THE EMPIRE NEVER ENDED; CAN THE YAMANAKA FACTORS REVERSE AGING? WHY FENTANYL DEATHS ARE PLUMMETING; WHY PLEASURE WEARS OFF; HOKUSAI THE GREAT WAVE

giant kelp

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COUNTRY HOUSE

maybe belonging to a great aunt:
her sepia shoulders, a velvet ribbon
holding me back before I was born

here on a gilded summer’s slope.
Lace breathes in the tall windows.
The verandah whispers Stay.

It is the house of time: 
an afternoon made of all afternoons,
a gold-leaf couple like a storied song,

and look: shimmering in the air, 
the young couple they once were. 
A bridal bouquet 

brims the vase on the piano.
It is my house and everyone’s, 
my youth and the harvest 

of old age yet to come. I stroke 
the railing, I caress
the generations like a swirl of wood —

then remember that slip-by,
slip-of-tongue young girl who sold 
her birthright for a different song.

Why didn’t you warn me, great aunt?
I slid down your sloped ribbon
out of place, out of time. 

And look: I am no one, 
in a language not mine
singing in an unknown country. 

~ Oriana

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CHARLES DICKENS WAS A CRUEL HUSBAND

Ian Jack: ~ My great-grandfather wanted to have his wife declared mad and locked up. Unlike the great writer, he succeeded.

Domestic tyranny was a fact of Victorian life: men who were saintly in public could behave very cruelly behind their front doors. In 1878, close to the end of her life, Catherine Dickens began to confide to her neighbors in Camden, north London, a few details of how her late husband had treated her. Charles was by now eight years dead, and the couple had last lived together in 1858, around the time the novelist began his long affair with the young actress Ellen Ternan. But the public knew nothing of this relationship.

Dickens’ worldwide reputation as a compassionate moralist – the enemy of humbug and suffering – continued to flourish untainted by the facts of his private life. Naturally the neighbors, Edward Dutton Cook and his wife, were shocked when Catherine told them how Charles had once tried to have her locked up as a madwoman.

The crucial evidence, which was disclosed this week, comes in a letter that Cook wrote to a friend and fellow journalist, William Moy Thomas. “He [Dickens] discovered at last that she had outgrown his liking,” Cook wrote of Catherine’s disclosures. “She had borne 10 children and had lost many of her good looks, was growing old, in fact. He even tried to shut her up in a lunatic asylum, poor thing! But bad as the law is in regard to proof of insanity he could not quite wrest it to his purpose.”

Thanks to Claire Tomalin, the biographer of both Dickens and Ternan, we already knew that Dickens’ behavior was secretive and complicated; but now, if we believe Cook’s letter, we have his wife attesting to a ruthless degree of self-interest. If he could have her declared mad, and she could be confined to an asylum, he could live as he pleased and nobody would think badly of him. A malignant character in one of his novels would have behaved no worse.

 Catherine Dickens 

But the real-life story has a hero. According to Bowen, the doctor who stood in Dickens’ way and refused to certify Catherine’s insanity was most probably Thomas Harrington Tuke, superintendent of Manor House asylum in Chiswick between 1849 and 1888. Tuke and Dickens were friends. They wrote to each other; Dickens attended the christening of Tuke’s son. Then the friendship seems to have turned sour, so that by 1864 Dickens was calling Tuke a “wretched being” and a “medical donkey”. Bowen speculates, reasonably, that it was Tuke’s refusal to certify Catherine that caused the breach.

If so, it was behavior firmly in the Tuke tradition. The Tukes were Yorkshire Quakers who made a small fortune trading in coffee, chocolate and tea, and spent some of the profits on philanthropy, including support for the campaign to abolish the slave trade. No other family, possibly in the entire history of British medicine, had such a concern for the welfare of the mentally ill, beginning in 1796 when William Tuke opened a Quaker asylum in York called the Retreat. There, patients were treated humanely and compassionately – the new “moral treatment” – in contrast to the brutish methods of the traditional asylums whose inmates were regarded as sub-humans fit only for restraint.

A pejorative: “He’s away tae Springfield” meant someone who was off his head. My great-grandmother Robina Birmingham entered its doors on 29 January 1898 and died there three months later. This week, for the first time, I looked at her entry in the asylum’s Register of Lunatics, where she is described as a female pauper aged 47 whose bodily condition is weak and who suffers from melancholia, which, together with mania and imbecility, is one of the register’s three favorite categories of mental disorder.

On whose authority was she sent there? The register lists a Dr Gillespie Esq, sheriff substitute of Dunfermline, but her children always believed that their father, Walter Birmingham, had connived to have his wife put away because she was an inconvenience to his drinking. (He was a drunk, though in the register he masquerades respectably as “Chelsea Pensioner”.) She had not been as lucky as Mrs Dickens, but then neither had her husband enjoyed the good fortune of Mr Dickens. 

Tomalin, commenting this week on the letters found in the Harvard archive, said an interesting thing: that it was Dickens and not his wife who was the mad one. He had told “startling lies” about his wife’s condition, but he had fallen in love and his life was a mess: “I think during this period he was mad, effectively, and their lives were thrown into turmoil … his behavior for that period when he was determined to separate was shameful and I think he regretted it after.”

Perhaps the same could be said of my great-grandfather: that he was not so much bad as driven mad by the privations and cruelties of the Victorian empire, and the routes to oblivion out of it. The 19th century, as Dickens often reminds us, was a brutal place.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/feb/23/charles-dickens-wife-victorian-asylum

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THE BATTLE OF HASTINGS AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE

If you were dropped into the Battle of Hastings, you couldn't even say the words "battle," "army," or "enemy." In 1066, they didn't exist in English.

The language spoken by King Harold's soldiers was not an archaic Shakespearean dialect; it was Old English, a heavily inflected West Germanic tongue that would sound more like modern Frisian or German to a modern listener.

Before William the Conqueror's victory, English vocabulary was overwhelmingly Germanic. It lacked the influx of French and Latin words that make up more than half of modern English. Instead of French-derived terms, a soldier would have used the native words beadu (battle), here (army), and feond (enemy). It is estimated that up to 85 percent of Old English vocabulary has permanently fallen out of use.

The grammar was also entirely alien to modern speakers. Like modern German, Old English used a complex system of grammatical cases and genders. Nouns, pronouns, and adjectives changed their endings depending on their role in the sentence. Every noun was classified as masculine, feminine, or neuter, regardless of its actual meaning—for example, the word for "woman" (wīf) was grammatically neuter. Because these endings dictated meaning, sentence word order was highly flexible.

Even looking at the written language would offer little help. Scribes used a modified Latin alphabet supplemented by runic characters to represent sounds that Latin lacked. These included thorn (þ) and eth (ð) for "th" sounds, ash (æ) for the short "a" sound, and wynn (ƿ) for "w".

You can see the difference in an entry from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle for the year 1066, documenting the arrival of Halley's Comet just months before the battle: "Men geseagon on heofonum swilc tacen swa nan man ær ne geseah." (Men saw in the heavens such a token as no man before saw.)

Ironically, the Battle of Hastings is the exact reason the language changed. The Norman victory installed a French-speaking aristocracy across England. As the two cultures collided over the next three centuries, Old English absorbed thousands of French words and progressively shed its complex grammatical endings, transforming into Middle English—and setting the foundation for modern English.
~ WordTrace, Quora

The first page of the Beowulf manuscript, written in Old English around the year 1000. Scribes of this era used runic letters like thorn (þ) and eth (ð) that have since disappeared from the English alphabet.

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CALIFORNIA GOVERNOR GAVIN NEWSOM ENDORSES GLOBAL FOSSIL FUEL PHASEOUT

The leader of the world’s fourth biggest economy, California governor Gavin Newsom, has explicitly endorsed a global phase out of the fossil fuels that drive climate breakdown.

Newsom told the Guardian that California is “100%” behind the efforts of the so-called Santa Marta coalition, a group of more than 50 countries that includes many of the world’s largest economies, to transition away from oil, gas and coal toward solar, wind, batteries and other non-carbon energy sources.

Speaking at the Cop31 UN climate summit on Thursday, Newsom said: “When you have a product that is obviously superior, which clean energy is for the climate and the economy, why wouldn’t you make that shift as quickly as possible?”

As the head of America’s most populous and economically powerful state, Newsom is the most prominent US politician at Cop31, a process the administration of US president Donald Trump continues to boycott.

More than 80 countries wanted last year’s COP30 to begin to develop a global “roadmap” to phase out fossil fuels. A handful of petrostates led by Saudi Arabia blocked that effort, relying on the disputed notion that decisions at UN climate summits can only be made by consensus. Undaunted, countries favoring a roadmap met in April in Santa Marta, Colombia, to begin designing a phase out on their own.

“Love it,” Newsom said of the challenge that this Santa Marta “coalition of the willing” is posing to the US and other states intent on keeping the world burning fossil fuels.

An oil refinery near Salt Lake City, Utah

The coalition is in effect no longer allowing petrostates to employ procedural tricks and endless talk to prevent what scientists say is imperative: rapidly phasing out fossil fuels. Instead, this critical mass of countries, which includes Germany, France, Brazil and The Netherlands – with additional countries, perhaps including the UK, expected to join later in Cop31 – is proceeding on its own with roadmaps to transition away from fossil fuels, hoping that its example and economic power will lead others to follow suit.

“You don’t ask drug dealers to vote for Prohibition, and you won’t get petro-states to agree to phase out fossil fuels,” said Mohamed Nasheed, the former president of The Maldives, who once convened a cabinet meeting underwater to dramatize the plight of low-lying island nations like his. “Countries wishing to phase out fossil fuels should just go ahead and do it,” Nasheed told the Guardian.

What makes the Santa Marta coalition’s vision more than a pipe dream is the coalition’s economic might. Collectively, the 80-plus countries that wanted a phase out roadmap at Cop30 amount to the biggest economic superpower on earth.

If the coalition can begin implementing a credible transition away from fossil fuels, it “would send an unmistakable message that the age of oil, gas and coal is ending, and the smart money is shifting,” Mohamed Adow, director of the nonprofit Power Shift Africa, said in an interview. Governments and financial markets around the world would be put on notice that staying invested in fossil fuels will be an increasingly risky proposition that could leave them holding trillions of dollars of stranded assets.

