Paleolithic hand stencils from Cueva de las Manos (Cave of the Hands), Argentina. 25-30,000 years old
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A WALK
My eyes already touch the sunny hill
rising beyond the road I have begun.
So we are grasped by what we cannot grasp;
it has an inner light, even from a distance—
and changes us, even if we don't reach it,
into something else, which, hardly sensing it,
we already are; a gesture waves us on,
answering our own wave…
but what we feel is the wind in our faces.
~ Rainer Maria Rilke, Translated by Robert Bly
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THE QUEEN OF THE GHETTO GAVE NEW YORK’S IMMIGRANT COMMUNITY A VOICE
Anzia Yezierska wrote from experience then worked hard to make sure her work found an audience. Then a new audience found her.
In the 1890s, the crowded Jewish enclave on New York’s Lower East Side, filled with horses, pushcarts, clotheslines and Hebrew shop signs, drew fascination and derision from the American public. This immigrant community was considered exotic and creative; it was also decried as squalid and foreign.
At the same time that uptown audiences were flocking to Yiddish theaters, novelist Henry James was writing with alarm about the “Hebrew conquest of New York.” Growing up in this crucible of a new America, a Jewish immigrant named Anzia Yezierska, through sheer force of personality, would overcome prejudice to become one of the Roaring Twenties’ most popular authors, one whom a New York newspaper dubbed “Queen of the Ghetto.”'
Yezierska’s writing gave voice to the ghetto’s dwellers, as she documented the struggles, particularly of immigrant women, to lead full lives in the United States. Her work helped nonimmigrants understand the striving of the foreign-born—and though her fame has wavered, her work remains as vital today as it was 100 years ago, capturing the immigrant experience with a vividness rarely matched in American letters.
Yezierska’s family arrived in New York from Poland in 1890 when Yezierska, the youngest of nine children, was about 10 years old; they were among the two million to three million Jewish people who migrated to the U.S. between 1880 and the early 1920s.
While her parents encouraged her brothers to pursue careers, they expected their four daughters to gain a minimal education, then do menial work in sweatshops before quickly marrying. Her father, Bernard, stressed that a woman without a man was less than nothing. Yezierska disagreed, and her father came to call her “Blood-and-Iron” for her willfulness. 
The queen’s domain: a 1902 scene on Hester Street in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, where streets bustled with immigrants.
When she was still a teenager and working long hours in a laundry, she left home and took a room on East 63rd Street in the Clara de Hirsch Home for Working Girls, where staff prepared immigrant girls to be garment workers or servants, or to train as stenographers. This was the first phase of Yezierska’s effort (as some of her later fictional characters would say) “to work myself up for a person.” A benefactor provided her with a scholarship to Teachers College at Columbia University. After graduating in 1904, she became a cooking instructor in city schools. Teaching, though, was not her calling: She later described the work as a “treadmill of deadness.”
Yezierska’s 1911 marriage to Arnold Levitas, a typographer, proved no escape. After giving birth to their daughter, Louise, in 1912, Yezierska detailed her ensuing discontent with the role of stay-at-home mother in an unpublished essay, “The Rebellion of a Supported Wife.” She ended the marriage in 1916 and dedicated herself to writing short stories.
For several years, Yezierska collected rejection slips. She was brimming with ideas, but the writing didn’t come easy. As she described it, “Sometimes, the vivisection I must commit on myself to create one little living sentence leaves me spent for days.”
Yezierska developed a style she termed “immigrant English,” mimicking the idioms of New York’s Yiddish speakers: “I told her my head was on wheels from worrying.” Her characters are hungry—for food and for fulfillment—and feel impeded in the effort to become “a person” in America.Their relentless drive reflects the author’s rage at women’s subordinate roles, at their poverty and at the widespread disdain they received.
As the narrator says in the short story “How I Found America,” without the public’s understanding, the immigrant “would forever remain driven back upon himself, corroded by the very richness of the unused gifts within his soul.”
Her own gifts she was determined to use. In 1917, Yezierska was in her mid-30s, had published only a few stories and was unable to find full-time teaching work. So she followed her mother’s advice to direct her complaints—as at a department store—to the top. On a cold day late that year, she dropped unannounced into the Columbia University office of John Dewey.
A major force in progressive education, Dewey was a dean at Teachers College, where Yezierska had trained. That day, as she spoke passionately to him about her dreams, the tall sage was stunned—and charmed. She gave him several short stories to read, and Dewey grew infatuated. Soon he was writing her love letters and poems. In one, he prophesied that from Yezierska, “a great song shall fill the world.”
Dewey bought her a typewriter, encouraged her to audit his graduate seminar and, to help subsidize her writing, employed her on a sociology project in Philadelphia. He also forwarded an essay of hers to the New Republic. The romance between upper-crust philosopher and passionate immigrant, which was to inspire many of Yezierska’s later writings, didn’t last more than a year. After the breakup, Dewey demanded she return his letters. She refused—and lifted some of his phrases for upper-class characters in her fiction.
After the New Republic ran the piece Dewey had sent them, editors began snapping up her stories. The critic Edward J. O’Brien gave Yezierska’s “The Fat of the Land” the top ranking in his annual anthology of “Best Short Stories” for 1919. The tale offered a fresh portrait of the immigrant Jewish mother in the character of Hanneh, a woman of frayed nerves and wild emotional swings.
When her children snatch food from her market basket, she shouts, “Murderers! What are you tearing from me my flesh? From where should I steal to give you more?” The children prosper. While Hanneh’s old-country ways remain an embarrassment, as adults they settle her in a comfortable townhouse with servants. Ambivalent about her new status, Hanneh is caught between worlds. She feels at home neither during a return visit to the ghetto nor amid the new comforts of “the fat of the land.”
When Houghton Mifflin published Yezierska’s short story collection Hungry Hearts in 1920, sales were sluggish. Serving as her own publicist, she knocked at the door of Hearst newspaper columnist Frank Crane and handed him a copy of the book. In his syndicated column, Crane wrote with awe about Yezierska, insisting that her stories revealed “an alien people’s naked soul.” That’s when Hollywood came calling.
In the 1910s and ’20s, film producers, many of them Jewish, were looking for stories that highlighted the humanity of Jewish immigrants at a time when groups such as the Immigration Restriction League and supporters of eugenics were stoking fear of foreigners. Movie studios produced more than three dozen silent films set in the Jewish ghetto in the 1920s, making the “ghetto picture” its own genre. In 1921, the pioneering film magnate Samuel Goldwyn offered Yezierska $10,000 for film rights to Hungry Hearts and put her on salary to complete the script.
She stepped off a westbound train in Los Angeles in January 1921, wearing a simple blue suit, felt hat and sandals. Journalists had gathered to cover her arrival, and before climbing into a limousine, she spun tales to them suggesting that Goldwyn’s contract had saved her from hard labor in Manhattan’s sweatshops and laundries. (She did not mention her long stints as a teacher and writer.) Headlines followed: “Sweatshop Cinderella Wins Fortune in Movies.”
Yet Yezierska soon wearied of the star treatment and the studio system. The script was completed in a few months, and she briefly remained in Hollywood to work on a novel but found no inspiration. After rejecting contracts from Goldwyn and producer William Fox, founder of Fox Film Corporation, she returned east for the most productive period of her life.
In 1923, she published her first novel, Salome of the Tenements, which featured a streetwise Jewish girl who marries an upper-class philanthropist. Famous Players-Lasky, the predecessor to Paramount Pictures, bought the film rights for $15,000, and the movie appeared in 1925. In that same year, Doubleday published Yezierska’s finest novel, Bread Givers, a coming-of-age tale with echoes of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. Yezierska describes the fate of a group of four sisters, three of whom are forced into dubious marriages by their father, Moisheh Smolinsky.
Sara, the feistiest of the sisters, breaks away from her family as a teenager. In their frequent arguments, her father (like Yezierska’s own) calls Sara “Blood-and-Iron.” After many struggles, Sara achieves independence by becoming a schoolteacher. In a coda, Sara and her husband, a school principal, take in her widower father, unruly as ever, whom Sara has found selling chewing gum on the streets. A reviewer in the New York Times hailed the novel’s “raw, uncontrollable poetry."
But it was the last of her books to sell well. Yezierska wrote two more novels, to diminishing interest, and the 1929 stock market crash wiped out her Hollywood earnings. Within a few years, the onetime “Queen of the Ghetto” applied for government relief and joined the New Deal’s Federal Writers’ Project, where, for one assignment, she employed her creative talent to describe the different species of trees in Central Park.
In 1950, her autobiography, Red Ribbon on a White Horse, with a foreword by the poet W.H. Auden, gained critical praise but few readers. She wrote book reviews for the New York Times but otherwise lived out her days far from the spotlight and died in 1970 at a California nursing home after a stroke.
Her work would soon emerge from obscurity after a chance rediscovery. In the late 1960s, Alice Kessler-Harris, a British-born historian, later a professor at Columbia University, was researching Jewish participation in New York’s labor movement. Finding references to Yezierska in Yiddish materials, she took breaks from the library’s microfilm machines to read Yezierska’s out-of-print books.
In the early 1970s, as the women’s movement gained momentum, Kessler-Harris shared her photocopy of the novel with publishers, painting Yezierska as an unsung hero of an earlier feminist moment. In 1975, thanks to her efforts, Persea Books published a new edition of Bread Givers.
Now a century old, the novel has sold more than 400,000 copies since its reissue. Many readers still identify with its portrait of a demanding immigrant father. “I can’t tell you the number of Chinese and Indian [and] Nepalese...who’ve written to me to say how the book resonates,” Kessler-Harris tells Smithsonian. “The father in the book is clearly an exaggeration, but that exaggeration is familiar to so many people from different cultures that it’s one of the things ... that give the book its standing power.”
Yezierska’s blood and iron—the passion and stubbornness that informed her prose—explain her endurance, and the jolt of recognition her words continue to offer readers. Not bad for someone who once said of her early days that she was just one of many new Americans “beating out their hearts at your gates for a breath of understanding.”
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/queen-ghetto-gave-new-york-immigrant-community-voice-century-later-reemerging-180988409/
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ENGLISH AS A HYBRID LANGUAGE
Roughly a third of the foundational vocabulary in English, German, and Dutch seems to have materialized out of thin air. Basic words like "ship" have no known Indo-European origin. This anomaly points to a fascinating linguistic collision: the ancient interactions between incoming Indo-European herders and the indigenous coastal populations of the North Sea region.
However, they were not entering an empty landscape. The region was already inhabited by indigenous cultures of hunter-gatherers and early farmers who had spent millennia adapting to the frigid, marshy, and marine-dominated environments of northern Europe.
When these two vastly different groups merged—eventually forming what historians call the Nordic Bronze Age—a massive language shift occurred. The indigenous people gradually abandoned their native tongue to adopt the language of the incoming population. But as with any adult population learning a new language, they spoke it with a heavy accent and retained much of their own local vocabulary. This phenomenon is known to linguists as the Germanic substrate hypothesis.
The most obvious evidence of this merger lies in vocabulary. The migrating Indo-Europeans originated in the inland Eurasian steppe and lacked the terminology needed for navigating complex maritime environments. Consequently, the newly forming Germanic language retained the indigenous words for the sea, seafaring, and local ecology. Core English words like sea, ship, strand, ebb, sail, keel, and eel have no cognates in Latin, Greek, or Sanskrit. They are the linguistic ghosts of a lost, pre-Indo-European maritime culture.
Scandinavian rock carvings of Bronze Age boats from Bardal, Norway.
Beyond vocabulary, the interaction fundamentally rewired how the language sounded.
Linguists believe the indigenous population struggled to pronounce certain Indo-European consonants, leading to a systematic mispronunciation that eventually became the regional standard. This shift, famously codified as Grimm's Law, explains why Germanic languages sound so different from their linguistic cousins. For example, the ancestral Indo-European 'p' sound was consistently pronounced as an 'f', turning the root word pater into father, and pes into foot. The 't' sound shifted to 'th' (turning tres into three), and 'k' softened into 'h' (turning kuon into hound).
The indigenous speakers also changed the rhythm of the language. While older Indo-European languages had a fluid, wandering pitch accent, the new speakers consistently slammed the stress onto the first syllable of a word. This heavy, fixed first-syllable stress is what gave early Germanic languages their distinctive punchy, staccato rhythm.
The original language of those ancient North Sea fishermen was completely erased by history, leaving no written records and no direct descendant tongues. Yet it never truly vanished. Every time a modern person says "shield," asks about the "weather," or pronounces a "th" sound, they are echoing the voices of an indigenous northern culture that left a permanent linguistic fingerprint on the modern world. ~ Sepia Glyphs, Quora
HB Clifford:
If a Venetian financier went broke, the wooden bench that served as his public “office” was ceremonially destroyed — whence our word “bankrupt” (“banca rotta”).
Andres Alvarez:
Latin domus acquired a new meaning a later stage, following the advent of Christianity: ‘cathedral’: cf. Italian duomo, after Late Latin domus Dei, that is to say, ‘house of God’. At the same time, domus may have acquired an elitist connotation, since the common people lived in a casa, originally, ‘hut’. That’s why the majority of the Romance language derive their word for ‘house’ after Latin casa.
Domicile, domestic, domain, dominion, are all derived from Latin domus.
There are some other Latin words for ‘house’ in the Romance domain:
a) Vulgar Latin *hostalem, a syncopated form of Latin hospitalem, ‘inn’: cf. Occitan ostal; Occitan (Provençal) oustau.
b) Vulgar Latin *masionem (< Latin mansionem, ‘residence’): cf. French maison.
Even out of the Romance domain, there’s also Latin hospitium, ‘hospice’, the source of Byzantine and Modern Greek σπίτι (spíti) and Albanian shtëpi.
The Western and Eastern Slavic words for ‘house’ are cognate to Latin domus. Also Lithuanian namas, ‘house’. And also English tame, ‘a domesticated animal’. They’re all words of Proto-Indo-european origin.
There are words in Proto-Indoeuropean and then Proto-Slavic with a common origin with Latin, not via Latin. The same reason why the words for wine in many Slavic languages, or the word for moon in Russian [luna], look so oddly similar to Latin.
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RUSSIA MOURNS THE ROMANOVS
When Bolsheviks executed the Romanovs in a damp cellar in 1918, they wanted to erase the dynasty forever. Today, tens of thousands of Russians walk through the night to weep for them.
Active mourning of the Romanovs does exist in Russia, but it is deeply intertwined with religious devotion and historical nostalgia rather than a widespread desire to restore the absolute monarchy. The most prominent vehicle for this mourning is the Russian Orthodox Church. In 2000, the Church officially canonized Nicholas, his wife Alexandra, and their five children as "passion bearers"—saints who faced their deaths with Christ-like resignation.
Because of this canonization, mourning the Romanovs has become a liturgical act. The site where the execution took place in Yekaterinburg is now home to the imposing Church on the Blood. Every year on the July anniversary of the killings, pilgrims gather there to participate in a solemn overnight procession to Ganina Yama, the forest site where the family's remains were initially discarded. Many participants carry icons of the imperial family, sing hymns, and openly weep for the tragic end of the dynasty.
At the fringes of this religious veneration is a radical subculture known as Tsarebozhie, or "Tsar-worshippers." Adherents of this movement view Nicholas II not just as a saint, but as a messianic figure who willingly sacrificed himself to atone for the sins of the Russian people. While the mainstream Orthodox Church frequently condemns this extreme theology, its existence highlights how the trauma of 1918 still resonates among certain conservative factions.
