Fernando Botero: Dog Turning a Corner, 1980*
We will not drink from the same glass,
Neither water nor sweet wine.
We will not kiss in early morning, nor look out
From the same window at night.
I breathe by the moon, you breathe by the sun,
But the same love keeps us alive.
My tender, my true friend is always with me,
And your merry friend is always with you.
But I understand the fear in your gray eyes
And you are the cause of my pain.
We don’t make our short meetings more frequent.
Thus our fate looks after our peace of mind.
At least your voice sings in my verses,
And in your verses my breath beats.
Oh, there’s a fire beyond the reach
Of oblivion or fear . . .
If only you knew how dear to me now
Are your dry, rosy lips.
~ Anna Akhmatova, 1913
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PAUL AUSTER: THIS MIGHT BE THE LAST THING I EVER WRITE
~ Early in Paul Auster’s latest novel, Baumgartner, his eponymous lead character is speaking to a grief counselor in the immediate aftermath of losing his wife in a freakishly violent swimming accident. “Anything can happen to us at any moment,” he tells her. “You know that, I know that, everyone knows that – and if they don’t, well, they haven’t been paying attention.”
When we meet Sy Baumgartner, it is 10 years after Anna’s death. Now 70 and a retired Princeton philosophy professor, we find him enduring a darkly comedic and somewhat lower stakes set of unexpectedly escalating domestic vicissitudes. In rapid succession he is frustrated in the simple task of calling his sister, scalds himself on a hot pan and tumbles down the stairs during an unnecessary visit to his basement.
“I’d wanted to try my hand at a short story,” explains Auster, 76, speaking from his home in Brooklyn, New York. “Something I have done almost none of in my career. I’d always written modestly sized books and then with 4321 and Burning Boy” – his 2017 Booker-shortlisted novel of close to 1,000 pages and his 2021 800-page biography of Stephen Crane – “I’d written two door-stoppers. It really wasn’t intentional. If you dropped those books you could break both feet, so I wanted something shorter and this older man came to me, sitting in his house and looking out the window at robins pulling up worms. I wrote a story called Worms, but then didn’t want to drop him. There was more there and so I started up again, knowing that underneath this almost Buster Keaton opening was something darker lurking.”
The bleak humor, if not the slapstick, persists through the book as Auster explores the darker material of Baumgartner’s decade-long relationship with loss and grief. Sy has an ultimately ridiculous relationship, complete with awkwardly botched marriage proposal, with a woman he imagines might be a replacement for Anna; he delves into Anna’s journals; he publishes and promotes her previously unpublished poetry and recalls incidents from his own childhood, life and family history, which, in a very Auster-ish way, imperfectly coincide with incidents in Auster’s own childhood, life and family history. But mostly Sy returns to that day on Cape Cod when Anna “encountered the fierce monster wave that broke her back and killed her, and since that afternoon, since that afternoon – ”.
In the last two years, Auster has himself been subject to two traumatic events. Firstly, an appalling family tragedy, with widespread press coverage, saw the death of his baby granddaughter, while in the care of his son. His son, from his first marriage to the short story writer Lydia Davis, died subsequently from a drug overdose. Then in March this year Auster’s wife, the writer Siri Hustvedt, alerted the world on Instagram to the fact that Auster was being “bombed with chemotherapy and immunotherapy” and the couple were now living in what she dubbed “Cancerland”.
It was around the end of last year, when Auster was finishing Baumgartner, that he began to encounter “mysterious fevers which would hit me in the afternoon”. He was first diagnosed as having pneumonia before going down some “blind alleys’’ about long Covid and eventually receiving a cancer diagnosis. “And since then the treatment has been unrelenting and I really haven’t worked. I’ve been through the rigors that have produced miracles and also great difficulties.”
As for Cancerland, he says there are no maps and no idea if your passport is valid to exit.
“There is, however, a guide who gets in touch right at the beginning. He checks if he’s got the name right and then says, ‘I’m from the cancer police. You’ve got to follow me.’ So what do you do? You say, ‘All right.’ You have no real choice in the matter, as he says if you refuse to follow he’ll kill you. I said, ‘I prefer to live. Take me where you will.’ And I’ve been following that road ever since.”
Auster says his fascination with the notion of a life-changing moment came from a childhood incident that provided the starting point for 4321. At a summer camp, a boy standing next to him was killed by a lightning strike. “It was the seminal experience of my life. At 14 everything you go through is deep. You are a work-in-progress. But being right next to a boy who was essentially murdered by the gods changed my whole view of the world.
I had assumed that the little bourgeois comforts of my life in postwar suburban New Jersey had a kind of order. And then I realized that nothing had that sort of order. I’ve lived with that thought ever since. It’s chilling, but also liberating. It keeps you on your toes. And if you can learn that lesson then certain things in the world are more bearable than they would have been otherwise. I guess the impulse to write and tell stories is different for each writer. But I think this is the essence of what I’ve been up to all these many years.”
In a recent interview, Auster described the American obsession with “closure” as being “the stupidest idea I’ve ever heard of. When someone who is central to your life dies, a part of you dies as well. It’s not simple, you never get over it. You learn to live with it, I suppose. But something is ripped out of you and I wanted to explore all that.” In Baumgartner, Sy reflects for a long time on phantom limb syndrome, describing himself as “a human stump” and yet the “missing limbs are still there, and they still hurt, hurt so much that he sometimes feels his body is about to catch fire and consume him on the spot”.
“I nearly called the book Phantom Limb,” Auster says. “It’s such a powerful idea. That connection we have with other people and how vital they are to our lives. The importance of love. It can be hard for us to talk about it the way it deserves to be talked about. Long-term, ongoing, lifelong love and all the possible twists and turns it will take.” He believes “the brilliant Siri” puts it best when she says people make the mistake of using a machine model to think about love and attempting to maintain the machine in its original state.
“You have to think of love as a kind of tree or a plant,” Auster says. “And that parts are going to wither and you might have to cut off a branch to sustain the overall growth of the organism. If you get fixated on keeping it exactly as it was, one day it will die in front of your eyes. For a love to be sustained it has to be organic. You have to keep developing as it goes along so everything is all intertwined, even the sheer strangeness of it all.”
The fact is, he says, that we never really know our partners completely. “There are mysteries we will never be able to answer. But I think this applies also to ourselves. There are so many things about my own life that I don’t understand. My actions over the years. Why did I do that? Why that impulse? People spend years in analysis trying to figure out the answers. I’ve never done that so I’ve been more or less on my own, trying to figure things out, and I honestly have to report that I don’t think I’ve made a lot of progress.”
Baumgartner is Auster’s second book to be published this year. In January he tackled a national, as opposed to personal, trauma in the form of American gun control. Auster wrote the text for a photographic book by his son-in-law, Spencer Ostrander. Bloodbath Nation captures the locations of mass shootings in the US. “I took a year to write those 80 pages. I wanted to be as concise and precise as I could and for it to have the feel of an old-fashioned political pamphlet. No other so-called advanced country in the world is anywhere close to America in terms of numbers. But Americans, as time goes on, look less and less to countries abroad for inspiration about how to act. We are so smug. We have such feelings of superiority to the rest of the world. Even the stupidest things we do are considered good because they’re American, underlined six times.”
He says the book was well received but provoked little action. “Of course it’s depressing, as it’s one of the biggest failings in our culture and also one that is emblematic of the kinds of erroneous thinking that have been driving us in recent decades. But maybe people are just sick of the subject. The debate is just not happening. No one beyond a very few politicians dares to pick it up. And that will surely continue into an election year.”
Baumgartner is set between 2016 and 2018, and there is allusion to “the deranged Ubu in the White House”. “I didn’t want to wrestle with Trump directly but of course he was lurking in the background of American life, an everyday presence.” As for the next election, Auster says he understood many Democrats’ initial lack of enthusiasm for Joe Biden. “He was certainly not my first thought for 2020. But he has surprised me immensely. I think he’s been quite extraordinary. And maybe in these few years, he’s been one of the best presidents that I can remember in my lifetime. He understands that government has an important role to play in our mental, moral and economic health. That the programs he has proposed are an advance over what we’ve been getting from the last 40 or 50 years.”
While the right wing attempts to paint Biden as a “kind of doddering old, incompetent man, it’s far from the truth”, says Auster. “He is perfectly capable and knows more about government than just about anybody in Washington. He’s made his blunders, we all know that, but he’s not a bad choice at the moment and I can’t think of anyone better than him today. So I’m praying that he manages to squeak through next year because this is going to be a very, very close and incomprehensibly weird election. And we can’t even begin to predict how the other side is going to be if they don’t get the votes.”
As for himself, Auster is not looking much beyond his treatment and recovery, but he has been gratified by the initial responses to Baumgartner. “I do things in a very old-fashioned way,” he says. “I write my novels on a typewriter and my assistant then has to put it on a computer to send to the publisher. She’s been with me for a good 15 years and has rarely said much about the manuscripts beyond something bland like ‘good job’. But this time she told me to ‘march on’ as she couldn’t wait to read the next chapter. Siri, for over 40 years my first reader, also had no comments beyond ‘keep going’. Even my agent of 40 years, who again rarely comments, was so encouraging.”
Auster says he still can’t quite explain where this book came from. “There was just this guy growing inside me who became more comprehensible as the book advanced. So in the face of these responses, I simply smile and offer thanks. I feel that my health is precarious enough that this might be the last thing I ever write. And if this is the end, then going out with this kind of human kindness surrounding me as a writer in my intimate circles of friends, well, it’s worth it already.” ~
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/nov/18/paul-auster-on-cancer-connection-and-the-fallacy-of-closure?CMP=share_btn_fb
Oriana:
I’m not familiar with Paul Auster’s work, but reading about him I was struck by the title of one of his novels: The Music of Chance (1990). I’ve long pondering the influence of chance and circumstances on the course of our lives, and wondered about “free will.” The closer you look, the more you are likely to see the force of circumstances. For me that was very liberating, since from early on I was used to blaming myself for everything that went wrong, even the weather — of course it would rain on my parade.
And yes, my life experiences confirmed that “Anything can happen to us at any moment. You know that, I know that, everyone knows that.” Your life can change in a fraction of a second — and not because you haven’t been working hard enough, or been a sufficiently loving mother — but because a stranger runs a red light, say. A fraction of a second can change the rest of your life — like the fraction of a second when I slipped down a stairway and shattered my left knee.
But somehow we carry on, not because we are brave and virtuous, but because carrying on is actually the easiest, compared with other options. That’s not to say that heroism is always accidental — in fact it’s determined by both our genes and everything that has happened to us. But disasters can happen in such a random fashion that it’s very hard to hold on to the Jungian belief that “there are no accidents; everything happens for a reason.” I’d modify that to “everything happens for many reasons over which we have no control.” The more we accept it, the more we gain the resistance to blaming ourselves — or feeling unmerited pride in our achievements.
The Taoist attitude of “going with the flow” seems to be the best policy — in most cases. I loved learning about Taoism — for the first time, the whip of self-blame ceased its relentless blows.
Mary:
That kind of realization [that anything can happen] can feel like a tremendous blow... Nothing can be assumed even about the next hour, let alone the next month or year. Sudden death is the best teacher of this particularly hard lesson. It can happen just exactly like that, lightning — out of the blue. Yes, it keeps you on your toes!!
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“NOTHING WILL BE THE SAME AGAIN” — DIFFERENCES ON ISRAEL, GAZA CAN DESTROY FRIENDSHIPS AND FAMILY BONDS
Worried about My Daughter
I’m a Jew living in New York with a daughter at a liberal-arts college outside the city. She has a friend in school she’s known for three years. Before the conflict, he and I had a great relationship. He used to visit our home.
My daughter and I don’t think what the Netanyahu government is doing is okay, but after the October 7 attacks, I was shocked by what her friend was posting on social media, insinuating that what happened was Israeli propaganda. The general sentiment of it was Israel deserved it.
After seeing the posts, I called him. We had a conversation, during which he showed little compassion for the victims. He told me there were no babies beheaded; he’d seen a video of a Hamas attacker being interviewed and told me, “I see a brown person being interrogated and oppressed.” I explained to him there are brown Jews.
It’s hard when people find it impossible to even say, “It’s horrible what happened,” or they’re saying it didn’t happen. I brought up to him that Hamas had raped women. He said, “Maybe there was rape.” I was dumbfounded. These are liberal-arts students who are supposed to be supporting women’s rights and minority rights.
