Sea anemone, beach near Monterey, California*
THE WOMAN WHO VOWED TO KILL
SEVEN GERMANS
told to my mother by a stranger on the train, 1945
Her husband’s broken body thrust
against the electric fence.
She dressed in black, lit a candle
in church, and swore:
seven Germans, by her own hand.
The days grew. The caw of crows
rang in hoarse, nagging echoes.
One afternoon, a knock on her door:
two German soldiers in retreat,
without food, without sleep.
She let them in.
They slumped down in the chairs.
Frost lilies shrouded the windows.
In the bedroom, a loaded revolver
pressed cold steel into slips and brassieres.
She stared at those frost-red, fear-eaten
young boys’ faces, flecks of snow
on their coats and hair —
then turned toward
the kitchen, and made them tea.
They cupped numb fingers
around the porcelain
and swallowed sips of heat.
A salvo of shooting
ricocheted far-off in the street —
She touched her hand to her mouth.
They nodded and hurried out,
turning into footsteps, then silence.
Sunday, she wanted to light
two more candles, two draft-torn
hearts of flame, but didn’t dare.
~ Oriana
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‘We were sure the Russian army would protect us’: fury after Ukrainian incursion into Kursk
As tens of thousands flee their homes in border region, many say government downplayed threat of invasion.
Lyubov Antipova last spoke to her elderly parents almost two weeks ago, when she first heard rumors of a Ukrainian incursion, and begged them to leave their village in Russia’s Kursk region.
The threat seemed unreal – Russian soil had not seen invading forces since the end of the second world war – and Russian state media initially dismissed the invasion as a one-off “attempt at infiltration”, so Antipova’s parents, who keep chickens and a pig on a small plot, decided to stay in Zaoleshenka.
The next day, Antipova saw photos online of Ukrainian soldiers posing next to a supermarket and the office of a gas company. She recognized the place immediately: her parents live about 50 meters away.
“All those years my parents didn’t think they would be affected,” Antipova told the Observer by phone from Kursk, carefully avoiding using the word “war”, which has been officially outlawed in Russia. “We were sure the Russian army would protect us. I’m amazed how quickly the Ukrainian forces advanced.”
Ukraine’s incursion into Russia has laid bare the apparent complacency of Russian officials in charge of the border. Many local people accuse the government of downplaying the Ukrainian attack or misinforming them of the danger.
The Kursk incursion caught Alexander Zorin, a custodian of the Kursk Museum of Archaeology, at an excavation site in the village of Gochevo, where he and his colleagues have been digging the 10th- and 11th-century burial mounds every summer for three decades.
Zorin thought the buzz of drones, jets and thud of artillery was routine since his team had witnessed a similar activity during two previous summers. Sudzha, the epicenter of the offensive, was 40km away.
“Officials’ reports were not scary at all: ‘100 saboteurs went in’ – but then it went up to 300, 800 … It was impossible to get a clear picture,” he said. “We decided to leave only after we saw locals who had been evacuated from there and told us to go.”
The official evacuation from the area was declared a day later.
Many in Kursk blame the government and state media for keeping them in the dark in the face of mortal danger, with outraged residents sharing messages on social media.
“I don’t even know who I hate more now: the Ukrainian army that captured our land or our government that allowed that to happen,” Nelli Tikhonova wrote on a Kursk group at the VKontakte website.
On Tuesday evening, when Ukrainian troops were already in Sudzha, Channel One news claimed the Russian army had “prevented the violation of the border”.
The next day President Vladimir Putin kept referring to a “situation in the border area of Kursk”, eschewing any mention of the incursion into Russian territory.
For days, state television has been showing military bulletins, reporting successful Russian attacks on Ukrainian troops in the “border area” without specifying if a foreign army was still on its soil. State media has covered the plight of tens of thousands of displaced Russians who fled their homes before any evacuation was organized – but state TV mostly calls them “temporary evacuated people”, not refugees or IDPs (internally displaced persons).
Russia’s emergency officials eventually put the number of IDPs from Kursk at 76,000. Air raids have become routine in Kursk, a city of about a million people, with many locals ignoring the sirens or sheltering in safer spots, said Stas Volobuyev.
But it was the influx of displaced Russians from the border areas that brought home the reality of war just a few dozen kilometers away.
“Things happened in the past two and a half years but the scale was completely different,” Volobuyev said. “I work in the city center, and every day I see people queueing for humanitarian aid. There are so many refugees, they have nothing. People had to flee in shorts and flip-flops.”
Volobuyev, whose wife is volunteering to help the IDPs, and Antipova, whose parents have not been heard from since the day of the attack, laments the failure to help the refugees and to stop the incursion.
The Kremlin has earmarked 3bn roubles (£26m) on a fortification line in the Kursk region, and a new territorial defense force was supposed to ward off the incursion. Antipova recalled seeing a high number of border guards during her last visit to Sudzha in May but spoke bitterly of the community having to crowdfund for troops stationed there.
“Locals were bringing them supplies. I’m really annoyed that the government and the army keep saying the troops have all they need – while we had to chip in for drones and underwear.”
As Sudzha was plunged into a communications blackout, Antipova went to IDP centers in Kursk to look for her parents. Liza Alert, a nationwide charity for missing people, said on Friday it has missing notices for nearly 1,000 people in the region.
The last thing Antipova heard from the village was that an elderly neighbor had also stayed put, which makes her hope that the man and her parents would “go to the basement and sit it out”. She had little hope of the official response after others saw “there’s a war on, and officials were doing nothing”.
“It’s scary when you see you’re on your own and you have no one to turn to,” she said. “Volunteers are doing the work. Local authorities are nowhere to be seen.” ~
Elena Gold:
It is 11th day of the Ukrainian incursion in the Kursk region, and by now it’s revealed something strategically important: the Russian Federation does not have an army to "advance all the way to the English Channel" as they threatened.
Sure, Russian troops can raze to the ground Ukrainian villages in Donbas with their aerial bombs and fill them with corpses of their stormtroopers, thrown in “meat attacks” by Russian commanders with no pity or count. They can still fire missiles at Ukrainian cities, although most of them get shot down.
But Russia does not have an army to defend its own territory.
It was first shown by Yevgeny Prigozhin, who managed to pass with a military convoy nearly all the way to Moscow (shooting down Russian planes and helicopters as they went).
And now it’s shown by the Ukrainian armed forces. Even in the fortified border regions with Ukraine, after 10.5 years of the military conflict — and 2.5 years of the full-scale war, even there the Ukrainians just rolled in and Russians began surrendering by hundreds.
Truly embarrassing for Putin — and it can get worse.
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HAMAS AND “RUNNING AMOK”
There is a phenomenon first observed in Malaysia, another Muslim country, called “running amok.” It's actually classified in psychological manuals as “Amok Syndrome.” The sufferer, in the face of unsupportable shame and humiliation and with no possible hope of relief, arms him or herself and goes on a public murder spree intended to result in their own deaths at the hands of the authorities. In the US we call it “suicide by cop.”
Hamas is in an untenable situation. They rely utterly on the charity of others, including their hated enemies, the Jews. All attempts at defeating Israel have been squelched. Their support among their fellow Arabs is fading away and they find themselves increasingly dependent on the hated Shiites and liberal Westerners.
There is no scope for advancement or success in Palestinian society. Things are so bad that strapping on a suicide vest and blowing something up is a legitimate career path for many young Palestinian men. A martyr's death seems preferable to an ignoble, dishonorable existence.
The intent of the October 7 massacre was to commit a crime sufficiently vile as to enrage the Israelis and elicit a no-holds-barred, full-scale attack that would kill everybody in Gaza, man, woman, and child. It's the Freudian Death Wish (another Jewish contribution, goddamit), Muslim style.
They want to die. They want us to kill them. Israel's scrupulously humane prosecution of this urban war campaign (approximately an eighth of the number of civilian deaths expected in this sort of fighting) is even more humiliating. They can't even beg for death right!
Sucks to be them almost as much as it sucks to deal with them. ~ Marc Clamage, Quora
Ellyn:
Take hate curriculum out of schools and mosques. Allow women to vote and hold jobs, create a market economy as a start. Do not throw unearned money at the problem and watch it funnel into terrorists hiding in Qatar, Iran, Lebanon and Syria. Don't pretend you didn't know the money allowed in was building tunnels and bombs.
Leopoldo Suarez: THE PATH THEY CHOSE 50 YEARS AGO
They are a defeated people who act as such. The path they chose 50 years ago (corrupting the minds and souls of their children) brought them nothing but misery and dishonor.
Young Arab boys being trained to kill
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BEYOND MOTHERING: ANN PATCHETT AND MATERNAL AMBIVALENCE
For a long time, I didn’t realize that my irritation at society’s oppressive prescription for motherhood was anything more than my state of being. This frustration buzzed on the periphery of my awareness so persistently, became a thing so familiar, that I didn’t acknowledge or identify it. When I finally did, it was through literature.
Ann Patchett is one of the most effective novelists today on maternal ambivalence, precisely because she writes compelling, full characters who unapologetically commit to decisions about their own maternity. This distinction from most other novels helped me to see that I was not alone.
Giampietrino: Diana the Huntress
In 2013, Ann Patchett gave a reading at Politics & Prose bookstore in my hometown of Washington, DC.
In retrospect, I can see I was at an extremely vulnerable place in my life. I was still finding my feet, following a split from my long-time, mortgage-sharing, dog co-parenting boyfriend. I was in my thirties, single, and had achieved none of the life milestones many of my contemporaries already had.
And then Patchett signed my copy of State of Wonder, adding, “Monica, live a life of wonder.”
I went away thinking about how to do that. I had allowed my relationship to limit my choices; I put off grad school at his request, and buried my ambition to be a writer so that I could contribute financially to our lives together. But in the aftermath of our split, I was only lonely. When I confided this to my stepmother, who was home with my two much younger half-sisters, she laughed and said, “I’d love to be lonely sometimes.”
It sparked an idea for me: what if, instead of alone, I was free? It took some time, but I eventually summoned the courage to enroll in an MA in Creative Writing in London.
When I was asked to choose a book for the module on Reading as a Writer, I chose State of Wonder because of its impressive plot and structure. It is a literary adventure, with the protagonist, Marina, searching the Amazon for a missing person who may have discovered a miracle infertility treatment. When I began my doctoral research on literary characters who expose the “maternal instinct” as a myth, I returned to State of Wonder and discovered a new reading of it: Marina does not want children, goes on a life-altering trip, and bonds with an orphaned child. Her decisions about that child’s future are wrenching and complicated, and interrogate many of the tropes we often read about motherhood.
I soon realized that there are more examples of non-maternal characters in Patchett’s novels. Like, almost all of them. And although it took me many years to connect the dots, Patchett’s heroines set an example for me that society broadly does not offer.
Patchett has been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, won the PEN/Faulkner Award, and was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Biden. She is a celebrated author, and yet this prominent element of her work is not widely discussed: most of her novels feature a mother who is missing or a woman who is ambivalent about motherhood. Critically, the reason for the mother’s behavior is rarely explained, and never sufficiently for the children left behind. Generally, the mother is not a bad person. Sometimes she’s even a very good person, objectively speaking.
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The Patron Saint of Liars, Patchett’s first novel, was published in 1992. Each of three sections of the novel are told from the point of view of a different protagonist, but the first narrator, Rose, is the central character. Rose is young, Catholic, married, and pregnant. When we meet her, she is fleeing her old life for a home for unwed mothers, where she will continue her pregnancy and give the baby up for adoption. She decides that her penance for abandoning her husband and child will be to sacrifice her relationship with her mother—the worst thing she can imagine. She tells no one where she is going, and, of course, tells no one at the home that she is actually married.
This is a dramatic opening for a novel, but things settle down as Rose makes friends in the home. All the other women wish they could keep their babies, but they are unmarried and ashamed of being pregnant. Most plan to labor in secret for as long as possible so that they have more time with their babies before the adoptive parents carry them away.
Rose does not explain herself to anyone—even the reader—but when her friend goes into labor, Rose suddenly marries the only man on the grounds, and they keep her baby. While some may read her decision to keep her child as her “maternal instinct” kicking in, she can’t bear to stay; her initial instinct to leave her first husband and give up her baby were the “right” ones for her. We don’t get an explanation from Rose on her abandonment of her daughter and second husband, but that is because she can’t see her ambivalence as a lack; it was never there.
This is the trait all Patchett’s heroines share: their actions are inexplicable until they suddenly shape into the most predictable behavior we can imagine. Rose’s decisions are driven by a persistent see-saw between guilt and self-preservation. She does not want children or marriage, but she believes she must make these traditional choices. Her need to conform consistently and predictably undermines her own desires, but she can never sustain her adherence to others’ expectations of her.
In The Magician’s Assistant, the protagonist, Sabine, is clearly a caregiving figure, but spends her life fully committed to a gay man, giving up on the hope of having children. The novel Run includes several mothers, but their roles are shifted and traded in such a way that force the reader to question the bounds of maternity and fertility.
Nearly thirty years after The Patron Saint of Liars, Patchett’s eighth novel The Dutch House (2019) features siblings Danny and Maeve, who have been abandoned by their mother, Elna. As adults, they learn Elna’s reasons for leaving. Narrated only by Danny, this novel is less about understanding his mother’s inexplicable actions, and more about whether her children can forgive her.
The disclosure of Elna’s motivation is something of an evolution in Patchett’s work. Like in her first novel, we see how the children were affected by the mother’s desertion, but in this case, even without the benefit of direct narration, we do get an explanation from Elna. Danny is unsatisfied, however, reporting “Of course it wasn’t just the house or the husband. There were the two children sleeping on the second floor who went unmentioned.” This narrative shift leads neatly on to Patchett’s latest novel, featuring the maternal narrator Lara, Tom Lake.
The clever structure of Tom Lake gives the reader access to Lara’s private memories, alongside the slightly censored version of her life as she shares it with her adult daughters. Her life story begins by merely falling into a short-lived acting career and even shorter-lived relationship, but what follows is a series of considered decisions to achieve what she actually wants for herself—not least of which is an abortion. “A nurse stood beside me and held my hand and I’m here to tell you, I felt nothing but grateful.” Her explanation is succinct and powerful, conveying even more conviction than Rose or Elna ever does.
Rose is conflicted and unhappy because she accepts obligatory roles. Elna is more peaceful because she has done what she believes to be right, even while feeling guilty for leaving her children. Lara may seem, on the surface, to have conceded a more traditional role—she works on an orchard, is happily married and has three wonderful daughters. If she were on Instagram, she might be a tradwife. But her life has been full, and she has demonstrated a commitment to pursuing things that make her happy, no matter how others perceive her choices.
Tom Lake is not without maternal ambivalence, however. When Lara’s eldest daughter Emily announces that she will not have children, Lara responds in an all-too-familiar way: “’You never know.’ I try to make my voice neutral. ‘You might change your minds later on.’” She doesn’t mean it in the condescending way this feedback is usually delivered; she means that she has changed her mind about what she wants and doesn’t want Emily to be afraid to do the same.
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Women who choose a different path to motherhood have more prevalent role models today than they did even ten years ago, yet since the 1990s, Patchett has portrayed full lives beyond motherhood—providing a counter-narrative to the one prescribed by society. In fact, Patchett has discussed her own decision to not have children and the backlash she faced. In 2011, she told The Guardian “I never wanted children, never, not for one minute, and it has been the greatest gift of my life that even as a young person I knew. It freed me up tremendously. Children are wonderful but they’re not for everybody, and yet it never stopped. To constantly have people tell me that I didn’t know my own mind and I didn’t know my body was kind of outrageous.”
Just because someone can be a mother does not mean they want to be a mother. Patchett’s ambivalent mothers are complete, in spite of their failures. In fact, their lives and their children’s lives are perhaps more full thanks to the mother’s willingness to interrogate her own desires. The beauty of Patchett’s work is that her characters progressively do not bend to societal expectations, but her novels are not explicitly about maternal ambivalence. They are about people in dogged pursuit of their best lives—like us all.
https://lithub.com/beyond-mothering-considering-ann-patchetts-novels-of-maternal-ambivalence/
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IS DOING ABSOLUTELY NOTHING THE SECRET OF HAPPINESS?
Few of us have the money to take a long pause from work or caring responsibilities. But, as I found, even a day can make a difference.
You might imagine that escaping from your everyday life would involve relocating to a Hebridean croft or attending a series of rejuvenating retreats. But, according to Emma Gannon’s new book project, A Year of Nothing, it could be as simple as staying at home.
“I did nothing,” writes Gannon. “I stopped replying to emails. I used my savings. I slept. I borrowed a friend’s dog. I ate bananas in bed. I bought miniature plants. I read magazines. I lay down. I did nothing. It felt totally alien to me.”