For the broader Russian public, the sentiment is less about literal mourning and more about a yearning for a lost era. The modern Russian state frequently utilizes the imagery of the Romanovs to promote traditional family values and to emphasize the continuity of the Russian state before the Soviet era. While very few people in modern Russia actually want a return to an autocratic Tsar, the Romanov family has been successfully transformed from historical casualties into potent symbols of a romanticized, pre-revolutionary empire.
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LENIN’S LAST TESTAMENT WARNING ABOUT STALIN (Elena Gold)
Leon Trotsky was Lenin’s favorite to lead the Soviet Union after his death—Lenin knew he was dying and left a letter to the Congress of the Communist Party, telling them to get rid of Stalin.
Leon Trotsky (1879–1940) was one of revolution’s brightest minds—he also was brutal enough to build the Red Army and win the Civil War. De facto, he was the second-in-command to Lenin and was supposed to become the country’s leader after Lenin’s death. Stalin made sure it didn’t happen.
Lenin was no angel himself—the Red Terror concept was his idea.
So, when Lenin wrote his “political last will and testament” for his buddy revolutionaries, he couldn’t predict that it would be precisely this document that would get them all killed. By the guy he told them to get rid of.
Center front: Kalinin and Stalin at the XIII Congress of RKP(B), where Lenin’s letter was read by his widow. The party members decided it wouldn’t be a good idea to remove Stalin from power, because the party might become unmanageable.
The Bolsheviks didn’t get rid of Stalin in his position of power (which seemed not too significant at the time—the general secretary of the communist party, what a big deal?), and devious Stalin managed to slowly make all other branches of power subordinate to the party bureaucrats, and his position suddenly became #1 in the whole state.
Other Bolsheviks weren’t paranoid enough to realize what was happening.
After Stalin managed to quietly subordinate all levers of power, he kicked out Trotsky to Alma-Ata (Soviet Kazakhstan) in 1928. The next year Trotsky was banished from the USSR altogether.
After moving from one European country to another—Stalin’s Soviet government kept going after him—Trotsky ended up in Mexico, because no other country would offer him refuge.
Fast forward to 1940: Stalin managed to get Trotsky assassinated.
But before that, Stalin liquidated all “old Bolsheviks” who knew about the secret Lenin’s letter to the Congress of the Communist Party, in which Lenin told the members to remove Stalin from power and replace him with someone more considerate.
The old Bolsheviks were accused by Stalin’s NKVD in trying to stage a “counterrevolution” together with exiled Trotsky.
Stalin wanted to make sure no one could be on the same standing as him—the guys who did the Revolution with him in 1917 had to be liquidated.
It’s not that the Russians “prefer leaders that are gangsters”—simply put, once violence starts, the genie is out of the bottle and it’s hard to get it back inside. And if violence is what rules, then the most ruthless thug captures the power. It’s just how it works.
A cautionary tale to other nations. ~ Elena Gold, Quora
Barbara:
Trotsky wanted to continue exporting the ideas and methods of the Bolshevik Revolution to other countries. Stalin wanted to first “build socialism in one country.” That explanation to naïve Bolsheviks helped Stalin consolidate his power, with tragic results for Russia and the world.
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ESTONIA VS RUSSIA IN WORLD HAPPINESS REPORT
The Russian culture has always being highly melancholic and fatalistic: you only need to read Chekhov to get that overwhelming feeling of existential gloom that is typical for an average thinking intellectual living in Russia.
Dostoevsky went deeper into societal depravity, and Count Leo Tolstoy confirmed that all social layers are full of unhappiness and lack of purpose.
Russia constantly threatens Estonia, as well as other Baltic countries. Which doesn’t prevent Estonians from enjoying their life, despite constant Russia’s threats.
As the World Happiness Report shows, Estonia is ranked #39, while Russia is #66.
Their difference in terms of points scored isn’t huge: 6.42 vs. 5.95.
So, people of Estonia are slightly happier.
(If anything, I’m surprised that the people of Russia rank themselves this high: I’d think they would be around 3–4 points out of 10.)
Thinking of lifestyle, in terms of happiness, Estonia is on par with other European countries: Romania, Spain, Italy, Poland.
Russia, on the other hand, is close to Ecuador, Malaysia, Honduras, and Peru.
People of Estonia live in the European Union with its standards of freedom and ability to travel, study and work abroad, while it’s much harder for Russians to do the same things: Russian wages are lower, and it’s harder for Russian citizens to get visas to western countries.
When I was in Estonia many years ago, the country was very clean and things seemed to be well-organized—this was still during the times of the late Soviet Union, when Estonia was under Moscow control.
So, even in the Soviet times, Estonians managed to keep their country clean and pretty, with a strong national and historical flavor—as compared to gloomy, dilapidated countryside of Russia, contrasted by grey facades of recently erected standard 5-story buildings in large Russian cities.
I’d say the fatalistic flair of Russian culture is the opposite of the quiet determination of Estonians, and this may be why Estonians generally feel happier than Russians. ~ Elena Gold, Quora
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PUTIN IS AWARE OF THE STATE OF RUSSIAN ECONOMY
Putin cannot not know what is happening in the country. You need to be pretty dense to not know or be completely gone mentally—Putin can still function and no one knows what’s happening in the weeks when he disappears from the public eye.
I think Putin is rather afraid that his senior officials lose hope—because if they lose hope, they will lose trust in him as the leader.
Putin is suspicious—you could say, paranoid—so he’s definitely doing his own research, not just blindly trusts the information in the folders that he’s getting from his officials.
But his officials know they need to present a positive picture, or they won’t last—not just at their positions, in this life.
So, they lie to make things look more positive—and Putin wants them to lie. He needs to maintain the illusion that things are under control,
The thing is, stealing millions on the job used to be part of the job. Because you had to pay up a share of what you were stealing—a duty for being given a budget to manage. A share of what you stole was yours, this was your pay for doing the job. Paying up was required to keep the job.
(In my latest book I explain the way the system works in Russia and why there could be no one who doesn’t steal.)
Putin used to be seen as the guarantor of stability and prosperity—if not for the regular Russians, then for these public servants who loyally worked for him and the state system.
But by now, the factual base for this image is all but gone.
The Russian officials, oligarchs, and public servants now see obstinate Putin as the reason why things are going bad. But they know he’d make any one of them a scapegoat if they step out of line.
Senior officials in Russia have been stealing for decades—the whole system was built on allowing the public officials to steal. They all are guilty in the current state of the economy: of course, they know that making goods and providing services and logistics only to see all what’s created burn in flames—on the battlefield or in transit to be delivered—this doesn’t create wealth for the nation.
They know that the war is bad for the economy.
They know that the whole system is rotten from top to bottom.
They know that admitting this would cause Putin’s fury and result in them turning un-alive—or being arrested and thrown in torture chambers.
Putin’s officials know they are expected to lie and say that things are not too bad.
And Putin expects them to.
Because if he has to admit that things are bad, then he’s the one to blame.
So, Putin says: things aren’t perfect, but we need to endure and persist, and we’ll get the ultimate prize at the end and enjoy the fruits of victory.
Everyone is expected to maintain the illusion. ~ Elena Gold, Quora
Cal Greg:
The war is destroying Putin. He has lost so much. Russian influence around the world is a joke now...before the war it was a player. Putin needs Iran's help and Iran needs Putin's help. What a nightmare around the world.. it is idiots like Trump and Putin.
Elena Gold:
Putin’s sycophants used to rake in tons of money as well. Then the flow dried up—and the flying out of windows began.
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RUSSIA’S CHANCES OF WINNING THE UKRAINE WAR DECREASE OVER TIME
One way to view this war is that Russia’s best chance of victory was in the early days or early months. But that did not happen.
And since those early days, victory has slowly been slipping from Putin’s grip.
Russia’s chances of victory have not increased with time. They have decreased.
Militarily, economically, staffing and morale wise things have gotten worse for Russia.
And there is no hope of turning them around.
We saw the same thing in WWII.
After the Battle of Britain, and particularly after the USSR and US became involved, it was all downhill for Hitler.
After 1940 Germany had no chance of winning.
They would no doubt have isolated victories.
But the course of the war had been determined.
It was fixed.
The same is true for Putin and Ukraine.
When he was unsuccessful early on, he allowed Ukraine to rearm and build up its military.
Not only was the edge lost, the momentum shifted.
Each day that passes, the likelihood of a Russian victory goes down.
One would think that Putin would realize this and try to negotiate a settlement.
But in many ways he is like Hitler.
His ego will not allow him to accept that Russia cannot defeat Ukraine.
And he is going to destroy his country trying to prove them wrong.~ Brent Cooper, Quora
Auzz:
This a war of attrition. Russia can’t win this war because:
Its economy is bleeding monthly from the strains of the war and sanctions
Its inhumane treatment and use of soldiers is going to see net loss of manpower as casualties exceed recruitment
It is solely dependent on its oil and gas revenue which is under daily assault from Ukranian drone attacks on its facilities
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KING CHARLES IN THE U.S. — THE SPEECH
Michael Jochum:
I hadn’t planned on watching King Charles III address Congress. I assumed I’d absorb the highlights later, filtered through the usual swirl of headlines and commentary. But something made me pause, just for a moment, and in that brief glance, I found myself unexpectedly drawn in.
There was a quiet gravity to his presence, a kind of composure that didn’t demand attention so much as earn it. His words were measured, deliberate, and carried with them the weight of history without ever feeling heavy-handed. It wasn’t just the content of the speech, but the cadence, the restraint, the sense that each phrase had been considered rather than performed. Before I knew it, I wasn’t skimming, I was listening. Fully. It’s rare, in this era of noise and urgency, to encounter a moment that feels both dignified and unhurried. Whatever one’s views, there was something undeniably compelling about witnessing a speaker who understands not only the power of language, but the responsibility that comes with it.
The Architecture of Language
What struck me most watching King Charles III stand before Congress wasn’t just the content of his speech, it was the reminder of what language sounds like when it is treated with respect. Full sentences. Complete thoughts. A measured cadence that doesn’t lurch from grievance to grievance like a drunk driver weaving across lanes. It was, quite simply, the sound of someone who understands that words are not just noise, they are instruments of meaning, responsibility, and, occasionally, wisdom.
And in that moment, the contrast with Donald Trump wasn’t subtle, it was seismic.
Charles spoke of alliances not as transactional leverage, but as living commitments. He invoked NATO not as a protection racket, but as a shared defense of democratic stability. He referenced Ukraine not as a bargaining chip, but as a moral obligation. And when he turned to the climate crisis, he didn’t reduce it to a punchline or a hoax, he framed it, correctly, as a systemic threat to prosperity, security, and the continuity of life itself. This is what leadership sounds like when it is informed by history rather than inflated by ego.
Meanwhile, Trump stood beside him, physically present, intellectually absent, delivering his usual slurry of half-formed thoughts, superlatives without substance, and that unmistakable whiny bloviation that has become his linguistic signature. Listening to him after Charles is like following a symphony with a kazoo solo. One man builds an argument; the other builds a grievance. One understands that words carry weight; the other uses them like confetti at a rally.
What made Charles’s remarks particularly striking was their subtlety. This wasn’t a scolding, it was something far more devastating: a polite, impeccably delivered reminder of what America used to be. When he spoke of checks and balances, rooted in the legacy of Magna Carta, he wasn’t just offering a history lesson, he was holding up a mirror. When he said, “America’s words carry weight and meaning… the actions of this great nation matter even more,” it landed less as praise and more as a challenge. A nudge, perhaps, but one delivered with the kind of elegance that makes it impossible to dismiss.
I couldn’t help but think of Barack Obama in that moment. Not because Charles is Obama, or Obama is Charles, but because both men understand the architecture of language. They know how to construct a thought, how to guide an audience, how to elevate rather than inflame. Listening to them reminds you that rhetoric, when done properly, is not manipulation, it’s illumination. It clarifies. It connects. It aspires.
Which raises the unavoidable, almost painful question: imagine the visual, the symbolic weight, the sheer intellectual oxygen of a room that included Obama, Michelle Obama, Charles, and Queen Camilla. A gathering of people who can speak, listen, and think in complete sentences, who understand that leadership is not performance art for the aggrieved, but stewardship of something larger than themselves.
Instead, we get Trump and Melania Trump, a pairing that feels less like statesmanship and more like a branding exercise gone stale.
Charles called the U.S.–U.K. alliance “one of the most consequential in human history,” and he’s right. But alliances, like language, require maintenance. They require honesty, consistency, and a shared understanding of reality. You cannot sustain them with slogans, tantrums, and a worldview that reduces every relationship to a deal to be won or lost.
What Charles offered in that chamber was more than diplomacy, it was a reminder. A reminder that the world is watching. A reminder that leadership still has a vocabulary, even if we’ve forgotten how to speak it. And perhaps most painfully, a reminder that somewhere along the way, we traded eloquence for noise, clarity for chaos, and principle for performance.
And the silence that follows that realization?
That’s the loudest indictment of all.
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RAISING CHICAGO
In the 1850s, the mud in the streets was deep enough to swallow a horse. The engineer who raised Chicago didn't try to pave over it. The city sat just two feet above the water level of Lake Michigan. When it rained, the water had nowhere to go. It sat in the streets. When the cholera came, it sat in the water.
Chicago, Illinois, in 1854 was a grid of wooden planks floating on a swamp. The population was exploding, doubling every few years as the railroads connected the coasts.
The physical geography could not support the human weight. Chicago was built on a sandbar and a wetland. When wagons rolled down Lake Street, they didn't just get muddy. They sank to their axles in the spring thaw. Horses broke their legs in the deep ruts. Pedestrians crossed intersections by walking on loose, untreated boards tossed haphazardly over the muck.
The boards warped in the summer heat. They splintered under the heavy draft wagons.
Underneath the wood, the city’s waste pooled in stagnant trenches. The drinking water was pulled directly from the lake. The waste drained directly back into the same lake.
During the epidemic of 1854, the death toll broke the city's ability to function. Six percent of the population died in a single twelve-month window. Funerals ran continuously from sunrise to sunset. The city cemetery filled faster than graves could be dug in the marshy soil. Water seeped into the open trenches before the wooden coffins could even be lowered.
The city council formed a Board of Sewerage Commissioners in a state of panic. They hired Ellis Chesbrough.
He arrived from Boston in 1855. He was a quiet, practical man. He had designed the Cochituate aqueduct. He understood how water moved. He surveyed the grid and saw that the problem was gravity.
Water flows down. Chicago was completely flat.
To build the first comprehensive sewer system in America, he needed a slope. He needed gravity to carry the waste away from the people.
At the time, the 1848 Public Health Act in London was the global standard for urban sanitation. It mandated covered brick drains, but left existing building elevations intact. Cities facing similar crises in the mid-19th century focused entirely on chemical treatment or pushing water intake pipes deeper into their reservoirs. Chicago's municipal charter made no legal provision for altering the physical geography of private property.
Chesbrough did the math. If he dug trenches deep enough to create a downward slope, he would hit the lake’s water table within three feet. The trenches would fill with groundwater before a single pipe could be laid.
It was physically impossible to dig down.
If he couldn't go down, there was only one direction left.
He submitted his plan to the city council in 1856. He proposed laying the sewer pipes directly on top of the existing streets. Once the pipes were connected, he would cover them with massive amounts of dirt dredged from the river.
The new streets would sit four to fourteen feet higher than the original ground level.
The plan would turn the front doors of every business into basements. The ground floors would become cellars. Property owners revolted at the expense and the disruption. The city approved the plan anyway.
The dirt arrived first. Wagons dumped thousands of tons of earth onto the streets, burying the pipes.
Pedestrians had to navigate a bizarre, fractured landscape. The new streets were ten feet higher than the existing sidewalks. People crossed intersections by climbing temporary wooden staircases.
