 85 percent of patients are there purely for “gender selection.”
In fact, according to most of the doctors I spoke with, the majority of parents selecting for daughters already have sons, a situation fertility clinics call “family balancing.” Denise, who requested that I use just her first name, works in tech and has four boys who like pink and glitter, will wear nail polish, and enjoy My Little Pony. But Denise still wants a daughter—a child with whom she can feel an even greater sense of “relatability.” Her husband can understand some of her sons’ experiences in ways she can’t, she explains. She also hopes her husband will treasure the “precious moments” possible only between a father and his daughter.
All the moms I spoke to were looking to add a little estrogen to their brood because they feel they could never have the same connection with a son as they could with a daughter. But some were blunter about their preferences.
Grace, a 31-year-old who works in human resources (I’m referring to her by her middle name), told me, “When I think about having a child that’s a boy, it’s almost a repulsion, like, Oh my God, no.”
Grace and her FAANG (Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google) engineer fiancé are freezing embryos to preserve their fertility—and to ensure they avoid that “Oh my God, no” scenario. After she turned 30, her fiancé wanted to make embryos right away. Grace wasn’t particularly eager to kick off the kid-having process: “I don’t like kids. I don’t want kids anytime soon. Especially one that’s a boy.” But she also thinks that her feelings around kids may change—and she wants to be able to dodge the possibility of becoming a “boy mom” if they do.
What’s so bad about boys? “Toxic masculinity,” said many women I spoke to, even those who were, sadly, already boy moms. For many, going through all the trouble to ensure a girl feels like a social good. Amy’s partner, Guthrie, believes that because oldest children tend to be more successful, if everyone did sex selection we could squash inequality by manipulating birth order. “Maybe one of our best chances at trying to destroy the glass ceiling is to have women first,” said Guthrie.
Among the moms I spoke to who already have boys, many want to give their sons sisters to make them into better men. They believe that girls can do anything—a conviction that often comes with the subtext that boys are incapable of doing their own laundry, calling their moms, expressing empathy, or even really being part of the family as they get older. “I don’t know a guy who has a strong relationship with his mother or his father,” Grace told me.
The perception is that boys are trouble—or at least are susceptible to a particular kind of trouble. There’s been a heavily reported-on crisis of masculinity, with men lagging in almost every metric that matters to success-obsessed Silicon Valley. Men are less likely to finish high school, graduate college, and have children. One study found that 60 percent of young men are single, compared with 30 percent of young women, who are more likely to be in a queer relationship.
To many, the prospect of raising a girl just feels as if it will be easier. She’s far less likely to commit a mass shooting or to idolize Andrew Tate. She’s also, points out Moayeri, less likely to be diagnosed with autism. Although a man striving to make as much money as possible might feel capitalist and gross, a woman who does the same is a #girlboss—a beloved trope among millennials making their way in an industry in which only 23 percent of technical roles are filled by women. A daughter, if you squint, can have all of the achievements with none of the baggage.
Could that really be so bad, valuing strong women to the point where you want to make sure you raise one? Many American ethicists argue that sex selection can’t be discriminatory if some parents—even most—opt for daughters. Further, if mothers are the ones choosing sex, that could be seen as an empowering new form of reproductive autonomy (an argument that becomes more complicated when men are picking too but women are bearing the brunt of IVF). For millennia, sex selection was performed via infanticide. This is not that.
Still, “the very act of sex selection is sexist,” argues Arianne Shahvisi, a professor of philosophy at Brighton and Sussex Medical School in the U.K., where elective sex selection is illegal.
You can’t actually foresee your child’s gender—let alone how they will choose to express it or the qualities they will possess as a human being. So sex selection requires making a decision based on stereotypes. In turn, this “feeds damaging systems of social organization,” Shahvisi told me, by reinforcing the idea that certain traits are biologically tied to sex—a view that has, historically, limited women. Selecting for girls might perpetuate negative views of boys and men: If you believe you can create a daughter with whom to have a deep emotional bond, why even try to cultivate that with a son?
Is it unfair to bring a child into the world, assuming she’ll fulfill gendered obligations, however positive? The women I spoke to are open to many different gender expressions—Lexi, Amy, and Grace would all be thrilled to raise a queer, athletic engineer—but at the end of the day, they expect their daughters to be compassionate, to relate well with their moms, and, once they fly the nest, to FaceTime their parents. They don’t expect the same things from sons.
