Dracula parrot, New Guinea
*
RETURN TO KOLUSZKI
If there is an afterlife, there will be
no angels. Winged desire will return
to Koluszki, Skierniewice,
towns I never knew
except as train stations —
yet it seems I stood forever
in the Market Square at noon
on brick pavement smooth as bones
turned into an alphabet.
Meanwhile scattered in space-time,
memory’s mass grave,
it’s my sweet abusive lover
speaking his last words:
To succeed, you must be willing
to wear uncomfortable clothes —
but before he pulls the trigger,
turns and whispers to me:
Remember only the beauty.
And Linda in a halo of drizzle
shouts at the landing jets,
Keep your nose up! On white
crematorium smoke
she rides into the arms of fog.
I stand in the medieval breeze
under the faded sign:
Let us build Socialism.
We few, we happy few
who have danced to our own
music, even on the floor of hell.
It’s all grace, Linda sings
from cathedral clouds,
and Kafka has beautiful hands
when he gestures like rain:
There are only miracles.
Let us ring all the bells,
let us hold a grand ball
at the railway station.
But now for eternity I stand
a few steps
beyond the known,
feeding crumbs of my sou
to the insatiable angels.
~ Oriana
**
Growing up in Poland, I traveled a lot by train, and because of that I frequently had a stop at the little town of Koluszki [Ko-LOOSH-key] where a lot of railroad tracks converged, and the station building was fairly large and impressive. Koluszki happens to be more or less the geographical center of Poland.
It seems that I knew the name Koluszki already in childhood. If you had to go anywhere, you needed to via Koluszki. Now I can imagine myself on my deathbed, in my delirium whispering Koluszki — and that train going nowhere, like the letters to the dead.
*
THE FRIENDSHIP AND RIVALRY OF PLATH AND SEXTON
In 1950s America, women were not supposed to be ambitious. When Sylvia Plath graduated from Smith College in 1955, her commencement speaker, Adlai Stevenson, praised the female graduates and pronounced the purpose of their education was so they could be entertaining and well-informed wives when their husbands returned home from work.
The postwar ideals of domesticity, the nuclear family, and the white middle-class woman who stayed at home dominated American thought until the mid-1960s. For those with enough privilege, a woman’s place was ensuring that a strong family unit would mean a strong, united society. Women were respected for not pursuing their own careers or ambitions. So, they had a lot to look forward to then.
Six years after graduation, when she was writing The Bell Jar, Plath satirized this viewpoint with the memorable lines: “What a man is is an arrow into the future, and what a woman is is the place the arrow shoots off from.” But subversively, Plath’s narrator, the sassy and wry Esther Greenwood, declared, “The trouble was, I hated the idea of serving men in any way.”
Far from planning to be a well-informed and interesting wife, Plath’s protagonist wanted an ambitious and varied future on her own terms. She rejected gendered double standards in all their forms, declaring that if men could do what they wanted and have sex with whom they wanted, so could she. One can only imagine how men must have withered beneath her gaze. Upon her first glimpse of male genitalia, Esther Greenwood pondered, “The only thing I could think of was turkey neck and turkey gizzards and I felt very depressed.” (Hetero)sexual liberation had its drawbacks.
In 1959, when Anne Sexton won a fellowship to study poetry under the greatly respected American poet Theodore Roethke, she wrote sarcastically to her poet friend Carolyn Kizer that he probably wouldn’t like her work and she’d be left sobbing in her “cave of womanhood.” More seriously, though, Sexton described the frustration of “kicking at the door of fame that men run and own and won’t give us the password for.”
But in 1950s America, Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton met for the first time. Both were emerging poets, and both were hugely ambitious women in a cultural moment that did not know how to deal with ambitious women. They realized that to pursue their desire to be writers would require determination, energy, and resilience. Operating in a male-dominated discipline was not easy, and their rebellion against the status quo seethed just below the surface.
Curiously, Plath and Sexton both grew up in Wellesley, a suburb of Boston, but never met during their teenage years. When their paths did finally cross, Plath was 26 and Sexton was 30. Their meeting was dramatic and literary, in a writing workshop at Boston University run by the well-known poet Robert Lowell.
Throughout the spring of 1959, on a Tuesday afternoon between 2 and 4 p.m., Plath and Sexton shared the same seminar space, room 222 at 236 Bay State Road. This room still exists today: tiny, with creaking wooden floors, a book-lined wall, and three airy windows offering a glimpse of the Charles River. It is a space that seems too small to have housed the personalities of Lowell, Sexton, and Plath. Sexton described it as “a dismal room the shape of a shoe box. It was a bleak spot, as if it had been forgotten for years, like the spinning room in Sleeping Beauty’s castle.”
The two women spent hours reading their poems, listening to about 18 other students, and taking advice from Lowell about what they were working on. The atmosphere was mostly awkward silences, slight terror at having their poems chosen for discussion, and equal terror at having them ignored. Poet Kathleen Spivack, who attended these classes as an undergraduate student, wrote, “The experience of being there was nerve-racking.”
Lowell dominated with one question he repeated again and again, “But what does the poem really mean?” Often long, uncomfortable silences would follow, and students would make embarrassed eye contact with each other or shift nervously in their seats. Sometimes, for Sexton, the silences would get too much “so I act like a bitch… [H]e will be dissecting some great poem and will say ‘Why is this line so good. What makes it good?’ and there is total silence. Everyone afraid to speak. And finally, because I can stand it no longer, I speak up saying, ‘I don’t think it’s so good at all. You would never allow us sloppy language like that.’”
Students also observed Lowell’s moods and manic depression with some alarm, noticing how during certain seminars he simply seemed, in Sexton’s words, “so gracefully insane.” Insomuch as he was a brilliant poet-critic, he could be distracted and vague, and would become increasingly obsessed with the same point during his manic phases. He could lash out at students if they said the wrong thing or irritated him. One April afternoon, he was so agitated that they became convinced he was about to throw himself out the window. In fact, immediately after the class, he was admitted to McLean Hospital on the outskirts of Boston, where Plath had already been a patient and Sexton would eventually become one.
Although during these sessions Plath and Sexton tentatively circled each other, Lowell finally paired them up. Perhaps he saw a similarity that neither woman could see. Perhaps he saw thematic connections in their work. Or maybe it was just chance. Whatever it was, the two women were then connected and forced to work together, and from this point on their friendship took a different turn.
Plath had a grudging respect for Sexton and was ambivalent in her praise. Her journal notes that Lowell had “set me up with Ann [sic] Sexton, an honor, I suppose. Well about time. She has very good things, and they get better, though there is a lot of loose stuff.”
Sexton, on the other hand, was keen to indicate that she was the trailblazer whom Plath, and other poets, followed: “She heard, and George Starbuck heard, that I was auditing a class at Boston University given by Robert Lowell. They kind of followed me in…”
What Sexton’s casual claim overlooks was her insecurity and fear at asking to be admitted. Her exchange of letters with Robert Lowell reveal a nervous, apologetic-sounding Sexton admitting that she is not a graduate, has not been to college, and has been writing for only a year. Included with the letter are manuscripts of “The Musicians,” “Consorting with Angels,” “Man and Wife,” and “Mother and Jack and the Rain.” Lowell responded warmly, assuring Sexton that of course she qualified for the course and that he had read her poems with admiration and envy. An elated Sexton replied, saying she planned to frame his letter and would require no further praise from anyone for “possibly a month.”
As with all small literary circles there was competition and jealousy among the same people applying for the same prizes, fellowships, and publishing opportunities. Literary life in the cobbled streets of the Beacon Hill area of Boston brimmed with poets: Plath, Sexton, Lowell, Starbuck, Ted Hughes, Adrienne Rich, and W. S. Merwin. Plath immediately felt direct competition and rivalry over awards such as the Yale Series of Younger Poets prize, an award she coveted (but much to her fury finally went to George Starbuck).
Students who audited Lowell’s class recalled the polar differences between Sexton and Plath, who each in her own way created an atmosphere of awe. Sexton was often late, all breezy and open, jangling with jewelry, wearing brightly printed dresses and glamorous hairstyles, and chain-smoking. According to Spivack, Sexton was a soft presence in the class, observing keenly with her green eyes behind cigarette smoke. She used her shoe as an ashtray. Her late entrances were dramatic as she stood in the doorway, dropping books and papers and cigarette stubs, while the men in the class jumped to their feet and found her a seat. Her hands shook when she read her poems aloud.
Plath on the other hand was mostly silent and often turned up early. Spivack would find her already seated at the table when she arrived, astonishingly still and perfectly composed. Her pencil would be poised over a notebook, or she would be reading and paying no attention to the comings and goings, the chair scrapings and nervous coughing. Occasionally Spivack found Plath a little restless and preoccupied, pleasant but noncommittal, with an intent, unnerving stare.
In contrast to Sexton’s appearance, Plath wore her hair pulled severely into a bun and owned a range of sensible buttoned-up shirts and cardigans. Her camel hair coat would either be carefully folded over the back of her chair or wrapped around her shoulders. She mostly took the seat at the foot of the table, directly opposite Lowell, and was the only student there who was not out intellectualized by him. None of his obscure references were obscure to Plath; she was impeccably educated. When she did speak it was often to make a devastating comment about somebody else’s work, though she could be equally brilliant at analyzing structure, rhythms, and scanning.
Most students were afraid of her. While outwardly Plath seemed self-contained and critical, those sharing the room with her could not have known the doubt, agony, and longing she was pouring into her journals: “I have a vision of the poems I would write, but do not. When will they come?” she asked plaintively in March 1959.
At this early stage in their writing careers, both Sexton and Plath were married, seemingly living the conventional lifestyle expected of white, middle-class, heterosexual American women lucky enough to have a certain level of privilege. Sexton’s husband, Alfred Muller Sexton II, known as Kayo, worked in her family’s business selling wool samples. Plath’s husband, Ted Hughes, was an increasingly well-known poet whose success at that stage easily eclipsed Plath’s. But running alongside this surface acceptance of the dutiful housewife was an underlying rejection of suffocating gender roles and expectations.
Plath mostly vented these frustrations in her journals, complaining about herself, her husband, her writer’s block, and her fury at rejections and failed applications. Sexton took lovers, and in the spring of 1959 she began an affair with her classmate George Starbuck. He, too, was an emerging poet and a junior editor at the publishing house Houghton Mifflin. The poet-editor Peter Davison recalls
Starbuck being “all knees and elbows, tall as a crane with great shadows under his eyes, and a slow melancholy, throw-away manner of speaking…”
This affair developed under the watchful and disapproving eye of Plath, who decided the best way to deal with it was to turn it into a story: “Here is horror. And all the details.”
The affair was almost certainly sparked by the after-class drinking that Plath, Sexton, and Starbuck started soon after encountering one another. Following the seminar, the three of them would pile into the front seat of Sexton’s old Ford Saloon and drive through Boston to the Ritz-Carlton on the edge of the Public Garden. Here, Sexton would pull into a loading-only zone, yelling at bemused hotel workers, “It’s okay, because we are only going to get loaded!”
Then Starbuck would hold out his arms and Plath and Sexton would take one each and drink, in Sexton’s words, “three or four or two martinis” in the lounge bar of the hotel. Sexton recalled the hushed quiet, plush, dark-red carpeting, leather chairs, and white-coated waiters serving the best of Boston. The three young poets hoped they might be mistaken for Hollywood types with their books, poems, and fiery conversations.
The two women must have realized at this point the many ways in which they were linked and the sensibilities they shared. Poised at the magnificent door of the Ritz, it is tempting to look back through a ghostly history to imagine the conversations that must have taken place over martinis and free potato chips. Both women were demonstrative and enthusiastic talkers, becoming relaxed and louder as they drank more alcohol. If, as Sexton claimed, the conversations were fiery, they must have been talking about things that mattered to them. What might those topics have been? We get tantalizing glimpses and memories, details here and there from journals and letters.
Although they came from very different economic backgrounds, both women had overbearing and emotionally demanding mothers. From a young age, both were ambitious in a subversive gendered way, thinking and acting in a manner that was regarded as unusual for women at that time.
Neither accepted the double standards regarding sexual pleasure, relationships, marriage, children, and careers. They could only cope with domestic and social expectations if they gave priority to their own time and ambitions. Women were not supposed to even think this in 1950s America, nor were they supposed to leave their husbands waiting for them at home while they went out to drink martinis with friends and lovers in the middle of the afternoon.
Family, poetry, husbands, sex, and Boston gossip in general were all fascinating topics. But Plath and Sexton shared an experience that overshadowed all other conversations that took place at the Ritz bar: they had both survived suicide attempts and mental illness.
“We talked death with burned-up intensity,” said Sexton. Yes, they knew, in Sexton’s phrasing, that it was “sick,” but they felt death made them more real. Plath had survived a suicide attempt six years earlier when, at age 20, she hid away in a crawl space of the family home and took a large quantity of sleeping pills.
Although this was a determined effort to die, Plath took too many pills and vomited them back up. She gradually came to consciousness two days later with a nasty gash under her right eye where she had repeatedly banged her head on the concrete ground. Sexton had survived numerous suicide attempts, all overdoses, some more serious than others.
These death conversations were treated as scandalous gossip, swapping stories in loving detail under the mostly silent gaze of George Starbuck. “It is a wonder we didn’t depress George with our egocentricity,” wrote Sexton. Both women were seeing therapists, and Sexton was completely open about this. Her daughter Linda observed that her mother had no sense of privacy, so if death and suicide were on the table, it seems likely therapy would be too.
After their afternoon drinking at the Ritz, they would weave through the streets of Boston to the Waldorf Cafeteria on Tremont Street for a 70-cent dinner and then Sexton would drive to an evening appointment with her psychiatrist in the city. Plath was in weekly therapy sessions with Dr. Ruth Beuscher, who had treated her immediately following her suicide attempt in 1953.