Chesbrough's preliminary engineering sketches showed a complete disregard for the chaos this caused the residents. He focused entirely on the pipe gradients and the mathematical flow of the water, leaving shop owners to build their own makeshift wooden bridges over the mud just to keep their businesses alive.
Then came the mechanics of survival. The buildings were now sitting in pits next to elevated roads. They had to be moved up to meet the new street level.
They did not empty the buildings.
In 1860, a team of engineers targeted the Tremont House.
Six stories tall.
Solid brick and masonry.
A footprint covering an entire city block.
Thirty-five thousand tons of dead weight.
The crown jewel of the Chicago grid.
Laborers dug down to the foundation. They slid five thousand steel jackscrews underneath the load-bearing walls.
The mechanics of the lift required absolute mathematical precision. If one section of the building rose faster than another, the masonry would crack. The structural integrity would fail, and thousands of tons of brick would collapse onto the workers below.
They needed a unified rhythm.
Six hundred men climbed into the trench. They stood shoulder to shoulder in the cold mud, in near darkness, holding heavy iron wrenches.
A whistle blew. Every man turned his assigned screws exactly one-quarter turn. The massive brick walls groaned. The timber cribbing settled.
The whistle blew again. Another quarter turn.
The hotel moved upward by a fraction of an inch.
Inside the building, life continued. Guests slept in their beds. Cooks prepared meals in the kitchen. Diners ate at tables with full glasses of water. Not a single pane of glass shattered.
Over five days, the six-story hotel rose vertically into the air.
They lifted it a total of six feet. Masons built new brick foundation walls in the expanding gap underneath. When the new foundation was secure, they removed the jackscrews.
They repeated this process across the entire downtown grid. Entire blocks of stone and brick rose simultaneously. Sometimes an entire row of shops was lifted at once, the owners keeping their doors open while the floor beneath them detached from the earth.
In 1868, they raised a block of buildings on Lake Street. The buildings went up.
In 1869, they raised a massive brick structure on Water Street. The building went up.
In 1870, they raised an entire block of businesses on Clark Street. The buildings went up.
They didn't try to cure the swamp. They just moved the city away from it.
The cholera deaths plummeted. The gravity-fed pipes worked. The waste flowed away from the drinking water.
If you walk through downtown Chicago today, there are still places where the modern sidewalk drops suddenly, or a set of heavy stairs leads down to a doorway that used to be ground level.
The original first floors are still down there. The city is still hovering above the swamp it was built on. The jackscrews are gone. ~ Victoria Stone, Quora
Blake Davis:
And the new sewers send the sewage directly into Lake Michigan, where the city got its water. Causing even more cholera epidemics.
Finally, the city decided to cut a channel across the drainage divide between the Great Lakes Basin and the Mississippi River Basin and reversed the flow of the Chicago River. Instead of the sewage flowing into the lake, it now flowed down the Mississippi River. The cholera epidemics finally ceased.
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DEPOPULATION AND BAD WEATHER: THE FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE REVISITED
At its peak, the Roman Empire boasted nearly 60 million people. But this demographic powerhouse was permanently shattered by a microscopic killer and a shift in the weather.
An illustration of an abandoned Roman street, depicting the devastating urban toll of the Antonine Plague.
The first major blow was biological. In 165 CE, Roman legions returning from campaigns in the East brought home a devastating stowaway—the Antonine Plague. Most modern epidemiologists believe this was the first widespread appearance of smallpox in the Mediterranean. It ripped through densely packed cities and military camps, killing an estimated five to seven million people, or roughly 10% of the empire's total population.
Before the numbers could bounce back, the empire entered the Crisis of the Third Century. This era brought nearly fifty years of relentless civil war, political instability, and currency collapse. Amidst this chaos, a second pandemic known as the Plague of Cyprian erupted in 249 CE. The sheer volume of death triggered a widespread labor shortage, leaving agricultural fields fallow and crippling the tax base required to maintain the military.
A hidden factor ensuring the population never rebounded was a massive shift in weather patterns. The empire's rapid expansion had been fueled by the "Roman Climate Optimum," a centuries-long period of unusually warm, stable, and wet weather that allowed crops to thrive even in arid regions like North Africa. By the late 2nd century, the climate began to cool and dry. This transition permanently reduced agricultural yields across the continent. The land simply could no longer produce the surplus food required to support the massive urban populations of the past.
Depopulation forced structural changes that prevented recovery. With fewer taxpayers, the Roman state desperately hiked taxes to fund its armies against escalating border threats. Crushed by these financial burdens, many independent farmers abandoned their lands to seek the protection of wealthy provincial landowners, laying the early groundwork for medieval feudalism. Cities shrank, trade networks fractured, and the highly interconnected economy of the High Roman Empire slowly dissolved into localized, survival-focused agrarian communities. ~ Sepia Glyphs, Quora
Robert Cook:
That cooling period — after the Roman Warming Period centered (roughly) on 00 AD — also pushed the warring tribes down south and west from their previous mid-Russian, far eastern European steppes and forests. Thus, the destruction and invasion of Roman territories by the Huns, Vandals, and their other tribes were greatly climate-driven as we descended into the Dark Ages of cold and famines across Europe.
Brendan Chu Chulainn:
A lesson from history that should be heeded by today’s almighty superpowers. Mother nature is the great equalizer, mass death the final arbiter.
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THE NAKED APE AT FIFTY: HOW WELL HAS THE CENTRAL CLAIM AGED?
In October 1967, Desmond Morris published his landmark study of human behavior and evolution. Here four experts assess what he got right – and wrong.
Robin Dunbar: ‘He gave us a picture of who we really are’
Professor of evolutionary psychology at the University of Oxford
We were all gearing up for the summer of love when, in 1967, Desmond Morris’s The Naked Ape took us by storm. Its pitch was that humans really were just apes, and much of our behavior could be understood in terms of animal behavior and its evolution.
Yes, we were naked and bipedal, but beneath the veneer of culture lurked an ancestral avatar.
With his zoologist’s training (he had had a distinguished career studying the behavior of fishes and birds at Oxford University as part of the leading international group in this field), he gave us a picture of who we really are. In the laid-back, blue-smoke atmosphere of the hippy era, the book struck a chord with the wider public – if for no other reason than that, in the decade of free love, it asserted that humans had the largest penis for body size of all the primates.
The early 1960s had seen the first field studies of monkeys and apes, and a corresponding interest in human evolution and the biology of contemporary hunter-gatherers. Morris latched on to the fact that the sexual division of labor (the men away hunting, the women at home gathering) necessitated some mechanism to ensure the sexual loyalty of one’s mate – this was the era of free love, after all. He suggested that becoming naked and developing new erogenous zones (notably, ear lobes and breasts), not to mention face-to-face copulation (all but unknown among animals), helped to maintain the couple’s loyalty to each other.
Morris’s central claim, that much of our behavior can be understood in the context of animal behavior, has surely stood the test of time, even if some of the details haven’t. Our hairlessness (at around 2m years ago) long predates the rise of pair bonds (a mere 200,000 years ago). It owes its origins to the capacity to sweat copiously (another uniquely human trait) in order to allow us to travel longer distances across sunny savannahs. But he is probably still right that those bits of human behavior that enhance sexual experience function to promote pair bonds – even if pair bonds are not lifelong in the way that many then assumed.
Humans are unusual in the attention they pay to other people’s eyes – for almost all other animals, staring is a threat (as, of course, it can also be for us under certain circumstances).
I can’t honestly say if the book influenced my decision to study the behavior of wild monkeys and, later, human ethology. Having been immersed in the same ethological tradition out of which Morris had come, viewing humans this way was no controversial claim.
Older zoologists, however, were a great deal more skeptical, often viewing the book as facile. What it might well have done for me was to create an environment in which the funding agencies were more willing to fund the kinds of fieldwork on animals and humans that I later did.
Angela Saini: ‘His arrogance has done untold damage'
From the moment The Naked Ape was published, female scientists and feminists rolled their eyes. For good reason. Desmond Morris credited hunting by males (and only males) as the one thing that drove up human intelligence and social cooperation. In a 1976 paper, American anthropologists Adrienne Zihlman and Nancy Tanner laughed at his implication that females had “little or no part in the evolutionary saga except to bear the next generation of hunters”.
His problem with women ran through every chapter. Let’s start with what females were doing while males were evolving. Morris answered: “The females found themselves almost perpetually confined to the home base.” But by his own admission, hunters would sometimes be away for weeks at a time chasing a kill. So how exactly were the womenfolk managing to feed their families in the interim?
His deliberate choice to ignore hunter-gatherers – the only people on Earth who live anything like the way our distant ancestors might have – blinded him to the fact that women are rarely housebound. We know, for example, that women gathering plants, roots and tubers and killing small animals tend to bring back more reliable calories than men do. What’s more, in many hunter-gather communities, including the Nanadukan Agta of the Philippines and the aboriginal Martu of Western Australia, women hunt. Martu women do it for sport.
What about the rest of us, who no longer hunt and gather, but live in towns and cities? “Work has replaced hunting… It is a predominantly male pursuit,” he wrote. Oh, Desmond, seriously? Anthropologists are fairly unanimous that in our distant past, men and women shared almost all work, including sourcing food and setting up shelter. That’s the harsh reality of subsistence living. Throughout history, there have always been working women.
His consistent failure to understand the impact of patriarchy and female repression bordered on the bizarre. He claimed that humans developed the loving pair bond to assure males their partners wouldn’t stray while they were off hunting. Females evolved to be faithful. But a few pages later he mentioned chastity belts and female genital mutilation as means of forcibly keeping women virginal.
“A case has been recorded of a male boring holes in his mate’s labia and then padlocking her genitals after each copulation,” he wrote, with the pathological detachment of a scientist observing flies in a jar. He never asked himself the obvious question: If women evolved to be faithful to one man, why did men resort to such brutal measures?
On other points of fact, time has simply proven him wrong. “Clearly, the naked ape is the sexiest primate alive,” he stated. Nope. That honor goes to the bonobo. Which incidentally happens to be a female-dominated species.
For 50 years, Morris’s arrogance (large chunks of his slim list of references were to his own work) has done untold damage to people’s understanding of our evolutionary past. We might forgive him for being a man of his time. But as a scientist, for choosing to overlook evidence right in front of his eyes, The Naked Ape still deserves as little respect as he showed half the human species.
Ben Garrod: ‘He made me stop dead in my tracks’
Broadcaster, primatologist and teaching fellow at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge
Like many zoologists, biologists and naturalists before me, I was drawn to the thrill of exploration and tracking animals. But as a 12-year-old living in a seaside town in Norfolk, there wasn’t much to explore and limited species to stalk. Instead, my quarry was old books about nature, anthropology and evolution, and my territory was the dusty shelves of old bookshops. I still vividly remember chancing upon a slim volume one winter weekend. I slid the book from the shelf, mainly prompted by the title. I was fascinated by apes, and the word “naked” had a definite (if slightly intangible) appeal to my 12-year-old self.
I don’t think I’ve ever read a book quite so slowly. Partly because I needed a copy of the Oxford English Dictionary to help me comprehend each paragraph. I didn’t want to miss a beat in what became an intoxicating series of revelations about not only my species but apparently about me, too. I’d never experienced a book that reached out to the reader in such a way and even now, this still holds true for The Naked Ape in that you can’t help but examine where (or even if) you fit in with Morris’s observations.
I brushed over the sections covering the evolutionary achievements of the penis, the covert mission of breasts and the untold benefits of being naked, but stopped dead in my tracks when I read how, despite our few millennia as a species relishing in the glow of civilization, our long lineage from our great ape precursors and hominid ancestors had left its indelible mark not only on our anatomy but upon our behavior, also.
This idea that we are simply the by-product of millions of years of evolutionary tinkering and are not alone as the pinnacle of some benevolent creation was such a revelation that when the book was released it shocked many. Yes, this had been written before but never quite so eloquently and never in a way that was aimed at a non-expert audience. At long last, they were being invited to share in some of the biggest, best-kept secrets of our somewhat extended family.
As a scientist, there’s a lot more I could say… of course, some of its ideas are now dated and wrong but it was 50 years ago and science does move inexorably onwards. The thing about reading The Naked Ape is that it can do one of two things. It can either set light to the kindling of an inquiring mind, or – if it causes your eye to twitch in consternation at, for example, outdated views on the sexes – make you take stock of what you actually know.
It sends you on an academic exercise, sieving through persuasive argument in order to pick out the tantalizing glimmer of empirical evidence. I’ve gone from one to the other. I fondly still have my copy tucked between a book on baboons and a treatise on skeletal pathology.
The Naked Ape is like an old friend I’ve grown up with, realized that they’re not quite as perfect as I once thought – but have decided that they’re still cool enough to hang out with anyway.
Adam Rutherford: ‘Did anyone take this seriously in the 60s?’
Author and presenter of Radio 4’s Inside Science
I spent rather too much time in the last couple of weeks arguing with men about breasts. I forget how it began, but there was a phenomenal volume of Twitter correspondence asserting one of two statements as scientific fact: the first was that the permanently visible breasts in female humans (compared to all other apes, whose breasts only enlarge during lactation or estrus) are signals to attract males. The second was that the primary function of breasts is to attract males.
The latter seems trivial to dispel: a baby that starves to death is a greater evolutionary pressure than whether an adult male is turned on – breasts exist to feed babies. The first argument is trickier to contest. In nature, there are wondrous variants of what we call “secondary sexual traits” – those bodily parts or behaviors evolved to aid mate choice – the peacock’s tail, the bowerbird’s bower, lekking stags. For humans, it might seem obvious that breasts fall into that category, and in my online debates, in all cases, the evidence presented found its evolutionary origins in The Naked Ape: “The enlarged female breasts are usually thought of primarily as maternal rather than sexual developments, but there seems to be little evidence for this.”
The question of why we are different to other apes is valid. Aside from the definitional function of mammary glands in mammals, the reasons for our morphological differences are certainly worthy of study. Morris goes on: “The answer stands out as clearly as the female bosom itself. The protuberant, hemispherical breasts of the female must surely be copies of the fleshy buttocks, and the sharply defined red lips around the mouth must be copies of the red labia.”
Did anyone take this seriously in the 1960s? To me, this is little more than salacious guesswork, erotic fantasy science. And this is the fundamental problem with The Naked Ape: it is a book full of exciting ideas that have little scientific validity. The attractiveness of an idea in science has no bearing on its veracity. Sometimes they are presented as “common sense” arguments – it’s obvious, innit? But common sense is the opposite of science – our senses deceive us all the time, our profoundly limited experience skewers us with bias.
In the case of the attractiveness function of breasts, this idea is almost entirely untested. The data simply does not exist. Maybe visible breasts are a secondary sexual trait in humans. It would be unusual, as in nature most of these types of traits are on males, and not all cultures regard breasts as erotic.
Did boobs replace bums as a sexual signal when we became upright? I don’t know, but the point is that no one does. We could test this today with genetics, by establishing genes involved in breast development and searching the genome for the signatures of selection. But this has not been done.
In my experience, much of the academic field that The Naked Ape is emblematic of – evolutionary psychology – falls victim to similar scientific crimes. We call it “adaptationism”, or “panglossianism”, after Dr Pangloss from Voltaire’s Candide. An eternal optimist, he suggested there was a reason for everything, and everything had a reason. Hence our noses had evolved to balance spectacles on; we have two legs because that suits the dimensions of a tailored trouser. For Morris, and millions of men on the internet, breasts are attractive, therefore their purpose is to attract.