Thus far, Germany, the world’s third biggest economy, has committed to phasing out fossil fuels by 2045. France, the world’s sixth biggest economy, and The Netherlands, the 18th biggest, have released phase out roadmaps as well.

Environmental activists march during the Global Climate Strike in downtown Chicago, Illinois, on 15 September 2023.

California’s clean energy track record aligns with the one policy goal that, analysts say, Cop31’s final agreement might endorse: a commitment to obtain 35% of the world’s energy from electricity by 2035. California’s economy has run on 100% clean electricity nine out of every 10 days during much of 2026, with batteries emerging as “a game changer”, as Newsom described it. As the costs of clean energy continue to fall, Newsom expects more counties to follow California’s example because “the markets are moving in our direction”.

The midterms also brought to power scores of climate champions at the state and local level. In Texas, the US’s second largest state economy after California, the new governor is Democrat Gina Hinojosa, who shunned contributions from the fossil fuel industry that has long dominated her state. In all, 29 states will have Democratic governors who, among other things, could block datacenters.

Humanity is in “a final battle against the evil forces” trying to keep the world burning fossil fuels, said Johan Rockstrom, the director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impacts Research. As the Nepal glacier disaster and 50,000 extreme heat deaths in Europe this summer illustrate, climate breakdown is already wreaking terrible damage. 

Nevertheless, Rockstrom added, “89% of citizens across the world trust science [and] want action. We are a majority power that can have confidence we have a collective global community that really wants this to succeed — and that it isn’t too late.”

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/nov/13/california-gavin-newsom-endorses-fossil-fuel-phaseout


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WORLD IS NOW IN ‘AGE OF ELECTRICITY’

The world has left behind the age of coal, oil and gas and is now firmly in “the age of electricity”, the world’s leading energy economist has said.

Fatih Birol, the executive director of the International Energy Agency (IEA), said more than twice as much electricity generation would be added to the global economy in the next decade than in the last, as countries scramble to secure their energy supplies against fossil fuel price volatility and supply shocks, such as the Iran war.

Transport is being electrified at an unprecedented rate: outside China, sales of electric cars have risen by 60% in the last nine months, the IEA has found. The growth of AI datacenters is also spurring electricity generation, as is the rapid growth in air conditioning, according to Birol, as heatwaves grow more intense and more frequent under rising global temperatures.

“We will still use oil and gas, but the dominant source of energy is becoming electricity,” Birol told the Guardian in an interview at the Cop31 UN climate summit in Turkey. “One staggering number [is that] in the last 10 years, the world has added about 5,000 gigawatts of electricity. And we expect, in a very conservative way, in the next 10 years, about 12,000 gigawatts, more than two times more than what we had in the last 10 years.”

Governments from 185 countries are meeting this week and next in Antalya for the annual talks, where the turn to electrification in place of fossil fuels is one of the key topics. A resolution to derive 35% of final energy worldwide from electricity by 2035 is on the table, which if it succeeds, could be one of the most important ways of achieving the needed decarbonisation of economies by mid-century.

Electricity now fulfills about a quarter of most energy needs while three-quarters of final energy worldwide is supplied by fossil fuels, mostly for transport, heating and industrial uses. Global electricity was increasingly generated by renewable sources and that process would speed up even faster over the next decades, Birol said.

The more our lives can be powered by clean energy the better, say experts, not least because, as a result of the inefficiency of fossil fuels, most of the rest of our energy is wasted as heat, so when these activities are electrified, only about half of the energy needs to be replaced.

Most countries back the electrification goal, according to Birol. He has worked closely with the Turkish and Australian governments, which are jointly presiding over this year’s summit. “It will be an unmistakable signal to the markets and investors that governments see that the future of energy is in electricity,” he said. “This will make the age of electricity even earlier and cheaper. It might be one of the most consequential decisions coming from Cops in the last several years.”

But even if the resolution was not adopted – some governments, including Saudi Arabia and Russia, are said to be opposed, and owing to the convention by which consensus is needed to pass decisions, a small number of countries can hold the rest to ransom – the “staggering” progress would continue, Birol said.

“The reason is there are three major drivers for electrification: one is AI and datacenters; second is the electrification transportation sector; and third, the most important one in terms of volume, is air conditioning. Air conditioners are growing explosively,” he said.

In the US, about 90% of households have access to air conditioning, but in India it is fewer than 20%, and in Nigeria about 5%. “With the increasing effects of climate change, and if they have more money, [people] buy air conditioners,” said Birol. “These things are happening, and electrification is not bad. It is good for energy security, because it is your own electricity [generated within a country rather than imported, as fossil fuels often are], good for the competitiveness of countries, and good for climate change.”

He added: “Global energy demand is growing strongly, but global electricity demand is growing three times faster than total energy demand. And it is impossible to stop it. The one and only issue is making electricity affordable for people.”

Birol placed the blame for the UK’s high electricity prices firmly on gas. “There is always a debate about this in the UK, but in fact the single most important reason why UK electricity prices may be on the high side is reliance on imported gas. Gas prices went up, so did the electricity prices, full stop. And the solution is not importing more gas, but building more [renewable] electricity at home,” he said.

The transformation is happening fast. “Five years ago, only 5% of all the cars sold was electric. And this year, we expect it is about one-third of all the cars sold is electric, and electric trucks are coming. This is going to displace a significant amount of oil,” he said.

“If the electrification pledge comes out [of Cop31] and the countries decide that the world’s energy future is electric, then it will definitely lead to a secure, more affordable and more livable planet.”

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/nov/13/cop-31-electricity-energy-fossil-fuels-fatih-birol-iea

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KEY DRIVERS OF THE ELECTRIC AGE

Rapid Electrification of Transport: Global electric vehicle (EV) sales are expanding fast, with non-China sales jumping 60% over a recent nine-month stretch. About one-third of all new cars sold globally are now electric. 

While electric vehicle (EV) sales are growing rapidly, most projections indicate they will make up a substantial share of new car sales rather than 100% of all vehicles on the road by the end of the decade.

In the United States, studies from Harvard Gazette project that EVs will account for about 38% of new car sales by 2030.

In China, industry leaders and forecasts anticipate EV and new-energy market penetration to surpass 90% of new sales.

In the UK, policy targets for 100% new petrol and diesel sales bans are shifting, with interim new-car EV mandates hovering around 60% to 80% and allowing more hybrids.

The Entire Fleet Takes Longer:

According to community insights on Reddit, because the average lifespan of a car is 13 to 15+ years, gasoline and diesel vehicles already on the road will continue driving well into the 2030s and 2040s.

Hybrid and Phase-Out Deadlines:

Many governments and automakers have pushed full zero-emission or all-electric deadlines (such as banning new gas car sales completely) to 2035 rather than 2030, while hybrids and plug-in hybrids remain part of the transition timeline.

Global Leaders: Countries like Norway are nearing total saturation, with battery-electric vehicles making up around 98% of new car sales. In China, pure electric and new-energy vehicles account for over 50% to nearly 60% of new sales,

Full Replacement Timeline: Scraping internal combustion engines (ICE) completely off the roads will take decades, as existing gas-powered cars stay on the road for 15+ years after they are sold. 

Internal combustion or hybrid vehicles will likely persist much longer in rural areas with sparse charging infrastructure, as well as for heavy-duty commercial trucking and long-distance towing where heavy batteries remain a limitation.

Upfront sticker prices, charging speed anxiety, and a strong cultural preference for larger trucks and SUVs continue to slow down a universal switch, leading automakers to lean heavily on plug-in hybrids alongside pure EVs.

Gas stations will not completely disappear by 2035. Millions of gas cars will still be on the road past 2035, meaning a demand for gasoline will remain. However, the industry is facing a massive shakeup as electric vehicle (EV) adoption grows. Many older gas stations face huge replacement bills for aging underground storage tanks, making closure a cheaper choice than upgrading

Transformation into EV hubs: Surviving locations are shifting their business models—adding fast EV charging stations, upgrading convenience stores, offering food service, and transforming into community or delivery stops to stay afloat. 

Alternative Paths: Many industry analysts and manufacturers suggest the future will not be exclusively battery-electric, pointing instead to a mix of hybrids (PHEVs), hydrogen fuel cells (FCEVs), and synthetic e-fuels that let combustion engines stay carbon-neutral.

Explosive Power Demand: Worldwide electricity demand is growing three times faster than total energy demand, driven heavily by the rapid expansion of AI data centers, high-density computing, and increased air conditioning usage during severe heatwaves. 

Clean Energy Expansion: More than half of the world's electricity is projected to come from low-emission and renewable sources before 2030. 

Next-Generation Tech: Innovations in geothermal energy, advanced nuclear fission, and fusion are scaling up to meet the multi-fold increase in long-term power needs. ~ Google


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THE CONTESTED HUNGARIAN UPRISING, 1956

In late 1956 hundreds of thousands of Hungarians joined an uprising against the country’s Moscow-oriented government. 70 years on, the revolution’s meaning is still unclear.

From the first day of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, which broke out on 23 October and was brutally repressed by Soviet forces on 4 November, a series of competing narratives attempted to explain what was taking place. This contestation has continued to the present day and helps explain the bitter ideological divides that have been one of the hallmarks of Hungarian politics since the collapse of the communist dictatorship in 1989.

On the morning of 23 October a group of about 1,000 students and professors staged a protest outside their university in the eastern city of Debrecen at which they read out a list of demands for the reform of the country. That demonstration was violently broken up by the security forces. 

Later that afternoon, in Budapest, a much larger crowd of 20,000 students set off at 3pm from the main university on the eastern Pest side of the city to march to a statue of a 19th-century Polish revolutionary, Józef Bem, on the western Buda side of Hungary’s capital. There they read out their own list of radical demands. They then re-crossed the Danube and gathered outside the parliament building where their numbers rapidly swelled as factory workers and other residents joined the protest. 