When I brought up my offense at what he said, he basically made me feel like an old lady who doesn’t know what the hell I’m talking about, that I don’t understand propaganda, that I don’t understand how I’m being brainwashed. We ended the phone call on a cordial note but had a last text exchange that was quite terse, where he again stated no babies were beheaded. Nothing will ever be the same again.
I’d reached out to him because I was scared for my daughter. These are kids she goes to school with. She tries to tell me everything’s fine, but she’s been coming home on the weekends. I don’t know how she found out about our phone call, but she was mortified when she did. She said I’d crossed a boundary and that I could not discuss this with her friend. I told her I was sorry.
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Armed With Hair Spray
I am a Palestinian with family in the West Bank. They’re scared. They don’t leave the house. I’ve lived in the U.S. for 37 years. I’m one of very few Palestinians and women who wear a hijab in my place of work. People whom I work with on a daily basis now barely look at me. It has felt like I cannot speak, and if I do, I have to be very careful what I say and whom I say it to. The leadership at my work has publicly villainized the protesters. They’ve said anyone who goes to a protest is celebrating the deaths of Israelis.
There are some colleagues whom I worry about if I have to go to a meeting or be on any calls with them and they try to corner me and say, “Hey, do you support what happened on October 7? Do you support Hamas?” I remember what it was like after 9/11, when I was constantly having to prove myself. I had to be more American than anyone else. Even something as simple as posting “Free Gaza” is seen as hate. You have to stand with Israel or you’re a terrorist.
Either we have to bite our tongues and not mourn the people who are dying in our families, or we have to criticize our own people for being killed in order for Americans and New Yorkers not to attack us. People are so scared to mourn. I will not put on headphones when I’m going home. I have to be super-vigilant. I started carrying a mini hair spray in my purse because pepper spray is illegal in New York. Hair spray allows us to get away from a situation that can potentially put us in danger.
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Abandoned by Colleagues
I’m Jewish and have worked with human-rights groups in different countries and lived in Hong Kong. I’m very involved in the pro-democracy movement there. The day after the October 7 massacre, before Israel had even done anything, one of my pro-democracy acquaintances posted about Palestinian freedom fighters. It got to a point where, after so many posts, I told him to fuck off.
I’m not one to quickly jump down the “Oh my God, that’s antisemitism” line, but some of the posts from people I’ve worked with have been pretty damn disgusting — that Israel planned and provoked the whole operation and set up a sacrificial group of its population. I’m horrified. I’ve stood by so many different people and their causes, and ever since this happened, people aren’t applying those same considerations to me. They don’t stand by me or understand if I say I feel vulnerable or existentially threatened.
I stood on the Palestinian side at the Israeli and Palestinian protest the Monday after the massacre. At the time, we thought my cousin was a hostage, but he was murdered at the music festival. I stood there and said, “My cousin’s name is Jake Marlowe, and he’s a hostage in Gaza. Please tell that to your friends.”
I was removed by the police twice and came back to the same spot because all these people had rushed into the demonstration, a lot of them with no skin in the game, for an opportunity to vent. People were telling me to fuck off. They were giving me the middle finger. The abuse I got for standing there was revolting. I said to my husband, “I feel so contaminated by the hatred around me.” I spent two days walking around feeling triggered, which is a word I hate, but now I know what it means. I’m not a Netanyahu flag-waving nationalist, but I don’t know if I believe in peace anymore. I don’t know what I believe.
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Lifelong Friends No Longer
I lost my very good friend of over 20 years over differences around the conflict. On October 7, I was so shocked by what I was seeing on TV, and because she’s my dearest friend, she’s the first person I reach out to when I’m upset. She had gone to Israel a few months prior, and I texted her and said, “See? This is why I didn’t want you to go.” I said, “They’re murdering children,” and she responded, “Bibi turned a blind eye to this.” She was worried about people she knew in the West Bank and talking about Israel building settlements there. I pressed her: “But they’re murdering children. Put aside your bias and just feel for these people.” She said children get murdered every day. She said, “I have empathy for everyone who’s a victim of violence.” I got angry with her. I believe in a two-state solution, but that was a slaughter. To gloss over it was too much for me.
For the first time in our friendship, we got nasty with each other. I sent her a photograph of a person in Times Square at the protest on October 9. They were flashing a swastika, and I said, “These are the people you agree with.” And she said, “Okay, I’m done. You called me a Nazi.” And I said, “Well, actually, I was done on Saturday when you showed no empathy toward children that were put in ovens.”
I haven’t spoken to her since. I’ve always known she was pro-Palestine. But I didn’t think my views were that different from hers. We have mutual friends, but they don’t know what happened between us. It would be strange if I wasn’t at Thanksgiving, but all she’d have to say is “Oh, she has other plans.”
My dad’s from Malawi, and my mom’s from Tanzania. We were the only Black family in town in the ’90s, and there was a lot of ostracism. Some of my first instances of community were being invited to bar and bat mitzvahs. I grew up going to summer camps at the Jewish Community Center and eventually became a camp counselor there. There was such a warmth around Judaism and the community, which I envied. Now, some of my lifelong friends whose mitzvahs I went to are the people I don’t see myself speaking to anymore, at least for the foreseeable future.
I spoke pretty sharply on October 7 on social media, where I said something along the lines of “Hamas wouldn’t exist if Israel gave Palestine the land it deserved,” which in retrospect was pretty harsh, considering Hamas massacred people at a music festival. But my heart was in the right place. I did a lot of protesting in New York around 2020, and one of the most lasting feelings was coming home from a long day of protesting and seeing Palestinians painting George Floyd murals on the barbed cement wall that Israel put up. For the first time, I was like, Wow, Palestine is fighting with us. Hell yeah. Ever since then, I’ve been studying more, learning more about the conflict, unlearning propaganda, and shaping my perspective as a Black man.
After my post, I got a few DMs from people I’ve known since elementary school, a few texts, some calls — “How could you say this? Hamas is a terrorist organization.” One of my oldest friends said, “I think you’re subconsciously antisemitic,” which hurt so much because I was like, “My friend, I was at your mitzvah. I’ve been to temple with you. I’ve been to JCC camp with you. Has there ever been any antisemitic bone in my body?”
There have been a lot of tough nights this past month. I’d go to sleep like, Wow, this situation is ruining lifelong friendships. My good friend recently got engaged. I used to play Super Smash Bros. in his basement. We hosted high-school parties together and saw each other through tough things in adulthood. When I had COVID, he drove over and put edibles and a doughnut on my doorstep. I was like, “Bro, I love you so much. Thank you.”
I’m not sure if I’m going to be invited to his wedding anymore. Conversations with him about this have been some of the toughest I’ve had to endure. But I’ve learned a lot from him. He told me, “First and foremost, look out for Jews. I know we’re disagreeing, but never succumb to antisemitism.” The last thing I texted him was a basketball video of Nikola Joki making an absurd play. He went, “That’s ridiculous.” And we haven’t talked since. And I’m like, Man, maybe this is all we’re going to talk about if we do talk going forward: just sports. I hate that this lifelong friendship has been diluted to an occasional sports video every month, if that.
Fact-checking Your Friends
Even before October 7, I knew I wasn’t aligned with my friends and family, who are mostly pro-Israel, but we didn’t talk about it. These past few weeks, there was pressure from Jewish friends and family to post and say something, so I did. I reposted from Jewish Voice for Peace, an organization I’ve followed for a long time that’s against the occupation in Gaza.
I immediately got substantial backlash from a lot of people in my network. I’ve had people in my life ask not to directly discuss the conflict because they know I have different views. My friends have posted explicitly calling people with my views antisemitic, which is incredibly hard to see as a Jew. My friend of 12 years — I was at her wedding — responded with a DM accusing me of endorsing another Kristallnacht or another Holocaust because I did not support Israel’s attack on Gaza.
She replied to my post asking, “What about the babies being murdered?” I told her I was saddened that she didn’t think I had empathy for the horrors happening, that I didn’t need to be convinced of the disregard for human life going on, but that I also held empathy for Palestinian babies; I don’t value the Jewish lives or the Palestinian lives more. We went back and forth for weeks. She and others send me endless videos of violence or news snippets, and I do the emotional and actual labor of actually fact-checking them. We have different understandings of what is going on because we do not agree on what is the source of a trustworthy fact: Do you trust what comes out of the Israeli government and the IDF? What is our definition of propaganda, and who is producing it?
She asked me if I knew the IDF warns civilians before bombing them or that Hamas uses civilians as shields; I said I was aware. To me, she was pivoting from one set of horrors to justify another. I kept telling her I understood where she was coming from, but at some point she was just sending me her random thoughts. I told her I didn’t know what to say anymore, and that’s where we left off the conversation. Recently she posted something saying, “Some things are worth losing friends for. Antisemitism is one of them.” It’s hard to not interpret posts like that as personal. We haven’t talked since.
Arguing in Posts
Over the past few weeks, my Palestinian friends and I have been keeping a careful distance. One told me she’s going to block me on social media for the time because it’s too painful. I have a lot of empathy about that; it’s a very trying time.
The people with whom I’m feeling a more complicated tension are actually Americans who aren’t closely connected to this conflict in any kind of way. I’m seeing people I consider colleagues posting things online that I find problematic at best. A friend made a post attributing the bombing of the hospital in Gaza to Israel even after the New York Times confirmed it was not their doing. Another friend approached me after I posted online trying to call people’s attention to some of the language they were using. I have no problem with anyone posting anything in support of Palestinian liberty. But I run into trouble when people post things about Israel in general, about its right to exist or lack thereof; when people post slogans such as “From the river to the sea” that imply that Jews in Israel need to be removed.
Yet another friend was alarmed by how upset and emotional I’ve been online. She told me, “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you in this much pain.” I told her I’ve never been in this much pain. That was the moment it hit home for her, how big this moment is for so many Israelis and Jews, both in terms of the tragedy that hit us and in the way that a big part of the world seemed to choose this moment, our moment of greatest weakness, to start feeling real comfortable with hating Jews, or at the very least with discounting Jewish life. The crazy thing is that I know that so many Palestinians are actually feeling the same way right now. And so a lot of times it sort of feels like this is a big conflict between those of us who are actually involved in this, who are feeling the pain, and a big audience of people who are kind of just cheering on, picking teams, and stirring shit up, basically.
I come from the literary world of writers, artists, and academics; it’s a left-wing, liberal, progressive circle in which I’ve always felt that I fit in well, but all these misunderstandings with friends make me question whether I fit in this liberal literary world. I’ve had the privilege of being a Jewish Israeli born in the ’80s to a world that I thought was not entirely post–antisemitic, but I definitely didn’t see it coming at me from people who claim to be humanists.
Questioning Who Is Really an Ally
I’ve been feeling a lot of whiplash, the initial real horror of October 7 and having to process that and feeling, Hi, here’s all of your epigenetic trauma, it’s back. You see this giant black hole opening up at your feet. Are my kids safe? Are we safe in our synagogue? I was very not okay, having a hard time sleeping, going into my kids’ room at night and praying over them and crying. Are we safe? And what about all the families that aren’t safe?
I work in the media industry. I’ve been working for ten years in this company for diversity, working with a lot of colleagues that I really like, who are primarily people of color. I’ve always considered myself an ally with them. And then I’m seeing these colleagues posting “FREE PALESTINE.” There’s a particular view by the far left and particularly among some people of color that Jews are the white violent institutional state. And they identify with Palestinians because they have been oppressed by the institutions in our own culture.
A good college friend of mine who’s Black comes from a Black Power, Black liberation background that has a lot of antisemitic elements. They perceive Palestinians as disenfranchised people of color — blah-blah-blah. I’ve been walking her through why Israelis are not these white colonists you’re comparing to the Boers in South Africa. I do feel like she’s engaging in good faith, and we’re able to give each other some grace.
What I take away from a lot of that is, yes, these Jews were killed, but … There’s a real aspect of “They had it coming.” I see all of these things that really, on the surface, sound like validations for what Hamas did and justifications. That tells me you don’t care if that happens to me. I’m sure if I did say it to their face, they would be taken aback: “Of course we don’t mean that your children deserve to die!” But that is kind of what it sounds like. One of my Jewish friends said, “You always wonder who’s going to hide you in the attic.” I realize not as many of my allies in those communities would hide me in the attic.
