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DUSHKA
Dushka, my Soul, do not be so proud
of not being made of ordinary stardust.
When I go you too will go.
Some say it will feel just as it did
before being born. But Dushka,
before I was born — open any
history book — it was murder.
Dushka, do you remember
the red streetcars in Warsaw?
And the chestnuts rioting in bloom
in front of the Polytechnic?
We took Wawelska Street,
the long way home so we could pass
the small park of the first kiss.
Dushka, it was New Year’s Eve,
snow on my eyelashes,
silence on bare branches.
For thirty years now
I’ve lived with a Norfolk pine.
People say I should cut it down,
its roots raise the sidewalk. But one
high noon on its tip I saw
a mockingbird sing his imitation
of a car alarm, so how could I cut down
my thousand-green-fingered pine?
I said in thirty years
I don’t think I’ll be alive.
I am taking the mockingbird
with me.
~ Oriana
Norfolk pine is not a real pine. It's a survivor from the Jarassic era — I call my tree Jurassica. It doesn't have needles; its myriad twigs are covered with green scales.
WHY WE ARE WE ATTRACTED TO EVIL CHARACTERS IN FILM AND FICTION
Think back to the last television show or film you watched in which a character thoroughly captured your interest. Was that character a decent, average person, doing regular things all day? Probably not. That person who kept you watching might have been a noble hero. But it’s also likely that the character was, instead, a little devious. Or maybe more than a little. Often, the stories that people choose to engage with follow someone who is morally ambiguous or just plain bad. Some of our own favorite main characters, such as Don Draper of Mad Men, Marvel’s Loki or Arya Stark from Game of Thrones, are deeply flawed.
Audiences opt to spend many hours with characters like these. In recent research, we asked people about the main characters of the most-watched Netflix shows over a five-month period. Specifically, we asked them to rate how morally good or bad these characters were. We then examined how these judgments related to the total number of hours viewers spent watching the shows. We found that, on average, people spent more time watching shows with protagonists who were more immoral. Some of the most popular shows on Netflix during that timeframe included You (2018-), featuring a charismatic stalker and murderer, and Inventing Anna (2022), about the con artist Anna Sorokin (aka Anna Delvey). The correlation between time spent watching and the immorality of the characters held true even when accounting for factors such as show duration and genre, and despite our participants saying that the shows with more immoral protagonists were more effortful to watch.
Why do many of us seem to be more captivated by characters who do bad things than those who do good ones? The popularity of their stories suggests that these characters help meet some psychological demand in the millions of people who follow them on their journeys.
To start to explore this further, let’s consider two ways of watching a show about a killer. In one common scenario, you are rooting for the detective to catch and stop the criminal. In a film like David Fincher’s Se7en (1995), you follow the detective, who seeks to deliver justice and unravel the puzzle the killer has laid out. You are being asked to act as a third-party observer of the events that unfold and then to cast judgment on them. Another way to describe what you are often asked to do as a viewer is to practice your moral judgment: sharpening your sense of what is good and bad, and ultimately identifying with the good guy and condemning the bad guy. It’s relatively easy to see why people enjoy this kind of story.
A different way of watching the story of a killer is one where you are asked to identify with and relate to the killer. The show Dexter (2006-) is a good example. Dexter is immoral – he kills people! – but he’s also a family man and has a backstory that invites the audience to hope for his continued (murderous) success. He’s a classic antihero: he is someone who is bad but has redeeming qualities. In this case, Dexter adheres to a code that rationalizes his murders – he kills only other killers (well, mostly). When watching Dexter, you are asked to spend a lot of time with him and feel along with him. In both Se7en and Dexter, the mind of the killer is intriguing, following an idiosyncratic set of rules; there is some puzzle to solve. Yet, in one, the killer is the protagonist, and viewers are invited to understand him and root for him.
Our research can help explain why people are so curious about protagonists like Dexter. We designed a task that showed study participants different sorts of individuals on a computer screen. In some cases, the person of interest was a fictional character, while in others, the person was depicted as a real-life individual whom the participants had not met. In both versions, the person varied in terms of how moral or immoral they were described as being.
We asked our participants to choose what to do next: learn more information about the person’s appearance, or learn more information about ‘the actions and experiences’ of that person. We found that study participants chose to learn about the actions and experiences of the immoral people – fictional or real – more than they did for morally good ones. This was true despite them reporting that doing so was effortful and more time-consuming than merely learning about someone’s physical appearance. Our research seems to suggest that people want to know why immoral people do what they do. They want to know what makes bad people bad.
Perhaps when we spend hours watching or reading about antiheroes, we are in search of this kind of information about the characters’ minds and motives. People are generally curious to understand the social world and the minds of others – which includes the bad things that people do to each other, and their reasons for doing them – and it may be that following around immoral protagonists helps audience members satisfy that basic desire. When we follow such characters, we are also getting to learn about extremes of social and moral life that we might not ever encounter personally.
The creators of fictional worlds – be it Dexter’s version of Miami or more fantastical settings like Asgard in the Marvel Universe – are engaging in a practice called worldbuilding. That is, they create a coherent fictional or fictionalized setting that situates characters in physical space and allows the audience to understand them psychologically. The audience gets to know their histories, personality, and the circumstances and struggles that shaped their beliefs and desires. For example, in the case of Dexter, viewers get access to his history of trauma, his own experiences with loss at the hands of a murderer, and a window into his conflicted feelings about his murderous desires. Worldbuilding allows us to make some sense of a wrongdoer’s behavior in context.
In everyday life, people engage in their own kind of worldbuilding. You need to map the social and moral terrain in order to navigate it. Who is close to you? Who is powerful? Who is connected to whom? Just as geographic maps represent physical space, people also create internal representations of social space. Part of this social mapping, we propose, is representing what kinds of people and actions are possible and permissible.
Engaging with fictional moral extremes can help a person chart this territory, filling in the map with rich details and many different kinds of people and relationships. Audiences may opt to engage with immoral characters for longer partly because, as research suggests, people’s understanding of individuals who are immoral (compared with morally good) is more precarious. And bad guys may offer especially rich information: bad things (people, actions, etc) often tend to be more varied than good things. There are relatively few ways to be good in the world, while there are many, many ways to be bad.
By gaining access to the motives and internal states of immoral individuals in books, TV shows, movies and more – information that is often not available through direct experience – audience members are able to make richer maps of the social world. Engaging with these fictional characters allows you to mentally travel to the far reaches of social acceptability, where there are charismatic adulterers and principled serial killers. You are exploring the outer spaces and possibilities of the map. We suggest that having a richer map of the social world, one that is partly informed by fictional immoral characters, likely helps people navigate the social world in real life. When someone engages with fictional characters in general, they are better able to understand why real people do the things they do, and may even become better at predicting what people will do next.
Indeed, people seem to have a sense that they have something to learn from morally ambiguous and immoral characters. Research outside of the moral domain suggests that one reason people are curious about explanations – curious for information about why – is that they think they will learn something valuable for the future. Learning seems to be part of what people want from immoral characters, too: participants in our studies chose to learn about the immoral people the most, and they also expected to learn most from the information about them.
Characters like Dexter or the mobster Tony Soprano capture viewers’ interest, then, because the allure of grasping why they are the way they are draws us in. As someone follows the in-depth narrative of a captivating antihero, the process of learning about their histories and circumstances brings with it the promise of understanding their motives and behaviors. And audiences learn about these characters’ minds with curiosity and sustained attention in a way that we seldom can with purely evil, unrelatable villains or even bad actors in our own lives – people with whom we might be unable or unwilling to follow along in the same way.
These narratives often ask the audience to set aside the typical role of judge and jury, and instead to join in – to feel alongside evildoers and criminals. Engaging with these characters is, ultimately, a social exercise; it shapes one’s understanding of moral boundaries in the real world, including what the boundaries are, how people navigate them, and why someone might cross them.
https://psyche.co/ideas/what-is-it-about-film-and-tv-antiheroes-thats-so-captivat
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HOW PUTIN’S RULE CHANGED THE WAY RUSSIANS SEE THEMSELVES AND THEIR COUNTRY
Putin the Big Brother on the side of a shopping mall.
I was driving today in southeast of Moscow when I saw this giant screen showing a likewise huge Grandpa Putin. There was one of his new quotes: “Without a sovereign, strong Russia, no steady world order is possible.”
This quote implies that if Putin’s regime is toppled in the manner of Yanukovich in Ukraine or Colonel Qaddafi in Libya, then that would be the end of sovereign Russia.
And if, by losing sovereignty to external, Western pressures, and being drained of its vitality, the balance in the world order would crumble.
“Why?” You might ask yourself. Well, because before being swept away in a righteous indignation of the pissed off masses, Grandpa Pu is going to drop a nuke or two or more on those belligerent, regime change savvy Americanskyys.
Not for survival of the regime, mind you, he’s not selfish! But because he’s so worried about keeping balance in the force from external disturbances.
Providence itself has given him this exalted role to play in the universe.
The man has become so far removed from mundane reality of the drivers who can’t get their tanks filled with gasoline that nobody can comprehend what the hell he even is talking about, but older generation is expecting a world war three starting any day now.
In the pet food section of my local supermarket, a lady is holding a corn cob in one hand, her phone in the other and a bottle of water in the crook of her arm checking out food for her cat.
I couldn’t help but imagine a baby where the bottle is and its mother about to feed it.
Modernity has taken everything from us and what do we care about the disturbances in the force when it works against us all ? ~ Misha Firer, Quora
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A CREED OF TREASON: THE CAMBRIDGE FIVE 
In 1931, during the height of the Great Famine caused by Stalin’s forced collectivization, the British playwright and social critic George Bernard Shaw visited the Soviet Union.
Shaw dismissed all talk of famine as malicious rumors. To demonstrate his faith in the regime, with a flourish he threw his packed lunch basket out of a train window, just before crossing the border from Poland to Russia.
The next day, the great man was dining in a restaurant reserved for foreigners with the wife of a foreign correspondent. She cautiously remarked that perhaps he should have waited until he was actually on Soviet territory before throwing away his food, so that a few starving Russians might have benefited from it.
Shaw looked around the room and mockingly observed that he certainly saw no signs of food shortage here. The woman then tried to explain that foreigners received special treatment: “I have a four-year-old daughter. As a foreigner, I can buy all the food she needs, but if I were dependent on Russian milk rations, my little girl would suffer greatly.”
The "Creed": The "creed" referred to in the title represents the absolute ideological devotion that led Western sympathizers—often referred to as "fellow travelers"—to ignore mass suffering, censorship, and state violence in pursuit of a utopian political ideal.
Moral Discernment: The review serves as an education in political discernment, contrasting the self-delusion of visiting high-society Westerners with the bleak, harsh reality experienced by ordinary citizens living under totalitarianism.
The essay examines the historical damage of treachery and explores how ideological compliance or a "creed" can lead individuals to compromise their own nations or communities. Bering notably details instances from the 20th century, such as how prominent Western intellectuals—including the British playwright George Bernard Shaw—traveled to the Soviet Union during the height of Stalin’s forced collectivization and willfully dismissed or mocked reports of mass famine.
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Released in May 2026, Stalin's Apostles is a deeply researched, narrative non-fiction account of the Cambridge Five—history's most infamous Soviet spy ring. The group consisted of five highly privileged, well-connected British intellectuals: Kim Philby, Anthony Blunt, Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess, and John Cairncross.
While traditional British accounts focus parochially on the men's upper-class backgrounds, schoolboy identities, or ideological disillusionment, Senior shifts the focus entirely to the devastating real-world human cost of their betrayal.
The Infiltration: It charts how the five men met at Cambridge University during the left-wing political ferment of the 1930s, swore absolute allegiance to Joseph Stalin, and smoothly climbed to the highest corridors of power within MI6, MI5, and the Foreign Office.
The Global Damage: Senior meticulously details how the top-secret intelligence they funneled to Moscow invaluably aided Stalin in cementing his post-WWII "Red Empire". Their leaks directly condemned millions of people across Central and Eastern Europe to decades of violent communist repression, executions, and forced labor.
A Trail of Blood: The book exposes raw operational details, such as how Kim Philby comprehensively betrayed a highly secret 1951 British mission to parachute anti-communist Ukrainian exiles back into their homeland. Because of his leaks, the Soviet Secret Police were waiting in the dark to capture and execute them the moment they landed.
Ultimately, Stalin's Apostles strips away the mythic, romanticized "gentleman spy" façade often granted to the ring by both British pop culture and Russian state media. Instead, it exposes them as deeply compromised fanatics whose blind "creed" resulted in massive, tragic loss of life.