For Gannon, the sabbatical was enforced after she experienced burnout, caused by chronic exhaustion from occupational stress. “All the while, I was keeping diaries,” she says. “Writing down the ‘nothingness’ of my days. I journaled all the things I noticed, the stuff I usually ignored, the people I met, the kindness of strangers, the magical coincidences – the smallest, tiniest uplifting glimmers.”
Am I alone in feeling a surge of envy reading Gannon’s litany of aimlessness? It’s not even as if I’m in need of a break. Recently I went on a relaxing holiday to Málaga. I admired the Pompidou Centre, stared out to sea at the distant blur of Morocco and guzzled bitter-orange-filled dark chocolate from the supermarket. In other words, bliss. On my return after two weeks, I plunged back into my working life recharged and raring to go. But, inexplicably, days later, I found myself intensely craving more time off, and experiencing a low-level discontentment that only intensified in the following days.
Was I having some kind of existential breakdown? I turned to the psychologist Suzy Reading, author of Rest to Reset: The Busy Person’s Guide to Pausing With Purpose, for advice. She suggested that, like many people, I probably struggle to identify what kind of rest I need. “For people who do a lot of socializing and interacting with other people for their work, they might find that what they actually need to replenish is silence and solitude.”
This definitely struck a chord with me, an extrovert who gets energized from being around others, but I was skeptical that spending time alone could possibly be rejuvenating. “If you are struggling to recharge, a good place to start is by thinking about how you normally use your mind and body. Ask yourself, what kind of environments are you in on a daily basis?” says Reading. She cites the example of a teacher who spends all day guiding and directing others. In that case, taking a break might involve allowing someone else to make decisions, even if it’s just where to go for dinner.
“Many people often confuse rest with sitting down quietly. But given that many of us spend our working lives sitting, staring at a screen, for some, a better form of rest might involve listening to music or doing some form of movement. For some people, rest might involve embarking on a creative project, which allows them to express themselves in a new and different way.” Taking a very large chunk of time out, perhaps a year, is obviously not financially viable for most of us. But the good news is, it’s not necessary.
“The key is to allocate some time out from the hurly burly of life to reclaim some headspace,” says Reading. “If we make time to step away from our routines, it gives us a chance to realize what we can’t wait to get back to. It can help us to appreciate the things we actually enjoy.”
This all sounds great but my Calvinist work ethic is too strong to take more than a day or two off.
“Even though my book is called A Year of Nothing, you can just do a weekend of nothing,” suggests Gannon, although she warns that doing so may provoke pushback. “People are always asking me what I’m up to at the weekend and I regularly say: ‘Nothing’. The response is often: ‘Surely you have some plans’, and I reply: ‘Nope, none.’
Indeed, some people find that taking time out prompts a surge in productivity. Tamu Thomas, the author of Women Who Work Too Much, believes that, as a society, we do not value rest. “We need to understand that it is what fuels everything else in our lives. There’s an American sports coaching maxim that states: ‘The rest is just as important as the race.’ It’s so true.”
A former senior social worker, Thomas was conditioned from a young age by her Sierra Leonean family to value productivity and achievement over relaxation. She began researching the mind-body connection of taking adequate rest after she experienced a severe panic attack before giving evidence on a high-profile case. “I discovered the work of physician and researcher Saundra Dalton Smith. Her Ted Talk explains that we actually need seven different types of rest: physical, mental, emotional, sensory, creative, social and spiritual.
” Thomas observes that for many of us, particularly women, emotional rest is often the one that is most overlooked. “For those of us who are conditioned to over-function and who believe that our value comes from caretaking in every sphere of our lives, emotional rest is one of the most necessary types of taking a break. In order to address that, you need to start identifying the people that compromise your emotional well-being and then make choices about whether you want to carry on engaging with those people.”
It can be helpful to make time away from your responsibilities a regular part of your life, even if that presents logistical challenges. Shirley-Ann O’Neill, an art adviser and director of the Visual Artists Association, organizes her life around taking a reset week every seven weeks. “I intentionally leave my diary open without firm plans, allowing for spontaneous moments of rest and rejuvenation. I enjoy a leisurely morning with a cup of tea, going for peaceful walks in nature to clear my mind, engaging in creative pursuits like journaling or painting, and having impromptu outings to explore new places or try new cuisines. I’m a busy mum of three so this really helps to rest me. At first I felt guilty; now it’s an absolute must.”
Sometimes it takes a traumatic life event for someone to realize that they need to step back and reprioritize. When she lost her mother, and then a close friend, health mentor Sophia Husbands decided to make 2023 a reset year. “Circumstances meant it wasn’t appropriate to go jetting off somewhere,” she says. So she took radical steps at home. She used her savings and scaled back her freelance work to allow herself to re-evaluate her life. She reviewed her core values (a coaching exercise favored by personal development authors such as Brené Brown) and conducted a relationship audit.
“I looked at all the people in my life and asked myself whether they were making me feel neutral, depressed or uplifted. I analyzed both old and present relationships and determined who was not making me feel good. I decided to cull people who were not serving my best interests, and felt much better.”
I decide to try a reset of my own, and plan a mini sabbatical one Sunday. Unfortunately, I soon realize that unless I impose a structure of aimlessness from the start, I’m liable to just loll around doomscrolling. I go back to Gannon, who suggests: “Look at your diary and ask yourself, what can you get out of doing? Find things to cancel. You might be surprised because a lot of the stuff we feel obliged to do, we don’t really need to do at all.”
I find this surprisingly difficult. I don’t like letting people down but I press ahead anyway, although I do justify it because it’s for an article. “Sorry, I can’t make it, I’ve got to work,” I tell a family member, and then a good friend I was looking forward to seeing.
I go for an aimless walk to a park that I rarely visit. It’s a gray day yet it is surprisingly beautiful. I sit on a bench and watch the world go by, then head home and wonder how on earth I am going to spend the evening.
I do more ironing than I have done for the rest of this year put together, then I go through the laborious process of repotting a snake plant. How can it only be 7pm?
In truth, I go to bed early with the sense that this has all been a massive time-wasting exercise and feeling pretty grumpy. Next morning, though, it’s a different story. For once, I’ve slept soundly all night and have had an unusually vivid dream that has provided the answer to a problem I’ve been grappling with for some time. That morning, I have an idea for a new project. As I go about my day in an uncharacteristically cheerful mood, I realize something I’m sure wise sages have always known: doing nothing much can be surprisingly productive.
“CROSSING”: A JOURNEY TO ACCEPTANCE
Unfolding against the backstreet cobblestones and packed tenements of Istanbul, Levan Akin’s sophomore feature Crossing tells a quietly evocative—if familiar—tale of regret and unforeseen connections.
Retired Georgian teacher Lia (Mzia Arabuli) sets out to fulfill her sister’s dying wish of finding her long-lost transgender niece, Tekla, years after her transphobic parents disowned her. In Lia’s search, she’s saddled with an unlikely companion when a former student’s scrappy, ne’er-do-well younger brother Achi (Lucas Kankava), hungry to leave his tiny Georgian town behind, offers her Tekla’s new address—on the condition that she take him with her to Istanbul.
Despite their easy chemistry, the film’s premise runs the risk of falling into a tired, outdated trope: centering a trans person’s well-meaning yet ignorant cisgender loved ones at the expense of more nuanced explorations of queerness.
It’s the introduction of Crossing’s third lead, trans sex worker–turned–legal volunteer Evrim (Deniz Dumanli), that ultimately elevates it from its more formulaic trappings. Dumanli brings a lived-in warmth to Evrim, whose realistic day-to-day scenes serve as a direct counterpoint to Lia’s assumption that Tekla’s community is defined by isolation and debauchery.
It’s Lia who is most often alone, roaming her niece’s new city like a specter until her two younger companions draw her into the bustling subcultures around her. As Achi enlists Evrim to help them in their search, they find themselves in the homes of Istanbul’s tight-knit trans community, and Lia has no choice but to confront the ways in which she could have showed up for Tekla had she confronted the conservative rationale proliferating around her sooner.
As an opening title card points out, Georgian and Turkish languages are gender-neutral. So if gender is inconsequential in our characters’ languages, why should it matter so much in the real world?
An on-the-nose fantasy-realist climax aside, the film isn’t interested in pat resolutions for its characters’ wanderings. Thanks to Akin’s eloquent character studies, Crossing lingers in the mind far longer than its rudimentary setup would suggest.
https://chicagoreader.com/film/movie-review/review-crossing/
from ebert.com:
“Istanbul is a place…where people come to disappear.” This is the sad conclusion arrived at by late in this moving film by one of its principal characters, Lia, a stern-faced older woman who has crossed over into the Turkish capital from the Black Sea’s Batumi, a desolate-looking spot in Georgia. A retired school teacher, she has left her home after making a promise to her now-dead sister. The promise was to find that woman’s child, who’s living in Turkey. All Lia has to go on is a name, and the fact that the now-adult child is transgender.
The movie, written and directed by Levan Akin, begins in the messy, tumultuous house where Achi, a young man who’s for all intents and purposes still a boy, lives miserably under the thumb of his older brother. Lia happens by the house, is recognized by one of its residents, and on the spot Achi concocts a tale, saying he knows the niece, Tekla, and has an address for her. He attaches himself to Lia, who accepts his company reluctantly, and soon they’re off, settling awkwardly in cheap lodgings and combing the poorer areas of Istanbul with not much to go on but hope.
The two actors who play Lia and Achi, Mzia Arabuli and Lucas Kankava, are marvels. Kankava has a wide-open face that registers Achi’s boundless naivete, which is always there no matter how cocky or obdurate he makes himself. Arabuli’s own expression as Lia is often pinched, but as time wears on her, and as she starts to let herself go in a “what the hell” sort of way — she likes to dip into a bottle of a fermented drink called “chacha,” a habit she initially tries to hide from Achi — a pained vulnerability makes itself felt. These are two lost souls who make an unlikely temporary fishbowl for themselves, far from homes they may never return to.
On one of their ferry rides, Akin’s camera makes a graceful camera move away from the anxious Lia and Achi and settles on the more content-in-the-moment face of a trans woman, whose story the movie then picks up. This is not, as is soon made clear, Tekla. The character’s name is Evrim, and she’s a woman who’s found a purpose. Near to completing a law degree, she works for a trans rights NGO that also looks into various cases in poorer neighborhoods; at one point we see her springing a young boy and his younger sister, who act on the peripheries of the movie’s central story threads, from jail. She’s confident and compassionate, enjoys a fairly robust sex life, but she’s subject to condescension — at best — from the various authority figures she’s obliged to deal with. Deniz Dumanli’s portrayal of the character is extraordinary, grounded, vanity-free.
Lia and Achi’s story will intersect with Evrim’s, but not right away. Akin is here working in a tradition established in Italian Neo-realism — and by the end of the film, he shows he can turn on the viewer’s tear ducts as deftly as De Sica did in his prime — but his narrative approach brings a vivid freshness to the proceedings. The camerawork he concocts with cinematographer Lisabi Fridell, often shooting through windows and doorways, often gives the viewer a “fly on the wall” feeling, but never becomes voyeuristic. It invites empathy, not titillation. And the movie’s portrait of Istanbul — roiling, unglamorous, and yes, packed with stray cats — makes the city a character in and of itself.
https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/crossing-film-review-2024
Languages, communities, lifestyles, borders, and values may separate us, but sadness and loneliness are universal, as is the desire to know ourselves and to find acceptance, forgiveness, and togetherness.
Crossing, writer/director Levan Akin’s film about an older Georgian woman searching for her trans niece in Turkey, understands and dramatizes that basic fact with an avalanche of empathy that’s all the more overpowering for being so gentle. Premiering in U.S. theaters on July 19 following its world premiere at February’s Berlin International Film Festival, it’s one of the year’s brightest, and most moving, imports.
In the small coastal Georgian town of Batumi, retired teacher Lia (Mzia Arabuli) arrives on the doorstep of a former student named Zaza (Levan Bochorishvili) who’s busy chastising his younger brother Achi (Lucas Kankava) for taking his car without permission. This is clearly not the first time the siblings have bickered over such matters, yet they pause their fighting long enough to invite Lia inside for a drink, over which she informs them that she’s looking for her niece Tekla, whose mother (Lia’s sister) has recently passed away.
Zaza claims ignorance about Tekla, but Achi remembers that she’s one of the trans girls who lived nearby until they were kicked out of their house. Upon departing, Lia is tracked down by Achi, who admits that he knew Tekla and has her address in Istanbul, where she’s living with friends. Arguing that he can speak a bit of Turkish and English (the latter from YouTube) and must get away from his brother, he convinces Lia to let him tag along on her quest.
With a head of curly black hair, a mole beneath her nose, and a stern expression consistently affixed to her face, Lia carries herself like a person with whom one does not trifle, and the younger Achi proves an initial annoyance to her. A brief trip to Lia’s house indicates that she had cared for her ill sister there. After gathering some tomatoes and cucumbers from the neighbor’s garden (and, in the morning, accepting a generous gift of pelamushi from them), Lia and Achi cross into Turkey, where he has never visited and she has only been once, years earlier. “It was all right” she says about Istanbul in her typically brusque manner. On their ensuing bus ride, Achi foolishly munches on the churchkhela being passed from passenger to passenger, and shortly thereafter winds up puking out the window—a sign of his immature irresponsibility.
Staring at a flirty woman on the bus, Lia remarks that Georgian women have lost all dignity. This suggests that Lia is a conservative with untoward opinions about the world into which she’s entering, and yet Crossing has no interest in being a simplistic scold. Once in Turkey, the duo board a ferry and director Akin’s camera lithely glides up and down stairs, considering the ship’s passengers and employees with the same casual warmth that it extends to its protagonists.
Those, it turns out, also include Evrim (Deniz Dumanli), a trans lawyer who disembarks from the same vessel and meets up with a friend, who chats with her about her latest boyfriend and her volunteering gig at an LGBTQ+-focused NGO. Evrim is in the process of getting her official female ID, and the way in which a doctor refuses to look at her during an office visit illustrates the everyday discrimination she endures, just as her decision to praise his hair on her way out demonstrates the kindness with which she faces it.
Lia and Evrim’s paths are fated to intersect in Crossing, although Akin’s script takes its time getting to its preordained destination, content as it is to travel alongside the aunt and Achi as they wander through bustling streets, up steep staircases, and down empty alleyways.
At every opportunity, the film reveals clues about its characters’ thoughts, feelings, and pasts through subtle expressions and interactions. That’s true whether it’s an encounter with a Georgian man that compels Lia to briefly come out of her shell (to unsuccessful ends), Evrim’s budding amour with a cabbie, or a chat with a trio of Turkish trans women who can’t understand anything Lia is saying (and vice versa) but who nonetheless share a moment when one of them is prompted to sing a melancholy song. Akin’s soundtrack is filled with similar woeful tunes, all of which reflect these individuals’ regrets, sorrow, and longing.
While Arabuli’s performance begins as an exercise in stone-faced dourness, the actress soon evokes the complex stew of emotions driving Lia forward on her mission. Her anger, despair, disgust, and self-recrimination are believable because they’re largely unarticulated and, moreover, uneasily reconcilable. Lia feels more than one thing about Tekla’s choices, as well as her own role in driving her niece to this place, and the film’s embrace of life’s untidiness bolsters its sympathy for her plight.
That additionally goes for its treatment of Achi and Evrim, who are likewise grappling with issues of rejection, alienation, and yearning for love and companionship. Crossing handles these dynamics with consistent deftness, such that even Lia and Achi’s surrogate mother-child bond resonates not as a schematic device but as an unexpected (if natural) outgrowth of their developing relationship.
Asked what she’ll do once she locates Tekla, Lia states that she has no future and thus no plans; “I’m just here until I’m not.” If she sounds forlorn, however, she isn’t without hope for reconciliation, absolution, and solace.
Crossing passes no judgment on its main characters, instead comprehending them from the inside out in all their knotty, contradictory, and ultimately optimistic glory.
Its spirit is so tender and welcoming that it’s impossible not to have enormous compassion for its wayward souls. Akin’s film is about estranged and adrift people who haven’t quit on mending themselves and the messes they’ve made (or have been saddled with), and its gracefulness and graciousness are equally enchanting.