Ignored at Work
I was raised in Kentucky and converted to Judaism four years ago. I met my husband at a party. He was raised Hasidic but wasn’t a practicing Jew. I wanted to convert so our children would be considered Jewish. We became part of the Hasidic community here in Crown Heights. I’ve become very connected to the Jewish community, and then Israel, because if anything were to be really bad here, it’s the only place a Jew could safely go and be protected.
When I went back to work after October 7, I could barely hold myself together. I was crying and on my phone too much, seeing these horrific photos and videos. I don’t have close friendships at work, but a couple co-workers have met my daughter and some have always asked me for the inside scoop on Orthodox life. That day, a few of them were like, “Oh, my gosh, are you okay? What happened? And I said, “I’m very upset by what’s happening in Israel. People are being slaughtered.” Everyone’s just silent and doesn’t say anything. There’s never been any direct, “I’m sorry about what’s going on.”
Only two out of my seven closest girlfriends have said anything, but I know they see my Instagram Stories. It makes me question things. A parent at my daughter’s school came up to me recently and said they’ve been thinking about us and were really sorry, and it meant a lot. An acquaintance we just met seems more supportive than some of my closest friends. They’re friends I made when I first moved to the city. Now I have to reevaluate. I feel even more isolated knowing people can’t muster up a bit of sympathy. When someone’s dog died at work, there was a card written. It was a big to-do. Not to downplay that, but this is a war.
Shunned by Siblings
Since the attacks, my sister and I got into a big argument and my brother is actively not speaking to me. I was arrested at Grand Central in one of the cease-fire protests, and I texted both of them to let them know because I didn’t want them to learn about it on the news. My brother did not respond.
My sister and I get along very well. She’s eight years older. I‘ve always considered her to be a good role model for me. When I came out, she went to bat for me. Outside of this, I respect how she approaches conflict. She’s usually willing to have difficult conversations.
I was a little surprised at how passionately she felt. After the attacks, she was raising money for Israeli aid — IDF soldiers included in that. And I was going the total opposite way. I posted on Facebook — purposely, because it’s less of an echo chamber; it’s more people I grew up with — that I didn’t want this done in my name, that I grieved the people in Israel who had been killed, and I didn’t want that grief and that outrage to be fueling genocide. My sister told me her very strongly that I had broken her heart. She thinks even having this conversation about Palestinian rights means Hamas is winning because that’s what they want.
My mom just ignores whatever I say about it. My dad made a joke about the fact that I got arrested, something along the lines of, if I wasn’t in prison anymore, I was welcome to join them the next weekend. It’s a very Jewish thing to joke about this. ~
https://www.thecut.com/article/israel-palestine-gaza-war-hard-feelings-confessions.html?utm_source=pocket-newtab-en-us
Mary: THE INSISTENCE ON DENIAL
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SAVED BY MUD
The single major factor that prevented the capture of Moscow in October 1941 was the sudden disappearance of roads when rains started in early September. At the time, there were almost no roads with hard surfaces. Rain made them impassable for anything on wheels in a matter of a few days.
As a Soviet joke went, “our major line of defense is our roads.” ~ Dima Vorobiev, Quora
*
WHY WAS SOVIET PROPAGANDA SO UPBEAT?
~ Soviet propaganda was inspired by Marxist teachings.
Communism, as a progressivist ideology, is filled with bright, optimistic expectations of the future. For the Communists, history is an often arduous and winding yet unstoppable march from the dark past to the increasingly perfect future.
Somewhere down the road, people are going to learn to live in peace and harmony with each other, at long last. That’s what Karl Marx promised, like the rest of the great progressive prophets.
The Communist propaganda posited that, deep down inside, we’re all inherently good creatures. What held us back were many “deficiencies,” “imperfections,” and “setbacks” inflicted on us by our miserable pre-Soviet past. We also had to fight against the permanent mischief-making of the foreign Imperialists and their few but very wicked agents inside the USSR.
The Party had to get rid of all the parasites and vermin left to us by the past. Everyone was expected to help the Party. We were required to banish detrimental bourgeois influences from our minds. Once everyone achieved that, life in the USSR would radically and irreversibly improve.
*
Below, a Soviet poster from 1962, titled “We sing a song about the Motherland!” A boy with the red necktie of the “Young Pioneers” (the Communist organization for schoolchildren in their early teenage) teaches a group of Little Octobrists to sing.
Remarkably, the artist managed to smuggle under the upbeat Communist motif her dark, reactionary view on the nature of human interactions.
What we see is an alpha male bossing around two submissive boys. The conductor's baton is the visible attribute of his authority. Two girls assist him. One of them looks at his baton with fascination, while the other volunteers as a drill sergeant. One of the younger boys strives to oblige. The one to the right, with the small star of “little Octobrists” weirdly pinned to his shoulder, watches the top guy’s left hand with fear and doesn’t seem to enjoy the scene at all. ~ Dima Vorobiev, Quora
Oriana:
I immediately thought of Norman Rockwell. There is sometimes a stunning similarity between those Soviet posters and Rockwell's depictions of Middle America. "That's because both countries are populist," a friend once explained. While most of Europe started with the aristocratic ideal, both the Soviet Union and the US tried to elevate "the people."
"Who exactly are 'the people'?" I asked some of my UCLA classmates. They were confused at first. Then someone said with a shrug, "Well, you know, the people ... the oppressed." For the sake of polite friendliness, I dropped the subject.
Mary:
Neither Russia nor China was industrialized, had an industrial working class or a large middle class. Instead, there were serfs, or peasants. Not really the capitalist ground for Marx' revolutionary transformation...but both places where such societal change was attempted on a grand scale. Both undergoing terrible decimation and suffering in the process. Russia becoming a Mafia state, China evolving its own successful take on capitalism...neither truly what Marx envisioned, but the world, and history, are both much messier and unpredictable than theory.
Oriana: MARXISM JUST NOT VIABLE
What Marx envisioned had zero chance no matter where it would be tried. The only successful and lasting systems that might be called truly communist exist on a small scale in monastic communities. But even those communities are often subsidized by the church. Marxism just isn't viable.
*
NO OLD CASTLES IN RUSSIA
~
If you ever travel in Russia, there is one striking feature: there are
no castles. Europe is full of castles — they are means of area denial in
warfare and powerbases in the civilian life. There are none in Russia.
Russian mode of warfare has never based on forming a network of
powerbases and area denial, but on scorched earth
— burn everything
behind, retreat hundreds of kilometers, stretch the enemy supply lines
and then counterattack. This is the steppe mode of warfare.
Russians themselves assume their country is indefensible by its terrain (the lesson which Walther Model gave them on defensive warfare in the Rzhev Meat Grinder went unlearned) and they must always attack before they themselves are attacked. But prohibition of local lords building castles also served the Czar so that there could not rise a private power or rival to his power.
Russian state apparatus attained its form what it is today in the rule of Ivan IV the Terrible — he concentrated all the power to himself, slaughtered the old nobility, founded a standing army loyal only to himself and stated laws of serfdom, and founded the secret police and spy organization. The Russian state apparatus was perfected by Peter I the Great by making the Orthodox Church as one of the offices of the State — thus eliminating the last private force which could rival with his power.
There has never been Feudalism in Russia. There has never been Renaissance in Russia. There has never been Enlightment in Russia. The two forces competing in the Russian soul have been crass superstition and fatalism, and almost slavish dedication to Orthodox religion — which the Communists crushed.
Russian state apparatus and society is perfect as it is. It has attained its evolutionary climax. It will not evolve any further except in detail. And no force in the Universe can reform, renew or alter it — it is completely immune to any attempts to reform it. After any reforms, it will inevitably return into what it was before.
Slavery
was abolished in Russia during the rule of Peter the Great — almost
1000 years after what it was elsewhere in the Christian world
— and
serfdom only in 1863, after the disaster of the Crimean war. But
remember when I said the nobles were not feudal lords but ruler’s
stooges and dependent on his mercy and whim? The only really free person
in Russia has always been the Czar (Premier, President) and everyone
else was his chew toy.
Such society can never evolve the rule of
law. Such society can never produce justice state, civil rights,
judicial safety, safety of ownership, untouchability
— nothing. There
has never been true Capitalism in Russia, but only crony capitalism.
There never will be true Capitalism in Russia, because any assets and
property can be seized by the ruler, by the ruler’s stooges, or by the
Mafia at any moment.
Russia is a low trust society, since the Czars and the Communists simply did everything to sow distrust, suspicion and corruption within the populace to prevent any mutinies. Russians do not trust their government, their rulers, their family members — nobody. This effectively prevents any rise of a strong and independent middle class, the mainstay of the Western society.
The only organized thing in Russia is the government — and the crime. Russia simply cannot get along without state terror and coercive regime. Each time a regime collapses, Russia itself collapses into svoboda (freedom), then into bespredel (anarchy) and then into smuta (trouble). Sooner or later, a new strongman emerges, and the cycle starts anew.
Belgium survived three years without a government — its organizations and civil servants took care of everything. Russia will not survive three weeks without a strongman rule.
*
The
consequence is that Russians live in this moment, here and now;
they do not plan for their future. If they ever amass money or wealth,
they squander it immediately on conspicuous consumption. It is the
wisest thing to do — remember that ownership has no protection. Poor
yesterday, rich today, poor tomorrow — a vot. [so what] There is no
private entrepreneurship, no private industry, no private financing, no
private media. All industries in Russia are controlled by the state or
the ruler’s stooges. This is known as the vertical of power.
But since this kind of system is horribly inefficient, horribly top-heavy and horribly unreliable, the Russians have long since found a lubricant — corruption. Russia is thoroughly corrupt. Since Russia is a low-trust society, and Communism managed to crush the little of human decency and honesty there were after the Orthodox church, the only way to run the system smoothly are private “special gifts”, “protektsiya”, “na chayu” [“for tea”] and bribes.
This explains why Russia is and has always been so poor, despite having the biggest amounts of natural resources in the world and capable population. It is the system they have — and they like it that way. Russian society has always been technologically backwards and lousy by its infrastructure, and the ordinary Russian has always been poor as a church mouse. But the State has always been rich, the ruler has always been rich and the ruler’s stooges have always been rich.
Just like the Americans, who never admit there is anything wrong in their society and hope they too will one day be millionaires, the Russians like their society just as it is; they identify not as individuals but as the State — and they too hope they can one day be the stooges of the ruler and tap the wealth. To be at the receiving end of the corruption cash flow.
Cultural evolution is the great enabler. The Western cultural sphere is so wealthy and so neat because it managed somehow to discover and assemble the right memes and memeplexes and evolve into what it is today. Likewise, the Eastern cultural sphere has managed to evolve in its own direction.
There is no coming back into what was before 1237. Belarus and Ukraine have irreversibly slid off the Greater Rus, and into the Western cultural sphere. The border opens as a rift, and the border of the cultural spheres go along with it. Let the Russians enjoy their society as it is — it is the way they want to be. Likewise, let us Westerners enjoy our societies as they are, and not live up false hopes that Russia will one day be like us. It won’t — neither will be China, North Korea, Iran or Saudi-Arabia.
~ Susanna Viljanen, Quora
Mary:
Neither
Russia nor China was industrialized, had an industrial working class or
a large middle class. Instead, there were serfs, or peasants. Not
really the capitalist ground for Marx' revolutionary
transformation...but both places where such societal change was
attempted on a grand scale. Both undergoing terrible decimation and
suffering in the process. Russia becoming a Mafia state, China evolving
its own successful take on capitalism...neither truly what Marx
envisioned, but the world, and history, are both much messier and
unpredictable than theory.
Oriana: MARXISM SIMPLY NOT VIABLE
It’s
dangerous to generalize, but there seems to be a kernel of truth in
Susanna’s emphasis on the disaster of the Mongol conquest and the long
Mongol rule on Russia’s history and national character (if such a thing
indeed exists as more than just a stereotype). I was stunned by the wide
range of cultural changes that happened in Poland after the fall of
Communism. Besides, the Polish form of "communism" wasn’t anywhere as vile as the
Russian kind, especially after the death of Stalin. For instance, in Poland agriculture was in private hands, so at least we didn't go hungry. (And the food was organic! Not that the concept existed back then.)
Still, blatant corruption and the illegitimacy of an imposed
government do have a demoralizing effect that interferes with the work ethic and even with respectful, polite everyday manners. In Poland, I was astonished to see how much ordinary social manners improved after the fall of communism — along with the standard of living, of course. But let me emphasize one thing: even when the standard of living was low, in the first post-communist years, just the absence of the daily effluvium of propaganda, i.e. lies, seemed to have had that interesting side effect of greatly improved social discourse.