There is no more infamous spy ring than the Cambridge Five, the group of friends who met at Cambridge University in the 1930s, were recruited by Soviet agents, and then proceeded to feed intelligence to Moscow from their various perches in British government. The best known, certainly, was Kim Philby, the model for the traitor in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy; the fact that Philby knew the author as fellow spy David Cornwell and blew his cover, leading Cornwell to begin a new career as a novelist under the pen name John le Carré, is the only good thing Philby ever did. Antonia Senior tells this tale of treachery very well, vividly capturing the personalities and politics of the time and describing in detail just how much damage these men did, especially in Eastern Europe. Stalin’s Apostles reads like a first-rate thriller, except the blood is real and the damage done is infuriating.
Stalin’s task in building what Senior calls his ‘Red Empire’ was made so much easier, and so much more brutal, by the intelligence the Cambridge spies passed to Moscow. This included information about partisans and individuals hostile to the Soviet Union, and about how much support they would get from the Western allies.
The Cambridge Five, Senior suggests, were blinded by ideology. And MI5, MI6 and the Foreign Office were blinded by prejudice: files have already revealed how those at the top simply could not believe that Cambridge graduates would betray their country. Such an attitude was perhaps father to the thought. The Whitehall establishment was terrified of the damage to their reputation and the reaction in Washington if the truth came out. Better to keep the growing evidence and their suspicions under wraps.
Questions remain about the circumstances surrounding Philby’s decision finally to defect – or, to use Strang’s term, ‘slip away’. Why, Senior asks, is there no record that any of the questions MI5 sent out were actually put to Philby? Why was no one watching Philby in the days before he disappeared? The official file on Lunn has not been released and even his file number has been redacted. What is there to hide?
The author contrasts the privileged lifestyle of the Cambridge spies with the brutality that Stalin meted out to his victims. For the spies, she says, the war was ‘not so bad. Not when they had gin and secrets and sex. And bread.’
It may be thought that the notorious Cambridge spies – the majority of them members of the Apostles, that university’s secretive, elitist society – had been written out. But, as Stalin’s Apostles makes clear, such is not the case. Most of the books on what the KGB later called their ‘Magnificent Five’ – Kim Philby, Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, Anthony Blunt and John Cairncross – have dwelt on their early lives, how they were recruited by Soviet talent spotters and through their individual networks, and how they were allowed to spy, undetected, for so long.
Antonia Senior’s message in this carefully researched and well-written book, rich in anecdotes and insights, is indicated by the subtitle. Senior, a former student of Christopher Andrew, the pioneering Cambridge historian of Britain’s security and intelligence agencies, concentrates on the lasting damage that the Cambridge spies inflicted by providing Stalin with crucial information about the Western allies’ strategy and priorities (as well as the development of the atom bomb) when it was becoming evident Germany was losing the war.
Churchill and Roosevelt sold the pass at their Yalta summit in February 1945 by accepting that eastern and central Europe would come under Soviet political control. But Stalin’s task in building what Senior calls his ‘Red Empire’ was made so much easier, and so much more brutal, by the intelligence the Cambridge spies passed to Moscow. This included information about partisans and individuals hostile to the Soviet Union, and about how much support they would get from the Western allies. In Ukraine, Senior notes, Britain backed the Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera, as well as partisans ‘riddled with fascists’ guilty of their own atrocities.
Senior acknowledges that only a fraction of the thousands of documents that reached Moscow from the British spies has surfaced, newly declassified files emerging randomly from time to time in the National Archives. Even so, there is enough evidence to show that intelligence the spies passed on about those opposed to Soviet communism was ‘priceless to Moscow in its bid to assert political control in eastern and central Europe’. The partisans’ fight for an independent future is a moment in Europe’s history that ‘has been forgotten in the West’. It was a time, Senior says, during which the Cambridge spies ‘poured the greatest secrets of the last months of the war into Soviet ears’, as a ‘ruthless [Russian] counterintelligence organization followed the Red Army to Berlin’.
The author contrasts the privileged lifestyle of the Cambridge spies with the brutality that Stalin meted out to his victims. For the spies, she says, the war was ‘not so bad. Not when they had gin and secrets and sex. And bread.’ More than once she describes the spies as part of a ‘chapocracy’: an establishment whose complacency and incompetence protected spies who dined and drank in the same clubs and were part of the same social network.
Although Senior states that ‘there was never enough evidence to charge any’ of the Cambridge spies, the reality was not so simple. Declassified files reveal that the foreign secretary, Anthony Eden, was told in March 1952 that there was insufficient evidence – in spite of months of investigation, phone taps and interviews to prosecute Burgess and Maclean – even if they were to come home from Moscow (they had defected in 1951). The files also reveal that the Foreign Office told Sir Patrick Reilly, the British ambassador in Moscow: ‘Defection is not, of course, a crime in English law.’ Another Foreign Office official told his boss, Sir Harold Caccia, in 1962: ‘We certainly don’t want either [Burgess or Maclean] to return.’
MI5 was so anxious that Burgess, unhappy in Moscow, might try and come back to Britain that the agency encouraged Blunt, whose Soviet affiliation was still unknown, to write to Burgess. ‘What the outcome of the trial would be is of course a matter of speculation,’ Blunt wrote in 1959, ‘but on the way the whole story would be raked up again and many of your friends would certainly be called as witnesses, and mud slung in all directions.’
In 1964, Blunt, Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures, overseeing the royal art collection, secretly confessed to spying for Moscow after hard evidence emerged against him in the United States. The Queen was not officially told until 1973, when she was said to have responded ‘calmly and without surprise’. Blunt was publicly outed as a wartime Soviet agent in 1979.
The flight of Burgess and Maclean threw suspicion on Philby. Another declassified file shows that Sir William Strang, the Foreign Office’s most senior official, told his Whitehall colleagues in December 1952: ‘If we want to avoid embarrassment, the best course would be to let him slip away.’ In January 1963, MI6 sent Philby’s former close colleague Nicholas Elliott to Beirut, where Philby was working for The Observer and The Economist.
Elliott was to confront Philby with new evidence that he had been spying for the Russians and offer him immunity from prosecution in return for a confession. After telegramming Philby’s confession back to London, Elliott left Beirut, handing over the job of questioning Philby to the MI6 local head of station, Peter Lunn. A few days later Philby vanished, only to turn up on board a Soviet ship.
Questions remain about the circumstances surrounding Philby’s decision finally to defect – or, to use Strang’s term, ‘slip away’. Why, Senior asks, is there no record that any of the questions MI5 sent out were actually put to Philby? Why was no one watching Philby in the days before he disappeared? The official file on Lunn has not been released and even his file number has been redacted. What is there to hide?
The continuing suppression or destruction of files, in London and Moscow, suggests we have not heard the last of the Cambridge spies. We may never be able to answer fully the question the author poses in her conclusion: ‘Whom exactly did the spies betray to Stalin?’ But we can answer much more now thanks to her valuable, thought-provoking book. And we have a much clearer answer to her second question: ‘What was the human cost of their ideological purity?’
This book tells of the Old Boys Network that is still so much in play today, visible in issues such as the Epstein files, where men of power, influence and wealth have avoided being brought to account for their involvement in crimes. One thing the book did not and probably could not answer — why these men continued to work for Stalin after the brutal nature of his regime became obvious.
These men—Kim Philby, Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, John Cairncross, and Anthony Blunt—started out as dewy-eyed believers in Marxist theory and in the Soviet Union as a country living Marxist ideals. They continued to be true believers despite the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact and Stalin’s terror. Some seemed to have doubts in their much later years, and certainly the three who fled to Moscow grew to despise their lives in the USSR, but these men mostly come across as overgrown, drunken boys who enjoyed the game of spying, the feeling of being in the middle of great events, and knowing more than others all around them.
Senior does an incredible job of humanizing the spies so we see the world from their eyes. She captures how recanting Communism, to them, would be like abandoning their identity & social capital. She highlights the spies' Anglocentric exceptionalism & how their love of country coexisted with their betrayal. This latter contradiction is what stands out to me, partly because I saw their actions as betrayal while the spies saw their actions as patriotism.
This line between loyalty and self-deception was one of my favorite parts of the book. We see how Britain was imagined as the vanguard of world revolution, which allowed the spies to discount the Great Terror and Soviet starvation as “Russian (read: lesser) communism,” separate from the ideal they believed Britain could realize. Yet, despite this, they funneled reams upon reams of intelligence from their government offices to their handlers.
For Philby, Blunt and Burgess especially, it often seemed like a thrilling game—a dangerous but exciting challenge, like naughty schoolboys playing at something they didn't fully understand. Except they did understand. They were repeatedly confronted with evidence of Stalinist brutality, yet remained almost completely deaf to criticism of the Soviet system and to the suffering caused in its name.
If you’re familiar with the Cambridge Five, you won’t be shocked to read about how these men were able to slide smoothly into important government jobs despite their communist sympathies during their college years being known. They were from the right class, they knew people, and that’s what mattered.
For decades they continued their deadly game, and, for the most part, they seemed to enjoy it. What is particularly galling is how few of them could face the consequences when the truth finally emerged. Maclean perhaps deserves some qualification, and maybe Philby to an extent, but the others certainly struggled with the reality of their choices. Most of them had no desire to live in the country they had spent years defending. Indeed, Blunt reportedly made it clear that he would rather kill himself than move to Russia.
He might have spared a thought for the millions of people who had no choice but to live under that system—and whose lives were made immeasurably worse by the actions of people like him.
One of Philby’s last acts before he defected was to expose David Cornwall (aka John Le Carré) as a British agent.
The last years of these men’s lives were filled with loneliness, alcoholism and a soulless existence. A fitting end to men who gave no thought for others in their pursuit of personal ends.
Rife with code names, smuggled documents, clandestine rendezvous, and copious amounts of gin, Stalin's Apostles wields impeccable research and storytelling and all the thrilling details and high tragedy of a classic spy thriller.
https://archive.ph/hbNif#selection-521.0-521.459 (and other sources)
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A MINOR MISUNDERSTANDING
During a meeting, Lenin wrote a note in pencil on a piece of paper and passed it to Felix Dzerzhinsky. He asked how many counterrevolutionary prisoners they had in the capital. The answer, written under the same note, was "about 1,500." Lenin read the response, made some notes in the margin, marked it with a cross, and returned the note to Dzerzhinsky. Dzerzhinsky left the meeting immediately, attracting everyone's attention.
The next day, the reason for his sudden departure was revealed: interpreting the Lenin cross on the note as an order to execute the prisoners in question, Dzerzhinsky had them all shot.
But it was a mistake.
Lenin, in fact, used to put an X on the tickets passed to him to indicate that he had "viewed," a bit like our blue ticks on WhatsApp. Dzerzhinsky had misinterpreted, and 1,500 people were shot for this misunderstanding.
~ Irina Petrova, Quora
Oriana:
I can’t be sure if this is a true story, but, based what we know about both Lenin and Dzerzhinsky, it is entirely plausible. And, given that the victims of Communism run into millions, this particular execution would indeed be minor.
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THE VIKINGS WHO REACHED THE AMERICAS 500 YEARS BEFORE COLUMBUS
The Norse made it to Canada around the year 1000, and used it as a base to explore. The BBC has delved into the "lost history" of the first Europeans to cross the Atlantic.
Christopher Columbus may have sailed the ocean blue in 1492 – arriving in the Bahamas on 12 October 1492, to be precise – but he wasn't the first European to reach what we now know as the Americas. His predecessors did so without much fanfare: no royal proclamations or crowds lining the streets to greet them upon their return. And they didn't sail directly across the vast Atlantic Ocean from one continent to another.
Instead, they hopped their way there, with Iceland and Greenland as staging posts. Their exploration was retold, centuries later, in sagas that were the stuff of epic literature rather than history books. And they made their first journey to American soil 500 years before Christopher Columbus.
The Norse sagas – Viking stories written down by their descendants – have come to be recognized as containing reliable historical truths. In 1966, BBC presenter Magnus Magnusson described the 14th-Century Flateyjarbók, or Flatey Island Book, as "one of the most valuable Icelandic manuscripts in existence". The book is so valuable, he added, that when, in 1893, the organizers of the Chicago World's Fair asked to borrow it for their belated 400th anniversary celebration of Columbus's voyage, "they offered to send a warship to Denmark to pick it up and an armored train to transport it across America and to insure it for a sum of $1 million [the book was housed in Denmark at the time.] But even at that, the Danes didn't care to take the risk."
And the reason the Americans "wanted to borrow it so badly"? Because the book contains "the account of the Norse settlement of Greenland in the 10th Century, and even more astonishingly, the story of the Norse discovery and attempted colonization of North America a few years later – five centuries before Columbus".
In 1960, a Norse transit camp was discovered at L'Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland, Canada. And in 2021, researchers using a new dating technique found that Vikings had occupied the site 1,000 years earlier. It is believed to have served as a base camp for exploring deeper into North America. "This is the start of a lost history, the centuries when Europeans visited America in voyages whose records are written only on the water," said Robin Ellis in a 1997 episode of the BBC documentary series, Timewatch.