In its poignant conclusion, Crossing offers little overt resolution but, in a vital sense, finds Lia completing the most important part of her odyssey. Akin doesn’t untangle his main character’s inner life; rather, he simply recognizes that healing is a process that both begins with oneself and is aided by those we allow into our lives and hearts.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/obsessed/crossing-review-years-brightest-and-most-moving-foreign-film
Oriana:
I agree with the reviews: this beautiful, melancholy movie subtly portrays a journey to becoming more accepting and emotionally giving. Lia starts out very hard-hearted; we get to see her gradual softening, opening up, and ultimately becoming accepting of those who choose a different path. In her fantasy* about meeting Tekla on a bridge — not an accidental location — Lia tells her niece that both her mother (in spirit, since she’s now dead) and aunt (i.e. Lia) completely accept Tesla’s right to live her own life, no matter what traditional taboos are broken. The family affection ends up being more important than the rigid views of a conservative society (i.e. Georgia, as contrasted with Istanbul, a vibrant metropolis more open to alternative lifestyles).
However, the movie completely skirts the issue of Islam and its oppressive gender stereotypes. At least once, we do hear a muezzin's call to prayer — but it blends with all the other sounds of the city, a choral symphony that speaks of inclusion rather than orthodoxy. In this city, which stands for humanity, no faith is the only true one — unless the faith in humanity, meaning that we are both good and bad, imperfect, in need of being forgiven and included. Crossing is ultimately a very loving movie.
Thus, even the scant portrayal if Islam is swallowed up by the drama of thousands of faces coming and going. It is indeed a city in which to disappear from those who insist on traditional lifestyle. It is also a city in which to let oneself go and dance, as Lia, once the best dancer in her village, discovers in what is perhaps the most joyful scene of the movie. Even aside from the dance, there is a kind of dance going on throughout the movie — there is a lot of movement, a lot of crossing of space — symbolic of the flexibility we need if we are to be truly a part of the current moment. Lia may be just a transient in Istanbul, but the city’s energy and openness to joy has transformed her and rejuvenated her. The grim older woman who thinks her life is finished becomes a warm and loving human being. We wish her love.
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I wish to thank Charles Sherman for convincing me it was indeed a fantasy.
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NARCISSISTS AND AGING
Narcissistic people get more empathetic, generous and agreeable with age, according to new research into the personality trait. But although their unreasonably high sense of self-importance may mellow, they do not fully grow out of it, the study involving more than 37,000 people suggests.
Those who were more narcissistic than their peers as children tended to remain that way as adults, investigators found.
And there are at least three types of narcissistic behavior to look for, they say.
WHAT IS A NARCISSIST?
Narcissist has become an insult often hurled at people who are perceived as difficult or disgreeable. We all may show some narcissistic traits at times.
Doctors use the term to describe a specific, diagnosable type of personality disorder.
Although definitions can vary, common themes shared by those who have it is an unshakeable belief they are better or more deserving than other people, which might be described by others as arrogance and selfishness.
The work, published in the journal Psychological Bulletin, comes from data from 51 past studies, involving 37,247 participants who ranged in age from eight to 77.
Researchers looked for three types of narcissist, based on behavior traits:
Agentic narcissists — who feel grand or superior to others and crave admiration
Antagonistic narcissists — who see others as rivals and are exploitative and lack empathy
Neurotic narcissists — who are shame-prone, insecure and overly sensitive to criticism
They studied what happened to these personality measures over time, based on questionnaires, and found that, generally, narcissism scores declined with age.
However, the changes were slight and gradual.
"Clearly, some individuals may change more strongly, but generally, you wouldn’t expect someone you knew as a very narcissistic person to have completely changed when you meet them again after some years," lead researcher Dr Ulrich Orth, from the University of Bern in Switzerland, told BBC News.
He says some narcissistic traits can be helpful, at least in the short term. It might boost your popularity, dating success, and chance of landing a top job, for example. But over longer periods, the consequences are mostly negative, because of the conflict it causes. "These consequences do not only affect the person themselves, but also the wellbeing of individuals with whom they interact, such as partners, children, friends, co-workers, and employees," he explained.
Dr Sarah Davies is a chartered counseling psychologist who has written a book on how to leave a narcissist. She told the BBC that although people may be arrogant or selfish at times, that should not be confused with true clinical narcissism. "Narcissists tend to be envious and jealous of others and they are highly exploitative and manipulative," she said. "They do not experience remorse or feeling bad, or have a sense of responsibility like other non-narcissistic people do.”
She says there has been a boom in interest about narcissism, driven by social media.
"To some extent that's helpful — it helps inform more people about it and to bring more awareness of this issue. However, like many mental health terms, the clinical meaning can get a little lost.
Dr Davies says we should be more discerning with the term. "I find it much more useful to be specific with naming behaviors and separate them. For example, a friend of mine recently called her ex a narcissist because he had ghosted her after they broke up. "
Being ghosted [suddenly cutting someone out of your life without explanation] is of course horrible, but he may not have been able to deal with a conversation after their relationship came to an end. It doesn’t necessarily mean he is a raging narcissist. "They were together a while and there were no other indications of his ‘narcissism'.
According to Dr Davies, some signs you may be involved with or around a narcissist include:
Constant drama — a narcissist needs to be needed and seeks chaos and conflict ;
No genuine apologies — they never really take full responsibility for their own behaviors ;
Blame game — they manipulate and exploit others for their own selfish gains .
Dr Tennyson Lee is a consultant psychiatrist with the Deancross Personality Disorder Service, based in the London borough of Tower Hamlets. He said the study was well-conducted and the findings were useful. "The good news is narcissism typically reduces with age. The bad news is this reduction is not of a high magnitude. "
Do not expect narcissism will dramatically improve at a certain age — it doesn’t.
"This has implications for the long-suffering spouse who thinks 'an improvement is just around the corner'," he told BBC News.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c2v0qq7z12qo
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THE POLITICS OF MARRIAGE
The institution of marriage isn’t doing so hot. In the United States, fewer Americans are getting married than ever before, while many are getting married later in life, if at all. What’s to be done about it? According to journalist Lyz Lenz, blow it all up and start over.
In This American Ex-Wife, a blistering memoir-meets-manifesto about the fraught gender politics of marriage and divorce, Lenz details how the end of her marriage became the beginning of her life. Raised religious and married at a young age, Lenz walked away from an unsatisfying partnership to rebuild her life on her own terms, only to discover that happiness, liberation, and freedom lay on the other side. “I believed that I would be a sad sack single mom, like you see in all the movies, but when I got to the other side, I realized, ‘This is actually great,’” Lenz tells Esquire.
Weaving together a detailed history of marriage, sociological research, cultural commentary, and a frank dissection of her own personal experiences, Lenz paints a damning portrait of marriage in America: “an institution built on the fundamental inequality of women,” as she describes it. Yet the book is also a rousing and exuberant cry for a reckoning—one where couples can love freely, leave freely, and build meaningful partnerships based on the full and equal humanity of men and women alike.
ESQUIRE: You write, “Divorce is both personal and political. Our governments sponsor and prop up the institution of marriage with tax breaks and incentives, while making it nearly impossible to be a single parent.” In what ways is divorce political?
LYZ LENZ: Heterosexual marriage is the way we organize our society. It's a political system, and you don't have to look far to see policy solutions that rely on marriage as opposed to funding SNAP benefits, funding Medicaid, and so on. This isn't just a Republican thing, either—Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama have all promoted marriage programs in order to combat poverty and save the government from having to fund necessities like healthcare and childcare. Marriage also forms the foundation for our tax base; this is how we determine who gets tax breaks and who doesn't, who's contributing to society and who isn’t.
Divorce cuts at the heart of our social order. If you set up your society around heterosexual marriage, then women realize that society relies on their unpaid labor, that's destabilizing. We're living through a time of political backlash where states across America are trying to pass policies that make it harder to get divorced. The party line is, "We have to support the American family," but if that was ever going to solve our problems, then we wouldn't have problems as an American society. There are studies out there that say, "If you want strong relationships, if you want marriages to last longer, if you want to decrease the rates of domestic violence, if you want kids to stay in school, then you liberalize divorce laws.”
When women have options, they make better choices, but that's getting lost in this discourse. Right now, it's incredibly hard to get a divorce—a 16-year-old has an easier time getting married in America than a 42-year-old woman does getting divorced. Divorce is political, but it's also personal, because it's where our politics meet the bedroom. It's really hard to parse out.
I'm reminded of what you write in the book about how our social order essentially relies on the subjugation of women: “We need women to buy into romantic partnerships so that they will become the social safety net that our leaders and politicians refuse to create.”
We create all these fantasies of love and happiness and equal partnership to get women's buy-in. Relationships are worth trying for—love is beautiful and valuable! But when it gets wrapped up into a political system, that's a problem. I know so many couples who say, "We're going to do this equally. We love each other and it's going to be wonderful." Then they get five years in, have two babies, wake up one day, and say, "Wait a minute, how did we get here?" In a society that makes it impossible to afford childcare, they were always going to reach this point. In a society with a wage gap, the person whose job takes the hit will always be the wife. None of this is an accident. We would love to believe that we could love our way out of fundamental inequality, but we can't. We need to fundamentally rethink the system of marriage, and one of the best ways to do it is to liberalize divorce laws.
What makes getting divorced so hard, and what policy changes would make it easier?
It's hard culturally. People treat you like a pariah without even meaning to. I have wonderful friends, but I had to have some tough conversations with some of my coupled friends. I had to say, "You stopped inviting me to stuff and that really hurt my feelings. I miss you and I miss our friendship." Being vulnerable and rebuilding those relationships was really difficult. A lot of them said, "Oh my God, I'm so sorry. I thought you would be uncomfortable around couples."
So culturally, it gets really uncomfortable. So many women have asked me, "Why? What happened?" They wanted to know how bad it got in case they ever needed to leave. It becomes this destabilizing thing where you have to walk through people's insecurities while you're also going through your own tough stuff.
Politically, it's hard to get divorced, too. Even if it's amicable, there are waiting periods and laws. It takes a long time. It's expensive. You can roll into a courthouse to get a marriage certificate and roll back out, but with a divorce, you have to wait.
I'm sure you've seen the wave of op-eds advocating for more people to prioritize marriage; it all started with a David Brooks piece titled, "To Be Happy, Marriage Matters More Than Career." What do you think of this wave of discourse?
I'd love to fight David Brooks in the street over this column. He's basing this on some really flawed data from The Institute for Family Studies, which is a group that admitted to messing with their data during the gay marriage debate. They released all this data arguing that gay parents were bad for children, which was used in public policy discussions—then they later admitted that the data was flawed, and intentionally so. Journalists should think more critically about the data that they use. I'm an English major from a mid-tier college and even I can think more critically about this data than a New York Times opinion columnist.
That said, I think it's very telling that these cultural commentators latch onto flawed data. It makes them feel more comfortable. Nothing makes our society more uncomfortable than a liberated woman. We can't forget that 2017 was a huge year for women—we elected women at unprecedented levels and the #MeToo movement got a lot of men fired. That was deeply destabilizing, so it's not shocking to see this rollback. Marriage is a conservative institution that upholds social order, so whenever I see someone saying, "People just need to get married," or, "Marriage is hard work," my challenge is, "Who are you asking to sacrifice?" You make it sound egalitarian, but what you're asking is for women to give up their careers and take on additional labor.
The average man adds seven hours of labor to a woman's weekly workload. So what are you actually asking? "Marriage is hard work"—hard work for who? Who's making the therapy appointments? Who's hiring the babysitter? Who's cleaning the house and making dinner? I don't like to be gender essentialist, but when people say, "Marriage makes you happy," I do think it's important to ask, "Who? Why? How? Who is being made happy, and who's actually being made miserable?" A happy marriage makes you happy, but happy singlehood makes you happy, too.
The whole discourse is so anti-intellectual. I just wish we would think harder and have smarter conversations about it, but this isn't anything new. If shoving people into the institution of marriage fixed our society, we would have a fixed society. It's not about empowering people to be happy; it's about men being happy and women existing to support that happiness. I want better for my life. I want better for my children's lives. I was not put on this earth to be the crutch for someone else. I don't think you need a romantic relationship to live a full, happy life; you can find connection and joy in so many other ways.
The other thing we often hear in the op-ed industrial complex is that men are increasingly single and lonely, and apparently women should do something about that. What’s your response to that discourse?
Women's bodies are always the solution for male problems. Get a therapist like the rest of us! Women are also sad and lonely—we had a worldwide pandemic, millions of people died, everyone is sad and lonely, and somehow we're confused about why. If the requirement for your happiness is that someone else be miserable and make you food, is that real happiness? Your freedom should not rest on other people's unfreedoms. Your happiness should not rest on someone else's unhappiness. Men will feel alienated by that. Female liberation is always blamed for male alienation, but I refuse to believe that this is true. Again, the data shows that when women have freedom, everybody benefits. I hate this discourse because it's designed to shame women for being free. I think being happy is the most radical thing you can do. Fighting for a happy life, that shit is hard—it's harder than being married!
There's a whole industry designed to make women feel less miserable. I keep joking that if we liberalized divorce laws, the scented candle industry would tank, because women would suddenly be happy and wouldn't need all these products anymore. Men, have you tried reading a self-help book? Have you tried going to therapy? Have you tried texting your buddies and saying, "Hey, I feel sad. Anybody want to grab a beer?" There are very simple solutions for alienation. They should involve community; they shouldn't involve my inequality.
I really loved the chapter of the book about good men, and about the pervasive belief among not just men, but also the women in their lives, that they are “one of the good ones.” What’s your response to men who might read this book and think, “But I’m one of the good ones”?
If you have to insist upon your goodness, you do not have it. What's the bar for being a good man? We've got a really fucked up set of requirements for what it means to be "good," so if you're checking off all the masculinity boxes, that's not great. I have a newsletter and I'm always a little surprised when subscribers get defensive with me. I turn it back on them and ask, "Why are you insisting on your goodness to an internet stranger? What is it about what I’ve said that's made you feel so defensive?" Look at the statistics: there's a ton of data showing that even if you love your wife, you're still not doing the work you need to do, so go do it! If you're feeling defensive, go ask your wife, "Do I contribute?" If she says, "Thank you so much for asking—actually, you don't," then get better.
My publisher has been fantastic, but there was a conversation about how the title and cover of my book would make men feel. I said, "I'm done bending and pleading and trying not to step on the landmine of male feelings." I want men to feel uncomfortable when they see this book. I want them to feel on blast and on notice. Men's good feelings are not my job. My job is my liberation, and you can either get on board or not. I'm glad you liked the "not all men" chapter, because it was really important for me to write it. I actually don't care if you're good or not; I'm not always good! I don't think that life requires our goodness. We just have to be human, and I want to be just as human as any man is. To me, it's really not about the goodness of men—it's about the liberation and full humanity of women.
You do such a wonderful job of capturing why people fear and avoid divorce; I thought it was especially poignant when you wrote about how getting divorced means publicly saying to your community, “I was wrong,” and how hard that can be. How do you suggest that we as a culture reframe the way we think about divorce?
It requires reframing what we think of as a good relationship. We still have this cultural bias toward believing that a good relationship is a long relationship, and that's not always true. You can have a good, short relationship. We need to rethink, "What does success look like? What does happiness look like?"
If we learned one thing from 2020, it's that life is to be enjoyed, but we don't tell women to enjoy themselves. As a mother and as a wife, you always have to be nailing yourself to the cross or you're not good enough. My job is to get women off that cross. We need to rethink what a good relationship is and separate it from the idea of longevity, because not everything lasts forever, and that's okay. It's okay to quit and it's okay to change your mind. It's okay to say, "This was great, but it's not what I want anymore.”
What would you say to anyone out there who's divorce-curious?
I think there are a lot of people who are divorce-curious, and for a lot of them, the question is, "How bad does it have to be before I can leave?" I identify with that; I write about how I was looking at other people's miserable marriages and thinking, "I'm not as miserable as Shirley Jackson, so I can stay." I always say what my friend Anna told me; she said, "Your life is not a game of chicken. You don't have to wait for someone else to blink first before you swerve. Your happiness is enough of a reason." Your partner doesn't have to be a villain for you to be unhappy. That's why I wanted to write about the system of marriage, rather than making it an individual problem.
To the divorce-curious, I say: you're in a system that doesn't serve you, so of course it feels hard and of course you're unhappy. There are better ways to live. When I left my marriage, it's not because I thought being a single mom would be so fun. It was because I was so miserable that I couldn't stay. I believed that I would be a sad sack single mom, like you see in all the movies, but when I got to the other side, I realized, "This is actually great." According to a Pew study, 43% of Americans think that single motherhood is ruining our society, but being a single mom is the best thing I've ever done. Your happiness is not frivolous. You don't have to wait for someone else to blink first.