Sexton recalled during these death-suicide talks that they would fix their eyes intently on each other, soaking up the gossip and the details while devouring dish after dish of free potato chips. Aware that this was unusual, that people could not understand the fascination, Sexton was always asked “Why, why?” She tried to answer in her poem “Wanting to Die.” “But suicides have a special language. / Like carpenters they want to know which tools. / They never ask why build.”
These strange conversations formed the basis of their brief but intense friendship, a friendship based on rivalry, respect, and admiration. Now, years later, the poets are long gone from the Ritz, and the martinis consumed. But the aftermath of those conversations ripple uneasily through time and space. This is partly because both poets trouble what society and culture does to women. Their voices disrupt dominant ideals as their poems tear apart unfaithful men, gender expectations, the difficulties of marriage, how it feels to be a mother, a woman, a woman who menstruates, suffers miscarriages, who enjoys masturbation and sex.
On those springtime Boston afternoons during their confessional drinking, Plath and Sexton were more radical than they realized. They began to pave the way for the rest of us. For although Sexton felt as though they were kicking at the door of fame waiting for men to share the password, in the end, the two poets kicked the door down anyway, no password needed, and found their own fame, on their own terms. We, at this later point in time, are lucky to see what is on the other side of that door.
https://lithub.com/on-the-friendship-and-rivalry-of-sylvia-plath-and-anne-sexton/
*
HOW TROTSKY AND STALIN HATED EACH OTHER
Perhaps it was the first time these two men met—in 1907, at the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party’s Fifth Party Congress in a damp, shabby church in London. Trotsky claimed later not to remember even seeing Stalin, who apparently remained mute for the whole three weeks of debates and arguments.
Trotsky was tall, with broad, muscular shoulders, a “great head,” abundant hair, and curiously small hands. He looked, at times, like a bird of prey: most of all because of his “mouth—big, crooked, biting. A frightful mouth.”
He was vain. There was something instinctively theatrical about him. He was always “calculating the effects of his gestures, his pauses and intonation.” He loved dressing up in gloves and shapely clothing—the things that the revolution he identified with so closely was supposed to be sweeping away.
He was clever, with an insatiable desire to exceed others. Even when he became one of the most infamous figures on the planet, he never quite stopped being a clever schoolboy desperate to show others how much he had learned.
Many thought he was the most dazzling speaker of his era. The kind of man who could make old, familiar ideas appear new and fresh. Even when he was wrong—and Trotsky was often wrong—he was still intoxicating. His arguments were original, surprising, and often brilliant. When he talked, his face lit up and his eyes flashed. Witnesses spoke wonderingly about his voice’s “electric crackle.”
And yet none of this would have mattered had he not married his fine words and fine gestures to immense courage and a queer instinct for those moments when history’s tectonic plates were shifting.
This precocious son of an illiterate Jewish farmer from an obscure part of what is now Ukraine, he emerged as a national figure during the revolution in 1905 that briefly shook the Russian Empire’s foundations. Somehow this shortsighted dandy who had never worked in a factory, nor spent a day in uniform, nor even studied at a university, found he could fire the imaginations and mirror the emotions of workers, soldiers, and students.
He was just twenty‑five, and yet, standing at the head of the St. Petersburg Soviet of Workers’ Deputies, he spoke with an authority that exceeded even that of the tzar. (When a gendarme tried to arrest Trotsky while he was in full flow, the young revolutionary rounded on the startled police officer: “Please don’t interfere with the work of the Soviet. If you wish to speak, kindly give your name and I will ask the assembly if they wish to hear you.”)
His glory was, of course, short‑lived. Prison, then exile, followed.
This was the second time he had been banished to Siberia. His earliest revolutionary activities, when he was still known as Lev Davidovich Bronstein, had been brought to a sharp halt by his arrest in 1898. He spent two years behind bars awaiting trial—during which he married his first wife, Aleksandra Sokolovskaya—before he was sentenced to four years in the farthest‑flung corner of the Russian Empire. He studied philosophy, had two daughters with Aleksandra, and then, in 1902, urged by his wife (“Go, a great future awaits you”), he escaped in a hay wagon.”
“In my hands, I had a copy of the Iliad in the Russian hexameter of Gnyeditch; in my pocket, a passport made out in the name of Trotsky, which I wrote in it at random, without even imagining that it would become my name for the rest of my life….Throughout the journey, the entire car full of passengers drank tea and ate cheap Siberian buns. I read the hexameters and dreamed of the life abroad. The escape proved to be quite without romantic glamor; it dissolved into nothing but an endless drinking of tea.”
One thing led to another and he found himself in London, where he met Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, a man whose respectable clothes, neat beard, and “strange, faun’s face” were scant disguise for the ruthless, uncompromising will to power that lay beneath. How, asked one of his political opponents, can you deal with a man who “for twenty‑four hours of the day is taken up with the revolution, who has no other thoughts but thoughts of the revolution, and who, even in his sleep, dreams of nothing but revolution?”
The party Lenin led, the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, was perhaps the most extreme of the many socialist groups formed in Russia during this period. They were “millenarian sectarians preparing for the apocalypse,” willing to sacrifice everything, willing to countenance any amount of bloodshed, if it meant they could depose the hated tzarist regime and completely transform society. Their ambitions were not limited to Russia. Revolution there would simply be the first act in the eventual, inevitable worldwide triumph of the working classes.
But although Trotsky would one day call Lenin the “greatest leader of the proletariat in the history of mankind,” for more than a decade, they both found themselves embroiled in the factional struggles that saw the party split into two warring sides: the Bolsheviks, who argued for a smaller, more tightly organized party; and the Mensheviks, who favored a looser organization.
Lenin led the Bolsheviks. Trotsky initially supported the Mensheviks, though later he adopted a more independent position, calling himself a “non‑factional social democrat.” This was not enough to save him from the rancor that surrounded these disputes. Lenin, whose gift for vituperation was unmatched, called Trotsky a “Little Judas,” a “scoundrel,” and a “swine.” Trotsky was just as vicious in return—abuse was a common currency in the incestuous world of exiled Russian revolutionaries; it was only years later that he came to regret his invective.
His second exile began with another daring escape that allowed him to rejoin the family he had started with Natalia Sedova, whom he had met in Paris in 1902. Over the next decade and a half, they moved through London, Vienna, Paris, Spain, and finally New York, where in February 1917 he learned of the uprising in Russia against the tzar. As fast as he could, he scrambled to return home.
*
Joseph Stalin was compact and ungainly, with a withered left arm and a pockmarked, sallow face whose expression told nothing of what he felt. His sunken feline eyes were honey‑colored most of the time but flashed a lupine yellow when angry. When he walked, it was with a limp; the second and third toes of his left foot had grown together. In meetings he spoke rarely and in a low, monotonous voice. Occasionally, his tone softened still further, and his Georgian accent emerged. At other times he simply smoked a Dunhill pipe packed with cigarette tobacco and doodled (phrases such as “Lenin‑teacher‑friend” or, as one foreign visitor noted, a drawing of wolves).
Melodramatic and vainglorious, moody and capricious, a fidgety, neurotic hypochondriac, Stalin was a bundle of appalling contradictions. He was a frustrated poet and a fine singer who destroyed every intimate relationship he entered. He possessed both an uncontrollable temper and extraordinary willpower. He was capable of bewildering recklessness and cold‑blooded displays of control.
Much of his behavior was possible because he despised pity, sympathy, mercy. Some people dated this rejection of ordinary human values to the death of his first wife. He had pointed at the coffin and said to a friend, “Soso, this creature softened my heart of stone; she died, and with her died—my last warm feelings for all human beings.” At this he moved his right hand to his heart: “It is all so desolate here inside, so inexpressibly desolate.”
It’s also possible his moral deformation occurred during his harsh childhood. On one of the very few visits he made to his mother in Georgia, Stalin asked her why she had beaten him so often. [Oriana: I read that it was his father, a violent alcoholic, who beat him.]
“That’s why you turned out so well” came the reply.
Nobody was better than Stalin, a man who read Machiavelli constantly, at spotting weakness in another person or institution. (He possessed an uncommon talent for snatching more from situations than they appeared to offer.) And nobody could sink their teeth so viciously into that soft spot, tearing and ripping until he had got exactly what he came for.
Stalin was an exceptional student who might have become a priest, but instead ended up as a gangster‑revolutionary. Like Trotsky, he had come from one of the far corners of the Russian Empire—in his case, Georgia. But he had traveled little and felt uncomfortable among the cosmopolitan exiles who made up much of the party. He loathed the way they talked, the jokes they told; he loathed émigré life, foreign countries, the intelligentsia—all the things that Trotsky embodied.
The two men felt an immediate and almost physical revulsion for each other. Stalin hated Trotsky’s delicately balanced pince‑nez and sweep of dark, glossy hair, his self‑confidence, eloquence, and authority. Trotsky was repulsed by the Georgian’s pockmarked face, his coarse manners, his provincialism.
Their paths crossed again—once they both returned to St. Petersburg in 1917 after the tzar had abdicated following the revolution in February of that year. Trotsky arrived in Russia on May 17, 1917. It was clear that his sympathies now lay with the Bolsheviks, who realized that the ferment into which Russia had been thrown offered them an unprecedented, perhaps unique, opportunity to establish, for the first time in history, a true workers’ state.
While the party’s leader, Lenin, was in exile in Finland and other Bolsheviks wavered just as it looked as if power were in their grasp, Trotsky was a force of nature: agitating, organizing, leading, doing everything he could to help prepare the coup that would allow the Bolsheviks to supplant the floundering liberal Provisional Government that had succeeded the monarchy. Then, on the night of October 25, 1917, with Lenin now back in St. Petersburg, the insurrection began. In the course of a little under twenty‑four hours, a handful of violent idealists seized control over an empire of millions of souls.
During these months, Trotsky and Stalin saw each other everywhere: at meetings, conferences. Stalin had obviously become an important figure—he was Lenin’s “wonderful Georgian”—and yet Trotsky appeared unable to see him as a personality in his own right. He might have registered the way Stalin’s cold eyes fixed on him each time they passed each other in a corridor, or he might have noticed Stalin sitting on the other side of the room, but Trotsky never seemed to recall if Stalin had even spoken. (Trotsky on Stalin’s revolutionary record: “The sum total of Koba’s revolutionary activities during the years of the First Revolution seems to be so inconsiderable that willy-nilly it gives rise to the question: is it possible that this was all?”)
Stalin was not just incensed by the way that this strutting peacock dismissed and disregarded him; he was jealous of how he himself had been supplanted in the Bolshevik firmament. By most measures, Stalin’s life was already a success. He had made an astounding journey from being the child of illiterate parents to thriving at the heart of a revolutionary government.
But it was Trotsky, not he, who emerged as a preeminent figure once the Bolsheviks were in power. It was Trotsky, who had been a Bolshevik for only a matter of months, who was seen as Lenin’s right‑hand man and likely successor. And with the onset of civil war—which pitched the Bolshevik Red Army against the White Army, a loose coalition of factions from across the political spectrum united only by their desire to thwart Lenin’s increasingly repressive regime—it was Trotsky who was made war commissar.
*
Trotsky welcomed the civil war that followed the Bolshevik coup in October 1917. He was intoxicated by the Bolshevik triumph, which he called “the festival of the oppressed.” His entire life had been devoted to an almost abstract idea of change. And now it had come. Despite the Soviet state’s parlous position, he was suffused with hope. A better future seemed to be just within reach. And his vision for this future was ecstatic: a universal order that would set the human spirit free.
In one celebrated passage, he talked lyrically of how human beings would change under socialism:
“Man will become incomparably stronger, more intelligent, more subtle. His body will be more harmonious, his movements more rhythmical, his voice more musical; the forms of daily existence will acquire a dynamic theatricality. The average human type will rise to the level of Aristotle, Goethe, Marx. It is above this ridge that new summits will rise.”
Every atom in his body was obsessed with revolution. There was nothing more important to him, nothing he believed that was not worth sacrificing to make it work. He once told a biographer that he and the party were perfectly happy to “burn several thousand Russians to a cinder in order to create a true Revolutionary American movement.” He meant it. Nothing, he said, was more humane in a revolution than the utmost ruthlessness.
And now a chance to show this ruthlessness had arrived. With victory, the Bolsheviks would be able to eliminate the nation’s exploiting classes once and for all. The jet‑black hair and lively bright blue eyes of the new war commissar appeared everywhere. He was carried in a train stuffed with weapons, uniforms, and felt boots. It had a printing press (occupying two carriages); a telegraph; radio and electric power stations; a library; a garage complete with trucks, cars, and a petrol tank; and a bath as well its own secretariat, team of agitators, and twelve‑man bodyguard (who, when not protecting Trotsky, looked out for food such as game, asparagus, and butter.) Over the course of the war, one of his companions estimated that they traveled the same distance as they would have if they had circled the world five times.
Just Trotsky’s presence at the front was sufficient to raise morale. Troops lined the route and greeted him with great cheers or renditions of “The Marseillaise.” [Oriana: I wonder if perhaps it was rather The International.] Clad head to toe in black leather, he would then proceed to act with extreme, flamboyant decision: setting up revolutionary tribunals to try turncoats; giving instant orders to repair supply problems; creating new divisions on the spot.
He was fond of rewarding those soldiers who distinguished themselves in battle with gifts such as watches, binoculars, telescopes, Finnish knives, pens, waterproof cloaks, and silver cigarette cases. Once, when in Bogorodskoe, he was presented with twenty men but found he had only eighteen gifts. With a flourish he gave one man his watch and another his Browning pistol.
There was another side to this largesse. One of the carriages on Trotsky’s train was set aside as a revolutionary tribunal to deal with deserters and cowards. It was suspected that some of those shot for treachery on Trotsky’s orders weren’t guilty. But that was not the point. The word “ruthlessly” appears with extreme regularity in his Red Army orders.