The Norse had found Iceland in around 870, and Greenland 100 years later. From there, it was just 200 miles across the Davis Strait to Baffin Island in modern Canada, which they called Helluland, the land of slabs. According to the sagas, they followed the coast southwards to Labrador, or Markland, the land of forests, and then further south to what they called Vinland, the land of vines. "The sagas describe not only these guys stopping off in one place, but stopping off in a number of places," Emily Lethbridge of the University of Iceland said on Timewatch in 2016. "And they left for several years. They had a whole new world to explore.”
The sagas say that the most famous settler, Erik the Red, arrived in Iceland in around 960 after his father was banished from Norway for murder. In the year 932, the Icelanders had established a parliament, the Althing. It was an open-air assembly of the whole nation, meeting every summer for a fortnight for legislative and judicial purposes – and it took place in a remarkable setting, inside a ravine that made an extraordinary natural amphitheater.
"It isn’t just the acoustics that make this place special," Lethbridge told the BBC. "This is a natural fault line. We’re on the point where the North American and the Eurasian tectonic plates meet."
The first Europeans to explore North America happened to have sited one of their parliaments in a rift valley between the two continents.
At the parliament, said Lethbridge, "Sentences of outlawry would be imposed on members of society who had broken all of the rules. You could go anywhere else, but you couldn’t set foot on Iceland for the period that the outlawry stood."
The Althing banished Erik the Red from Iceland in 982, following a violent dispute with a neighboring farmer – and his exile launched an astonishing chapter in Viking exploration. "Erik the Red was the first Icelander to discover Greenland and then make a permanent settlement there," said Lethbridge.
He started a colony on Greenland that would last for around 500 years and be the launching point for the Norse exploration of North America. "They were people who took chances and were prepared to undergo huge physical trials," said Lethbridge, "such as sailing in open boats across the Atlantic, to see what they could find."
The Norse settlement on Greenland continued until the early 15th Century, and the Vikings – led by Erik's son Leif Eriksson – appear to have made not just one but multiple journeys across the sea from there to North America.
"Most people assume that after Leif Eriksson and his friends came to Vinland and then gave up and went away, nothing more was heard of the New World," Robert McGhee, an archaeologist at the Canadian Museum of Civilization, told Timewatch. "But archaeologically, we have evidence which shows that the Norse were at least making occasional trips to the New World for the following two or three centuries."
Did Columbus know about Vinland?
"We have so many good reasons to know that travels did take place throughout the entire Middle Ages on the two coasts that we call Greenland and North America," Kirsten Seaver, a historian of medieval shipping, told Timewatch. "By 1480, we know that they deliberately tried to sail to North America, or what they called the Isle of Brazil. We shouldn't look upon that as their first voyage, but as their first attempt to do it directly, without going via Greenland, which was the ordinary navigational marker."
Seaver also cited a document which implied that Columbus himself knew about such voyages. "In the winter of 1497-98, an Englishman named John Day wrote to Christopher Columbus to tell him about John Cabot's successful 1497 voyage to North America. And among many other things, he mentioned as a matter of course that as Columbus knew, men from Bristol [in England] had made this voyage to the northern part for many years already."
By the time Columbus reached the shores of the Bahamas in 1492, then, the place the Vikings called Vinland could already have been on his radar. There are even theories that Columbus was deliberately attempting to avoid a land he knew had already been discovered by Europeans.
"Columbus knew as well as any navigator does today that if you want to travel across oceans [in the Northern Hemisphere]... you move up into the north where the latitudes are short, and you zip across, and then you go back down again," McGhee told Timewatch. "Instead, Columbus took the long way around directly across the ocean. Perhaps he was trying to avoid Canada. Maybe he was trying to avoid Vinland… which was not what he was looking for. I think Columbus's intent was to bypass America and therefore try to get to the riches of the Far East."
So while many US citizens celebrate Columbus Day every October, they shouldn't forget all the Atlantic crossings that came first.
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AMERIGO VESPUCCI PROVED COLUMBUS WAS WRONG
Amerigo Vespucci absolutely reached the New World. But he didn't get two continents named after him just for showing up—he earned them by proving Christopher Columbus completely wrong.
While Columbus reached the Americas first in 1492, he went to his grave believing he had found an alternate route to the eastern edge of Asia. Vespucci was the one who realized they had stumbled upon an entirely unknown landmass.
Born in Florence, Vespucci was a merchant and navigator who eventually worked in Spain and Portugal. The exact number of his voyages is disputed. A series of published letters attributed to him claimed he made four trips, including one in 1497 that would have placed him on the South American mainland a year before Columbus reached it. Modern historians widely consider the 1497 voyage a fabrication, either exaggerated by Vespucci himself or, more likely, forged by opportunistic publishers looking to sell sensational pamphlets.
However, two of his voyages are undisputed historical facts. In 1499, sailing under the Spanish flag with Alonso de Ojeda, Vespucci explored the northern coast of South America, discovering the mouth of the Amazon River. In 1501, he sailed again, this time for Portugal, traveling much further south along the coast of Brazil and down toward Patagonia.
It was during this Portuguese expedition that Vespucci had his epiphany. By tracking his southern progress and observing the vast, continuous coastline, he deduced that this territory extended too far south to be the Asian continent described by Marco Polo. He detailed his findings in a letter titled Mundus Novus (New World), explicitly stating that these lands were not Asia, but a distinct, previously unknown continent.
Vespucci’s revelation spread rapidly across Europe. In 1507, the German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller published a new world map. Persuaded by Vespucci’s Mundus Novus accounts, Waldseemüller drew a separate continent in the western hemisphere. To honor the explorer who recognized it for what it was, he labeled the new landmass with the Latinized, feminine version of Amerigo's name: America.
A portrait of Amerigo Vespucci by an unknown artist, based on a 16th-century original.
~ Sepia Glyphs, Quora
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WHAT IT WOULD FEEL LIKE TO MEET A NEANDERTHAL
If you shook a living Neanderthal's hand, their grip could shatter your fingers. Looking into their eyes, you wouldn't see an ape—you'd be locking eyes with another human species.
You would immediately notice the sheer density of their body. Neanderthals were a bit shorter than the average modern human—males stood around 5 feet 5 inches—but they were exceptionally stocky. They possessed broad barrel chests, thick bones, and a heavily muscled frame built for explosive power and surviving the cold of Ice Age Europe. An average Neanderthal could likely manhandle a modern Olympic powerlifter.
Looking at their face would reveal stark anatomical differences. You would not see the flat, vertical profile of a modern Homo sapiens. Their face would appear pulled forward at the nose and jaw. They had swept-back cheekbones, almost no chin, and a heavy, protruding brow ridge sheltering their eyes.
A modern human face-to-face with a lifelike model of a Neanderthal, highlighting the distinct differences in skull shape, brow ridge, and facial structure.
Their nose would be enormous and wide—an evolutionary adaptation designed to warm and humidify the freezing Pleistocene air before it reached their lungs. And contrary to the classic dark-haired caveman stereotype, genetic sequencing has revealed that at least some Neanderthals had pale skin, freckles, and bright red hair.
If they spoke to you, the sound would be entirely unexpected. Popular culture often depicts primitive hominins communicating in deep, low-pitched grunts. However, anatomical studies of Neanderthal hyoid bones and nasal cavities suggest they had high-pitched, loud, and nasal voices. Their vocal anatomy was well-suited for projecting sharp, piercing sounds over long distances in harsh, windy environments.
The most lingering feeling of the encounter, however, would come from their eyes. You would not be looking into the blank, instinctual stare of a wild animal. You would see a spark of complex intelligence. This was a species that crafted specialized tools, formed pitch glue to attach spearheads, painted cave walls, created jewelry from eagle talons, and buried their dead with care. Fossil evidence shows they survived severe injuries, meaning they nursed their sick and wounded back to health.
EAST AND WEST ASIANS
East Asians carry 20% more Neanderthal DNA than Europeans. While evolution drove most facial differences between the two groups, this ancient DNA left a permanent mark on human features.
All non-African human populations carry about 1% to 2% Neanderthal DNA, a legacy of interbreeding that occurred when early modern humans migrated out of Africa roughly 60,000 years ago. Because these populations inherited slightly different fragments of the Neanderthal genome, this ancient DNA has influenced their physical traits in distinct ways.
In 2023, researchers at University College London discovered that Native American and East Asian populations carry a specific Neanderthal gene variant, known as ATF3, which contributes to increased nasal height. This taller nose shape was likely an evolutionary advantage that Neanderthals developed to survive in colder climates, helping to warm and humidify frigid air before it reached the lungs. When modern humans pushed into the harsh environments of northern and eastern Asia, inheriting this genetic "cheat code" provided an immediate survival benefit.
However, these genetic borrowings are just isolated adjustments rather than the root cause of the broad visual divide between Eastern and Western Eurasians. The distinct facial architecture that defines these populations—such as differences in cheekbone prominence, jaw structure, and fat distribution—was driven by genetic drift and environmental adaptation long after they split from a common ancestor.
For populations that settled in the extreme cold of Siberia and East Asia, natural selection favored features that protected against frostbite and snow glare. Flatter faces, thicker subcutaneous fat pads, and epicanthic folds over the eyes provided essential insulation in ice-age winters. Meanwhile, Western Eurasians experienced different evolutionary pressures, leading to divergent traits in skin pigmentation, eye color, and facial structure.
While Neanderthal genes gifted some groups with specific tools for survival, the grand divergence in human faces is a map of where modern humans migrated, not just who they met along the way. ~ NovaPrism, Quora
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THE BASQUES: INDO-EUROPEAN AFTER ALL?
Basques speak Europe’s most famously non-Indo-European language. Yet their men carry the continent's highest concentration of R1b—the quintessential Indo-European DNA.
For decades, geneticists and linguists assumed the Basque people were the last unbroken lineage of Paleolithic Europeans. Because their language, Euskara, is a complete isolate, the theory was that they had remained sheltered in the Pyrenees mountains for tens of thousands of years, entirely bypassed by the migrations that reshaped Europe.
But modern DNA testing shattered that assumption. Haplogroup R1b did not originate with Paleolithic European hunter-gatherers. Instead, it traces directly back to the Yamnaya pastoralists who expanded out of the Pontic-Caspian steppe during the early Bronze Age, around 4,500 years ago. These steppe herders brought wheeled vehicles, copper metalworking, and Indo-European languages into Western Europe.
This genetic paradox is the result of a rapid population turnover that occurred in the Iberian Peninsula. In 2019, a landmark archaeogenetic study mapped the ancient DNA of Iberia. Researchers found that around 2500 BCE, descendants of the steppe pastoralists—often associated with the Bell Beaker culture—poured over the Pyrenees. Within just a few hundred years of their arrival, the local male lineages of Iberia were almost entirely replaced by R1b.
The ancestors of the Basques were not spared from this turnover. Steppe men mated with local Iberian women, meaning the paternal ancestry of the Basques became overwhelmingly Indo-European. Meanwhile, their maternal (mtDNA) lines remained largely indigenous, retaining higher levels of early European farmer and hunter-gatherer ancestry than surrounding groups.
The true isolation of the Basques only began after this Bronze Age admixture event. Once the steppe descendants integrated with the locals, this newly formed population became geographically and culturally isolated in the rugged terrain of northern Spain and southern France. In a rare historical anomaly, the incoming men passed on their Y-chromosomes to the entire population, but the local women's pre-Indo-European language somehow survived and became the mother tongue of the resulting culture. ~ NovaPrism, Quora
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PAN’S LABYRINTH: THE MAGIC OF FANTASY AND THE HORROR OF REALITY
Pan’s Labyrinth has been re-released again after twenty years. If you haven’t seen it yet, don’t wait for the fiftieth anniversary — although I fully expect that there will be a fiftieth anniversary. Classics have a way of reappearing and being pronounced, again and again, as even more applicable to our reality than at the time of the original showing. That’s the mystery of the timelessness of certain works of art, no matter how solidly set in historical details.
“BEWITCHNG INVITATION TO A LAIR OF MONSTERS”
But magical realism is the province of mad Latins. Del Toro made Cronos and The Devil’s Backbone, films that subjected reality to gothic aerobics and midnight mythopoeia. Pan’s Labyrinth is deadly earnest in its portrait of a time: the aftermath of war, when Franco’s soldiers pushed north to purge the last resistance. Captain Vidal (Sergi López) is a handsome sadist whose new wife, pregnant but ailing, and stepdaughter must get in step with the counter-rebellion. But little Ofelia, a virtual orphan riding into the storm, starts to live in her redeeming imagination and so do we. Here is the ruined labyrinth, here the garrulous faun. Go further to encounter the monster toad, the mazy challenges and the Pale Man, an albino humanoid with eyes set into his hands who presides over a banquet from which no one may eat.
Del Toro, a lapsed Catholic, has hinted that this forbidden repast symbolizes the Church. It does and doesn’t. The labyrinth does and doesn’t stand for the Spanish Civil War. And the girl does and doesn’t embody the dawn of a new Spain. As in dreams, the obvious interpretation is just the iceberg’s tip. A vast hull of mystery and poetry remains unsounded, unfathomed. What about the girl’s supernatural stick-insect guide, a dadaist Tinkerbell? Or the chalk outlines she draws in walls to create real passages and doorways?