There is plenty to like about this book. Its descriptions of the physiology on show during various human activities are accurate, detailed and genial. To position us as animals and under the auspices of natural selection is happily Darwinian. The Naked Ape was colossally successful – 20m copies have been sold, which is an astonishing number for a book ostensibly about human evolution. Supporters have argued that its real value is in popularizing science. The problem is, and has always been, that it is not science. It is a book of just so stories.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/sep/24/the-naked-ape-at-50-desmond-morris-four-experts-assess-impact
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IS BEING AN OLDER, SINGLE MOTHER THE NEW IDEAL?
I’m a single mother of what doctors and insurance companies cheerfully call an “advanced maternal age,” which makes me sound like an appliance with an expired warranty. In reality, I’m a 42-year-old woman with a toddler who is having—against all cultural expectations—a genuinely good time.
There’s a particular pleasure to being an older single mother that goes largely undiscussed. Women are sold single-mother extremes: the exhausted martyr, the cautionary tale, or the immoral welfare queen—the latter, historically weaponized against Black single mothers in particular. As a group, single moms are supposed to feel shame and embarrassment. But what I feel is something else entirely: joy.
Before my daughter, I’d already lived several lives in several cities. I’d been (briefly) married. I’d been to therapy. I had a career, a passport, a mortgage. By the time I became an unmarried mother at 39, I was fully directing my own life.
While newly pregnant, I had a long talk with my then-boyfriend about how I did not want to be a single mom. The agreed expectation was that after our baby arrived and everyone was settled and healthy, he and I would get engaged. I was scared to mother without a husband. I didn’t think I could do it alone. I didn’t want the stigma.
A few months after our daughter was born, however, it was clear the engagement wasn’t happening. Even in my postpartum haze—which included being laid off from my job shortly after returning from maternity leave—I was sure that I didn’t want my daughter to grow up with the version of her mom romantically attached to her dad. Single motherhood was the better parenting choice. So, just before my 40th birthday, I officially became an unemployed, single mom with an infant.
Of course, there was stress and fear and sadness in those early days. But after a few weeks, my focus shifted from grief for the fantasy family I wouldn’t have to the scaffolded network of dependable relationships I’d already spent four decades building—a solid structure of grandparents, grown siblings with their own kids, life-long friends, former colleagues, neighbors, and other mothers. People I trusted.
From there, motherhood, on my own, started to feel less like misfortune and more like creative control. I could enjoy parenting without negotiating my identity, time, and wellbeing inside a romantic partnership. In my house, when I’m with my daughter, the vibe is… calm. Really calm. Decades of taking care of myself taught me to put systems in place that I know work. The house reflects me and my daughters’ thresholds—for mess, for noise, for emotion, for stimulation, for fun. There is no low-grade domestic tension humming beneath the day; I set the tone.
The parenting work is constant, of course. I worry about money and the future, but so do partnered parents. Daycare pick-up times and costs aren’t open to compromise. But when the labor and responsibility are fully mine, it feels different. I’m not keeping score. I’m not wondering if I’m doing enough. I’m simply doing it. And I like doing it.
I like knowing that if my daughter needs something, I’ll find a solution. I like meal-prepping on Sunday afternoons while she helps from her perch on a toddler tower. I like taking her to the beach and on bike rides and to story hour. I like hearing her observations and unfiltered thoughts. Before she turned two, we visited friends in Italy and the whole international trip was a breeze—even navigating Rome’s airport by myself with a toddler and no stroller.
Every stage she’s gone through has been my favorite stage. I’m not sure I would have been a capable single mother in my 20s or early 30s. But at 42, I’m unflappable. I don’t spiral when my daughter has a meltdown. Her moods don’t trigger mine. The decades and past mistakes have taught me to regulate my own feelings so I can help her with hers.
In 2023, births to women over 40 surpassed births to teenagers in the United States for the first time. Celebrities like Gisele Bündchen, Mindy Kaling, Halle Berry, and Charlize Theron have expanded their families in their late 30s and into their 40s outside of marriage.
I don’t see stigma when I look at them. I see women who understand that partnership and parenthood can be separate decisions. That you can want a child without wanting to negotiate your life around a husband. And that you can do it later than 35.
This isn’t a manifesto against marriage or fathers or young mothers. Many married mothers of all ages are extremely supported. Many single mothers of all ages are overwhelmed. Many women struggle with infertility and the option to mother at all. But there is a version of motherhood—the one I’m living—that feels genuinely enviable.
Of course, I understand that my story and circumstances aren’t a blueprint; I have the privileges of health, employment, and citizenship. But what I hope they do show is that partnership is no longer the prerequisite for a satisfying domestic life. My family dynamic as a matriarch is as valid as anyone else’s.
Dr. Cashuna Huddleston, of Houston, became a single mom at 36 years old, when her son was eight months. She says of her experience, “I get to create an environment rooted in love, stability, and intentional parenting. My son sees strength, resilience, and joy modeled every day, not compromise or chaos.”
Tory DeBassio, a single mom in the Netherlands co-parenting her four-year-old at 40, agrees: “I feel less lonely now than I did when I was married. Everything feels like an accomplishment and a milestone because I figure it out on my own.”
Crystal Reinwald adopted her two children at age 39 and lives in Connecticut. She appreciates the freedom to make her own parenting decisions based on her values and morals (a sentiment echoed by all of the moms I spoke to for this piece). Reinwald says, “My kids and I are very close to each other, which is probably my favorite part about motherhood in general.”
Angela Berardino adopted her infant son at age 43. “There’s a freedom people don’t talk about enough,” she says, “the ability to make decisions without needing consensus.”
I am exactly the woman I want raising my daughter. When I’m with my daughter at bedtime, I feel loved and whole in the family I built—not because someone chose me, but because I chose this.
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“WALKAWAY WIVES”
Like so many people, Karen Ruimy’s work went online during the pandemic. A spiritual teacher for more than 30 years, she started to host more and more digital workshops, which were mostly attended by women. But within these spaces, and in her face-to-face work once restrictions had lifted, she started noticing something. Where once women often stayed in unhappy marriages, more and more were starting to walk away.
“Covid gave us all a pause, the wheel of life stopped and something shifted as people saw things more clearly,” says Ruimy, 61, who is based between London and Marrakech but who sees clients based all over the world. “Women in midlife particularly have begun to say ‘enough’.
But while all the individual stories are painful, it’s about something much bigger. With the world in crisis in so many ways, and the dominance of war, division and suppression, there is a lot of pain. Emotional crisis sparks awakening.
“A profound shift of consciousness is beginning and women in particular are realizing that there is another way to live.”
What Ruimy has noticed in her spiritual practice is born out by research because the rise – and rise – of “walkaway wives” is a phenomenon that everyone from statisticians to lawyers has noticed.
In recent years, around 63 per cent of divorce petitions have been filed by wives, according to Stowe Family Law, and research released late last year by NOON for Mishcon de Reya and Julius Baer International found that nearly 56 per cent of midlife women would end a marriage simply because they felt unhappy.
The survey of 2,000 midlife women also revealed some other significant insights. While almost a quarter said affairs were the reason for marriage breakdowns, just as many cited falling out of love as the cause. Over half (55 per cent) of women also said there was no longer a stigma about getting divorced, and almost a third said they were happier than they’d ever been after the separation.
But Ruimy believes the emotional factors driving the statistics are critical. And while women’s increased economic independence is certainly a factor, she says there is also a particular midlife pinch point driving this phenomenon.
“It’s a very specific point for many women,” she says. “Their children have grown and the day-to-day care demands are lessening. Menopause also means shifting into who we really are as women and really experiencing the wisdom we possess.
“A huge power comes with that and once women have grabbed that piece of themselves, they can’t go back because they know their marriage is not working anymore.“
Suddenly there is an awakening. They’ve had a job, they’ve had children, but their husband doesn’t know them. And many women are now asking themselves: ‘Do I want to keep lying to myself, believing in a system that’s not loving me or listening to me. Or do I want more?’”
A key factor driving this, says Ruimy, is the fact that marriage is in many ways “outdated”. For one, we’re living longer. While 50 years ago, average life expectancy in the UK was 72, today it’s 82. When you still have half a life ahead of you, people are increasingly asking themselves how they want to live it. The dominance and division which characterize so much of modern life are also vital to understanding the walkaway wife phenomenon.
“All of us, men and women, have been taught to live in very confining ways,” says Ruimy. ‘There is still a strong belief that men are the principal financial providers for families and women do the caring. But while this gives us a feeling of safety, it’s also a prison.
“The needs of both men and women are evolving and relationships should be a place of respect, companionship and love. But so many marriages after 20 years are more about keeping things viable than enjoyable and that doesn’t work for so many women anymore.
“This is a long overdue reckoning, a crisis of conscience, because we’ve limited both men’s and women’s expression for too long in very reductive identities. They can see that the nine-to-five job and usual marriage aren’t enough. We’ve all become dislocated from ourselves and our true feelings. There is so much pain in the world and we are all feeling it.”
But why are women in particular choosing to exit partnerships?
“Most marriages are more beneficial for men because women are only allowed the freedom of self-expression once everything is done in the home,” says Ruimy. “And there is often very little space for that because the caring role is so demanding.”
“I think spirituality and community are very feminine energies that they are tapping into,” says Ruimy.
“So while the trend of women walking away is very shocking to society and can be viewed with fear, it’s also an empowering moment. Women are finding out who they are, no longer afraid of losing comfort and security, and starting to empower themselves.”
https://www.the-independent.com/life-style/walkaway-wives-gen-x-divorce-marriage-b2965548.html?utm_source=firefox-newtab-en-us
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WHAT NOT TO SAY TO SOMEONE GOING THROUGH A HARD TIME
When Rebecca Love’s oldest son took his own life in 2019, at age 25, she felt like her entire world blew up overnight. In the days and weeks that followed, as she nearly collapsed under the weight of the worst pain she’d ever experienced, people said the same three words to her again and again: “You’re so strong.” They thought they were being helpful, but the message stung for some reason.
“It took me a long time to sort out how I felt about it, and I realized that ultimately, it completely invalidated my pain,” says Love, a therapist in Fair Oaks, Calif. “What I needed more than anything was for my pain to be witnessed, because the way we integrate grief—there’s no finish line for it. To say ‘You’re so strong’ is really to say, ‘I’m not seeing your struggle. I’m not acknowledging how awful this is for you.’”
While others were praising her supposed strength, Love was simply trying to survive another day. It wasn’t her own resilience carrying her through—it was the people around her. “There was no part of me that felt strong,” she says. “My heart beats; my lungs breathe. I didn’t want to be here after I lost a child, but my body had other plans.” What got her through, she says, was her husband, her mother, her best friend—the people who understood instinctively that no one gets through that kind of loss alone. Rather than telling her she was strong, they just showed up.
Love’s experience isn’t unusual. Experts say that while the phrase is often meant as comfort, it can land differently for the person on the receiving end.
Strength is often misinterpreted. Therapist Amy Morin defines it as showing emotion, asking for help, and being frank about the fact that you’re struggling. Yet many people confuse being strong with acting tough.
A comment like “you’re so strong” implies, “‘Great job not showing emotion!’ or, ‘I’m impressed you’re holding it together,’” says Morin, author of 13 Things Mentally Strong People Don’t Do. It can unintentionally make people feel they need to hide what they’re really going through—that they can’t let their guard down, ask for help, or talk about their struggles, she says.
When Morin was 26, she lost her mother and then her husband. She remembers one person, who almost certainly meant well, saying to her: “The fact that you’re not crying speaks to how strong you are.”
“As a therapist I knew that a lot of times, we have to put on a brave face in public,” she says. “Obviously you’re trying to not cry in the grocery store; you’re trying to get through the day. But when people interpret the fact that you don’t look upset to be strength, it really sends the wrong message.” Those three words, she says, encourage people to act tough, even when that’s the last way they feel.
Lauren Jessell, a licensed clinical social worker in New York, points out that people often resent being told how strong they are because it discounts how out of control they actually feel. The phrase, she says, is a kind of mis-attunement—it reflects back an image of the person that has nothing to do with their inner experience. “When we’re in a tough situation, we aren’t ‘being strong,’” she says. “We’re just managing the cards we were dealt.”
There’s an implicit suggestion that the person somehow chose their circumstances and is rising admirably to meet them—when in reality, they’re simply doing what they have to do to get by. The phrase can also reinforce the pressure to keep suffering private, Jessell says, particularly for people who have already internalized the idea that they should appear composed during hard times.
Love equates lauding someone’s strength to praising their ability to hide their vulnerability. When people told her she was strong, she didn’t feel seen—she felt silenced. “‘You’re so strong’ is really dismissive,” she says. “It does not invite dialogue. It does not invite an opportunity for that person to talk about not feeling strong.”
Why we keep saying it
So why is this phrase so common? Usually, Morin says, it’s because it makes us feel better—not the person we’re trying to comfort. When someone we care about is suffering, our own anxiety spikes. We don’t know what to say and are afraid of making things worse. And if the grieving person appears to be holding it together, there’s a temptation to latch onto that—to reflect it back as a compliment and call it support.
“When somebody goes through a tragedy, we often have a fear of, ‘How would I handle that if it happened to me?’” Morin says. “We see the other person and think, ‘Well, clearly they’re doing all right.’ It gives us a strange reassurance.”
Love understands the impulse, even if the words still sting. “I do think these comments usually come from a good place,” she says. People are trying to relate and convey that they grasp the enormity of what you’re going through. They just don’t realize that by opting for these three specific words, they’re asking the grieving person to do the emotional labor—to manage not only their own pain, but the discomfort of everyone around them.
“We’re not a culture that talks about grief, so we don’t have any foundation for how to sit in discomfort,” she says. It took her a long time to arrive at that understanding—but she now extends grace to the people who hurt her without meaning to. “I’m so glad on some level that they don’t understand,” she says. “I would not wish this pain on anyone.”
What to say instead
If you truly want to comfort someone who’s going through a hard time, experts say the most powerful thing you can do is to just be there—and resist the urge to fix anything.
“Words consistently fail the bereaved,” Love says. “There are no good words that are truly going to encapsulate a loss.” She’s found that the most meaningful thing anyone said to her was some version of: “I don’t know what to say, but I love you and I’m here for you.” That honesty, she says, was far more comforting than any well-worn platitude. As she puts it: “It didn’t hurt that they didn’t know what to say. Of course they didn’t know what to say. I don’t know what to say.”
Silence, Love adds, is also underrated. People tend to rush to fill quiet moments—cracking a joke, changing the subject, or pivoting to a story about themselves. But sitting with someone in their pain, without trying to narrate it or reroute it, is one of the most generous things you can offer. “Your presence is so powerful,” she says. “You don’t have to fix it. You just need to witness it.”
Morin suggests normalizing emotional pain regardless of how someone appears on the outside. “You have no idea how they’re feeling on the inside,” she says. A few phrases she recommends: “I’m sure you’re feeling a lot of emotions right now, and that would be normal.” Or: “I can’t imagine how you might be feeling right now.” Or simply: “Whatever it is you’re feeling, it’s OK.
She also encourages people to give explicit permission to drop the brave face. You might say something like: “I know you have to hold it together at work, but if you ever feel like having a conversation where you don’t need to act tough, I’ll be there for you.” The key, Morin says, is that it has to be a genuine offer—don’t say it unless you mean it.
Open-ended questions also help, as long as they’re specific enough to signal that you actually want to hear the answer. Morin recommends adding two small words: “right now.” “When you add ‘right now’ on the end of ‘how are you doing,’ it makes it clear—I’m not just saying hi,” she says. “I really want to know.”
Jessell agrees that the goal is to be with the person rather than try to bypass the hardship they’re enduring. Instead of labeling someone’s experience for them, try reflecting back what they’re actually telling you so they feel heard. And ask what kind of support would be most helpful—sometimes people want practical help, and sometimes they just want a friend to listen. “Really just asking can be useful,” she says.