“Boy children tend to be less caring towards their parents,” Lexi explained. “It doesn’t really matter if it’s socialized or biological. It’s probably socialized, but I can’t change all of society.”
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Virtually all the industrialized world—including Canada, Australia, and every European country besides Cyprus—bans sex selection except in rare medical cases. Most nations prohibit the practice on the grounds that it promotes sexism and that the children born from it may be harmed by gendered expectations.
Widespread preference for a certain sex can also skew the population—as in India and China, where abortion and infanticide of girls have resulted in tens of millions more men than women. (Amy, who is Chinese American, views her plan to select for girls as a reversal and correction of her culture’s historical preference for sons.)
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In countries where infertility care is covered by insurance or provided by the government, sex selection is also seen as a frivolous waste of taxpayer funds.
In 1994 the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, the nonprofit that provides the industry’s professional guidelines, condemned sex selection for nonmedical reasons. Yet with no enforcement power, the guidelines remained just that. Unlike in most peer nations, IVF in America is mostly privately paid and weakly regulated. Instead, market forces dominate. By 2018, despite the ASRM’s recommendation that they not offer sex selection, 75 percent of clinics continued to provide the service. Since then, the ASRM’s ethics committee has updated its position to a neutral stance.
While public sentiment toward sex selection has grown increasingly negative abroad, in the U.S. the ability to select sex is framed as a matter of personal autonomy: just one of many expensive choices that make our country free.
This particular freedom is big business. The U.S. market for fertility is growing. Clinics are increasingly owned by venture capital; at least 30 percent of fertility services in America are provided by private equity–backed firms, whose priority is maximizing profits. Some thousands of patients a year—though it’s hard to know just how many—travel to the United States in order to sex select, which could easily account for millions of dollars in revenue.
Convincing parents that it’s worth undergoing IVF to have a child of a specific sex is an effective way to increase clinics’ customer base beyond the 15 percent of couples of reproductive age who experience infertility. As more tech companies provide IVF benefits, their employees are especially attractive bait. (Grace says she’d never be considering freezing embryos to sex select if her job didn’t pay for it.)
But what can go wrong?
Laura Kerwin, a Harvard-trained psychologist in California, sees many parents like Amy, Lexi, and Grace. In her practice of filthy-rich clients, sex selection is so common as to be unremarkable. She can relate to her patients. She followed all the old wives’ tales—including “drugging” her husband with supplements, timing intercourse, and eating acidic foods—in an attempt to maximize the odds that her third child would be a daughter. She has a message for those patients: Be careful what you wish for.
“You have this picture in your mind of the family that you want,” Kerwin said. “But what do you do if the girl comes out and she doesn’t want to be a girl or she isn’t the ideal girl that you have in your mind?” Not only will parents be disappointed, Kerwin cautions, but the children will rebel.
She has also seen seemingly open-minded parents who—after investing time, money, and pain into selecting their child’s sex—are devastated after their kid comes out as trans.
“As a parent, your role is to accept the child you have. Not to mold them into someone that you want them to be: That’s narcissism,” she said. Kerwin did have a daughter—but her daughter has totally defied her expectations. “My boys were much sweeter,” she told me.
“It’s a moneymaking industry,” she said. “People need to realize that [clinics] have a fiduciary duty to their shareholders to make money. They’re trying to sell you on an option.”
Some of the sex selectors admit that this is all fraught. “My main concern is that that puts pressure on the child to be a certain way,” Lexi told me. She reassures herself by saying that she’s not choosing specific personality traits or even gender: She and her husband are merely “weighting the dice.”
One mother, who’s doing IVF to give her daughter a sister—a built-in best friend, she hopes—told me that the pressure can be crushing. She admitted to feeling as if “anything that goes wrong is my fault.”
Grace is aware that her disdain for boys may “seem dumb or offensive” to someone who is struggling to conceive, let alone the millions of infertile Americans who can’t afford even the most basic fertility care. In fact, all of the prospective girl parents I spoke to expressed enormous empathy for those unable to have a child of either sex; almost everyone agrees that the way IVF is funded in the U.S. is unfair. But in the end, these daughter-desiring patients have the means— so they’re going to use them.