*
RUSSIA LOOTING UKRAINIAN GRAIN
~ It’s no secret that Russian troops have looted homes, businesses and museums, taking truckloads of treasures from Ukraine since Vladimir Putin’s invasion began almost two years ago.
But a more insidious war-time theft has been kept under wraps, until now.
Farmers in occupied Zaporizhzhia reported Russian military confiscating their crops just five days after the invasion on February 24, 2022.
Evidence unveiled today shows that since then the Kremlin has pillaged more than £1 billion worth of grain to fund the occupation – and fuel global food insecurity.
A new report by Global Rights Compliance focuses on the occupied Luhansk and Zaporizhzhia regions, where the first mass extraction of grain was documented in mid-March last year.
Maps and locations exclusively shared with Metro.co.uk point to how disused railways in the two regions were refurbished to transport the stolen goods.
Russian agricultural companies like Kalmichanka, which carried out works on the old infrastructure, have been named in the ‘Agriculture Weaponized’ report.
Images shared on Telegram and verified by investigators show officials from the Russia-aligned Luhansk People’s Republic boasting about the thousands of tons that would be loaded onto wagons at the seized Starobilsky facility.
They would then be transported via the refurbished Luhansk Railway to export ports controlled by Russia.
These include locations in Berdiansk (Ukraine), Sevastopol and Kerch (Crimea), and Rostov-on-Don (Russia).
Analysis based on satellite images show that two companies in Russian-controlled areas, Starobilsky Elevator and State Grain Operator, extracted Ukrainian grain for international export.
The speed at which Russia targeted and took over Ukraine’s grain infrastructure in these regions speaks to a highly coordinated level of pre-planning, investigators warned.
Russia’s withdrawal from the Black Sea Grain Initiative in July 2023 means that vital grain exports from Ukraine – often hailed as ‘the breadbasket of the world’ – are now blocked to some of the most food insecure nations.
The deal was negotiated in July 2022 between Turkey, the United Nations and Russia, but not renewed this year.
Since then, Russia has been carrying out targeted attacks against Black Sea port infrastructure, destroying some 60,000 tons of grain.
The report highlights multiple convoys of vehicles seen carrying grain towards the Crimean Peninsula in the weeks following the invasion.
GPS trackers on farmers’ stolen trucks show them driving through Crimea and into Russia.
Trains carrying grain along the railways from June 2022 were decorated in the liveries and the logo of state-owned freight service provider, Russian Railway.
Job adverts posted on Telegram by Russian logistics companies, and analyzed by investigators, also show they could not hire enough drivers in time to transport the vast quantities of stolen Ukrainian grain.
Russia’s State Grain Operator, under which multiple private Ukrainian companies were forcibly incorporated after the invasion, claims to have the capacity to export 12,000 tons of grain per day, equivalent to four million tons a year.
Partner at Global Rights Compliance, Catriona Murdoch, stressed that the report reveals ‘an insidious backdrop’ through which Russia has sought to dismantle Ukraine’s agricultural outputs, ruin livelihoods, and create a global food crisis.
She said: ‘Russia does this through systematic extraction of grain; transporting it to occupied areas inside Ukraine or cross-border into Russia; and then relentlessly attacking and destroying grain infrastructure and Ukrainian ports.’
In addition to looting grain and transporting it by land, extractions via the Black Sea were also identified.
In December 2021 and February 2022, three 170-meter grain carrier ships were purchased by Crane Marine Contractors, a subsidiary of a Russian state-owned defense contractor, the report said.
Russia’s crimes have restricted supply to multiple food insecure regions like Horn of Africa, the Sahel, Yemen, and Afghanistan.
In the UK, this has resulted in rising prices across supermarkets, felt by millions in the last year and a half.
Naomi Prodeau, one of the authors of the report, told Metro.co.uk: ‘The facts speak for themselves – as they progressed in their invasion of Ukrainian territory, Russian and affiliated forces systematically seized grain elevators, equipment, and transportation infrastructure on road, rail, and sea.
‘This logistical takeover was strategic and is thieving thousands of tons of Ukrainian grain each day, the yearly loss reaching one billion dollars.
‘Such direct targeting of the most essential necessity holds hostage to Russian volition not only Ukrainian civilians, but people around the world who rely on this grain for tomorrow’s meal.
‘This cannot escape the attention of the UK’s Summit on Global Food Security.’
Ukrainian grain and anti-tank "hedgehogs"
https://metro.co.uk/2023/11/16/vladimir-putin-funding-russias-war-ukraine-finally-revealed-19827646/?ico=trending-module_category_news_item-0
*
UKRAINIAN MECHANICS RESURRECT TOTALED TESLAS
~ This summer, a Vancouver car mechanic named Max got a perplexing ping on his phone: Betty White was in Ukraine and needed his help. This was surprising because she had died on a Canadian highway back in January.
When Max last saw Betty White, his nickname for his Tesla Model Y Performance, they were both in rough shape after getting sideswiped on the highway. Max’s rotator cuff was torn in several places. The small SUV had bounced off multiple concrete barriers at high speed and was bashed in on all four corners, its wheels ripped to pieces. Coolant appeared to be leaking into the battery chamber. From his own work on EVs in the garage, Max knew that Betty was done for.
“No auto shop would put a repair person at risk with that kind of damage,” says Max, whose last name isn’t being used out of doxing concerns. A damaged EV battery can become dangerous due to the risk of shocks, fire, and toxic fumes. His insurer agreed, and Betty was written off and sent to a salvage yard.
Months after he had last seen the car, Max’s Tesla app was now telling him that Betty needed a software update. It showed the car with an extra 200 kilometers on the odometer, fully charged, and parked in Uman, a town in Ukraine’s Cherkasy Oblast, midway between Kyiv and the front line with Russia’s invasion force. Minutes after that first ping, the app showed the car in service mode, suggesting Betty was undergoing repairs. “I thought it must be a mistake,” Max says.
There was no mistake. WIRED tracked Betty down to a Ukrainian auto auction website, looking good as new, maybe even better, with newly tinted windows and rearview mirrors wrapped in black. Betty 2.0 was being sold by “Mikhailo,” who wrote that the car had suffered “a small blow” in Canada and been repaired with original Tesla parts. The price, $55,000, was roughly the same as a new Model Y Performance costs in the US.
Betty White’s intercontinental resurrection was impressive but not unusual. For a long time, cars written off in North America have found their way to Eastern European repair shops willing to take on damage that US and Canadian mechanics won’t touch. In 2021, the most recent data available, Ukraine was a top-three destination for used US passenger vehicles sent overseas, close behind Nigeria and the United Arab Emirates. And Ukraine’s wreck importers and repairers are particularly known for their ingenuity. Some have made fixing EVs written off across the Atlantic into a specialty, helping to drive a surge in the number of electric vehicles on the country’s roads, even as the war with Russia rages.
Though few automakers sell new EVs in Ukraine, the share of newly registered vehicles that are fully electric, 9 percent, is about the same as in the US and nearly double that of neighboring Poland and the Czech Republic. Most of Ukraine’s refurbished EVs come from North America, and many arrive with major damage.
There’s a ready supply of crashed North American EVs in part because electrics are becoming more common, and also because in recent years, relatively new EVs with low mileage have been written off at a higher rate than their gas-powered equivalents, according to data from insurers. US and Canadian repair shops and insurers see them as more dangerous and difficult to fix. Scrapyards find it hard to make money from their parts and instead ship them abroad.
Ivan Malakhovsky is not afraid to work on cases like Betty White. His five-year-old repair business in Dnipro, in eastern Ukraine, fixes about 100 Teslas a month, roughly a fifth of them from overseas, and employs a staff that varies between six to 10 people. He’s currently away from home, serving with the Armed Forces of Ukraine, but he manages his workers, and sometimes makes software-mediated repairs, remotely. “We have problems in our lives and can fix them, whether a battery or a full-scale invasion,” says Malakhovsky. “Electric cars, electric car batteries—it’s no problem.”
An electric vehicle battery is made up of thousands of individual cells, which store and release energy. Sometimes, Malakhovsky says, he and his coworkers will break up large EV batteries damaged beyond repair and repurpose the cells to power electric scooters or even drones for the war effort. He says the vast majority of Teslas on Ukrainian roads were once involved in wrecks in North America.
The war has even boosted Ukraine’s EV resurrection business at times, by driving up gas prices and making electrics more attractive to drivers. Ukraine has a public charging network of some 11,000 chargers, according to Volodymyr Ivanov, the head of communications at Nissan Motor Ukraine—that’s more than the state of New York, and double the number in neighboring Poland.
Since 2018, Ukraine’s government has removed most taxes and customs duties on used EV imports. In the US, electric vehicles tend to be expensive, and the average EV driver is still a high-income male homeowner. North American wrecks, Ukraine’s EV incentives, and its relatively low electricity prices have created a different picture.
“There is a joke here that all poor people are driving electric cars, and all the rich people are driving petrol cars,” says Malakhovsky. “Tesla is a common-people, popular car because it’s very cheap in maintenance.”
That’s a relatively recent development, says Hans Eric Melin, head of Circular Energy Storage, a UK-based consultancy that tracks the international flows of used EVs and batteries. He began watching the Ukraine market in particular a few years ago, after he noticed more ads for Nissan Leafs on auction sites listed in Ukrainian than in English. At the time, the Leaf, a pioneer among EVs, was essentially the only one that had been around long enough to develop a healthy used market. Over time, Ukraine’s electric fleet grew to encompass the full range of EVs sold around the world, including Teslas, as more cars hit the roads and aged or got into crashes.
Melin had suspected Ukraine’s EV boom would end with the war. “I was completely wrong,” he says. By this summer, Ukraine’s EV fleet had doubled since July 2021, to 64,312, according to data compiled by the Automotive Market Research Institute, a Ukrainian research and advocacy group.
*
Roman Tyschenko, a 25-year-old IT worker who lives in Kyiv, decided last September that he was sick of his Jeep’s $400-a-month gas bill. Friends had purchased used, damaged electric cars on an online auction website called Copart, a US-based public auto reseller with 200 locations around the world. He logged on and spent $24,000 on a gray 2021 Tesla Model Y that had taken a solid blow to its passenger side in Dallas, Texas. Its bumper was almost fully detached; its hood was tented; some of its airbags had deployed.
That Texan Model Y was likely declared totaled by an insurer. From there, it probably moved to a salvage auction in the US, where licensed exporters, salvage shops, and repairers tried to figure out how much value they could squeeze out of the wreck. The winner, or perhaps the insurer itself, listed the car on Copart, which made it available to anyone around the world who wanted a smashed-up Tesla and was willing to pay for shipping.
If Tyschenko hadn’t brought the Texan Tesla to Ukraine himself, it had a good chance of being shipped there anyway by someone who professionally flips cars to countries like Ukraine. These exporters look for wrecks potentially worth more than their scrap value, but little enough that an expensive US repair and resale wouldn’t make sense. Some ship vehicles directly to Ukrainian repairers and pay for the fix, while others import damaged cars and relist them for sale to Ukrainian buyers who can figure it out for themselves.
It takes a damaged North American car between one and five months to reach a nearby port. Before the war, wrecked cars headed to Ukraine’s Port of Odessa on the Black Sea. Since Russia invaded in 2022, they come through Klaipėda in Lithuania on the Baltic Sea, or Koper in Slovenia on the Adriatic, and are brought to Ukraine by truck. A shop like Malakhovsky’s can fix a Tesla in somewhere between one week and one year, depending on the damage.
Tyschenko arranged for his Model Y to be shipped to a local repair shop in Kyiv, where it arrived in February 2023, five months after he hit the Buy button online. The technician sent him videos of the EV’s ongoing revamp every few weeks, and Tyschenko stopped by to visit a handful of times. By May, he had paid the technician some $25,000 for his work and was driving the Model Y around Kyiv.
Two months later, the battery died and Tyschenko spent another $4,000 to replace it—a demonstration of the risks of electric vehicle rescues. Still, he’s happy with how things worked out, and now pays just $10 to $100 a month to refuel his car, depending on whether he charges at home or at public stations.