That evening, after being denounced by the government as ‘scum’, the crowd moved to the headquarters of Magyar Rádió, the state broadcaster, which some attempted to storm at around 9pm. Chaotic fighting broke out and continued sporadically until 4 November when the Soviet Union’s armed forces advanced into the capital, crushed the revolution, and installed a new regime headed by János Kádár, who governed Hungary until 1988. 

A new course?

At least as regards the causes of the revolution there is a solid consensus. Even resolute communists recognized that the Stalinist regime which had governed the country since 1948 needed to change. Under Mátyás Rákosi, known as ‘Stalin’s best student’, the Hungarian communist party, formally the Party of Hungarian Workers, had eliminated all rival parties and every independent form of civil society, and imposed a reign of terror on Hungary that was out of step even with the Soviet Union’s own slow break from Stalinism under Khrushchev from 1953. 

During the eight years of communist rule between 1948 and 1956, more than a quarter of all families in Hungary had at least one member arrested or deported. Although Rákosi was exiled to the Soviet Union in the summer of 1956 as a signal that the grim years of Stalinist terror were over, his replacement, Ernő Gerő, was hand-picked by Moscow and had been Rákosi’s right-hand man. Meanwhile, the Hungarian peasantry remained hostile to the ongoing process of collectivization, the industrial workforce was infuriated by low wages, while the broader economy was stuttering after an initial spurt of postwar growth.

Hopes for reform were dealt a significant blow by the dismissal of Imre Nagy as prime minister in April 1955. Nagy was an unlikely standard-bearer for reform: he had escaped to Moscow after the first attempt to establish a communist dictatorship in Hungary failed in 1919. Unlike many of his fellow exiles, he managed to avoid being killed in Stalin’s purges. In 1945 he returned to Hungary and began to work closely with Rákosi, who had spent most of the interwar period in prison.

Both men were determined to ensure that the second attempt to turn Hungary into a communist state would be successful. Nevertheless, whereas most of Hungary’s communist elite came from either the urban trade union or Budapest’s socialist intellectual circles, Nagy, who was appropriately portly, possessed a substantial mustache, and whose spoken Hungarian was clear, steady, and relatively free of ideological cliches, was clearly of peasant stock. This mattered in a country where, as late as the Second World War, half of the population worked in agriculture. He came across as more humane and more Hungarian than most of his fellow ministers.

Prime minister Imre Nagy, center, facing the viewer, with members of his revolutionary government, October 1956.

The sense that Nagy was in touch with the popular mood was reinforced by his promise of a ‘new course’ when, in an attempt to shore up the party’s popularity, he was appointed as prime minister in 1953. At least some of the regime’s leadership were aware that the appearance of change was needed in response to the new mood in Moscow following the death of Stalin. 

East Germany, the ‘shop window’ of the Soviet bloc, had enacted limited reforms in response to its own brief and brutally put-down uprising in June 1953. Nagy was keen to follow suit.

In practice, his ‘new course’ addressed only the very worst features of Hungary’s version of Stalinism. There was no talk of democratization, freedom of speech and association, nor of a break from the Soviet Union. Nevertheless, Nagy ended the obsession with industrialization at any cost, the brutal pressure on the peasants to ‘voluntarily’ collectivise, and the network of camps for political prisoners that constituted a version of the Soviet gulag in Central Europe.

Wage rises, price reductions, and an effort to build more flats to ease the chronic over-crowding (another grim consequence of the frantic postwar push for industrialization and urbanization) also boosted Nagy’s popularity.

Nagy’s cautious talk of reform resonated with some intellectuals, who began to publish guarded critiques of the regime and the damage it had wreaked, especially to the countryside. As had happened during earlier revolutions, such as in 1848 when the Hungarians revolted against the Habsburg monarchy’s conservatism, poets became the voice of resistance. 

Gyula Illyés, a poet who had come to prominence in the 1930s as the voice of peasant culture, but who had largely withdrawn from public life after 1948, began publishing a new wave of poems with electrifying effect. His ‘One Sentence About Tyranny’ captured the fears of his countrymen. The poem became one of the anthems of the revolution. 

In response, Rákosi, who regarded any reforms as an admission of failure, ensured that the party first watered-down Nagy’s proposals and then removed him from government. All this explains why the re-appointment of the committed communist and former Stalinist minister Imre Nagy was among the first demands in October 1956. 

Hungary demands

The demonstrators were also inspired to take to the streets by reports from Poland of the brutal repression of the June 1956 protests in Poznań, in which factory workers had taken the lead in protesting against austerity that had resulted in food shortages. 

The savagery of the Polish authorities, who shot dead more than 50 people and arrested and tortured hundreds more, elicited a wave of sympathy, particularly from Hungary’s students. 

The choice to march to the statue of Józef Bem, a Polish general who had helped lead the Hungarian uprising in 1848 before seeking refuge in the Ottoman Empire, was not accidental. That revolution had been crushed when a Russian army invaded Hungary to assist the Habsburgs in restoring their authority.

As any legal gathering throughout the communist bloc required official permission, the demonstrators who marched on 23 October were aware that they were carrying out an illegal and potentially revolutionary act. Nevertheless, the 16 demands, hastily drafted on the previous day and read out at Bem’s statue, were vague about what their collective act of disobedience actually sought to achieve. These students still regarded themselves, on the whole, as committed socialists. Their demand for the reinstatement of Nagy suggested that they supported the relaunch of his program of moderate reform under the auspices of the communist party.

 Students marching towards Bem Square, 23 October 1956

Among the initial 16 demands were, however, more radical ambitions: an investigation into the ‘criminal activities’ of Rákosi’s regime, complete freedom of speech and association, radical economic reform of industry and agriculture, and free multi-party elections, alongside the withdrawal from Hungary of the various Soviet military units garrisoned across the country.

There was even a sprinkling of overt nationalist demands, including the restoration of Hungary’s historic coats of arms (first used by the revolutionaries in 1848), new patriotic army uniforms, and the establishment of new national holidays to commemorate the 1848 revolution.

The students in Debrecen, who had drafted their own overlapping set of demands, also called for renewed attention to the grim fate of the substantial Hungarian-speaking minorities in neighboring countries. In the aftermath of the First World War the old kingdom of Hungary, along with the entire Habsburg monarchy, had imploded. Around two-thirds of Hungary’s population, and one-third of ethnic Hungarians, found themselves living in the new or expanded hostile neighboring states. These lost lands had been an obsession of Hungary’s old conservative regime which had, during the Second World War, briefly reincorporated around half of this territory as a reward for waging war on the side of Nazi Germany. 

These lands were again lost at the end of the war, while their Hungarian minorities were subject to a new wave of brutal treatment and deportations. Following the communist party’s takeover, the topic became another in a long list of taboo subjects, which also included the maltreatment of Hungary’s own minorities – such as the postwar expulsion of 250,000 German and Slovak speakers.

There were, therefore, no public protests by the Hungarian government in response to renewed efforts by neighboring states to assimilate their Hungarian minorities. For example, in Romania the governing regime increasingly fused together intolerant communism and intolerant nationalism, and abolished the self-governing Hungarian region in eastern Transylvania in 1955. It is unsurprising that the students in Debrecen, located only 30 kilometers from the Romanian border, paid particular attention to the fate of the Hungarian minority there and demanded that a reinstated Nagy government do likewise.

Soviet response

On the evening of 23 October, after the attempt to storm Magyar Rádió, violent clashes ensued involving the secret police (Államvédelmi Hatóság, ÁVH), hastily dispatched units of the regular Hungarian army, and some of the demonstrators, who had begun forming military detachments and establishing a network of independent councils to coordinate the revolution from below. 

These were an echo of the soviets (councils) that had sprung up to coordinate earlier socialist revolutions, including in Russia in 1917. One can still come across the claim that the 1956 revolution was an authentic Marxist uprising against the Stalinist perversion of communism and the new ‘red bourgeoisie’, a claim first made by the Marxist philosopher György Lukács, who served in Nagy’s revolutionary government as minister for culture.

The revolution certainly attracted immense support. By the evening of the first day somewhere close to 200,000 people had joined the protests in Budapest alone. Violence surged, claiming the lives of almost 3,000 Hungarians and 700 Soviet troops over the 12 days of the revolution, and more than 20,000 Hungarians and 1,500 Soviet troops were wounded. 

Student demonstrators had already clashed with the security forces in Debrecen, where the first shots of the revolution were fired, and factory workers protested in the eastern industrial city of Miskolc, although most of the countryside remained curiously quiet, and the regular army largely remained confined to barracks.

In the days following 23 October a wide range of prominent personalities, including the head of the Catholic Church in Hungary Cardinal József Mindszenty and the dedicated communist János Kádár (both of whom had been imprisoned by the Rákosi regime), gave radio speeches in support of the revolutionaries.  

Kádár first privately denounced the demonstrators as ‘counter-revolutionaries’, then publicly lauded what he called the ‘people’s uprising’, before absconding to Moscow on 1 November. 

Three days later he returned to Budapest with the invading Soviet army, and oversaw the repression of the revolution, including the execution of Nagy and 340 other revolutionaries, and the imprisonment of another 20,000 Hungarians. He would insist until the end of his life that Hungary had no other choice but to remain obedient to the Soviet Union.

Protesters burn images of Mátyás Rákosi, Budapest, October 1956.

Before that, however, Nagy was appointed as the head of a reconstituted government on 24 October in a misguided attempt by Moscow to restore order. Having first urged the demonstrators to return home, appealing for an end to the ‘useless bloodshed’ of ‘innocent working people’, he changed tack on 28 October, declaring his full support for the revolution which he now described as a struggle ‘to ensure our national independence’. As well as appointing non-communists as ministers and promising free elections, Nagy also negotiated the temporary withdrawal of the Soviet army from Budapest on 30 October and pledged that Hungary would henceforth be a neutral state.

Nagy was, however, ill-suited for the near-impossible task of satisfying both the revolutionaries and the hard men in the Kremlin. Moscow could not tolerate an independent, democratic Hungary, even if for a while it dithered about how to respond to the chaos in the country. We still cannot be sure when the Soviet Union decided to send its armed forces back into Budapest. Critical documents related to the role of the Soviet intelligence services have never been made public. Soviet decisions were often made informally, through unminuted telephone conversations and even in the sauna.