Oriana:
"The very act of sex selection is selfish." Yes, but the heart wants what it wants, and that could be a daughter, imagined as a lovely little angel you can cuddle, dress in beautiful clothes, and just adore. A little girl can be seen as a super-pet. Is this fair to her? A friend of mine, a mother of five, including two daughters, pointed out, "They turn out the way they turn out, not the way you want them to be, and there is nothing you can do about it."
Older mothers are more likely to have daughters, but of course there is no guarantee. Older mothers are also more likely to have twins, but it's certainly possible to end up with twin boys. Talk about "gender disappointment"!
Consuming fewer calories to keep the blood sugar on the low-normal side, and taking calcium and magnesium supplements may increase the odds of having a girl, but again, there is no guarantee. Only the expensive and difficult IVF procedure described in the article reliably produces results.
One of my aunts ardently desired a daughter. She ended up with four sons.
Her eldest son ended up with three daughters, so he wanted a son. On the fourth try, he got lucky. Meanwhile his mother gloried in her three granddaughters. For her holding a baby girl in her arms was a dream fulfilled.
And I'll never forget a German scientist I met at UCLA, his three sons standing near. "Is this your daughter?" he asked my mother, who replied (with pride in her voice, I thought): "Yes." The man's voice grew melancholy as he said, "God has not blessed us with a daughter."
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WHICH KIND OF EXERCISE IS MOST BENEFICIAL AGAINST DEPRESSION?
A large body of evidence demonstrates that exercise is an effective for depression.
New research provides details on which forms of exercise are most effective.
Dance, walking, and jogging are the best are relieving symptoms.
But patients are most likely to stick with exercise programs that involve yoga and strength training.
Chances are that someone you love has experienced depression. Approximately 8 percent of U.S. adults — some 21 million people — have a major depressive disorder each year. For people under age 18, depression is the most common cause of hospitalization.
For decades, researchers have been exploring interventions to prevent and treat depression, including medications, talk therapy, and exercise — which many studies have found is equally as effective in treating depression as medications and psychotherapy.
A new systematic review compiled by a team of global researchers adds more evidence to how exercise helps treat depression. The review was published in the British Medical Journal and includes 218 studies with more than 14,000 participants.
The review examined specific types and intensities of exercise to determine the best treatments for individuals. Here are some of its findings:
Dance, exercise combined with medication, and walking or jogging were most effective for relieving symptoms of depression.
Yoga, strength training, mixed aerobic exercises, and tai chi or qigong were moderately effective when performed regularly.
Although light exercise, such as walking or hatha yoga, was still clinically meaningful, more vigorous exercise such as running or interval training was more effective at alleviating depression symptoms.
The age and gender of the participants mattered. Walking and jogging were equally effective for men and women. Strength training was more effective for women, and yoga or qigong was more effective for men. For older adults, yoga was more effective. For younger people, strength training was more effective.
Study participants were more likely to stick with exercise programs that included yoga or strength training. This is important when considering whether patients can adhere to a treatment program.
The researchers also discussed the limitations of the available data. Many studies only focused on a specific group, such as one gender or age group. Others included participants with many comorbidities, which makes it difficult to single out the benefits of a single treatment.
The researchers also highlighted the ancillary benefits exercise provides. For example, a group exercise class offers social interaction, running outside means access to nature, and yoga or tai chi promotes mindfulness. There is clear evidence that all of these “side benefits” also improve depressive symptoms, which makes it difficult to tease out the specific mechanisms at work.
Despite lingering questions, the take-home message is clear: Exercise is an effective treatment for depression. The authors of this review suggest that healthcare practitioners should prescribe exercise to patients experiencing depression, including specific advice on what types of exercises and intensities may work best for them.
PURSUING CANCER TO THE LAST CELL
In The First Cell and the Human Cost of Pursuing Cancer to the Last (Basic, Oct.), oncologist Raza Azra discusses a new approach to dealing with cancer.
~ Do you see a major shift in your field coming?
Absolutely. The current cancer paradigm, scientifically and financially, is simply untenable. A radical change in all of health care is imminent, with the realization that the best cure is still prevention. The ability to detect disease-perturbed networks months or even years before the actual clinical appearance of illness—be it diabetes, stroke, schizophrenia, or cancer—and taking steps to eliminate it at inception is a far better strategy than treating advanced diseases.