If someone does say something that stings—whether it’s “you’re so strong” or something else that lands wrong—Love wants people to know they don’t have to smile through it. She tells her therapy clients to keep a phrase in their back pocket for moments like these: “That’s not helpful.”
“That’s the end of your interaction,” she says. “You’re not blowing up at them. But you are sending a clear message: This isn’t working for me. And then let them go figure it out.”
It’s a boundary that can also be instructive. When someone learns that their go-to phrase doesn’t land the way they intended, they’re less likely to say it to the next person who’s struggling. “I’ve had people say, ‘Oh my God, I didn’t realize—I’ve been saying this to people all the time and nobody ever told me it wasn’t helpful,’” Love says. “And they say, ‘Thank you. I’m never going to say this again.’”
https://time.com/article/2026/04/15/what-to-say-to-someone-grieving/?utm_source=firefox-newtab-en-us
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THE SECRETS OF HAVING A “GOOD VIBE”
A simple seven-minute Buddhist practice can shift how you feel about others—and how others feel around you.
I was in a New York City taxi headed for the airport for a flight back to California. All should have been well except for one thing: My driver was out of his mind. Granted, I had made him wait for a few minutes while I was getting my bags. But his level of rage was truly frightening. Fueled by frustration, he was driving fast and recklessly on the highway around Manhattan. Cowering in the back seat, anxious for our lives, and feeling completely powerless, I decided to try an ancient Buddhist practice I had heard about.
I closed my eyes and started silently repeating these phrases in my head: "May you be happy, may you be peaceful, may you be at ease." They were directed at the driver, wishing him well.
To my surprise, after a few minutes of doing this silent practice, the driver noticeably relaxed, slowed his speed, and struck up a lovely conversation with me. By the end of the car ride, he even showed me pictures of his kids. The change was radical (and a relief!).
Could it have been due to my practice? Or was he just anticipating a better tip? As a scientist, I had to find out. As psychologists and research scientists, we are trained to be skeptical of explanations that rely on vague or mystical claims. So when I got back to Stanford, where I was completing my Ph.D. training, my colleague and friend Cendri Hutcherson and I decided to study loving-kindness meditation empirically.
What we found surprised us.
Across two studies, including a neuroscience study, we found that after just seven minutes of loving-kindness meditation, people felt more connected to strangers. Not metaphorically connected—measurably so, in ways that showed up both in subjective experience and in neural processes associated with social connection.
What Is Loving-Kindness Meditation?
Loving-kindness meditation (sometimes called metta) is not about relaxation, emptying the mind, or suppressing negative thoughts. Instead, it involves intentionally generating goodwill toward others.
A typical practice involves silently offering phrases such as:
May you be safe.
May you be healthy.
May you live with ease.
People usually begin with someone they care about, then extend these wishes to acquaintances, strangers, and eventually to all people.
Crucially, the practice does not require feeling warm or affectionate. The task is simply to offer the intention—even if the feeling doesn’t immediately follow.
Study One: A Brief Behavioral Experiment
In our first study, participants—most with no prior meditation experience—completed a simple seven-minute loving-kindness meditation (available for free on YouTube or the SATTVA app.)
Before and after the practice, the participants reported how connected they felt to other people, including strangers, using established psychological measures of social connection.
After just seven minutes, participants reported feeling significantly more connected to strangers. Nothing about their external social environment had changed; the shift came from the practice itself.
Study Two: What Changed in the Brain
In our second study, we examined neural correlates of this shift using brain imaging.
Following the brief meditation, we observed changes in neural systems involved in social cognition, affiliation, and emotional regulation, suggesting a greater sense of social connection to and care for others.
What Creates a Good Vibe?
When we like how we feel around someone, we say they have "a good vibe." [Oriana: I'm used to the phrase "good energy." "Vibe" goes back to the Hippie era, and feels dated to me.]
Subtle cues—softer facial expression, reduced vigilance, relaxed attention—signal non-threat. What people describe as a “good vibration” can be understood scientifically as the interpersonal nervous system signaling. When someone cultivates benevolence, their nervous system shifts toward safety and openness. The result: We like how we feel around them.
A Fundamental Human Need
Humans are social mammals. Our nervous systems are exquisitely sensitive to cues about whether we are seen, safe, and included.
Loving-kindness meditation, by helping you cultivate benevolence, can change the subtle emotional signals you send.
Instead of “you are a threat,” the signal becomes: you are seen; you are safe; you belong. And this can help others feel better around you.
What This Does—and Doesn’t—Mean
Seven minutes of meditation will not necessarily eliminate all conflict in your life. But it may very well help.
The takeaway is simple: Connection is more possible than we assume, and by changing how we approach others, we can build better relationships — even with strangers.
The best part, given how busy most of us are: Even a very brief, intentional practice like seven minutes of loving-kindness meditation can shift how we relate to others.
Research is now beginning to show why cultivating benevolence and wishing others well can change both how you feel and how others perceive you. It may very well be the elusive secret to cultivating "a good vibe.”
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/feeling-it/202601/the-secret-to-having-a-good-vibe-that-others-cant-resist
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WHAT MAKES A GOOD PARTNER
To better understand how to think about attraction, falling in love and cultivating intimacy, I spoke to writer Mandy Len Catron, author of How to Fall in Love With Anyone and the viral 2015 New York Times article "To Fall in Love With Anyone, Do This." Here are some of her best insights.
We have more control over whom we fall for than we might realize.
"When we talk about attraction, we talk about it in this really passive way, as if it's this thing that sort of happens inside of us, instead of thinking about it as something that we actually have some influence over," Catron says. "We have a lot of say over who we want to invest our time and energy into."
And realizing you have autonomy can be empowering: It can help you open yourself up to new experiences, including attractions that may feel new to you (like interest in someone who isn't your "type" or even someone who is a different gender from the people you've always dated). It can help you end relationships that are full of intense feelings but also endless drama.
"I don't necessarily think you can force yourself to fall in love with someone, but I do think you can re-create the conditions that help intimacy thrive," Catron says.
To help intimacy thrive, both people need to be willing to be vulnerable — but it's a good idea to ease into it slowly.
One of the defining features of the 36 questions that (supposedly) lead to love is the way they get increasingly intimate, but it happens gradually, so you're not talking about matters of life and death until the very end of the conversation. And that's a good approach for real life too, Catron says — whether you're getting to know a potential partner or just talking to a new friend. Sharing too much too soon can make the other person feel uncomfortable or like there's an imbalance in the relationship. So start small.
"[Vulnerability] doesn't have to take the form of confessing your most intimate secrets or dumping out your whole family history," Catron says. "I think it comes in much smaller ways, like talking about something that's really important to you or that you're passionate about. Or start with telling a funny but embarrassing story that you wouldn't necessarily tell a stranger." When you open up in a thoughtful, measured way, she says, it invites the other person to do the same.
If you're looking for a relationship, pay close attention to how potential partners treat you, and don't waste your time on anyone who isn't genuinely excited about you.
"We're not always thinking about what makes a great partner when we're dating and looking for a long-term relationship," Catron says. Researchers have identified qualities that make someone likely to be a good long-term relationship partner: Openness to new experiences, agreeability and conscientiousness are all good signs.
"Someone who is just responsible and who takes care of themselves and other people," Catron says. "I mean, these things, when you lay them out like that, seem obvious, and yet I don't think we're thinking about them very often as we're going about our dating lives.”
But even the most agreeable or easygoing person in the world won't be a good partner if they don't treat you well. So pay close attention to whether the person celebrates you and your wins and how they respond to your "bids." "You just want someone who shows up, engages with you and makes a big deal out of things that are important to you," Catron said.
"The simplest metric is finding someone who makes you feel better about who you are, who never makes you feel smaller or inadequate," Catron said. "It's a really simple metric that is pretty reliable across all different kinds of relationships."
https://www.npr.org/2021/02/05/964514838/what-makes-a-good-partner-and-how-to-cultivate-connection
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THE REVOLUTIONARY POWER OF ROMANTIC LOVE
Romantic love has historically advanced gender equality by fostering empathy and mutual respect.
Cultural norms significantly influence how love impacts gender roles across societies.
Digital distractions and other modern challenges threaten the prevalence of romantic connections.
Reinvigorating the value of love could be pivotal in promoting continued progress towards gender equality.
Romantic love is not just the stuff of fairy tales and wishes. It might explain why some societies have developed gender equality while others remain strictly patriarchal.
Alice Evans, Senior Lecturer in the Social Science of Development at King's College London, told an audience at the annual TED conference in 2025 that love, though often dismissed as a private or trivial matter, has quietly and powerfully shaped social structures, female empowerment, and cultural evolution.
A century ago, virtually every institution on the planet—parliaments, courts, media, religion, and universities—was steeped in patriarchy. Men dominated public and private life, often assuming authority as not merely natural but moral. Since then, economic development, education, birth control, legal reforms, and feminist activism have generally been credited for the strides made toward gender equality. Evans proposes an additional, often-overlooked force: the transformative potential of romantic love.
Love as a Political Force
Feminism has long harbored a suspicion of romantic love and marriage, viewing them as an ideal and an institution historically used to subjugate women. Second-wave feminists, in particular, critiqued the “emotional labor” and other work women performed within marriage and warned against the social expectation that women find fulfillment through heterosexual romantic attachment. Love, in these frameworks, was often seen as a trap—seductive in its promises but ultimately reinforcing male dominance and female dependency.
There is, however, another side of the story—the emancipatory potential of love when it is based on mutual devotion and respect. Instead of undermining women's ability to flourish, Evans argues, love can advance it. Men who deeply love their partners find ways to support them. And love is the “special glue” that binds men and women together “in empathy and understanding.”
Love's Uneven Global Footprint
Evans embarked on a global journey to research how love manifests differently across cultures and across time, and how its acceptance—or suppression—shapes gender relations.
In Europe, romantic love began gaining social legitimacy in the 19th century through the work of women writers such as Jane Austen, George Eliot, and the Brontë sisters. Their novels celebrated women not as passive recipients of male attention but as discerning individuals worthy of respect and emotional depth.
Their fictional heroines inspired real-world expectations. Men began expressing their affection through heartfelt love letters, vowing to cherish their wives and support their well-being. In some cases, such love led to something tangible—like Alfredo di Lelio, who created the now-famous Fettuccine Alfredo to nourish his wife when she wasn't eating well after childbirth.
In parts of the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia, however, romantic love is stigmatized. And marriage based on love is often seen as a threat.
In Karachi, Bilal adored his wife, even building a dividing wall to provide some privacy from his parents on the other side of the house. But his devotion was viewed with suspicion. It was not just unusual. It was seen as subversive. What spell had she cast over him?
In contrast, Amal, a woman in the same city, suffered emotional and physical abuse from a husband who deferred completely to his mother, seeing marital loyalty as a betrayal of familial duty. Without the emotional bond of love, women in such systems are often unable to prevent abuse or even find support. In Pakistan, Evans notes, only 39% of women have a say in their own healthcare or household decisions. And 40% of men say wife-beating is justified.
Even in countries with high female employment, such as China, love can take a back seat to productivity. Economic growth has improved women’s public roles, but many marriages remain loveless. Women often manage housework alone and feel unsupported in pursuing personal dreams.
“But when love blooms,” Evans reports, “it proves transformative.” A woman named Chen described to Evans her experience with a husband who loves her. “He cares about my feelings. He cares about my job. He said, if it is your dream, then do it.”
In Rwanda, where men are traditionally mocked and ostracized for prioritizing their wives over their male friends, one community eventually realized that it was the families of men devoted to their wives that flourished. Instead of belittling those men, they began applauding them.
When Love Disappears
In reframing love as a driver of gender justice, Evans challenges both conservative and progressive narratives. To those who dismiss love as irrelevant or regressive, she offers evidence that it can be revolutionary. And to those who cling to traditional roles, she shows how true devotion often requires breaking free from rigid hierarchies. Romantic love, in her account, is not a distraction from equality—it is one of its most powerful engines.
Across both Eastern and Western societies, however, young people are increasingly disengaging from romantic relationships. Marriage rates are falling, digital distractions are rising, and building lasting partnerships seems harder than ever. Paradoxically, just as societies have begun to embrace gender equality, the emotional connections that could help solidify it are eroding.
Far from being a sentimental detour, Evans’s exploration of love takes us to the heart of what it means to build a more just world, one in which emotional connection, mutual respect, and deep care abound. Social scientists typically focus on the measurable, but “this omits something fundamentally human,” Evans says. “Rising numbers of young people are increasingly single, drifting apart. The special glue that once bound men and women together in empathy and understanding is dissolving.”
Love thrives, Evans says, when it is celebrated. And when love is allowed to flourish, it has the power to reorient not just relationships but society.
As Evans says, what the world needs now is love.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/happiness-and-the-pursuit-of-leadership/202504/the-revolutionary-power-of-romantic-love
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A WOMAN CHEMIST WHO CHANGED PHARMACOLOGY
In 1937, a nineteen-year-old woman graduated summa cum laude in chemistry. She applied to fifteen graduate schools. Not one offered her funding. Laboratories told her they did not hire women. She never earned a PhD.
Decades later, she received the Nobel Prize and helped save millions of lives.
Her name was Gertrude Belle Elion.
That same year, her grandfather died of cancer.
Watching his illness closely shaped her decision. She chose to study chemistry with the goal of finding better treatments.
She attended Hunter College because it was free and graduated in 1937 at nineteen, at the top of her class.
But her achievements didn’t open doors.
Jobs were scarce during the Depression, and most laboratories refused to hire women. She applied to multiple graduate programs and was not offered funding. To support herself, she worked as a teacher, a secretary, and even took unpaid lab positions just to gain experience.
Eventually, she earned a master’s degree while working during the day.
In 1944, she joined Burroughs Wellcome and began working with scientist George Hitchings.
Instead of relying on trial-and-error methods, they focused on understanding diseases at a molecular level and designing drugs to target them directly.
That approach changed medicine.
In the early 1950s, she helped develop a drug used to treat leukemia. At the time, the disease was almost always fatal in children. The new treatment made remission possible and extended survival.
She later contributed to the development of drugs that made organ transplants viable by controlling the body’s immune response.
In the 1970s, her work led to one of the first effective antiviral medications, showing that viruses could be treated with targeted drugs.
She continued her research without ever completing a PhD.
At one point, she had to choose between continuing her studies full-time or staying in the lab.
She chose the lab.
Over the years, her work influenced treatments for cancer, transplant patients, and viral diseases, and contributed to later developments in HIV treatment.
In 1988, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. She was seventy years old.
By then, institutions that once rejected her were honoring her work. She received major awards, patents, and recognition across the scientific community.
She also encouraged young scientists, especially women, to continue despite barriers.
Gertrude Belle Elion died in 1999.
Her work had already changed how medicines were developed and how diseases were treated.
The student who was denied funding by fifteen schools went on to reshape modern pharmacology—not through titles, but through results.
https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1LDKSWiufX/
A summary of Gertrude Elion’s discoveries:
Gertrude Elion was a Nobel Prize-winning biochemist who revolutionized drug development by creating compounds to fight, rather than just treat, major diseases. She developed groundbreaking treatments for leukemia, the first antiviral (acyclovir), immunosuppressants for organ transplants, and treatments for gout and malaria.
Her key discoveries, often in collaboration with George Hitchings, included:
6-mercaptopurine (6-MP/Purinethol): The first major chemotherapy drug for childhood leukemia, transforming it from a fatal to a treatable disease.
Azathioprine (Imuran): The first immunosuppressive agent, which made organ transplants possible by preventing rejection.