And I promise you, it's great on the other side. If you're divorce-curious, that's already telling you something about where you are and what you feel. I think that's a lot of people in America, and I wish them luck.
https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/books/a46789002/lyz-lenz-this-american-ex-wife-divorce-marriage-interview/
Mary:
It is undeniably true that our social system is built on the foundation of marriage and the nuclear family, and that marriage is based on the subjugation of women — easily demonstrated by the legal and tax structures, the economics of women's work and women's pay, and the frustrating failures of those couples trying to work out marriage as an equal partnership. The forces at work are historical, social and biological. They have existed for so long the "rules" and assumptions are almost unconscious, only obvious as constructs when analyzed from opposition...otherwise they seem simply "natural." That oppositional analysis has been the work of Feminists...oppression and injustice are seen, felt and lived by those on the bottom, and remain stubbornly invisible to those that benefit from the inequality. This remains true even after generations of struggle for equality.
I believe there can be no full freedom and equality for women as long as we remain unable to control and choose our reproductive lives. Without that power all other choices are circumscribed, limited and denied. Contraception and birth control are key to body autonomy — and that includes the ability to choose and have available safe and legal abortion. The lack of these things kept women from full and active agency in the world for most of history...made us limited and too often temporary creatures, who died or were physically depleted by constant pregnancies and childbirth, ignorance about the risks and dangers involved, and the complacency of men and their religions dictating that these trials and dangers were no more than woman's god ordained and inevitable lot.
Science and medicine have made women's freedom and equality possible. What we are witnessing now in the US is the fear of that freedom expressed by the Right wing male patriarchy in their determination to subvert those rights and freedoms, and force women back generations...back to where she has no choice nor ability to control her reproductive life. They even shore their repression up with fears about population decline — wanting to force, cajole, or bribe women back into producing lots of babies for the state. China and Russia have tried this to little effect. Here in the US they are working to eliminate choice by outlawing contraception (oh yes, they will) and abortion.
I believe motherhood should be a choice not a sentence. In order for that to come true many things must change, not just people's attitudes. Among the changes are all that has been mentioned, most importantly, social support for child care and child welfare, and support for mothers who are also workers and career women. We have a long hard way to go, but in many ways the current backlash is a measure of how much the unfreedom and inequality of women has been challenged. And we're not ready or willing to go back.
I could go on about the inequality embedded in marriage — another long hard struggle worked out by individuals with less than great success — and probably one of the most prevalent causes of conflict and dissatisfaction. But people still seem to want what marriage promises, even as long term unions seem to become rarer and rarer. It is hard for me to imagine a world without families.
Oriana:
Marriage is here to stay because it is a social contract. The state is supposed to enforce the financial obligations of the parents toward their offpsring. By the way, I know two women who kept paying child support; one (an artist) said that she wanted to experience pregnancy and giving birth, but not the daily chores of child rearing. As more and more people keep saying nowadays, she wanted to live her own life. She was fortunate to meet a man who was fine with that, and I think his parents (the child's grandparents) were supportive as well.
That support — and I mean doing the chores of child rearing, not just the money — is crucial if we want women to want to have children. Just yesterday I read in a mainstream source that only 45% of women wanted children. And it has become socially acceptable for a mother to say that if she could do it over, she wouldn't have had kids. That would have been unimaginable in the fifties or early sixties, where such an attitude would be regarded as "sick" or "selfish." Back then children were always "cute" and "sweet." Now it's OK to say that children are a lot of trouble and expense.
Perhaps it's become too normal to say that, from the point of view of collective welfare. Not that we should go back to the sexist fifties, but perhaps there should be some sincere voices in praise of parenthood. Above all, there should be more social support in the form affordable childcare and parental leave. And yes, easy access to birth control and abortion so that all children could know the joy of being wanted children.
I also like the saying that the abortion debate is not about whether a fetus is a person, but about whether a woman is. If she doesn't own her body and has no right to put education or career ahead of motherhood (which can be delayed until the circumstances are right), then she is a slave.
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JOE: A NON-TRADITIONAL DIVISION OF LABOR IN MARRIAGE
Oriana:
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HOMELESSNESS ISN’T ONLY ABOUT LACK OF HOUSING
You probably didn’t have a good answer. Bad luck? A shortage of housing supply and exploding prices? Mental illness? Addiction? Some combination of the four? But mostly you wish the answer wasn’t: “Because we live in an unfair society and we look the other way so that we can function.”
Kevin Adler is an activist and author of the book When We Walk By: Forgotten Humanity, Broken Systems, and the Role We Can Each Play in Ending Homelessness in America. He isn’t afraid of our children’s questions. In fact, he believes he has compelling and effective answers. Flying in the face of the learned helplessness that so many of us feel these days about the unhoused neighbors in our cities, Adler argues that we can stop compartmentalizing and actually do something about it.
I spoke with Adler about his book and how each one of us can be part of building a more hospitable country.
Courtney Martin: One of the fundamental arguments of this book is that homelessness isn’t just a result of economic poverty, but relational poverty. Can you explain what that is and why it’s so rampant?
Kevin Adler: Eleven years ago, I met a person experiencing homelessness named Adam who first attuned me to the concept of relational poverty. I’ll never forget his words: “I never realized I was homeless when I lost my housing, only when I lost my family and friends.”
Adam was in a very tenuous situation in life, but had been able to get by for a while through the support of his loved ones—staying with family, relying on friends for a bit of work or money, etc. When Adam’s access to social capital ran dry—perhaps due to an argument with a loved one, the unexpected death of a family member, or the like—his situation went from bad to worse.
Though we often think of poverty as a lack of financial resources, what Adam was describing was relational poverty, or the profound lack of nurturing relationships which, when combined with stigma and shame, leads to nearly unimaginable levels of isolation and loneliness among many individuals experiencing homelessness. As one unhoused neighbor put it in the early months of the pandemic, “You don’t need to teach me about social distancing, that’s my life already.”
Stories like Adam’s are not unique: As many as one in three individuals experiencing homelessness in the United States have lost their social support systems, attributing the immediate cause of their homelessness to a falling-out with or loss of a loved one.
Finally, to better understand the significance of relational poverty for so many of our unhoused neighbors, we can look upstream toward our housing insecurity neighbors more generally. With 40% of Americans self-reporting that they would not know where to get $400 for an unexpected emergency, and over one in two Americans one paycheck away from not being able to pay rent, it is actually surprising that more people are not experiencing homelessness. Given these stats, how is it possible that “only” 1-2% of people in the U.S. experience homelessness at some point over the course of the year, rather than 10 to 20 times that? I believe one of the main reasons is due to family, friends, faith-based groups, and other forms of social support helping people get by.
To paraphrase Bill Withers, we all need somebody to lean on. We ignore relational poverty at our own peril.
CM: I really appreciated how you delineated the different reasons that this kind of disconnection can go on for so many years—barriers to access, like internet and cell phone, and administrative issues, for example—but also the emotional fractures. Your nonprofit reconnects folks by jumping over some of the accessibility barriers, but how do you help people deal with the emotional depths of reconnection? Seems like a tall order.
KA: We consider our work to be a first step toward reconnection, and try to set expectations and provide support on all sides accordingly.
For example, in most of the reunion cases that our community of volunteer digital detectives work on each week, it has been years or even decades since the last contact occurred. Thus, the messages we deliver (and encourage) from our unhoused neighbors tend to be openers to re-engage: “I love you,” “I miss you,” “I’m sorry,” “I’m thinking of you,” “I want you back in my life,” “I’m still alive.”
Our staff and global community of volunteers have a mantra (well, several, but here’s one of them): You know your relationships better than we do. Sometimes, reconnecting is not appropriate or in the best interest of one or both parties; tragic cases abound of homelessness resulting from domestic violence, LGBTQ+ youth escaping an unsafe home environment, etc. Sometimes, bridges have been burned between a person experiencing homelessness and most of their loved ones, and family members choose not to reconnect. We don’t believe reconnecting is a one-size-fits-all solution to homelessness. But we know that for many of our unhoused neighbors, it is an essential step toward lasting stability and well-being.
Finally, I think it’s important to note that though the process of reconnecting can be incredibly emotional, the experience of homelessness itself is incredibly emotional, physically devastating, and very isolating—the most heartbreaking cardboard sign I ever saw read, “At least give me the finger.”
When I started this journey by spending a year helping a few dozen of our unhoused neighbors share their stories, I was struck by how many folks talked at length about loved ones who often were no longer in their lives—beloved siblings, favorite teachers, children who are now adults. In other words, it’s not like family isn’t on the minds of our unhoused neighbors.
CM: I was so sad to learn that homelessness is growing among those over 65 and that a quarter of people experiencing homelessness are under 25. What does it say about our society that we tolerate such harsh lives for our most vulnerable? Are there contemporary societies where this is not the case, and what can we learn from them?
KA: Homelessness is a policy choice. Thus, there are plenty of other places where homelessness is not nearly as prevalent as it is today in the United States.
As one example, Finland has received widespread recognition for successfully providing permanent housing without preconditions and wraparound support services to most of its people experiencing homelessness. In 1987, there were 18,000 people experiencing homelessness in Finland. In 2023, the figure had dropped to 3,429.
By contrast, in 1987, there were 500,000 to 600,000 experiencing homelessness in the U.S. According to the 2023 PIT Count in the U.S., that figure has increased to 653,104 people. If we prioritized affordable housing and a robust social safety net for our most vulnerable residents, we would have a much smaller population of people forced to live in shelters and on our streets.
CM: Why do we accept such a broken, costly status quo in the United States?
KA: I believe in large part it is due to another form of relational disconnection: Many of us “housed people” are just as disconnected from our unhoused neighbors as many of them are from their loved ones.
When I give a talk, I tend to ask my audience two questions: “First, how many of you care about the issue of homelessness?” Every hand shoots up. “Second, how many of you know someone who is currently experiencing homelessness?” In response to this question, never more than 5–10% of hands remain in the air.
I believe this disconnection is part of the problem, for we don’t know who “they” are, as the mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, sons and daughters, friends and neighbors that they are. Instead, we largely see people experiencing homelessness as problems to be solved, not people to be loved. I believe we have a duty to keep reminding ourselves of the fundamental humanity of our unhoused neighbors, lest we lose a bit of our own.
Consider the aftermath of a flood or wildfire. For a brief period of time, we tend to rally around those who were affected, organizing food drives, building shelters, creating online fundraisers and advocacy campaigns, or passing emergency ordinances, in what sociologist Charles E. Fritz described as the emergence of the therapeutic community. We don’t look at survivors of these disasters as deserving of their situation—very few would ask, “Well, did they have the right kind of flood insurance? Why did they choose to live in such a vulnerable area?”
And yet, when it comes to homelessness in the U.S., we maintain a mindset of rugged individualism, and wonder what the person did or what is wrong with the person to result in their situation.
I believe the way to overcome this narrow-mindedness is through relationships and storytelling.
CM: You make a lot of structural suggestions, but one of them is guaranteed income, based on your own successful pilot. Tell us more about that.
KA: I began as a skeptic about basic income. Not so much whether our unhoused neighbors would use the money in a way we might consider wise, but whether a few hundred dollars a month would be enough to help people experiencing homelessness meaningfully improve their lives, much less get off the streets.
Fortunately, our volunteer community was wiser than me. In 2020, we created a phone buddy program, which matches unhoused neighbors with trained volunteers for weekly phone calls and texts. Within a few months of its creation, our volunteers began asking whether we could provide some money to their unhoused friend. Through their interactions, trust was built, relationships were built, and, with it, the desire to see their friend succeed and an understanding of the multitude of barriers keeping them from doing so.
And so, in December 2020, we created what turned out to be the first basic income pilot for individuals experiencing homelessness in the U.S.
We gave $500 a month for six months to 14 participants in our phone buddy program, all of whom were nominated by their friends. Within six months, 66% of those who were homeless at the beginning of the program had secured stable housing. They used the money better than we could have used it for them: About one-third of funds were spent on food, another third was spent on housing, and the last third was spent on a mix of child care, storage, paying down debt, supporting family, and the like.
The initial “Miracle Money” pilot was very small, but it showed us what we needed to know to double down on direct cash. Today, we are in the final months of a $2.1 million randomized controlled trial, funded by Google.org and other foundations and individual donors, with research led by Dr. Ben Henwood and his team from the USC Dworak-Peck School of Social Work.
The preliminary results are very promising: Among people who received the $750-a-month payment, the proportion who reported spending time unsheltered in the past month decreased from 30% at baseline to under 12% at the six-month follow-up, which was a statistically significant change. For those in the control group, a modest decrease from 28% to 23% was not statistically significant.
Today, there are more than 100 communities across the U.S. and Canada that have pilot programs based on basic income, including some with a focus on homelessness such as the Denver Basic Income Project and the New Leaf Project out of Vancouver. We are excited to be part of this movement to trust people with the resources they need to better their lives.
CM: You encourage individuals reading the book to re-humanize “the homeless” in their own lives, neighborhoods, communities. What is the first step to doing that?
KA: If I can be a bit self-promotional in this last question: Consider volunteering with us as a phone buddy or digital detective at Miracle Messages and reading When We Walk By, as this is a major focus of the book! The awkwardness is normal at first, but no need to go through it alone.
Alcohol and drug addiction may lead to homelessness. "People who are homeless suffer from substance abuse and addiction at a greater rate than those who have homes. The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) estimates that roughly 38% of the homeless suffer from an alcohol dependency while 26% abuse drugs. Mar 8, 2024. We do have reasonably effective 12-step programs designed to deal with alcohol and drug addiction. I wonder why we don't hear more about collaboration between the AA and organizations dealing with homeless alcoholics.
Likehouse, perhaps we need more half-way houses and job-training programs, with secure housing provided already while the person is enrolled in the program.
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ANTONIO VIVALDI: IL PRETO ROSSO
Is it myth or fact that endlessly spirals around the famous "Red Priest" of 18th-century Venice, Antonio Vivaldi? What do we really know of this man's character and music? A number of biographical novels and films recently released or currently under way have used a handful of surviving documents to eroticize Vivaldi's life, but perhaps it's time to revisit the facts.
Vivaldi was born in Venice in 1678, the son of a professional violinist. His musical training was with his father but by 1693 he was taking steps to enter the priesthood as well. The year of his ordination, 1703, he was also engaged as music teacher by a home for foundlings, La Pietà, and it is here that the conjecture begins.
From 1703 to 1735, Vivaldi alternately, and at times simultaneously, played the role of music master and composer to the young girls living at La Pietà. Imagining Vivaldi in such a scene of temptation, in a role of both authority and intimacy among these vulnerable young women, has seduced writers and film-makers into fantasizing about the erotic potential of the scenario. It is easy to imagine a libidinous red-haired priest exploiting the privileges of the cloth, in an institution that even 17th- and 18th-century visitors described with thinly veiled salaciousness.
For the record, we know he had red hair, wore a habit and suffered from asthma, for which he was excused from having to recite mass. As to illicit affairs, we have nothing to go on.
A better documented trail leads to Vivaldi's muse, Anna Giro. In 1724, this promising young singer and her elder half-sister, acting as chaperone, moved in with Vivaldi. Anna first sang in one of Vivaldi's operas in 1726 and appeared in nearly all his operas after that. She was closely affiliated with him until the end of his life. Again, the titillating image of a "loose" priest comes up. In truth, this arrangement may not have been so shocking in an age in which priests traditionally maintained a life-long, live-in "perpetua" — a woman who dedicated her time to the priest as cook, house cleaner and general companion.
But Anna held a special place in Vivaldi's heart; in opera after opera he wrote roles specifically for her, molding the music to her particular vocal strengths and weaknesses. No other singer received such consistent attention and privilege from the composer. In 1738 Vivaldi was refused entrance to the city of Ferrara where his opera Farnace was to be performed. The city's new cardinal was making a moral point — his disapproval of a priest involved in the frivolities of the operatic world and living under the same roof as a female singer. But Vivaldi consistently denied any wrongdoing.
These are the scant facts we have to go on, and the basis for contemporary biographies. Looking further, an idea of Vivaldi's personality can be pieced together through a scattering of quotes by his contemporaries. Fully aware of his own exceptional talent, he was said to be proud, vain and quick to boast of his speed of composition. He was also sensitive to criticism, obsessed with money and volatile, but at the same time possessed a zest and enthusiasm that earned the admiration of those who knew him.
The Venetian playwright Carlo Goldoni has left us a vivid description of his first meeting with Vivaldi in 1735. He arrived to find the composer engrossed in meditational reading and describes him clutching his missal throughout the interview — signs of, at the very least, a modicum of religious conviction. To this should be added that Vivaldi signed many of his music scores, especially but not exclusively the operas and sacred music, with an extravagant dedication to the Virgin Mary.