Finding parts to repair Teslas and other EVs can be a challenge. On Facebook and Telegram, groups like “Renault Zoe Club Ukraine” host thousands of EV owners who barter with each other for spare parts. Oleksandr Perepelitsa, a 25-year-old electric vehicle repairer in Kyiv, says that when he first began his work three years ago, he and his business partners would buy two wrecked Teslas from overseas to create a single working vehicle to sell to local Ukranians. “Even that was profitable for us,” he says. Now, business connections can send Tesla parts from the US or Europe, or repairers buy cheaper Chinese reproductions.
*
The success of Ukraine’s EV resurrection industry is the flip side of the failure of insurers and manufacturers in North America to figure out what to do when a shiny new EV becomes roadkill.
Industry-wide data is hard to come by, but numerous sources suggest that EVs are more likely to be written off than gas-powered cars, and can be declared unfixable after even minor crashes. A Reuters analysis this year found that a “large portion” of damaged EVs sold for scrap were low-mileage, nearly-new vehicles. While one in 10 new cars sold in the US and Canada this year are forecasted to be electric, the infrastructure and expertise needed to assess and fix damaged EVs can be patchy.
The North American scrap industry is also somewhat leery of EVs, says Megan Slattery, a researcher at UC Davis who studies what happens to damaged EV batteries. Scrap businesses generally make money by taking cars apart to extract the most valuable widgets to resell. But dismantling a battery takes dedicated workers, equipment, and—most important of all—space, due to the fire risks of storing lithium-ion cells. Many mom-and-pop dismantlers don’t have any of that.
Plus, EVs tend to have simpler drivetrains, with more plastic and large, prefabricated body components that can’t be easily pulled apart. In some electric vehicles, the battery is built directly into the car’s structure, making it especially difficult to dismantle or repair. All of that means that exporters looking to sell to eager buyers abroad have less competition when bidding on totaled cars.
In the US, there’s increasing pressure to keep broken EVs from heading overseas. Regulators are concerned about safety, hoping to better track broken batteries through shipping channels as fears rise of fires sparked by used EVs, including on cargo ships. Another is to avoid dumping e-waste on countries without the means to recycle or repurpose, and instead keep the valuable minerals inside batteries local. Battery recycling startups have received vast amounts of private and public investment—both in Western Europe and the US, with funds from the Inflation Reduction Act—with a promise to help shore up raw material supply chains. But so far, they have received only a trickle of used batteries.
Policies that wind up choking off the export of EV wrecks would in some ways be a shame, Slattery says. More stringent European Union export rules for used cars and EV batteries in particular are one reason why the supply of Teslas to Eastern Europe is so dependent on North American wrecks. Without them, the electric revolution would be much less advanced in places like Ukraine, where US and Canadian write-offs have helped support the emergence of charger networks, trained repair specialists, and a wide familiarity and acceptance that electric propulsion is not just green but also practical.
For Max in Vancouver, Betty White’s reappearance overseas did cause some headaches. The car was still logged into his Google, Netflix, and Spotify accounts, potentially allowing the new owners to access his personal data. When he asked Tesla support, he was advised to change his passwords, Max says. (Tesla did not respond to WIRED’s questions.)
But looking back on the crash, and now driving a new Model Y—named Black Betty—Max says his old car’s resurrection is the best possible outcome. “I’m happy to see that Betty White has lived to see another day,” he says. ~ 
https://www.wired.com/story/why-teslas-totaled-in-the-us-are-mysteriously-reincarnated-in-ukraine/
*
JEWS AND ARABS NOT AS CLOSE GENETICALLY AS PREVIOUSLY THOUGHT
~ The Arabians have deeper roots in Africa, while the Levantines’ roots lie in Europe and Anatolia in today’s Turkey. They differ in their amount of Neanderthal DNA as well.
Anatomically modern humans have been leaving Africa for almost a quarter million years, but they all went extinct until an exit around 50,000 to 60,000 years ago. A new study of genomes in the Middle East shores up this hypothesis, finding no trace of the early humans in any of the genomes tested.
One of the routes out of Africa for hominins going back 2 million years, and later, for humans too, was the Levant, Iraq and Arabia. Indeed, researchers have found evidence of human and hominin exits in various places, including Israel and Saudi Arabia: stuff like the odd bone or a batch of stone tools.
The prevailing belief is that the groups taking part in the earliest migrations went extinct (though not before encountering other hominins in Eurasia). Then about 50,000 to 60,000 years ago, anatomical humans left Africa – and survived. They met and mixed with Neanderthals and heavens knows who else, and begat modern humanity.
The belief that the early exiters did not survive is now bolstered by an international team led by Mohamed Almarri of the Wellcome Genome Campus in Britain. In their study, published in Cell, they looked at the genomic history of the Middle East and concluded that present-day populations in Arabia, the Levant including Israel, and Iraq have no signals from those early modern humans.
“We used a new whole genome sequencing technology to study human populations from the Levant [Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Israel and the West Bank], Iraq and Arabia, and we reconstruct the population history of the region from over 125,000 years ago up to the last millennium,” Almarri says. “We show how changes in lifestyle and climate have affected the demography of human populations in the region.”
How does one test latter-day DNA for signals older than 60,000 years? By the density of mutations, he explains: “The more mutations there are, the older the segments will be.”
That’s a generalization; some genetic sequences are more evolutionarily conserved than others. If you check the sequence for the protein ubiquitin, it will be the same from a human to a tree frog and obviously, for earlier humans. But if a given segment has a ton of mutations (that didn’t kill the bearer), we may assume it’s old.
Also, obviously modern humans didn’t descend from newly-created beings who sprang up some 60,000 years ago; we will have some very, very ancient DNA. But, Almarri explains, when a population expands, the migrants are a tiny percent of the original population. The same would have applied to the African exit.
And indeed, genomic studies of today’s non-African populations show a genetic bottleneck around that time, Almarri says. Non-Africans all descend from exiters around 50,000 to 60,000 years ago and are much less genetically diverse than sub-Saharan Africans, who suffered no bottleneck.
The Neanderthals and the Levantines
Moving on, Levantines and Iraqis share the same Neanderthal signals as Eurasians, the team found. Arabians on the other hand have less Neanderthal DNA.
The reason apparently lies in origins. Levantines have more ancestry (than Arabians) from Europe and Anatolia. The Arabians have more ancestry (than Levantines) from Africans, who didn’t mix with Neanderthals, and from Natufians, who were the prehistoric inhabitants of the Levant, including Israel.
The Natufians were prehistoric peoples living about 11,000 to 16,000 years ago in what is today Israel, Jordan and Lebanon. It’s possible that they also reached Arabia, but their remains haven’t been found.
Also, present-day Africans are believed to have a contribution from Neanderthals after all, a very small one, conferred by early humans who trekked in reverse – from Europe back to Africa – after mixing with Neanderthals.
Anyway, the Arabians of today apparently didn’t arise from early Levantine farmers but from Natufian hunter-gatherers who preceded these farmers and Africans, the study shows. Nor do the findings support the theory that Levantine farmers later replaced the indigenous Arabian population.
A Natufian burial, Rakefet Cave, Israel.
It bears stressing that human fossil remains are incredibly rare; from the deep prehistoric past Saudi Arabia has so far produced one finger bone from 85,000 years ago, but it has also produced tools that may have been special to humans (as opposed to other hominins) from 125,000 years ago. In Israel there are a lot more very ancient human remains, starting with the 200,000-year-old jawbone found in Misliya, and there are more when you get to the Natufian period but they’re still very rare.
Desertification and population collapse
Another difference the genomic analysis indicated relates to the Neolithic Revolution – the “invention” of agriculture.
But here it bears stressing that the Middle East, Arabia and North Africa weren’t always baking-hot deserts. Sometimes, depending on planetary orbital cycles, they “greened.” Hippos and crocodiles cavorted in lakes and rivers, and hominins – and later, modern humans – could comfortably roam.
When the Neolithic Revolution – the gradual transition from a life of hunting and gathering to agriculture and animal husbandry – began over 10,000 years ago, Arabia and the Sahara were in such a lush period. The Arabian Desert as we know it today, the biggest sand desert in the world, didn’t exist. It began to form sometime between 6,000 to 8,000 years ago. (That might help explain the paucity of prehistoric human remains.)
The Neolithic Revolution drove a massive population increase in the Levant and Iraq, but not in Arabia. The team even postulates that the small population groups of ancient Arabians may have perpetuated or descended from the local epipaleolithic hunting-gathering groups.
But as the Arabian Desert was forming, about 6,000 years ago its population imploded. The same would happen in the Levant about 4,200 years ago, commensurate with an intense aridification event.
“We find that prehistorical aridification and desertification events have resulted in population crashes a few thousands of years ago,” the team says – a warning for today, with all due respect to desalination technology.
Say it in Semitic
Current-day peoples the team studied in the Levant, Arabia and Iraq turned out to form distinct core clusters: Populations from the Levant and Iraq (Lebanese, Syrians, Jordanians, Israeli Druze, and Iraqi Arabs) clustered together. The Iraqi Kurds clustered with central Iranians.
The Arabians (Emiratis, Saudis, Yemenis and Omanis) clustered with Bedouin – who are from Israel, too. “These samples were collected by the Human Genome Diversity Project and were sequenced by us,” Almarri notes.
Fascinatingly, both the Iraqi Kurds and Iranians, who clustered together, speak Indo-Iranian languages – Kurdish isn’t Arabic or Semitic, it’s Indo-Iranian. All the other people sampled in the study speak Arabic, a Semitic language.
“The clustering patterns we find reflect the historical ancestries present in modern-day populations. In the Levant [and Iraqi Arabs], all the populations we tested have higher Anatolian-like ancestry, which is much rarer in Arabia. Arabian populations in contrast have higher Natufian-like ancestry,” Almarri says.
Apropos language, the team also suggests that a Bronze Age population in the Levant (meaning from about 5,000 years ago) plausibly was responsible for spreading Semitic languages to Arabia and East Africa.
A glass of milk and thou
Marc Haber of the University of Birmingham notes that the study detected positive selection for lactose digestion – the ability to drink and eat dairy products without experiencing socially repulsive and painful consequences.
“In the last 8,000 years this variant increased to a frequency of 50 percent in Arabians, coinciding with the transition from a hunter-gatherer to herder-gatherer lifestyle. This variant is much rarer in the Levant, and almost absent outside the region,” Haber says.
It bears adding that apparently the domestication of the sheep, goats and cows wasn’t driven by a desire to exploit their milk but to eat the whole animal, instead of hunting for toothsome herbivores.
What have we learned? That we thrived after the advent of agriculture but were brought low by climate change. That we did not thrive in the Arabian Desert but did when it was wetter and greener. Did we do that?
We did not – the greening and aridification of North Africa and Arabia were due to planetary cycles, not human impact. Today Arabia contains the largest sand desert in the world (though not the largest desert), but by the next time the cycle swings and the area should, theoretically, turn green again, it may not happen, and that’s on us.
https://www.haaretz.com/archaeology/2021-08-04/ty-article/genomic-study-levantines-and-arabians-have-different-origins/0000017f-e96d-df2c-a1ff-ff7d275c0000
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There is a large graveyard filled with my enemies. I do not wish to add to it, but will given no choice. Those who pick fights with me do so at their own peril, but maybe this is their lucky day.
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STILL TRYING TO CLEAN UP AFTER WW1
~ They are still slowly trying to clean it up. The areas that were too dangerous are called Red Zones. Restrictions within the Zone Rouge still exist today. After the war, the French government declared a 460-square-mile area unfit for human habitation or development. It stretches roughly from Nancy through Verdun and onto Lille, with various non-contiguous zones so riddled with unexploded shells (many of them gas shells), grenades, ammunition, and human and animal remains that it was simply too dangerous to enter.
In the 1920s and ’30s, the government oversaw the planting of 36 million trees, mostly pine and spruce, in part of the Zone Rouge. This the Verdun forest.
The Department du Deminage, was created after the war. Over the decades, it has helped to reduce the extent of the Zone Rouge, destroying hundreds of thousands of munitions and chemical shells, and has returned some land to civilian and agricultural use. They calculate that they have 300 years work ahead of them before they have cleared the whole battlefield. French farmers collect a huge amount of unexploded ordnance, barbed wire, shrapnel, and bullets every year. It is called the “Iron Harvest.”