It was Trotsky—the man with the phenomenal cultural range and princelike bearing—who had argued, “We must rid ourselves once and for all of the Quaker‑Papist babble about the sanctity of life.”
It was Trotsky who ordered the slaughter of sailors from the Kronstadt naval base who had risen up against the Bolsheviks. These rebels, who Trotsky himself had once called the “adornment and pride of the revolution,” were disappointed by the way the Bolshevik government had diminished the civil rights of the working classes and become increasingly consumed by a mania for centralization and bureaucratization. This challenge could not be tolerated, so Trotsky sent sixty thousand troops from the Red Army to crush them. Revolutionary justice was applied without mercy.
It was Trotsky who, when faced with a peasant rebellion, approved of the measures introduced by the local commissars, which included the burning of insurgent villages, “the merciless execution of every single person who has taken direct or indirect part in the uprising,” and the execution of every fifth or tenth adult male inhabitant. “The nests of these dishonest traitors and betrayers must be destroyed,” he said. “These Cains must be exterminated.”
And it was Trotsky who, as much as any other leader, was intimately involved in the construction of the apparatus of terror—including helping to create the Soviet secret police, the Cheka (an abbreviation of the All‑Russian Extraordinary Commission, the forerunner of the NKVD)—that allowed the Communist Party to subjugate a population of millions. In a very profound sense, Trotsky combined what was most attractive and most repellent about Bolshevism.
*
The Civil War was an opportunity for Stalin too: it gave his desire for recrimination and revenge a physical form. He used his own authority to persecute Trotsky’s proxies. (At one time, he imprisoned four hundred of them in a barge moored on the Volga River—many starved or were shot or died when the barge sank. “Death solves all problems. No man, no problem,” Stalin said when he learned of the tragedy.) He placed articles filled with insinuations and crude exaggerations in Pravda, sent telegrams full of administrative slander, interfered with Trotsky’s orders, and tried to undermine his authority.
In response, Trotsky attempted several times to remove Stalin from any position with military responsibility, complaining to Lenin by effectively accusing Stalin of sabotage: “I consider Stalin’s [conduct] a most dangerous ulcer, worse than any treason or betrayal.”
Stalin was convinced that if Trotsky were to ever become the Bolsheviks’ leader, the revolution would be in mortal danger. But while Stalin identified Trotsky—the man he derided as an “operetta commander, a chatterbox, ha‑ha‑ha!”—as his main obstacle to securing power, once the ailing Lenin died, Trotsky remained insouciant. It was as if he could not believe his comrade could also be a threat. Trotsky was the man who had done more than almost anyone else both to help the Bolsheviks seize power and to protect their prize during the Russian Civil War. For this he was celebrated and vilified in equal measure; his notoriety stretched across continents. Trotsky did not see, until it was far too late, that his opponent was both stranger and more gifted than he thought possible.
https://lithub.com/how-trotsky-and-stalin-ruthless-in-their-own-ways-absolutely-hated-each-other/
*
WHY RUSSIA BANNED JEHOVA’S WITNESSES AND SCIENTOLOGY
J’s Witnesses and Scientologists — They have the inner discipline, motivation, sources of funding and opacity that match the way Lenin and comrades operated before the Communist power grab in 1917.
For the KGB alumni like President Putin and his Kremlin crew, this alone is enough to clamp down on them. If they can’t infiltrate the system like they did the established churches, they consider it a hostile actor.
Longer answer:
Once upon a time, a few of Lenin’s comrades decided to publicize the way they funded the revolution. A book was published, titled “The Techniques of the Clandestine Bolshevik Activity. A collection of articles and memoirs.”
Stalin was fresh in his role as Secretary General, and didn’t shoot the thing down in time. 2,500 copies were printed, and some even distributed. However, it didn’t take too many months before the title got classified for the rest of Soviet rule, and all public copies confiscated and destroyed.
Its contents give a general idea where the juice of revolutionary effort came from. Once the Communists grabbed power, they knew exactly what to look for to prevent enemies from doing to them the same they did to old Russia. The KGB was tasked to permanently scan the terrain for anything reminding of the M.O. described in this book.
The KGB’s proud successor, Russia’s FSB got enough enough resources to go on ferreting out anyone quietly planning to take President Putin’s place. Especially after his shock of seeing Qaddafi's inglorious end, organizations like Jehovah's Witnesses didn’t have much chance. ~ Quora
*
WAS THE SOVIET UNION WORSE THAN TZARIST RUSSIA?
Soviet destruction of life was far graver than anything under Tsarism.
Bolshevism is one of the most sinister criminal enterprises in history. The magnitude of violence unleashed by those terrorists knows almost no parallel.
Those who excuse the violence of Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky, Jospeh Stalin, Felix Dzerzhinsky, Yakov Sverdlov and many others are either ignorant or ideologically poisoned.
During the first year of Bolshevik terror in 1918, more people were murdered under Lenin and Trotsky’s orders than political murders from over a century of Tsarism. Really think about that. Lenin and Trotsky eclipsed a whole century of political murder in just a year.
Trotsky even wrote a pamphlet in 1918 which justified this very process of extrajudicial murder. He entitled it Terrorism and Communism and it explicitly defended revolutionary terror. In other words, Trotsky believed mass murder was perfectly acceptable to such an extent that he wrote an essay about it and publicly championed this position.
Trotsky in Terrorism and Communism (1918)
"To make the individual sacred we must destroy the social order which crucifies him. And this problem can only be solved by blood and iron."
Trotsky oversaw political executions as leader of the Military Revolutionary Committee and later became the mastermind for the Red Army and Bolshevik brigades. He put his essay into practice.
The wider apparatus of Bolshevik terror collaborated with this theater of blood. In the Urals, Yakov Sverdlov organized the ruthless murder of the Romanov family. They were gunned down like stray animals in a basement with some children shot multiple times. Remember there are scores of historians today who justify the Bolshevik regime. They are justifying this murderous savagery.
Lenin justified the Red Terror and ordered his party apparatus to begin the mass extermination of political and economic rivals. He oversaw the destruction of any democracy and crushed all opposition to him even within leftist and socialist ranks.
Vladimir Lenin’s speech at the Third All‑Russia Congress of Soviets of Workers, Soldiers and Peasant’s Deputies on 24 January 1918:
"Not a single problem of the class struggle has ever been solved in history except by violence. When violence is exercised by the working people, by the mass of exploited against the exploiters — then we are for it!"
Following Lenin’s direct orders and his ideology, the Cheka rampaged through Russia and murdered an extraordinary number of people. This included those who simply did not want to comply with Bolshevism. Those who could escape fled for their lives.
The Cheka was organized by Felix Dzerzhinsky, who was notable for surpassing Lenin in ruthlessness. He permitted torture and routine violence against prisoners before shooting them. Up to 200,000 people could have been murdered by Dzerzhinsky’s Cheka from 1918 to 1922.
Dzerzhinsky was a sadist. Prisoners were bayoneted, drowned, shot and strangled. Many more were killed off by starvation or forced labor as the Bolsheviks took the whole of Russia.
Felix Dzerzhinsky in Novaya Zhizn on 14 July 1918:
"We stand for organized terror — this should be frankly admitted. Terror is an absolute necessity during times of revolution. Our aim is to fight against the enemies of the Soviet Government and of the new order of life. We judge quickly. In most cases only a day passes between the apprehension of the criminal and his sentence. When confronted with evidence criminals in almost every case confess; and what argument can have greater weight than a criminal's own confession."
By the end of the Russian Civil War that was instigated by the Bolsheviks, about seven to twelve million people had perished. Not all of these deaths were just due to the Bolsheviks, but responsibility falls on their shoulders. They decided to destroy any chance of democracy. Russia was covered in blood, ruin and misery as the territory was kidnapped by gangsters.
These gangsters plotted to undo the system of land distribution to the peasants brought in by Alexander II during the 1850s and 1860s when the serfs were emancipated. Whilst peasants wanted more land and did not like the holdings they were given, the Bolsheviks literally stole all their land and handed it over to the Bolshevik government.
From the late 1920s, the peasantry of the Russian Empire were turned back into serfs. They had very little private property, couldn’t properly travel and didn’t even have the right to eat their own food. Whatever injustice took place under Tzarism, it was exacerbated to hellish degrees by Bolshevism. The forced collectivization of Eurasia was one of the most violent acts of history.
Every complaint against Tzarism by its opponents were worsened by the Bolsheviks. During the process of forced collectivization in Kazakhstan, the native peasantry were stripped of their property and it was all handed over to Moscow’s domination.
From 1928 until 1933, about 1.5 million native Kazakhs died which was about 40% of their population. Few other populations have been wiped out to such degrees. This is about the same percentage of Jewish people from the world population that were murdered by Hitler in a similar timeframe.
Stalin oversaw the forced collectivization of land across the Russian Empire. He saw this as the enactment of communism and comprehended it as a revolutionary policy. Stalin aimed to crush private property and destroy small scale profiteering. He denounced those who kept agricultural profit as Kulaks who were to be liquidated. This terror blighted millions of ordinary Russians and many other nationalities of the territory.
The bread and butter of this policy was endorsed by the Bolshevik machine, especially Leon Trotsky who fell out with Lenin in the 1920s only because of the privatization policy (NEP) that Lenin pushed through to prevent peasant uprisings against Bolshevism. Trotsky condemned Lenin’s ideological pragmatism and Stalin ultimately reversed it.
Stalin was ideologically communist and saw the implementation of collectivization in the Russian Empire as literal communist policy. Most apologists of Bolshevism say that he departed from communism, but Stalin saw the whole Russian Empire as a worldwide area with cultures, countries and languages that were to be communized.
Stalin’s falling out with Trotsky had almost nothing to do with ideology because both of them agreed on so much. It was far more about personalities. Those who argue otherwise are trying to exonerate Trotsky and the Bolshevik or communist project. Don’t let them get away with lies.
The destruction of Kazakhstan by Stalin and the Bolshevik Party appears as a footnote in most retellings of Soviet history, but it was repeated across the Eurasian landmass with different ethnicities and peoples. In Ukraine, the Holodomor was another demonic episode of mass death resulting from Stalin’s collectivization policies and the terror of the NVKD.
Estimates put the total death figure at over 7 million Ukrainians. That was anywhere from 10-15% of that populated agricultural region. Soviet authorities kidnapped the grain of Ukrainian farmers and peasants, threatening them with execution if they even took a handful to eat.
Peasants were often denounced as hoarders of grain as their bodies broke down from starvation. Stalin even championed a law which permitted the execution of children who pocketed grain. If they were not executed, Ukrainians starved to death in millions. Some ate grass, others ate dead bodies. Look up photographs because they are too violent to include here.
In total, millions of innocent men, women and children perished during Bolshevik terror. They were murdered, starved to death or whipped into the grave. Loyalists to the party were killed without trial. Liberals were shot and many others fled for their lives. Some villains like Lazar Kaganovich who helped orchestrate this terror from the very beginning escaped all justice.
Bolshevism remains evil in how its enterprise was carried out from its beginning to end. It did not believe in the fundamental dignity of human life. The terror unleashed by that criminal organization ranks it as one of the most despicable ideologies in history.
As a landmass groaned in blood and terror, Bolshevik leaders squabbled over palatial apartments or got drunk at buffets of vintage wine, vodka and caviar. Bolshevik terrorists even allied with Nazism and carved up Poland together. Stalin joined forces with Nazism, but had the audacity to exterminate his own generals for allegedly being fascists.
Bolshevism surpassed the terror of Tzarism by magnitudes. There is no other example of depravity from Tzarism which equals anything unleashed by the Bolsheviks.
~ Jack, Quora
Baruch Cohen:
Tzarist Russia — 5000 political prisoners.
Stalin USSR — 1 million 500 thousand political prisoners.
George Esson:
My great grandfather was deemed a kulak and was brutally killed for that in 1929. He was kulak because (as per my grandmother — his daughter’s — recollection) he had two goats and ten chickens. Today I am making in one day more than the value of the entire possessions of my great grandfather were, yet he was kulak who deserved to be killed.
Stalin and his propaganda officially stated that joining collective farm was voluntary endeavor. That is the reason my great grandfather refused to give his 10 chickens and two goats to the collective farm they were starting nearby. For that he was deemed kulak, with all the described above consequences. That Stalin’s double speak, officially it is voluntary, in reality not, actually adds to brutality of the whole thing.
And yes it was sadistic. My great grandfather was killed by the blow of his own axe into his head. The entire village including his daughter — my grandmother — she was 15 at a time — were forced to watch.
*********
There are no innocent people, only those who were badly interrogated. ~ Felix Dzerzhinski
**********
A RETIRED RUSSIAN GENERAL GIVES HIS ASSESSMENT OF PUTIN
What happens when even Russia’s own generals stop believing the story?
Retired general Leonid Ivashov watched Vladimir Putin’s New Year address and delivered a brutal assessment of Russia’s reality. He said he saw no leader, no commander, and no defender of the people. Only a man living in a fairy tale, while ordinary Russians struggle to survive on about 16,000 rubles a month.
Ivashov opposed the invasion of Ukraine from the very beginning, and says the last four years have proven his warnings were right. According to him, Russia has failed at every level of the war. No tactical or operational successes, and total strategic defeat. He says industry has been destroyed, science is in crisis, and education has collapsed. Prices keep rising, making people poorer by the day. Healthcare is falling apart, with regions cutting medical spending. Food quality is declining, flooded with palm oil and increasingly unsafe.
On demographics, he is even harsher. Ivashov says Russia’s only global “leadership” is in population decline. Men are disappearing rapidly, and the war is only speeding it up.
He also rejects the idea that Russia has real allies. North Korea and Belarus, he says, only drain resources. China is not an ally at all, just a Kremlin myth. His final warning is stark. A strategic failure in Ukraine, he says, could lead to the collapse of Russia itself. ~ Quora, February 9, 2026
*
WHY WERE HITLER’S GENERALS SO ANGRY AFTER THE BATTLE OF KURSK
The battle of Kursk was when Hitler's generals lost faith in him. Before it began, high-level commanders such as Manstein and Kluge desired the striking of the Soviet lines as soon as possible in March 1943. They believed that the Soviets were still weak. Hitler did not listen. He waited many months as he wanted more Panther and Tiger tanks. That wait was a big mistake.