Acyclovir: A pioneering antiviral drug used to treat herpes virus infections.
Allopurinol: A treatment for gout and kidney stones.
Pyrimethamine: Used in the treatment of malaria.
AZT (Zidovudine): A key medication in the treatment of AIDS, which she helped develop.
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THE RISING SEA LEVEL: IT’S WORSE THAN WE THOUGHT
These findings come from two major new studies that are reshaping our understanding of the threats posed by rising tides and sinking land and underlining the imminent risk of inundation facing tens of millions of people in some of the world’s largest megacities, say researchers not involved in the studies.
“The impacts of sea level rise under climate change have been systematically underestimated,” concludes Matt Palmer, a specialist on sea level rise at the U.K. Met Office’s Hadley Centre for Climate Science. “We could see devastating impacts much earlier than predicted — particularly in the Global South.”
“Taken jointly, these two papers paint a considerably more concerning picture than either would in isolation,” says Franck Ghomsi, an oceanographer at the University of Cape Town. “We are seeing an emerging body of research that rewrites the story of coastal vulnerability.”
It has long been known that sea levels vary a lot globally, and have been rising more in some places than others. But now a groundbreaking Dutch analysis of actual sea levels as measured by tidal gauges has found that almost the entire scientific literature has dramatically underestimated current sea levels.
Katharina Seeger and Philip Minderhoud, geographers at Wageningen University & Research, in the Netherlands, say seas are on average almost 1 foot higher than standard estimates, which are based on global models that assume calm seas and ignore ocean currents and the effect of winds. Sea levels are not rising faster than thought, but the baseline for future rise is considerably higher in most places.
In many of the 385 cases the pair examined, previously accepted sea levels are 3 feet or more off — almost all of them too low. They conclude that around 80 million people are today living on land in coastal areas below sea level — almost twice previous estimates — dramatically increasing the numbers at risk as sea level rise accelerates in the coming decades.
For many low-lying coastal areas, scientific forecasts of how soon they may flood as sea levels rise may be off by several decades, making planning to protect coastlines much more urgent than previously supposed by policymakers and funding bodies such as the World Bank that rely on scientific assessments of flooding risk.
The other new study focused on the world’s river deltas. It has long been known that many deltas are sinking under the influence of groundwater pumping. But as Robert Nicholls, climate adaptation researcher at the University of East Anglia, notes, “There have been lots of different estimates.” Data were inconsistent and based on crude, delta-wide estimates. “Now at last we have a consistent data set, with high spatial resolution.”
That data comes from Leonard Ohenhen, an earth system scientist at the University of California, Irvine, who used satellite-mounted radar to produce 3D maps of subsidence on 40 of the world’s biggest and most populous river deltas. He has found that subsidence afflicts more than half those deltas. Most startlingly, in 18 cases subsidence rates exceed those of rising tides — hence, more than doubling the effective yearly rise in local sea levels, and in some cases multiplying it tenfold.
This again puts tens of millions of people once thought safe from rising tides this century in imminent harm’s way, including those living on the deltas of the Nile in Egypt, the Mekong in Vietnam, the Mahanadi in India, and the Yellow River in China. If the current rate of subsidence persists, these areas will be flooded much sooner than thought.
Researchers say many deltas and other low-lying coastal areas not included in the two studies are at greater risk than believed and urgently require detailed investigation of both actual sea levels and the rate of land subsidence.
The two studies, conducted largely independently, show glaring gaps in past research tracking the severity of climate change impacts. Seeger says peer-reviewed studies and reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are almost all based on faulty methodology.
One problem is that more than 90 percent of local studies estimating current sea levels and future rises cut-and-paste the results of mathematical models of the “geoid,” the shape of the Earth as calculated from the planet’s rotation and gravitational fields. They deliver approximate sea levels, but by assuming calm and uniform oceans, they result in significant local errors, says Seeger.
Very few studies use actual measured data, even when it is available.
In particular, Seeger says, this approach “ignores ocean dynamics,” such as currents, water expanding from unusually high temperatures, and prevailing winds piling up water along shorelines. Her painstakingly assembled real-world data from tidal gauges shows that actual sea levels worldwide are on average 9.4 to 10.6 inches higher than predicted by geoid models.
This discrepancy exceeds total global sea level rise since the start of the 20th century, notes Jonathan Bamber, a glaciologist at the University of Bristol.
Higher than expected sea levels turn out to be greatest “in the Global South, where ocean dynamics tend to be stronger,” says Minderhoud. Tides along the coasts of Southeast Asia are 3 feet or more higher than geoid modeling predicts. Just a few places have lower levels — notably around Antarctica and the northern Mediterranean.
“Our corrected calculations reveal that up to 37 percent more area and up to 68 percent more people will fall below sea level following [3.3 feet] of sea level rise,” says Seeger. That represents an additional area at risk of inundation the size of the United Kingdom, occupied by 132 million people, equivalent to the population of Mexico.
Seeger says the “methodological blind spot” that she and Minderhoud have uncovered went undetected for so long in part because geoid estimates are most accurate in Europe and the eastern seaboard of North America, where the majority of published researchers are based.
The fact that current sea levels are higher than supposed does not directly alter global projections of future rise. But it raises the baseline from which future rises will occur in most places, and the evidence of strong local variations in sea levels suggests that future rises in some places will be higher than in others.
Minderhoud says the prevalence of geoid data in the scientific literature has led to complacency, by predicting that many heavily populated coastal regions have more leeway before flooding thresholds are crossed than now appears likely.
A case in point is the Mekong Delta in Vietnam, where Minderhoud began his own investigations into the reliability of sea level data in the scientific literature a decade ago. Published data predicted that “the land would start to become inundated if sea levels were to rise by [5 to 6.6 feet],” he says. “But I could see that the surface water level was already in many places… much higher.” Without urgent protection, the land was on the brink of becoming inundated.
Many deltas face a similar harsh confrontation with reality, because they are also sinking into the rising ocean. Some deltas subside naturally, if rivers do not supply enough sediment to replenish what is lost to erosion by the ocean. But “natural subsidence is rarely more than [0.1 inches] a year,” says Nicholls. That is a fraction of current rates, which mostly have an anthropogenic origin, he says.
Parts of Shanghai, a megacity of 25 million people on the Yangtze Delta, have subsided by more than 6 feet, Bangkok by more than 5 feet, and Osaka and Tianjin by around 10 feet, says Nicholls.
Dead cypress trees are common in Venice, Louisiana. Advancing seawater is killing trees in Louisiana's marshlands.
Much of Jakarta, the megacity capital of Indonesia, has sunk by up to 13 feet since 1970, and it continues downward 10 times faster than seas are rising in the adjacent bay. The threat of widespread submersion was a primary reason for the Indonesian government’s 2019 decision to move its capital to Borneo.
Ohenhen’s analysis confirms that subsidence of deltas is usually caused by pumping groundwater to fill city faucets and supply industry and agriculture. The dried-out subsurface loses volume, causing widespread sinking at the surface.
Jakarta is just the largest of many coastal cities and farming areas threatened by groundwater withdrawal on Java, the world’s most populous island. Semarang, a booming coastal Javan city of 2 million people pumps so much water that subsidence reaches between 20 and 50 times sea level rise, according to analysis by Ohenhen. Floods washed through the city in October 2025 and again in February this year. Waterlogged residents repeatedly rebuild their houses on ever higher stilts to avoid inundation. But whole neighborhoods are disappearing permanently beneath the waves.
A second cause of subsidence is dams and levees on rivers. These structures cut off sediment supplies that maintain deltas. Thanks to a total of more than 20 large dams on its main stem, China’s Yellow River is no longer so yellow from sediment. Ohenhen found that, as a consequence of the reduced sediment, its delta has been subsiding up to 10 times faster than the Yellow Sea, into which it empties, is projected to rise.
In Europe, the Po delta in Italy is sinking by between 2 and 4 inches per year, says Ohenhen. This after losing 71 percent of its sediment supply to dams. In North America, the Mississippi delta has lost 1,900 square miles in the past century. It continues to sink by an average of 2 inches per year, says Ohenhen, as levees prevent the river from flooding across the delta and depositing sediment. The subsidence renders it ever more vulnerably to storm surges during hurricanes.
Sometimes subsidence has a range of causes, says Nicholls. The Nile Delta, which contains two-thirds of Egypt’s farmland, has been starved of sediment by the High Aswan dam, which was constructed in the 1960s, and undermined from beneath by groundwater pumping to irrigate crops. The new analysis found rates of subsidence were “much bigger than previously reported, with millions of people in harm’s way.” Nicholls says. It is the dominant cause of a retreat in the delta coastline that in places exceeds 300 feet per year, engulfing farmland, threatening the city of Alexandria, and poisoning palm trees as salty water infiltrates underground water.
The new findings point to urgent problems for governments and aid agencies. In many parts of the world, authorities are acting to protect communities against rising tides without realizing either how high current sea levels already are or the extent of land subsidence.
In Java, the Indonesian government and NGOs have been restoring coastal mangroves as a natural way to help hold back tides that have swamped whole villages. But as the work has progressed, it has emerged that groundwater pumping in Semarang and elsewhere is making this work much less impactful.
Still, the often-dominant role of land subsidence as a cause of coastal flooding is potentially good news. For, while rising sea levels can only be halted with global climate action, subsidence can be stopped quickly by local action, such as ending groundwater pumping, says Scott Jasechko, a hydrologist at the University of California Santa Barbara, and author of a new global study of groundwater recovery.
Parts of Tokyo sank by up to 15 feet between 1920 and 1960, as it became the world’s most populous metropolitan area. But then the city largely banned groundwater pumping, and land levels have been stable ever since, says Nicholls.
Elsewhere, the operation of dams can be altered, and levees removed, to restore sediment supplies to deltas. After Hurricane Katrina flooded New Orleans in 2005, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers began turning the tides in the Mississippi Delta by diverting sediment-rich water to restore protective coastal marshes.
Still, the threats loom large, especially in Southeast Asia and Africa, where Ghomsi, of the University of Cape Town, sums up what faces countries with few resources to repel the tides: “The sea level baseline is higher than assumed; the land is sinking in many critical regions; the sea is rising faster; and extreme events now come on top, producing impacts that are greater than the sum of their parts.”
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ASPIRIN CAN REDUCE CANCER RISK
The 4,000-year-old drug, most commonly used to treat pain, prevents certain tumors from forming and spreading across the body – findings that are already changing health policies.
Nick James, a British furniture maker in his mid-40s, first became concerned about his health after his mother died from cancer and his brother, along with several other family members, later developed bowel cancer. He opted to undergo genetic testing, and was found to be carrying a faulty gene which causes Lynch Syndrome, a condition that significantly increases the risk of developing that type of cancer.
Help came from an unexpected place, however, when James became the first person to sign up for a clinical trial that set out to test whether a daily dose of aspirin – the over-the-counter painkiller – could protect against developing cancer.
Depending on the type of gene mutation, 10-80% of people with Lynch syndrome will get bowel cancer during their lifetime. But so far, things are looking good for James. "He's been on aspirin now with us for 10 years without any cancer so far," says John Burn, a professor of clinical genetics at Newcastle University, who led the trial.
It sounds almost impossible to believe, yet there have long been indications that the drug might reduce the chances of colorectal cancer spreading, or even occurring in the first place. In the past year, a string of trials and studies have strengthened such evidence. Some countries have already changed their medical guidelines to include the pill as a first line of protection for those who are most at risk (though experts stress that this should only be done under your doctor's supervision). And we're finally beginning to understand the reasons why it has such a mysterious effect.
Ancient roots
The latest findings offer a remarkable new twist in the tale of one of our oldest and most effective medications. In the late 19th Century, archaeologists uncovered 4,400-year-old clay tablets from the ancient Mesopotamian city of Nippur – in what is now Iraq – offering lists of a range of medicines crafted from botanical, animal and mineral compounds.
Among them were instructions for a substance derived from the willow tree [salix]. We now know that this contains a chemical called salicin, which the body can convert into salicylic acid that helps to calm pain. It is very similar in structure to modern aspirin – acetylsalicylic acid – but more irritating for the stomach. Other ancient civilizations – including the Egyptians, Greeks and Romans – also used the remedy.
The modern study of the compound kicked off in 1763, when the English cleric Edward Stone wrote to the Royal Society to describe the fever-fighting properties of dried and powdered willow bark. About a century later, scientists managed to synthesize salicylic acid into the less corrosive acetylsalicylic acid, and put it on the market under the brand name Bayer.
Fast forward yet another century, and scientists started noticing some unexpected benefits of aspirin on preventing cardiovascular disease – reducing the risk of blood clots by making the blood thinner and the blood platelets less sticky. For this reason, organizations like the UK's National Health Service recommend low daily doses for people with a high risk of heart attack or stroke.
By 1972, the potential benefits had extended to the prevention of cancer, with an attention-grabbing study of mice injected with tumorous cells. The American scientists found that lacing the animal's drinking water with aspirin significantly reduced the risk that the cancer would spread across the body – a process called metastasis – compared to mice who were not given the drug.
While discovery generated some excitement, "it wasn't immediately clear how this would impact clinical practice," says Ruth Langley, a professor of oncology and medical trials at University College London. It wasn't obvious if the drug would have the same effect in humans, after all – meaning that the finding remained an obscure fascination rather than a potentially life-changing treatment.
A turning point came in 2010, when Peter Rothwell, a professor of clinical neurology at the University of Oxford in the UK, went back and re-investigated the much more abundant data on aspirin as a prevention of cardiovascular disease. In his analyses, the drug appeared to reduce both the incidence and spread of cancer, prompting renewed interest in both the power of aspirin to help fight the disease, and the reasons that it does so.
Proving that aspirin can prevent cancer in the general population is a challenge, however. In an ideal world, researchers would recruit a large sample of people. Half would take aspirin, while the rest would take a placebo pill – and you would then compare which had the highest rates of the disease. It can take many decades for cancer to occur in the first place, however, meaning that a randomized controlled trial would take a very long time to conduct at a huge expense. "It's almost impossible, actually," explains Anna Martling, a professor of surgery at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden.
For this reason, scientists have turned their attention to specific groups, such as those who have already had cancer or those who are genetically susceptible to developing it.
Mounting evidence
It is here that John Burn's study of patients with Lynch Syndrome, which vastly increases the risk of colorectal and other forms of cancer, enters the picture. In 2020, Burn published the results of a landmark randomized, controlled trial of 861 patients with the condition. Following the participants for 10 years, his team discovered that people who had taken a daily 600mg dose of aspirin for at least two years effectively halved their risk of colorectal cancer.
His team have since conducted a second trial, which is currently under peer review. The early results suggest that a much lower dose of aspirin (75-100mg) is just as effective – if not more. "The people who took aspirin for two years had 50% fewer cancers in the colon," he says.
"What we want to do is keep on going for a few more years because the data is going to get better as time goes on.” (Nick James, the very first patient to enter the trial, was among the ones who appeared to have benefited.)
The low dose (75-100mg) is similar to what people take for the prevention of cardiovascular events. That matters, since aspirin can come with unpleasant side effects, including indigestion, internal bleeding, stomach ulcers and even brain hemorrhage, and lower dose can be much better tolerated.
The findings are already affected policy. "In the UK, guidelines have been changed as a result of our findings," says Burn. Since 2020, these now recommend that people with Lynch Syndrome should start taking aspirin at about 20 years of age for most people, or 35 for less severe cases.
Given these results, it is natural to wonder whether aspirin could benefit other patient groups. Martling has investigated whether aspirin can reduce the risk of metastasis in people who've already had a diagnosis of colorectal cancer. Her team focused on people with common mutations in their bowel or rectal tumors. "Of all patients getting colorectal cancer, 40% have one of the mutations we have studied," she explains. Previous research had suggested these people may respond particularly well to aspirin.