What is certain is that by 31 October the Kremlin had decided on a military solution and the installation of a new regime to be headed by Kádár who was whisked out of Hungary the following day, without having the time to pack a suitcase or inform his wife. When the Soviet Union re-invaded the country on 4 November with 15 divisions and thousands of tanks, Nagy’s naivety was confirmed; he sought refuge in the Yugoslav embassy which subsequently handed him over to the new and vengeful communist regime headed by Kádár. 

Nagy had initially signed the collective declaration of the government that ordered Kádár’s removal from his post as minister of the interior in 1951 and paved the way for his subsequent imprisonment as a victim of the Rákosi regime’s paranoid purges, but he had also permitted Kádár’s release from prison during his first stint as prime minister in 1954. The favor would not be returned. Nagy was hanged in Budapest in June 1958.

The outside view

Outside Hungary audiences were gripped by reports and a stream of compelling photos and newsreels (some staged) which reinforced the Cold War narrative that communist regimes were devoid of popular support and reliant on repression. In Britain a huge fundraising effort was launched, supported by Winston Churchill, and both the government and the Labor opposition lauded the revolutionaries. The British ambassador, Leslie Fry, summed up the mood in Parliament and beyond when he informed MPs that the British people were watching events unfold in Budapest ‘with profound sympathy and admiration’. 

Britain initially took in the second largest share of the 200,000 Hungarians who fled their country after the revolution was crushed. As many of these refugees came from Hungary’s professional classes, their subsequent contribution to Britain and other host countries was immense. More than 500 of them were hired by British universities as researchers and lecturers.

Both Britain and continental Europe’s communist parties were particularly shaken by the scenes of Hungarians unleashing their pent-up anger by toppling communist statues, lynching secret policemen and party functionaries, and tearing out the red star emblazoned on the national flag. That they were then silenced by the columns of Red Army tanks proved even more agonizing to supporters of the Soviet Union – up to a third of Western Europe’s communists resigned their party membership in the wake of the Soviet invasion.

In response, Kádár’s regime insisted that it had won back the support of its population pointing, for example, to the huge numbers of Hungarians who participated in the May Day celebrations of communist rule. Although in practice semi-obligatory, the regime made much of the fact that in 1957 some 400,000 people took part in these celebrations in Budapest, a larger number than had joined the revolution. On the rare occasions that it discussed the revolution, Kádár’s government insisted that legitimate Hungarian grievances had been hijacked by a small group of ‘counter-revolutionaries’ emboldened by Nagy’s treachery, a nostalgia for ‘capitalists and landlords’, and, implausibly, residual antisemitism. 

It was not until 1989 (the year in which Kádár died) that the communist party in Hungary officially acknowledged that the 1956 revolution was not a ‘counter-revolution’ but a legitimate ‘popular uprising’. The subsequent reburial of Imre Nagy and his executed associates in Heroes’ Square, Budapest, with an official televised state funeral, was another defining moment at a time when the communist dictatorships across the region began visibly imploding.

Since 1990 the outbreak of the revolution has been commemorated as a national holiday. Memorials to the courage of the revolutionaries have been erected across Budapest. However, the annual commemorations have been persistently marred by various political parties holding rival commemorations while denouncing their opponents for having betrayed the revolution.

One of the hallmarks of right-leaning parties in Hungary is their claim to be the true heirs of 1956, an event they venerate as one in a series of glorious attempts by Hungarians to regain their freedom from foreign powers and alien ideologies. That Imre Nagy, the nominal head of the revolutionary government, insisted up to his execution in 1958 that he remained a communist, proved awkward for former prime minister Viktor Orbán, who first came to prominence for a speech he gave at Nagy’s reburial in 1989 in which he made the first public call since 1956 for the withdrawal of the Soviet Union’s armed forces from Hungary. 

In power, Orbán removed Nagy’s statue, insisting that the site, a short distance from the Hungarian parliament, needed to be restored to its historic appearance before the communist dictatorship took over the country. Even some liberal politicians have joined in the denunciation of their socialist opponents as the ideological heirs of the repression that followed the crushing of the revolution.

Protesters hold the Hungarian flag from which the Soviet star has been removed, October 1956.

That charge was reinforced by the election of Gyula Horn as the socialist prime minister of Hungary in 1994: Horn had been a member of the communist militia that assisted the Soviet army in the revolution’s aftermath. The radicalized rhetoric of heroes and traitors then reached a new fever-pitch in 2006, on the 50th anniversary, when right-wing protesters, demonstrating against what they regarded as a treacherous socialist government, waved the national flag replete with its iconic hole in the centre, and attempted to storm the headquarters of the state broadcaster.

In reality, the Hungarian revolution was too brief, too chaotic, and too contested from the very moment it broke out to fit into any single narrative. That has allowed different ideologies, political parties, and historians to offer their own contrasting interpretations of what actually occurred and the lessons subsequent generations should draw from these events. For Hungary, the unfolding story of how the 1956 revolution has been interpreted has arguably been as consequential as the revolution itself.

https://www.historytoday.com/archive/feature/hungarys-contested-1956-revolution?utm_source=Newsletter&utm_campaign=b2c4f9e1f8-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2017_09_20_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_fceec0de95-b2c4f9e1f8-1214148&mc_cid=b2c4f9e1f8

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HOW THE SOVIET UNION ALTERED HISTORY BOOKS 

In 1938, a mandatory Soviet textbook recast the very architects of the USSR as foreign spies. By 1956, schools were literally tearing out the pages praising Joseph Stalin himself.

This textbook revisionism was the defining feature of the 1938 History of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks): Short Course. Published under Stalin’s direct supervision, this mandatory schoolbook completely restructured the narrative of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution.

The Short Course artificially inflated Stalin’s role, presenting him as Lenin’s indispensable right-hand man. Meanwhile, the actual early architects of the Soviet state—such as Leon Trotsky, Lev Kamenev, and Grigory Zinoviev—were removed from prominence or explicitly framed as lifelong traitors.

This literary erasure was matched by a massive overhaul of the visual record. Stalin’s regime employed teams of skilled retouchers to doctor historical photos, physically removing purged enemies from public memory.

In this widely circulated version of a 1920 photograph of Vladimir Lenin giving a speech in Moscow, the wooden stairs to his right appear empty. In the original image, Leon Trotsky stood on those stairs, but Soviet censors airbrushed him out completely after his political downfall.

Inconvenient geopolitical events were also dropped entirely. The 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, a non-aggression treaty between the USSR and Nazi Germany, contained secret protocols dividing Poland and the Baltic states between the two powers. For decades after World War II, Soviet history books omitted these protocols entirely. State educators dismissed Western reports of their existence as anti-Soviet fabrications, an official denial that held until 1989.

Stalin himself was eventually subjected to this historical revisionism. Following his death, Nikita Khrushchev initiated a period of "de-Stalinization," culminating in his 1956 "Secret Speech" which condemned Stalin's cult of personality and the Great Purge. The Soviet state immediately ordered new history books. Textbooks were pulled from classrooms, pages praising Stalin were torn out, and new editions were issued that downgraded his infallibility. In Soviet historiography, even the supreme architect of historical erasure could be written out of the narrative. (Quora)


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EMPEROR VESPASIAN WANTED TO DIE STANDING UP 

Even as a fatal bout of diarrhea drained his life, Emperor Vespasian demanded his attendants drag him to his feet. "An emperor," he declared, "ought to die standing."

To understand this final act, one has to look at how Vespasian lived. He was not born into imperial luxury like Nero or Caligula. He was a battle-hardened general from a modest background who clawed his way to the throne through military competence. When he took power in AD 69—the chaotic Year of the Four Emperors—he brought stability back to Rome through sheer pragmatism and grueling hard work.

A marble bust of Emperor Vespasian. Unlike the idealized, youthful statues of his predecessors, Vespasian chose to be depicted as a weathered, aging soldier.

This no-nonsense approach extended to his public image. In his official portraits, Vespasian revived the old Roman style of "verism," deliberately emphasizing his bald head, deep wrinkles, and strained expression. He wanted the public to see a tough, unpretentious man who was always on duty, rather than a vain aristocrat.

Even as his final illness took hold in the summer of AD 79, he refused to stop working. While bedridden in his ancestral home, he continued to receive embassies and dictate orders. As he felt his strength failing, his lifelong military instincts took over. For a Roman general, lying down in the face of the enemy felt like surrender. Dying on his feet was the posture of a commander holding his post to the bitter end.

Vespasian also maintained his characteristic dark humor right up to his death. Just before demanding to be stood up, he reportedly mocked the tradition of deifying dead emperors by quipping, "Dear me, I think I'm becoming a god" (Vae, puto deus fio). His insistence on standing was the final expression of a man who viewed the throne not as a divine right, but as a demanding job, one he intended to perform until his final breath. ~ Regal Line. Quora

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THE ROMAN EMPIRE NEVER ENDED

The Roman Empire never died; it just shape-shifted. Today, its most direct institutional descendant is led by a man holding the exact same title as Julius Caesar.

When the Germanic king Odoacer deposed Romulus Augustulus in 476 AD, he didn't destroy the empire—he simply sent the imperial insignia to Constantinople, acknowledging that one emperor was enough.

The eastern half of the empire continued uninterrupted for another thousand years until 1453. Modern historians call it the Byzantine Empire, but its citizens called themselves Romans (Rhomaioi). After Constantinople fell, various states claimed the mantle of the "Third Rome," including the Russian Empire and the Ottoman Empire, but those political entities have since collapsed.

The Roman Catholic Church operates as this direct institutional descendant. The Pope still governs under the title Pontifex Maximus—the chief priest of ancient Rome. The Church preserved the Latin language and maintained the empire's administrative boundaries. The modern Catholic "diocese" is named directly after the Roman administrative unit created by Emperor Diocletian.

If you live in Europe, Latin America, or parts of Asia and Africa, you are likely governed by Roman law. The Corpus Juris Civilis, compiled under Emperor Justinian in the 6th century, forms the bedrock of modern civil law systems. Concepts like the presumption of innocence, written contracts, and property rights were codified by Roman jurists and passed down almost intact.