Finally, we have the phenomenal amount of music Vivaldi left: hundreds of concertos and endless pages of sacred music. From 1710, Vivaldi was pre-eminently a composer for the stage, writing some 50 operas; though fewer than 20 have remained intact, this is enough to show that they represented his ultimate passion and greatest achievement.
To most people, Vivaldi is synonymous with one masterwork, The Four Seasons. To be sure, this is a great piece and one of the earliest and finest instances of program music, but the elements that make it so attractive — syncopation, quick rhythms and harmonic changes coupled with highly expressive melodies — can be found in 500 other of his concertos. The celebrated phrase insinuating that Vivaldi wrote the same concerto hundreds of times (said to have been coined by Dallapiccola, repeated by Stravinsky and echoed thereafter) ought perhaps to be construed positively. This is a composer with a marked style, true, but gifted with the ability to infinitely vary his eloquent melodies and harmonic sequences.
The Vivaldi Edition, a 15-year project to record the immense quantity of his music, and of which I am director, has set out to create a complete aural documentation of it all. When the project is completed, more than 100 titles will have been released in recordings that reflect interpretations by many of today's most eminent performers, combined with the research of leading scholars. It is here, in his greatest legacy, the music, that further clues into Vivaldi's intriguing character may be found and, I dare say, the greatest pleasure derived.
It is the less well-known and more recently discovered operas that are perhaps the most revealing of his works. With the lyrics providing the emotional setting, Vivaldi, a consummate word painter, expresses pathos, fury, madness, longing and love with striking emotional force. All this can be heard in his 1719 opera Tito Manlio, which gets a rare performance under Ottavio Dantone in London on February 19. At first, sit back, close your eyes and listen to the arias. Should you lack the will to delve into the convoluted text in an attempt to discern who's who in the thick plot of cross-dressing and couple-swapping, have no fear; at this early stage in the history of opera, you can go without. Let the music guide you to your own conclusion as to what kind of man Vivaldi was. What you will find is music with an infectious joie de vivre and an emotional depth that has an exhilarating impact on the listener every time.
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2008/feb/15/classicalmusicandopera
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REMOVING METHANE MAY BE THE BEST WAY TO DEAL WITH GLOBAL WARMING
Cumulative emissions matter the most for longer-lived gases such as carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide. Cumulative emissions of carbon dioxide since 1850 are about two and a half trillion tons—from all the coal mines ever dug, all the oil and gas ever burned, and all the net losses of carbon in trees and soils from deforestation, agriculture, and other changes on land. A trillion tons is an unfathomable number—about three million Empire State buildings worth of mass.
Restoring the atmosphere in a lifetime—returning concentrations to preindustrial levels—is impossible for carbon dioxide. It would mean removing a trillion tons of pollution now in the air. No one reading this book will live long enough to see that happen; the quantities are too vast, today’s emission rates are too high, and carbon dioxide lasts too long in the atmosphere. The same is true for nitrous oxide.
But for methane we need to remove “only” two or three billion tons to restore the atmosphere to preindustrial levels. (In comparison, three billion tons is roughly one month’s worth of current carbon dioxide emissions.) My dream is to see this happen in my lifetime.
If we want to slow global warming by reducing greenhouse gas concentrations over the next decade or two, reducing atmospheric methane concentrations is the best—and perhaps only—lever at our disposal to shave peak temperatures and delay crossing critical temperature thresholds, such as 1.5 and 2°C global increases.
Most methane is cleansed from the atmosphere naturally within a decade of its release, split by sunlight and nature’s detergents. Because of this short lifetime, if we could eliminate all human-caused methane emissions from agriculture, fossil fuels, and fire—a huge if—methane’s concentration would return to safer preindustrial levels within a decade or two. If that doesn’t happen, we will need to actively remove it from the atmosphere to reduce peak temperatures.
In the 2010s, methane was responsible for about 0.5°C of global surface warming compared to the late 1800s. Carbon dioxide contributed a little more, about 0.75°C warming over the same period. Other gases warmed the Earth, too, particularly nitrous oxide (almost 0.1°C), with another 0.1°C warming coming from refrigerants such as the chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), which cause the ozone hole, and their replacements, hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs).
Carbon dioxide is two hundred times more abundant in the atmosphere (425 ppm) than methane (~ 2 ppm). However, pound for pound, methane is eighty or ninety times more potent two decades after its release and roughly thirty times more potent than CO2 after a century. Concentrations of methane have also increased far more in the Earth’s atmosphere since preindustrial times (160 percent) than those of carbon dioxide (“only” 50 percent).
Although carbon dioxide remains the most important greenhouse gas, methane is the second most important and the priority of my current climate work. No other greenhouse gas provides the opportunity for such rapid atmospheric restoration. Restoring the atmosphere will require drastic cuts in greenhouse gas emissions and—most likely—the removal of greenhouse gases already in the air.
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The need for “drawdown,” defined here as removing carbon dioxide, methane, and other greenhouse gases from the atmosphere after their release, arises from failure. We have flooded the atmosphere with trillions of tons of carbon dioxide pollution—most of it in the last fifty years—even after the danger to life was clear. In fact, annual global fossil carbon dioxide emissions rose 60 percent since publication of the first IPCC report in 1990 that documented the climate problem comprehensively. We have not just failed but failed spectacularly.
Given our failure to act, we’ve left future generations little choice but to clean up after us if global temperature increases are to stay below 1.5°C or 2°C thresholds. And paying to remove greenhouse gases from the air tomorrow will cost much more than preventing them from entering the air today.
Can drawdown technologies actually work? They can. Can they work at the billion-ton scales needed? Perhaps, but only if someone pays enough for them. They aren’t magic—as we’ll see—and they’re expensive. Under almost every scenario, meeting the 1.5°C temperature target will require removing some previously emitted carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere.
One of our recent Global Carbon Project analyses led by Sabine Fuss in Germany concluded that if we could keep cumulative global emissions below 750 billion metric tons (about two decades of current emission rates) before 2100, about 400 billion tons of carbon dioxide would still need to be removed from the atmosphere to keep global temperatures increases below 1.5°C in 2100.
Even if we estimate the cost of removing carbon dioxide in the future as $100 per ton, an aspirational target at best and five times lower than a typical industrial cost today, removing 400 billion tons will cost $40 trillion—larger than the combined annual GDPs of China and the United States. Younger generations are legitimately asking: “Why should we pay for this?”
Even if we find a way to pay this $40 trillion bill, carbon removal is tricky to achieve at scale. The atmosphere contains about 1 molecule of carbon dioxide for every 2,500 molecules of other gases (0.04% CO2), which makes finding and “removing” carbon dioxide like pulling needles repeatedly from a haystack. In contrast, about one in ten molecules emitted from the smokestack of a fossil power plant is carbon dioxide (10 percent CO2).
Thus it makes no sense to pay to remove dilute CO2 from the atmosphere while allowing smokestacks to keep belching concentrated carbon dioxide into the air today. Wherever we keep burning fossil fuels, we need to capture the carbon pollution from smokestacks now, before it enters the air. And unless fossil power plants are serving a region of the world mired in energy poverty, no new fossil plants should be built without carbon capture and storage technology.
In 2023 there were only about forty carbon capture and storage (CCS) plants running worldwide, with another 325 in development. The amounts of carbon stored annually rose to twenty-nine million tons of carbon dioxide, less than one-thousandth of all fossil carbon dioxide emissions. Compared to the forty active CCS facilities, thousands of fossil plants operate globally. If all of those fossil plants complete the end of their lifetimes without carbon capture and storage, their “committed emissions” will entail hundreds of billions of additional tons of carbon dioxide pollution, more than enough to push us past 1.5ºC and possibly 2ºC.
If we fail to curb emissions and fail to capture and store the carbon pollution from large sources, then carbon drawdown or removal technologies come into play. Using land is one of the cheapest options—especially regrowing the carbon in forests and soils lost to the atmosphere through deforestation and agricultural activities.
The world lost a billion hectares of forest in the twentieth century; most of that land is now used for growing crops and cattle ranching. Agricultural activities such as plowing have released billions of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere from the world’s soils. These carbon losses from soils and forests underpin natural climate solutions, approaches that stem carbon losses and put carbon back through conservation, restoration, and improved land management.
Fairly optimistic estimates suggest such practices could provide one-third of the climate mitigation needed by 2030 to stabilize global warming below 2°C. Natural climate solutions are also currently the cheapest way to offset fossil fuel pollution, often at costs of approximately $10 per ton of CO2 stored—acknowledging that carbon stored in a tree is not permanent like carbon locked away underground.
We can remove billions of tons of carbon from the atmosphere through natural climate solutions such as forest and wetland restoration, tree planting, no-till farming, and other actions. A more plant-based diet, especially eating less red meat, would also reduce deforestation, the global tally of a billion-plus cows, and methane emissions, while sparing land for other ecosystems and human uses.
Can we rely mostly on natural climate solutions? No, at least not to offset anywhere near the almost forty billion metric tons of annual fossil carbon pollution, and not if we don’t want it to compete with agriculture for land.
Without immediate, drastic emissions cuts, industrial greenhouse gas removal will be needed to keep global temperature increases below both 1.5°C and 2°C. Scientists have studied atmospheric carbon dioxide removal for more than a decade: the twin steps of capturing carbon dioxide from the air and storing it out of harm’s way. Plants, including trees, grasses, kelp, and phytoplankton, as well as some microbes, take up carbon dioxide through photosynthesis. Rocks and industrial chemicals can also be used to remove CO2 from air.
Beyond the natural climate solutions discussed above, there is a hybrid industrial approach known as BECCS, which stands for bioenergy with carbon capture and storage. For BECCS, users gather or harvest trees or other plants that extract CO2 from the atmosphere, burn the biomass to produce electricity (or convert it into biofuels), and pump the carbon dioxide pollution underground to keep it from returning to the air. Of all the drawdown or negative emissions technologies, BECCS is the only one that provides energy rather than requires it (and, done carefully, can provide close to carbon-free or even carbon-negative energy). A recent U.S. National Academy of Sciences study put the U.S. potential for BECCS at three to five billion metric tons of carbon dioxide removed per year without large adverse impacts. That amount is roughly one-third to one-half of the carbon removal many scientists believe will be needed each year globally to maintain a livable climate. We will explore BECCS in the next chapter.
Another drawdown technology is enhanced weathering. This approach tries to accelerate the rate at which rocks react naturally with atmospheric CO2. Igneous basalt—dark-grained and volcanic—covers a tenth of the Earth’s continental surfaces and most of the ocean floor. Basalt contains lots of minerals that react with carbon dioxide to form carbon-rich rocks. Calcium carbonate, or common “limestone,” for instance, combines one calcium atom with carbon dioxide and an extra oxygen (CaCO3). It is the stone that was used to build the Empire State Building and the Great Pyramid of Giza.
Imagine mining basalts, crushing them, and exposing them to the air to react with carbon dioxide. You might even fertilize an agricultural field with them, enhancing plant growth because of the extra calcium, magnesium, and additional nutrients the rocks release. Alternatively, you might just expose crushed rock to air and rebury it after it reacts fully with atmospheric CO2. Cost estimates for enhanced weathering are $75–250 per ton of CO2 removed. Start-up companies are forming to try, but enhanced weathering hasn’t scaled to commercial-level projects yet. We know weathering works in nature over thousands of years; can companies speed up the process enough for it to work in only years?
Finally, dozens of companies are working on direct-air capture (DAC) of carbon dioxide using specialized chemicals, as we will see in a journey to Iceland in Chapter 10 to examine a process that combines aspects of enhanced weathering and DAC. Nitrogen-based “amines” have been used for decades in refineries and chemical plants to scrub carbon dioxide from gas streams. Hydroxides are a second family of chemicals used in commercial direct-air capture operations. In both cases, the original chemicals can be regenerated using heat or by changing the acidity of a solution. Concentrated carbon dioxide is released during this chemical regeneration.
In most direct-air capture operations, the captured carbon dioxide must be pressurized and pumped underground, just as for BECCS during the carbon capture and storage (CCS) part of the process. The current cost range for direct-air capture is about $250–600 per ton of CO2 removed, far more than for natural climate solutions. Today, companies are removing a few tens of million tons of carbon dioxide a year from the atmosphere industrially. That’s a start but far from the billions of tons needed yearly.
Beyond carbon dioxide, we’ll need to remove other greenhouse gases from the air, too. Two-thirds of global methane emissions come from human actions, including fossil fuel use and agriculture. Global methane concentrations are now 2.6 times higher than they were two centuries ago.
Removing methane from the atmosphere is more difficult than removing carbon dioxide. It’s less abundant in air than carbon dioxide and therefore more difficult to isolate. But methane removal also has advantages. Notably, you don’t need to capture it and pump it underground. If you can react it using catalysts or nature’s detergents, you can convert it to CO2 and release it, eliminating the capture and storage phases that make carbon capture so expensive. Because all methane emitted into the atmosphere eventually becomes CO2, methane removal simply speeds nature’s reaction. Trading methane for carbon dioxide is good for the climate because methane is so much more potent than CO2.
If feasible at scale, methane removal could help shave tenths of degrees off peak temperatures and buy us more time to cut carbon dioxide emissions further before a given temperature threshold is passed. Further, some scientists believe that it is possible—even likely—that catastrophic levels of methane could be released from Arctic permafrost and tropical wetlands this century because of warming temperatures. Preparing for methane removal today could provide much needed insurance against future disaster.
For all drawdown solutions, we will need either a regulatory mandate or a global price or market for carbon and methane pollution to prompt action. An “upstream” carbon price adds a fee wherever fossil fuels are extracted, with the extra cost passed on to consumers in the price they pay for products derived from fossil energy. (Discussions are needed on what to do with the proceeds from fees and how to keep poorer people from paying higher prices for their energy.) This price would better shift the financial burden of emissions onto the people, companies, and industries responsible for them and would more closely reflect the real cost of fossil pollution. None of the options I’ve discussed above is feasible at large scale without a carbon market or, short of that, policy mandates requiring action.
Unfortunately, a national carbon price is unlikely anytime soon in the United States. The last market-based climate bill with any chance of passage was more than a decade ago: the Waxman-Markey American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009, which passed the U.S. House with bipartisan support but never reached a vote in the Senate. Getting a market-based climate bill through either the U.S. House or Senate these days seems a tall order, despite the success of such bills to reduce acid rain cheaply and efficiently in the past.
Although the cost of drawdown is high, the cost of doing nothing is staggering. Insurance companies understand costs and risks better than anyone. Insurance giant Swiss Re, the world’s second-largest reinsurance company (reinsurance companies insure insurance companies), recently estimated that the global economy could shrink by 18 percent if no climate mitigation action is taken, at a cost of up to $23 trillion annually by 2050. Their report concluded: “Our analysis shows the benefit of investing in a net-zero economy. For example, adding just 10% to the U.S. $6.3 trillion of annual global infrastructure investments would limit the average temperature increase to below 2°C. This is just a fraction of the loss in global GDP that we face if we don’t take appropriate action.” The insurance industry believes that the costs of climate inaction dwarf the costs of climate action.
To reduce these costs, we need to cut emissions—and then cut them some more. (That’s the reason I began this book with “Emissions First.”) We’ll also need to deploy energy technologies that not everyone reading this book will like. If we shun nuclear power, we might need to harvest trees and biomass for energy from additional land the size of Texas, changing land-use habitats and conservation priorities.
If we scuttle those options, we might need thousands of natural gas plants pumping pollution underground, monitoring groundwater beneath them to make sure the pollution stays put. And if we don’t do that, we might pay far more and cover a tenth of usable land area with solar panels to keep the lights and heat on during winter, as our recent analysis showed for the state of California. We need a new energy system that is reliable and capable of reducing emissions, and, as in the classroom and workplace, diversity helps.
We will need diverse drawdown technologies, too. We’ll need to implement natural climate solutions, restoring forests and soils wherever possible. We need to lower the cost of drawdown technologies and hope people accept such technologies at thousands of locations. We need to discuss personal issues of population, diet, energy use, and inequality.
In truth, I’m frustrated writing about “drawdown” technologies because we shouldn’t need them. I’ve watched years of climate inaction roll by like floats in a parade. When will the victory parade finally begin?
into the clear blue book
https://lithub.com/why-methane-removal-might-be-our-best-bet-to-stop-rising-global-temperatures/
THE FRUIT BAT’S RESISTANCE TO DIABETES
Artbeus jamaicensis
Some bats like candy.
Well, not the kind of candy you buy in a sweets shop. Rather, they like fruit, which is rich in sugar.