From May onwards, German leaders were split into three angry camps. Manstein wished to attack now or not at all. Other leaders, such as General Model and tank expert Guderian wanted to annul the plan. They saw the Soviets had built huge walls, had deep trenches, and had lots of mines. Even when his staff told him to stop in June, Hitler fought through.
When the attack began on July 5, it was little more than a suicide mission. In the north, the German army became stuck almost immediately. In the south Manstein's SS tank units fought through some of the toughest defenses ever. By July 12 they arrived at a place called Prokhorovka. Manstein believed that he had got the worst over with and was ready to wage battle against Soviet tanks in open ground.
Then Hitler suddenly cancelled the entire mission for fear of allied troops landing in Italy. Manstein was furious. He begged to keep fighting a few more days for a win, Hitler had said no. 70% of the German tanks were wasted for nothing.
After Kursk, Hitler gave up listening to his experts and the German army never again had the strength to attack.
~ Ahmed Tareen, Quora
Frabncis Deighan:
It seems to me that the German Generals actually wanted to straighten the frontlines and pull back to more defensible positions, rearm and reorganize the entire Eastern army for a major attack the following year. At the very least, just straighten the line and avoid Kursk altogether.
But, because Hitler didn't get into art school, he forced a completely hopeless attack on a superior force in prepared defensive positions.
David Renddahl:
Manstein was a fool to think he had the momentum to continue. After breaking through the first defensive line there was not just a second line behind that, but the southern Red Army reserves: 1.2 million men to Manstein’s 200,000, 2,500 tanks to Manstein’s 250, 13,000 artillery pieces to Manstein’s couple hundred — all fresh, all fully supplied, all ready to launch the Belgorod-Kharkov operation.
The Red Army’s Orel offensive in the north was fixing any help from that direction, Manstein was on his own having pled with Hitler to continue to Prokhorovka where he wasted his last mobile reserves.
I know what he says in his memoirs, but if he genuinely thought he had the southern Red Army groups on the ropes in late July he was mad.
Kenneth Schaaf:
I fear our own mistakes more than machinations of the enemy. ~ Pericles.
So just imagine Nato now getting into a serious military situation.
*
DIMA VOROBIEV EXPLAINS ONCE AGAIN THE RUSSIAN NOSTALGIA FOR THE SOVIET UNION
We had a lot of colonies and friends around the edge, had a better army, looked much bigger on the map, and felt safer. We want it back.
Everyone was younger back then. Being young is great, just ask us old people. And if you ask the young, they tell you fantasy beats the present reality any day, hands down.
We prefer to be like this (“Youth, go for knowledge!”) (Oriana: "Pursue knowledge" would be a more idiomatic translation.)
*
SECOND LIEUTENANT HIROO ONODA KEPT FIGHTING WW2 UNTIL 1974
To understand how Second Lieutenant Hiroo Onoda held out on Lubang Island until 1974, you have to realize that he wasn't simply "lost" or hiding in fear. He was executing a mission.
Onoda was not a standard infantryman. He was an intelligence officer trained at the elite Nakano School, which specialized in commando warfare, subversion, and counter-intelligence. While most Japanese soldiers were taught that surrender was shameful and suicide was preferable to capture, Onoda was taught the opposite. His training dictated that he must stay alive at all costs, never take his own life, and continue to hamper the enemy until the Imperial Army returned.
When he was deployed to the Philippines in 1944, his commanding officer, Major Yoshimi Taniguchi, gave him a specific order that became the defining logic of his next three decades:
"It may take three years, it may take five, but whatever happens, we’ll come back for you. Until then, so long as you have one soldier, you are to continue to lead him."
Onoda took this literally. For 29 years, he didn't just survive; he waged a low-intensity guerilla war.’
One of the biggest misconceptions is that Onoda was a solitary hermit for 30 years. He initially led three other soldiers. Together, they formed a functioning military unit. They maintained their weapons, gathered intelligence on "enemy" movements (actually local police and farmers), and rotated campsites to avoid detection. This group dynamic helped reinforce their shared delusion that the war was still ongoing.
It wasn't until his last companion, Kinshichi Kozuka, was shot by police during a skirmish in 1972 that Onoda spent the final two years completely alone.
The psychology of denial
Onoda was discovered multiple times, in a sense. Search parties were sent, leaflets were dropped, and family members shouted into megaphones. However, Onoda’s intelligence training worked against him. He was trained to view information critically and suspect deception.
When he saw leaflets announcing the war's end, he analyzed the wording and concluded they were clever American propaganda.
When family photos were dropped, he believed the Americans had doctored them or coerced his family.
When he saw American jets flying overhead during the Korean and Vietnam wars, it confirmed his belief that the battle for East Asia was still raging. To him, the continuous military air traffic proved the war had never ended.
Survival skills
Practically, Onoda was a master of jungle survival. He kept his Arisaka rifle in working order for decades using stolen coconut oil and preserved his ammunition by only firing when necessary. He subsisted on stolen rice, bananas, and occasional cows slaughtered from local herds. He was a ghost on the island, killing an estimated 30 Filipinos and injuring many others over the years during skirmishes and raids, which he viewed as military operations against enemy collaborators.
The End
The U.S. military had long since stopped looking for him, assuming he was dead. It took a college dropout named Norio Suzuki to end the war. Suzuki traveled to the Philippines in 1974 with the stated goal of finding "Lieutenant Onoda, a panda, and the Abominable Snowman, in that order."
Suzuki found Onoda, but the soldier refused to go home. He insisted he could not leave his post without orders from a superior officer. Suzuki returned to Japan, located the now-elderly Major Taniguchi (who was working at a bookstore), and flew him to Lubang.
In March 1974, wearing his tattered uniform, Onoda stood at attention and listened as Taniguchi read the order to cease all combat operations. He wept. Only then did he hand over his rifle, 500 rounds of ammunition, and his sword, finally accepting that the war was over.
Canisfamiliaris:
This is why the Japanese lost: blind devotion to duty, endless useless Banzai charges, inability to use their initiative.
Pour Attitude:
Hiroo Onada was never punished for the murders of civilians in the Philippines. He was even given a pardon. President Ferdinand Marcos granted him immunity in 1974.
I never understood this. As was stated in the answer above, he was a highly trained intelligence officer who was engaged in constant surveillance, and whether or not he believed that the Philippines were under American occupation; and that the war continued, he most definitely had ample knowledge regarding the difference between combatants and civilians.
It is an interesting story, but he was, in fact, an unprosecuted war criminal.
Richard Banderis:
There was a Latvian who held out against the Soviets till ’85 where it was much colder. Google Latvian “Forest Brothers.”
Oriana:
These days there are so many AI-generated stories that one has to check additional sources. I did. Hiroo Onoda (1922-2014) was a real person. He wrote a book, No Surrender: My Thirty-Year War.
*
NURSES HELPING MOTHERS WITH NEWBORNS IN THE NETHERLANDS
All new mothers in the Netherlands have a legal right to "kraamzorg" – a unique form of maternity care in the days after they give birth. Here's how it transforms the "fourth trimester.”
New mum Caterina Yannicelli recalls feeling wholly unprepared for the arrival of her little one when she gave birth four weeks early by caesarean-section following a rare complication. "We wouldn't have even known how to set up the bed," she says. "We didn't know how to do anything.”
This was also the case for Elissa Fischel – she had a surprise home birth when her baby came several weeks earlier than expected. "I didn't know how to change a diaper [nappy]. The first time that I did it, I put it on backwards," says Fischel.
As any new parent knows, welcoming a baby into the world can be a time of immense joy, but also stress, sleep deprivation, leaking bodily fluids and an ever-growing list of conflicting advice.
It's no wonder then that many new mothers feel overwhelmed and alone postpartum. But Yannicelli and Fischel both benefited in ways many other parents do not – they gave birth to their babies in the Netherlands.
All new parents in this small European country receive the support of a trained professional who arrives shortly after birth. These are the Netherlands' "kraamverzorgenden" – maternity carers.
These trained maternity carers typically spend up to eight days in the new parents' home, helping with everything from doing the washing to spotting health issues early.
For Yannicelli, an American expat who was living in Amsterdam but is now back in the US, having the reassurance of a trained professional in her home made her feel more confident and secure. "It just felt like we weren't alone," she says.
Fischel felt the same. "It was really reassuring to just have somebody to ask questions to," she says.
All parents in the Netherlands are entitled to this personalized form of care. For those living elsewhere, turning to family, friends or the internet, the "Kraamzorg" service is an unheard of benefit. It is a unique form of care that those I spoke to for this piece believe helps parents and babies thrive.
"We give new parents a good start in their home environment," explains Wendy Olieman, a maternity carer from KraamZus, one of the organizations that provides care to new families. The magic of the role, she says, lies in the ability to transform a family's initial experience with a newborn "from what might feel chaotic to peace", and to help parents feel more confident. "We are the eyes and ears of the midwife and can identify problems early, because it doesn't always go smoothly.”
Parents are entitled to between 24 and 80 hours, typically spread over eight days. The service is largely covered by health insurance, but some policies require an additional fee of €5.70 (£5.00/$6.70) per hour. It's usually provided by private organizations and, as insurance is mandatory in the Netherlands, everyone is entitled to kraamzorg. The carers have a wide-ranging role, from domestic support to checking the wellbeing of the family. They can watch the baby so the new mother can rest, look after the baby's siblings and monitor the health of the new mother and child, such as checking stitches or providing breastfeeding support.
Fischel recalls feeling relieved that someone medically trained was readily available in her first week as a new mother. She was especially surprised by the practical support – her carer "did a ton of laundry", including items languishing at the bottom of the laundry basket. The kraamverzorgende would also cut up fresh fruit and prepare tea for Fishcel every morning. She even cleaned the toilet. Most of all, Fischel felt reassured that she could ask any questions as they came up.
Kraamverzorgenden will do other tasks, such as changing the bed sheets each day and light cleaning around the house. They will often provide a steady supply of hot drinks alongside "beschuit met muisjes", a traditional Dutch snack when a child is born. These crackers have blue or pink sugar and anise-flavored seeds on top. (My Dutch mother baffled our grocery delivery driver by offering him some of these when she brought them to the UK after my daughter was born. He seemed to enjoy them though.)
Wendy Aaij-Karuth, a mother of three, found the support for her last child so helpful that she cried when the carers left. She had two carers supporting her, since one was a trainee. "They really knew what needed to be done and made sure I got snacks before I could ask." They also cared for her older two children, allowing her and her partner to rest and bond with their newborn.
"We monitor everything, the mother's wellbeing, the baby's wellbeing," says Marie Claire de Ligt, a kraamverzorgende at Baby's en Zo who switched to this role two years ago after working as a nurse for two decades. "We explain feeding, we teach new parents how to hold a baby, how to change them and how to put them to bed safely.”
It would have been so much easier – and medically safer in my case due to a life-threatening C-section complication – if we had the help of a trained professional monitoring my health closely. Instead, I was bundled off into an ambulance for emergency surgery as my bewildered husband looked after our four-day-old daughter, who was still exclusively breastfed, alone in the waiting room. He had to hunt down formula and a bottle in the hospital in the middle of the night when she woke up howling and hungry.
Esther Feijen-de Jong, an associate professor in midwifery science at the University Medical Center Groningen in the Netherlands and a former midwife, says that kraamzorg can prevent serious issues from occurring. Carers can quickly notice if the baby shows signs of jaundice or is losing too much weight and not feeding well, which a new mother may not spot right away.
"If the baby's safety is at risk, we step in," says Sandra Leerves, a colleague of De Ligt. "I once had a case where the mother became unwell on day six and I called an ambulance. It turned out something serious was happening. The family was so grateful I was there.”
Preventive care
The postpartum phase can be intense and it can be hard for new mothers to monitor what is normal and what is routine. Many women tend to ignore their own physical complaints because they are so focused on their new baby, says Feijen-de Jong. A trained maternity carer can therefore catch issues before they get worse.
Fischel found this comforting: she had experienced a tear during childbirth, so her carer checked her stitches for signs of infection. Similarly, Frouke Engelaer, a mother of two and medical doctor, lost a lot of blood during her second birth so it was reassuring to have someone regularly check up on her.
Engelaer had planned a hospital birth but as labor progressed so quickly, she had a home birth instead. Her kraamverzorgende arrived in the middle of the night to help her get settled. "I've got great memories of that time," says Engelaer. "Everyone feels so insecure in the beginning, wondering am I doing it right, is there enough milk... all kind of small questions pop up in your mind and you’ve got somebody there who you can ask immediately and who can support you.”
The system is designed to facilitate a "smooth transition into motherhood", especially as it's such an "intense period, both mentally and physically", says Feijen-de Jong. One important goal of the care, she says, is for women to gain the confidence necessary to care for their newborns independently once their carer leaves.
As everyone's situation is unique, maternity carers must adapt to the needs of each family they support – and this can range from parents who have prepared for weeks, to extremely vulnerable families living in poverty. Low-income families can apply for benefits to cover the cost.
The kraamversorgende will help with the baby but also do other jobs around the house that new parents might not have time or the energy for.
Each kraamversorgende I spoke to mentions how they must act "like a chameleon" to fit in where needed. De Ligt laughs and says she has to quickly figure out where everyday items are stored, from cleaning supplies to cutlery, because new mothers may not themselves know what they need support with. She recalls how she recently entered a home where both parents wanted to sleep, so she figured out where the dishwasher and cleaning products were and made herself useful.
Whilst some people may welcome a stranger at home, others may find it intrusive at a time when they feel at their most vulnerable.