The three-year randomized controlled trial involved 2,980 patients, with one group taking 160mg of aspirin daily, starting within three months of surgery, and the other receiving a placebo. The aspirin-treated group had less than half the risk of recurrence – a highly significant effect size. "That's a large group of the patients," says Martling. What's more, both Martling's and Burn's trials showed very few cases of adverse effects in the people taking aspirin.
Martling's study, published in September 2025, quickly changed practice in Sweden. Since January 2026, bowel cancer patients in the country have started being screened for the mutations in question, and offered a low dose of aspirin if they have them.
It is not yet clear whether aspirin could protect patients from other cancers as well – but we may soon have some answers. Langley is currently running a large randomized controlled trial with 11,000 participants who've had colorectal, breast, gastroesophageal, or prostate cancer in the UK, Ireland and India. Her team will be looking at the effect of a daily 100mg or 300mg preventative dose of aspirin, and they're hoping to have results next year.
"We really are the first to explore the role of aspirin in other tumor types," she says. She is aiming to replicate Martling's findings for colorectal cancer, as well as gathering funds to investigate the implications of the specific mutations in the other cancers, too. The replication is key, she says, as authorities ideally want two sets of trial results before they make recommendations for patients.
How does it work?
The precise mechanism by which aspirin prevents cancer has long remained a mystery. "This fantastic drug works both within the cell and outside the cell," explains Martling, so there could be several different mechanisms involved. Her own works implicates an enzyme within the cell called Cox-2, which we know is inhibited by aspirin. This enzyme helps produce hormone-like compounds called prostaglandins, she says, which in turn activates a signaling pathway that can lead to uncontrolled cell growth.
Recent research by Rahul Roychoudhuri, a professor of cancer immunology at the University of Cambridge in the UK, and his colleagues, suggests there may be another mechanism involving a gene that inhibits T-cells in the immune system from spotting and killing metastatic cancer cells.
They found that this gene can be activated by a clotting factor called thromboxane A2, which – as the name suggests – helps the blood to form clots when we have been injured. Since aspirin inhibits thromboxane, it may therefore render cancerous cells more visible to the immune system. This came as a surprise to the team.
Roychoudhuri's research was conducted on mice, so we can't be sure whether the results would also hold for humans. But intriguing research by Langley and her colleagues has shown that people who have had colorectal cancer or gastroesophageal cancer have much higher levels of thromboxane than healthy individuals – even up to six months after successful treatment, suggesting it may be a driver of metastases in humans, too.
A cure all?
Exactly who should be taking aspirin regularly, and when, remains a matter of debate. Some researchers believe that the combined benefits for cardiovascular disease and cancer should inspire wider uptake.
Burn, who has taken aspirin as a preventative measure in the past, is optimistic about its potential for public health. "We did a big study where we showed that if every 50-something year-old took a baby aspirin for ten years, the national mortality from all causes would be reduced by 4%," says Burn.
Most researchers argue that it should only be restricted to particular patients, however. "It's one thing to give aspirin to a cancer population but it's a totally different thing to offer the healthy population something that might harm them as well," says Martling. That's because aspirin can have serious adverse effects, and it isn't likely to work for all people or all cancers.
If you've got Lynch Syndrome or you've been treated for bowel cancer, however, it may be worth enquiring whether a regular low dose might be beneficial. "Always speak to a doctor or other healthcare professional before starting aspirin," Langley says.
As the research on aspirin keeps building, there may be surprises yet to come. But will the long history of aspirin extend another 4,000 years into the future? Perhaps our descendants will be using versions of the drug in ways we cannot even begin to imagine.
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HOW ULTRASOUND IS USHERING A NEW ERA OF SURGERY-FREE CANCER TREATMENT
Ultrasound has long been used for helping doctors see inside the body, but focused high frequency sound waves are offering new ways of targeting cancer.
If Zhen Xu hadn't annoyed her lab mates, she might never have discovered a groundbreaking treatment for liver cancer.
As a PhD student in biomedical engineering at the University of Michigan in the US during the early 2000s, Xu was trying to find a way for doctors to destroy and remove diseased tissue without the need for invasive surgery. She'd landed on the idea of using high-frequency sound waves – ultrasound – to mechanically break up tissue and was testing her theory on pig hearts.
Ultrasound isn't supposed to be audible to human ears, but Xu was using such a powerful amplifier in her experiments that other researchers she shared the laboratory with began to complain about noise. "Nothing had worked anyway," she says. So she decided to humor her colleagues by increasing the rate of ultrasound pulses, which would bring the sound level outside the range of human hearing.
To her shock, increasing the number of pulses per second – which also meant each pulse reduced in length to a microsecond – was not only less disruptive to those around her, but also more effective on living tissue than the approach she'd tried previously. As she watched, a hole appeared in the pig heart tissue within a minute of ultrasound application. "I thought I was dreaming," says Xu, who is today a professor of biomedical engineering at the University of Michigan.
Decades later, Xu's serendipitous discovery, known as histotripsy, is one of several approaches using ultrasound that are ushering in a new era of advanced cancer treatment, offering doctors non-invasive methods to rid patients of cancerous tumors using sound rather than surgery.
Histotripsy was approved by the US Food and Drug Administration for the treatment of liver tumours in October 2023. The following year, a small study funded by HistoSonics, the company formed to commercialize Xu's technology, found that the approach achieved technical success against 95% of liver tumors. While side effects ranging from abdominal pain to internal bleeding are possible, research suggests complications are rare and the method is generally safe.
In June, the UK became the first European country to approve histotripsy. The treatment was made available on the NHS under the pilot phase of its Innovative Devices Access Pathway for unmet clinical needs.
"People think of ultrasound as imaging," says Julie Earl, a principal investigator in the biomarkers and personalized approach to cancer group at Spain's Ramón y Cajal Institute for Health Research who has studied the technology. But a growing body of research, she says, suggests it can also destroy tumors, subdue metastatic disease (cancers that have spread to other parts of the body) and boost the efficacy of other cancer treatments – all without putting a patient under the knife.
HOW ULTRASOUND WORKS
For many people, the word "ultrasound" triggers instant associations with sonograms during pregnancy. To create a medical image like a sonogram, a handheld transducer sends high-frequency sound waves into the body, where they ricochet off tissues inside. A sensor in the device picks up the waves that bounce back, converting their activity into electrical signals, which are then used to create an image of what's going on beneath the skin.
In cancer treatment, ultrasound waves are concentrated onto a small area of a tumor to destroy it.
For treatment of liver cancer, histotripsy devices channel ultrasound waves into a focal zone of about two by four millimeters – "basically, the tip of your coloring pen", Xu says. Then, a robotic arm guides the transducer over the tumor to target the correct area.
MICROBUBBLES
The ultrasound is delivered in quick bursts. These pulses create tiny "microbubbles" that expand and then collapse in microseconds, breaking apart the tumor tissue as they do. The patient's immune system is then able to clean up the remains.
The whole thing is fast, non-toxic and non-invasive, usually allowing patients to go home the same day, Xu says. While exact treatment time varies, most procedures are over in one to three hours, according to HistoSonics. Tumors are often destroyed in a single session, although patients with multiple or larger lesions may need multiple rounds.
While its benefits are promising, there are unanswered questions about histotripsy. There's not yet robust long-term data about cancer recurrence after treatment. Some researchers have raised concerns about histotripsy potentially seeding new cancer growths as tumors are broken up inside the body, meaning they can be transported to other areas. That fear, however, hasn't borne out in animal studies so far.
Cooking cancers with ultrasound
Histotripsy is not the first use of ultrasound in cancer care. High-intensity Focused Ultrasound (HIFU), an older and more established technology, can also be used to attack tumors. A focused blast of ultrasound is applied to a tumor to generate heat that essentially "cooks" the tissue, says Richard Price, who co-directs the Focused Ultrasound Cancer Immunotherapy Center at the University of Virginia in the US.
"If you take a magnifying glass and you hold it outside on a sunny day over a dry leaf, you could actually start the leaf on fire," Price says. HIFU essentially does the same thing to cancer tissue, only using sound energy.
In oncology, HIFU is perhaps best known as a non-invasive way to treat prostate cancer, an application for which it seems to be roughly as effective as surgery, according to a 2025 study. Patients may experience some pain and urinary side effects when they wake up, but recovery is generally faster than after intensive therapies like surgery.
Both histotripsy and HIFU therapy are typically performed under general anesthesia so patients don't move during treatment, minimizing the possibility of accidental damage to nearby organs or tissues. But histotripy does not generate the heat produced by HIFU, which can damage nearby healthy tissue.
Not all cancers can be treated with HIFU, however – again, bone or gas can block ultrasound from reaching tumors. It's not generally an option for patients whose prostate cancer has spread throughout the body. Still, researchers in numerous countries are studying it in the hope of targeting other cancers, including some forms of breast cancer.
ULTRASOUND PLUS DRUGS
The power of ultrasound could also be supercharged by combining it with other existing forms of cancer treatment, researchers say.
Recent research suggests, for example, that injecting microbubbles into the bloodstream and stimulating them with ultrasound can temporarily open the blood-brain barrier. This barrier usually prevents toxins in the bloodstream from entering and damaging the brain. But purposely opening it during cancer treatment could allow drugs to reach the tumors they're meant to attack.
"The non-invasive part is awesome, but the [drug-delivery component] is really unmatched anywhere," Price says.
Deepa Sharma, a research scientist at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre in Ontario, Canada, says those benefits don't stop at brain cancer. She has studied the combination of ultrasound and microbubbles across cancer types, finding that it can broadly improve drug delivery.
Sharma's research also suggests that ultrasound-enhanced microbubbles can boost the effects of radiation by damaging the vasculature of tumors, leading to greater cell death. Those findings suggest that doctors can use smaller amounts of toxic cancer treatments, like chemotherapy and radiation, if they're paired with ultrasound and microbubbles, she says.
"Radiation therapy does cure cancer, but it does also cause a lot of long-term side effects," Sharma says. If its effects can be enhanced thanks to ultrasound-stimulated microbubbles, she says, doctors could theoretically use lower doses to achieve the same treatment effects with fewer devastating side effects.
Ultrasound also seems to be a good match for immunotherapy, a treatment approach focused on spurring the immune system to fight off cancerous cells that may be dodging or hiding from the body's natural defenses.
As focused ultrasound heats and damages tumors, it seems to make these tissues more visible to the immune system – and thus more vulnerable to its defenses, says Price, whose research centre is focused on using ultrasound along with immunotherapy.
A direction for future research, Price says, is determining whether that pairing can work against advanced-stage cancer. Metastatic cancer is much harder to treat than localized disease – when cancer spreads throughout the body, it's no longer enough to remove a single tumor.
The holy grail would be that clinicians could someday use ultrasound to coax one tumor out of hiding by breaking it apart, allowing the immune system to pick up on its characteristics and launch a system-wide attack against cancerous cells elsewhere in the body, Price says. This remains to be tested in any kind of trials, but theoretically, doctors could "treat 10, 15, 20 tumors just by treating one tumor", Price says.
The histotripsy transducer head produces a tiny cloud of bubbles that can break apart tissue
That said, trials on ultrasound and immunotherapy are still in relatively early stages, Price cautions. That means far more research is required to know if, when or how this combined approach could change patient care.
But ultrasound approaches already in use are ushering in a new era in oncology – one that aims to replace, or at least improve, effective-yet-devastating therapies like surgery, chemotherapy and radiation. "Cancer is awful," Xu says. "What's making it even worse is cancer treatment.
"Ultrasound isn't a "magic cure" for cancer, Xu says. Like any medical treatment, it has downsides and shortcomings. But just as she was able to spare her lab mates from annoying noise decades ago, Xu hopes her discovery – and those of other scientists – will help patients avoid unnecessary suffering for years to come.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20251007-how-ultrasound-is-ushering-a-new-era-of-surgery-free-cancer-treatment
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A NATURAL SUGAR MAY HELP REVERSE BALDNESS
Researchers believe that sugar naturally occurring in the human body can help stimulate hair growth.
Hair regrowth came after the formation of new blood vessels, thanks to a boost in the blood supply to hair follicles.
Male pattern baldness impacts up to 50 percent of men worldwide with few FDA-licensed treatments.
We’ve all been told that a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down, but research shows that a it may also help regrow hair. It gets a bit more scientific than that, but a study shows there’s some promise in using a naturally occurring sugar found in the human body to stimulate blood flow to form new blood vessels and encourage hair regrowth.
Testing the method worked in mice, and we all know the best laid schemes of mice and men may coexist, especially in a world where up to 50 percent of all men encounter male pattern baldness.
In a 2024 study published in the journal Frontiers in Pharmacology, researchers at the University of Sheffield and COMSATS University Pakistan found that the natural sugar 2-deoxy-D-ribose (2dDR) can stimulate hair regrowth.
“Our research suggests that the answer to treating hair loss might be as simple as using a naturally occurring deoxy ribose sugar to boost the blood supply to the hair follicles to encourage hair growth,” Sheila MacNeil, emeritus professor of tissue engineering at the University of Sheffield, said in a statement. “The research we have done is very much early stage, but the results are promising and warrant further investigation.”
With only two drugs licensed by the FDA to treat male pattern baldness, a naturally occurring condition brought on by genetics, aging, stress, and hormones, MacNeil believes that the researchers are on track for something altogether new.
As researchers spent eight years studying how the sugar can help to heal wounds on mice by promoting the formation of new blood vessels, they saw that the hair around those healing wounds appeared to grow more quickly compared to those that hadn’t been treated.
In came more mice. To study the hair regrowth side of the blood vessel research, the scientists created a model of testosterone-driven hair loss in mice to mimic human-style male pattern baldness and found that applying a small dose of the naturally occurring sugar helped to form new blood vessels. New blood vessels directly led to hair regrowth within weeks.
The mice “demonstrated an increase in length, diameter, hair follicle density, anagen/telogen ratio, diameter of hair follicles, area of the hair bulb covered in melanin, and an increase in the number of blood vessels,” the authors wrote.
“This pro-angiogenic deoxy ribose sugar is naturally occurring, inexpensive, and stable, and we have shown it can be delivered from a variety of carrier gels or dressings,” Muhammed Yar, associate professor at COMSATS University Pakistan, said in a statement. “This makes it an attractive candidate to explore further for treatment of hair loss in men.”
Of the two drugs licensed to treat hair loss, minoxidil (brand name Rogaine) is topical and approved for men and women, and finasteride (brand name Propecia) is taken orally, has been linked to side effects, and is not considered suitable for women.
The study claims the deoxy-ribose sugar proved as successful as minoxidil at regrowing hair, with both between 80 and 90 percent effective. That’s a lot of new blood vessels, and a fair bit of new hair.
“This could offer another approach,” MacNeil said, “to treating this condition.
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KEY TO WEIGHT LOSS: ENJOY YOUR FOOD
It’s not just what you eat, but how you think about it that matters. The mind-body connection can shape our appetite because our expectation of what we've eaten influences the brain's perceptions of hunger and satiation.
If confronted with a delectable chocolate bar or a low-calorie, naturally sweetened alternative, which would you pick?
Most of us may rationally know we should pick the latter, but a tasty treat is incredibly hard to avoid, making it hard for individuals who are trying to lose weight to maintain a diet.
We're wired to crave energy dense, sweet treats, partly because our early ancestors once depended on it.
And to add to this challenge, our environment is filled with high-calorie, ultra-processed foods, which when we do eat them, can increase feelings of guilt around our eating habits.