The empire also survives in the mouths of nearly a billion people. The Romance languages—Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, and Romanian—are not just influenced by Latin; they are modern, evolved dialects of Vulgar Latin, the everyday language spoken by Roman soldiers and merchants.

Every time you check the date, you are using a Roman imperial tool. The Gregorian calendar used worldwide today is just a minor 16th-century correction to the Julian calendar, introduced by Julius Caesar in 46 BC to synchronize the civic year with the solar year.


St. Peter's Square in Vatican City. The Roman Catholic Church adopted much of the Roman Empire's administrative structure, including its dioceses and the title of Pontifex Maximus.

Andrew Kirchhoff:
The Roman Patrician Senators were late to convert to Christianity, maintaining the older religious rituals of Rome. When they converted, the Catholic church created a new entity, the College of Cardinals reflecting the continued political power of the Patricians. The Pope is the consul and the Cardinals are the Senate. It's the continuation of the Roman government system under a new management. The Pope is the Bishop of Rome and the seat of the Bishop of Rome is St John Lateran. The doors of St John Lateran are the original doors of the Roman Senate building.

Mukta:
I have always believed and a quick trip to the Vatican will make that evident in the architecture and statues etc — the Roman Empire just transmuted to the Roman Catholic Church.


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HOW EXTREME WEA;TH CAN COLLAPSE EMPIRES

When extreme wealth inequality collapses a society, it rarely starts with a peasant revolt.

Instead, empires fall when the ultra-rich legally exempt themselves from paying taxes.

During the decline of the Western Roman Empire, senatorial elites bought up vast tracts of land to form immense estates called latifundia. They used their political influence to secure tax exemptions, shifting the empire’s financial burden onto a shrinking middle class of urban administrators (the curiales). Free citizens were forced to sell their land to the wealthy and work as tenant farmers (coloni). Because the elite hoarded the wealth and dodged taxes, Rome could no longer afford to pay its professional legions. The state was forced to rely on cheap, unreliable Germanic mercenaries, paving the way for the empire’s fragmentation in the fifth century.

A similar mechanism destroyed China's Ming Dynasty in the 17th century. Wealthy gentry families accumulated large estates that were legally exempt from state taxation. As the tax base shrank, the imperial treasury emptied, leaving the government unable to pay its soldiers or maintain the Grand Canal. To compensate, the Ming state levied crushing surcharges on the remaining independent peasant farmers, right as the Little Ice Age caused widespread crop failures. Unpaid postal workers and starving peasants formed rebel armies under leaders like Li Zicheng, who captured Beijing and ended the dynasty in 1644.

In France, the Ancien Régime collapsed under the weight of a tax system detached from where the wealth actually sat. Leading up to 1789, the First Estate (clergy) and Second Estate (nobility) controlled most French property but were exempt from the taille, the primary direct land tax. The French monarchy accrued deep debt fighting foreign wars, and its solution was always to squeeze the impoverished Third Estate harder. When a series of bad harvests hit, the state had no financial reserves and the peasantry had no surplus. The rigid refusal of the wealthy elite to contribute to the national treasury made violent revolution inevitable.

A 1789 watercolor painting by Jean-Pierre Houël depicts the storming of the Bastille, an event triggered by the economic collapse of the Ancien Régime. 

Nicholas David Rosen:
I don’t believe that violent revolution was inevitable in late 18th century France. There was a school of economists called the Physiocrats who advocated an import unique on the value of land. (About a century later, the American economist Henry George, whose analysis was a bit different, proposed essentially the same reform, and had a mass movement for a single tax on the value of land flourishing for a while.) In France, Louis XVI had a reformist minister, Anne-Robert Turgot, who deregulated prices, laid off unneeded officials, and hoped to implement land value taxation. 

Unfortunately, he had enemies, and bandits stole price-deregulated grain, and dumped it into the Seine. (The bandits may have been officials who had lost their jobs enforcing price controls.) The king discharged Turgot, and tried other ministers, whose attempts to deal with France’s fiscal and other problems were unsuccessful, and that led to summoning the Estates-General and thence to the revolution.

Please note, it was not just that the rich were not taxed enough; it was how people were or were not taxed, whether in France, the Roman Empire, or Heian Japan (about which I know more than I do about Ming Dynasty China). It was and is a matter of what was taxed. If a government imposes high taxes on people whose skills and diligence enable them to earn substantial incomes, and high taxes on profits that result from productive investment and sound management, people tend not to bother to be productive, to take their skills and capital elsewhere, or to operate on the black market. These are bad ways to soak the rich. 

However, if a government finances itself by taxing the value of land, it can collect funds from those who enjoy the privilege of owning large tracts of valuable land, whether that land is agricultural, or high-priced urban land, or mineral holdings. No one responds to higher land value taxes by reducing his production of land (since there is no production of land), or by rolling up his acreage, and carrying it to a jurisdiction with lower taxes.  (Oriana: I can easily imagine this as lines from a comedy monologue.)


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POSSIBLE BIOLOGICAL CAUSE OF HENRY VIII’S PROBLEMS PRODUCING A MALE HEIR

Henry VIII discarded Catherine of Aragon and sparked the English Reformation over her repeated stillbirths. But modern doctors suspect his own rare blood type was attacking their unborn children.

Between 1509 and 1518, Catherine spent a decade trapped in a grueling cycle of pregnancy, childbirth, and mourning. Despite conceiving at least six times with Henry, only one child—Princess Mary—survived infancy.

The most devastating loss was Henry, Duke of Cornwall, born in 1511. He lived just 52 days before dying of an unrecorded illness. The remaining pregnancies ended in stillbirths, miscarriages, or infants who lived only hours.

Historically, this tragedy was viewed as divine judgment, but the Kell blood group theory provides a biological explanation. If Henry was a carrier of this rare antigen and Catherine was Kell-negative, her immune system would have produced antibodies that attacked subsequent Kell-positive fetuses in utero, causing the late-term stillbirths. 

Other factors likely compounded the tragedy. Basic Tudor obstetrics lacked modern sanitation, and infant mortality was exceptionally high across all classes. Furthermore, historians note that Catherine's extreme religious piety led to severe fasting and wearing a hairshirt throughout her pregnancies, which may have caused maternal malnutrition and compromised fetal development.

These repeated reproductive failures directly destabilized the Tudor dynasty. The English crown had recently emerged from the bloody Wars of the Roses, and Henry VIII was convinced that a male heir was required to prevent another civil war. A surviving princess was viewed as a recipe for a disputed succession.

Henry’s dynastic anxiety eventually morphed into religious paranoia. He fixated on a passage in Leviticus stating that a man who married his brother's widow would be cursed with childlessness. Because Catherine was briefly married to Henry's older brother, Arthur, before his death, Henry concluded their marriage was invalid in the eyes of God.

When Catherine refused to step aside quietly—dramatically pleading her case before Henry at the legatine court at Blackfriars in 1529—it marked a point of no return. The failure of Catherine’s pregnancies cost her the crown and caused her banishment from court, forever altering the course of European history.

Catherine of Aragon (1485–1536) pleads her case against the annulment of her marriage to Henry VIII (1491–1547) at the legatine court at Blackfriars in 1529. ~ RegalLine, Quora


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THE FATE OF CHILDREN WITH GENIUS-LEVEL IQs

In 1921, researchers tracked 1,500 children with genius-level IQs, expecting them to become world leaders. None ever won a Nobel Prize—but two children rejected for "low" IQs did. 

This longitudinal experiment, run by psychologist Lewis Terman, highlights a paradox in human achievement: raw cognitive power does not guarantee success. To understand why, it helps to look at where intelligence comes from. The debate over whether intelligence is innate or learned often misses that the two forces are strictly interdependent. Twin studies show that genetics account for about 50% to 80% of the variance in adult IQ. 

However, "innate" does not mean fixed. Environment acts as a multiplier for genetic potential. A child might inherit the genetic blueprint for exceptional cognitive ability, but without adequate nutrition, early cognitive stimulation, and education, that potential remains locked. Conversely, a rich environment can maximize the cognitive potential of someone with a more average genetic baseline.

When Terman's researchers later split his gifted cohort into the most and least successful groups, the defining differences were not found in their intelligence scores. The highest achievers demonstrated superior conscientiousness, goal-oriented persistence, and self-confidence.

Average-intelligence individuals often outpace their high-IQ peers because success relies heavily on traits that intelligence tests cannot measure. Emotional intelligence, social skills, and "grit"—the ability to maintain passion and perseverance for long-term goals—are far stronger predictors of life outcomes than raw intellect. 

Highly intelligent individuals can also be hindered by a fixed mindset; if they grew up succeeding effortlessly, they may never have developed the resilience required to overcome failure. Meanwhile, an individual with average intelligence who is accustomed to working hard for marginal gains has spent a lifetime building the exact habits required to navigate professional setbacks.

Alfred Binet (1857–1911) developed the first practical intelligence test, establishing the foundation for the modern concept of the intelligence quotient (IQ).


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HOKUSAI’S GREAT WAVE, 1831

Katsushika Hokusai's 1831 masterpiece The Great Wave has become a potent global symbol – yet it also has a "peculiar power to befuddle". As a new exhibition in London displays its various iterations, what are the clues that help decipher this remarkable image?

What grips the imagination are the claws curling from the crest of Katsushika Hokusai's suspenseful 1831 woodblock print, Under the Wave off Kanagawa – better known today simply as The Great Wave. It was precisely these menacing talons that seized the attention of both Vincent Van Gogh and his brother, Theo, when the two discussed the print in an exchange of letters in the 1880s. "These waves are claws", Vincent and Theo repeated back to each other in September 1888, "the vessel is caught in them, you can feel it".

For nearly two centuries, the world has continued to feel more than see Hokusai's extraordinary, relatively small and spare image dominated by Prussian Blue. Alongside Leonardo's Mona Lisa, Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring, and Van Gogh's own The Starry Night, it is one of the most instantly recognizable in cultural history. What is notable about the Van Gogh brothers' shared reaction to the image is the imprecision in their recollection of what The Great Wave actually depicts.