It could have been feyness, pure and simple-minded. But few other moviemakers have the talent to suggest there are many mansions in make-believe, or the nerve to twin the pantomimic with the implacable. There is a torture scene you want to watch only through your fingers. (Is that the meaning of those eye-implanted hands? “See no evil”, while allowing it to happen?) And there is a DIY lip-stitching, performed on himself by the injured Captain, that will put the heebie-jeebies into the squeamish. Yet that scene is another hint at the denial theme – “speak no evil” – in a magisterial movie that sees truth as the greatest challenge of all, the final mystery and mandate at the heart of the human maze.
https://www.ft.com/content/4874c3be-7a46-11db-8838-0000779e2340#axzz3IoFoUsar
The Mexican fantasist Guillermo del Toro has two careers. In Hollywood, he makes diverting but ultimately callow fare like Blade II and Hellboy. Back home, he crafts dark, thoughtful fables like Cronos, The Devil’s Backbone, and now Pan’s Labyrinth. I much prefer del Toro’s Mexican work, away from Hollywood bean-counters who would insist on stripping the fairy-tale illogic from his films. “What’s the deal with all the fascists?” they might say. “Can’t the thing with eyes in his palms be nice? And why does it have to be in Spanish?”
Set after the Spanish Civil War, when Franco was sending troops into the hills to smoke out any remaining rebels, Pan’s Labyrinth presents humanity at its cruellest and kindest. This is a world in which a little girl can stick a living mandrake root in a bowl of milk, put it under her ailing mother’s bed, and feed it with her own blood so that her mom can get better. It is also a world in which a sadistic captain shows a prospective torture victim which tools he plans to use, and at which point in the proceedings his victim’s confession will finally be convincing. Crudely put, Pan’s Labyrinth is Schindler’s List meets MirrorMask, in which the reality an imaginative girl seeks to escape through fantasy is harsh and foul, and sometimes the fantasy is, too.
Carmen (Ariadna Gil) is pregnant with the child of the aforementioned sadist, Captain Vidal (Sergi López), who has insisted that she be delivered to the mill he and his men are protecting. Carmen brings her daughter Ofelia (Ivana Baquero), a 12-year-old girl from Carmen’s previous marriage to a now-deceased tailor. Ofelia hates her stepfather and hates that her beloved mother is stuck with him, but she loves her future brother, who hears Ofelia’s stories in the womb. Ofelia encounters some buzzing insectoid creatures, who soon resolve themselves into fairies out of one of Ofelia’s books, and eventually they lead her into an enchanted labyrinth ruled by a growling faun. Here she receives three tasks, as if her life weren’t complicated enough.
Del Toro constructs Pan’s Labyrinth as two states of being, not always in opposition. The various creatures Ofelia meets, especially the ghastly one sitting at a banquet table just waiting for a hungry little girl to steal some grapes, are meant to be as terrifying as the ruthless fascist soldiers. Women are pushed around by males both human and inhuman.
There’s a sliver of hope in Captain Vidal’s housekeeper Mercedes (the excellent Maribel Verdú, from Y Tu Mamá Tambien), whose sympathy lies with the rebels. Is Ofelia’s fantasy world real, or just in her head? It’s real to her, and it’s made real to us by virtue of its very unpleasantness. This is a fantasia only a traumatized little girl — or a director fascinated with monsters with horns and monsters in jackboots — could weave.
Carmen (Ariadna Gil) is pregnant with the child of the aforementioned sadist, Captain Vidal (Sergi López), who has insisted that she be delivered to the mill he and his men are protecting. Carmen brings her daughter Ofelia (Ivana Baquero), a 12-year-old girl from Carmen’s previous marriage to a now-deceased tailor.
Ofelia hates her stepfather and hates that her beloved mother is stuck with him, but she loves her future brother, who hears Ofelia’s stories in the womb. Ofelia encounters some buzzing insectoid creatures, who soon resolve themselves into fairies out of one of Ofelia’s books, and eventually they lead her into an enchanted labyrinth ruled by a growling faun. Here she receives three tasks, as if her life weren’t complicated enough.
Del Toro constructs Pan’s Labyrinth as two states of being, not always in opposition. The various creatures Ofelia meets, especially the ghastly one sitting at a banquet table just waiting for a hungry little girl to steal some grapes, are meant to be as terrifying as the ruthless fascist soldiers. Women are pushed around by males both human and inhuman. There’s a sliver of hope in Captain Vidal’s housekeeper Mercedes (the excellent Maribel Verdú, from Y Tu Mamá Tambien), whose sympathy lies with the rebels.
Is Ofelia’s fantasy world real, or just in her head? It’s real to her, and it’s made real to us by virtue of its very unpleasantness. This is a fantasia only a traumatized little girl — or a director fascinated with monsters with horns and monsters in jackboots — could weave.
https://robsmovievault.wordpress.com/2006/12/29/pans-labyrinth/
A BRUTAL FAIRY TALE
Made with the enthusiasm of a child and the artistry of a master, Guillermo del Toro’s El laberinto del fauno is a film so dedicated to making us dream that even its score is a lullaby. Drawn from countless sources and a lifetime of fascination with the genre, the Mexican filmmaker’s richly conceived fantasy creates a new postmodern mythology and establishes the picture as a landmark of the genre.
Del Toro’s small but impactful presence in modern cinema has been nothing short of paramount, as he elevates the fantastic with vision, craftsmanship, and personal storytelling. In film after film, his protagonists are extensions of himself, actual or ostensible children who, like in some venerable fairy tale, discover an impossible world or learn that frightening creatures actually lurk in the dark. And with each new tale, he awakens the viewer’s imagination without sacrificing invention or dramatic authority.
Del Toro’s story takes place in 1944, when anti-Franco resistance fighters use a Spanish forest to conceal themselves and await the liberation by Allied forces. Arriving to hunt them down is a barrage of Franco’s troops led by the cruel Capitan Vidal (Sergi Lopez), a man ruled by his sadistic notions of order and family. Vidal establishes headquarters in an abandoned mill surrounded by ancient ruins and woodland, and brings along his new wife, Carmen (Ariadna Gil), and her 11-year-old daughter from her first marriage, Ofelia (Ivana Baquero).
His only interest in Carmen is their unborn child; his concern for Ofelia is even less. This is a pitiless man, one who brutally kills suspected freedom fighters only to discover that they are what they said, farmers out hunting rabbits; then he takes their modest game for his dinner. As his forces gradually converge on the resistance sheltered in the woods, he begins to suspect someone at the mill has been informing for the enemy. The head servant, Mercedes (Maribel Verdú), who has developed a rapport with Ofelia, supplies the rebel forces with antibiotics and intelligence. But Vidal remains fixated on the ailing Carmen, whose weakness could cost him his successor’s life. “If you have to make a choice,” he tells the doctor, “save the baby.”
While Vidal advances his Fascist agenda, Ofelia, a natural dreamer, grows enchanted by the forest. She meets a stick bug of sorts that reveals itself as a fairy; it leads the child through the ruins of a nearby labyrinth to her first encounter with the Faun (Doug Jones), a creature born of mountains and earth, but whose intentions are suspect.
The Faun tells Ofelia that she is Princess Moanna of the Underground Realm, a vast kingdom free of pain and death, and that to return home, she must complete three tasks before the next full moon. For her first task, she must climb into a muddy passage of roots to collect an important key from a gluttonous toad, whose presence has killed a once-magnificent fig tree.
On her second assignment, with the toad’s key, she must enter the lair of a horrible creature called Pale Man (also Jones), unlock a safe box, and bring back the dagger inside without eating from the creature’s table. Ofelia’s temptation prevails, however, and she fails the Faun, who, in consideration of her mother’s death, resolves to give her another chance. He asks that Ofelia bring her newborn brother to the Labyrinth.
Del Toro weaves the two stories together with a close connection between Vidal’s violent war and Ofelia’s fantastical realm. Both are dangerous places for the girl, yet only her mythic world offers the possibility for escape, whereas any future with Vidal means certain doom for Ofelia and her mother. The Capitan’s forces have been crushed by the resistance, and all seems lost. Vidal follows after Ofelia and his progeny to the Labyrinth, where she safeguards her only family and refuses to give her brother to the Faun.
Close behind, Vidal reaches Ofelia in the Labyrinth and sees her talking to no one. After taking the child, he shoots her down. With her death and self-sacrifice for her innocent brother, Ofelia earns her throne in the Underground Realm as Princess Moanna, while above, the resistance disposes of Vidal, and Mercedes mourns over Ofelia’s body.
Against expectations, Ofelia’s magical world does not provide an all-protective sanctuary; its inhabitants are dangerous and even deadly, perhaps informed by unrelenting atrocities in her life—a father taken by war only to be replaced by a dogmatic madman; a mother who eventually dies during childbirth; a despotic guardian with no concern for human life. If Ofelia has dreamt up her world, then it has been influenced by the tragedies around her, leaving her to trust no one, not even her imagination. Only in death can her imagination truly save her.
Consider how the Faun emerges from the dark, eating some unidentified slice of flesh that he shares with a fairy, and then asks the girl to place herself in danger. Such a creature hardly seems escapist for a child, even a child like Ofelia, versed in storybooks. But then, with Vidal as a stepfather, even duplicitous and monstrous creatures might seem comforting by contrast. Later, she embraces the Faun like an old friend.
Del Toro wants us to question the nature of his story—whether or not Ofelia’s daydreams are imagined, or part of a greater world that only she can see because, indeed, she is Princess Moanna. He maintains a balance between the two worlds with a formal interconnectedness through editing, yet also distance. Fantasy scenes seem to unfold from Ofelia’s point of view only, though what could be considered the “reality” of Vidal’s war is verified through multiple perspectives (Vidal, Carmen, Mercedes, etc.). This is true except in two bookmarking scenes: the initial after Ofelia first meets the insect on the road and later just before the end credits, when the film’s perspective shifts to the insect-fairy, whose sole presence onscreen suggests a connection between the viewer and the fantasy world, therefore confirming its existence within the overall world of the film.
Though known in most circles as Pan’s Labyrinth, del Toro has pointed out that the mythical creature Pan never appears in the film, and that the central half-man, half-goat faun, or satyr, goes unnamed. The Spanish-language title translates to “The Faun’s Labyrinth”, which may have confused English-language audiences in its similarity to “fawn” or young deer, and so for marketing purposes the title was changed. However, del Toro is quick to point out that he specifically avoided including Pan in his story, as the Greek god associated with the spring season and fertility, as well as with stories of bestiality and masturbation, would make unsettling company for his 11-year-old protagonist. Instead, del Toro draws not only from Greek mythology, but from authors like Algernon Blackwood, Lord Dunsany, and Arthur Machen to conceive a tale ruled by a powerful mixture of myth and history that has fascinated the filmmaker since his youth.
As a child growing up in Guadalajara, Mexico, del Toro explored all things macabre, from horror movies to black magic to insects. Interested in seemingly all things morbid, he preoccupied his parents, who ultimately concluded that he was just “imaginative.” His fascination became a well-funded obsession once his father won the national lottery and could finance his son’s hobbies. After his first copy of the magazine “Famous Monsters of Filmland”, the young cineaste began drawing bizarre creatures and exploring methods of movie makeup—everything from vampire fangs to fake blood.
He went to film school at the Centro de Investigación y Estudios Cinematográficos in Guadalajara, and after graduating, in 1985, he started Necropia, a special FX company based in Mexico City. Experiments with short films like Geometria, the horror-movie equivalent of a dirty joke, led to the release of his first feature, Cronos, in 1993, which won the Mercedes-Benz Award at Cannes and secured his future in Hollywood.
During the heyday of practical makeup effects, ushered by H.R. Giger’s lurid designs for Alien, del Toro watched the masters at work and drew inspiration. Rick Baker’s work on An American Werewolf in London and Videodrome broke barriers in what movie makeup could do. Along with the film’s setting, Rob Bottin’s terrifying, morphing organism in John Carpenter’s The Thing helped echo a horrifying twist on H.P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness, a dream project for del Toro.
Chris Walas transformed Jeff Goldblum into a human gradually overrun by insect DNA that overwhelms his body like a disease, while Stan Winston created monster effects for Predator and robotics for The Terminator that changed the industry with their iconic appearance. Del Toro would join this list of landmark artists by ingraining his personal flourishes into the concepts of his makeup and creatures.
His seemingly boundless vision draws on mythical iconography, fairy tales, classical paintings, his favorite comic books and movies, and all things pulp. Yet, del Toro redefines such material through sizeable doses of pure imagination. Winding patterns in the Faun’s labyrinth or in the textures of both beautiful and horrible creatures are all rendered with the same sense of wonder and conceptual splendor, some derived, but always reinvented.