Some areas remain entirely off-limits, the soil so full of arsenic that 99 percent of all plants die. There is still the ever-present threat of unexploded shells. There are many ghost villages that were left abandoned after the war, deemed beyond repair. The bodies of roughly 80,000 soldiers whose bodies were never recovered are still there. The bomb depressions are still there. ~
Verdun today: battlefield scars. Some portions of Ukraine may end up looking like that for the next hundred years.
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THE CALORIE COUNTER: EVOLUTIONARY ANTHROPOLOGIST HERMAN PONTZER BUSTS MYTHS ABOUT HOW HUMANS BURN CALORIES—AND WHY
~ On a warm Wednesday morning in October, Herman Pontzer puts on a wrinkled lab coat, adjusts his mask, and heads into his lab at Duke University, hoping to stress out a student. An undergraduate named Christina is resting on a lab table with her head in a clear plastic hood. Pontzer greets her formally and launches into a time-honored method to boost her blood pressure: He gives her an oral math test.
“Start off with number 1022 and subtract 13 until you get to zero,” he says, speaking at full volume to be heard over a clanking air conditioner. “If you make a mistake, we’ll start over again. You ready to go?”
“1009, 997,” Christina says.
“Start over,” Pontzer barks.
Christina, who has signed up for a “stress test,” laughs nervously. She tries again and gets to 889, only to have Pontzer stop her. This happens again and again. Then Pontzer asks her to multiply 505 by 117, out loud. By this point, she is clenching her sock-clad toes.
Postdoc Zane Swanson and undergrad Gabrielle Butler monitor her heart rate and how much carbon dioxide (CO2) she exhales into the hood. Then Pontzer asks a set of questions designed to boost a student’s stress levels: What’s her dream job, and what exactly is she going to do after graduation?
It’s another day in the Pontzer lab, where he and his students measure how much energy people expend when they are stressed, exercising, or mounting an immune response to a vaccine, among other states. By measuring the CO2 in Christina’s breath, he is finding out how much energy she has burned while coping with math anxiety.
At 44, Pontzer’s life’s work as a biological anthropologist is counting calories. It’s not to lose weight—at 1.85 meters tall and about 75 kilograms (6 feet 1 inch and 165 pounds), with a passion for running and rock climbing, he is “a skinny to normal size dude,” in the words of an online reviewer of Pontzer’s 2021 book Burn: New Research Blows the Lid Off How We Really Burn Calories, Lose Weight, and Stay Healthy.
Pontzer is happy to expound on weight loss on The Dr. Oz Show and NPR, but his real mission is to understand how, alone among great apes, humans manage to have it all, energetically speaking: We have big brains, lengthy childhoods, many children, and long lives. The energy budget needed to support those traits involves trade-offs he’s trying to unravel, between energy spent on exercise, reproduction, stress, illness, and vital functions.
By borrowing a method developed by physiologists studying obesity, Pontzer and colleagues systematically measure the total energy used per day by animals and people in various walks of life. The answers coming from their data are often surprising: Exercise doesn’t help you burn more energy on average; active hunter-gatherers in Africa don’t expend more energy daily than sedentary office workers in Illinois; pregnant women don’t burn more calories per day than other adults, after adjusting for body mass.
Metabolism over the life span
Adjusted for body mass, toddlers burn the most calories per day. Total energy expenditure declines after age 60, although individuals show some variation.
Pontzer’s skill as a popularizer can rankle some of his colleagues. His message that exercise won’t help you lose weight “lacks nuance,” says exercise physiologist John Thyfault of the University of Kansas Medical Center, who says it may nudge dieters into less healthy habits.
But others say besides busting myths about human energy expenditure, Pontzer’s work offers a new lens for understanding human physiology and evolution. As he wrote in Burn, “In the economics of life, calories are the currency.”
“His work is revolutionary,” says paleoanthropologist Leslie Aiello, past president of the Wenner-Gren Foundation, which has funded Pontzer’s work. “We now have data … that has given us a completely new framework for how we think about how humans adapted to energetic limits.”
THE SON OF TWO high school English teachers, Pontzer grew up on 40 hectares of woods in the Appalachian hills near the small town of Kersey, Pennsylvania. His dad, who helped build their house, taught Pontzer to be curious about how things worked and to fix them. “No one ever called plumbers or electricians,” Pontzer recalls.
Those lessons in self-sufficiency and an outgoing nature helped him cope when his dad died when Pontzer was just 15. An older cousin also took him climbing, which taught him to be both brave and organized—skills he says later helped him take intellectual risks and challenge established ideas. “When you have a bad experience and life plucks you off your track, it’s scary,” Pontzer says. “You have to move forward, though, and that teaches you not to be scared of new things.”
Pontzer applied to a single college—Pennsylvania State University, whose football games were a highlight of his childhood. “I assumed I’d be my dad—go to Penn State, get my teaching degree, and stay in Kersey,” he says. But once at Penn State, he worked with the late, renowned paleoanthropologist Alan Walker and found himself considering grad school in biological anthropology.
After learning his promising student was choosing schools based on their proximity to mountains, Walker was blunt: He told Pontzer he was an idiot if he didn’t apply to Harvard University—and, once Pontzer was accepted, he’d be an idiot if he didn’t go.
Pontzer went. In the early 2000s, scientists knew little about humans’ total energy expenditure (TEE)—the number of kilocalories (the “calories” on food labels) a person’s 37 trillion cells burn in 24 hours. Researchers had measured the rate at which our bodies burn energy while at rest—the basal metabolic rate (BMR), which includes energy used for breathing, circulation, and other vital functions. They knew BMR was roughly the same among larger mammals, when adjusted for body size. So although BMR only captures 50% to 70% of total energy use, researchers figured that, kilo for kilo, humans burn energy at roughly the same rate as other apes.
But humans have an added energy expense: our big brains, which account for 20% of our energy use per day. Aiello had proposed that our ancestors had compensated for those expensive brains by evolving smaller guts and other organs. Others thought humans had saved energy by evolving to walk and run more efficiently.
At Harvard, Pontzer wanted to test those ideas. But he realized there weren’t enough data to do so: No one knew how much total energy primates use when they move, much less how differences in anatomy or trade-offs in organ size impact energy use. “We talked about locomotor adaptations in hominins, we talked about efficiency, power, and strength, but it [was] all sort of made up,” Pontzer says.
He realized he had to go back to basics, measuring the calories expended by humans and animals walking and running on treadmills. Mammals use oxygen to convert sugars from food into energy, with CO2 as a byproduct. The more CO2 a mammal exhales, the more oxygen—and calories—it has burned.
For his Ph.D. thesis, Pontzer measured how much CO2 dogs and goats exhaled while running and walking. He found, for example, that dogs with long legs used less energy to run than corgis, as he reported in 2007, soon after he got his first job at Washington University in St. Louis. Over time, he says, “What started as an innocent project measuring the cost of walking and running in humans, dogs, and goats grew into a sort of professional obsession with measuring energy expenditures.”
Pontzer still measures exhaled CO2 to get at calories burned in a particular activity, as he did with Christina’s stress test. But he found that physiologists had developed a better way to measure TEE over a day: the doubly labeled water method, which measures TEE without asking a subject to breathe into a hood all day.
Physiologist Dale Schoeller, now at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, had adapted the method, first used in mice, to humans. People drink a harmless cocktail of labeled water, in which distinct isotopes of hydrogen and oxygen replace the common forms. Then researchers sample their urine several times over one week. The labeled hydrogen passes through the body into urine, sweat, and other fluids, but as a person burns calories, some of the labeled oxygen is exhaled as CO2. The ratio of labeled oxygen to labeled hydrogen in the urine thus serves as a measure of how much oxygen a person’s cells used on average in a day and therefore how many calories were burned. The method is the gold standard for total energy use, but it costs $600 per test and was out of reach for most evolutionary biologists.
Pontzer’s first of many breakthroughs with the method came in 2008 when, with $20,000 from the Wenner-Gren Foundation, he got the chance to collect urine samples at what was then the Great Ape Trust, a sanctuary and research center in Iowa. There, primatologist Rob Shumaker poured isotope-laced sugar-free iced tea into the mouths of four orangutans. Pontzer worried about collecting the urine from a full-grown ape, but Shumaker reassured him the orangs were trained to pee in a cup.
Later that fall, when Pontzer got the urine results, he didn’t believe them: The orangutans burned one-third of the energy expected for a mammal their size. A retest returned the same results: Azy, a 113-kilogram adult male, for example, burned 2050 kilocalories per day, much less than the 3300 a 113-kilogram man typically burns. “I was in total disbelief,” Pontzer says. Orangs were perhaps the “sloths in the ape family tree,” he thought, because they suffered prolonged food scarcity in their past and had evolved to survive on fewer calories per day.
Subsequent doubly labeled water studies of apes in captivity and in sanctuaries shattered the consensus view that mammals all have similar metabolic rates when adjusted for body mass. Among great apes, humans are the outlier. When adjusted for body mass, we burn 20% more energy per day than chimps and bonobos, 40% more than gorillas, and 60% more than orangutans, Pontzer and colleagues reported in Nature in 2016.
The high-energy ape
Humans burn far more energy daily—and also store much more energy as fat—than other apes. Our total energy expenditure (TEE) includes our basal metabolic rate (BMR) plus other activities including exercise.
Pontzer says the difference in body fat is just as shocking:
Male humans pack on twice as much fat as other male apes and women three times as much as other female apes. He thinks our hefty body fat evolved in tandem with our faster metabolic rate: Fat burns less energy than lean tissue and provides a fuel reserve. “Our metabolic engines were not crafted by millions of years of evolution to guarantee a beach-ready bikini body,” Pontzer writes in Burn.
Our ability to convert food and fat stores into energy faster than other apes has important payoffs, however: It gives us more energy every day so we can fuel our big brains as well as feed and protect offspring with long, energetically costly childhoods.
Pontzer thinks characteristically human traits in behavior and anatomy help us maintain amped-up metabolisms. For example, humans routinely share more food with other adults than do other apes. Sharing food is more efficient for the group, and would have given early humans an energy safety net.
And our big brains created a positive feedback loop. They demanded more energy but also gave early humans the smarts to invent better tools, control fire, cook, and adapt in other ways to get or save more energy.
PONTZER GOT A LESSON in the value of food sharing in 2010, when he traveled to Tanzania to study the energy budgets of the Hadza hunter-gatherers. One of the first things he noticed was how often the Hadza used the word “za,” which means “to give.” It’s the magic word all Hadza learn as children to get someone to share berries, honey, or other foods with them.
Such sharing helps all the Hadza be active: as they hunt and forage, Hadza women walk about 8 kilometers [5 miles] daily; men, 14 kilometers [8.7 miles]—more than a typical American walks in one week.
To learn about their energy expenditure, Pontzer asked the Hadza whether they’d drink his tasteless water cocktail and give urine samples. They agreed. He almost couldn’t get funding for the study, because other researchers assumed the answer was obvious. “Everyone knew the Hadza had exceptionally high energy expenditures because they were so physically active,” he recalls. “Except they didn’t.”
Individual Hadza had days of more and less activity, and some burned 10% more or less calories than average. But when adjusted for nonfat body mass, Hadza men and women burned the same amount of energy per day on average as men and women in the United States, as well as those in Europe, Russia, and Japan, he reported in PLOS ONE in 2012. “It’s surprising when you consider the differences in physical activity,” Schoeller says.
One person who wasn’t surprised was epidemiologist Amy Luke at Loyola University Chicago. She’d already gotten a similar result with doubly labeled water studies, showing female farmers in western Africa used the same amount of energy daily when adjusted for fat-free body mass as women in Chicago — about 2400 kilocalories for a 75-kilogram [165 lbs] woman. Luke says her work was not well known—until Pontzer’s paper made a splash. The two have collaborated ever since.
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Studies of other hunter-gatherer and forager groups have confirmed the Hadza are not an anomaly. Pontzer thinks hunter-gatherers’ bodies adjust for more activity by spending fewer calories on other unseen tasks, such as inflammation and stress responses. “Instead of increasing the calories burned per day, the Hadza’s physical activity was changing the way they spend their calories,” he says.
He backed this up with a new analysis of data from another team’s study of sedentary women trained to run half marathons: After weeks of training, they barely burned more energy per day when they were running 40 kilometers per week than before they started to train.
In another study of marathoners who ran 42.6 kilometers daily 6 days per week for 140 days in the Race Across the USA, Pontzer and his colleagues found the runners burned gradually less energy over time — 4900 calories per day at the end of the race compared with 6200 calories at the start.