Look again, and there is not, in fact, just one vessel caught in the waves' claws. There are three. These long, streamlined cargo barges (or oshiokuri-bune, as they are called in Japan), are not small details that one has to squint to find. Their presence and suspended plight are crucial to the story that The Great Wave tells. And their strange invisibility is indicative of the print's peculiar power to befuddle even the most attentive of observers.

The Great Wave is comprised of remarkably few elements – the three boats, the surging waves, the lowering sky, and, in the far distance, a small snow-capped Mount Fuji. Yet understanding what is being portrayed in the famous print remains almost mystically elusive. 

Is this an image of the sublime power of nature and the puniness of human pursuits, or is it a portrait of mankind's irrepressible fortitude in the face of imminent disaster? Is The Great Wave a study that contrasts life's fleetingness (as symbolized by the wave) against the soul's endurance (as embodied by the mountain)? Or is it an allegory of divine overview, as a protective Mount Fuji peers at us unflinchingly through the swirling aperture of crashing danger? 

Today The Great Wave can be found featured in everything from emojis, memes and Lego sets to the Japanese 1,000-yen banknote. Perhaps anticipating its remarkable resonance, the artist created an accompanying series of prints. This series helps to unlock the meanings behind the original Great Wave – and helps explain its pervasive power. Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji is on display at the Dulwich Picture Gallery in London, the first time the entire series (as well as 10 subsequently added prints) has been shown in the UK. 

By the time Hokusai created the series, he was undergoing a remarkable reinvention of identity. Having survived a severe stroke in his late 60s, he became preoccupied with Japan's highest mountain Mount Fuji, which had long been associated with immortality. He undertook to capture from many angles the shifting temperaments of this object of both worship and pilgrimage. Though none of the other 45 images Hokusai created has fixed itself in cultural consciousness quite as securely as The Great Wave, each print casts light back on the most famous work, drawing our attention to intriguing details and themes that we might otherwise miss. 

A fisherman's frailty

Consider the print Kajikazawa in Kai Province, which features a figure perched precariously on a rocky promontory at the centre of the image, casting lines into the turbulent Fuji River. Here, Hokusai, who set out in his series to celebrate the eternal in the fleeting, has turned his attention to the struggles of a single fisherman to locate something eternal and archetypal in his toil. The almost subliminal fishing lines that the figure casts into the violent stream, tethered to cormorants, fix him in a delicate geometry of tangents that echo the triangular shape of the mighty mountain behind him. 

A lone fisherman perches precariously at the center of Kajikazawa in Kai Province

Suddenly, the dozens of anonymous crewmen who row the barges in The Great Wave and whose individual presences are barely hinted at by Hokusai in that print, are made more intimate and invested with greater emotional weight. Place the prints side-by-side and the ghostly outline that the fishing lines trace in Kajikazawa in Kai Province, as they converge in the fisherman's fist, suggests the vanished shape of one of those slender barges in The Great Wave. It seems to be foreshadowing an ordeal, yet to occur, or eerily recalling a tragedy that has already occurred.

Inner and outer worlds

Or take the deceptively simple print Fujimigahara in Owari Province, whose sunny serenity may, at first glance, seem at furthest remove from the tempestuousness of The Great Wave. A masterclass in compositional staging, the print reduces Mount Fuji – which had long been revered as a symbol of immortality – to an almost imperceptible sliver of shaved wood scooped by the cooper, who is busy fashioning a large round barrel in the foreground of the print. Bottomless, the still-unfinished barrel becomes a kind of oversized lens through which Mount Fuji is simultaneously glimpsed and eclipsed, framed and forgotten.

Fujimigahara in Owari Province is a masterclass of composition

If we allow that barrel to roll its way backwards to the start of the series and place it alongside The Great Wave, we can see the mighty, if momentary, curl of water around the mountain in the distance. It is both a prop that directs our eye to Mount Fuji's faraway presence and a domineering distraction that obliterates it altogether. The wave is at once more formidable than the mountain and a foil for its infinitude. The result is a work that restlessly focuses and refocuses our eyes on what we see and how we see it – on the fluid boundary between the inner and outer worlds.  

Everything is in flux

The cumulative effect of these shifting views of Mount Fuji is a sense of the illusory nature of existence. It's a theme that became associated with ukiyo-e (or "floating world") woodblock prints of the Edo period. Perhaps no work in the series amplifies this aspect of The Great Wave more intriguingly than Reflection in Lake at Misaka in Kai Province, which portrays a lone fisherman lying in his boat, surrounded by glassy, smooth water, watched over by a bold and barren Mount Fuji.

 
Reflection in Lake at Misaka in Kai Province emphasizes the illusory nature of existence

There is a dream-like serenity about the still scene, surrounded by green hills and leafy trees. But it is strangely unsettled by the sudden realization that the inverted reflection of the mountain held by the lake – which dominates the lower half of the print – imagines Fuji not as it is in the lushness of spring or early summer, but as it was or will be, snow-capped in deepest winter. Scroll back to The Great Wave, and we find Hokusai playing similar tricks with the static stature of the deceptively malleable mountain.

Were it not for the broader series title, Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, one might well miss the diminutive mountain altogether and mistake its snowy shroud for a smaller, choppy peak of foamy water. In Hokusai's telling, everything is in flux. Mount Fuji is never one thing or another, but a momentous morphing force whose elastic power lies in its ability to be mirrored in everything we feel and felt in everything we see. 

Hokusai: Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji from the luchi Collection is at Dulwich Picture Gallery, London until 17 January 2027.

Hokusai exhibition costume 

https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20261112-the-hidden-meanings-in-hokusais-iconic-great-wave


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WHY THE FEELING OF PLEASURE WEARS OFF

Ten minutes after entering a bakery, your brain actively erases the smell of fresh bread. This phenomenon—sensory adaptation—is exactly why people take the most important things in life for granted.

The human brain is an efficient machine designed for survival, not sustained gratitude. To conserve energy, the brain continuously filters out constant, unchanging stimuli, dedicating its processing power to noticing change. An environment that stays the same—a stable job, a reliable heart, or a loyal partner—is quickly categorized as safe background noise. The brain stops signaling joy or appreciation for these constants because they no longer require urgent action or problem-solving.

Psychologists call this emotional dampening the "hedonic treadmill." When someone experiences a major positive life change, such as moving into a dream home or recovering from a serious illness, their happiness initially spikes. However, they rapidly adapt to the new circumstance. The novelty wears off, the new reality becomes the baseline expectation, and the brain resumes scanning the horizon for the next unfulfilled desire.

This survival wiring creates a profound negativity bias. A person with perfect health, a warm house, and a stable income might spend an entire evening agonizing over a mildly critical email from a coworker. The brain ignores the vast majority of life that is functioning perfectly because it is not an immediate problem, hyper-fixating instead on the tiny fraction of life that feels threatening.

Because humans are biologically wired to notice disruptions rather than constants, they typically only recognize the immense value of their foundational assets when those assets are threatened or lost. It is the sudden illness, the breakdown of a reliable routine, or the absence of a loved one that abruptly forces the brain to pull these once-invisible background elements back into sharp, painful focus. ( ~ Quora)


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GORILLA, THE 400-POUND VEGETARIAN ATHLETE

A human eating 50 pounds of raw leaves a day would slowly starve. A silverback gorilla uses that exact same diet to build enough muscle to lift ten times its body weight.

The secret lies in an evolutionary divergence in the digestive tract. Gorillas do not digest plants the same way humans do. They are hindgut fermenters with a massive cecum and colon. While humans lack the enzymes to break down cellulose—passing it through the body as dietary fiber—a gorilla's gut is a complex fermentation vat packed with specialized bacteria. As the animal digests its daily foliage, those bacteria break down the tough cellulose and convert it into short-chain fatty acids. Rather than running on the low-calorie carbohydrates found in the leaves, the gorilla's body absorbs the resulting fat. The animal is essentially farming bacteria in its own gut.

Beyond how they extract nutrients, gorillas also have a vastly different genetic blueprint for building tissue. Muscle growth in mammals is regulated by a protein called myostatin, which acts as a molecular brake to prevent muscles from growing too large. Gorillas possess less active myostatin pathways than humans do, raising their genetic ceiling for muscle hypertrophy. This is paired with a much higher density of fast-twitch muscle fibers, which provide the explosive power necessary for climbing and fighting.

A gorilla's skeletal structure also maximizes mechanical advantage at the expense of dexterity. In humans, muscle attachment points are relatively close to the joints, which allows for precise, fine motor control—perfect for throwing a spear or threading a needle. A gorilla's muscles attach further down the bone. This arrangement acts like a longer wrench on a bolt, providing enormous leverage that allows them to snap thick tree branches with minimal effort.

A mountain gorilla resting among vegetation in Bwindi Impenetrable National Park, Uganda.


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WHY FENTANYL DEATHS ARE PLUMMETING — 8 THEORIES

The state of Virginia has seen drug overdose deaths plunge by more than 40% in a single year. Many other states are seeing improvements above 30%. Why is this happening? Researchers say it may be a combination of factors, some hopeful and some painful.

Over the past six months, I've been tracking something really cool and mysterious happening on American streets. For the first time in 30 years, drug deaths are plunging at a rate that addiction experts say is hopeful — but also baffling.

In the past, even the most ambitious, well-funded efforts to slow drug deaths only helped a little bit. Reducing fatal overdoses by 8% or 9% was seen as a huge win.

But now, deaths nationwide plunged more than 26% from the peak in June 2023, according to the latest preliminary data gathered by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

That means roughly 30,000 fewer people a year are dying. Many states are seeing even bigger improvements of 30% to 50%. In some states, progress has been sustained since 2021 and 2022, which suggests this isn't a temporary blip.

So how did the U.S. finally turn the corner on drug deaths?

What's going on? No one knows for sure, but here are eight leading theories I hear from experts.

1. Naloxone, also known as Narcan, may be the game-changer. The Biden administration raced to make this medication, a nasal spray that quickly reverses opioid and fentanyl overdoses, far more widely available. People can buy it now over the counter without a prescription. It's distributed for free in many high-risk communities, and people using drugs often carry it. It's unclear how many lives naloxone is saving each year, but many front-line public health workers tell me the impact is huge.