“We call it nature’s candy,” says Wei Gordon, a biologist at Menlo College. She was catching neotropical bats this spring in northern Belize as part of the Bat-a-thon, an annual event when dozens of researchers converge to study many kinds of neotropical bats — including fruit bats, the subset that feast on fruit.
Gordon wonders whether these furry, flying enigmas might hold clues to treating diabetes in people. That’s because when fruit bats gorge on fruit, it jacks their blood sugar. But somehow, it doesn’t cause them any harm.
“These bats control sugar like it was nothing,” says Nadav Ahituv, who is standing near Gordon. He’s the director of the Institute for Human Genetics at the University of California San Francisco. Ahituv likes to think of bats as little superheroes — each with their own special superpower. For the fruit bats, their superpower is their capacity to handle so much sugar.
This isn’t the case for humans: We have to be careful about how much sugar we consume. That’s because “diets rich in sugar contribute to things like diabetes,” says Gordon. “And it’s just gonna cause a lot of havoc.”
Gordon says fruit bats may keep enough sugar circulating in their blood to power their flight to their next fruit meal. “They are really dependent on having sugar ready to go in their system to fuel their lifestyle,” she says. Within half an hour of a fruit feast, though, the bat can pretty much bring its sugar levels back to where they started.
“So the question is,” Gordon asks, “how do they bring [their blood sugar] down so low, so quickly? How can they handle it without acquiring some sort of metabolic disease?”
Fruit bats are wired differently
A lot of the sugar that we consume winds up in our blood as glucose. Insulin helps us manage that glucose and get it to the cells that need it. But over the last two decades, a combination of factors, including a decrease in exercise and changes in our diets, have caused diabetes to surge worldwide. The disease is characterized by an inability to regulate blood sugar, which can lead to heart disease, nerve damage, blindness and in some cases, death.
To learn more about how fruit bats manage their sugar, Gordon set out to compare fruit bats to bats that eat insects, a diet that’s rich in protein but low in sugar.
Along with Ahituv and other colleagues, she was particularly interested in the kidney and pancreas, organs that researchers already knew looked different to the naked eye between the two kinds of bats.
So Gordon zoomed in on them to compare the cells and genes of those organs. “And what was really exciting is that in fruit bats,” she says, “we did see a lot more cells that are responsible for maintaining your blood sugar.” That is, they had more pancreas cells available to produce insulin compared to the insect-eaters.
Plus, the fruit bats had genetic differences that seemed to allow them to act quickly to control the blood sugar coursing through their bloodstream. “The genes were sort of primed” to pump out insulin, for example, as soon as it was needed, says Gordon.
The results were published early this year in the journal Nature Communications. Gordon says that one day, such features of fruit bats might teach us how to help people regulate their sugar levels.
“Yes, very much down the road,” Gordon says, “but that would be the ultimate, ‘Wow, we did it.’”
The fuzzy Olympians of sugar consumption
When it comes to bats, there are superheroes … and then there are SUPERHEROES.
Take Glossophaga mutica — a kind of nectar feeding bat the color of milk chocolate that’s found in the Americas.
“These are basically hummingbirds of the night, drinking floral nectar,” says Jasmin Camacho, an evolutionary biologist at the Stowers Institute for Medical Research in Missouri. “Evolution has shaped them to go around and enjoy all the sweets.”
Camacho, who’s in Belize with the Bat-a-thon as well, stands inside a big screened walk-in tent at 2 a.m. one night. She’s holding a Glossophaga mutica bat that was caught earlier in the evening. She feeds the bat a little sugar water and he licks it right up. This is just a drop in the bucket for this guy. Nectar feeders consume even more sugar than fruit eaters.
“Their biology is so extreme,” she says. “They’ll go around foraging up to 800 flowers a night. So that’s basically like every night, they’re eating their body weight in sugar. Imagine eating your body weight in sugar every day.”
For humans, that would be a one-way ticket to metabolic catastrophe — diabetes, obesity or worse.
“That is industrial levels,” says Camacho. “That is toxic. That is gonna kill you.” But nectar bats “go beyond what we know is survivable for other types of mammals,” she say — and somehow don’t get sick. Unlike the fruit bats that can “rapidly lower their blood glucose with insulin,” she says, “nectar bats keep their blood sugar levels higher for longer periods of time.”
Camacho wants to know how the nectar feeders manage that much glucose without health problems. She thinks the answer may lie, at least in part, in all the flying the bats do. Just think of a nectar-feeding bat flapping its wings at least twelve times a second, darting from flower to flower and slurping up glucose and other sugars all night long. That’s a lot of cardio.
“When you exercise,” says Camacho, “you’re able to uptake about 100 times more glucose than you would with insulin.” That is — ”when we exercise, we use more energy.”
So maybe these bats don’t absorb all the sugar to store it away in their bodies. Rather, similar to fruit bats, they keep it circulating in their bloodstream to fuel their ability to fly to the next flower. In that way, “energy is always available,” says Valentina Peña, a colleague of Camacho’s who’s starting her Ph.D. in ecology and evolutionary biology at UC Irvine this fall.
We’re not unlike the bats. Exercise impacts the way we handle sugar, too, which is why Camacho is curious about the connection between flight and a bat’s ability to metabolize a lot of sugar.
In particular, she wants to know which molecules the bats are using during exercise to regulate their blood sugar in order to bring their glucose levels down. And she’s curious about how they protect their bodies from accumulating the kind of damage to their cells and DNA that usually comes from digesting a lot of sugar.
“Maybe that can teach us some things about how to be healthier in our lives,” explains Camacho, including — perhaps — how to treat or even prevent the onset of obesity and type 2 diabetes. “There’s a lot that we can learn from how they’ve come to thrive on the sugar diet.”
The sweetest of puzzles
Camacho has been letting the bat that she fed earlier rest for a few minutes. She now wants it to fly around the tent so she can sample its blood for any of those molecular clues about how it processes sugar to fuel its flight.
She needs the bat to fly for about ten minutes, but after a minute or so, the bat lands on the side of the tent. “Not every bat cooperates,” she says.
Camacho and Peña try another one of the same species. Unlike his colleague, this bat soars into the air and doesn’t stop flying — for 15 minutes.
Camacho is ecstatic. “Oh, what a beautiful bat,” she coos. “I love him!”
After catching him in a net again, Camacho and Peña take a blood sample. She’ll freeze some of it to study in the lab later. But then Peña touches a glucose meter — the kind that people with diabetes use to measure their blood sugar levels — to a drop of the bat’s crimson blood.
Camacho is floored. “Damn!” she exclaims. “I can’t believe you.”
She figured the glucose level would have dropped, as it has in similar experiments in the lab conducted by other researchers. But even after 15 minutes of flying in this more natural environment, it’s still so elevated, she can’t measure the change. The bat’s maxed out the meter, so the display just reads “high.” If a person had such a reading for long enough without medical intervention, they’d expire.
“This doesn’t make sense,” she says with a mix of disbelief and admiration. "Why aren't you dead?"
Camacho then offers this bat another sip of sugar water. Remarkably, he laps it up greedily. “Oh my gosh, I need to understand this,” she says, marveling at this brown furry superhero.
https://www.npr.org/sections/goats-and-soda/2024/08/16/nx-s1-5064652/diabetes-bats-sugar-consumption
Oriana:
For answers, I turned to PubMed, and found out only that these bats, as well as small birds, use sugar directly to power their flight instead of relying on lipids and glycogen. Flight requires a lot of energy, and small bats and small birds have the ability to utilize sugar directly. Their very rapid metabolism runs directly and exclusively on sugar. “The rate at which the fruit bats oxidized dietary sugars was as fast as in 10 g nectar-feeding bats and 5 g hummingbirds. Our results support the notion that flying bats, irrespective of their size, catabolize dietary sugars directly, and possibly exclusively, to fuel flight.” ~ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20639431/
and
Hummingbirds and nectar bats coevolved with the plants they visit to feed on floral nectars rich in sugars. The extremely high metabolic costs imposed by small size and hovering flight in combination with reliance upon sugars as their main source of dietary calories resulted in convergent evolution of a suite of structural and functional traits. These allow high rates of aerobic energy metabolism in the flight muscles, fueled almost entirely by the oxidation of dietary sugars, during flight.
It is suggested that the potentially harmful effects of nectar diets are prevented by locomotory exercise, just as in human hunter-gatherers who consume large quantities of honey.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28704953/
Most humans don’t get enough exercise to prevent the toxic effects of sugar. Women who spend money on expensive facial creams and cosmetic treatments should study this simple diagram of glycation:
glycation collagen
While some glycation is inevitable, we can minimize it by consuming a diet rich in berries, dark chocolate, vegetables, and green tea. In addition, certain highly antioxidant spice, including cinnamon, cloves, anise, and allspice are also protective (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6523868/).
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COULD A LOW-CARB DIET SLOW DOWN BRAIN AGING?
The study, led by Stony Brook University professor Lilianne Mujica-Parodi, suggests that early signs of aging in the brain can be prevented by a low-carb diet, or what’s commonly referred to as the ketogenic diet — a low-carb, high-protein diet designed release ketones into the bloodstream for the body to use stored fat as its main source of energy, rather than blood sugar or glucose from carbohydrates. Once the body starts breaking down ketone molecules—a process called ketosis—it begins to run on the energy provided by fat, rather than glucose. The ketogenic diet needs to be pretty substantial with fats and proteins in order to be sustainable. It typically includes things like grass-fed meats, eggs, cheese, butter, oils and avocados, and almost entirely avoids common carbs like bread, wheat or rice.
Low carb meal
In the latest study, Mujica-Parodi and her team wanted to examine whether the effects of a low-carb diet could be seen in the brains of people who may be showing some early signs of aging, but who were presymptomatic.
First, the researchers found that aging in the brain, seen in the form of destabilized communication between brain regions, typically starts to set in when a person is in their late 40s, particularly around age 47. This tends to be associated with weaker cognition.
They identified brain network stability as a biomarker for aging, and found that having type 2 diabetes increased this destabilization of brain networks. They then tested how the brain’s network stability would respond to diet changes.
One group of participants was placed on a standard diet, which metabolizes glucose as its primary fuel. The second group was given a low-carb diet, meaning they were only eating things like meat or fish with salad—and no sugar, grains or starchy vegetables. In the low carb diet, the main fuel source was ketones.
The researchers found that the people who were metabolizing ketones on the low-carb diet saw increased brain activity and stabilized networks in brain regions.
“The bad news is that we see the first signs of brain aging much earlier than was previously thought,” Mujica-Parodi said in a news release.
“However, the good news is that we may be able to prevent or reverse these effects with diet,” she continued, “by exchanging glucose for ketones as fuel for neurons.”
Part of the power behind ketones, Mujica-Parodi argues, is that the brain eventually loses its ability to use glucose as fuel, something known as hypometabolism.
“Therefore, if we can increase the amount of energy available to the brain by using a different fuel, the hope is that we can restore the brain to more youthful functioning,” she said.
In the Alzheimer’s research world, ketones are actually being explored for their potential as a therapeutic pathway for the disease. One recent study conducted by a researcher at the National Institute on Aging found that increasing the number of ketones in the body may help fight Alzheimer’s.
Diet, overall, has been examined in various studies to better understand how it’s linked to improved brain function and mental health. Some experts say that a healthy diet and exercise are some of the most effective interventions for preventing, or slowing down, the progression of neurodegenerative diseases.
https://www.beingpatient.com/low-carb-diet-reverse-aging-in-the-brain/
THE GARVELLACH MOUNTAINS IN SCOTLAND, A REMAINDER OF PRE-“ICEBALL EARTH”
A remote cluster of Scottish islands could help solve one of our planet's greatest mysteries, scientists say.
The Garvellach islands off the west coast of Scotland are the best record of Earth entering its biggest ever ice age around 720 million years ago, researchers have discovered.
The big freeze, which covered nearly all the globe in two phases for 80 million years, is known as "Snowball Earth", after which the first animal life emerged.
Clues hidden in rocks about the freeze have been wiped out everywhere — except in the Garvellachs. Researchers hope the islands will tell us why Earth went into such an extreme icy state for so long and why it was necessary for complex life to emerge.
The Earth became almost completely covered in ice during the longest and most severe ice age in the planet's history
Layers of rock can be thought of as pages of a history book – with each layer containing details of the Earth’s condition in the distant past.
But the critical period leading up to Snowball Earth was thought to be missing because the rock layers were eroded by the big freeze.
Now a new study by researchers at University College, London, has revealed that the Garvellachs somehow escaped unscathed. It may be the only place on Earth to have a detailed record of how the Earth entered one of the most catastrophic periods in its history – as well as what happened when the first animal life emerged when the snowball thawed hundreds of millions of years ago.
Back then Scotland was in a completely different place because the continents have moved over time. It was south of the Earth’s equator and had a tropical climate, until it and the rest of the planet became engulfed in ice.
“We capture that moment of entering an ice age in Scotland that is missing in all other localities in the world,” Prof Graham Shields of University College London, who led the research, told BBC News.
“Millions of critical years are missing in other places because of glacial erosion – but it is all there in the layers of rock in the Garvellachs.”
The islands in the Inner Hebrides of Scotland are uninhabited, apart from a team of scientists working out of the main island's solitary building, although there are also the ruins of a 6th Century Celtic monastery.
The breakthrough was made by Prof Shield’s PhD student, Elias Rugen, whose results have been published in the Journal of the Geological Society of London. Elias is the first to date the rock layers and identify them as from the critical period that is missing from all other rock formations in all other parts of the world.
His discovery puts the Garvellachs in line for one of the biggest accolades in science: the golden spike hammered in at locations identified as the best record of planet-changing geological moments – though to ward off thieves the spike is not actually made of gold.
Elias has taken many of the judges of the golden spike, formally known as members of the “Cryogenian sub-commission”, several times to the rock faces to press his case.
The next stage is to allow the wider geological community to voice any objections or to come up with a better candidate. If there are none, then the spike could be hammered in next year.
The prize would raise the scientific profile of the location and attract further research funding.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cj9l2mrn43jo
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A GIANT SOLAR SUPERSTORM 14,000 YEARS AGO
A sudden solar superstorm is thought to be behind a devastating bombardment of high-energy particles around 14,000 years ago
The Sun is going through a period of high activity, but it is nothing compared to an enormous solar event that slammed into our planet 14,000 years ago. If one were to occur today, the effect on Earth could be devastating.
The oldest trees on Earth date back a whopping 5,000 years, living through all manner of events. They have stood through the rise and fall of the Roman Empire, the birth of Christianity, the European discovery of the Americas and the first Moon landing. Trees can even be fossilized in soil underground, giving us a connection to the last 30,000 years.
At first glance, these long-lived specimens might just appear to be static observers, but not so. They are doing something extraordinary as they grow – recording the activity of our Sun.
As trees photosynthesize throughout the year, they change in coloration depending on the season, appearing lighter in spring and darker by autumn. The result is a year-on-year record contained within the growth "rings" of the tree. "This gives us this really valuable archive of time capsules," says Charlotte Pearson, a dendrochronologist – someone who studies tree rings – at the Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research at the University of Arizona, US.
For most of the 20th Century, dendrochronologists have largely used tree rings to investigate change across wide chunks of history – a decade or more. Yet at certain points in time, the change they document has been more sudden and cataclysmic. What they are finding evidence of are massive solar events that reveal disturbing insights into the turbulent recent past of the star at the center of our Solar System.
"Nobody was expecting a brief event to appear," says Edouard Bard, a climatologist at the College de France in Paris. But in 2012 a then-PhD student called Fusa Miyake, now a cosmic ray physicist at Nagoya University in Japan, made an astonishing discovery. Studying Japanese cedar trees, she discovered a huge spike in a type of carbon known as carbon-14 in a single year nearly 800 years ago, in 774 CE. "I was so excited," says Miyake.
After doubting the data at first, Miyake and her colleagues soon came to an unnerving conclusion. The spike in carbon-14 must have come from something injecting huge numbers of particles into our atmosphere, since this radioactive isotope of carbon is produced when high-energy particles strike nitrogen in the atmosphere. Once linked perhaps to cosmic events like supernovae, studies have since suggested another probable cause: a monster burst of particles thrown out by the Sun. These would be generated by superflares, far bigger than anything seen in the modern era.
"They require an event that's at least ten times bigger than anything we've observed," says Mathew Owens, a space physicist at the University of Reading in the UK. The first recorded solar flare sighting dates back to the middle of the 19th Century, and are associated with the great geomagnetic storm of 1859, which has become known as the Carrington Event, after one of the astronomers who observed it, Richard Carrington.