Yannicelli says her carer was very chatty, which she enjoyed, but recalls hearing how others sent theirs away early for being "too chatty". Engelaer also didn’t feel fully supported by her first kraamverzorgende, whose values didn’t align with her own. "For our second child I preferred somebody we felt really connected to.”
'Behind the door care’
Maternity carers are also in a unique position to be able to spot early warning signs of abuse, neglect, an unsafe environment or relationship stress. "You pick up on that. You can actually feel the tension in the household," says Olieman. "We are among the few professionals who get to step 'behind the front door' for several days in a row, which gives us a very clear picture of the family situation.”
She also monitors a mother's mood, specifically looking for signs of the "baby blues" or postnatal depression.
Leerves has direct experience of this – and explains that detecting issues early "can save a lot of care costs". If there are concerns – be it from domestic violence or poverty, she can help source additional support.
Feijen-de Jong recalls how, as a midwife, she has visited families who had no baby items or clothes. "We had to quickly arrange supplies and maternity care. As a team you can put the right help in place. This is one of the most beautiful parts of our system.”
Increased confidence
One in-depth study by medical doctor Lyzette Laureij features interviews with postpartum women and found that kraamzorg increases "parenting self-efficacy", that is, it makes parents feel more competent to handle all the challenges that come with caring for a newborn. One mother noted that she was "just as insecure" with her second child as her first and needed that "extra reassurance" to know she was doing a good job.
But there are challenges. Vulnerable women, including those from lower socioeconomic backgrounds, those who are victims of domestic violence or those with a history of drug or alcohol addiction often face additional health concerns yet are less likely to access healthcare in the first place. Despite the clear benefits of preventative healthcare, vulnerable women tend to use fewer hours of the care they are recommended, the report notes, with 5% using no postpartum care at all.
Due to the costs and labor shortages there is now extra scrutiny in the Netherlands on showing evidence of the benefits, says Feijen-de Jong, but this is difficult to track with data. What is clear though is that mothers in the Netherlands are more likely to have home births compared to other countries. About 16% of mothers have a home birth there, compared to about 1% in many neighboring countries, and evidence has shown that complications are lower among planned home births.
"We know from research that women have complaints for a long time after giving birth," says Feijen-de Jong. "If we can address things in the first week… they may have fewer long-term problems.”
The immediate impact of this care is obvious to the women I spoke to. Olieman too says her role therefore feels not only vital but extremely rewarding. She doesn't do it for the money, she says, "but for the differences we can make.”
Leerves and de Ligt agree. "You’re allowed into the most important moment of someone’s life and can support them. That’s so beautiful," says de Ligt. "Seeing families feel confident who started out insecure is fantastic.”
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20260220-the-nurses-caring-for-new-parents-in-the-netherlands
*
"One of the most surprising things in life is the sudden realization that one has become old." - Lev Trotsky
*
‘I SENSED AN ENORMOUS INNER DESOLATION’: THE DARKNESS BEHIND L.S. LOWRY’S CITY SCENES
The celebrated painter liked to call himself a simple man who created his work with simple materials. In 1957, he showed the BBC how he built up his pictures of industrial urban life from his imagination, and described the loneliness that informed them.
When Laurence Stephen Lowry died on 23 February 1976 at the age of 88, few people knew that he had led a double life as a full-time rent collector, even after his depictions of northern England's sooty industrial landscapes had made him one of Britain's most beloved artists. Success came to him late but he was determined not to let it change him, turning down a knighthood because he didn't want people to think he was too fancy. He left the bulk of his vast fortune to a young woman who, as a 13-year-old, had written to him asking for advice on becoming an artist.
In 1957, the BBC made a short documentary showing Lowry at his easel. In the film, he revealed his ways of working, his creative habits and why he painted his distinctive matchstick figures. "I see them like that so I paint them like that, that's all there is to it," he said. While he liked to describe himself as a simple man, the apparent naivety of his work was a mask that hid inner complexity and decades of deep artistic learning.
Lowry was aged 69 when the BBC film was shown, having retired from his day job five years earlier. Because he never made a profit from his paintings until he was 58, it's hardly surprising that he needed a steady income. His role involved trudging around the poorer areas of Salford and Manchester to pick up payments from tenants. These were the same pavements walked a century earlier by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, when the harsh industrial conditions helped shape their revolutionary ideas. Salford was also the Dirty Old Town of legend in Ewan MacColl's folk song made famous by the Dubliners and the Pogues.
But Lowry insisted he had no reason to focus on its gasworks walls and old canals, apart from there being "something about them that attracts me in the pictorial sense". He told the BBC: "I'm not a social reformer; I don't think there's any propaganda in my work. I just paint the scenes that I see." All he cared about was how to truthfully depict life in the shadows of England's austere factories, warehouses and mills.
How he has been misunderstood
The romantic origin story of how Lowry became an artist is that, one day in 1916, he missed his train. He told John Read, the maker of the BBC film, about how having found himself at a loose end in a Manchester suburb, he happened upon some streets of terraced houses at the foot of an immense mill. As he took in the scene, he was filled with the urge to paint it, and at that moment he decided to become an artist. When it emerged after his death that he had held down a day job for years, it led some critics to dismiss him as a so-called "Sunday painter". The truth is that he had studied painting and drawing for at least 20 years, taking classes at the Manchester Municipal and Salford Schools of Art.
Just as some of Picasso's work may look crude to the untutored eye, Lowry's pictures could seem naïve, but both artists had to first master the traditional rules before finding new ways to break them. Lowry bristled at being thought of as an amateur artist. One of his biggest inspirations was the painter Adolphe Valette, who turned up in Manchester in 1906 to teach art and introduce French Impressionism to the city. Valette's paintings of modern industrial life had an important influence on Lowry's subject matter and early style. While Lowry was a talented painter of landscapes, he produced fewer of them as time went on. Perhaps he felt that what he witnessed as a rent collector was more urgent and compelling.
Although Lowry is identified with Lancashire's industrial landscapes, his scenes were mostly drawn from his imagination rather than real life. "I start on an empty canvas and prefer to paint from my mind's eye," he said. The blank page held no terror for him. While he would have no preconceived notion of what to paint, he would begin by painting the buildings and the rest would suggest itself. "It sometimes comes very well and sometimes for no apparent reason, not at all well, but it could take a couple of years to paint a picture quite easily from start to finish. Of course, they're intricate pictures and they're full of figures and detail – it all takes balancing, which is not easy to do.”
"I'm a simple man," Lowry once said, "and I use simple materials: ivory black, vermilion, Prussian blue, yellow ochre, flake white, and mix them with no medium – that's all I ever use for my painting." Lowry did not believe in sitting around and waiting for inspiration to strike. In the 1957 short film, he said that painting was a habit, whether he was in the mood or not. He did not want his creativity to be clouded by overthinking. "I find that when I'm very anxious to do a thing well, I don't do it at all well, and when I don't seem to mind very much at all and nothing matters about it, it comes out all right," he said.
He would continue working steadily on the painting until he was satisfied he could do nothing more with it. He refused to be bound by precise notions of central composition and perspective, often stretching or compressing his buildings to heighten the bustle of his matchstick crowds. "After all, it's only a picture – it's all make-believe, it's not reality," he said.
Lowry struggled to sell his paintings for years – but they now fetch millions at auction
The BBC's short film adopted what has since become a familiar approach, blending Lowry's own voiceover with scenes of him at work. The footage was shot in Lowry's clock‑filled house in a leafy village near Manchester where he lived alone. Producer John Read later recalled: "In spite of his awkward figure, he had the dignity and the bearing of a gentleman. But when I saw him sitting in this room, staring into the fire… I sensed an enormous inner desolation in the man." An eternal observer of life, Lowry's work captured the melancholy of large crowds. "I'm bound to reflect myself in the figures – I'm a very lonely sort of person," he told the BBC.
The 'matchstick men' association
Lowry hid behind a down-to-earth facade, but this unpretentious attitude may have led some to dismiss his work as unskilled. Asked about why his pictures were filled with so many matchstick figures, he said he would begin with just a few but, "for the sake of design," by the end "you've got a picture full of people". In the 1957 film, he insisted he didn't mind that people called his figures matchstick men, but in later years, he came to resent this as a patronizing way to look at a trained artist's work.
Despite this, the idea struck a chord with the British record-buying public when two years after Lowry's death, musical duo Brian and Michael's tribute to the artist, Matchstalk Men and Matchstalk Cats and Dogs, topped the UK charts for three weeks. This sentimental one‑hit wonder, complete with children's choir and key change, includes a lyrical twist, as the line "Now he takes his brush and he waits outside them factory gates" becomes "pearly gate" in the final chorus.
In the same year that the BBC broadcast its short film, Lowry received a letter from 13-year-old Carol Ann Lowry who said that since they shared a surname, did he have any advice on how she could become an artist. He didn't reply, but turned up unannounced at her Rochdale home a few months later. After her initial alarm at this strange man on her doorstep, she would become a sort of adoptive goddaughter. When he died in February 1976 aged 88, the unmarried artist left the bulk of his fortune to her.
A few months after his death, the Royal Academy staged a retrospective exhibition of his work to great acclaim. In the exhibition catalogue, Poet Laureate Sir John Betjeman wrote that Lowry's collected works would dispel any idea of him as "just another self-taught 'primitive' with a passion for industrial archaeology". According to him, "All over his work broods a menacing melancholy. He is the painter of loneliness.”
While Lowry valued the recognition that his Royal Academy membership bestowed, he remained suspicious of the art establishment that it represented. The Queen tried to honor Lowry a record five times, including with an OBE in 1955, a CBE in 1961 and a knighthood in 1968, but he turned them all down. According to fellow artist Harold Riley, his friend told him that this was because he didn't want to change how people saw him, not because he had "anything against the system.”
LS Lowry: Going to work
Although he struggled to sell his paintings for years, they now fetch millions at auction. In 2024, Sunday Afternoon, a painting that he completed in the same year the BBC broadcast its short film, was sold for almost £6.3m ($8.5m). His 1953 painting Going to the Match went for even more, selling for £7.8m ($10.5m) two years earlier.
In 2000, the opening in Salford of the Lowry Centre confirmed his status as one of the city's favorite sons. Built as part of a project to renovate the old canal, the sleek £106m theatre and gallery complex has become one of the most visited attractions in the area. Today, Manchester and Salford bear little resemblance to the world LS Lowry once captured, yet the poetry he found in what he called the everyday "battle of life" continues to resonate with people.
https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20260220-the-darkness-behind-british-artist-ls-lowrys-famous-city-scenes
*
THE LOCHNAGAR CRATER
The Lochnagar Crater, the largest man-made crater in the world, caused by a single explosion during WW1.
The Lochnagar Crater in La Boisselle, France, is a massive WWI memorial crater created on July 1, 1916, by British forces during the Battle of the Somme. It is one of the largest craters made by man, measuring 30 meters deep and 100 meters across. It was formed by 60,000 lbs of explosives to destroy German lines. It was detonated at 7:28 a.m. on July 1, 1916, to mark the start of the Battle of the Somme.
*
GLOBAL WARMING AND THE TIPPING POINT(S)
Global warming is a slow process — but it suffers from one extremely severe problem.
Suppose you’re blindfolded and walking down a gentle downhill slope that leads to a 150 foot cliff…which is some uncertain distance away - could be 20 feet in front of you — could be 100 feet. You don’t know.
You can take a step forward — and nothing happens.
You can take another step forward — and nothing happens.
But if you keep taking a step forward — eventually (and VERY suddenly) you’ll fall to your death — and with little or no warning.
That is PRECISELY what’s going to happen to our climate.
We’re going to keep on taking another step — another half a degree up in temperature…and the idiots will keep making excuses about ice ages and plants growing better with more CO2 and on and on.
But there WILL come a day — when the ocean gets just a little bit TOO warm — and just a tiny bit TOO acidic — and the less tolerant species of algae will die. When that happens, the CO2 that they were pulling out of the air for us will remain in the air - and atmospheric CO2 will rise. That’ll make the oceans still warmer and still more acidic — causing still more tolerant algae to die as well. This process will spiral out of control in a way that’s completely unstoppable. Even if humanity instantly agrees to stop all fossil fuel usage — it’ll be too late — once you step off of that cliff — you’re going down.
If it was JUST that effect — we might have a chance to predict it. But it’s not:
As permafrost melts in the colder parts of the world, it’ll expose ancient peat-bog that’s been locked away for millions of years. That stuff will rot — and produce both CO2 and methane (which is a MUCH worse greenhouse gas). More CO2 and methane — more warming — more permafrost melts — and more peat bog is exposed. This is a different cliff to step off of.
Deep ocean “clathrates” are weird frothy ice deposits found in deep ocean water — it’s a mix of ice and methane bubbles. The quantities of this stuff in the deepest oceans is phenomenal. As the oceans warm, it’ll melt — releasing bubbles of methane — causing more warming - killing more algae, defrosting more peat bogs….
As snow an ice retreats in warmer weather — shiny white surfaces of snow and ice are replaced by dirt and rock — which doesn’t reflect light as well. This traps heat — which…yeah - kills more algae, melts more permafrost, melts more clathrates.
As more CO2 goes into the air — more of it dissolves into the oceans — forming Carbonic Acid — which makes the water more acidic…and again…less algae…yadda yadda yadda,
That’s just a handful of these effects that are going to kick in. As soon as any one of them triggers — it’ll cut the time we have left before another triggers.
When these things happen - they’ll be utterly uncontrollable - and surprisingly fast.
Just like walking off of a cliff while blindfolded…except that there are a whole lot of cliff faces.
~ Steve Baker, Quora
John Fenn:
And the sad part is that we know how to stop this and start the healing. But we simply cannot cooperate with each other.
Andrew DdavuekL
And yet we won't make any “sudden changes” for fear of damaging the economy
Hunter Johnson:
We are at something like 10x the CO2 release rate during the great dying at the end of the Permian.