~ Do you think the pharmaceutical industry might resist this?
Not in the least. Instead of focusing on a few million sick patients, the industry will need to monitor every healthy individual from birth to death for the first signs of disease, which is surely a far more lucrative deal.
~ You write about the need for compassion in medical care. Does current medical training emphasize this for students?
Yes, of course medical training stresses compassion. It is the way our health-care “business” has evolved which robs doctors of the luxury to practice, express, and manifest the compassion they were taught. We become doctors we detest because of the demands placed on us to make money to keep the business running.
~ Your book relates some very moving stories about your patients. How do you retain a healthy emotional balance under such circumstances?
It is not an issue just for me but for all physicians involved in patient care. We don’t have simple formulas or algorithms to follow to find this balance. Rather, each patient demands a unique skill set from their doctors. We, in turn, learn to switch strategies, modify speech, alter styles to meet those demands. Patients are our best teachers. They guide and inspire us through the most challenging of times by their courage, their desire to live, their capacity to love. It is deeply humbling.
~ What advice can you offer patients and families at such times?
The same that Antonio Gramsci famously imparted: “Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.” In other words, see the world as it really is, warts and all, but still forge ahead with courage, tenacity, persistence, acceptance. The will can overcome many challenges if hope remains alive.
~ Poetry seems to play an important role in your life. What does it mean to you?
To quote from Modern Poetry and Science by Octavio Paz: “To see with our ears, to feel with our minds, to combine our powers and use them to the limit, to know a little bit more about ourselves and discover within us unknown realities: is that not the aim assigned to poetry?”
Sherry Turkle:
We are accustomed to a narrative of war in books by cancer researchers. The doctors are generals on the barricades alongside their soldier patients. Progress is slow, but the battle is gradually being won. This book tells another story. The drugs that are declared successes offer only a few weeks of painful extension of life. The best clinicians are usually thrown back on the primitive combination of cut, poison, and burn that as students, they thought they would look back on as an embarrassment.
Bespoke genetic treatments have significant limitations. Azra Raza breaks out of the official story to tell a new one. She's not fighting a war. She's negotiating with a resilient and dynamic enemy. She wants to change the terms of engagement. No more fighting at the endgame, but hunting down the first deviant cells. This book is a passion project, a personal story, a scientific proposal, and quite simply one of the most compelling books you'll read. It breaks out of the standard narrative. It invents a whole new one. It works.
By the end you'll want to sign on to her revolution.
Rafia Zakaria:
Here is a masterful rendition of how an emphasis on curing cancer, instead of working to detect its first venomous breath, has exacted a terrible price in human lives, including that of her very own husband, Harvey [who died of leukemia].
JCinSD:
Raza advocates for a paradigm shift in cancer treatment, urging the medical community to prioritize early detection and intervention.
C. Mangels:
The First Cell is a daunting review of a healthcare system that spends billions on trying to cure cancer while ignoring the need to prevent cancer. Rather than trying to kill off the last cancer cell we need to funnel money into figuring out how to prevent the first cell. Essentially our environment and big, for profit corporations are killing us and that needs to change if we have any hope of reducing cancer deaths.
Cheryl Kolb:
Instead of "slash and burn" therapies employed in late stage disease, efforts should be refocused on finding the "first cell" using cutting edge technologies now in development but underfunded.
A Reader:
As a stage 4 cancer patient I found the book particularly infuriating. When her friends or family have problems she just calls famous oncologists who drop everything (which must include their regular patients) to come and be helpful. This is not the experience of most cancer patients. I realize that she has experienced terrible losses and really wants to be helpful, but she is just illustrating the unequal treatment of those who lack her connections and wealth.
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THE BIZARRE HISTORY OF THE HUMAN HEART
Fifteen-thousand BCE, long before we had knowledge of what a human heart actually looked like, the earliest known depiction of a modern-day heart symbol was created in Spain within El Pindal Cave. Remnants of cave paintings from early hunter-gatherers show this: a woolly mammoth with the heart symbol located right on its torso. Hardly anything is actually known about these paintings, such as who actually made them and what they mean, but some experts speculate that the paintings of animals like the woolly mammoth may have been instructions for where to strike with spears while hunting. Not exactly a romantic origin story, though.