"Ultra-processed products are essentially like being at a heavy metal concert. They're designed to drown everything else out. And it's really hard for folks to tune in to the subtle classical music of a fruit or a vegetable," says Ashley Gearhardt, a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan.
But research points to the idea that to maintain a healthier weight, we shouldn't only focus on what we eat – but our mindset around food. In fact, there are health benefits to finding pleasure in eating, precisely because the expectation of what we've eaten goes on to shape how hungry we are.
Unsatisfying 'healthy' milkshakes
In a now well-known experiment published 15 years ago, a group of scientists found that what we believe we are eating can affect how our body responds.
A team led by Alia Crum, a psychologist at Stanford University in the US, demonstrated that if participants believed they were eating a decadent high-calorie milkshake, their body's hormonal response differed depending on what they believed they were consuming – not how many calories they actually consumed.
Participants were given the exact same milkshake but were either told it was healthy and only 140 calories or that it was a 620-calorie "indulgent" shake. In reality, it was only 380 calories.
Our expectation of what we eat shapes the brain's perceptions of hunger
When participants believed they were drinking the "indulgent" shake, they experienced a significantly sharper drop in the hunger hormone ghrelin, which stimulates appetite and tends to rise when we are hungry and drop when we're full. But when they were told they were drinking a healthy shake, there was less of a drop in ghrelin.
This revealed that their mindset and expectations about the food altered how their body responded. "Believing you're eating enough makes your body respond as if it's had enough," says Crum.
This is important when it comes to maintaining a healthy weight, because ghrelin influences our metabolism. If we don't feel full and our metabolism slows down, we won't burn as much energy. A restraint mindset could therefore be counterproductive for maintaining a healthy weight. "If you're trying to lose weight and you reduce sugar and fat and caloric intake, but you're in a restraint mindset, that will keep you from losing as much weight."
Crum has found similar results when it comes to our own genetic predisposition to feeling full. Individuals who were told they had genes that made them fuller easier produced more of the weight-regulating hormone GLP-1, even if they didn't have those genes.
Why labeling matters
Labeling makes a difference too. In another study, participants were asked to eat a protein bar either labelled as "tasty" or "healthy", but both had the same nutritional contents. A third group of participants were only asked to rate the appearance of the bar.
After eating the "healthy bar" participants reported feeling less satisfied and more hungry, and went onto consume more food, even compared to those who didn't eat the bar. This shows that health labels can reduce the expectation of experiencing pleasure, meaning foods labelled as healthy could leave us feeling less satisfied.
Labeling healthy foods to emphasize taste and enjoyment rather than health or nutrition has also been found to increase the likelihood of people enjoying those foods. Similarly, individuals who feel guilty about eating something indulgent like chocolate cake, have been found to be less successful at losing weight.
Taken together, this research has important implications for those who are looking to lose weight. As my colleague David Robson has explored in depth in his book The Expectation Effect, denying yourself a treat doesn't automatically mean you will be eating fewer calories overall. In fact, restraint could lead to compensatory overeating later.
What we could instead focus on, says Crum, is trusting our bodies and avoiding food descriptors that suggest deprivation, such as "light", "low" or "reduced". A mindset of feeling like you're not getting enough, could actually be counteracting the work of dieting," she says.
Gearhardt agrees, and says it would benefit us to think of food as enjoyable rather than solely focusing on nutrients and calories.
"When we limit ourselves it can become a chore," she says.
Instead, we need to focus on unprocessed food including proteins and plenty of fruits and vegetables, Gearhardt says. "This is what the human body was designed to be nourished by and to find rewarding and appealing."
Reducing ultra-processed foods will also help with that as they do not provide the nutrients we need, and can leave us wanting more.
We can do this with a "mindset of indulgence" too, Crum argues. This means ensuring your body is getting exactly what it needs rather than focusing on restraint. "Trust yourself and your body to be hungry for the right things at the right time," Crum says.
Eating an occasional treat and enjoying it, alongside a balanced diet, can clearly play a role in maintaining a healthy weight.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20260424-diet-why-enjoying-your-food-is-key-to-weight-loss
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‘MAGIC MUSHROOMS’ MIGHT HELP PEOPLE QUIT SMOKING
Nicotine is highly addictive, but new research is showing that psychedelics can shift people's worldview in ways to help them give up cigarettes.
Tobacco is one of the toughest drugs to quit. The nicotine it contains is as addictive as cocaine and heroin – perhaps even more so. In surveys, around 70% of adult smokers say they want to quit. Yet of those who try, less than one in ten succeed in any given year.
Evidence is growing, however, that certain psychedelic drugs might offer some people an off-ramp from smoking. In a 2017 survey, for example, 781 people said that tripping on LSD, magic mushrooms or another psychedelic had either allowed them to reduce smoking or quit altogether.
Why? The solution seems to be of the philosophical kind. Nearly all of those who managed to kick their nicotine habit reported a common insight: they suddenly felt that their life priorities or values had changed – specifically, that smoking no longer served them.
"The magnitude of the experience kind of overshadowed this previously insurmountable psychological challenge of quitting smoking," says Matthew Johnson, lead author of the study and a professor of psychiatry and behavioral science at Johns Hopkins University, in the US.
And it is not just anecdotal. These findings have held up in a laboratory setting, too. In March 2026, Johnson and his colleagues published the most robust evidence to date showing that talk therapy combined with one dose of psilocybin, the primary psychoactive compound in magic mushrooms, is significantly more effective for helping people quit than therapy combined with nicotine patches.
Six months after undergoing treatment, the 42 people who had taken the dose of psilocybin had six times higher odds of having quit smoking than those in the nicotine patch group.
Psychedelic drugs remain illegal in most countries around the world and their use in research or clinical trials is tightly controlled. Yet there is growing evidence suggesting they could be used to help treat a range of mental health conditions and addictions.
"There hasn't been a new smoking cessation medication in the United States in 20 years, so the potential here is exciting," says Megan Piper, professor of clinical psychology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in the US, who was not involved in the research. Smoking is the leading preventable cause of death and disease worldwide, she adds, so "we need more tools to help people quit”.
But exactly why magic mushrooms help people stop smoking isn't clear, and scientists question whether these results are replicable in a larger, more diverse population and what psychological or physiological mechanisms are really at play.
"We won't know a lot about how this works, although you don't need to know how something works for it to be FDA approved," says Johnson.
Psychedelics to treat addiction
Psychedelic drugs have long been explored for their potential ability to alleviate various types of addiction. In the 1950s, researchers used LSD to treat alcoholism – sometimes successfully. MDMA (ecstasy) has helped clinical trial participants with alcohol use disorder to significantly reduce or quit drinking. Anecdotal evidence and pilot studies, meanwhile, suggest that ibogaine, a psychoactive alkaloid from the Central African iboga shrub, can reduce opioid withdrawal symptoms and allow some people to stop using those drugs entirely.
When it comes to reductions in preventable mortality, though, Johnson and his colleagues' work on psilocybin for smoking cessation "represents one of the most compelling and potentially impactful lines of inquiry in psychedelic science", says Lynn Marie Morski, the executive director of the Psychedelic Medicine Association, who was not involved in the research.
Johnson, the researcher leading the trial, became interested in smoking cessation in 2006. He often heard people describe psychedelics as one of the most meaningful experiences of their lives, but as a scientist, he wanted to precisely measure what that meant. "Words are words," he says. "I was ultimately most interested in behaviour change."
He chose smoking over other types of addiction in part for practical reasons: compared to other substances people use, the biological markers of cigarettes can be measured more reliably and cheaply by taking a simple breath and urine sample. He was also interested in testing psychedelics on a type of addiction that did not entail the emotional turmoil and trauma of hitting rock bottom, but instead involved an equally addictive habit that fits neatly into daily life (which, in some ways, makes it even more difficult to quit).
It took Johnson years to pull together an initial study on psilocybin for smoking cessation, in large part because of a lack of funding. That small study, published in 2014, involved only 15 participants who had been smokers for an average of 31 years and had tried to quit multiple times.
Following the treatment with psychedelics – with patients receiving psilocybin three times within a structured 15-week procedure that included cognitive behavioral therapy – one participant reported no withdrawal symptoms from tobacco whatsoever.
Another said "it was like she was reprogrammed such that touching a cigarette wasn't possible", Johnson says.
Six months after receiving two to three psilocybin-assisted therapy sessions, 80% of the participants were still abstaining from smoking. Other behavioural and pharmacological therapies for smoking cessation typically achieve a comparatively meager abstinence rate of around 35%.
The idea, it seemed, showed promise.
A potential way out
In the latest study, Johnson and his colleagues recruited 82 participants and randomly assigned them to receive either a high dose of psilocybin – a capsule with about 30mg of the drug according to body weight – or a nicotine patch to wear for several weeks. During the trip, some people reflected on their smoking habits, while others didn't. All of the participants also then received 10 sessions of cognitive behavioral therapy spread over 13 weeks, each about a week apart, in which they talked to a therapist about quitting smoking.
At the six-month mark, 52% of participants in the psilocybin group remained abstinent from cigarettes, compared with 25% in the nicotine patch group.
Piper agrees that the new study's findings are "impressive" and "promising".'
She adds, however, that they will need to be replicated with a larger, more diverse sample. "This was a small pilot trial with highly educated, mostly white participants with a history of psychedelic use," she says. "It is not clear if psilocybin would be as effective for all people who smoke."
As a small preliminary study, it is also still unclear whether the percentage of people who quit smoking after taking psilocybin will really kick the habit for good, whether such promising results can be replicated in larger studies, or whether there are risks and side effects that haven't yet emerged, Johnson says.
Johnson and his colleagues are currently conducting just such a follow-up study: a large double-blind, randomized trial in several different locations. That study was made possible by nearly $4 million (£2.9 million) in funding from the National Institutes of Health of the US – the first US government grant to be awarded in over 50 years to investigate the therapeutic effects of a psychedelic drug.
Participants in that study will receive two doses of psilocybin, which Johnson suspects will achieve better results for helping people to quit smoking than the single dose given in the most recent experiment.
Johnson and his colleagues are also analyzing brain imaging data from the participants to gain insight into patterns that can predict smoking cessation. He suspects, though, that behavioral plasticity is at the heart of the change. "If you've been stuck in a pattern for a long time, this can shake you up," Johnson says. "It's not guaranteed, but it's a potential way out of it.”
Researchers believe psilocybin is creating a window of opportunity for unlearning old smoking habits
Why tripping works
Gül Dölen, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Berkeley, US, says that the new findings are consistent with her and her colleagues' 2023 discovery that psychedelics can reopen "critical periods" in the brain – finite windows of heightened sensitivity and malleability that are usually restricted to childhood, when the individual is primed to learn new things.
In this case, psilocybin is creating "a window of opportunity for learning new habits around smoking, via cognitive behavioral therapy," Dölen says. Ultimately, the durability of the therapeutic response is likely the lasting consequence of reconfiguring old brain patterns.
Morisano similarly suggests that therapists working with patients with psilocybin could take even greater advantage of the drug's induced neuroplastic effects by introducing other coping mechanisms for smoking cessation can enhance and help to maintain the antidepressant benefits. Exercise and grounding practices such as mindfulness and meditation have been shown to help some people quit smoking. These could be integrated into psychotherapy before, during, and after a patient's psilocybin session, Morisano says.
"Addiction is a complicated outcome that is exacerbated by many factors, and any truly successful treatment will likely need to entail multiple factors as well," Morisano says. "In today's complicated world, we need to be increasingly creative regarding the interventions that we provide to individuals who are struggling."
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20260430-magic-mushrooms-could-help-people-quit-smoking
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HEALTH BENEFITS OF CREATINE
Creatine is a highly researched supplement that enhances athletic performance, increases muscle mass, and speeds up recovery by helping cells regenerate energy (ATP). It boosts strength, supports cognitive function under stress, and may help mitigate age-related muscle loss (sarcopenia). Generally safe, 3-5 grams daily is recommended.
Key Benefits of Creatine
Enhanced Exercise Performance: Increases maximal strength, power output, and sprint performance.
Increased Muscle Mass: Boosts muscle growth by enhancing cell hydration, increasing water content, and facilitating protein synthesis.
Brain Health & Cognition: Potential neuroprotective effects, including improved memory and concentration, especially during sleep deprivation or fatigue.
Faster Recovery: Reduces muscle damage and inflammation, allowing for faster recovery between high-intensity workouts.
Injury Prevention: May reduce the severity of muscle injuries and help athletes tolerate heavier training loads.
Reduced Sarcopenia: Helps fight age-related muscle loss and promotes bone density in older adults.
Important Considerations
Dosage: Typically 3-5 grams per day is recommended.
Safety: It is considered safe, though it may cause minor water retention, weight gain, or gastrointestinal discomfort.
Caution: People with pre-existing kidney conditions should consult a doctor first.
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COFFEE HELPS FIGHT AGING AND DISEASE
Does your morning coffee may make you feel invincible? There may be some truth to that, as new research explains how coffee helps protect against aging and chronic disease.
In the study, published in the journal Nutrients in March 2026, researchers at the Texas A&M College of Veterinary Medicine and Biomedical Sciences found coffee can activate NR4A1, a receptor in the body recognized for its role in aging, stress response and disease.
These findings offer a potential explanation for the drink's widespread health effects, which has previously been associated with reduced risk of cognitive decline and more
In the study, researchers looked at what compounds in the coffee influenced the receptor's activity. And caffeine wasn't the standout − instead, it was compounds like polyhydroxy and plant-based polyphenolic that were "much more active," explained study author and professor Dr. Stephen Safe in a news release.
"This may help explain why both regular and decaffeinated coffee have been associated with similar health benefits in large population studies," the news release added.While the study doesn't prove direct cause-and-effect in humans, it does shed light on how biological processes work.
So yes, the study is good news for coffee lovers, but there's "still a lot of work to be done" when it comes to future research, Safe said.“We’ve made the connection, but we need to better understand how important that connection is," he said.
Chlorogenic acid (CGA) is a potent antioxidant polyphenol found in high amounts in coffee and, to a lesser extent, in potatoes (especially the peel), offering benefits like reduced inflammation, improved glucose metabolism, and neuroprotection. Coffee is the primary dietary source, with green beans containing 5–12% CGA. (AI overview)
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ending on beauty:
[All night I hear the noise of water sobbing]
All night I hear the noise of water sobbing. All night I make night in me, I make the day that begins on my account, that sobs because day falls like water through night.
All night I hear the voice of someone seeking me out. All night you abandon me slowly like the water that sobs slowly falling. All night I write luminous messages, messages of rain, all night someone checks for me and I check for someone. The noise of steps in the circle near this choleric light birthed from my insomnia. Steps of someone who no longer writhes, who no longer writes. All night someone holds back, then crosses the circle of bitter light.
All night I drown in your eyes become my eyes. All night I prod myself on toward that squatter in the circle of my silence. All night I see something lurch toward my looking, something humid, contrived of silence launching the sound of someone sobbing.
Absence blows grayly and night goes dense. Night, the shade of the eyelids of the dead, viscous night, exhaling some black oil that blows me forward and prompts me to search out an empty space without warmth, without cold. All night I flee from someone. I lead the chase, I lead the fugue. I sing a song of mourning. Black birds over black shrouds. My brain cries. Demented wind. I leave the tense and strained hand, I don’t want to know anything but this perpetual wailing, this clatter in the night, this delay, this infamy, this pursuit, this inexistence.
All night I see that abandonment is me, that the sole sobbing voice is me. We can search with lanterns, cross the shadow’s lie. We can feel the heart thud in the thigh and water subside in the archaic site of the heart.
All night I ask you why. All night you tell me no.
~ Alejandra Pizarnik, tr. Patrizio Ferrari and Forrest Gander