Not only will climate eventually reach a tipping point, ecosystems will as well. Right now it looks like house of cards time is inevitable.
I wish we had better leadership and people weren't so ignorant.
*
THE ENVIRONMENTAL COST OF WINTER OLYMPICS
Rivers drained dry to create artificial snow, a forest cut down for the bobsleigh track – IOC’s claims to prioritize sustainability at Milano Cortina exposed
On the foothills of the mountains, by the banks of the river in Cortina, there was a forest. It was full of tall larch trees. Arborists said the oldest of them had been there for 150 years and dendrologists that it was unique because it was unusual to find a monocultural forest growing at such a low altitude in the southern Alps.
The locals knew mostly it was the place where the old wooden bobsleigh run was, where you went on your walks in summer or autumn, or when you wanted to play tennis on the small courts built near the bottom. They called it the Bosco di Ronco and it isn’t there any more.
Sustainability is the great lie of these Games. It was written all through the bid document and the International Olympic Committee has slapped it across all manner of promotional literature.
“For the IOC, for sport in general, sustainability is a priority,” said the executive director of the Olympic Games, Christophe Dubi. If you want more details, the IOC can give you any amount of information about its low carbon transport plan and how it is only using recyclable cutlery and linen tablecloths. It will tell you over and again that 85% of the venues being used at this Olympics already existed or are temporary.
What it won’t say is the vast majority of those existing venues needed to be demolished and rebuilt with much larger footprints; that, for example, they decided to gouge a new snowpark out of a mountain in Livigno even though they already had one at Trepalle in the adjacent valley. Or that in Predazzo the ski jumps were rebuilt from scratch a few hundred meters across from the existing ones. Or to make room for their new bobsleigh track they had to cut down the Bosco di Ronco, so that, if you go there now, all you see is 2km of steel and concrete.
It won’t say, either, that the climate crisis has caused the average February temperatures in Cortina to rise by 3.6C since the Olympics were last in Italy, 20 years ago, that the average February snow depth has fallen by 15cm in the past 50 years and that they had to build four high altitude reservoirs to provide the 2.3m cubic meters of artificial snow they need to fluff up the ski runs to the required depth of 1.5m. Or that most of the water being used to fill those reservoirs has to be pumped all the way up the mountains after being extracted from the local rivers, which are already in drought for large parts of the year.
It probably won’t mention that out of the total spend on the 98 construction projects, 13% went on things essential to the staging of the Games and that the remaining 87% is on infrastructure works – roads, rails, car parks – most of which are not due to be built until the Olympics is over. Or that the Italian government waived the need for any Environmental Impact Assessment work to be done on 60% of these projects. Or that all this is happening in the middle of a Unesco world heritage site and one of the most fragile ecosystems on the planet.
“The Milano Cortina 2026 Winter Olympic Games were presented as ‘the Olympics of sustainability’,” says World Wildlife Fund Italia, “but this is not the case.”
It didn’t need to be like this. WWF Italia was one of a group of environmental organizations involved in discussions with the Italian Olympic Committee to work out what a more sustainable Games would look like. It felt compelled to walk away from them when it became clear the organizers were treating it as window dressing.
“In reality,” the WWF said, “there has been no real discussion, prompting the associations themselves to abandon the roundtable a year before the start of the Olympic Games.”
When they cut down the Bosco di Ronco, the Venetian cellist Mario Brunello came and played Camille Saint-Saëns’s The Swan among the fallen boughs. Luigi Casanova, a former forest ranger who is now a writer and activist, was there with him.
“You have to remember that in all these situations, the Italian environmental movement proposed alternative solutions,” Casanova says. “Less environmentally impactful, less costly, safe and socially beneficial to communities. The environmental and landscape impact of the Olympics will be paid for by those who follow us.”
Casanova, who has written two vital books on the environmental impact of the Olympics, describes the destruction of the forest as “the most striking example of the violence of these Olympics”, then says: “We have other Olympic sacrileges to list: the Socrepes cable car in Cortina, built on a moving landslide, the Olympic village in Cortina, 15 hectares [37 acres] of natural land destroyed for a village that will be dismantled, the village of Predazzo built at the confluence of two alluvial streams; the slopes of Bormio and Livigno, upgraded with the destruction of thousands of trees.
Not everyone agrees with him. Local business owners say they do not miss the forest and would rather have the business the bobsleigh track will bring in. The Winter Olympics have been held in Italy twice before, in 1956 and 2006, a bob track was built both times and both fell into disuse.
Their opinions reveal some the tension here, between the need to provide infrastructure that will support the local economy even while the construction of that infrastructure undermines the viability of the community.
Carmen de Jong, professor of hydrology at the University of Strasbourg, has been running a multi-year study on the environmental impact of the Winter Games, concentrating in particular on the crucial issue of the water supply. It is easy to forget from watching the pretty pictures on TV that these Games are not being held on real snow. It has been made from water taken from springs, torrents, valley rivers, dam reservoirs, drinking water networks, even groundwater that has to be pumped uphill and cooled before use.
“Four new reservoirs ‘had to be constructed’ to supply vast amounts of snow for only a few days of competition for the Olympic ski runs, half-pipe, and snow park,” she says. “In a frantic attempt to catch up the delay in reservoir construction, the organizers started pumping as much water as their infrastructure allowed from the already drought-stricken alpine rivers.”
According to De Jong’s analysis, they used temporary derogations to take three and five times the permitted water quantities from the Spöl river in Livigno and Boite river in Cortina, “and almost completely dried them up, resulting in fish death and acute pollution.
“Water reservoirs for creating artificial snow over ski runs in alpine ski resorts or Olympic venues are a clear sign of water scarcity and a cry for help in times of climate change.”
Spreading the Games across such a vast area has only multiplied the effect they are having on the environment already under immense stress. The Olympic imperative that every Games has to be newer, bigger and better than the one before makes the claim that this is a “sustainable Games” an insult to everyone playing and watching.
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2026/feb/22/the-great-olympic-lie-untold-story-of-winter-games-huge-environmental-impact
*
NEW UNDERSTANDING OF THE GIANT EASTER ISLANDS STATUES
But archaeologists and soil scientists studying the ancient Moai believe they’ve uncovered the meaning of the famous statues. Clues in nearby soils suggest the statues may have been placed there to celebrate the fertility of crops in the area.
For more than three decades, Jo Ann Van Tilburg, of the University of California, Los Angeles, has studied the origins of the Moai along with Rapanui artist Cristián Arévalo Pakarati and other members of the local community. They recruited soil scientist Sarah Sherwood, of the University of the South in Tennessee, to analyze the soil the base of two statues found peculiarly perched upright in the Rano Raraku quarry on the eastern part of the island, where most of the more than 1,000 Moai statues originated. (The scientists suspect that work in the quarry began around A.D. 1455.)
The team analyzed soils at the foot of two of the structures, which archaeologists believe were erected by or before A.D. 1510 to A.D. 1645, and found chemical evidence of common food crops. The soils revealed traces of foods like taro, banana, and sweet potato, according to research published in the Journal of Archaeological Science.
The findings suggest locals on the island may have actually utilized the quarry itself as a place to grow food.
“When we got the chemistry results back, I did a double take,” Sherwood said in a statement. Soils across much of Rapa Nui are in poor shape—either highly eroded or leeched of the vital nutrients that help plants grow. Analysis showed that soils within the quarry are far more fertile than previously thought, with plenty of water and elevated levels of elements like calcium and phosphorus, which are essential in increasing crop yields.
“This study radically alters the idea that all standing statues in Rano Raraku were simply awaiting transport out of the quarry,” Van Tilburg said in the same statement. “That is, these and probably other upright Moai in Rano Raraku were retained in place to ensure the sacred nature of the quarry itself. The Moai were central to the idea of fertility, and in Rapanui belief their presence here stimulated agricultural food production.”
Oriana:
Perhaps it's politically incorrect, but I much preferred the mysterious and almost early cubist look of the Easter Island "heads." As soon as I learned (was it two years ago?) that these were supposed to the guardians of fertility, I thought "How boring."
*
THE LOSS OF TECHNOLOGY WITH THE FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE
The most dramatic loss for the ordinary person wasn't a specific machine or a secret formula, but rather the catastrophic collapse of standardization and mass production.
If you were a peasant living in Britain or Northern Gaul around 350 AD, your quality of life was supported by a massive, interconnected global economy. You likely ate off high-quality, mass-produced ceramic plates imported from North Africa. You lived under a roof made of standardized fired clay tiles. You used metal tools made of iron smelted in industrial quantities.
By 500 AD, just a few generations later, those "everyday" technologies had vanished from the lives of ordinary people.
Here are the specific comforts that disappeared:
High-Quality Pottery (Terra Sigillata): This is the most visible archaeological evidence of the collapse. In the Roman period, even poor households possessed Terra Sigillata—glossy, red-slip, durable tableware produced in massive factories and shipped across the empire. It was hygienic and easy to clean. After the collapse, the trade networks that made shipping heavy ceramics profitable fell apart. People went back to using crude, locally made pottery that was porous, fragile, and hard to clean, or they reverted to using wood and leather, which rot and harbor bacteria.
Tiled Roofs: The Romans covered everything in ceramic tiles. They were heavy, waterproof, and, crucially, fireproof. To have a tiled roof, you need a nearby factory to fire them and a road network to transport them. When the economy collapsed, ordinary people lost access to fireproof roofing. Housing reverted to timber structures with thatched roofs, making catastrophic village fires a constant reality of daily life again.
The Hypocaust (and Public Hygiene): While the average peasant didn't have underfloor heating (hypocausts) in their own shack, they had access to it through public spaces. Roman towns were dotted with public baths that were affordable enough for almost everyone. These were marvels of hydraulic engineering and heating. When the Roman state could no longer maintain the aqueducts or pay for the massive amount of wood required to keep the fires burning, the baths went cold and then fell into ruin. The "technology" of being warm and clean in the winter was lost.
This sounds trivial, but it represents the loss of industrial scale. At the legionary fortress of Inchtuthil in Scotland, departing Romans buried 875,000 iron nails to keep them from enemies. Iron was that abundant. Later, in the post-Roman period, iron became precious. Buildings were no longer held together by iron nails but by wooden pegs and joinery. If a building burned down, people would sift through the ashes to recover the nails—something a Roman builder would have found absurd.
Literacy as a Utility: In the height of the Empire, literacy wasn't just for scholars; it was for soldiers, merchants, and tradesmen. Graffiti in Pompeii shows that regular people wrote jokes, insults, and shopping lists. This was possible because of the availability of cheap papyrus imported from Egypt. When the trade routes fractured, papyrus became rare in Europe. Writing shifted to parchment (animal skin), which was astronomically expensive. As a result, writing ceased to be an everyday tool for the commoner and became the guarded reserve of the church and elite administration.
The tragedy of the fall of Rome wasn't that people forgot how to make a tile or a good pot. The knowledge remained in pockets. What was lost was the economic complexity required to make those things cheap enough for ordinary people to afford.
When the safety of the seas and roads vanished, the cost of transport skyrocketed. A potter in Tunisia could no longer sell a bowl to a farmer in England for a few copper coins. The farmer had to make his own bowl, and the potter went out of business. The "technology" that was lost was the specialized, interconnected civilization itself.
Roman pottery
Pelsia Chen:
Standardization is a great achievement of humanity that always remains humble, easily taken for granted. Maybe that is why it is among the first things to disappear when society collapses.
*
HOW CHRISTIANS RECONCILE THE IDEA OF HAVING TO GIVE UP EVERYTHING, INCLUDING FAMILY AND WEALTH, TO TRULY FOLLOW JESUS
Materialism in Christianity is very recent. Although there have always been occasional fake preachers who only wanted an offering for his traveling show, the “prosperity gospel” sprang up in the televangelist era, starting in the 1980s.
Vows of poverty were very typical. Moneylending prohibitions kept Christians away from wealth.
You cannot serve both God and Money.
I have had a number of Christian friends make mean comments about our nice house. Yes. It is a nice house. But it is not our “idol” and we do not “serve” our house.
But no, you do not have to give up everything. You just need a humble attitude and you must not pursue wealth. You must not value even your own family above God. For example— if a family member won’t talk to you because of your faith, you do need to let it go. You would not give up your belief for family acceptance.
It is all about attitude, not about literalism. It is about being humble and not valuing financial status or the opinions of others above your faith journey.
I always raised my kids that way. But I also taught them academic stuff too much, because now they both have very lucrative careers and I kind of feel like I failed. Not failed in raising successful and good people, but that they value success too much. And they are somewhat critical of my choices, saying I should stop being a “martyr.” They don’t really understand my motivations because they grew up so differently and in a different time. So yes that makes me feel misunderstood. I am not a “martyr.” I am doing what I WANT to do. I am very stubborn with my personal beliefs and values.
If you put God first, it is only natural that money is not your first priority. But that doesn’t mean you should not have any wealth, just that you don’t pursue wealth for wealth’s sake. That means you should choose a useful profession, not just go for cash.
But yes, I completely condemn prosperity preachers. Their teaching is absolutely false. They have no shame.
~ Amy Chai, Quora
TC Quah:
In Christianity, success is defined as faithfully obeying God, fulfilling His specific purpose for your life, and bringing Him glory, rather than accumulating worldly wealth, status, or power. It is a relationship-driven, obedience-focused, and eternal mindset, centered on loving God and serving others.
Liang-Hai Sie:
As one following no belief/faith, I disagree, since I see no need nor benefit for obeying an imaginary upper being people often refer to as God, let alone serving them. In the past as you know this has been repeatedly abused by priests/ministers in cahoots with those in power so they both can continue being power, and keep the dumb masses compliant, among others by promising them a better life in the so called afterlife. For me a more humanistic world view prevails.
Mary Nelson:
After all, money is not the root of all evil. The love of money is. Pursuing money for the sake of money is wrong. Ending up with money while living a good successful life is not.