From preproduction notebooks dating back to 1993, del Toro’s designs for El laberinto del fauno feel familiar in a way that is hard to pinpoint. Take the giant toad that offers up Ofelia’s crucial key; it looks like one from a dozen storybooks, but filtered through del Toro’s imagination to emerge altogether original. Del Toro seems to have obtained material from our collective dreams and reformed it into something completely new.
Another example, Pale Man, comes from a place both historical and personal for the director. Seated before a mountainous feast in his lair, the giant Pale Man looks revoltingly thin and, given folds of skin that drape his frame like a gown, appears to have been cursed to starvation. His body inert and hungry, he waits until an unwitting child eats from the lavish table of food and becomes his dinner. On a platter before him rest his eyes, which are inserted into sockets in his palms to peer with outstretched hands. Fresco murals on the surrounding walls depict ogres consuming children, and it becomes clear that del Toro has reimagined an even more nightmarish version of Francisco de Goya’s painting Saturn Devouring his Children.
But the image also comes from a very personal place, as the director remembers drooping folds on his own body after losing much weight, and then recaptured the image here. Del Toro’s understanding of the body and its weaknesses, its ability to change, mutate, or be destroyed, informs his creation of such creatures, and also his resistance to CGI-based characters.
For del Toro, the more tangible the film’s fantastical elements appear, the more believable they are to the viewer. As a result, he has resisted complete conversion into computer animation on his productions, and even devoted most of his salary to Hellboy and all of it from El laberinto del fauno to complete practical monster effects that the studios refused to finance, but which he considered crucial to the audience’s suspension of disbelief. An audience can see through digitized artifice, and no matter how skilled the CGI, a viewer can always tell.
Using former mime Doug Jones to play both the Faun and Pale Man under hours of makeup and animatronics to fulfill other creatures, del Toro’s world in El laberinto del fauno has an earthy realism. Enhanced by the forest setting, laden with fallen leaves and crumbling ruins, the mise-en-scène feels imbued with organic life. The Faun appears composed solely of forest components; even the computer-generated stick bug transforms into a fairy with leaves for wings. All of these details, along with the predominant natural surfaces that augment del Toro’s imaginative designs, give each of his films a substantial depth beyond any others in their genres.
Viewing after viewing, it is impossible to determine with certainty if the film’s fantasy world is part of Ofelia’s dreams or an actual subworld of mystical creatures and clever monsters. Just as del Toro enjoys exploring a child’s imagination, he revels more in the idea of pulling back the curtain to discover that our richest imaginings are actually real. Think about how Agent Meyers in Hellboy discovers the government’s best-kept paranormal secret, smoking cigars and tending to his cats, or how the boy in The Devil’s Backbone (the older brother of El laberinto del fauno) realizes that his innocent fear of ghosts is justified.
And yet, such a clear distinction is not made in El laberinto del fauno. Del Toro employs measured wipes between worlds rather than concise cuts; their interconnectedness is often defined by a single full movement from the shadow of one world into another, as his film is about making a choice between two worlds. Just as Ofelia must decide whether or not to trust the Faun, the audience must decide if the Faun is truly there, or if she has dreamt this world merely as a way of escaping Vidal’s war.
For Ofelia, certainly, men like Vidal and the atrocities around her have shaped her perception of reality and influenced her dreams, making the creatures of the Faun’s world elaborately designed and often untrustworthy, whereas the monsters of her imagination are more terrifying than even Vidal. They must be, for how else could Ofelia cope with the Captain’s sadistic treatment of her family and his subordinates, unless there was something out there even more terrifying than him?
What resounds as the lasting tragedy of Ofelia’s story is that even though her dreamworld in a sense “rescues” her from death, she cannot merely delete such notions from her thoughts—the world’s monsters have crept into her unconscious and fill the dark places of her dreams. Those two worlds are so unalterably linked in her mind that even her wildest visions cannot protect her, not entirely, from reality’s cruel influence.
Through a realistic backdrop punctuated by dramatic storytelling, tragedy, and violence, del Toro engages the imagination with the fantastic. At once, his film underscores the importance of escapist fantasy through a horrifying real-world parable, yet tells its own fairy tale in the process, one with imagery so memorable and powerful that it could outlast cinema and enter an oral tradition reserved for campfires and bedtime.
https://www.deepfocusreview.com/definitives/el-laberinto-del-fauno/
Oriana:
Something very odd kept happening when I looked for negative reviews of this famous movie. Every single one either failed to load, leaving me staring at a virtual blank page, or else receiving the 404 “error message.” I felt this was a sign: don’t look for the ultimately insignificant flaws in this magical tapestry woven of beauty and brutality. As in classical fairy tales it’s pointless to point out that Little Red Riding Hood and her Grandmother could not emerge unharmed from the wolf’s belly. We simply have to suspend disbelief and submit to the magic.
One very interesting part of the movie that no critic seems to comment at length on is the part of the narrative that is a strange parallel with the biblical tale of Abraham and Isaac. After her sickly mother dies giving birth to Ofelia’s half brother, the girl is asked to sacrifice some blood from the newborn to the Faun: “That’s exactly what we need —- absolute innocence.”
Unlike Abraham, Ofelia emphatically refuses this command. Thus she reveals her moral greatness. placing the sacredness of life ahead of the security of blind obedience. I never expected to see, in a work of art, a refutation of Abraham’s obedience to a cruel archaic god, but — here it finally is, in the form of an eleven-year-old girl, mature enough to know good and evil, and choose good.
The AI overview of the movie singles out Ofelia’s disobedience as the movie’s central message:
“The climax of Guillermo del Toro’s dark fantasy masterpiece, Pan's Labyrinth, serves as a direct structural and thematic inversion of the biblical story of Abraham and Isaac. Both narratives center on the ultimate test of faith: a divine authority commanding the sacrifice of an innocent child. However, while the biblical story uses the test to reward blind obedience, Pan's Labyrinth uses it to champion the sanctity of disobedience as a moral triumph.”
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THE ‘UNRETIREMENT’ MOVEMENT
More people of a certain age are holding jobs rather than waiting for their Social Security checks to arrive in the mail. The demographics of the American workforce are changing, and for the better, as it becomes more diverse in terms of age.
A 2026 AARP survey of adults age 50 and older found that over six months, 7 percent of retirees “unretired,” meaning they reentered the labor force. Not surprisingly, most of them reported that their primary reason for returning to work was to make money.
Financial problems most commonly push retirees back into the workforce: Spiraling healthcare costs or a health-related emergency are primary reasons that retirees return to work either part-time or full-time. Recent inflation spikes have also driven many older Americans to look for work, as the rising cost of living has reduced spending power. What might have seemed like a sizable nest egg has shrunk for many Americans, and the thought of running out of money is understandably terrifying.
Purpose, Structure, and Social Connection
Not just financial necessity but simply wanting to stay busy or engaged is behind the unretirement movement. While money is the major factor in returning to the workforce in some way, many retirees have found their post-career lives are not the nirvana they had expected. Americans as a whole have a strong work ethic, and full-time leisure is not as fulfilling or rewarding for those who have been productive for decades. Research indicates that engaging in work provides routine, purpose, and social connection, which can boost physical and mental well-being.
A growing labor shortage in many industries may help drive the unretirement movement and options for retirees who prefer to work on their own terms. Older adults are, among many other things, selling health insurance, becoming real estate agents, tutoring and substitute teaching, and working in retail or food service in their spare time.
Our knowledge economy also allows retirees to leverage the skills and wisdom they have gained over the years by serving as life coaches, youth mentors, community outreach specialists, and caregiving companions. According to Pivoters, which connects people over age 55 with employers looking for experienced talent, the United States has more than "100 million people 55 and over, most of whom need to work for financial reasons and want to work for the longevity, health, and social benefits of work.”
Baby boomers, now in their 60s and 70s, are not surprisingly leading the unretirement movement. In their book The Talent Revolution: Longevity and the Future of Work, Lisa Taylor and Fern Lebo examine the gradual sidelining of boomers in the American workforce. In the 1980s and 1990s, boomers were undoubtedly an economic powerhouse; however, a couple of decades later, society thinks they have little to contribute.
The authors argue that digital technology created a false perception of this generation as obsolete—akin to viewing them as beta-max. The authors see older adults as essential to the future workplace, and longevity may pave the way for the coming “talent revolution.” “We identify boomers as revolutionaries—a population of disruptors that is altering career patterns, creating new expectations, and demanding inclusion,” they write.
Pairing Older Workers’ Wisdom with Younger Workers’ Energy
Chip Conley has conceived perhaps the most compelling and welcoming workplace scenario for older adults. The notion of modern elderhood has been simmering for some time, but Conley has shown how it could serve as a platform for age-friendly work. In his early 50s, Conley sold his business and wasn’t sure what to do next when he unexpectedly found a new gig as the designated “elder” for Airbnb, the online vacation rental marketplace. At that company, like most tech-driven ones, digital intelligence was the primary job qualification, putting young people with little managerial experience in major positions of power.
Conley wrote in his book Wisdom at Work, "Here exists a generation of older workers with invaluable skills—high emotional intelligence, good judgment born out of decades of experience, specialized knowledge, and a vast network of contacts—who could pair with these ambitious millennials to create businesses that are built to endure.”
Conley advised older workers to repurpose their experience by seeking recognition as wise elders in organizations, like village elders in traditional societies who wielded authority based on the wisdom that came with age. Wise words indeed.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/future-trends/202610/the-unretirement-movement
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WHALE GRAVEYARDS
A photographer captured this extraordinary site where whales' bodies lie in the shallows. Had they died naturally, their bodies would usually be scattered across the ocean. These images tell the story of a deep-sea denied of vital sustenance, and entire ecosystems that will never come to be. In eastern Greenland, Alex Dawson slipped into the ocean through a hole cut into the pack ice. He sank into the darkness below and – just a few meters down – he found a mass grave of butchered minke whales.
It took an hour of traveling to get to the dive site, by foot and by snowmobile. The air was -20C (-4F), and the team battered by strong winds. "We had a lot of gear," says Dawson, an acclaimed underwater photographer. "We were six scuba divers, with six divers' gear. There were cameras, there was food and all kinds of supplies for the day – safety equipment, ice drills…"
The equipment was piled on a sledge and pulled by a snowmobile while the team walked on foot. "When you walked, if you didn't have snowshoes on you stepped through the thin layer of ice, and you got into water almost to your knees – every step," says Dawson.
"Once we got there it took hours to make the hole," he continues. Their way into the ocean beneath the ice was a small triangle-shaped hole cut by hand through about a meter (3ft) of ice. "We tried to clear out as much of the slush from the hole as possible," he says. Then, Dawson – in his thick drysuit, hood and gloves – was first to enter the water.
The site Dawson eventually found below the waves was not only striking, but troubling. In life whales transform their environment, and in death too they play an outsized role on their ecosystems. And here in eastern Greenland, bones that would naturally have fallen to the deep ocean floor instead lie trapped in the shallows.
Despite the protection of his drysuit, "I felt like my face was falling off", he says. "It was so extremely cold.”
Anna Von, who Dawson was to photograph swimming amongst the whale bones, followed him into the ocean. The competitive freediver wore just a 5mm wetsuit to protect her for from the -2C (28F) water. At this temperature she could only last up to 45 seconds before needing to surface for air.
Dawson, attached to a safety rope, dove straight down away from the daylight. This is when the fear began to creep in, he says. When you first enter the water through the hole, "you see nothing. It's just the black abyss below you. You feel like all these creatures are lying there [in the deep] looking up at you."When he reached the seafloor, "I just lay there breathing," he says, as he waited for his eyes adjust to the darkness.
After a short while, his vision became clearer. "I started looking around, and I was like, 'This is so crazy. There are so many bones everywhere.'" There, at around just 5m (16ft) depth – bathed in the blue light of their icy tomb – lay the remains of around 20 minke whales.
Dawson was just beginning to relax when he heard a loud "boom". "It sounded like somebody was blowing dynamite underwater. Then I heard a second boom. That's when I realized that this was the tide starting to move, and the ice cracking."
Diving under pack ice is one of the most hazardous kinds of diving. The currents could carry you away under the "endless pack ice", says Dawson, "and you'd be gone forever". Pack ice is made up of fragments of frozen seawater that are squeezed together, becoming a large mass of floating ice that covers the sea surface and drifts with the winds and ocean currents.
"The tide was going out, which meant the ice was sinking. If our hole were to compress, I thought, 'I'm screwed' – because there was only one hole. It would take [the team above the ice], well over an hour to make a second hole if they were trying to save me.” He decided to risk it, however. "Focus on the photography," Dawson told himself. "Everything will be fine". This mindset paid off. The Swedish photographer was named winner of the Under Water Photographer of the Year 2024 for the image he called "Whales Bones”.