Just a quick 12,000 years later, the Egyptians began to identify the heart as the center of life and mortality. Egyptians believed the heart was responsible for things such as your emotions, wisdom, and memory. In fact, Egyptians revered the heart so strongly that, during mummification, the heart was left inside the body and not removed like other organs because it was believed that the heart was needed in the afterlife.
Gods would take your heart, which was often represented as a jar with two small handles, and weigh it as a form of judgment. The Egyptian god Anubis would weigh your heart against a feather. If they weighed the same, you were blessed into the afterlife. If your heart outweighed the feather, you were cursed into oblivion because of all the guilt and evil deeds weighing your heart down. This is also potentially thought to be the origin of the phrase "having a heavy heart.”
The ancient Greeks took this a step further. They not only believed that the heart contained a person's soul, but that it had a functional mechanism within the human body. The world's first doctor, Hippocrates, and ancient Greek scholar Aristotle believed that there was a connection between the heart and the lungs. They spent years discussing the importance of the heart's pumping action.
Aristotle developed these theories after studying embryos of chicks — not actually humans —
and while he may have been headed in the right direction, he did get some parts wrong. Aristotle believed the heart had three chambers. It actually has four. He believed the function of the heart was to heat the body. I guess you could say that's sort of true because the heart pumps blood, which does aid in thermoregulation. He also theorized that the organ served a purpose of cooling down the body. Well, no, that's too far because we have sweat glands for that. While not totally accurate, the Greeks were definitely making some progress.
Seven hundred years later across the Mediterranean, the city of Cyrene in Libya began issuing silver coins that depicted the heart symbol. But was it actually the heart symbol or simply the leaf of a plant called silphium? Well, it may have actually been both because in the ancient world silphium grew naturally in the northern coast of Africa and it was considered a miracle drug to treat countless problems. In fact, it was so sought after that Caesar was rumored to have stored 1,500 pounds of it within the Roman treasury. Given that silphium was used as an aphrodisiac and contraceptive, historians do speculate that the heart-shaped leaves of the plant may have actually been the origin of the heart symbol's association with love and romance. Sadly, because of its extinction, likely due to over-harvesting, we'll never know if it was a cure-all or nothing more than an ancient goop.
Flash forward another 1,000 or so years and the rise of Christianity gave birth to the sacred heart. This religious symbol associated with Jesus Christ created some visual depictions that started to resemble the beginnings of the anatomical version of the heart, although it was still a ways away from what an actual heart looks like. These depictions exploded, appearing in Christian monasteries across Europe and the Middle East. It went on to be shown in thousands of religious texts and is still in use today for ceremonial purposes and in the names of countless schools, hospitals, as well as other institutions across the globe.
By the Middle Ages, cultural depictions of the heart extended well beyond the confines of religion and were used in art to represent royalty. The heart also made its earliest appearance on one of the world's most popular items, something you may actually have in your house right now -- playing cards. Initially developed in Asia, playing cards made their way to Europe where different cultures experimented with different suits. Fifteenth-century Germans were the first to implement the heart suit, which is still around in poker tables and campfires today.
While the heart was finding its way into culture, actual scientific progress had stalled for over 1,000 years because of the religious persecution during the Dark Ages. You see, back then when someone died you buried them and moved on. The idea of performing a dissection or examining a dead body was just not common and often publicly condemned.
It was only during the Renaissance that Leonardo da Vinci and eventually others were bold enough to begin dissecting human and animal bodies for research. This gave Da Vinci an opportunity to become the first artist to sketch a truly accurate representation of the heart. He was meticulous with his work, successfully and accurately capturing diagrams of the heart with nothing more than pens and paper.
While his work dramatically improved our understanding of the heart, it was not without its conspiracies. Da Vinci never published the drawings himself, and in the margins of the diagrams, he even wrote, "I could tell more if I was allowed to do so." Unfortunately, science during that time was heavily corrupt and even silenced by religion and the oppressive Spanish Inquisition. Luckily, the Renaissance would soon lead to the Age of Enlightenment where science and art would break free from these confines. One does have to wonder, how many more discoveries would da Vinci have made had he not feared persecution?