Spikes in the level of carbon-14 isotope in tree rings have revealed past spikes in high-energy particles bombarding the Earth
Miyake's discovery was confirmed by other studies of tree rings and analysis of ancient ice in cores collected from places such as Antarctica and Greenland. The latter contained correlated signatures of berylium-10 and chlorine-36, which are produced in a similar atmospheric process to carbon-14. Since then, more Miyake events, as these massive bursts of cosmic radiation and particles are now known, have been unearthed. In total, seven well studied events are known to have occurred over the past 15,000 years, while there are several other spikes in carbon-14 that have yet to be confirmed as Miyake events.
The most recent occurred just over 1,000 years ago in 993 CE. Researchers believe these events occur rarely – but at somewhat regular intervals, perhaps every 400 to 2,400 years.
The most powerful known Miyake event was discovered as recently as 2023 when Bard and his colleagues announced the discovery of a carbon-14 spike in fossilized Scots pine trees in Southern France dating back 14,300 years. The spike they saw was twice as powerful as any Miyake event seen before, suggesting these already-suspected monster events could be even bigger than previously thought.
The team behind the discovery of this superstorm from space had scoured the Southern French Alps for fossilized trees and found some that had been exposed by rivers. Using a chainsaw, they collected samples and examined them back in a laboratory, discovering evidence for an enormous carbon-14 spike. "We dreamed of finding a new Miyake event, and we were very, very happy to find this," says Cécile Miramont, a dendrochronologist at Aix-Marseille University in France and a co-author on the study.
Deep Impact
If such an event were to occur again today, however, the impacts would be unprecedented. "People who lived thousands of years ago would have probably seen aurora, they would have seen lights in the sky," says Pearson. "They might have marveled at that. But beyond that, this wouldn’t have impacted them at all. We're the first society on Earth that might witness one of these events who would be intensely vulnerable and massively impacted by it.”
Our Sun today goes through periods of maximum and minimum activity on an 11-year cycle, during which it can fire out huge flares of plasma called coronal mass ejections (CMEs) and huge explosions of radiation, called solar flares. If the Sun rotates a CME in the direction of Earth it can cause geomagnetic storms as charged particles flow into our atmosphere, unleashing aurora, known as the Northern and Southern lights. In May 2024, with our Sun heading towards its current solar maximum, the strongest geomagnetic storm in two decades produced aurora visible as far south as London in the UK and near San Francisco, California.
The most powerful solar storm in recent history, the Carrington Event of 1859, triggered intense auroral light shows in both hemispheres of our planet and triggered electrical surges that knocked out in telegraph lines around the world. Today, the effects of a Carrington-level event would be disastrous. In worst case scenarios, the Global Positioning System (GPS) could break down as satellites are pushed out of place or their delicate electronics damaged, while multiple power grids on Earth and even the internet could fail. In 2013, a report estimated the economic loss in the US alone from a Carrington-level event could be $0.6tn-$2.6tn (£0.4tn-£2tn).
Miyake events, however, are a different beast – causing blasts of particles at least ten times larger than the Carrington event. In fact, so small was the Carrington event by comparison that any spike of carbon-14 it produced barely shows up in tree rings at all. In March, a study found a very subtle hint of carbon-14 from the Carrington event, but nothing compared to a Miyake event. "It doesn't show up", says Pearson. "Either that means there's something different [going on], or [Miyake events are] on a much greater scale than the Carrington event. That's where the potentially dramatic side lies. If they are events like the Carrington event but just on a larger scale, we need some serious mitigation strategies as quickly as possible.”
An event on the scale of the one that swept over the Earth 14,300 years ago could cause such widespread damage to the modern technology our lives rely upon it is hard to fathom.
"The Carrington event is presumed to be the worst-case scenario," says Raimund Muscheler, a solar scientist at Lund University in Sweden. "So the question is, could they really be much worse?”
We know that some stars, particularly red dwarves which are smaller and dimmer than our Sun, are prone to superflares that can rip apart the atmospheres of planets orbiting nearby. While it's unlikely our Sun poses such a danger to Earth, the existence of Miyake events does raise the possibility that it is capable of bursts of much more extreme activity than the 11-year-cycle we observe today – and much more powerful than even the Carrington event.
What's unclear at the moment is the link between Miyake events and geomagnetic storms. The carbon-14 spikes produced in the events likely come from bursts of highly energetic particles from the Sun. But it's not certain if these events are always linked to CMEs that cause powerful geomagnetic storms on Earth. "When you have very big storms at the Sun, you often get a lot of energetic particles and CMEs," says Silvia Dalla, a solar physicist at the University of Central Lancashire. But she notes the link is "not exactly one to one”.
Energetic particles can also stream from sunspots, twisted magnetic fields that cool portions of the Sun's surface and drive activity, but not all also produce large eruptions. Some researchers say there does not appear to be a correlation between Miyake events and sunspots. Instead they say the could be due to far more prolonged storms and bursts of solar activity that go on for a year or more.
For our technology dependent world, that is deeply troubling.
Confronted with such a barrage of high energy particle and radiation, all but the best shielded equipment could be vulnerable.
"Satellites could be destroyed," says Muscheler.
Infrastructure on Earth would be at risk too. "You get particles that whizz through a chip and change one of the bits from a one to a zero," says Owen. It is something that occurs from time to time under normal conditions, leading to baffling and unexpected computer errors. But a Miyake event would cause so many that electronic systems would likely become unusable or even destroy the delicate circuitry.
"In something that's controlling the fuel going in and out of a nuclear power station, you really worry about that stuff," says Owens. "In space weather we tend to talk about the one-in-100-year events, but the nuclear industry is often worried about the one-in-1,000-year events, the really big stuff."
Bursts of solar particles would play havoc with aviation too, causing flights to be diverted away from the poles where the incoming particles would be funnelled by the Earth's magnetic field, to prevent passengers being exposed to potentially harmful levels of radiation. But given these particles travel from the Sun to Earth at close to the speed of light, a journey of just eight minutes, there would be little time to prepare. "You tend to know an event is ongoing more than you can really forecast them," says Owens.
If a Miyake event were to occur today, it would likely cause power surges so great that it would destroy much of our electricity network.
Sizing up the Sun
Of course, tree rings only give us a snapshot of an entire year in which a Miyake event has occurred, so it's still unclear if the events would be the result of one single catastrophic solar burst, or multiple periods of increased activity over a year. "We don't know whether that was one single event on one day, the superflare hypothesis, or there just happened to be an unusually large number of very big particle storms in that year," says Owens. Each of those storms, however, would still be large and potentially dangerous.
Futher analysis of tree rings and ice cores to look for more Miyake events is ongoing in the hope it will provide more answers. "I think more events are hidden," says Miyake. An estimated 95% of tree ring data from the past 5,000 years has been studied, says Nicolas Brehm, a solar scientist at ETH Zurich, a public research university in Switzerland, meaning it's unlikely there are many more Miyake events to be found in recent history. Beyond that, there is a limit of about 30,000 years worth of data in preserved wood, although that analysis is difficult. "It's hard to get good material from this time period," says Brehm.
Despite this, the hunt for more Miyake events goes on. In June, Bard returned to the French Alps to collect samples of more exposed fossilized trees. Now, with samples in tow, he will begin "the tedious work" of studying the tree rings, he says, over several months. Perhaps, one day, an even bigger event than that 14,300 years ago will be found.
And of course there is still the chance one could happen again. We had better hope we are ready for it.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20240815-miyake-events-the-giant-solar-superstorms-that-could-rock-earth
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ARE WE BREAKING THE ATLANTIC OCEAN?
Of all the potential consequences of global warming, one of the most unexpected is that temperatures in some parts of the world could plummet.
A recent paper in Science Advances outlined a scenario where, given enough ice melting into the North Atlantic, average temperatures in cities like Bergen, Norway, could drop 15 degrees Celsius (a bone-chilling dip of 27 degrees in Fahrenheit). London could drop around 10°C (18°F).
But not only would temperatures in Europe plummet, the change would trigger a climate tipping point, generating cascading effects around the world. There would be more than two feet of extra sea level rise in North America. The Southern Hemisphere could grow warmer, potentially further destabilizing Antarctica’s ice sheets. In the Amazon rainforest, some parts would get rainier and others would dry out. Wildlife would suffer too, as essential nutrients for marine life would not as readily reach the Northern Atlantic.
And all of this would happen on top of the sea level rise that is already expected to disrupt so much of our world.
This scenario is high stakes, as it would vastly reshape the world as we know it. But it is also very uncertain, and hinges on a question scientists don’t know the answer to: Are humans going to break the Atlantic ocean?
“This is a sort of $2 million question,” Till Wagner, an atmospheric and ocean scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, says. “Can this actually happen? And if so, when?”
THE AMOC EXPLAINED
The AMOC is a system of ocean currents that circulates water within the Atlantic Ocean, bringing warm water north and cold water south.
And all of this would happen on top of the sea level rise that is already expected to disrupt so much of our world.
This scenario is high stakes, as it would vastly reshape the world as we know it. But it is also very uncertain, and hinges on a question scientists don’t know the answer to: Are humans going to break the Atlantic ocean?
“This is a sort of $2 million question,” Till Wagner, an atmospheric and ocean scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, says. “Can this actually happen? And if so, when?”
“This overturning is really important for climate,” says Nicholas Foukal, a scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. The AMOC is primarily a means for transferring heat. Heat from the tropics is transported over to Europe, which maintains milder temperatures despite the high Northern latitude of many of its countries. (The United Kingdom is roughly the same latitude as Newfoundland and Labrador in Canada, but the average January high temperature in London is 47°F, whereas in St. John’s, Canada, the average January high is closer to 32°F.)
“The concern is, as we’re melting ice sheets, it could introduce more fresh water to the Arctic,” Foukal says, producing a layer of fresh water on top of salt water.
Fresh water is less dense than salty water. Which is why ocean scientists suspect, over time, if you introduce enough fresh water into the Arctic, the water up there won’t be dense enough to sink and then move southward.
A strong enough slowdown in the AMOC could trigger its death spiral. “It’s a positive feedback loop,” Foukal says. “If you strengthen it in one direction, it will continue to strengthen.” If you pump the brakes on it hard enough, “it will turn off.”
Scientists are concerned about this happening in the future, because they think this death spiral has happened before.
Around 13,000 years ago, the Earth was emerging from its last ice age. Temperatures had been rising for thousands of years. Ice was melting. And then, suddenly, screech. For about 1,300 years, temperatures plummeted: The ice age was back on. The period is called the “younger dryas” — named for the cold-hearty dryas flowers that thrived during this period.
The best explanation for what happened during this time was that ice had been acting as a dam for an absolutely enormous lake that existed in modern-day Canada. When that dam burst, an estimated 21,000 cubic kilometers of fresh water (5038 cubic miles) diluted the salt content of the sea, triggering the system’s failure. For a comparison, today, Lake Superior contains around 3,000 cubic miles of water. All that fresh water, the theory goes, caused the AMOC to collapse.
WHERE IS THE POINT OF NO RETURN?
Scientists will know when the AMOC is shutting down “when we see an acceleration in its decline,” says René van Westen, a climate scientist at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. The good news is that “we have measurements in place,” he says. “And at the moment they don’t show any evidence that it has tipped. It only shows evidence that it is weaker at the moment.”
Though when it does show that evidence of tipping, he says, “we’re already too late.”
Europe’s temperatures won’t plunge overnight. Once the accelerated decline starts, Van Westen says, we would only have about 100 years before the AMOC completely shuts down.
A big source of uncertainty is that scientists just don’t completely understand what drives the AMOC. They know it’s affected by temperature and salinity, but they don’t have a precise formula putting it all together. “We don’t have ‘plug in this temperature, this salinity into this equation, and you get an overturning of X cubic meters per second,’” Foukal says. “It just doesn’t exist.”
Scientists have only been measuring the AMOC directly since 2004. For such an important regulator of global climate and weather, there’s just not a ton of data on it.
And while there is convincing historical evidence that the AMOC collapsed during the younger dryas, it might not be a great analog to what’s happening today.
Back then, much of the Earth’s water was still locked up in ice. “Sea level was about a hundred meters below what it is right now,” Foukal says. The fresh water that burst and emptied into the ocean immediately went into the deepest parts. “That’s a very different system than what it is right now,” he says. The geography of the world was simply different, and maybe the AMOC shutdown played out differently then.
Despite those limitations, scientists do try to create computer models of the AMOC, and see what it takes to shut it down.
Recently Van Westen and co-authors published a modeling paper showing that you would need to dump a truly staggering amount of water into the Atlantic to cause the AMOC to collapse. “That is not very likely to happen in the near future,” Van Westen says, but adds that their model might be overstating the amount of water it could take to tip the AMOC. Overall, he says we’re “not certain how much additional melt water” is needed.
A separate recent modeling paper looked at trends in ocean temperature fluctuations in a particular area of the North Atlantic, and similarly concluded that an AMOC tip is possible starting between 2025 and 2095. They caution that “these results are under the assumption that the model is approximately correct.” (Modeling the entire ocean is very hard, and every model has limitations. “The trickiest part about modeling this is the whole system is very dependent on how the ocean and the atmosphere interact with each other,” Wagner says.)
I asked the scientists what to make of the conclusions of the two papers, which have generated some concerning headlines. Their take isn’t as apocalyptic as some of the headlines.
“There is an underlying potential for collapse — I think that exists,” Wagner says. “We have just simply not enough information to assess whether it is imminent or accessible in a realistic world. It might be that you would have to put our climate into such a strange state in order to shut the AMOC down.”
Of his own study, Van Westen says the strongest thing they can conclude is: “We have some indications that we are moving closer to the tipping point. But this doesn’t mean that we are crossing the tipping point. So I think that is a very important message. What we sketched over here is a potential future scenario.”
An uncomfortable certainty
The science here is uncomfortably uncertain. It’s not like a type of cancer, Wagner explains as an example, where you can track 10,000 patients and see 1,000 of them die. In that case you could conclude the probability of dying from that cancer is 10 percent. “In this case, we only have one AMOC.” There’s no way to calculate such certain odds of it collapsing.
So instead we have modeling papers, and scientists working on a mathematical understanding of this system. I’m told the uncertainties around the AMOC might be reduced with more direct observations of the system. But another problem is that we’re changing the climate so rapidly. If we understand how the AMOC works today, “it doesn’t mean we understand how it’s going to work in the future,” Foukal says. “And that’s because we’re perturbing our climate system so drastically.”
This system is complicated. As you warm the oceans, Van Westen says, the impact salinity has on water density can change. But not in a straightforward way — it’s possible, he says, the rising temperature of the ocean could, at times, counteract the impact of the fresh water.
“The lower latitudes are expected to increase in surface salinity due to higher temperatures and hence more evaporation,” Van Westen explains. “However, higher latitudes may freshen due to ice melt and receive more precipitation. Depending on the trends and ocean currents, you can have different salinity responses.”
Those future potential ocean temperature changes weren’t factored into the current model — though Van Westen says he and colleagues are working on one that does.
There are some consequences of climate change that are certain. Temperatures will rise, and ice will melt. Sea level will rise. Weather patterns will shift. But some of climate change’s most impactful consequences are still deeply unclear. It’s scary: There’s a non-zero chance of this happening, and we might not know it is until it’s too late.
“We need to rule out such a potential future scenario,” Van Westen says. “And therefore, very urgent climate action is needed to limit our impact on Earth.”
https://www.vox.com/climate/24099459/amoc-atlantic-meridional-overturning-circulation-freeze-europe
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THE CRITICAL ROLE OF SHADE TREES DURING HEAT WAVES
My two-year-old is too young to know about climate change. He doesn’t understand what an "urban heat island" is either. He just knows that his papa keeps saying “No” because it's too hot out to go to our local park in Point Breeze, South Philadelphia, which lacks the shady tree cover found in other neighborhoods. As we head home, and he's in full melt-down, pointing over my shoulder and repeating “Pahk! Pahk!” in that plaintive voice that breaks my heart, the father and environmentalist in me deeply worries about extreme heat and how it will affect my son’s generation.
You may have never heard the term “urban heat island,” but you can probably guess its meaning—especially if you live in a city. Modern cities have become concrete jungles with buildings, roads, and other infrastructure absorbing and retaining heat; when these urban areas “lack nature” like trees and green spaces, residents can’t benefit from tree shade and evapotranspiration, the process by which plants release water vapor that cools the air, bringing down temperatures. Extreme heat caused by climate change exacerbates this issue, making it a public health crisis.
But just how much of a difference do trees make? Studies show the temperature in urban areas can differ from 12-18°F between the hottest and coolest neighborhoods—and much of that variation is due to differences in tree cover and green space. As heat waves become more frequent and intense, an increase of 18° can be the difference between life and death. Heat-related illnesses such as heat stroke and dehydration pose a serious threat to vulnerable populations like the elderly and those with pre-existing health conditions. In 2023 alone, extreme heat exposure was responsible for over 2,300 deaths across the U.S., the highest in a half-century.