As the athletes’ ran more and more over weeks or months, their metabolic engines cut back elsewhere to make room for the extra exercise costs, Pontzer says. Conversely, if you’re a couch potato, you might still spend almost as many calories daily, leaving more energy for your body to spend on internal processes such as a stress response.
This is Pontzer’s “most controversial and interesting idea,” says Harvard paleoanthropologist Daniel Lieberman, who was Pontzer’s thesis adviser. “This morning I ran about 5 miles; I spent about 500 calories running. In a very simplistic model that would mean my TEE would be 500 calories higher. … According to Herman, humans who are more active don’t have that much higher TEE as you’d predict … but we still don’t know why or how that occurs.”
Pontzer’s findings have a discouraging implication for people wanting to lose weight. “You can’t exercise your way out of obesity,” says evolutionary physiologist John Speakman of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. “It’s one of those zombie ideas that refuses to die.” Already the research is influencing dietary guidelines for nutrition and weight loss. The U.K. National Food Strategy, for example, notes that “you can’t outrun a bad diet.”
But Thyfault warns that message may do more harm than good. People who exercise are less likely to gain weight in the first place, and those who exercise while they diet tend to keep weight off better, he says. Exercise also can impact where fat is stored on the body and the risk of diabetes and heart disease, he says.
Pontzer agrees that exercise is essential for good health: The Hadza, who are active and fit into their 70s and 80s, don’t get diabetes and heart disease. And, he adds, “If exercise is tamping down the stress response, that compensation is a good thing.” But he says it’s not fair to mislead dieters: “Exercise prevents you from getting sick, but diet is your best tool for weight management.”
Meanwhile, Pontzer was laying the groundwork for other surprises. Last year, he and Speakman co-led an effort to assemble a remarkable new resource, the International Atomic Energy Agency Doubly Labelled Water Database. This includes existing doubly labeled water studies of almost 6800 people between the ages of 8 days and 95 years.
They used the database to do the first comprehensive study of human energy use over the life span. Again a popular assumption was at stake: that teenagers and pregnant women have higher metabolisms. But Pontzer found it was toddlers who are the dynamos. Newborns have the same metabolic rate as their pregnant mothers, which is no different from other women when adjusted for body size. But between the ages of 9 and 15 months, babies expend 50% more energy in a day than do adults, when adjusted for body size and fat. That’s likely to fuel their growing brain and, perhaps, developing immune systems. The findings, reported in Science, help explain why malnourished infants may show stunted growth.
Children’s metabolisms stay high, when adjusted for body size, until about age 5, when they begin a slow decline until age 20, and stabilize in adulthood. Humans begin to use less energy at age 60, and by age 90, elders use 26% less than middle-aged adults.
Pontzer is now probing a mystery that emerged from his studies of athletes: There seems to be a hard limit on how many calories our bodies can burn per day, set by how fast we can digest food and turn it into energy. He calculates that the ceiling for an 85-kilogram man would be about 4650 calories per day.
Speakman thinks that limit is too low, noting that cyclists in the Tour de France in the 1980s and ’90s exceeded it. But they were injecting fat and glucose directly into their bloodstreams, a practice Pontzer thinks might have helped them bypass the physiological limits on converting food into energy. Elite athletes can push the limits for several months, as the study of marathoners showed, but can’t sustain it indefinitely, Pontzer says.
To understand how the body can fuel intense exercise or fight off disease without busting energy limits, Pontzer and his students are exploring how the body tamps down other activities. “I think we’re going to find these adjustments lower inflammation, lower our stress reaction. We do it to make the energy books balance.”
That’s why he wanted to know how much energy Christina burned while he grilled her in the lab. After the test, Christina said she “definitely was stressed.” As it went on her heart rate rose from 75 to 80 beats per minute to 115. And her energy use rose from 1.2 kilocalories per minute to as much as 1.7 kilocalories per minute.
“She burned 40% more energy per minute in the math test and 30% in the interview,” Pontzer says. “Think about any other process that boosts your energy by about 40%.”
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Pontzer's groundbreaking studies with hunter-gatherer tribes show how exercise doesn't increase our metabolism. Instead, we burn calories within a very narrow range: nearly 3,000 calories per day, no matter our activity level.
This was a brilliant evolutionary strategy to survive in times of famine. Now it seems to doom us to obesity. The good news is we can lose weight, but we need to cut calories. Refuting such weight-loss hype as paleo, keto, anti-gluten, anti-grain, and even vegan, Pontzer discusses how all diets succeed or fail: For shedding pounds, a calorie is a calorie.
At the same time, we must exercise to keep our body systems and signals functioning optimally, even if it won't make us thinner. Hunter-gatherers like the Hadza move about five hours a day and remain remarkably healthy into old age. But elite athletes can push the body too far, burning calories faster than their bodies can take them in. It may be that the most spectacular athletic feats are the result not just of great training, but of an astonishingly efficient digestive system.
Humans have "constrained energy expenditure", meaning that you only burn so many calories a day no matter what you do. Our extremely effective "metabolic compensation" simply shifts calories around so we break even at the end of the day no matter how much we move.
For practical purposes, this means that you basically can't lose weight through exercise. Reducing caloric intake is the only way. Nevertheless, the manifold health benefits of exercise still make it the single most healthful activity we can do, as Prof Pontzer takes pains to emphasize.
https://dupri.duke.edu/news-events/news/calorie-counter-evolutionary-anthropologist-herman-pontzer-busts-myths-about-how
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Studies overall show that doing moderate-intensity aerobic exercise such as walking for 30 minutes a day, five days a week—the amount recommended for good health—typically produces little or no weight loss by itself. When moderate exercise is added to diet, the results are equally unimpressive. Pooling data from six trials, researchers found that a combination of diet and exercise generated no greater weight loss than diet alone after six months. At 12 months, the diet-and-exercise combo showed an advantage, but it was slight—about 4 pounds on average. In another review of studies, the difference was less than 3 pounds.
While it’s not very helpful for melting away pounds, exercise can prevent weight gain and improve your appearance by increasing muscle mass and reducing visceral fat, the type indicated by a large waist that’s linked to heart disease and diabetes.
https://time.com/6138809/should-you-exercise-to-lose-weight/
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Islamic preacher Zakir Naik got into a taxi in London and said aloud to the taxi driver: “Brother, please turn off the radio, because as the Holy Qur'an commands, I am not allowed to listen to music, because in the time of the Prophet there was no music, especially western music, which is the music of the disbelievers.”
The taxi driver politely turned off the radio, stopped the taxi and opened the door.
Zakir asked him: “What are you doing bro...”
The taxi driver answered politely: “In the era of the Prophet:
There were no taxis.
There were no bombs.
There were no shortcuts.
There were no loudspeakers in the mosques to wake up newborns, the elderly and the sick at eerie hours.
There were no suicide bombings.
There was no AK 47.
Now get out and wait for your camel.”
HOW BACTERIA HELP REGULATE BLOOD PRESSURE
Researchers found that the bacteria in our guts send signals to the kidneys and blood vessels that help to balance our vital signs.
Some years ago, when Jennifer Pluznick was nearing the end of her training in physiology and sensory systems, she was startled to discover something in the kidneys that seemed weirdly out of place. It was a smell receptor, a protein that would have looked more at home in the nose. Given that the kidneys filter waste into urine and maintain the right salt content in the blood, it was hard to see how a smell receptor could be useful there. Yet as she delved deeper into what the smell receptor was doing, Pluznick came to a surprising conclusion: The kidney receives messages from the gut microbiome, the symbiotic bacteria that live in the intestines.
In the past few years, Pluznick, who is now an associate professor of physiology at Johns Hopkins University, and a small band of like-minded researchers have put together a picture of what the denizens of the gut are telling the kidney. They have found that these communiqués affect blood pressure, such that if the microbes are destroyed, the host suffers. The researchers have uncovered a direct, molecular-level explanation of how the microbiome conspires with the kidneys and the blood vessels to manipulate the flow of blood.
The smell receptor, called Olfr78, was an orphan at first: it had previously been noticed in the sensory tissues of the nose, but no one knew what specific scent or chemical messenger it responded to. Pluznick began by testing various chemical possibilities and eventually narrowed down the candidates to acetate and propionate. These short-chain fatty acid molecules come from the fermentation breakdown of long chains of carbohydrates — what nutritionists call dietary fiber. Humans, mice, rats and other animals cannot digest fiber, but the bacteria that live in their guts can.
As a result, more than 99 percent of the acetate and propionate that floats through the bloodstream is released by bacteria as they feed. “Any host contribution is really minimal,” Pluznick said. Bacteria are therefore the only meaningful source of what activates Olfr78 — which, further experiments showed, is involved in the regulation of blood pressure.
Our bodies must maintain a delicate balance with blood pressure, as with electricity surging through a wire, where too much means an explosion and too little means a power outage. If blood pressure is too low, an organism loses consciousness; if it’s too high, the strain on the heart and blood vessels can be deadly.
Because creatures are constantly flooding their blood with nutrients and chemical signals that alter the balance, the control must be dynamic. One of the ways the body exerts this control is with a hormone called renin, which makes blood vessels narrower when the pressure needs to be kept up. Olfr78, Pluznick and her colleagues discovered, helps drive the production of renin.
How did a smell receptor inherit this job? The genes for smell receptors are present in almost every cell of the body. If in the course of evolution these chemical sensors hooked up to the machinery for manufacturing a hormone rather than to a smell neuron, and if that connection proved useful, evolution would have preserved the arrangement, even in parts of the body as far from the nose as the kidneys are.
Olfr78 wasn’t the end of the story, however. While the team was performing these experiments, they realized that another receptor called Gpr41 was getting signals from the gut microbiome as well. In a paper last year, Pluznick’s first graduate student, Niranjana Natarajan, now a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University, revealed the role of Gpr41, which she found on the inner walls of blood vessels. Like Olfr78, Gpr41 is known to respond to acetate and propionate — but it lowers blood pressure rather than raising it. Moreover, Gpr41 starts to respond at low levels of acetate and propionate, while Olfr78 kicks in only at higher levels.
Here’s how the pieces fit together: When you — or a mouse, or any other host organism whose organs and microbes talk this way — have a meal and dietary fiber hits the gut, bacteria feed and release their fatty-acid signal. This activates Gpr41, which ratchets down the blood pressure as all the consumed nutrients flood the circulation.
If you keep eating — a slice of pie at Thanksgiving dinner, another helping of mashed potatoes — Gpr41, left to itself, might bring the pressure down to dangerous levels. “We think that is where Olfr78 comes in,” Pluznick said. That receptor, triggered as the next surge of fatty acids arrives, keeps blood pressure from bottoming out by calling for renin to constrict the blood vessels.
The new understanding of how symbiotic bacteria manipulate blood pressure is emblematic of wider progress in linking the microbiome to our vital statistics and health. While vague statements about the microbiome’s effect on health have become commonplace in recent years, the field has moved beyond simply making associations, said Jack Gilbert, a microbiome researcher at the University of Chicago.
“Everybody goes on about the promise,” he said. But in fact, studies full of mechanistic details, like the ones Pluznick, her collaborators and other researchers have published, have been growing more and more numerous.
In June of last year, the National Institutes of Health convened a working group on the microbiome’s control of blood pressure. Researchers met in Maryland to thrash out what important questions still need to be answered, including what role the host’s genetic background plays — whether, for instance, the microbiome matters more for some hosts than for others.
Understanding those details is key to knowing whether transplanting a certain set of microbes into someone can reshape the recipient’s biology enough to cure a health problem, as some proponents of personalized medicine hope. One famous early study showed that giving lean mice the microbiome of an obese human made them obese too, while the microbiome of lean humans kept the mice lean. “There’s one paper that came out earlier this year … that showed that maybe this can happen with blood pressure as well,” Pluznick said, though she cautioned that the study was small and needed follow-up. But theoretically, even if swapping in new bacteria could only slightly lower the blood pressure of those with a genetic tendency toward hypertension, it could make a difference over the course of a lifetime.
“It might be something that’s easier to manipulate than your genes, or my genes. Those are much harder to change,” she said.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-bacteria-help-regulate-blood-pressure-20171130/
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DO WE REALLY LIVE LONGER THAN OUR ANCESTORS?
~ Do we really live longer than ever before?
The wonders of modern medicine and nutrition make it easy to believe we enjoy longer lives than at any time in human history, but we may not be that special after all.