Now in the 1600s, a 10-year-old boy named Hugh Montgomery was riding his horse through the English countryside. The horse bucked him off, flung him through the air, and Hugh landed chest first onto a jagged rock or fence. The injury was so devastating it shattered Hugh's ribs and left a gaping wound right in the middle of his chest. Miraculously, though, young Hugh survived, but not without what would become one of the world's most famous scars. He was left with a gaping hole in his chest, his heart beating fully exposed to the naked eye. Never before in recorded history had any human being laid eyes on a living beating heart. In fact, initially they thought it was his lungs they were looking at, not even his heart.
Hugh not only survived, but he flourished, beginning his tour all over Europe, amassing crowds desperately wanting to lay eyes on an actual human heart for themselves.
One of those people: King Charles I, who summoned Hugh for a royal examination. The king was fascinated, inching closer to Hugh to lay his eyes and his hand on the beating organ. The king reached in and touched the heart with three fingers and his thumb. "Does it hurt?" the king asked. “Not at all,” Hugh replied. Royal physician William Harvey documented the boy's unique case and verified its legitimacy, which opened the door for further research into the cardiovascular system. ~
https://www.medpagetoday.com/popmedicine/popmedicine/109405?xid=nl_popmed_2024-03-29&eun=g2215341d0r&utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=PopMedicine_032924&utm_term=NL_Gen_Int_PopMedicine_Active
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Let’s take a quick poetry break:
JUDGMENT DAY
I saved a dragonfly,
with a canopy pole I hoisted him up
from the pool. Without pausing to dry
the stained glass of his bronze-veined wings,
he took to the air, a weightless shimmer
zigzagging across the dazzled yard.
Perhaps this brilliant buoyancy
will save me on Judgment Day —
on one scale, my heart
heavy with darkness;
on the other, like the Egyptian
Feather of Truth,
a translucent dragonfly wing.
~ Oriana
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THE CENTENARIANS ARE COMING! THE LONGEVITY REVOLUTION
By 2050, nearly 3.7 million people are expected to live up to 100. What can we do to get the most out of our bonus years?
Loneliness. Age-ism. Physical limitations, cognitive decline and, increasingly, elder poverty.
The downsides of living to 100 and beyond are numerous. But so are the upsides. Life at its essence is about time – time to live, time to laugh, time to love – and many of those who have achieved a triple-digit age are living their best lives as centenarians.
As I explore in my new book, The Big 100: The New World of Super-Aging, we’re experiencing what the United Nations calls a “longevity revolution”, and there’s no turning back. By 2050, the number of us reaching 100 is projected to increase eightfold to 3.7 million people – roughly the equivalent of everyone living in Connecticut or Los Angeles. And half of all five-year-olds alive right now are expected to live to 100.
What can we do to get the most out of our bonus years? Here’s some wisdom from those who’ve been there.
Find your purpose
If we’re going to live to 100, we’d better have something to live for. That wasn’t a problem for the US district judge Wesley Brown.
He died at 104 as the oldest sitting federal judge in American history. Sharp and competent to the end, with a wicked sense of humor – Brown used to warn lawyers gearing up for lengthy trials in his Kansas courtroom that he might not be alive for their closing arguments – he credited his very caseload for extending his life by keeping his mind and body active and giving him a sense of purpose.
Well past his 100th birthday, he was still taking the stairs to his fourth-floor chambers. A year before his death, asked how he intended to leave the bench that John F Kennedy appointed him to in 1962, he quipped: “Feet first.”
Dr Ephraim Engleman understood. The 104-year-old rheumatologist died as he lived: at work, at his desk, in between seeing patients at the Rosalind Russell Medical Research Center for Arthritis in San Francisco.
Engleman very deliberately never retired, a move he regarded with suspicion as “generally a great mistake”. One of his top rules for longevity was: “Enjoy your work, whatever it is, or don’t do it.”
Laugh
The world’s oldest person who ever lived whose age could be authenticated by records, credited laughter for her longevity and she should know. Jeanne Calment of France – who made it to 122 years and 164 days – lost her eyesight and her hearing but kept her sense of humor to the last.
“I never wear mascara ... too often I laugh until I cry,” said Calment, who’s best known for a wisecrack she made at the age of 121: “I only have one wrinkle and I’m sitting on it.”
Herlda Senhouse of Wellesley, Massachusetts, who just celebrated her 113th birthday, didn’t have an easy life as a Black woman in the Jim Crow era. But she giggles through conversations and sees laughter as a perfect way to counter toxic stress, the enemy of longevity.