*
A DEADLY FUNGUS TURNS INTO AN ANTI-CANCER DRUG
Penn-led researchers have turned a deadly fungus into a potent cancer-fighting compound.
After isolating a new class of molecules from Aspergillus flavus, a toxic crop fungus linked to deaths in the excavations of ancient tombs, the researchers modified the chemicals and tested them against leukemia cells. The result? A promising cancer-killing compound that rivals FDA-approved drugs and opens up new frontiers in the discovery of more fungal medicines.
“Fungi gave us penicillin,” says Sherry Gao, Presidential Penn Compact Associate Professor in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering (CBE) and in Bioengineering (BE) and senior author of a new paper in Nature Chemical Biology on the findings. “These results show that many more medicines derived from natural products remain to be found.”
From Curse to Cure
A. flavus, named for its yellow spores, has long been a microbial villain. After archaeologists opened King Tutankhamun’s tomb in the 1920s, a series of untimely deaths among the excavation team fueled rumors of a pharaoh’s curse. Decades later, doctors theorized that fungal spores, dormant for millennia, could have played a role.
In the 1970s, a dozen scientists entered the tomb of Casimir IV in Poland. Within weeks, 10 of them died. Later investigations revealed the tomb contained A. flavus, whose toxins can lead to lung infections, especially in people with compromised immune systems.
Now, that same fungus is the unlikely source of a promising new cancer therapy.
A Rare Fungal Find
The therapy in question is a class of ribosomally synthesized and post-translationally modified peptides, or RiPPs, pronounced like the “rip” in a piece of fabric. The name refers to how the compound is produced — by the ribosome, a tiny cellular structure that makes proteins — and the fact that it is modified later, in this case, to enhance its cancer-killing properties.
“Purifying these chemicals is difficult,” says Qiuyue Nie, a postdoctoral fellow in CBE and the paper’s first author. While thousands of RiPPs have been identified in bacteria, only a handful have been found in fungi. In part, this is because past researchers misidentified fungal RiPPs as non-ribosomal peptides and had little understanding of how fungi created the molecules. “The synthesis of these compounds is complicated,” adds Nie. “But that’s also what gives them this remarkable bioactivity.”
Hunting for Chemicals
To find more fungal RiPPs, the researchers first scanned a dozen strains of Aspergillus, which previous research suggested might contain more of the chemicals.
By comparing chemicals produced by these strains with known RiPP building blocks, the researchers identified A. flavus as a promising candidate for further study.
Genetic analysis pointed to a particular protein in A. flavus as a source of fungal RiPPs. When the researchers turned the genes that create that protein off, the chemical markers indicating the presence of RiPPs also disappeared.
This novel approach — combining metabolic and genetic information — not only pinpointed the source of fungal RiPPs in A. flavus, but could be used to find more fungal RiPPs in the future.
A Potent New Medicine
After purifying four different RiPPs, the researchers found the molecules shared a unique structure of interlocking rings. The researchers named these molecules, which have never been previously described, after the fungus in which they were found: asperigimycins.
Even with no modification, when mixed with human cancer cells, asperigimycins demonstrated medical potential: two of the four variants had potent effects against leukemia cells.
Another variant, to which the researchers added a lipid, or fatty molecule, that is also found in the royal jelly that nourishes developing bees, performed as well as cytarabine and daunorubicin, two FDA-approved drugs that have been used for decades to treat leukemia.
Cracking the Code of Cell Entry
To understand why lipids enhanced asperigimycins’ potency, the researchers selectively turned genes on and off in the leukemia cells. One gene, SLC46A3, proved critical in allowing asperigimycins to enter leukemia cells in sufficient numbers.
That gene helps materials exit lysosomes, the tiny sacs that collect foreign materials entering human cells. “This gene acts like a gateway,” says Nie. “It doesn’t just help asperigimycins get into cells, it may also enable other ‘cyclic peptides’ to do the same.”
Like asperigimycins, those chemicals have medicinal properties — nearly two dozen cyclic peptides have received clinical approval since 2000 to treat diseases as varied as cancer and lupus — but many of them need modification to enter cells in sufficient quantities.
“Knowing that lipids can affect how this gene transports chemicals into cells gives us another tool for drug development,” says Nie.
Disrupting Cell Division
Through further experimentation, the researchers found that asperigimycins likely disrupt the process of cell division. “Cancer cells divide uncontrollably,” says Gao. “These compounds block the formation of microtubules, which are essential for cell division.”
Notably, the compounds had little to no effect on breast, liver or lung cancer cells — or a range of bacteria and fungi — suggesting asperigimycins’ disruptive effects are specific to certain types of cells, a critical feature for any future medication.
*
HOW CELLS AGE
Our DNA is copied every time a cell divides. The “parent” splits that double helix structure into two strips. Each strip is then used to build it’s other half — so now there are two “identical” double helix strands — one for the parent cell and one for the new copy of it.
However, the process is imperfect. When the strand is split in two — the very last piece is lost.
Every time a cell divides — the last bit of the DNA is lost…so as DNA gets copied — it gets shorter.
Fortunately — our DNA has a whole lot of “junk” DNA at each end — it doesn’t do anything. These are called “telomeres”.
As we age our cells divide to replace losses and also as we grow — and every time they do, the telomeres get shorter.
However, at some point in old age — we lose the last teleomere — and the DNA is damaged.
This process is what causes us to get old and die.
The cells that divide most rapidly are the ones that typically run out of telomeres first.
Our intestinal tract cells reproduce the fastest — because they get a lot of wear and tear from food passing along them. Hair follicles, skin, and bone marrow come next. White blood cells are also fast reproducing.
So as we age, we get problems with digestion, our hair falls out and doesn’t re-grow. Our skin cells decline, and we lose our youthful glow…and those white blood cells are what fight off diseases.
So this is why we look the way we do, and suffer those symptoms of aging.
But as we get older and older — more of the slower-growing cell types run out of telomeres — so we get various organ failures.
Precisely which of those things kills us depends on a huge number of factors…but the symptoms of the failure of certain cell types to continue to repair damage is absolutely inevitable.
Some very simple organisms have a fix for that — they have circular DNA strands — which have no ends that require telomeres — and those organisms don’t age — and are (effectively) immortal — although they still die due to accidents and disease.
This perhaps seems surprising. Why is it that larger organisms have this stupid flaw — when the simplest organisms “live forever”.
But here’s the thing. Larger plants and animals cannot reproduce indefinitely without exhausting the food supply and other resources. So there are two choices: Either thy have to reproduce very slowly — or they have to die soon enough to avoid over-population.
However, we have to consider evolution.
Evolution is what allows organisms to improve — to adapt to changing situations.
A species that reproduces very slowly can’t evolve fast enough to adapt. So there is an evolutionary advantage to have a faster reproductive cycle but to have organisms age and die.
So — it's true to say that organisms like us — who have the telomere “problem” — have evolved to be able to age and die.
The fact that we die is an evolutionary advantage for our species. (~ Quora)
*
RITA LEVI-MONTALCINI AND THE DISCOVERY OF NERVE GROWTH FACTOR
Rita Levi-Montalcini (born Rita Levi; 22 April 1909 – 30 December 2012) was an Italian neurobiologist. She was awarded the 1986 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine jointly with colleague Stanley Cohen for the discovery of nerve growth factor (NGF).
From 2001 until her death, she also served in the Italian Senate as a senator for life. This honor was given due to her significant scientific contributions. On 22 April 2009, she became the first Nobel laureate to reach the age of 100, and the event was feted with a party at Rome's City Hall.
Early life and education
Levi-Montalcini was born on 22 April 1909 in Turin, to Italian Jewish parents with roots dating back to the Roman Empire. She and her twin sister Paola (who would become a respected artist best known for her reflective aluminum sculptures) were the youngest of four children. Her parents were Adele Montalcini, a painter, and Adamo Levi, an electrical engineer and mathematician, whose families had moved from Asti and Casale Monferrato, respectively, to Turin at the turn of the twentieth century.
In her teenage years, she considered becoming a writer and admired Swedish writer Selma Lagerlöf, but after seeing a close family friend die of stomach cancer she decided to attend the University of Turin Medical School. Her father discouraged his daughters from attending college, as he feared it would disrupt their potential lives as wives and mothers, but eventually he supported Levi-Montalcini's aspirations to become a doctor. While she was at the University of Turin, the neurohistologist Giuseppe Levi sparked her interest in the developing nervous system.
After graduating summa cum laude M.D. in 1936, Levi-Montalcini remained at the university as Levi's assistant, but her academic career was cut short by Benito Mussolini's 1938 Manifesto of Race and the subsequent introduction of laws barring Jews from academic and professional careers.
CAREER AND RESEARCH
During World War II, Levi-Montalcini set up a laboratory in her bedroom in Turin and studied the growth of nerve fibers in chicken embryos, discovering that nerve cells die when they lack targets, and laying the groundwork for much of her later research. She described this experience decades later in the science documentary film Death by Design: The Life and Times of Life and Times (1997).
When Germany invaded Italy in September 1943, her family fled south to Florence, where they survived The Holocaust, under false identities, protected by some non-Jewish friends. During the Nazi occupation, Levi-Montalcini was in contact with the partisans of the Action Party.
After the liberation of Florence in August 1944, she volunteered her medical expertise for the Allied health service, providing critical care to those injured during the war. This period highlighted her resilience and commitment to medical science despite the tumultuous circumstances. Upon returning to Turin in 1945, she resumed her research activities.
This crucial finding in biology identified NGF as the main protein responsible for the growth of neurons within the nervous system, allowing for major advances in research. The critical experiment was done with Hertha Meyer at the Carlos Chagas Filho Biophysics Institute of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro in 1952. Their publication in 1954 became the first definitive indication of the protein.
By transferring pieces of tumors to chick embryos, Levi-Montalcini established a mass of cells that was full of nerve fibers. The discovery of nerves growing everywhere like a halo around the tumor cells was surprising. When describing it, Levi-Montalcini said it is: "like rivulets of water flowing steadily over a bed of stones." The nerve growth produced by the tumor was unlike anything she had seen before – the nerves took over areas that would become other tissues and even entered veins in the embryo. But nerves did not grow into the arteries, which would flow from the embryo back to the tumor.
This suggested to Levi-Montalcini that the tumor itself was releasing a substance that was stimulating the growth of nerves. Her research led to the seminal publication "In vitro experiments on the effects of mouse sarcomas 180 and 37 on the spinal and sympathetic ganglia of the chick embryo" in 1954, which was a foundational work in identifying and understanding nerve growth factor (NGF). NGF is a critical protein for the growth and maintenance of neurons in the sympathetic and sensory nervous systems, without which brain cells die. This discovery paved the way for future research in neurobiology, demonstrating that the nervous, immune and endocrine systems are linked which had profound implications for understanding neurodegenerative diseases.
She was made a full professor in 1958. In 1962, she established a second laboratory in Rome and divided her time between there and St. Louis. In 1963, she became the first woman to receive the Max Weinstein Award (given by the United Cerebral Palsy Association) due to her significant contributions to neurological research.
From 1961 to 1969, she directed the Research Center of Neurobiology of the National Research Council, and from 1969 to 1978, the Laboratory of Cellular Biology. After she retired in 1977, she was appointed as director of the Institute of Cell Biology of the Italian National Council of Research in Rome. She later retired from that position in 1979, but continued to be involved as a guest professor.
Levi-Montalcini founded the European Brain Research Institute in 2002, and then served as its president. Her role in this institute was at the center of some criticism from some parts of the scientific community in 2010.
Controversies were raised concerning the cooperation of Levi-Montalcini with the Italian pharmaceutical firm Fidia.
While working for Fidia, she improved her understanding of gangliosides. Beginning in 1975, she supported the drug Cronassial (a particular mixture of gangliosides) produced by Fidia from bovine brain tissue. Independent studies showed that the drug actually could be successful in the treatment of intended diseases (peripheral neuropathies). Years later, some patients under treatment with Cronassial reported a severe neurological syndrome (Guillain–Barré syndrome).
As per the normal cautionary routine, Germany banned Cronassial in 1983, followed by other countries. Italy prohibited the drug only in 1993; at the same time, an investigation revealed that Fidia paid the Italian Ministry of Health for a quick approval of Cronassial and later paid for pushing the use of the drug in the treatment of diseases where it had not been tested. Levi-Montalcini's relationship with the company was revealed during the investigation, and she was criticized publicly.
*
In the 1990s, she was one of the first scientists to point out the importance of the mast cell in human pathology. In the same period (1993), she identified the endogenous compound palmitoylethanolamide as an important modulator of this cell. Understanding this mechanism initiated a new era of research into this compound which has resulted in more discoveries regarding its mechanisms and benefits, a far better understanding of the endocannabinoid system and new liposomal palmitoylethanolamide product formulations designed specifically for improved absorption and bioavailability.
Levi-Montalcini earned a Nobel Prize along with Stanley Cohen in 1986 in the physiology or medicine category. The two earned their Nobel Prizes for their research into the nerve growth factor (NGF), the protein that causes cell growth due to stimulated nerve tissue.
On 1 August 2001, she was appointed as senator for life by the President of Italy, Carlo Azeglio Ciampi.
On 28–29 April 2006, Levi-Montalcini, aged 97, attended the opening assembly of the newly elected Senate, at which the President of the Senate was elected. She declared her preference for the center-left candidate Franco Marini. Due to her support of the government of Romano Prodi, she was often criticized by some right-wing senators, who accused her of saving the government when the government's exiguous majority in the Senate was at risk. Her old age was mocked by far-right politician Francesco Storace.
PERSONAL LIFE
Levi-Montalcini had an older brother, Gino, who died after a heart attack in 1974. He was one of the best-known contemporary Italian architects and a professor at the University of Turin. She had two sisters: Anna, five years older than Rita, and Paola, her twin sister, a popular artist who died on 29 September 2000, age 91.