Whales, some of which are the largest animals to have ever existed, usually die out in the open ocean, most likely scattered along their migration paths, says Greg Rouse, curator of benthic invertebrates at Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego, California. Their bodies – a colossal bounty of nutrients – sink to the ocean floor to become oases of life.
After a whale dies, its insides begin to decay first. The body expands with gas and may float to the surface like a balloon. The first scavengers to profit are therefore surface-dwelling creatures like seabirds and sharks.
Eventually, the carcass begins to sink, falling through the ocean's sunlight, twilight and midnight zones, perhaps to the abyss – maybe even making it to the deepest trenches. "You can find them thousands and thousands of meters [down]," says Rouse.
The deepest whale carcass ever found belonged to an Antarctic Minke whale. It lay in the darkness of the abyssal zone, at 4,204m (13,793ft) depth on Southwest Atlantic Ocean. And what was left of skeleton – just nine vertebrae of the animal's tail – suggested the whale had been lying on the seabed for as long as a decade.
The species found living there made up a thriving ecosystem. Among them were deepwater crabs, sea snails and bristle worms. In fact, most of the 41 species living on the carcass were new to science. The species did, though, share qualities with those living on other whale carcasses found thousands of miles away in other ocean basins – suggesting the existence of a "worldwide whale-fall corridor".
Once on the ocean floor, the usually nutrient-limited ocean floor suddenly has an immense island of food. Deep-sea creatures amass. Large scavengers and microscopic bacteria alike come to inhabit the whale fall.
"There is an initial phase of scavenging by deep-water scavengers," says Adrian Glover, deep-sea ecologist at the Natural History Museum in London, UK. "These include vertebrates like hagfish and sleeper sharks, as well as scavenging amphipods – little crustaceans like shrimps. They eat the flesh, exposing the bone." Hagfish burrow face-first into their enormous meal, while sleeper sharks, crabs and lobsters strip the blubber and muscles from the bone.
It can take several months to strip off all the flesh – then just the skeleton is left "sitting in the mud" says Glover. Now, the oily bones become home to another community of organisms, like the Osedax – or "bone-eating worm".
"They are related to hydrothermal vent tube worms," says Glover, "but have evolved the ability to degrade the bone directly, and consume the fats and the collagen inside the bone”.
The divers found themselves amongst around 20 minke whale carcasses The benefits of whale fall spread beyond the carcass itself. Lipids and oils leak out into the seabed and a "massive bacterial mat forms around the whale", says Rouse. "Invertebrates explode in numbers."
As the bones decompose, sulphur is released. "There's a halo of organic enrichment," adds Glover, with sulphur-rich habitats found in the sediments surrounding whale carcasses. The sulphur is consumed by chemosynthetic organisms – bacteria which live in environments devoid of light and derive their energy directly from chemicals in their environment, rather than the products of Sun-driven photosynthesis.
Chemosynthetic bacteria live symbiotically with deep-sea creatures like clams, mussels, snails and worms. "This is where you get organisms, which exist on hydrothermal vents and cold seeps, hopping onto whale bones as a sort of similar habitat," says Glover. The diversity of species found in this last stage is larger than any other deep seafloor community that we know of – and this "sulphophilic" – or sulphur-loving – stage can last for decades.
Whale carcasses are thought to be the largest organic inputs to reach the deep ocean floor in a single event. The extended whale fall biome can support as many as 407 species, "fundamentally" contributing to deep-sea biodiversity, say experts.
This is slightly less than a hydrothermal vent – where geothermally-heated water escapes from fissures in the ocean floor – which can sustain up to 469 species. But it is far more than a cold seep – where energy-rich chemicals like hydrogen sulphide and methane escape from cracks in the ocean floor – which host to up to 230 species.
Specialized organisms have evolved over millions of years in the bodies of whales, ever since the appearance of these large ocean-going beasts. Now, say experts, whale fall should be considered a source of "evolutionary novelty and biodiversity in the deep-sea".
But in some cases, this natural progression of decay from the surface to the ocean depths is interrupted.
Over the past century, industrial whaling has decimated whale populations. In a single century, the world witnessed likely the "largest cull of any animal – in terms of biomass – in human history," according to a report in Nature. Almost three million whales were killed, devastating global whale populations.
The carcasses were stripped of blubber and flesh, baleen plates and teeth removed, and the head split into precious parts. Any remains were then abandoned to decay in the shallows or left to litter the shores. Often, there was nothing left at all.
Dawson took photographs off the coast of Tasiilaq, a town of around 2,000 people that sits roughly 66 miles (106km) south of the Arctic Circle. Here Greenlanders live in a "wild and harsh environment where agriculture is severely limited", states the International Whaling Commission (IWC), the intergovernmental organization that regulates whale hunting. This means that indigenous Greenlanders continue to depend upon on marine resources – including permitted subsistence hunting of whales.
The hunters drag their catch ashore at the flenseplassen – or "skinning grounds", says Dawson. Families gather to cut away the skin, blubber and meat, stripping the carcasses down to the bare bones. Then the tide carries the skeletons back into the water.
Minke whales are the smallest of the baleen whales. They are considered abundant and found all over the world, from the tropics to polar regions. Of this stable population, an average of nine minke whales are killed each year in East Greenland.
Even catches as small as this can impact deep ocean ecosystems, though, with shallow graves depriving the deeper ocean floor of vital nutrients.
As whale populations continue to struggle, a decline in whale falls is reported to have reduced the biodiversity of deep sea ecosystems – and has likely contributed to the extinction of species before we ever knew of their existence.
"We're still in an era of very low whale numbers," says Rouse, "So, there's probably a lot less whale skeletons on the seafloor than there used to be. What was striking to me is that we still see thriving whale fall ecosystems today. But did we lose some things when we had such a catastrophic decline in whales? We don't know."
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20260225-the-whale-graveyards-that-transform-the-deep-sea
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CAN INSECTS FEEL DEPRESSED?
For decades, the idea that insects have feelings was considered a heretical joke – but as the evidence piles up, scientists are rapidly reconsidering.
One balmy autumn day in 2014, David Reynolds stood up to speak at an important meeting. It was taking place in Chicago City Hall – a venue so grand, it's embellished with marble stairways, 75ft (23m) classical columns, and vaulted ceilings.
As the person in charge of pest management in the city's public buildings, among other things, Reynolds was there to discuss his annual budget. But soon after he began, an imposter appeared on one of the walls – a plump cockroach, with her glistening black body contrasting impressively with the white paint. As she brazenly sauntered along, it was as if she was mocking him.
"Commissioner, what is your annual budget for cockroach abatement?" one councilor interrupted, according to a report in The Chicago Tribune. Cue raucous laughter and a mad scramble to eradicate the six-legged prankster.
No one would question the cockroach's impeccable, though accidental, comic timing. But the incident is partly funny because we think of insects as robotic, with barely more emotional depth than lumps of rock. A cockroach that's capable of being amused or playful – well, that's just plain absurd. Or is it?
In fact, there's mounting evidence that insects can experience a remarkable range of feelings.
They can be literally buzzing with delight at pleasant surprises, or sink into depression when bad things happen that are out of their control. They can be optimistic, cynical, or frightened, and respond to pain just like any mammal would. And though no one has yet identified a nostalgic mosquito, mortified ant, or sardonic cockroach, the apparent complexity of their feelings is growing every year.
When Scott Waddell, professor of neurobiology at the University of Oxford, first started working on emotions in fruit flies, he had a favorite running joke – "…that, you know, I wasn't intending on studying ambition", he says.
Fast-forward to today, and the concept of go-getting insects is not so outrageous as it once was. Waddell points out that some research has found that fruit flies do pay attention to what their peers are doing, and are able to learn from them. Meanwhile, the UK government recently recognized that their close evolutionary cousins – crabs and lobsters – as sentient, and proposed legislation that would ban people from boiling them alive.
An evolutionary imperative
Insects are a jumbled group of six-legged invertebrate creatures with segmented bodies. There are more than a million different types, encompassing dragonflies, moths, weevils, bees, crickets, silverfish, praying mantis, mayflies, butterflies, and even head lice.
The earliest insects emerged at least 400 million years ago, long before dinosaurs took their first tentative plods. It's thought our last common ancestor with them was a slug-like creature which lived around 200 million years before that, and they've been diversifying ever since. Initially they ruled over the land as giants – some dragonflies were sparrowhawk-sized, with 2.3ft (70cm) wingspans – before evolving into the extraordinary array of arthropods around today, from flies with fake scorpion tails to fuzzy moths that resemble winged poodles.
As a result, they're strikingly similar to other animals, and yet vividly different. Insects have many of the same organs as humans – with hearts, brains, intestines and ovaries or testicles – but lack lungs and stomachs. And instead of being hooked up to a network of blood vessels, the contents of their bodies float in a kind of soup, which delivers food and carries away waste. The whole lot is then encased in a hard shell, the exoskeleton, which is made of chitin, the same material fungi use to build their bodies.
The architecture of their brains follows a similar pattern. Insects don't have the exact same brain regions as vertebrates, but they do have areas that perform similar functions. For example, most learning and memory in insects relies on "mushroom bodies" – domed brain regions which have been compared to the cortex, the folded outer layer that's largely responsible for human intelligence, including thought and consciousness.
(Tantalizingly, even insect larvae have mushroom bodies, and some of the neurons within them remain for their whole lives – so it's been suggested that adult insects that went through this stage might be able to remember some things that happened before they metamorphosed.)
There's mounting evidence that our parallel neural setups power a number of shared cognitive abilities, too. Bees can count up to four. Cockroaches have rich social lives, and form tribes that stick together and communicate. Ants can even pioneer new tools – they can select suitable objects from their environment and apply them to a task they're trying to complete, like using sponges to carry honey back to their nest.
However, though insect brains have evolved down an uncannily familiar path to our own, there is one crucial difference: while human ones are so engorged they sap 20% of our energy and drove women to evolve wider hips, insects have compacted their wits into packages several million times smaller – fruit flies have brains the size of a poppy seed. How they've managed this is an enduring scientific mystery to this day.
So, even at first glance, it seems like insects would have the intellectual capacity for emotions.
But does it make sense that they would have evolved them?
Emotions are mental sensations that are usually linked to an animal's circumstances – they're a kind of mental program that, when it's set off, can change the way we act. It's thought that Geraldine Wright, a professor of entomology at the University of Oxford, gives the example of hunger, which is a state of mind that helps you to alter your decision-making in a way that's appropriate, such as prioritizing food-seeking behaviors. Other emotions can be equally motivating – rumblings of anger can focus our efforts on rectifying injustices, and constantly chasing happiness and contentment nudges us towards achievements that keep us alive.
All these things could also apply to insects. An earwig that's thrilled when it finds a nice damp crevice filled with delectable rotting vegetation will be less likely to starve or dry out, just as one that panics and plays dead when it's disturbed has a better chance of escaping the jaws of a predator.
"Let's say you're a bee that ends up in a spider web, and a spider is swiftly coming towards your across the web," says Lars Chittka, who leads a research group that studies bee cognition at Queen Mary, University of London. "It's not impossible that the escape responses are all triggered without any kind of emotions. But on the other hand, I find it hard to believe that this would happen without some form of fear," he says.
A heretical idea
When Waddell first started his own research group in 2001, he had a fairly simple goal in mind. He wanted to find out if flies are better at recalling where to find food when they haven't eaten for a while – i.e. when they might, if they could experience subjective moods, be feeling "hungry". (It turns out they are, and they can.)
To begin with, Waddell cautiously chose the word "motivation", rather than "hunger", to describe the flies' state of mind – he suggested that they were more motivated to find food if it had been withheld. "And people found it a little problematic," says Waddell. Some other scientists felt that this was too anthropomorphic and preferred the term "internal states". "So I often had arguments that I thought were essentially meaningless, because they were just playing with that word," he says.
Then in a matter of years, studying insect intelligence became significantly more fashionable – and all of a sudden the term "motivation" was abandoned, with researchers making the case for insects having "emotional primitives", says Waddell. In other words, they experienced what looked suspiciously like emotions.
"I had always thought of these physiological changes that occur when animals are in deprivation states – deprived of sex, deprived of food – as subjective feelings of 'hunger' and 'sex drive'," says Waddell. "I've never really bothered labeling them as 'emotions', pretty much because I thought it was going to get me into trouble. But before I knew it, everyone seemed to be more comfortable using that [word]."
Now that the suggestion insects have feelings is slightly less scandalous, the field has exploded in popularity – and this strange group of animals is becoming more relatable by the day. But proving that an insect can experience an emotion remains tricky.
Take the humble bumblebee.
In humans, those who have experienced trauma are especially wired to expect the worst – and this has also been demonstrated in a number of other vertebrate animals, including rats, sheep, dogs, cows, cod and starlings. But no one had ever thought to check if insects did this too.
Back in 2011, together with colleagues from Newcastle University (where she worked at the time), Wright decided to take a look. "When psychologists are studying this in humans… they can verify affect [a person's emotional state] because they can ask," says Wright. But discerning emotions in bees requires a bit more ingenuity.
Cockroaches are highly sociable and copy the behavior of their peers, just like humans do
So, how does one detect emotions in an insect? How can we tell they're not just responding automatically? And if they really are sensitive creatures, should we treat them differently?
First, the researchers trained a troupe of bees to associate one kind of smell with a sugary reward, and another with an unpleasant liquid spiked with quinine, the chemical that gives tonic water its bitter taste. Then the scientists divided their bee participants into two groups.
One was vigorously shaken – a sensation bees hate, though it's not actually harmful – to simulate an attack by a predator. The other bee crowd was just left to enjoy their sugary drink.
To find out if these experiences had affected the bees' mood, next Wright exposed them to brand new, ambiguous smells. Those who had had a lovely day usually extended their mouthparts in expectation of receiving another snack, suggesting that they were expecting more of the same. But the bees who had been annoyed were less likely to react this way – they had become cynical.
Intriguingly, the experiment also hinted that the bees weren't experiencing some alien, unrelatable form of pessimism, but a feeling that might not be too dissimilar to our own. Just like humans who are feeling exasperated, their brains had lower levels of dopamine and serotonin. (They also had lower levels of the insect hormone octopamine, which is thought to be involved in reward pathways.)
Wright says many of the chemicals in our brains are highly conserved – they were invented hundreds of millions of years ago. So an insect's emotional experiences could be more familiar than you would think. "So from that perspective, yes, they [the brain chemicals] may have diverged a little bit in terms of what they signal in which animal lineage, but it's quite interesting," she says.
For example, Waddell's research on fruit flies has found that their brains use dopamine just like ours do, to elicit feelings of reward and punishment. "So it's very, very interesting that those things have, you know, convergently evolved and are sort of similar," says Wright. "It means that that's the best way of doing it."
Wright explains that her bee experiment doesn't necessarily mean that all insects can experience pessimism or optimism, because bees are unusually social – community life at the hive is particularly cognitively demanding, so they're considered intelligent for insects. "…But other insects probably do [have pessimism] too," she says.
A clear message
However, it would be surprising if insects could feel emotions but not express them at all. And tantalizingly, there are some hints that insects might be more relatable than you'd think here too.
The problem is something Charles Darwin first considered in the late 19th Century. When he wasn't pondering evolution or eating the "strange flesh" of the exotic fauna he discovered, he spent much of his time thinking about how animals communicate their feelings, and wrote up his findings in a little-known book.
In The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, Darwin argues that — just like every other characteristic — the ways humans express their feelings would hardly have appeared out of nowhere in our own species. Instead, our facial expressions, actions and noises are likely to have evolved via a gradual process over millennia. Crucially, this means that there's probably some continuity among animals, in terms of the ways that we display our emotional state to others.
For example, Darwin noted that animals often make loud noises when they're excited. Among the loud chattering of storks and the threatening rattling of some snakes, he cites the "stridulations", or loud vibrations, of many insects, which they make when they're sexually aroused. Darwin also observed that bees change their hums when they're cross. This all suggests that you don't need to have a voice box to express how you're feeling.
Take the golden tortoise beetle, which looks like a miniature tortoise that's been dipped in molten gold. It's not actually covered in the element, but instead achieves its glamorous look by reflecting light off fluid-filled grooves embedded in its shell. However, pick one of these living jewels up – or stress it out in any way — and it will transform before your eyes, flushing ruby-red until it resembles a large iridescent ladybird.
Most research on the beetle has focused on the physics of how it achieves the color switch, but intriguingly, it's thought that the response is controlled by the insect, which may choose to change depending on what's going on around it – rather than something that just happens passively.
Then there's the Asian honey bee. Around October each year – during what's ominously referred to as the "slaughter phase" – they run the gauntlet of gangs of bee-decapitating giant hornets, also aptly known as "murder hornets". The wasps have a wide native range in Asia, from India to Japan, but scientists suspect they're slowly invading other areas, with occasional sightings in North America. Their raids on bee hives can last for hours, and wipe out entire colonies – first, they cut up their worker bee victims into pieces, then they go for their offspring.
But the bees don't go quietly. In work released earlier this year, scientists revealed that they scream – using an amplified, frantic version of their usual buzz. And though no one has conclusively tied the shrieks to an emotional response in the bees, the study's authors noted in their paper that these "antipredator pipes" share similar acoustic features to the alarm calls of many other animals, from primates to birds to meercats, and might suggest that they're fearful.
An uncomfortable truth
However, the most contentious aspect of the inner lives of insects has to be pain.
"There's lots of evidence in fruit fly larvae that they feel mechanical pain – if we pinch them, they try to escape – and the same is the case for adult flies as well," says Greg Neely, a professor of functional genomics at the University of Sydney. As always, proving that these unpleasant experiences are interpreted as emotional pain is another matter. "The issue is really the higher order aspect," says Neely.
However, there's emerging evidence that they can indeed feel pain as we know it – and not only that, they can experience it chronically, just like humans.
One basic clue to the former is that, if you train fruit flies to associate a certain smell with something unpleasant, they will simply run away whenever you present them with it. "They link together the sensory context with the negative stimulus, and they don't want that – and so they go away from it," says Neely. When fruit flies are prevented from escaping, they eventually give up and exhibit helpless behavior that looks a lot like depression.
But perhaps the most surprising results have emerged from Neely's own research, which has found that injured fruit flies can experience lingering pain, long after their physical wounds have healed. "It's almost like an anxiety-like state, where once they've been injured, they want to make sure nothing else bad happens," says Neely. The fruit flies' responses are thought to mirror what can happen in humans, when an injury leads to chronic "neuropathic" pain.
And though pain hasn’t yet been studied in a wide variety of insects, Neely thinks its likely that it would be similar across the board.
"If we look at the overall architecture of how the brain is set up – the receptors, the ion channels and the neurotransmitters are all pretty similar," says Neely, who points out that you can find examples of insects that are blind to these sensory signals, such as larvae that are in the middle of their transition to adulthood, but this is unusual.
A question of numbers
All this research has some unsettling implications. At the moment, insects are among the most persecuted animals on the planet, routinely killed in almost-incomprehensibly large numbers. This includes 3.5 quadrillion – 3,500,000,000,000,000 – poisoned by insecticides on US farmland each year, two trillion squashed or slammed by cars on Dutch roads, and many more that have gone uncounted.
But though there isn’t much data on the full extent of our insecticide, one thing is widely accepted – the numbers we're dispatching are so vast, we're living through an "insect Armageddon", an era where insects are vanishing from the wild at an alarming rate. Three-quarters of the flying insects in German nature reserves have disappeared in the last 25 years, and one report found that 400,000 species may be facing extinction.
The discovery of insect emotions also poses a slightly awkward dilemma for researchers – especially those who have devoted their careers to uncovering them.
Fruit flies are the archetypal research animal, studied so intensively that researchers know more about them than almost any other. At the time of writing, there are around 762,000 scientific papers that mention its Latin name, "Drosophila melanogaster", on Google scholar. Equally, studies into bees are growing in popularity, for the insights they can provide into everything from epigenetics – the study of how the environment can influence the way our genes are expressed – to learning and memory. Both have endured more than their fair share of experimentation.
"I like to watch bees and I've studied behavior for a lot of my career, so I empathize quite a lot with them already," says Wright, who has been a vegetarian for decades. However, the numbers used in research are tiny compared to those sacrificed elsewhere, so she feels that it’s easier to justify. "It's this sort of disregard of life in general that we have [that Wright finds more problematic] – you know, people just wantonly take life and destroy it and manipulate it … from humans to mammals, insects to plants."
But while using insects for research is still largely uncontroversial, the discovery that they may think and feel raises a number of sticky conundrums for other fields.
There's already a historical precedent for banning pesticides to protect certain insects – such as the EU-wide embargo on nicotinoids for the sake of bees. Could there be scope for moving away from others? And though insects are increasingly promoted as a noble and environmentally friendly alternative to meat from vertebrates, is this actually an ethical win?
After all, you'd have to kill 975,225 grasshoppers to get the same volume of meat as you would from a single cow.
Perhaps one reason we don't tend to think of insects as emotional is that it would be overwhelming.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20211126-why-insects-are-more-sensitive-than-they-seem
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THE TALE-TELL CHROMOSOME
DNA analysis reveals that approximately 16 million men alive today—roughly 8% of the male population across the former Mongol empire—carry an identical Y-chromosome lineage. Evolutionary geneticists trace this genetic signature back to a single man living around 1,000 years ago: Genghis Khan. ~ Quora
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HOW HANNIBAL DEPRIVED THE ROMANS OF THEIR FINAL TRIUMPH
When soldiers finally surrounded his seaside villa in 183 BC, Hannibal found every secret exit blocked. Refusing to be taken to Rome in chains, he reached for a vial of poison.
His suicide marked the end of a decades-long cat-and-mouse game across the Mediterranean. After his decisive defeat at the Battle of Zama in 201 BC, Hannibal wasn't captured or even exiled. He remained in Carthage, transitioning from military commander to high magistrate (Suffete). In a surprisingly effective pivot, he enacted sweeping anti-corruption reforms that rapidly restored Carthage's economy. This success alarmed his political enemies at home, who sent word to Rome that Hannibal was secretly plotting to renew the war.
When Roman agents arrived in Carthage in 195 BC demanding his arrest, Hannibal slipped out of the city at night. He spent the rest of his life as a high-profile fugitive, offering his tactical genius to eastern kingdoms that were clashing with Rome's expanding empire.
First, he fled to the court of King Antiochus III of the Seleucid Empire. When the Romans defeated Antiochus in 189 BC, one of their absolute conditions for peace was that Hannibal be handed over. Anticipating the betrayal, Hannibal fled again, bouncing between Armenia and Crete before finally taking refuge with King Prusias I of Bithynia, in modern-day Turkey.
The Romans never stopped hunting him, eventually tracking him to the seaside town of Libyssa. When the Roman statesman Titus Quinctius Flamininus arrived at the Bithynian court to demand the aging general, King Prusias folded to the pressure and sent the soldiers who trapped Hannibal in his villa.
According to the Roman historian Livy, Hannibal's final words before drinking the poison were a parting jab at his lifelong enemies: "Let us relieve the Romans from the anxiety they have so long experienced, since they think it tries their patience too much to wait for an old man's death.”
~ PowderArchive, Quora
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WHAT SCIENTISTS CAN LEARN FROM JONATHAN, A 195 YEAR-OLD GIANT TURTLE?
Jonathan the tortoise, the world’s oldest living land animal, is still chugging along at the ripe age of roughly 194. Now, scientists have discovered some of the secrets to Jonathan’s longevity by sequencing his genome for the first time, according to a study published Wednesday in Science Advances.
Jonathan, a Aldabra giant tortoise (Aldabrachelys gigantea), hatched around 1832 in the Seychelles archipelago, and he was already in his twenties when Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species. In his fifties, Jonathan was brought to the remote island of Saint Helena, along with three other tortoises, as a gift to the British colonial governor in the 1880s. He has lived there ever since.
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Jonathan (left) in the 1880s Aldabra giant tortoises often become centenarians, but Jonathan is a major outlier even for his species as he approaches nearly 200 years on this planet. To better understand his extreme lifespan, researchers evaluated Jonathan’s genome based on swabs of his cheeks and compared it with the genomes of several other tortoises, including a 36-year-old named Tank.
The results revealed that Jonathan has “unique gene variants in most aging pathways” including DNA repair, insulin regulation, mitochondrial function, and “low entropy” methylation, reports the study.
“Aging is very complicated, and there's all these different hallmarks,” said Stephen Clark, an aging researcher at the non-profit Kallel Foundation and an author of the study, in a call with 404 Media. “That's why this Jonathan study is so interesting. We're still just at the very beginning of trying to understand aging.”
The study was not an easy lift. Clark first reached out to Jonathan’s caretakers in 2017, but it took some negotiating to figure out the best way to obtain the tortoise’s genetic information. A blood draw was deemed too risky, so Jonathan was coaxed into opening his mouth for a swab. The results were delayed by incomplete early samples, the Covid pandemic, and new regulations governing access to Jonathan.
After years of back and forth, the samples were delivered from Saint Helena to Florida by the U.S. Space Force. The results showed that Jonathan had many gene variants the team expected to see, based on studies of other long-lived individuals and populations. These included variants associated with DNA repair, maintenance of aging-related sequences called telomeres, and the process of cellular recycling known as autophagy.
But the researchers found a surprise in Jonathan’s “methylome,” which is a set of methyl-based modifications involved in gene expression. The subset of Jonathan’s methylome related to mitochondrial processes was unusually pristine, or “low entropy.”
“Jonathan's really the first of his kind to have this analysis, and we were also able to do the methylome for the younger tortoises,” Clark said. “We actually compared him to a five-year-old tortoise, so we had 189 years of difference between the methylomes. No one's ever done that, even in humans, because no humans live that long. That was one of the main things we were excited about: how does this methylome change with age?”