Senhouse’s emphasis on positivity and optimism underscores how both of those things not only add years to our lives but life to our years.
More than mere wishful thinking, positive beliefs around aging have the potential to extend our lives by as much as seven and a half years, according to research by Becca Levy, an epidemiologist at Yale University’s School of Public Health. The cumulative effects of an optimistic outlook even outweigh the steps we take to exercise, lower our blood pressure and cholesterol, and watch our weight.
Love
What’s love got to do with it? A lot more than you might think.
Researchers say married people tend to live longer than singles – men by two and a half years; women by a little less – and they also stand a better chance of living to 100.
Tension and conflict in marriage are stand-up comedy staples, but studies have shown that those of us who endure the vicissitudes of life with a partner experience less stress than those who go solo. Couples in happy, nurturing relationships have greater life expectancy free of disability and other health challenges than singles, and they tend to have more financial security.
It’s not the sex, the tax deductions or even the cohabitation. Deep platonic friendships can have the same effect. At an assisted living facility in Montana, two centenarians have found beauty and meaning in a relationship that’s blossomed around their shared love of poetry. When they met, Bob Yaw was 101 and Gloria Hansard was 100. They live down the hall from each other but gather each evening in her apartment to recite verses.
“We didn’t meet long ago,” Hansard told the Bozeman Daily Chronicle. “Just poems are all we know of each other.”
Their friendship isn’t just life-extending. It’s life-giving.
https://www.theguardian.com/wellness/2024/apr/28/advice-100-year-old-people-living-long-lives
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CENTENARIAN BLOOD TESTS GIVE HINTS OF THE SECRETS TO LONGEVITY
Centenarians tend to have lower levels of glucose, creatinine and uric acid from their sixties onwards.
How long humans can live, and what determines a long and healthy life, have been of interest for as long as we know. Plato and Aristotle discussed and wrote about the aging process over 2,300 years ago.
The pursuit of understanding the secrets behind exceptional longevity isn’t easy, however. It involves unraveling the complex interplay of genetic predisposition and lifestyle factors and how they interact throughout a person’s life. Now our study, published in GeroScience, has unveiled some common biomarkers, including levels of cholesterol and glucose, in people who live past 90.
Nonagenarians and centenarians have long been of intense interest to scientists as they may help us understand how to live longer, and perhaps also how to age in better health. So far, studies of centenarians have often been small scale and focused on a selected group, for example, excluding centenarians who live in care homes.
Huge dataset
Ours is the largest study comparing biomarker profiles measured throughout life among exceptionally long-lived people and their shorter-lived peers to date.
We compared the biomarker profiles of people who went on to live past the age of 100, and their shorter-lived peers, and investigated the link between the profiles and the chance of becoming a centenarian.
Our research included data from 44,000 Swedes who underwent health assessments at ages 64-99. They were a sample of the so-called Amoris cohort. These participants were then followed through Swedish register data for up to 35 years. Of these people, 1,224, or 2.7%, lived to be 100 years old. The vast majority (85%) of the centenarians were female.
We compared the biomarker profiles of people who went on to live past the age of 100, and their shorter-lived peers, and investigated the link between the profiles and the chance of becoming a centenarian.
Twelve blood-based biomarkers related to inflammation, metabolism, liver and kidney function, as well as potential malnutrition and anaemia, were included. All of these have been associated with aging or mortality in previous studies.
The biomarker related to inflammation was uric acid – a waste product in the body caused by the digestion of certain foods. We also looked at markers linked to metabolic status and function including total cholesterol and glucose, and ones related to liver function, such as alanine aminotransferase (Alat), aspartate aminotransferase (Asat), albumin, gamma-glutamyl transferase (GGT), alkaline phosphatase (Alp) and lactate dehydrogenase (LD).
We also looked at creatinine, which is linked to kidney function, and iron and total iron-binding capacity (TIBC), which is linked to anaemia. Finally, we also investigated albumin, a biomarker associated with nutrition.
Findings
We found that, on the whole, those who made it to their hundredth birthday tended to have lower levels of glucose, creatinine and uric acid from their sixties onwards. Although the median values didn’t differ significantly between centenarians and non-centenarians for most biomarkers, centenarians seldom displayed extremely high or low values.