2. Weaker fentanyl. Street fentanyl is incredibly potent. But in many parts of the U.S., organizations that test fentanyl doses sold by drug dealers — often in pill form — have found a significant drop in purity. No one's sure why drug cartels have changed their mixtures. Some researchers believe law enforcement pressure in China, Mexico and the U.S. is disrupting the black market fentanyl supply chain.

3. A dangerous but less lethal street drug supply. In most of the the U.S., gangs are selling complicated "cocktails" of street drugs. The amount of fentanyl appears to be dropping (see above), while the amount of animal tranquilizers, such as medetomidine and xylazine, is rising. These chemicals are highly toxic. They cause skin wounds, severe withdrawal symptoms and other long-term health problems. But doctors and addiction experts generally agree they aren't as immediately lethal as fentanyl. That could mean more chronic illness but fewer fatal overdoses. 

4. Better public health. Thirty years after the U.S. opioid crisis began — and a decade after fentanyl spread nationwide — the U.S. has made strides developing better and more affordable services for people experiencing addiction. Medications that reduce opioid cravings, including buprenorphine and methadone, are more widely available, in part because of insurance coverage provided by Medicaid. In many states, roughly $50 billion in opioid settlement money paid out by corporations is also starting to help. Going forward, it's unclear how the Trump administration's deep cuts to public health agencies and grants will affect this new addiction safety net.

5. Many of the most vulnerable people have already died. This theory is discounted by some researchers I talk to, but many addiction experts think it's a factor. Over the past five years, the U.S. has been losing roughly 110,000 people to fatal drug overdoses every year. It's possible drug deaths are declining in part because a heartbreaking number of people using fentanyl and other high-risk street drugs simply didn't survive.

6. Waning effect of the COVID pandemic. The isolation, trauma and disruption of addiction treatment programs that followed the onset of COVID in 2020 overlap with the most devastating years of drug overdose deaths. Many public health experts believe the pandemic deepened the catastrophic impacts of fentanyl. According to this theory, as the impacts of COVID continue to fade, deadly overdoses are also declining to a more "normal" level.

7. People are using fentanyl (and other high risk street drugs) more skillfully. This is a common theory among people who use street drugs. They often tell me they've adapted to the risks of fentanyl by smoking rather than injecting the drug, which many addiction experts believe is safer (though still incredibly dangerous). People try to never use fentanyl alone and often carry naloxone or Narcan to reverse overdoses. Many people use test strips to identify unwanted contaminants in their drugs and use smaller fentanyl doses.

8. A decline in young people using drugs. Street fentanyl has emerged as a leading cause of death among young people in the U.S., age 18 to 45. But research suggests far fewer young people and teenagers are using drugs (other than cannabis). This trend matters because new users have low physical tolerance for opioids such as fentanyl, which means they're more likely to overdose and potentially die. Fewer young users means fewer people taking that risk.

It's important to emphasize all of these theories are just that — theories. Most researchers, doctors and front-line care providers say they need more data and more time to understand a shift this large.

But there is a growing, tentative consensus that the answer may well be "all of the above." 

A big question going forward is How low will U.S. drug deaths go? We've already seen the biggest, fastest drop in U.S. history. So far, there's no sign the improvement is slowing.

https://www.npr.org/2025/03/24/nx-s1-5328157/fentanyl-overdose-death-drugs

*
THE COUNCIL OF NICEA AND THE DIVINITY OF JESUS 

I find it amusing that Jesus was promoted to “god” by the democratic vote of a board meeting of feuding catholic bishops at the Council of Nicaea in 325 AD.

However, the Council of Nicaea did not create the “trinity” as is commonly believed, but rather a “duality” of father and son — and then only by denying that the father begat the son!

I also find it amusing that the mediator was a pagan Roman emperor, Constantine, an unrepentant worshiper of Sol Invictus (“the unconquerable sun”).

Why was the much-ballyhooed holy ghost unable to lead christians into “all truth”?

We are constantly told that only christians guided by the holy poltergeist can properly interpret the bible.

Why, then, were christians so divided over the nature of Jesus?

Was he fully human?

Was he fully god?


Was he a demigod?


Was he subordinate to god?


Was he co-eternal with god?


Did he preexist the universe?

The heated feuding involved some fisticuffs and excommunications before the deciding (or dei-ciding) vote was taken.

Arius, the father of Arianism (later known as Unitarianism), pointed out, quite reasonably and correctly, that the “father” could not be the father and the “son” could not be the son, unless the “father” came first and begat the “son.”

How could the son be co-eternal with the father, if the father came first?

This was, according to loopy christian theology, a great “heresy” and Arius was excommunicated twice, first by Bishop Alexander of Alexandria, circa 318-320 AD, then by the Council of Nicaea in 325 AD.

Where, oh, where was the holy poltergeist?

Why was a pagan emperor needed to finally unite christians into a single loopiness?

And that singular loopiness was not a “trinity” but a “duality” of god and Jesus.

The junior partner of the trinity, the holy poltergeist, was not promoted to personhood and godhood until another democratic vote of another board meeting of catholic bishops, at the Council of Constantinople in 381 AD, nearly four centuries after the alleged birth of Jesus.

None of the earliest christian fathers were trinitarians.

They all thought Jesus was inferior and subordinate to god.

It took four centuries for the loopy “trinity” to become church dogma.

What a long, strange trip it’s been!

~ Michael R. Burch, Quora

Halston Bathmatt:
The council did not decide whether Jesus would be "promoted" to deity. It was called because a presbyter named Arius taught that Jesus was unique and exalted, yet not truly God. The bishops gathered to settle that dispute, and they affirmed what the church had already held.

Etienne:
Yeah, the Councils were all pure heresy, from the original Jewish Christian perspective, which was preserved only among the Ebionites, who were themselves sadly dismissed as heretical. Jesus himself didn’t claim to be God nor did those who know knew him personally claim that of him.

The fourth gospel, contains views the Johannine community would later develop and put on Jesus’ lips, but Bart Ehrman makes a strong case that if Jesus had claimed divinity (or even called himself “the light, the truth and the way” or something like that) the earlier Synoptic gospels wouldn’t have left such an important assertion out.

John’s Jesus is mostly a late 1st century fictional creation, and the gospel itself appears to be the work of different writers. If you leave out the prologue with its bold, apparently Philo-inspired ideas, the gospel itself has Jesus sometimes claiming alignment with God (the Father and I are one) which is NOT to say they are ontologically one and the same, and sometimes making a sharp contrast between himself, the messenger, and the “one who sent me”, God the Father.

The Synoptics have their own share of add on myths and legends, mostly spun in all the retellings of various things Jesus supposedly said or did. The closest we can get is perhaps to look only at Q content in Matthew and Luke, observe how, like each author changes various things in the Markan source material they don’t like, they probably did for Q as well.

You look for the common ground in the Q parts of each gospel and what stands out the most is that it appears relatively free of Pauline influence. Matthew and Luke, writing after the fall of Jerusalem, independently (in all likelihood ) and in differently located communities, have each tried to stitch different source material together with the Pauline-influenced Mark, but there are some pretty notable incompatibilities you just can’t iron out, for instance Jesus says, like most Jews then and now, the way to salvation is through personal repentance and conduct with others, Paul says its through faith (in Jesus atoning d&r) and God’s grace.


*
CAN THE YAMANAKA FACTORS REVERSE AGING?

Dr. Shinya Yamanaka can no longer enjoy a beer in peace. After a long day at a recent conference in Montreal, the scientist found a seat at the quiet hotel bar, hoping for a few moments to himself. “But unfortunately, or fortunately, a group of Japanese businessmen came into the bar,” he says. And although scientists don’t get recognized very often, Yamanaka is a celebrity in Japan.  

He doesn’t mind. Celebrity, he knows, is a small price to pay for the profound impact that he has on an impressively wide range of scientific fields: developmental biology, regenerative medicine, chronic-disease treatments, and, increasingly, longevity. In 2006, he published a groundbreaking paper that would forever change our understanding about how the human body develops and ages, and how to reverse those processes. In 2012, Yamanaka earned the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work, becoming a hero in his country and inspiring generations of scientists worldwide. 

What Yamanaka achieved was long thought to be impossible: turning back the clock of human cells. Certain animals can regenerate cells, tissues, and entire limbs, but human cells seemed to develop only in one irreversible direction. Yamanaka proved that theory wrong, showing first in animals and then in people that any adult cell could become like those found in embryos, capable of developing into any of the body’s different types of cells. This discovery catalyzed new ways of treating disease by replacing failing cells. This year, the first treatments based on his discovery 20 years ago became available to some patients.  

“I can’t believe it’s been 20 years already,” Yamanaka said in a recent interview at the Center for iPS Cell Research and Application (CiRA) at Kyoto University, which he helped create and directed for 12 years. (He remains there as professor and director emeritus.) “And I would say, so far, so good. The technology has grown, so now we are seeing medical applications of this on a small scale.”

We may be at just the start of how Yamanaka’s discovery transforms human health. If diseased or injured cells can be replaced, then why not reprogram aging ones to become youthful and vigorous again? It is one of the most actively researched areas in the longevity field. Scientists are finding that it may not even be necessary to reprogram older cells all the way back to an embryonic, blank-slate state; even partially reprogramming them could rejuvenate cells enough to slow some aging processes. The hope is that one day, aging itself may be “treatable” with fresh sets of cells and tissues that work like decades-younger versions of themselves. “It’s a very active area [of research],” Yamanaka says. “And I think partial reprogramming is a very powerful potential way to live healthier and longer.” 

Yamanaka didn’t start his career as a scientist but as a physician. Born in Osaka, where his father made saw parts, he liked to take apart clocks and radios, although he wasn’t always successful in putting them back together. He diligently read a monthly science magazine for schoolchildren and performed the included experiment kits. He attended medical school in Kobe at his father’s urging and became an orthopedic surgeon, influenced in part by the overtraining injuries he had endured playing judo and rugby. But Yamanaka soon realized that surgery didn’t inspire him. Just as he had been drawn as a boy toward understanding the mechanics of electronics, he was intrigued by basic science and learning how diseases take root.