Dig deeper into this growing public health crisis and you’ll also find a crisis of environmental justice, with the haves and the have-nots splitting along familiar lines. Predominantly white and affluent neighborhoods tend to have more trees, while historically marginalized and underserved communities have significantly less. This disparity exacerbates inequities in health outcomes, with poorer air quality and higher heat vulnerability in areas with fewer trees. It also means higher energy costs, imposing another financial burden on already cash-strapped communities, as well as higher rates of violent crime, as higher temperatures can increase incidences of aggression and irritability.
Climate impacts have always disproportionally impacted minority populations, from Black and Brown communities that lack sufficient infrastructure and insurance to cope with increasingly frequent and extreme storms, to Indigenous tribes that depend on fish stocks threatened by ocean acidification. Extreme heat exposure is one of the most immediate and deadly impacts of climate change, however, and once again communities of color are taking the brunt of it. In Philadelphia and elsewhere, that 18° difference between neighborhoods can be linked to redlining, which has systematically denied services and investments to neighborhoods predominantly inhabited by racial minorities, leaving these areas with inadequate green spaces.
Nature can be our ally in helping people adapt to an increasingly inhospitable climate. We need to rethink how we develop our cities and the built environment. It’s not just about planting more trees; it’s about integrating nature-based solutions into our urban planning. This includes some obvious steps like creating more parks and community gardens, but it also includes innovative methods like green roofs and walls. These structures, which are partially or completely covered with vegetation, help filter out pollutants, improve insulation, reduce energy costs, absorb rainwater to reduce runoff and enhance biodiversity in urban areas.
Local initiatives, like Philadelphia's Beat the Heat campaign and the Philly Tree Plan, which received $12 million in federal funding for urban forestry, aim to increase tree cover in areas that need it most. Other cities, such as Miami-Dade, have appointed Chief Heat Officers to implement strategies like increasing tree canopy, creating cool roofs and developing public awareness campaigns about the dangers of extreme heat. By learning from these initiatives and scaling them up, we can create healthier, more resilient and more equitable cities.
We also need to extend protections to people who put their lives on the line in the scorching heat to keep our economy running. Those who work in construction or on farms—two professions disproportionately comprised of people of color—are many times more likely to die from heat-related illnesses than the average person. Providing basic improvements like paid rest breaks and more access to water and shade would be huge benefit to these essential workers, yet just a few months ago Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a law that prevents cities and counties from doing exactly that. My message to our elected leaders is simple: a bit more empathy—and a lot more trees—can save lives.
Finally, community involvement in planning and implementation is essential, not just because it’s the fair thing to do, but because it increases the chances that solutions are effective and stand the test of time. A study conducted last year by some of my colleagues at World Wildlife Fund (WWF) found conservation efforts that incorporate the views and values of local communities result in better outcomes—for people and nature. When we take the time to build trust, recognize communities’ personal stake in the issues we’re working to solve, and tap into their wisdom to ensure that these initiatives stand the test of time, we sow the seeds for lasting, large-scale change that benefits everyone.
A few nights ago, right before I put my son to bed, we read a children’s book about the life of Wangari Maathai and how she inspired the women of Kenya to plant over 30 million trees to protect their communities. The first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize, Wangari encouraged us to start by planting 10 trees each and getting involved with local initiatives that help our communities. We can tackle the urban heat islands that disproportionately impact people of color. Our neighborhood’s park doesn’t have to be hotter, dirtier, and deadlier than another one just a few neighborhoods over.
By investing in green spaces and planting more trees, we help build a future where healthy, happy children from all walks of life can enjoy the simple joy of playing in the park.
https://time.com/6996432/trees-heat-waves-essay/?utm_source=pocket-newtab-en-us
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AKKERMANSIA MUCINIPHILA BENEFITS GUT HEALTH
Akkermansia muciniphila and Gut Immune System: A Good Friendship That Attenuates Inflammatory Bowel Disease, Obesity, and Diabetes
Akkermansia muciniphila is a Gram-negative anaerobic mucus-layer-degrading bacterium that colonizes the intestinal mucosa of humans and rodents. Metagenomic data have shown an inverse correlation between the abundance of A. muciniphila and diseases such as inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), obesity, and diabetes. Thus, in recent decades, the potential of this bacterium as an immunomodulatory probiotic for autoimmune and chronic inflammatory diseases has been explored in experimental models. Corroborating these human correlation data, it has been reported that A. muciniphila slows down the development and progression of diabetes, obesity, and IBD in mice. Consequently, clinical studies with obese and diabetic patients are being performed, and the preliminary results are very promising.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9300896/
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Akkermansia muciniphila is one of the most incredibly beneficial gut bacteria, linked to everything from healthy weight to GLP-1 production to balanced blood sugar and a strengthened gut lining. Akkermansia makes up to 1-5% of the total bacteria in a healthy gut. Studies have shown that there is a strong link between strong levels of Akkermansia in the gut and metabolic health. A quick Google search shows that Akkermansia is getting a lot of positive attention in the healthcare community, with over 1,000 science publications and counting.
The “muciniphila” in the Latinate name Akkermansia muciniphila actually translates to “lover of mucin.” Mucin is a glycoprotein that regulates the thickness of the mucosal layer lining the intestines, i.e the gut lining. Akkermansia feeds on that mucin which might seem like a bad thing because we want our gut lining to be thick and strong, but nope! The fact that Akkermansia eats mucin is actually important and beneficial. The more mucin that Akkermansia eats, the more it encourages epithelial cells to make additional mucin which then strengthens the intestinal wall. They don’t call it the keystone strain for gut health for nothing!
To encourage the growth of Akkermansia, you can eat foods rich in polyphenols, including apples, bananas, beans, berries, grapes, flaxseed, green tea, nuts, Brussel sprouts, yams, okra, cauliflower, olives, asparagus, onions, oats, etc. The polyphenols in these foods are considered prebiotics, as they benefit the good bacteria in your gut microbiome, like Akkermansia, and promote a healthy gut. Green tea is particularly effective. The same goes for green tea extract.
Fatty acids found in fish also increase Akkermansia.
You can also increase Akkermansia by taking a probiotic (bacteria-containing) supplement.
The levels of Akkermansia decrease with aging. Antibiotics and a diet low in fiber and polyphenols may also result in suboptimal levels of Akkermansia.
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A TYPE OF SEAWEED MAY HELP REDUCE THE RISK OF PARKINSON’S
Parkinson’s disease is a neurological condition that leads to movement challenges and sometimes cognitive changes. There are many complexities behind how the condition develops and the underlying mechanisms involved.
The researchers found the seaweed to be quite effective in mouse models, and they also gained insight into the underlying mechanisms likely involved.
Using Edible Brown Algae to Prevent Parkinson’s
Researchers of the current study note that there are two main types of Parkinson’s disease. One is primarily related to genetics, while the other most likely has many risk factors contributing to it.
They note that exposure to certain neurotoxic substances is one environmental risk factor for Parkinson’s disease. One potentially dangerous substance is rotenone, a pesticide and insecticide. Rotenone leads to heightened levels of reactive oxygen species and, ultimately, cell death.
The researchers wanted to study the protective effects of Ecklonia cava against nerve damage caused by rotenone.
Study author Akiko Kojima-Yuasa, associate professor at Osaka Metropolitan University’s Graduate School of Human Life and Ecology, explained more about the study setup and details to Medical News Today:
“In this study, we focused on Ecklonia cava, an edible brown algae, to investigate the preventive effects of food components against Parkinson’s disease. Ecklonia cava is rich in phlorotannins, a type of polyphenol unique to brown algae, and has strong antioxidant properties. We examined the preventive effects of Ecklonia cava polyphenols (ECP) and their mechanisms of action as a novel physiological effect using animal experiments with a Parkinson’s disease model mouse and cell experiments with a Parkinson’s disease model cell. Rotenone was used to create the Parkinson’s disease models.”
The researchers further noted in the study that the death of neurons that occurs in Parkinson’s disease is associated with oxidative stress, which is when there is an imbalance of antioxidants and free radicals that can lead to cell harm.
The researchers conducted their research using male mice and cell models.
The cell research results indicated that Ecklonia cava polyphenols (ECPs) helped restore cell viability and inhibited rotenone-induced reactive oxygen species production. The results also indicated that ECP helps to increase the activity and gene expression level of a specific antioxidant enzyme called NQO1. Additionally, inhibiting the protein Nrf2, which is involved in the cellular response to oxidative stress, contributed to a loss of the protective effects of ECP.
For the research involving mice, researchers divided the mice into four groups. One was a control group, and one received rotenone. The other two groups received Ecklonia cava polyphenols (ECPs) at different concentrations. The group receiving the highest ECP amount also received rotenone.
Improved Parkinson’s Symptoms
The researchers then examined several outcomes in the mice.
They found that the mice who had received ECP had improved motor skills and intestinal function, which rotenone would normally impair. They also found that ECP also likely protects dopaminergic neurons.
Kojima-Yuasa explained the study results this way:
“In the cell experiments, it was revealed that ECP eliminated intracellular reactive oxygen species by activating antioxidant enzymes and had a protective effect against rotenone-induced neuronal cell damage. In the animal experiments, oral administration of ECP was found to improve motor function in Parkinson’s disease model mice. These results suggest that ECP has a preventive effect against Parkinson’s disease.”
Daniel Truong, MD, neurologist and medical director of the Truong Neuroscience Institute at MemorialCare Orange Coast Medical Center in Fountain Valley, CA, who was not involved in the study, further commented with his thoughts on the study to Medical News Today:
“Oxidative stress is believed to play a key role in the degeneration of dopaminergic neurons in [Parkinson’s disease], leading to the progressive nature of the disease. By targeting oxidative stress, therapies could potentially slow or prevent the progression of Parkinson’s. Antioxidants, like those found in Ecklonia cava polyphenols, have shown promise in preclinical models by reducing oxidative damage and preserving neuronal function, supporting their potential use in Parkinson’s prevention.”
Research like this emphasizes that experts are closer to understanding what proactive steps can address the problems of Parkinson’s disease. Preventing Parkinson’s disease and minimizing its symptoms could lead to improvements in quality of life and cut down on healthcare costs that are related to Parkinson’s disease.
Positive results in animal studies give hope for preventing Parkinson’s disease in the future.
“The fact that the preventive effects of ECP on Parkinson’s disease were observed in animal experiments suggests that orally administered ECP was absorbed through the small intestine and acted effectively without losing its potency. Additionally, based on the amount of orally administered ECP, when converting the dosage for a human clinical trial, it was found that the amount is safely consumable by humans,” Koima-Yuasa said.
https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/type-seaweed-help-prevent-parkinsons-disease
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SPECIAL GENES ALLOW A MINORITY OF SMOKERS TO LIVE A LONG LIFE
For a small minority of very lucky people, smoking doesn't seem to cause all the life-shortening illnesses that threaten most other smokers. Indeed, some of the world's oldest people reach extreme ages while being smokers. The world's documented longest-living person, Jeanne Calment, was a smoker for most of her life, and another claimant to the title is said to smoke a pack a day. What's their secret?
According to new research, the lifespans of such long-living smokers aren't a coincidence. A study published in The Journals of Gerontology, Series A: Biological Sciences & Medical Sciences this month has found that SNP (single nucleotide polymorphism) sequences of DNA in some people appears to help them better withstand and mitigate the environmental damage caused by long-term smoking.
"We identified a set of genetic markers that together seem to promote longevity," said Morgan E. Levine, corresponding author of the study, in a press release. "What's more, many of these markers are in pathways that were discovered to be important for aging and lifespan in animal models.”
The researchers sequenced the genomes of 90 long-lived smokers who lived past 80 years of age – "a group whose survival may signify innate resilience" – and contrasted them with the genomes of 730 smokers who died before they reached 70.
They identified a network of SNPs in genes that conferred significant anti-aging benefits, offering those with the longevity genes effectively a 22 percent increase in the likelihood of reaching 90–99 years of age, and a threefold increase in the likelihood of becoming a centenarian. And those same genes are associated with an almost 11 percent lower cancer prevalence.
"There is evidence that these genes may facilitate lifespan extension by increasing cellular maintenance and repair," said Levine. "Therefore, even though some individuals are exposed to high levels of biological stressors, like those found in cigarette smoke, their bodies may be better set up to cope with and repair the damage.”
The researchers conclude that long-lived smokers may represent a "biologically distinct group, endowed with genetic variants allowing them to respond differentially to environmental stressors”.
As Levine told Ariana Eunjung Cha of The Washington Post, in the future it's quite possible that individualized testing will be available to consumers to help them determine whether they carry the genetic markers that could help them resist the effects of aging and stave off illnesses.
But there's a limit to how much the knowledge will do for them.
"[The proportion] of people who have a 'genetic signature' that would help them cope with the biological stresses of smoking is extremely small, and therefore, nobody should use this paper as an excuse to continue smoking," he said.
https://www.sciencealert.com/researchers-identify-the-longevity-genes-that-keep-some-life-long-smokers-healthy
Oriana:
I remember this discussion already many years ago: the centenarians' embarrassingly "bad habits" of drinking and smoking. "They have fabulous detoxifying genes," the presenting scientist explained. This was an unforgettable if demoralizing answer: the centenarians were definitely not role models. They rarely (or even never) went to see a doctor or a dentist, but quite frequently smoked and drank, and not just wine with dinner. Again, in spite of the earnest wishes of authors who implore us to establish good habits, having good genes trumps all.
Or almost all. An unhappy marriage can be worse than smoking or drinking.
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HOW KETOGENIC DIET SLOWS DOWN BRAIN AGING AND MEMORY LOSS
A new study from researchers at the University of California, Davis, shows a ketogenic diet significantly delays the early stages of Alzheimer’s-related memory loss in mice. This early memory loss is comparable to mild cognitive impairment in humans that precedes full-blown Alzheimer’s disease. The study was published in the Nature Group journal Communications Biology.
The ketogenic diet is a low-carbohydrate, high fat and moderate protein diet, which shifts the body’s metabolism from using glucose as the main fuel source to burning fat and producing ketones for energy. UC Davis researchers previously found that mice lived 13% longer on ketogenic diets.
Slowing Alzheimer’s
The new study, which follows up on that research, found that the molecule beta-hydroxybutyrate, or BHB, plays a pivotal role in preventing early memory decline. It increases almost seven-fold on the ketogenic diet.
“The data support the idea that the ketogenic diet in general, and BHB specifically, delays mild cognitive impairment and it may delay full blown Alzheimer’s disease,” said co-corresponding author Gino Cortopassi, a biochemist and pharmacologist with the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine. “The data clearly don’t support the idea that this is eliminating Alzheimer’s disease entirely.”
Scientists gave mice enough BHB to simulate the benefits of being on the keto diet for seven months.
“We observed amazing abilities of BHB to improve the function of synapses, small structures that connect all nerve cells in the brain. When nerve cells are better connected, the memory problems in mild cognitive impairment are improved,” said co-corresponding author Izumi Maezawa, professor of pathology in the UC Davis School of Medicine.
Cortopassi noted that BHB is also available as a supplement for humans. He said a BHB supplement could likely support memory in mice, but that hasn’t yet been shown.
Other cognitive improvements
Researchers found that the ketogenic diet mice exhibited significant increases in the biochemical pathways related to memory formation. The keto diet also seemed to benefit females more than males and resulted in a higher levels of BHB in females.
“If these results translated to humans, that could be interesting since females, especially those bearing the ApoE4 gene variant, are at significantly higher risk for Alzheimer’s,” Cortopassi said.
The research team is optimistic about the potential impact on healthy aging and plans to delve further into the subject with future studies.
The study was funded by the National Institute on Aging, a unit of the National Institutes of Health.
Oriana:
A word of warning. I tried BHB in supplement form, and ended up with painful abdominal cramps. Apparently this is not rare. On the other hand, there is much to be said for the keto (or approximately keto) diet. Diets that lower fasting blood sugar (and thus insulin) show great promise, especially for older people.
And no, you don't have to go "full carnivore." Consuming leafy greens and mushrooms along with protein and fat of your choice (fatty fish is a great choice) provides some benefits that meat or fish alone can't. Think fiber, Vitamin C, and some micronutrients.
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ending on beauty:
If I can stop one heart from breaking,
I shall not live in vain;
If I can ease one life the aching,
Or cool one pain,
Or help one fainting robin
Unto his nest again,
I shall not live in vain.
~ Emily Dickinson
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