For example, very few of the centenarians had a glucose level above 6.5 earlier in life, or a creatinine level above 125.
For many of the biomarkers, both centenarians and non-centenarians had values outside of the range considered normal in clinical guidelines. This is probably because these guidelines are set based on a younger and healthier population.
When exploring which biomarkers were linked to the likelihood of reaching 100, we found that all but two (alat and albumin) of the 12 biomarkers showed a connection to the likelihood of turning 100. This was even after accounting for age, sex and disease burden.
The people in the lowest out of five groups for levels of total cholesterol and iron had a lower chance of reaching 100 years as compared to those with higher levels. Meanwhile, people with higher levels of glucose, creatinine, uric acid and markers for liver function also decreased the chance of becoming a centenarian.
In absolute terms, the differences were rather small for some of the biomarkers, while for others the differences were somewhat more substantial.
For uric acid, for instance, the absolute difference was 2.5 percentage points. This means that people in the group with the lowest uric acid had a 4% chance of turning 100 while in the group with the highest uric acid levels only 1.5% made it to age 100.
Even if the differences we discovered were overall rather small, they suggest a potential link between metabolic health, nutrition and exceptional longevity.
The study, however, does not allow any conclusions about which lifestyle factors or genes are responsible for the biomarker values. However, it is reasonable to think that factors such as nutrition and alcohol intake play a role. Keeping track of your kidney and liver values, as well as glucose and uric acid as you get older, is probably not a bad idea.
That said, chance probably plays a role at some point in reaching an exceptional age. But the fact that differences in biomarkers could be observed a long time before death suggests that genes and lifestyle may also play a role.
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/centenarian-blood-tests-give-hints-of-the-secrets-to-longevity?utm_source=pocket-newtab-en-us
Oriana: WAYS TO LOWER YOUR URIC ACID
Lowering blood sugar is effortless if you take berberine. But how does one reduce uric acid? The first step may be surprising: DRINK COFFEE. Coffee contains CHLOROGENIC ACID, an antioxidant. Four cups of coffee a day is fine.
Not a coffee drinker? Then drink tea.
Not a tea drinker either? Then become a blueberry eater. I've discovered that frozen blueberries eliminate the worry about spoilage.
"Chlorogenic acid primarily exerts its effects by inhibiting the enzyme
alpha-glucosidase, which is responsible for breaking down carbohydrates.
Therefore, it reduces the uptake of carbohydrates and glucose during
digestion." https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/7-health-benefits-chlorogenic-acid-side-effects-leo-sun
I found coffee to be a lot more pleasant tasting when I sweeten it with allulose. Allulose is found in small amounts in figs and raisins, but the only way to get a sufficient amount is to use lab-produced allulose, derived from fructose. Unlike obesity-inducing fructose, allulose has various health benefits (everything in moderation, of course).
Eliminating sugar is of course important. Beer, alas, does increase uric acid, but wine is OK — of course in moderation.
Organ meats, shellfish, and oily fish increase uric acid. This is unfortunate because organ meats, shellfish, and oily fish are highly nutritious. Again, the answer may be not elimination, but moderation.
Asparagus, mushrooms, and spinach should be consumed only in moderation.
On the other hand, you can eat eggs, nuts, and peanut butter. Milk, cheese and yogurt are also OK. I especially recommend goat dairy. (Costco has very affordable goat cheese.)
Cherries have long been recommended for lowering uric acid. Citrus fruit and other fruit high in Vitamin C may also help.
Less protein and more fiber is a standard recommendation for practically everything. I’m curious if this will remain standard advice five years from now. Many nutritionists still tend to recommend a high-protein diet for seniors to help slow down muscle loss. Moderate exercise may be a more efficient way to achieve that goal. Yes, even seniors can maintain and even build muscle if they exercise. A simple daily walk has surprising health benefits.
Above all, have something to live for and keep your blood sugar low. And, as the only centenarian in my family said, "Eat less and walk more."
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Ending on beauty:
THE UNTOUCHABLE
The untouchable purity of cherry
blossoms that walked with us
that slow springtime
over the pale pond
turns into pillars of salt
every time I look behind
Yet spring is back every year
with the cool silence
we’ve left there forever
and a boy blows the untouchable
soap-bubbles of every spring
every life
~ Henryk Grynberg