He earned a Ph.D. in pharmacology at Osaka City University and completed a fellowship at the Gladstone Institutes in San Francisco. (TIME co-chair and owner Marc Benioff is a past supporter of the Gladstone Foundation.) Yamanaka thrived there, studying a gene that lowered cholesterol in mice and learning how to culture embryonic stem cells in the animals, which served as a foundation for his later discovery. 

When his fellowship ended in 1996, Yamanaka returned to Japan. But he missed the scientific community at Gladstone. “I experienced post-America depression,” he says. He had trouble getting funding for his basic research projects and became so disillusioned with his career path in Japan that he considered practicing medicine again, admitting, “I nearly died once as a scientist.”

But an opportunity to run his own lab at Japan’s Nara Institute of Science and Technology provided one last shot at the scientific career he yearned for. “I wanted to try something very big, very risky, but that will have a huge impact on medicine,” he says. “So that’s how I started this project”—his modest way of describing the work that would earn a Nobel Prize.

At the time, other stem-cell scientists were focused on trying to coax embryonic stem cells to become the mature cells the body needs to treat disease—islet cells in the pancreas, for instance, which produce insulin. “I thought I wouldn’t be competitive enough if I just did a similar approach,” he says. So Yamanaka zagged. Rather than starting with embryonic cells, he started with mature, specialized cells and tried to turn them back to an embryo-like state.

There was no guarantee this was even possible with human cells, but Yamanaka pinned his career on two studies that convinced him it might be. First, British biologist John Gurdon, with whom Yamanaka would share the Nobel, had shown in the 1960s that a cell from an already-developed tadpole still contained the genetic instructions it needed to become a new frog.

Then, in 1996, Scottish embryologist Ian Wilmut took a mature cell from a female sheep and created an exact clone of the ewe. “Because of those two studies, I thought at least in theory, we could revert somatic [adult] cells back into the embryonic state,” Yamanaka says. “So I was not just a crazy scientist.” 

He started by trying to identify which genes were responsible for driving the development of embryonic cells. Then, he used engineered viruses that could infect cells (but no longer cause disease) to introduce these genes to adult cells; these, in turn, would instruct the cell to make the proteins that help the mature cells act more like embryonic ones. Yamanaka and his team winnowed 24 possible genes down to four.

Even Yamanaka was surprised that the process worked. When his colleague first showed him the older mouse cells that seemed to have reverted back to young versions of themselves, he refused to believe it. “I thought it was a mistake,” he says. “I asked my colleague to repeat the experiment again and again and again, but it always worked,” even with different types of mature mouse and human cells. “So we gradually became confident in the results.”

He called the cells induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS cells for short), and researchers raced to capitalize on the potential of these “Yamanaka factors” to generate replacements for diseased cells in conditions like diabetes and Parkinson’s disease. “iPS cells impact all sorts of areas, from the study of disease to the study of development,” says Dieter Egli, associate professor of developmental cell biology at Columbia University and a leading stem-cell scientist. “This fundamental insight of the reversion of time and cell specialization is absolutely a miracle.”

To capitalize on the discovery, the Japanese government invested heavily in CiRA—where the scientists’ teams still call him Yamanaka-sensei—to refine the production of iPS cells. One of the key genes involved in the process can also promote tumors; Yamanaka found a way to omit it while reprogramming the cells, albeit less efficiently, and has since developed ways to manufacture high-quality iPS cells for use in human studies. He also initiated important discussions with the government on the ethical use of these cells. 

“When we succeeded in making human iPS cells, I was very happy for just one week,” Yamanaka says. The process bypassed the ethical challenges of needing embryos as a stem-cell source. “But I realized, ‘Wow, maybe I overcame one ethical hurdle, but now I generated another, even higher hurdle.’” 

Because any adult cell can be turned into any other type of cell in the human body, including egg and sperm, he quickly realized the potential for abuse. Eggs, sperm, and embryos that could theoretically be generated by iPS cells would cause permanent changes not just in individuals but to future generations, forever altering the human gene pool. He asked the Japanese government to help draft guidelines to navigate when and how using iPS cells to create such germ-line cells would be ethically justified, and invited ethicists to join the team at CiRA. “It’s an ongoing, very, very important issue,” he says. “The speed of scientific progress is becoming faster and faster, so we can’t just postpone these discussions. We have to talk [about them] and start deciding now.”

While egg and sperm from iPS cells have not been approved for human studies, other iPS cells are already being used in people. In March 2026, the Japanese government issued the first conditional approvals of two treatments based on iPS cells: one for Parkinson’s and another for heart failure. If ongoing trials of these treatments continue to be successful, they could pave the way for exploring not just how dysfunctional or injured cells can be rejuvenated, but whether older ones can be reprogrammed to regain their youthful function. “Our first priority is to extend healthy longevity, not just longevity itself,” he says, “so that people can live through their 80s and 90s without the need of aid from other people.”

One of the first efforts to test iPS cell-based rejuvenation began in May in the U.S., when the first patient was treated with iPS cells to reprogram aging eye cells that were causing glaucoma and optic neuropathy. These retinal cells can’t be regenerated by the body, so if they start to deteriorate over time, people can lose their vision. The hope is that by injecting a treatment using three of the Yamanaka factors, these older retinal cells can become rejuvenated to function normally again, and potentially rescue people from blindness.

While efforts like this are important steps toward improving human health, they also open the door to extending human life. Reprogramming is becoming a mainstay of numerous longevity strategies, including one from a team at the University of Tokyo, which is using iPS cells to generate exosomes, small sacs that contain various components that cells need to survive and thrive, and injecting them into mice and humans. Research is early, but the therapy seems to reduce inflammation, a driver of aging in cells. 

Yamanaka is cautiously optimistic about the expansion of interest in iPS cells in the field of longevity. “I think the potential is very high, but the application of partial reprogramming may be a bit more challenging,” he says. Because they are relatively new, it isn’t clear yet whether reprogrammed cells are exactly equivalent in function and safety to normally developed adult cells, so Yamanaka continues to study the process in depth. He splits his time between CiRA and his lab at the Gladstone Institutes in San Francisco, where—again taking a contrarian approach—his latest research explores when reprogramming may not work, and how certain cells might protect themselves from being reverted to a younger state. Understanding the limitations of the method he discovered could also help solve more mysteries about how the body ages. 

While Yamanaka says the iPS field has made remarkable progress in the past 20 years, when it comes to the technology’s ultimate potential, “we are at the halfway point,” he says, drawing an analogy to marathons, which he began running in his 40s. “We are happy to reach the halfway point, but we still have to run the second half. And we all know that the remaining half is tougher.”

In another 20 years, Yamanaka hopes to see more human approvals for iPS cell-based therapies. But just as few people could have predicted that it would be possible to reprogram mature cells back to a younger state, he also hopes that by then, there may be new discoveries that can’t be imagined today. “My hope is that in 20 years, we have other technologies so that iPS cells aren’t required anymore,” he says. “I hope the younger generation will come up with something even better.”

https://time.com/collection/longevity-leaders/2026/shinya-yamanaka/

*
“SUPER-AGERS”

Geneticist Nir Barzilai’s work has helped drive a new approach to medicine. Instead of treating individual diseases, his research has supported the idea that targeting the biology of aging with drugs and lifestyle interventions could more broadly extend “health span,” the healthy years of a person’s life. 

“Right now, our maximum lifespan is 115, and about half of us die at around the age of 80,” Barzilai says. “I don’t know if we’ll ever break the 115-year mark, but we should get decades more of life and good health.”

Over decades studying centenarians and “superagers,” people who live past the age of 95 in good health, and the biological and genetic factors that help them defy disease and delay aging, Barzilai and his collaborators have found several factors associated with healthy longevity, including variations in genes linked to cholesterol and lipid metabolism. Researchers are now exploring whether they can create drugs that mimic these so-called longevity genes, and Barzilai is co-leading an ambitious project, the SuperAgers Initiative, in search of more genes that help slow aging and disease, 

The project aims to recruit 10,000 people over the age of 95 and their family members for study. “People don't get over the age of 100 without some genetic explanation, so we're trying to understand the biology behind that,” he says. “That knowledge will help us develop more drugs.” 

Barzilai has played an instrumental role in pushing the idea that existing drugs could be repurposed as longevity-boosting treatments. He designed a clinical trial testing whether metformin, a diabetes drug, could delay the onset and progression of age-related diseases such as cardiovascular disease and cancer. That trial has yet to launch, but Barzilai says the study design could be adapted by other groups looking to test whether drugs such as GLP-1 medications could be used not just to treat a single disease but to prevent multiple age-related conditions. 

Barzilai is also helping lead a project aimed at finding reliable biomarkers for aging that could be used to test whether drugs and lifestyle improvements, such as exercise and sleep, actually slow someone’s aging. 

This all has massive implications for how we could live and age, and Barzilai is eager to persuade the world just how transformative longevity science could be. “There’s a lot of junk out there,” he says—and that junk sometimes obscures what he sees as truly revolutionary research. He even eschews the term that often accompanies his title; “longevity” has been sullied by too much hype and misinformation, he says. Instead, he favors “geroscience,” the study of how biological processes of aging contribute to disease. “Longevity is the outcome. Geroscience is the mechanism,” he says. 

For Barzilai, changing the language is part of transforming the field. He heads the Albert Einstein College of Medicine’s Institute of Geroscience in New York and is president of the Academy of Geroscience, a coalition of scientists aimed at advancing research on the biology of aging. Both organizations recently changed their names under his leadership. “We need to distinguish ourselves from all the noise,” Barzilai says. “It’s become important to have the word ‘science’ in there.”

https://time.com/collection/longevity-leaders/2026/nir-barzilai/


ending on beauty:

BACKSTITCH

In this pine village time’s so slow
that I permit myself to sew —
a patient stitch that imitates 
the over-and-over 
of a sewing machine.

What luxury, my hand my own
sewing machine, dipping back 
before moving forward —
stitching the moment that has passed 
to the moment that is passing now.

It’s backstitch, a friend explains.  
Thirty years I’ve worked that stitch
without knowing its name.
I learned to sew long ago, 
in a faraway language — 

silence and I in mortal race
to see who’ll say it first:
in sun-flood of a California summer
stitching to where the past and now
fall together in seamless snow.

~ Oriana