Over the last few decades, life expectancy has increased dramatically around the globe. The average person born in 1960, the earliest year the United Nations began keeping global data, could expect to live to 52.5 years of age. Today, the average is 72. In the UK, where records have been kept longer, this trend is even greater. In 1841, a baby girl was expected to live to just 42 years of age, a boy to 40. In 2016, a baby girl could expect to reach 83; a boy, 79.
The natural conclusion is that both the miracles of modern medicine and public health initiatives have helped us live longer than ever before – so much so that we may, in fact, be running out of innovations to extend life further. In September 2018, the Office for National Statistics confirmed that, in the UK at least, life expectancy has stopped increasing. Beyond the UK, these gains are slowing worldwide.
This belief that our species may have reached the peak of longevity is also reinforced by some myths about our ancestors: it’s common belief that ancient Greeks or Romans would have been flabbergasted to see anyone above the age of 50 or 60, for example.
Rome’s first emperor, Augustus, died at 75 – underscoring the distinction between our ancestors' average life expectancy versus their life span.
In fact, while medical advancements have improved many aspects of healthcare, the assumption that human life span has increased dramatically over centuries or millennia is misleading.
Overall life expectancy, which is the statistic reflected in reports like those above, hasn’t increased so much because we’re living far longer than we used to as a species. It’s increased because more of us, as individuals, are making it that far.
“There is a basic distinction between life expectancy and life span,” says Stanford University historian Walter Scheidel, a leading scholar of ancient Roman demography. “The life span of humans – opposed to life expectancy, which is a statistical construct – hasn’t really changed much at all, as far as I can tell.”
Life expectancy is an average. If you have two children, and one dies before their first birthday but the other lives to the age of 70, their average life expectancy is 35.
That’s mathematically correct – and it certainly tells us something about the circumstances in which the children were raised. But it doesn’t give us the full picture. It also becomes especially problematic when looking at eras, or in regions, where there are high levels of infant mortality. Most of human history has been blighted by poor survival rates among children, and that continues in various countries today.
The 6th-Century ruler Empress Suiko, who was Japan’s first reigning empress in recorded history, died at 74.
This averaging-out, however, is why it’s commonly said that ancient Greeks and Romans, for example, lived to just 30 or 35. But was that really the case for people who survived the fragile period of childhood, and did it mean that a 35-year-old was truly considered ‘old’?
If one’s thirties were a decrepit old age, ancient writers and politicians don’t seem to have got the message. In the early 7th Century BC, the Greek poet Hesiod wrote that a man should marry “when you are not much less than 30, and not much more”. Meanwhile, ancient Rome’s ‘cursus honorum’ – the sequence of political offices that an ambitious young man would undertake – didn’t even allow a young man to stand for his first office, that of quaestor, until the age of 30 (under Emperor Augustus, this was later lowered to 25; Augustus himself died at 75). To be consul, you had to be 43 – eight years older than the US’s minimum age limit of 35 to hold a presidency.
In the 1st Century, Pliny devoted an entire chapter of The Natural History to people who lived longest. Among them he lists the consul M Valerius Corvinos (100 years), Cicero’s wife Terentia (103), a woman named Clodia (115 – and who had 15 children along the way), and the actress Lucceia who performed on stage at 100 years old.
Then there are tombstone inscriptions and grave epigrams, such as this one for a woman who died in Alexandria in the 3rd Century BC. “She was 80 years old, but able to weave a delicate weft with the shrill shuttle”, the epigram reads admiringly.
Not, however, that aging was any easier then than it is now. “Nature has, in reality, bestowed no greater blessing on man than the shortness of life,” Pliny remarks. “The senses become dull, the limbs torpid, the sight, the hearing, the legs, the teeth, and the organs of digestion, all of them die before us…” He can think of only one person, a musician who lived to 105, who had a pleasantly healthy old age. (Pliny himself reached barely half that; he’s thought to have died from volcanic gases during the eruption of Mt Vesuvius, aged 56).
In the ancient world, at least, it seems people certainly were able to live just as long as we do today. But just how common was it?
Age of empires
Back in 1994 a study looked at every man entered into the Oxford Classical Dictionary who lived in ancient Greece or Rome. Their ages of death were compared to men listed in the more recent Chambers Biographical Dictionary.
Of 397 ancients in total, 99 died violently by murder, suicide or in battle. Of the remaining 298, those born before 100BC lived to a median age of 72 years. Those born after 100BC lived to a median age of 66. (The authors speculate that the prevalence of dangerous lead plumbing may have led to this apparent shortening of life).
The median of those who died between 1850 and 1949? Seventy-one years old – just one year less than their pre-100BC cohort.
Of course, there were some obvious problems with this sample. One is that it was men-only. Another is that all of the men were illustrious enough to be remembered. All we can really take away from this is that privileged, accomplished men have, on average, lived to about the same age throughout history – as long as they weren’t killed first, that is.
Still, says Scheidel, that’s not to be dismissed. “It implies there must have been non-famous people, who were much more numerous, who lived even longer,” he says.
The Roman emperor Tiberius died at the age of 77 – some accounts say by murder.
Not everyone agrees. “There was an enormous difference between the lifestyle of a poor versus an elite Roman,” says Valentina Gazzaniga, a medical historian at Rome’s La Sapienza University. “The conditions of life, access to medical therapies, even just hygiene – these were all certainly better among the elites.”
In 2016, Gazzaniga published her research on more than 2,000 ancient Roman skeletons, all working-class people who were buried in common graves. The average age of death was 30, and that wasn’t a mere statistical quirk: a high number of the skeletons were around that age. Many showed the effects of trauma from hard labor, as well as diseases we would associate with later ages, like arthritis.
Men might have borne numerous injuries from manual labor or military service. But women – who, it's worth noting, also did hard labor such as working in the fields – hardly got off easy. Throughout history, childbirth, often in poor hygienic conditions, is just one reason why women were at particular risk during their fertile years. Even pregnancy itself was a danger.
“We know, for example, that being pregnant adversely affects your immune system, because you’ve basically got another person growing inside you,” says Jane Humphries, a historian at the University of Oxford. “Then you tend to be susceptible to other diseases. So, for example, tuberculosis interacts with pregnancy in a very threatening way. And tuberculosis was a disease that had higher female than male mortality.”
Childbirth was worsened by other factors too. “Women often were fed less than men,” Gazzaniga says. That malnutrition means that young girls often had incomplete development of pelvic bones, which then increased the risk of difficult childbirth.
“The life expectancy of Roman women actually increased with the decline of fertility,” Gazzaniga says. “The more fertile the population is, the lower the female life expectancy.”
Missing people
The difficulty in knowing for sure just how long our average predecessor lived, whether ancient or pre-historic, is the lack of data. When trying to determine average ages of death for ancient Romans, for example, anthropologists often rely on census returns from Roman Egypt. But because these papyri were used to collect taxes, they often under-reported men – as well as left out many babies and women.
Tombstone inscriptions, left behind in their thousands by the Romans, are another obvious source. But infants were rarely placed in tombs. Poor people couldn’t afford them and families who died simultaneously, such as during an epidemic, also were left out.
And even if that weren’t the case, there is another problem with relying on inscriptions.
“You need to live in a world where you have a certain amount of documentation where it can even be possible to tell if someone lived to 105 or 110, and that only started quite recently,” Scheidel points out. “If someone actually lived to be 111, that person might not have known.”
The Roman empress Livia, wife of Augustus, lived until she was 86 or 87 years old.
As a result, much of what we think we know about ancient Rome’s statistical life expectancy comes from life expectancies in comparable societies. Those tell us that as many as one-third of infants died before the age of one, and half of children before age 10. After that age your chances got significantly better. If you made it to 60, you’d probably live to be 70. [Oriana: the biblical "three score and ten"]
Taken altogether, life span in ancient Rome probably wasn’t much different from today. It may have been slightly less “because you don’t have this invasive medicine at end of life that prolongs life a little bit, but not dramatically different”, Scheidel says. “You can have extremely low average life expectancy, because of, say, pregnant women, and children who die, and still have people to live to 80 and 90 at the same time. They are just less numerous at the end of the day because all of this attrition kicks in.”
Of course, that attrition is not to be sniffed at. Particularly if you were an infant, a woman of childbearing years or a hard laborer, you’d be far better off choosing to live in year 2018 than 18. But that still doesn’t mean our life span is actually getting significantly longer as a species.
On the record
The data gets better later in human history once governments begin to keep careful records of births, marriages and deaths – at first, particularly of nobles.
Those records show that child mortality remained high. But if a man got to the age of 21 and didn’t die by accident, violence or poison, he could be expected to live
almost as long as men today: from 1200 to 1745, 21-year-olds would reach an average age of anywhere between 62 and 70 years – except for the 14th Century, when the bubonic plague cut life expectancy to a paltry 45.
Did having money or power help? Not always. One analysis of some 115,000 European nobles found that kings lived about six years less than lesser nobles, like knights. Demographic historians have found by looking at county parish registers that in 17th-Century England, life expectancy was longer for villagers than nobles.
“Aristocratic families in England possessed the means to secure all manner of material benefits and personal services but expectation of life at birth among the aristocracy appears to have lagged behind that of the population as a whole until well into the eighteenth century,” he writes. This was likely because royals tended to prefer to live for most of the year in cities, where they were exposed to more diseases.
But interestingly, when the revolution came in medicine and public health, it helped elites before the rest of the population. By the late 17th Century, English nobles who made it to 25 went on to live longer than their non-noble counterparts – even as they continued to live in the more risk-ridden cities.
Surely, by the soot-ridden era of Charles Dickens, life was unhealthy and short for nearly everyone? Still no. As researchers Judith Rowbotham, now at the University of Plymouth, and Paul Clayton, of Oxford Brookes University, write, “once the dangerous childhood years were passed… life expectancy in the mid-Victorian period was not markedly different from what it is today”. A five-year-old girl would live to 73; a boy, to 75.
Not only are these numbers comparable to our own, they may be even better. Members of today’s working-class (a more accurate comparison) live to around 72 years for men and 76 years for women.
Queen Victoria died in 1901 at the age of 81. During her reign, a girl could expect to live to about 73 years of age, a boy to 75.
“This relative lack of progress is striking, especially given the many environmental disadvantages during the mid-Victorian era and the state of medical care in an age when modern drugs, screening systems and surgical techniques were self-evidently unavailable,” Rowbotham and Clayton write.
They argue that if we think we’re living longer than ever today, this is because our records go back to around 1900 – which they call a “misleading baseline”, as it was at a time when nutrition had decreased and when many men started to smoke.
Pre-historic people
What about if we look in the other direction in time – before any records at all were kept?
Although it is obviously difficult to collect this kind of data, anthropologists have tried to substitute by looking at today's hunter-gatherer groups, such as the Ache of Paraguay and Hadza of Tanzania. They found that while the probability of a newborn’s survival to age 15 ranged between 55% for a Hadza boy up to 71% for an Ache boy, once someone survived to that point, they could expect to live until they were between 51 and 58 years old. Data from modern-day foragers, who have no access to medicine or modern food, write Michael Gurven and Cristina Gomes, finds that “while at birth mean life expectancies range from 30 to 37 years of life, women who survive to age 45 can expect to live an additional 20 to 22 years” – in other words, from 65 to 67 years old.
The Roman empress Domitia died in 130 at the age of 77.
Archaeologists Christine Cave and Marc Oxenham of Australian National University have recently found the same. Looking at dental wear on the skeletons of Anglo-Saxons buried about 1,500 years ago, they found that of 174 skeletons, the majority belonged to people who were under 65 – but there also were 16 people who died between 65 and 74 years old and nine who reached at least 75 years of age.
Our maximum lifespan may not have changed much, if at all. But that’s not to delegitimize the extraordinary advances of the last few decades which have helped so many more people reach that maximum lifespan, and live healthier lives overall.
Perhaps that’s why, when asked what past era, if any, she’d prefer to live in, Oxford’s Humphries doesn’t hesitate.
“Definitely today,” she says. “I think women’s lives in the past were pretty nasty and brutish – if not so short.”%20Balthasar%20Denner.jpg)
Portrait of an Old Woman (1749) by Balthasar Denner
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20181002-how-long-did-ancient-people-live-life-span-versus-longevity
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ending on wisdom and beauty:
And remember: you must never,
under any circumstances, despair.
To hope and to act,
these are our duties in misfortune.
~ Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago
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