Whereas most of Jonathan’s genome showed signs of entropy commensurate with his age, his mitochondrial methylome seemed on par with that of the five-year-old tortoise, signaling that these pathways may play a special role in his advanced age. However, Clark said it would take more research to follow up on that lead, and to untangle the complicated web of genetic components that influence aging and lifespan.
“We're interested in long-lived species like Jonathan because we can hopefully find other targets,” Clark said of his team’s work at Kallel Labs. “The ultimate goal of the company is to affect human healthspan and lifespan.”
As for Jonathan, he continues to live out his voluminous days at the governor’s residence, Plantation House, where he and his fellow tortoises have become one of the island’s tourist attractions. Saint Helena is also known for the exile of Napoleon Bonaparte, who died there a mere decade before Jonathan is thought to have been hatched. It’s amazing to think about just how much the world has changed in Jonathan’s lifetime. Long may he graze.
https://www.404media.co/oldest-living-land-animal-jonathan-the-tortoise/?utm_source=firefox-newtab-en-us
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INFECTONS LINKED TO 12% OF NEW CANCER CASES
Cancer can seem random. It’s often the result of many factors, including genetic mutations that build up over a lifetime of exposure to sun, pollution, and other sources of DNA damage, combined with a person’s genetic predisposition. DNA damage accumulated over time can weaken the body’s ability to suppress out-of-control cell growth, which is how tumors form.
But infections are another significant cause of cancer. Uncovering the links between certain infections and cancers raises the hope that by preventing infection, one could prevent certain malignancies. A recent report from the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) published in the Lancet Oncology found that 12% of new cancer cases in 2024—the most recent year for which data were available—were caused by 12 infections.
WHICH INFECTIONS ARE ASSOCIATED WITH CANCER?
Certain human papillomaviruses, or HPV, are behind the majority of cervical cancers and a number of head and neck cancers as well, says Harriet Rumgay, an epidemiologist at IARC who is an author of the new report. About 4% of new cancer diagnoses in 2024 could be attributed to HPV infection.
Doctors and researchers have known for decades that hepatitis B and hepatitis C infections also drive many cases of liver cancer, linked to 2% and less than 1% of new diagnoses respectively, according to the report.
There is also strong evidence linking Helicobacter pylori, a bacterium that infects the stomach and small intestine, with gastric cancers. This infection was calculated to be behind about 4% of new diagnoses. And Epstein-Barr Virus (EBV), which causes mononucleosis and affects more than 90% of the world’s population, was involved in around 1% of new diagnoses, including lymphomas, nasopharyngeal cancers, and gastric cancers.
Seven other infections, including HIV, were also flagged as carcinogens in the study.
Most people who have these infections will not develop cancer. It’s not also immediate—there may be a years-long delay. And infection is often only one of a number of factors contributing to a given cancer. For instance, when it comes to the relatively high rates of EBV-driven nasopharyngeal cancers in China, researchers believe that some genetic predisposition and environmental factors are also involved.
Why do some infections cause cancer?
It depends on the infection. In the case of HIV, the virus suppresses the immune system, making it easier for other carcinogenic viruses to replicate. H. pylori causes tissue damage and produces toxins that destabilize the body’s natural control of cellular growth and division, which can lead to cancer.
With EBV, says Claire Shannon-Lowe, a virologist at the University of Birmingham in the U.K. who studies EBV and cancer but was not involved in the research, it has to do with how the virus hides within immune cells called B cells. “It's a whole host of things that the virus itself is doing to the B cell to make it continually grow,” she says. That includes blocking normal cellular housecleaning procedures that would both root the virus out and arrest cancer development.
How can these cancers be prevented?
Some of these infections have treatments. H. pylori can be cleared with antibiotics, for example, reducing the risk of gastric cancer, and treating HIV reduces cancer risk from the infection as well. Some other infections on the list have vaccines.
In fact, for some of these vaccines, cancer prevention was a major goal driving their development. “The hepatitis B virus vaccine was the first vaccine that was developed against cancer,” says Rumgay. Likewise, the HPV vaccine, which was approved 20 years ago, is intended to prevent cervical cancer. Cancer epidemiologists may start seeing the effects of widespread HPV vaccination in future analyses, Rumgay says. “More and more people who have been vaccinated are starting to reach the age where we would potentially see the impact on cervical cancer rates or other cancer rates,” she says.
However, these vaccines aren’t making it to everyone who might benefit from them. In the U.S., hepatitis B vaccination rates in newborns have declined steeply over the last two years.
For other infections, no vaccines are available. For EBV, a nearly ubiquitous virus with a long, clearly documented history of contributing to cancer, “we don't have an effective vaccine yet, or an effective way of preventing it,” says Rumgay. “This is something that we want to highlight with our study.”
Historically, it was difficult to interest pharmaceutical companies in vaccines for viruses like EBV that are common and nonlethal, says Lawrence Young, a virologist and emeritus professor of molecular oncology at University of Warwick in the U.K. who has spent his career studying cancer and EBV. (Young was not involved in the IARC research.)
But thanks in part to research suggesting EBV might be involved in multiple sclerosis, an autoimmune disorder, “they've all become very interested,” he says. A number of vaccine candidates are now being studied, with some in clinical trials.
For some of the infections implicated by the latest study—the Kaposi-sarcoma associated herpes virus, in particular—there’s need for much more research into prevention, says Rumgay. The hope is that “these new findings might stimulate more development in that area,” she says.
https://time.com/article/2026/10/13/infections-linked-to-new-cancer-cases/?utm_source=firefox-newtab-en-us
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THE DISEASE THAT FOLLOWED THE DISCOVERY OF AMERICA
While European diseases killed up to 90% of Indigenous Americans, the New World exported just one catastrophic pathogen in return: a rapidly fatal, flesh-eating plague.
The biological exchange was heavily one-sided because most human diseases originated in large herds of domesticated livestock, like cows and pigs, which the Americas largely lacked.
But that single export—venereal syphilis—altered global history.
In 1493, Christopher Columbus and his crew returned to Spain. Some of his men soon joined the army of King Charles VIII of France as mercenaries. In 1495, Charles marched this multi-national army down the Italian peninsula and laid siege to Naples.
When the city fell, a horrifying new sickness ripped through the camps. The syphilis of 1495 was not the slow-burning infection of the modern era. Historical accounts describe victims covered from head to toe in painful, foul-smelling pustules. The disease ate away at noses, lips, and eyes, often killing the afflicted within a few months.
As the terrified army disbanded, mercenaries scattered across Europe, carrying the bacteria (Treponema pallidum) with them. Because it first appeared during the French invasion, the Italians named it the "French disease." The French called it the "Neapolitan disease." As it spread, the English called it the "French pox," the Russians called it the "Polish disease," and the Turks called it the "Christian disease." Everyone blamed their enemies.
Within a few decades, syphilis evolved. The most lethal strains killed their hosts too quickly to spread effectively. The bacteria mutated into a less immediately fatal, chronic illness, ensuring hosts lived long enough to pass the infection on.
A few other indigenous American pathogens, like Chagas disease and a localized strain of tuberculosis, existed before contact. However, they lacked the transmissibility or the specific insect vectors required to spark trans-Atlantic epidemics. Syphilis remained the singular biological export from the New World, altering sexual behavior and haunting Europe for the next four centuries until the invention of penicillin. ~ SepiaGlyphs, Quora
Oriana:
The current view is that while syphilis existed in Europe before Columbus, it was relatively benign compared to the virulent strain brought from America.
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WARTIME FOOD RATIONING IN BRITAIN AND CONSEQUENT
IMPROVEMENT IN PUBLIC HEALTH
When German U-boats began sinking British food convoys in 1939, the nation braced for starvation. Instead, severe wartime rationing accidentally triggered a public health miracle.
Before the war, Britain imported roughly 55 million tons of food annually, accounting for 70% of its cheese and sugar, 80% of its fruit, and half of its meat. To manage the suddenly severed supply chain, the British government established the Ministry of Food, led by Frederick Marquis, Lord Woolton.
Woolton's approach was grounded in nutritional science. Rather than simply reducing food intake, the Ministry equalized it. Everyone received a ration book, and prices on essential goods were subsidized to ensure the poorest families could afford them. The traditional diet of white bread and meat was replaced by the "National Loaf" (a fortified wholemeal bread), homegrown root vegetables, and heavily restricted portions of fat, sugar, and meat.
The resulting meals were notoriously bland. Recipes for "Woolton Pie"—a dish consisting of carrots, parsnips, potatoes, and turnips under a potato or whole wheat crust—were pushed on the public to stretch limited resources. Dried egg powder replaced fresh eggs, and butter was scarce.
However, from a public health perspective, the diet was a triumph. It eliminated the severe malnutrition that had plagued the British working class during the Great Depression. Infant mortality rates fell, and the average lifespan of civilians increased. Because sugar and sweets were strictly rationed, dental health improved dramatically. The entire nation consumed a high-fiber, low-sugar diet rich in vitamins from the heavily promoted "Dig for Victory" vegetable gardens.
While people were undoubtedly bored by their wartime meals and craved the varied flavors of pre-war imports, they were far from starving. The mandated diet provided exactly what the human body needed to function properly, even if it lacked what the palate desired. ~ BlitzChronicle
Fred Barrett:
A significant number kept rabbits and chickens, even in cities — feeding them on waste vegetable trimmings normally thrown away and weeds like dandelions etc picked in gardens and parks. Many cycled round the countryside quietly picking up extras from fields. Not much fruit got left on trees. Allotment veg patches got more attention.
Joanna Clarke:
There was one thing you could get off ration, according to my mum — Ryvita. She lived in the countryside of Norfolk where most people kept chickens, so eggs were a good item to barter.
David Pritchard:
No mention of the “community pig” scheme: neighbors got together & were given a pig to raise on scraps… come slaughter time, the animal was butchered & the ministry took half for redistribution & the neighbors shared the other half.
P. Mayer:
I remember reading of a campaign to get people to eat potatoes in their jackets with the slogan “Don’t you know the sight of peelings greatly hurts Lord Woolton’s feelings?” Apparently the one thing they couldn’t get people to eat was a tinned fish called snoek.
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TO LOWER BLOOD PRESSURE, EAT BEETS
High blood pressure is a major risk factor for heart disease, so it’s important to keep it in check.
It’s possible to lower blood pressure without medication by losing weight, exercising and eating a healthier diet.
One vegetable in particular stands out, says Dr. Annapoorna Kini, a cardiologist at the Mount Sinai Fuster Heart Hospital in New York.
Heart Health Tip of the Day: Add Beets to Your Diet
“If you really want to know what decreases blood pressure, it is beet — beet root,” Kini tells TODAY.com.
Beets contain nitrates, which get converted to nitric oxide in the body, and “plays an essential role in cardiovascular health,” researchers note.
It’s a natural vasodilator, meaning it opens blood vessels, allowing greater blood flow.
“It works on the (blood) vessel wall — dilates the smooth muscle of the vessel wall. That way, your vessel remains pliable,” Kini adds.
Why It Matters
Blood vessels become more rigid as people get older and start building up plaque in their arteries, Kini notes; and when the arteries get stiff, that’s how you develop high blood pressure.
Arterial stiffness is a “leading marker of risk in hypertension,” researchers wrote in the journal Circulation Research. It also impacts the function of the brain and kidneys.
Nitric oxide is a “potent vasodilator that opens the blood vessels and promotes blood flow throughout the body. This increase in blood flow results in less pressure in the arteries,” explained registered dietitian Natalie Rizzo, nutrition editor for TODAY, when writing about beet benefits.
Beets are particularly high in nitrates, which the body turns into nitric oxide, and their juice has been shown to lower blood pressure. It’s one reason why beets make the list of cardiologists’ favorite vegetables.
How to Get Started
Juicing beets is a simple way to get a high amount of nitrates in one serving, Rizzo says. Try beet carrot ginger juice or Craig Melvin’s beet juice.
Incorporate beets into your meals with a roasted beet salad with salmon or beet risotto.
Beet greens, the vegetable’s leafy tops, are rich in nitrates. They’re also edible and delicious, Rizzo notes. She suggests sautéing them with some olive oil, garlic and salt for a healthy side dish, or adding them soups, smoothies and casseroles.
https://www.nbcnews.com/health/diet-fitness/lower-blood-pressure-vegetable-beets-cardiologist-tip-rcna603498?utm_source=firefox-newtab-en-us
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Ending on beauty:
I saw a high hill and on it a form shaped against hard air.
It could have been just a pole with some old cloth attached,
but as I came closer
I saw it was a human body
trying to stand against winds so terrible that the flesh was blowing off the bones.
And there was no pain.
The wind
was cleansing the bones.
They stood forth silver and necessary.
It was not my body, not a woman’s body, it was the body of us all.
It walked out of the light.
~ Anne Carson, ending of The Glass Essay