In 2003, she filed a libel suit for defamation against Beppe Grillo. During a show, Grillo called the 94-year-old woman an "old whore.”
Levi-Montalcini never married and had no children. In a 2006 interview, she said, "I never had any hesitation or regrets in this sense... My life has been enriched by excellent human relations, work and interests. I have never felt lonely." She remained active in scientific research and public life well into her later years, even attending the opening assembly of the newly elected Senate at the age of 97.
She died in her home in Rome on 30 December 2012 at the age of 103. In honor of her legacy, numerous institutions, scholarships, and awards have been named after her.
For instance, the Rita Levi-Montalcini Foundation was established to support education and research for young women in Africa and Italy, ensuring her impact on science and society continues to inspire future generations. Additionally, various commemorative events and memorials, including a Google Doodle on her 106th birthday, celebrate her life and contributions to neurobiology.
Levi-Montalcini's grave at the Monumental Cemetery in Turin, which she shares with her twin sister Paola.
Upon her death, the Mayor of Rome, Gianni Alemanno, stated it was a great loss "for all of humanity." He praised her as someone who represented "civic conscience, culture and the spirit of research of our time." Italian astrophysicist Margherita Hack told Sky TG24 in a tribute to her fellow scientist, "She is really someone to be admired." Italy's prime minister, Mario Monti, paid tribute to Levi-Montalcini's "charismatic and tenacious" character and for her lifelong endeavor to "defend the battles in which she believed." Vatican spokesman Federico Lombardi praised Levi-Montalcini's civil and moral efforts, saying she was an "inspiring" example for Italy and the world.
According to the former President of the Grand Orient of Italy, she was invited and participated in many cultural events organized by the main Italian Masonic organization.
In 1986, Levi-Montalcini and collaborator Stanley Cohen received the Nobel Prize in Medicine, as well as the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research. This made her the fourth Nobel Prize winner to come from Italy's small (less than 50,000 people) but very old Jewish community, after Emilio Segrè, Salvador Luria (a university colleague and friend) and Franco Modigliani. (Wikipedia)
A portrait of Levi-Montalcini on the external wall of the Vall d'Hebron University Hospital in Barcelona, Spain
*
HOW TO INCREASE YOUR PRODUCTION OF NGF
Increasing natural production of Nerve Growth Factor (NGF) is best achieved through consistent exercise, stress reduction, and a nutrient-rich diet. Key strategies include high-intensity or aerobic exercise, mindfulness/yoga, optimizing Vitamin D, and consuming Omega-3 fatty acids, curcumin, and polyphenols.
Here are the most effective ways to naturally increase NGF:
Physical Exercise: Regular exercise is one of the strongest stimulators for increasing NGF and BDNF, which promote neuron growth and survival. Both aerobic exercise and resistance training (like treadmill exercises) are effective.
Nutritional Support:
Omega-3 Fatty Acids: Essential for stimulating nerve cell growth, repair, and increasing neurotrophic factors.
Vitamin D: Stimulates NGF production and prevents its depletion.
Antioxidants and Polyphenols: Foods rich in polyphenols (like green tea, berries, and curcumin) can modulate neurotrophic signals and reduce neurodegeneration.
Zinc: Supports neurogenesis and may boost NGF levels.
Theanine: Found in tea, it helps increase both NGF and BDNF.
LIFESTYLE ADJUSTMENTS:
Stress Reduction: Chronic stress significantly decreases NGF concentration in the brain; practicing mindfulness and meditation can help.
Social and Environmental Enrichment: Engaging in stimulating, social environments can increase NGF levels in the hippocampus and hypothalamus.
Quality Sleep: Essential for the maintenance of optimal NGF levels.
Natural Compounds & Supplements
Lion’s Mane Mushroom: This edible mushroom contains bioactive compounds (erinacines and hericenones) that have been shown in studies to induce NGF production.
Vitamin D3: Research indicates that Vitamin D regulates the release of NGF and may prevent its depletion.
Acetyl-L-Carnitine (ALCAR): This amino acid derivative can cross the blood-brain barrier and enhance the production of nerve growth factors
Zinc: An essential micronutrient that constitutes part of the NGF molecule and stimulates cell proliferation.
Herbal Support:
Centella Asiatica (Gotu Kola): Contains triterpenoids that stimulate nerve growth.
Curcumin: The active compound in turmeric may promote the release of NGF.
Theanine: Found in green tea, it may enhance the synthesis of NGF during nerve maturation.
(~ mulltiple sources)
*
MORE SUN, MORE SONS?
You might think that our population is divided exactly 50:50 between men and women, but this too swings depending on the weather. In the Northern Hemisphere, for instance, more sons are likely to be conceived during warmer years than those with particularly cold spells. (Puzzlingly, women in London also gave birth to more daughters and fewer sons nine months after a bad outbreak of smog in December 1952.)
Exactly why that happens is a complete enigma. It could be that the temperature alters hormonal balances, or the production of sperm. Some have argued that it’s an evolved mechanism, to boost a mother’s chances of passing on her genes: sons are less likely than a daughter to reproduce, if they are in poor condition, so our bodies decide the sex based on our current environment. In any case, the effect is tiny, and seems to vary from region to region. Although these trends are biologically interesting, they certainly shouldn’t guide your family planning.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20150716-the-mysterious-ways-the-weather-changes-the-body-and-mind
*
MORE COSMIC RADIATION, LOWER LIFE EXPECTANCY?
The Sun is constantly showering the earth with geomagnetic storms and cosmic rays. The Earth’s atmosphere should protect us from the worst of this space weather – but we may not be completely safe. A team from Lithuania recently examined the records of more than one million deaths over a 25-year period – and they found that mortality from heart disease and stroke seemed to peak during periods of extreme space weather events.
Even more strangely, another study found that those born during periods of heightened activity have a shorter average life span, by about five years – compared to those born in calmer periods; it also seemed to reduce their fertility.
Clearly, more investigations will be needed to confirm the results and try to find an explanation. It is hard enough to swallow the fact that our health depends on something as unpredictable as the weather here on Earth – let alone a random storm of charged particles 92 million miles away. It seems that our fates really might be decided in the heavens after all.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20150716-the-mysterious-ways-the-weather-changes-the-body-and-mind
*
HEAT, DEPRESSION, AND MANIA
Winter weather is in full effect in many parts of the United States, exciting many who love a cozy, white Christmas or snow sports, and upsetting those who miss having more daylight and warmer temperatures. For the latter group, unseasonably warm days might feel like a much needed reprieve. However, things appear a bit more complicated for those experiencing symptoms of depression or mania.
A 2025 study in the Journal of Affective Disorders by Philippa Clery and colleagues showed some surprising seasonally-dependent effects of elevated ambient temperatures. Unexpectedly, warmer temperatures in winter did not improve depression symptoms, and in some cases, they appeared to make them slightly worse.
The researchers who conducted this study used an approach called ecological momentary assessment, or EMA. Around 4000 participants with depressive symptoms and over 2000 with mania symptoms responded to questions and surveys on a mobile app. The surveys included validated clinical assessments of bipolar and depression symptoms and were linked to the meteorological conditions where each participant completed the surveys for the preceding 2 weeks.
Based on prior studies documenting an increase in psychiatric hospitalizations with elevated temperatures in the summertime, the team hypothesized that hotter temperatures would worsen depression and mania symptoms. However, they also sought to investigate several key factors that might influence this relationship. They looked at different ways to quantify temperature (average daily temperature vs. maximum daily temperature), whether the effects differed across seasons, and whether it mattered if the temperature was different from ‘typical’ weather conditions in the area at that time.
Mania spikes in warmer weather, but depression is more complicated
As expected, participants with bipolar disorder reported more manic symptoms with warmer temperatures, and the effects didn’t differ much by season. These effects also held when controlling for participant gender and other related weather effects, like sunshine and air pollution. When the researchers examined changes in heat relative to the normal weather conditions, they found the same effect — warmer ambient temperatures led to more mania symptoms.
Counter to the researchers’ hypotheses, warmer temperatures led to fewer depressive symptoms, particularly in the spring and summer. More surprisingly, when accounting for typical temperatures, the effects of unseasonably warm winter days actually showed an increase in depression.
Though this study cannot test why warmer weather causes these effects, there are some promising mechanisms — at least for why heat increases mania. Specifically, increases in temperature affect key neurotransmitters, like serotonin, which can impact both manic and depressive symptoms. Additionally, sleep is known to impact mood disorder symptoms, and there is increasing evidence for the toll that heat takes on sleep quality.
As for the effects on depression? Well, this is where things are much less clear. These results aren’t consistent with what most prior research has found, so it’s hard to know exactly what is going on here. A few points to consider are that the researchers are using outdoor temperature as their estimates for heat exposure. Depending on the use of indoor heating and cooling systems, and time spent indoors vs. outdoors, this may not match actual exposures.
Beyond this, most of the research that has looked at changes in mood with higher temperatures hasn’t focused specifically on individuals with depression or bipolar disorder. So the effects might be different for those with a diagnosed condition compared to those who experience subclinical symptoms. Ultimately, much more research is needed to identify what is going on, and why unseasonably warm days might not have mood-boosting benefits for individuals with depression.
In the meantime, might I recommend spending some quality time outside, noticing the natural world around us? Maybe give this exercise a try — according to a 2022 study by Passmore et al., it seems like the mood boosting effects of noticing nature work just as well in the cold winter months as they do in warmer weather.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/environ-mentality/202512/a-curious-link-between-seasonal-heat-depression-and-mania
*
ON TURNING 80 AND PLANNING TO LIVE TO 100
Lifestyle changes after 80 can help you live to 100.
Meg Selig: I haven’t actually turned 80 yet. I’ll pass that mile marker in a few months. But I am already thinking of myself as 80 just to get used to the idea. The thought fills me with 1. dread because I am that much closer to the final exit, 2. gratitude because I’ve had so much joy and love in my life, and 3. astonishment because I’m basically healthy and feel great most of the time.
I attribute my good health and long life partly to good luck and good genes. But I also made several good decisions when I was younger.
In my 20s, I vowed to lose the weight I had gained in college and maintain that healthy weight for the rest of my life. To do it, I developed my own healthy eating program, avoided restrictive diets, and figured out how to get the most pleasure—yes, pleasure—from eating. (My secrets to healthy eating are described here and in my book, Silver Sparks.)
The result: I’ve been at the same healthy weight for 55 years. I feel obliged to say that my original decision was motivated as much by vanity as health. Since then, decades of research have confirmed the benefits of a healthy weight.
I made my second big decision when I hit my 40th birthday. I wanted to avoid medical problems and remain healthy as I aged. As I looked around at the healthiest older people I knew, I saw that they all had one thing in common: they were active and exercised regularly. Nowadays, you can’t turn on your computer without seeing a plethora of articles about the benefits of exercise. But 40 years ago, there was much less published research—at least not that I was aware of as a busy divorced single parent working full-time.
Nonetheless, I had the intuition that the secret to longevity and health was exercise. I decided to exercise three times a week, using a combination of walking, exercise DVDs (thanks, Jane Fonda and Ellen Barrett), and aerobics classes. (I now follow the standards of the World Health Organization and exercise 5-7 times a week for about 20-30 minutes each time.) My intuition about exercise and longevity proved correct, though I never could have guessed the bouquet of benefits of almost any amount of exercise.
I made other healthy decisions, too. I quit smoking in my 20s and eventually stopped drinking because I realized alcohol predictably gave me headaches. (Not surprisingly, I was later diagnosed with migraine.)
So, here I am at 80 years old. Now what? I would like to live to a healthy 100, feeling as fit, happy, and energetic as I do today, but will my current health program do that for me?
Just as I was asking myself this question, an article entitled How to Live to 100 appeared in Medical News Today. Here is a summary of the research and recommendations.
How to Live to 100
The research was unique because it studied the influence of lifestyle factors, such as exercise and healthy eating, on people 80 and older. Most such studies have concentrated on people in midlife or younger.
In the study, researchers in China followed 1,454 centenarians and 3,768 people who died before reaching 100. Each person was rated from 1-6 on such lifestyle habits as smoking, exercise, and diet. As health reporter Tony Hicks states:
"(The researchers) reported that the participants with the highest healthy lifestyle scores – based on smoking history, exercise routines, and dietary diversity – had a significantly higher likelihood of living to 100 compared to those with the least healthy lifestyle behaviors. Researchers said their findings suggest that healthy habits, even at an advanced age, can have life-prolonging benefits.”
Hicks interviewed a geriatrician, Scott Kaiser, who confirmed that setting a goal to live to 100 could itself motivate healthier choices, thereby lengthening both lifespan and health span. “Much like a car you’re hoping to keep on the road if you take care of your body as if you’re going to need to for 100 years, you’re far more likely to achieve your healthy longevity goals,” Kaiser said.
In addition to exercise and healthy eating, longevity experts generally recommend the following:
Sleeping 7-8 hours per night.
Keeping your brain active.
Spending time with people you love and value.
Managing stress with tai chi, meditation, mindfulness exercises, or cultivating a flexible mindset.
Finding a purpose or a way to contribute to others.
Savoring the small and large pleasures of life.
Quitting smoking and other unhealthy drugs.
The Power of a Decision
It’s good to know that I am already doing most of what I must do to reach my goal of being healthy and happy at 100. My ability to manage stress could be kicked up a notch or three, but nobody's perfect. I've decided to become an "imperfectionist," and that's remarkably helpful in reducing stress, as I write here.
What about you? Can you make a decision that will help you live longer and better? If you can create a specific goal to change something that will benefit you, you are more likely to achieve your goal than if you set no goal at all, according to this research. Beyond acquiring a worthwhile health behavior, you may find that the change process strengthens your self-esteem and builds your confidence. Moreover, being healthier will make you happier. That alone is a huge bonus.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/changepower/202406/on-turning-80-years-old-and-planning-to-reach-100
*
ending on beauty:
