Blue city of Chefchaouen, MoroccoTHE STOOPED WOMAN
And he was teaching in one of the synagogues on the sabbath. And, behold, there was a woman which had a spirit of infirmity eighteen years, and was bowed together, and could in no wise lift up herself. Luke 13:10-13
After eighteen years
of living bent,
bent as though bowing,
bowing all the time –
dressed like a beggar
because you have spent
all you had on potions and spells,
sin sacrifices at the Temple,
the Levites’ costly advice —
so botched you begged
the earth to take you back
into the mother dark —
After eighteen years,
you shuffle toward healing,
stooped, head down,
eyes to the ground —
Come, he says,
this strange rabbi who allows
women to sit near.
He lays his hands
on your frightened shoulders,
and suddenly it’s easy.
You grow straight
just by daring
to lift up your eyes.
And the crowd
hushes, no one hisses
“Unclean, unclean” —
Straight as a young tree,
in the glory between
the leaf and the dove,
you unbend to become who you are.
Centuries later, women read the few
verses about you whose body
portrayed all womankind.
They bless you from beyond
the watching crowd:
Stooped woman of Judea,
straighten up. Beautiful
daughter of Sarah, unbow.
~ Oriana
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ALBERT CAMUS: ALWAYS THE STRANGER
It is a century since French Nobel prize-winning author Albert Camus was born – and more than 50 years since he died in an accident on an icy road – yet the polemics over his legacy and "mysterious" death rumble on.
What his only daughter, Catherine Camus, recalls, however, is not the man shunned by Algeria, the country of his birth, as an Arab-despising colonialist, nor the slowness of the French establishment to recognize him, nor even the anti-communist who may – or may not – have been murdered by the Russians.
"Was he killed by the KGB? I don't know and I don't want to know. He was Papa," she says, her voice faltering a fraction. "And I lost him. There is nothing more to say. It was horrible enough that he was taken away; the idea that this was done deliberately is unbearable. The result was the same. He was dead.”
We are sitting in the tall-ceilinged former office of Claude Gallimard, son of Gaston, founder of the French publishing company that brought Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre and André Gide to the wider world.
Camus was being driven from Paris to his Provençal home by Gaston's nephew Michel, when the car careered off the road and hit two trees killing both men. Camus, the author of La Peste and L'Etranger, was 46 when he died; Catherine and her twin brother, Jean, were 14. On the desk is Catherine's book, Le Monde en Partage (The World to Share), published to mark the centenary of Camus's birth. It is a hefty trove of photographs, drawings, notes, letters, telegrams and extracts from his books and essays, documenting Camus's connections to and travels in Algeria, Europe, the Americas and Russia. Much of the material, she says, has never been published before.
In the Gallimard reception there is a small display of Camus first editions and a yellowing page 21 of the New York Times of 18 October 1957 headlined: "Albert Camus has just been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature." It is accompanied by a photograph of Camus by Henri Cartier-Bresson.
That the display article is from an English-language newspaper is symbolic – Camus has long been afforded greater recognition and respect abroad than in France. Centenary events have taken place in the US, India, Israel, Chile and Jordan among others, but there have been no national celebrations in France, or in Algeria, where Camus still provokes hostility for his sympathy with the French pied noir colonialists and opposition to Algerian independence.
A major French exhibition was cancelled amid rows and recriminations over what part Algeria should play in it. Instead, a smaller, some say more anodyne, event.
Albert Camus, Citizen of the World was held in Aix-en-Provence as part of the Marseille 2013 European culture capital program.
However, there is no grand retrospective in Paris planned. Catherine, 68, says her father would have approved. "There are lots of small events in villages, towns, little hamlets across France because Camus is still widely read and people have great affection for him. Over and above his books, readers love the man," she told the Observer. "He touched them as human beings, maybe because the man is in the books; he asked the same questions everyone asks and addressed the same suffering and pain and concerns everyone has. He spoke directly to them and I know he touched people profoundly because of the hundreds of letters I receive.
"That there is no national celebration of his birth is natural; those in power in France have never liked Camus, and he detested those in power. He always said he was in the service of those who suffered history, not those who made it. In many ways Camus is still l'étranger [the outsider] in France. I find it astonishing that ministers don't realize what Camus represents for the country. I am proud of him and the image he gives of France.”
Algeria is altogether more problematic. The late Palestinian-American academic Edward Said suggested in 1993 that Camus's work sprang from an "incapacitated colonial sensibility.”
"The plain style of Camus and his unadorned reporting of social situations conceal rivetingly complex contradictions ... unresolvable by rendering, as critics have done, his feelings of loyalty to French Algeria as a parable of the human condition ...", Said wrote. Camus was critical of French colonialism in Algeria, but pleaded for reconciliation rather than independence. French historian Benjamin Stora described it as a "paradoxical and double positioning that might be called that of the ‘outsider’.”
It still rankles in Algeria, though Catherine Camus says the view of the "ordinary Algerian people, who love reading Camus" conflicts with those of the authorities in Algiers. "He was no racist, he was as concerned for the fate of Muslims in Algeria as he was for the fate of French there. In any case, events in Algeria since independence have shown his position was justified," she said.
The book includes a chapter on England, quoting from his essay A Combat, in which he praises English "heroism" during the second world war. "We cannot forget that not for one minute was the idea of capitulation [to the Nazis] accepted by a single Englishman." He loved Shakespeare, whose Othello he translated into French, Oscar Wilde, Graham Greene, William Blake and Arthur Koestler.
But it is to the man and the father, to whom Catherine Camus repeatedly returns. "He was very handsome and had the attitude that unimportant things didn't bother him, what we would call 'cool' today … He never punished us if we did something wrong, he would always ask why we had done it and what we were thinking. This was complicated for a child, a smack would have been easier, but it wasn't his way. What remains with me is his love of life and love for other human beings.”
She added: "For 53 years I have dealt with the pain of his death, and I have thought of him every single day. I don't know what he would think of the world now, with its race for money, and consumerism and disregard for the suffering of individuals.
"I cannot speak for him, but I know that what he wrote is still relevant and still speaks to people today.”
Camus in his garden with his son and daughter
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/nov/23/albert-camus-outsider-catherine-camus
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“The tragedy of old age is not that one is old, but that one is young. Inside this aging body is a heart still as curious, still as hungry, still as full of longing as it was in youth. I sit at the window and watch the world pass by, feeling like a stranger in a strange land, unable to relate to the world outside, and yet within me, there burns the same fire that once thought it could conquer the world. And the real tragedy is that the world still remains, so distant and elusive, a place I could never quite grasp.” ~ Albert Camus, “The Fall”
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GLOBAL WARMING AND FIRE STORMS
Climate change has been a key factor in increasing the risk and extent of wildfires in the Western United States. Wildfire risk depends on a number of factors, including temperature, soil moisture, and the presence of trees, shrubs, and other potential fuel.
Research shows that changes in climate create warmer, drier conditions. Increased drought, and a longer fire season are boosting these increases in wildfire risk. For much of the U.S. West, projections show that an average annual 1 degree C temperature increase would increase the median burned area per year as much as 600 percent in some types of forests. In the Southeastern United States modeling suggests increased fire risk and a longer fire season, with at least a 30 percent increase from 2011 in the area burned by lightning-ignited wildfire by 2060.’
Once a fire starts—more than 80 percent of U.S. wildfires are caused by people—warmer temperatures and drier conditions can help fires spread and make them harder to put out. Warmer, drier conditions also contribute to the spread of the mountain pine beetle and other insects that can weaken or kill trees, building up the fuels in a forest.
In summary (AI -generated)
Drought conditions:
Rising temperatures caused by climate change often lead to extended droughts, drying out vegetation and making it highly flammable.
Longer fire season:
Warmer temperatures can also lengthen the fire season, increasing the window of time when wildfires are likely to occur.
Increased wind speeds:
Some studies suggest that climate change may also influence wind patterns, potentially creating stronger winds that can further spread wildfires, contributing to firestorm conditions
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Wildfires in Southern California have burned tens of thousands of acres, destroyed thousands of buildings, and killed at least 10 people. Experts say global warming may have set the stage for the catastrophic blazes.
As the planet heats up, rainfall is growing more erratic over much of the globe, leading to wide swings between wet and dry conditions. So-called “weather whiplash” is ramping up the risk of wildfire in California, said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at UCLA.
Last year, Los Angeles saw record rainfall, which fueled the growth of grasses and shrubs, but so far this winter the city has gotten a fraction of its usual rainfall, leaving dense vegetation to dry out. In light of the arid conditions, federal officials warned of “significant fire potential” in the region.
Making matters worse, the region is seeing unusually strong Santa Ana winds, which bring hot, dry air from the mountains out to sea during the winter months. There is little evidence that warming has made the winds more potent, Swain said, but with climate change, California’s dry season is extending into the early winter, when the Santa Ana winds typically take shape. This, he said, “is the key climate change connection to Southern California wildfires.”
Troublingly, dry conditions are likely to persist in the months ahead. The Pacific has officially entered its La Niña phase, U.S. weather officials said Thursday, which typically brings more arid weather to California.
European weather officials announced Friday that 2024 was the hottest year on record and the first to measure more than 1.5 degrees C warmer than the preindustrial era. It is too soon to say if the world has officially breached the 1.5-degree target set forth in the Paris Agreement, which will be judged according to the average temperature over several years, but the record heat is causing alarm.
“Each year in the last decade is one of the 10 warmest on record,” said Samantha Burgess, of the European weather service. “We are now teetering on the edge of passing the 1.5-degree C level defined in the Paris Agreement.”
https://e360.yale.edu/digest/los-angeles-fires-climate-change
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WHAT’S CAUSING THE RECENT SPIKE IN BLOBAL TEMPERATURES?
~ About 18 months ago, climate scientists began to notice something strange. In March of 2023, global sea surface temperatures started to rise. In a warming world, the seas would be expected to grow hotter, but the rise, which came at a time when the Pacific Ocean was in the neutral phase of the weather pattern known as the El Niño–Southern Oscillation, or ENSO, was unusually steep. In April, 2023, sea surface temperatures set a new record. They did so again in May.
As the months went on, the weirdness continued. In the summer of 2023, the world entered an El Niño, the warm phase of ENSO. El Niños typically bring higher temperatures, but in the second half of 2023, both sea surface and air temperatures increased so much that scientists were stunned. One called the figures “absolutely gobsmackingly bananas.”
In an essay that appeared in Nature this past March, NASA’s chief climate scientist, Gavin Schmidt said: “It’s humbling, and a bit worrying, to admit that no year has confounded climate scientists’ predictive capabilities more than 2023 has.”
Officially, the El Niño ended in May 2024. But global temperatures have remained stubbornly high. This year they are expected to set yet another record.
Schmidt says that scientists still can’t explain the unexpected spike in temperatures. When I talked with him recently, he called the continuing confusion “a little embarrassing” for researchers.
Scientists have identified several recent developments that could have contributed to the last year and a half of anomalous warmth. The first is a set of rules that reduced the sulfur content of the fuel used in super tankers. Since sulfur dioxide pollution reflects sunlight, this change, while good for public health, could have led to increased ocean heating.
A second potential contributor is an unusual eruption that occurred in January 2022. Normally, volcanoes emit sulfur dioxide and so produce temporary cooling. But the eruption of Hunga Tonga–Hunga Ha‘apai, an underwater volcano in the South Pacific, sent water vapor shooting into the stratosphere, which could have had a warming effect.
The
January 2022 eruption of the underwater Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha'apai
volcano produced water vapor that could have had a warming effect.
Yet another possible contributor is the solar cycle. The sun is currently at, or near, a peak of activity, and this, too, could be boosting temperatures.
People were also talking about unusual behavior of the Saharan dust or the wind pattern in the North Atlantic. People were talking about long-term, ongoing changes in how much pollution is coming from China and India. Maybe those things are changing faster than we anticipated. The pollution in the air is a cooling factor, and so if you take it away, then that’s a warming factor.
Things are behaving in a more erratic way than we expected, and that means the future predictions may also be more off. And you could think of things being more off in multiple ways because the system is changing in a way where what happened in the past is no longer a good guide to what’s going to happen in the future. And that’s concerning. For example, we have huge industries and huge expectations based on temperature anomalies that are associated with El Niño.
And if that is now the new normal, there’s no new normal. We are going to get to 1.5 degrees a little faster than we anticipated even four years ago.
https://e360.yale.edu/features/gavin-schmidt-interview
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DID WORLD WAR I HAD TO HAPPEN?
A British staff car passes refugeesDisputing Disaster is a book about the First World War’s origins and causes, not – as its title suggests – the war itself. It discusses six historians who have written on a century-old debate that has swung from an acceptance of German war guilt (as stated in the Paris Peace Agreement in 1919) to sharing responsibility among all the players. Today the scholarly needle, as in the early 1930s, points more to the latter conclusion than the former.
Perry Anderson’s own position prioritizes the systemic origins over the proximate and contingent causes of the July 1914 crisis. He aligns the war’s outbreak with the collapse of the Concert of Europe – confirmed by Austria-Hungary’s decision to abandon a system which had served it well since 1815 – and the emergence of ‘new’ imperialism after 1885.
Austria-Hungary was not party to this late flowering of empire and its use of war overseas, neither was Germany, but the Entente powers of Britain, France, Russia, and, ultimately, Italy were, with consequences which from 1909 were visited on Europe via the Balkans.
Perversely, the historian of Anderson’s six who best encapsulates this argument is not known primarily for his work on the Great War. In his magisterial book on European international relations between 1763 and 1848 Paul Schroeder identified the moment in 1815 when the great powers (and Schroeder argued lesser ones too, though Anderson disagrees), fearing that war might trigger revolution, prioritized peace and so created an international order.
Anderson’s sextet is so diverse, and his treatment of each historian so different, that it is hard to find consistency between them. The repeated refrains – that the July crisis is itself an insufficient explanation for the war, that the long-term origins matter as much as the causes – have been the stuff of debate since the 1920s when German historians responded to the war guilt charge by releasing documents that appeared to situate the beginning of the story with Germany’s unification in 1871.
To cover this opening period, Anderson begins with Pierre Renouvin, a historian who, as well as being himself a mutilé de guerre, occupied the high ground in French scholarship on the war until his death in 1974. The chapter puts Renouvin in context, by incorporating not just his French contemporaries but also the Americans Sidney Fay and Bernadotte Schmitt who, in 1928 and 1930, wrote the first major works addressing the war’s causes in comparative terms.
Fay argued that the system had failed and that responsibility was therefore shared. Renouvin disagreed: Germany was guilty because of its decisions in 1914. Anderson’s discussion of this historiographical phase is rewarding but it will be hard going for the lay reader: it takes unfamiliar names for granted and gives no account of the war’s outbreak. That does not come until the chapter on Christopher Clark’s The Sleepwalkers.
Luigi Albertini, the author of the three-volume standard work on July 1914, follows Renouvin. Anderson provides a full account of the failure of Italian liberalism before and after the war to explain Albertini’s role, as the editor of the Corriere della Sera, in supporting the war and Mussolini’s rise to power. Bizarrely, he says less about Albertini’s book, the product of his enforced retirement after 1925, or its eventual impact after the Second World War.
Anderson’s concern with the inherent conservatism of both Renouvin and Albertini finds its fullest flowering in his third case study. Fritz Fischer’s two books on German aims during and before the war, published in 1961 and 1969, reignited the debate around German war guilt. They did so by discounting the actions of the other powers and by using fresh evidence in ways that were selective. Anderson is inclined to forgive Fischer because in the process he contributed to Germany’s wider liberalization. However, he is less interested in the furor Fischer provoked (and in who supported him) than in Fischer’s credentials as a Nazi and the reasons he changed his political views after the Second World War.
Keith Wilson, Anderson’s fourth subject, never published his doctoral thesis and is best known for a brief book of essays, The Policy of the Entente, which for all their individual excellence lack an overarching argument and focus entirely on Britain. Although Anderson makes the case for Wilson as a scholar with a broader international perspective, the chapter fails to locate Wilson’s output sufficiently in the work of others.
Finally we come to Clark and Schroeder. Their chapters are the longest, largely because they are the most discursive: that on Clark gives equal treatment to his most recent book, on the 1848 revolutions; that on Schroeder devotes space to his critique of US foreign policy after 9/11 (another moment when a great power ruptured the order on which it relied).
Both Clark and Schroeder sought to make what they wrote relevant to international relations theory. Clark did so in ways which, as Anderson says, were anachronistic. Schroeder’s engagement with theory was much more sophisticated and sustained. The irony is that neither has had much impact on international relations theory, which takes the outbreak of the First World War as a case study of war’s origins but remains stubbornly wedded to the Fischer thesis. The 1914 debate has become a case study of disciplinary division, not fusion.
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MADNESS IN METROPOLIS; IS CITY LIFE BAD FOR US?
Shanghai, a pedestrian street. In 1903, German sociologist Georg Simmel (1858-1918) wrote an essay titled, “The Metropolis and Mental Life.” He articulated a question that many people had been pondering: Could city living drive you crazy?
In North America and Europe, in particular, many people had recently abandoned lives in rural settings, doing agricultural work, for life in urban settings, where they worked in industry or perhaps in services supporting these industries. Simmel wondered what effect this momentous change was having on mental health.
In the United States, neurologists, such as George Miller Beard (1839-1883) and Silas Weir Mitchell (1829-1914) had been arguing since the 1860s that the stresses of modern life, typified by bustling, hectic urban environments, taxed the nervous system in susceptible individuals, resulting in a disorder called neurasthenia. Towering skyscrapers, crowded streets, jangling telephones, staccato telegraphs, and inescapable traffic taxed the nerves of susceptible individuals.
Middle-class, white, Protestant city dwellers were thought to be particularly vulnerable to neurasthenia, which caused a wide range of mental and physical symptoms, including fatigue, depression, anxiety, and neuralgia. Others argued that Black Americans, migrating to northern cities from the South, might also struggle to cope in the new environment.
Neurasthenia ceased to be commonly diagnosed after World War One, though it continues to be diagnosed in Asia. But concern with cities remained. By the 1920s, social scientists at the Chicago School of Sociology had put the Windy City under the microscope. Chicago was a particularly appropriate subject for study. After the Great Fire of 1871, it was rebuilt.
Chicago boasted the world’s first skyscrapers and its new downtown was designed to emphasize commercial, rather than residential, development. A truly modern city.
Chicago School researchers investigated juvenile delinquency, suicide, homelessness, gangs, and mental illness. Although these problems were not restricted only to cities, they came to be associated mainly with urban environments. One of these studies, which explored the geography of mental illness in Chicago, found that schizophrenia in particular was associated with the deteriorated slum areas (nicknamed “Hobohemia”) surrounding the downtown core. They suspected that the chaotic, disorganized, and unstable characteristics of life there, along with the endemic poverty, were behind these rates. But were these problems limited to cities? Or could they lead to mental illness anywhere? Two post-World War Two studies would attempt to answer these questions by exploring mental health in two very different places.
The first location was an even more emblematic American city: New York City. Researchers in the Midtown Manhattan Study surveyed adults in the Upper East Side to assess how mentally healthy or unhealthy they were. Their findings were somewhat of a shock. The study found that fewer than one in five (18.5 percent) Manhattanites had good mental health. A quarter were incapacitated by their mental health problems, unable to work or function socially. These statistics captured the attention of the nation’s media, with headlines blaring, “New York City Living for Nuts Only,” and “City Gets Mental Test, Results are Real Crazy.”
But did this mean that cities drove people insane? The second study, conducted at roughly the same time and co-led by Alexander Leighton (1908-2007), the same researcher who would complete the Midtown Manhattan Study, suggested otherwise. This was the Stirling County Study (Stirling County was a pseudonym), which did not investigate an urban environment at all, but a very rural one in southwestern Nova Scotia, Canada. Stirling County, which consisted of fishing, forestry, and farming communities, might have been as far removed from the Big Apple as one could get, but its rates of mental illness were strikingly similar.
Rather than blaming cities per se, therefore, the researchers suggested that underlying factors—that could be present in both urban and rural environments—were really the issue. These factors included poverty, inequality, social isolation, and community disintegration. Other studies, which used rat models to investigate crowding, also suggested that the relationship between cities and mental health was more complex than people thought. But the baby was already being thrown out with the bathwater in many places.
Urban renewal, partly justified because crowded inner cities were bad for mental health, was already well underway in North America and Europe. Boston’s West End, for example, was razed to the ground, destroying what many observers argued was a vibrant, multi-ethnic community. Some contended that such measures resulted in more, not less, mental illness. Elsewhere, downtown cores emptied as people left for the suburbs. The neighborhoods that remained were often impoverished, disenfranchised, and underfunded, characterized by crumbling infrastructure, fires, and homelessness, none of which was good for mental health.
Perhaps the urban planners should have referred back to Georg Simmel. His conclusion in 1903 was that the relationship between cities and mental health was effectively ambivalent. For people who felt constrained and stifled living in close communities where everyone knew your business, cities could be liberating. Cities made others feel detached, lonely, and unimportant. There are city mice and country mice, after all.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/a-short-history-of-mental-health/202501/mad-in-the-metropolis-is-city-living-bad-for-mental
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THE INTROVERT ADVANTAGE IN OLDER AGE
An intriguing pattern has emerged from psychological research: Introverts might have a leg up when navigating the choppy waters of aging. While extroverts have long been celebrated for their social butterfly abilities, it turns out that the introvert's natural inclinations may serve as a built-in buffer against some of aging's most common challenges. This is good news as we collectively hurtle toward our golden years.
Susan Whitbourne's longitudinal studies at the University of Massachusetts have revealed that introverts often report higher levels of contentment with their later-life circumstances compared with their more extroverted peers.
"The very qualities that define introversion—preference for quieter environments, comfort with solitude, and deeper but fewer social connections—appear to align remarkably well with the natural evolution of our social worlds as we age," Whitbourne finds. Who knew that all those nights declining party invitations were early retirement training?
The science of social selection
The key lies in what is known as "positive disengagement." Laura Carstensen, the founding director of Stanford’s Center of Longevity, where she developed socioemotional selectivity theory, suggests that as people age, they naturally become more selective about their social interactions, preferring quality over quantity.
The transition, which can feel jarring to extroverts, often comes more naturally to introverts, who have spent a lifetime curating smaller, more intimate social circles.
Cultural perspectives and anxiety levels
Equally fascinating work by Helene Fung at the Chinese University of Hong Kong found that introverts typically experience less anxiety about the social changes accompanying aging.
While extroverts may struggle with the decreased energy for extensive socializing or the natural shrinking of their social networks, introverts often find that such changes align with their pre-existing preferences.
It's like discovering that the world has finally caught up with your preferred operating speed.
The Power of Introspection
Robert McCrae's research at the National Institute on Aging supports this "introvert advantage." His team's findings suggest that introverts' tendency toward introspection and self-reflection helps them process the existential aspects of aging.
While extroverts might seek external distractions from aging-related concerns, introverts' natural inclination to turn inward often results in better psychological adjustment and acceptance of life's changes.
The Biological Connection
The plot thickens when we consider Elissa Epel’s fascinating look at telomeres, those protective caps on our chromosomes that reflect how we age at a cellular level. Her studies hint at a possible connection between introversion and stress management that might even have biological implications, preserving telomere length.
Introverts' preference for lower-stimulation environments and tendency to process experiences more deeply may result in lower levels of chronic stress, potentially affecting cellular aging. Though more research is needed, it's tantalizing to think that being an introvert might get under your skin—in a good way.
A Balanced Perspective
But it's not all quiet contemplation and smooth sailing, and nothing is conveniently binary regarding human personality and temperament. Margaret Gatz's twin studies at the University of Southern California remind us that personality type is just one factor in the complex equation of aging well.
The advantage lies not in introversion alone but in how introverted tendencies align with the natural evolution of social needs and energy levels in later life.
The Development of Coping Mechanisms
Perhaps most compelling is the work of Klaus Rothermund, whose research on emotion regulation in aging has shown that introverts often develop more sophisticated coping mechanisms earlier in life. Such skills as comfort with solitude, the ability to self-reflect, and the capacity for deep one-on-one connections become increasingly valuable as we age.
It's as if introverts have been unknowingly practicing for their senior years all along.
Practical Implications
The implications of the findings extend beyond mere academic interest. Understanding how different personality types navigate this transition becomes increasingly crucial as the global population ages.
For extroverts reading this, don't despair—awareness is half the battle, and many coping strategies that come naturally to introverts can be learned and cultivated.
Conclusion
And for introverts? You might want to add this to your list of quiet victories. Your lifetime of preferring solitary walks, deep conversations over small talk and overcrowded parties, and quality over quantity in relationships, may have prepared you for a more graceful journey into your later years.
Sometimes, it seems, the tortoise doesn't just win the race. It may also enjoy the journey more.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/transformative-leadership/202412/the-introvert-advantage
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MY FIVE MAJOR LIFE-CHANGING INSIGHTS ~ Oriana (A repost because something here may help someone else)
I credit my breakthrough depression-ending insight to reading the statement “You can practice falling apart, or you can practice being strong.” It was like a proverbial lightning hit. I happen to come from a family of strong women, so it seemed only natural to choose to be strong and cope rather than brood and have crying fits. But it took me a long white to remember this, to regain my true self.
Just reading the sentence about choosing strength versus falling apart, simply the way it presented a choice, was the moment of insight. Later I realized I had to read those words at just the right time: “ripeness is all.” Once my thinking normalized away from automatic negative thoughts, I was able to remember that I also had minor insights along the way, which helped me to develop a desire to be rid of depression rather than indulge the perverse desire to go ever deeper into it. The first such step was probably the loss of pride in my suffering — suddenly it was presented as a weakness, as “falling apart.”
So the build-up toward the insight was gradual. But once the insight hit — never might that it was in the words of someone else — I knew there was no going back into depression. It wasn’t just that the door was forever closed. I couldn’t even find the door.
And that’s the somewhat unnerving thing about insight — you can’t go back to the pre-insight perception. You are stuck with having to live up to the insight.
The first time I had such “instant” change was dropping religion. In spite of the heavy Catholic propaganda, I soon began to doubt both the pie in the sky and the sulfur-belching flames of eternal damnation. A thought arose in my mind: “It’s just another mythology.” It seemed instant, but of course the moment of insight was preceded by preliminary steps and stages, including reading a certain crucial page in a book on comparative religion about the dying and rising gods. Or was it on the creation myths? I no longer clearly remember that part — it was enough to be reminded that there are many religions. Suddenly, the life-changing thought.
Once I saw that the Judeo-Christian tradition was one of many mythologies, there was no going back. Gods and religions were man-made "forests of symbols." It's an interesting stroll, and we can enjoy and admire the beauty of the art religions have inspired. But to believe that this was literal truth was ridiculous.
The third such moment happened when a former college boyfriend wrote a one-sentence reply to a desperate letter from me: “Do only that which is in your best interest.” Before, no one had ever given me that permission — rather the contrary. This was revolutionary. The women of my generation were still socialized to do that which was in someone else's best interest; they were supposed to serve others, or else be seen as "selfish." But here was a man telling me to act in my own best interest. And just like that I was no longer willing to risk a disastrous marriage, or in any way subjugate my primary needs to a man’s needs. It was my feminist moment, and it’s a bit funny that I owe it to a man. But that’s exactly what a typical man would do without any need for coaching — do that which is in his best interest.
The fourth life-changing insight came from a woman friend to whom I complained how a a certain person was mistreating me, not replying to me emails, breaking promises. My friend smiled and said, “You suffer because you want something from her.” I instantly knew that was profound wisdom. In my thoughts I began to repeat: “There is nothing I want from X. There is nothing I want from X.” (X here stands for the other party's name, which need not be revealed). Later, whenever I happened to be reminded of that person, I deliberately thought, “There is nothing I want from X.” That meant that X had no power over me.
An interesting thing happened. Eventually I got a long, effusive, self-centered email from X, making no mention of the promise she’d made earlier. I replied with a brief and aloof email that made no request — I truly stopped needing anything from X. Her next email to me was friendly and respectful — but I was no longer interested in cultivating this friendship, so again I replied in a brief and aloof way. And that was the end of it, and good riddance, since the woman was an alcoholic. (The critical thing about alcoholics and the prime reason to avoid them is that they don't keep their promises. They get drunk instead.)
Ever since, I practiced saying to myself “There is nothing I want from X” [insert the relevant name] whenever trouble arose. It worked. No expectations, no disappointment, no resentment. This person will never be a part of my life. I also remembered that my mother said that a school friend taught her a similar method: when someone or something doesn’t work out, repeat to yourself “that’s not for me, that’s not for me (or, in the case of romantic involvement, "He's not for me, he's not for me").
(When there is lack of clarity, my motto becomes "May the best possible outcome manifest itself.")
The fifth insight, like the depression-ending insight, arose from what I call “the power of OR.” (I mean the tiny word “OR.”) This one I owe to a banker who was trying to induce me to invest a certain relatively modest sum of money over which I just gained sole autonomy. “What do you want to do with your money?” he asked. “Do you want to invest it make more money?”
He paused, and then asked what to me was a revolutionary question: “Or do you want to spend it?” And after a lifetime of being taught exclusively to save, save, save, and never having questioned the “virtue” of thrift, I surprised myself by saying without hesitation, “I want to spend it.” Of course the point was to spend it intelligently to improve the quality of my life — or to donate to a cause truly important to me.
Though this new willingness to spend seemed to come out of the blue, I realized that I’d been thinking about the stages of life. A parallel insight emerged: “I don’t want to die rich.”
I don’t want to die rich, but I’d like to die with the awareness of having lived a rich life — and yes, it helps to have money because money can buy education and experiences.
These five insights have changed my life for the better. I hope that perhaps one or two of them may prove useful to a particular reader. Why this relatively modest expectation? Because one needs to be ready. Much needs to fall into place, sometimes slowly, almost imperceptibly, before the lightning of insight can strike and irreversibly rewire the brain.
The experience can be exhilarating, but in some cases frightening as well. What you now seen can’t be unseen. The doors to depression and other escapes are not only closed, but can’t even be found anymore. Without an escape, you have to soldier on. The glamor that suffering used to have is replaced by the thought that it’s too late now for indulging in misery. You have to act in your own best interest.
And that calls for the clarity about what is indeed one's best interest. It's not always instantly obvious. I've learned to wait to hear that "voice from the other self" — the self that is never depressed, or overly enthusiastic. The self that knows there is a solution, that "more shall be revealed."
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THE NAZI SEARCH FOR “ARYAN ORIGINS” IN TIBET
A little over a year before World War Two began, a group of Germans landed surreptitiously along India's eastern borders.
They were on a mission to discover the "source of origin of the Aryan race."
Adolf Hitler believed that "Aryan" Nordic people had entered India from the north some 1,500 years earlier, and that the Aryans had committed the "crime" of mixing with the local "un-Aryan" people, losing the attributes that had made them racially superior to all other people on earth.
Hitler regularly expressed deep antipathy for the Indian people and their struggle for freedom, articulating his sentiments in his speeches, writings and debates.
Yet, according to Himmler, one of Hitler's top lieutenants and the head of the SS, the Indian subcontinent was still worth a close look.
This is where Tibet came into the picture.
Those who swore by the idea of a white Nordic superior race were believers in the tale of the imagined lost city of Atlantis, where people of "the purest blood" had apparently once lived. Believed to have been situated somewhere between England and Portugal in the Atlantic Ocean, this mythical island allegedly sunk after being struck by a divine thunderbolt.
Heinrich Himmler and Hitler, both believers in the Aryan myth
All the Aryans who survived had supposedly moved on to more secure places. The Himalayan region was believed to be one such refuge, Tibet in particular because it was famous for being "the roof of the world”.
In 1935, Himmler set up a unit within the SS called the Ahnenerbe — or Bureau of Ancestral Heritage — to find out where people from Atlantis had gone after the bolt from the blue and the deluge, and where traces of the great race still remained and could be discovered.
In 1938, he sent a team of five Germans to Tibet on this "search operation."
Two of the team's members stood out from the rest. One was Ernst Schafer, a gifted 28-year-old zoologist who had been to the India-China-Tibet border twice earlier. Schafer had joined the SS soon after the Nazi triumph of 1933, long before Himmler became his patron for the Tibet expedition.
Schafer was crazy about hunting and loved to gather trophies in his Berlin home. On one hunting expedition, while attempting to shoot a duck from a boat he and his wife were in, he slipped when taking aim and shot his wife in the head accidentally, killing her.
The second key man was Bruno Beger, a young anthropologist who had joined the SS in 1935. Beger would take measurements of the skulls and facial details of Tibetans and make face masks, he said, "especially to collect material about the proportions, origins, significance and development of the Nordic race in this region.”
The ship carrying the five Germans docked at Colombo in Sri Lanka early in May 1938. From there, they took another one to Madras (now Chennai) and a third one to Calcutta (now Kolkata).
British authorities in India were wary of the traveling Germans and thought them spies. They were initially reluctant to allow them to pass through India and the then British-run Times of India even ran the accusatory headline: "A Gestapo Agent in India."
The British political officer in Gangtok, in the north-eastern Indian state of Sikkim, which was an independent mountain kingdom at the time, was also not enthusiastic about granting the men entry into Tibet through Sikkim.
But ultimately, the Nazi team's resolve won. By the end of the year, the five Germans, with swastika flags tied to their mules and baggage, had entered Tibet.
The swastika was a ubiquitous sign in Tibet, known locally as "yungdrung". Schafer and the team would have seen plenty of it during their time in India too where, among Hindus, it had long been a symbol of good fortune. Even today, the symbol is visible outside homes, inside temples, at street corners and on the backs of tempos and trucks.
Ernst Schafer (third from left) in Tibet in 1939
In Tibet, meanwhile, things were changing.
The 13th Dalai Lama had died in 1933 and the new one was only three years old, so the Buddhist Tibetan kingdom was being controlled by a regent. The Germans were treated exceptionally well by the regent as well as by common Tibetans, and Beger, who made face masks, even acted as a sort of stand-in doctor for locals for a while.
What the Tibetan Buddhists did not know was that in the perverse imagination of the Nazis, Buddhism, just like Hinduism, was a religion that had weakened the Aryans who had come to Tibet — and had resulted in the loss of their spirit and strength.
Just when it appeared that Schafer and the others could spend more time exploring for their real "research" in the guise of carrying out scientific investigations in areas such as zoology and anthropology, the German expedition was abruptly cut short in August 1939 by the inevitability of the war.
Beger had, by then, measured the skulls and features of 376 Tibetans, taken 2,000 photographs, "made casts of heads, faces, hands and ears of 17 people" and collected "the finger and hand prints of another 350.”
He had also gathered 2,000 "ethnographic artefacts", and another member of the contingent had taken 18,000 meters of black-and-white film and 40,000 photographs.
As their trip was cut short, Himmler made arrangements for the team to fly out of Calcutta at the last moment and was himself present to greet them when their plane landed in Munich.
Schafer took most of his Tibetan "treasures" to a castle in Salzburg he moved to during the war. But once the Allied Forces came in 1945, some of the Tibetan pictures and other material were lost.
But much of the collection has survived and is held in museums and archives in Germany and the United States.
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/when-nazis-tried-to-trace-aryan-race-myth-in-tibet?utm_source=firefox-newtab-en-us
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RUSSIA AND THE SPECTER OF MARX
Joan Miro: Person Throwing a Stone at a Bird
Alta Ifland: Like Trump, Putin did not appear out of thin air: just like him, he is a product of a specific society and political system, and unless one has a clear understanding of this type of society and system, one is incapable of dealing with its products. Before Putin was the President of Russia, during Communism, he was an officer of the KGB, which may have been the biggest criminal organization in the history of humanity. It is not the purpose of this essay to prove this point — if you are unfamiliar with the history of Communism and of the various types of Secret Police organizations that, in its name, have tortured, imprisoned, and killed more than 40 million people around the globe, there are plenty of books that could instruct you.
You may retort that whatever Putin may have been, he is certainly not a Communist now, and there is nothing Communist about contemporary Russian society. Indeed, neither Putin nor Russia are Communist. But in the same way that we analyze the conditions that made Trump possible, we need to remember that before he was a politician, he was a boisterous celebrity created by the same networks that can’t stop attacking him now, one needs to go back to where Putin and contemporary Russia are coming from. Russia’s economy, like that of China, is wildly capitalist, but its structures of power are very much grounded in the structures of former Communist societies. A major reason capitalism is so corrupt in these countries is that, when Communism fell, their first entrepreneurs were the members of the former nomenklatura — they were the only ones who had money to invest. Many of today’s Russian oligarchs once recited The Communist Manifesto or are the privileged children of those who did.
But these were not “real” Communists, you’ll say! Indeed, they weren’t. I lived for 25 years in a Communist country and I never met a “real” Communist. You know why? Because “real” Communists only exist on Western campuses; in the books written by American activists; in the ivory towers filled with naïve academics divorced from reality. In the palpable reality in which 40 million people died and many more had their lives destroyed, the only real Communists that existed were opportunists who, as soon as the opportunity presented itself, used the power given to them to abuse innocent people and enrich themselves.
This may be true, you’ll say, but the fact that this happened in these countries is no reason to stop believing in the ideal! If the deaths of millions of people is not enough for you to change your ideal, let me try to bring in an authority. In Specters of Marx, the French philosopher Jacques Derrida claims that Marx himself was not a Marxist. This may seem like sophistry, but, in fact, Derrida makes a point that could be translated like this: Marxism is the realization/materialization of an ideal, or a theory (represented symbolically by Marx). As soon as this ideal is implemented, it is distorted, because any realized utopia betrays its very essence, which is that of being fiction, and it becomes, logically, dystopia, or, in the words of French philosopher Maurice Blanchot, who was one of Derrida’s major influences, a disaster. This is the reason why “real” Communism doesn’t exist. Every single time a society tried to implement it, it turned into a disaster.
Putin is a specter of Marx. Not because he is a Marxist or a Communist, of course, but because he is the remnant of a history that Western intellectuals, in particular American intellectuals, never bothered to strongly condemn, or even learn. In the ten years I spent in American academia, no one ever bothered to ask me how life was under Communism; on the contrary, I can’t tell you how many times I was lectured on the “real” Communism that, poor me, I couldn’t understand, by people who had never set foot in a Communist country. Often, these are the same people who are telling you that you aren’t allowed to have an opinion about the “lived experience” of people with different skin color than yours. Clearly, not all “lived experiences” are created equal.
Today, American academia is full of specters of Marx. If you think that invoking this specter is irrelevant for this particular historical moment, this is only because, unless you are a historian or a scholar specializing in Russia and Eastern Europe, or one of their students, what you’ve learned in American academia about Marxism and Communism comes, very likely, from some of the countless dogmatic activists that now pepper each American university and brainwashed generations of students with their wooden language and binary, victimist ideology. When I was in academia, these activists could be found only in the humanities, mainly in English departments; now, they are almost everywhere, and their language is hauntingly familiar to all of us from former Communist countries.
I hear that some idiots in Canada and France are canceling the Canadian dish called “poutine.” On the other hand, in the States, no one seems to have a problem with the name of a famous New York bar that has hosted many remarkable literary events over the past quarter-century: “KGB.” According to the bar’s website, its owner, who appears to be one of those idealists (interestingly, and, somewhat ironically, in the current context, he is the son of a Ukrainian immigrant) with a penchant for postmodern irony, chose this name in the early 90s to honor the bar’s history as a speakeasy and as a covert institution. I get it: KGB as in 007 (though the images in the Red Room are less 007 and more 1917). The name has something cool about it—the coolness of a covert Soviet institution, which happens to be the criminal state police known as the KGB, also known as the mentor of one Vladimir Putin.
I’ve seen this kind of “ironic” exoticization that intellectuals of a certain persuasion project onto the history of my part of the world also when I was a resident at MacDowell Colony. For hours, two dozen writers and artists—some of whom, I am sure, were working on pieces with serious ethical dilemmas—danced under the special-effect wallpaper created by one of the artists, which consisted of “cool” images of hypnotic marches of pioneers from North Korea (the artist, by the way, was a very nice, intelligent and well intentioned young man). I wonder how many American intellectuals would feel just as comfortable dancing while images with the Heil Hitler salute covered their walls; or how many would recite poetry or read stories in a bar called, say, Gestapo or The Ku Klux Klan, two other covert organizations.
The reason, my dear American friend, this double standard exists, the reason why in the United States the intellectuals minimize or choose to ignore, the horrors of the history of people from my part of the world, is simple: they can’t stop idealizing a system that, at least in theory (and the distance from theory to practice is as big as the distance from Marx to Marxism), is very appealing. They refuse to see reality in the name of fiction.
To be very clear: I am not inviting anyone to “cancel” anything. I understand very well how, sometimes, one can reverse the meaning behind a name by changing the context. Rather, I am inviting you to pause and think, and to go to the roots of Putinism. I hope that now that he is doing overtly what he has been doing his entire life behind closed doors, may give you the curiosity to find out where he is coming from. I am hoping that those of you prone to soul searching—“What could we have done to stop this war?” etc.—and who have been looking for the answer, like some of my American friends, in NATO’s expansion, which has supposedly “provoked” Putin, (as if NATO were forcing anyone to join it, when, in reality, it is all the countries in Eastern Europe that are begging it to accept them to protect themselves from the aggressor that has been bullying them since forever), I am hoping that you may, finally, connect the dots between his career as an officer in what was once the world’s biggest criminal organization and his threat to us all with nuclear war. ~ Alta Ifland
https://eastwestliteraryforum.com/essays/alta-ifland-putin-american-intellectuals-and-specters-of-marx/
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COLLEGES ARE BEGINNING TO EXPERIENCE A “DEMOGRAPHIC CLIFF”: A SHORTAGE OF 18-YEAR-OLDS
This "demographic cliff" has been predicted ever since Americans started having fewer babies at the advent of the Great Recession around the end of 2007 — a falling birth rate that has not recovered since, except for a slight blip after the COVID-19 pandemic, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Demographers say it will finally arrive nationwide in the fall of this year. That's when recruiting offices will begin to confront the long-anticipated drop-off in the number of applicants from among the next class of high school seniors.
But the downturn isn't just a problem for universities and colleges. It's a looming crisis for the economy, with fewer graduates eventually coming through the pipeline to fill jobs that require college educations, even as international rivals increase the proportions of their populations with degrees.
"The impact of this is economic decline," Jeff Strohl, director of the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce, says bluntly.
As fresh data emerges, the outlook is getting only worse. An analysis by the higher education consulting firm Ruffalo Noel Levitz, using the latest available census figures, now projects another drop in the number of 18-year-olds beginning in 2033, after a brief uptick. By 2039, this estimate shows, there will likely be 650,000, or 15%, fewer of them per year than there are now.
These findings sync up with another new report, released in December by the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education (WICHE), which says that the number of 18-year-olds nationwide who graduate from high school each year — and are therefore candidates for college — will erode by 13%, or nearly half a million, by 2041.
"A few hundred thousand per year might not sound like a lot," Strohl says. "But multiply that by a decade, and it has a big impact.”
Fewer students means fewer colleges
This comes after colleges and universities already collectively experienced a 15% decline in enrollment between 2010 and 2021, the most recent year for which figures are available, according to the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). That includes a drop-off of more than 350,000 during the first year of the pandemic alone, and it means there are already 2.7 million fewer students than there were at the start of the last decade.
In the first half of last year, more than one college a week announced that it would close. Still more new research, from the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, projects that the pace of college closings could now accelerate.
The news is not all bad. For students, it means a buyer's market. Colleges and universities, on average, are admitting a larger proportion of their applicants than they did 20 years ago, new research by the think tank the American Enterprise Institute finds. And tuition, when adjusted for inflation, is declining, according to College Board. (Housing and dining charges continue to increase.)
Ripple effects through the economy
The likely closing of more colleges is by itself a threat to the economy. Nearly 4 million people work in higher education, the NCES reports. Though the most imperiled colleges tend to be small, every one that closes translates to, on average, a loss of 265 jobs and $67 million a year in economic impact, according to the economic software and analysis company Implan.
While the falloff in the number of 18-year-olds has been largely discussed in terms of its effects on colleges and students, the implications are much broader, however.
"In an economy that depends on skilled labor, we're falling short," says Catharine Bond Hill, an economist, a former president of Vassar College and the managing director of the higher education consulting firm Ithaka S+R.
She points out that, based on NCES data, the United States has fallen to ninth among developed nations in the proportion of its 25-to-64-year-old population with any postsecondary degree.
"We should be aiming for No. 1, and we're not," she says.
The diminishing supply of young people will contribute to "a massive labor shortage," with an estimated 6 million fewer workers in 2032 than jobs needing to be filled, according to the labor market analytics firm Lightcast.
Not all of those jobs will call for a college education. But many will. Forty-three percent of them will require at least a bachelor's degree by 2031, according to the Georgetown center. That means more jobs will demand some kind of postsecondary credentials than Americans are now projected to earn.
Still-unpublished research underway at Georgetown forecasts major shortages in teaching, health care and other fields, as well as some level of skills shortfalls in 151 occupations, Strohl says.
"If we don't keep our edge in innovation and college-level education," he says, "we'll have a decline in the economy and ultimately a decline in the living standard.”
A scarcity of labor is already complicating efforts to expand the U.S. semiconductor industry, for instance, the consulting firm McKinsey & Company warns. It's a major reason that production at a new $40 billion semiconductor processing facility in Arizona has been delayed, according to its parent company.
A worker shortage of the magnitude projected for the coming one hasn't happened since the years immediately after World War II, when the number of young men was reduced by death and disability, Strohl and others say. And this worker shortage coincides with a wave of retirements among experienced and well-educated baby boomers.
A host of complex demographic factors
"It's kind of a remarkable moment in our history," says Luke Jankovic, an executive vice president and general manager at Lightcast. "We have a lot of people moving from economic producers to economic consumers, and there just aren't enough people coming up behind them to replace them.”
The falling number of 18-year-olds is compounded by other issues, including a sharp drop in the proportion of Americans in the labor market — particularly baby boomers who retired early and men derailed by substance abuse or incarceration. The proportion of men 20 and older in the workforce has declined from around 76% at the start of the Great Recession to around 70% today, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports.
The decline in high school graduates through 2041 is projected to be most severe in the Northeast, Midwest and West, where fertility rates have been generally lower than in other regions, and to which fewer families have moved. In all, 38 states will see declines, WICHE estimates, some of them much steeper than the national average: 32% in Illinois, 29% in California, 27% in New York, 20% in Michigan, 17% in Pennsylvania.
In places where the number of high school graduates remains stable or increases, meanwhile, it will be largely because of one group: Hispanic students. The proportion of high school graduates who are Hispanic, nationwide, is expected to rise from 26% to 36% by 2041.
But Hispanic college-going is below the national average and has been going down, U.S. Department of Education statistics show.
All of these things present "a combination of factors that we haven't seen before," says Emily Wadhwani, a senior director at credit-rating agency Fitch who works on higher education.
Concerns about the value of a college education
Falling enrollment, meanwhile, has been made worse by a decline in perception of the value of a college or university degree. One in four Americans now says having a bachelor's degree is extremely or very important to get a good job, the Pew Research Center finds.
Among high school graduates, the proportion going straight to college has fallen, from a peak of 70% in 2016 to 62% in 2022, the most recent year for which the figure is available.
The only thing that will restore stability in the higher education sector, says Wadhwani, "is a renewed sentiment that it's worth it.”
Demarée Michelau, the president of WICHE, calls these trends, "the most perplexing set of issues to face higher education planners and administrators in a generation.”
There are other customers for colleges, of course, including international students, students who are older than 18 and graduate students.
But these other sources may not be enough to make up for the coming declines, experts say.
Now that Donald Trump is about to start a second presidential term, 58% of European students say they are less interested in coming to the United States, according to a survey conducted in October and November by the international student recruiter Keystone Education Group.
And despite colleges' attempts to recruit students over 25, their numbers have fallen by half since the Great Recession, the Philadelphia Fed calculates. Many older students say they are discouraged by the cost or have families and jobs, which colleges don't always accommodate, or they started college but dropped out and have little inclination to go back.
On the campus of Iowa Wesleyan, the old gym was stripped of its wood flooring and whatever else had value and was then ripped down. The cornerstone fell into the pile of rubble. It bore the date of the college's founding: 1842.
"In so many of these towns, their identity is inextricably linked to the college that's been there forever," says Doug Moore, the man who oversaw the liquidation. "It's a huge source of local pride. It's also a big source of good-paying jobs that are not replaceable.”
The process of shutting it down, he adds, "is brutal and painful."
And yet he knows that in the coming years, more colleges and universities will likely go under the auctioneer's gavel and the wrecking ball:
"You have a staggering number of variables" facing colleges and universities. "It's supply and demand. You've got to evolve and adjust, or die.”
https://www.npr.org/2025/01/08/nx-s1-5246200/demographic-cliff-fewer-college-students-mean-fewer-graduates?utm_source=firefox-newtab-en-us
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COULD A SPONGE MADE OF SQUID BONES HELP REMOVE MICROPLASTICS?
Microplastics are everywhere. They have been found on the peak of Mount Everest and in creatures inhabiting the deepest trenches of the sea. They’re in bottled water, human placentas and breast milk.
These tiny plastic particles choke wildlife, disrupt ecosystems, and threaten human health – and they are notoriously difficult to remove.
But scientists in China have come up with a possible solution: a biodegradable sponge made of squid bones and cotton.
A research team from Wuhan University used chitin from squid bones and cellulose from cotton – two organic compounds known for eliminating pollution from wastewater – to create a biodegradable sponge.
They then tested the sponge in four different water samples, taken from irrigation water, pond water, lake water and sea water, and found it removed up to 99.9% of microplastics, according to a study published last month in Science Advances.
“The planet is under great threat from microplastics, and aquatic ecosystems are the first to suffer,” wrote the authors.
“Even under a variety of policies, including plastic product reduction, waste management, and environmental recycling, microplastic pollution is irreversible and escalating.”
The microplastics problem
Microplastics are tiny shards of plastic smaller than 5 millimeters. They come from everything from tires, which are then broken down into smaller pieces, to microbeads, a plastic found in beauty products such as exfoliants.
One study from 2020 estimated there are 14 million metric tons of microplastics sitting on the ocean floor.
Scientists have called microplastics “one of this generation’s key environmental challenges” and the problem is an internationally recognized environmental issue.
Plastic is a persistent pollution that hurts wildlife, the ocean itself and there’s growing concern about the potential health risks it poses to humans.
The problem is only set to get worse with plastic production and pollution expected to increase in the coming years.
Even if we embarked on an immediate and globally coordinated effort to reduce plastic consumption, an estimated 710 million metric tons of plastic would still pollute the environment by 2040, according to another study.
That makes finding solutions to get rid of the plastics contaminating our oceans all the more urgent.
The sponge created by the Wuhan researchers was able to absorb microplastics both by physically intercepting them and through electromagnetic attraction, the study said.
Previously studied methods for absorbing plastics tend to be expensive and difficult to make, limiting their scalability.
Last year, researchers in Qingdao, China developed a synthetic sponge made of starch and gelatin designed to remove microplastics from water, though its efficacy varied depending on water conditions.
The low cost and wide availability of both cotton and squid bones mean the sponge created in Wuhan “has great potential to be used in the extraction of microplastic from complex water bodies,” according to the study.
Shima Ziajahromi, a lecturer at Australia’s Griffith University who studies microplastics, called the squid-cotton-sponge method “promising” and said it could be an effective way to “clean up the high risk and vulnerable aquatic ecosystem.”
However, the study’s authors did not address whether the sponge can remove microplastics that sink to the sediment, which is the majority of microplastics in our waters, said Ziajahromi, who was not involved in the study.
Another “critical issue” is the proper disposal of the sponges, Ziajahromi said.
“Although the material is biodegradable, the microplastics it absorbs need to be disposed of properly,” she said. “Without careful management, this process risks transferring microplastics from one ecosystem to another.”
Ultimately, Ziajahromi added, minimizing plastic pollution is in the first place should remain a “top priority.”
https://www.cnn.com/2024/12/17/science/microplastics-sponge-wuhan-china-scn-intl-hnk/index.html
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HUMAN BRAIN IS HARD-WIRED TO AVOID EXERCISE
We all know that working out makes us feel better. So why is it so hard?
Humans aren’t the fastest or strongest species. We’ve no wings, fangs, claws, venom, or armor. Physically, we’re largely nature’s also-rans.
‘Also-ran’ is an ironic term, though, because humans do physically dominate all other species in one area: long-distance running. Our bipedal gait and unique sweat glands mean humans can keep running long after other species collapse from exhaustion.
Humans evolved to spend long periods physically exerting themselves, that is, exercising. But while many people do indeed enjoy exercising, they’re in the minority (as the less-crowded gyms and abandoned New Year’s resolutions of mid-February reveal).
So why, even though we’ve evolved to do it, doesn't everyone enjoy exercise? The baffling complexity of the human brain is to blame. Evolving an ability doesn’t automatically mean we’ll want to use it. Creatures with armor don’t actively want to be attacked.
While physical exercise isn’t that bad, it’s still typically unpleasant, and uncomfortable. It has to be; you’re pushing your body to its physical limits, which leads to significant discomfort – they’re limits for a reason.
How your brain thinks about exercise
Another issue is that the human brain is highly sensitive to wasted effort. Studies have shown that they contain dedicated circuits, within the insula cortex, that calculate the effort required for actions – they're there to ask "Is it worth it?”
It’s an evolved tendency to stop us from squandering vital resources on pointless endeavors, like walking 20 miles for a handful of berries.
But regular exercise to get 'in shape’ requires constant and considerable effort – all for gradual progress and uncertain rewards (it’s impossible to guarantee ahead of time that you’ll succeed). So, your brain’s tendency to ask, "Is it worth it?" will be hard to quieten.
This trait also means we typically prefer things which offer minimum effort for maximum reward. So we take the path of least resistance, stick to routines and dwell within our comfort zones.
Taking up exercise means changing all that, for uncertain results. To keep us safe, our brains typically tend to put more significance on risks rather than rewards, meaning we are even more reluctant to take up physically demanding activities.
So, while our bodies may be adapted to constant exercise, our brains have in many ways adapted to avoid it. And we’ve built a world for ourselves where avoiding physical activity is a viable option.
Thankfully, the human brain is a terrifyingly complex organ, so has a few tricks up its metaphorical sleeve. Most obviously, it isn’t ruled by its more primitive, immediate instincts and drives. While many species’ thought processes are limited to ‘Food, eat it!’, ‘Danger, run!’, ‘Pain, avoid!’, we’ve evolved beyond that.
Human brains can form multiple long-term goals and ambitions. We’re rarely content with just day-to-day survival: we can simulate a desirable future scenario, figure out how we’d achieve it, and… do just that. Or at least work toward it.
This directly impacts how our brain processes motivation and willpower, in many interesting ways. For one, it makes us capable of delayed gratification: we can recognize that rejecting a reward now can lead to a greater reward later, and act accordingly.
In this case, we understand that eating four family bags of crisps while bingeing TV will be enjoyable at the moment, but going to the gym will mean we’re fitter, stronger, and healthier later.
And then there's the ‘just world’ fallacy. This is where we assume the world is fair, which leads us to believe – and studies have shown this – that any suffering will surely lead to rewards later. No pain, no gain, as the saying goes.
How your brain gets motivated
So how does the brain process all these different motivations? The self-discrepancy theory suggests we have several ‘selves’ active in our minds at any given time; our ‘actual’ self, our ‘ideal’ self, and our ‘ought’ self.
Your ‘actual’ self is your current state, how you are right now. Your ‘ideal’ self is what you want to be. And your 'ought' self is the self that does all the stuff required to become your 'ideal' self. It’s the self that does what you ought to be doing. So, if your 'ideal' self is a professional footballer, and your 'actual' self isn’t, your 'ought' self is the one that spends a lot of time training, exercising, and getting better at football.
That’s just one framework for how motivation works when it comes to physical exercise. There are, of course, many other factors that play an important role, like time constraints, body image and mobility.
But as far as your brain is concerned, there are processes that discourage exercise, and processes that encourage it. Ideally, you’ll end up putting more weight on the latter than the former. And moving weights around is a go-to type of exercise, so it helps to start somewhere.
https://www.sciencefocus.com/comment/exercise-brain
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TUBERCULOSIS RATES PLUNGE WHEN POOR FAMILIES GET A MONTHLY CASH PAYOUT
What if the best medicine isn't a pill or vaccine — but it's cold cash?
There's a growing body of research that suggests economic programs that give money to very poor people can have major health benefits. Now, a new study — out on Friday in Nature Medicine — proves this approach can work when it comes to the world's deadliest infectious disease: tuberculosis, which killed more than 1.25 million people in 2023.
The study is impressive in its scale. Researchers combined two Brazilian datasets — one from the Ministry of Health and one that tracks social programs for the poorest half of the population — enabling them to zero in on 54 million people in Brazil living in poverty. In this group, 44% of them received cash each month from a government program while 56% did not. The families that received the cash were significantly less likely to contract TB. Among the extremely poor in this category, TB cases and deaths dropped by more than 50% and in the Indigenous population the drop was even more dramatic: more than 60%.
"There are very large benefits — large and underappreciated — of these [types of] programs," says Dr. Aaron Richterman, an assistant professor of infectious diseases and health policy at the University of Pennsylvania who was not involved in the study.
The findings could have far-reaching implications for global efforts to end the TB epidemic. "If we think about what can take us to the next level, it's not the next drug," he says. "It's probably not the vaccine that we're all waiting for. It may be something like this, which I think we have good reason to believe would help potentially end something like a TB epidemic."
Here's a look at how the conditional cash transfer program works, why it's having unintentional – but welcome – health impacts and what the implications are.
Free money with some strings attached
Twenty years ago, Brazil started what was then a revolutionary program. The government would give poor people a regular cash handout with a few strings attached. Today, the program, which is called Bolsa Familia (Portuguese for Family Allowance), helps 21 million families in Brazil or about a quarter of the population.
To be eligible, a family must live below the poverty line. The government gives these households a monthly cash benefit that's the equivalent of at least $120; the amount can be increased, based on their neediness and the number of children. For some families, that sum doubles their income.
Recipients can spend the money as they please. But they must meet certain requirements: sending their kids to school and regular check-ups for pregnant women and kids, including prenatal visits and childhood vaccinations.
The program is focused on "the long game," says Seema Jayachandran, a professor of economics and public affairs at Princeton University, who was also not involved in the study.
"The philosophy of conditional cash transfers was to break the cycle of poverty by investing in the younger generation," she says. "And it's through two prongs: One is making sure they get educated, they grow up healthy with access to health care. And then the second is giving the family money so that they can have better food or school uniforms."
There's lots of data to show that programs like Bolsa Familia reduce economic and social inequalities. But lately, she says, studies have been showing an added bonus: "There are some extra benefits that are actually quicker wins.”
How money is helping people avoid and fight TB
Tuberculosis is famously a disease of poverty.
People are exposed to the bacteria that causes TB in overcrowded, under ventilated spaces.
This type of scene is, unfortunately, familiar to many in Brazil, says Priscila Scaff, an author of the study and a postdoctoral researcher at the Federal University of Bahia's Institute of Collective Health. In low-income families, she's seen 10 people living in one room. In poor urban areas, she adds, there are sometimes houses "where they don't have access to the sunlight" or fresh air. These are perfect conditions for TB to flourish — the tuberculosis bacteria spreads through the air, traveling on a cough, sneeze, spittle, or even a laugh. The monthly payouts might enable a family to move to larger, better ventilated quarters.
The cash transfer can also lead to a healthier diet — and that can help avoid TB even if someone's exposed to the bacteria. "People who have poor nutrition – it increases the risk very, very substantially for progression to tuberculosis," says Richterman. Again, Scaff says, poor people in Brazil often don't have access to enough food — or nutritious food.
But things get better when a household enrolls in Bolsa Familia. It's one of the program's primary goals: On its website, the government claims to have reduced hunger for millions of families. A series of studies have found that families spend more on food than those who didn't get the payments and that they buy healthier foods.
And, finally, the treatment for TB is intensive — and can lead to a loss of income. "You have to treat it for at least six months. There's a lot of side effects and toxicities related to the medicines," says Richterman. "Even if you have free medicines, you have to take medicines every day, you have to get to the clinic, you have to get transported there. You're sick and you can't work," he says.
He explains that many day laborers — or others living hand-to-mouth — can't afford to take time off work. Unless, of course, they have that extra cushion provided by Bolsa Familia.
"So you can see how cash support — or poverty alleviation, more generally — can work at every single step of the way, from exposure to TB outcomes," Richterman says.
And there may be something else going on too, says Davide Rasella, a study author and head of the health impact assessment and evaluation group at the Barcelona Institute for Global Health or ISGlobal. It's possible, he says, that because the program insists on regular checkups for kids, parents become more connected to the health system.
"Sometimes the [health] outpost is not even so distant, but somehow it is not accessed," he says. "[But with the requirements of the Bolsa Program] the families are in more contact with the health post. They trust more health professionals and they get diagnosed earlier.”
But wait! It's not just TB
The magnitude of the drop in TB cases and deaths surprised even the study authors. "We were expecting an effect but not so big," says Rasella.
"What we are discovering – the more we study – is the effects are really strong. It's not just tuberculosis. We have seen it in HIV/AIDS, child mortality, etc.," he says. "We have a study showing an enormous effect on reduction of hospitalization, or millions of hospitalizations that have been avoided in the last two decades because of the [Bolsa Familia] program.”
The study results are echoed in other parts of the world. In a study published last year, Richterman and colleagues looked at cash transfers in 37 low- and middle-income countries and found huge benefits for reducing mortality, including a 20% reduction in risk of adult women dying.
He says they found that the program spends about $11,000 for each life that is saved. He calls that "an extraordinarily cost effective intervention just for that" — an stunning result from a program that was never intended to save lives. And protection from fatal illness is not the only payoff from payouts: "These programs do a lot of things. They improve education. They improve women's empowerment. They reduce poverty. They improve food security. They improve child nutrition," he says.
There are now conditional and unconditional cash transfer programs all over the world — including in the U.S. "It's an example of something that has spread from lower-middle income countries to rich countries," says Jayachandran. And these efforts got a big boost during the pandemic when many countries were looking for ways to help households who'd lost income because of lockdowns and the like, especially without requiring in-person meetings.
But these programs are not cheap. Bolsa Familia costs about 14 billion Brazilian reais — or about $2 billion — a month; the money comes from the state as well as groups like the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank.
As policymakers debate whether they can afford to start or expand such programs, Rasella says, the message from Brazil is clear: It's not just an economic program. It's also an "impressive" health program.
https://www.npr.org/sections/goats-and-soda/2025/01/03/nx-s1-5246014/tb-tuberculosis-brazil-poverty-cash-transfer
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THE WORLD’S POPULATION JUST HIT 8 BILLION
Happy 8th billion day!” Natalia Kanem, the head of the UN Population Fund, said in a media briefing. She’d long known the date—Nov. 15—to be special: According to the UN, it marked the day the world’s population crossed 8 billion, the last billion having been added since 2010.
Population pessimists may grumble at Kanem’s choice of the word “Happy.” She was speaking at the International Conference on Family Planning in Pattaya, in Thailand—and superficially, the persistent swelling of the world’s population might indicate a failure of family planning.
Further, at a time of a shortage of everything—energy, semiconductors, baby food, housing—it’s tempting to think that any growth in population is a cause for high alarm. But to go by that headline number would be to miss both the larger picture and the finer details. Growth is, in fact, slowing; this year, the world’s population went up by just 0.8%, whereas in the 1960s, it was rising at thrice that rate every year. At the present rate, we can even spot a peak to the world’s population: 10.4 billion or so, arriving some time between 2080 and 2100, before the number starts to decline.
Overall, the fertility rate—the number of children an average woman will have—is 2.3 now, down from 3.3 in 1990 and very close to 2.1, the so-called “replacement rate” at which the population will stabilize, neither growing nor shrinking. And as Kanem pointed out, the billions that the human race will gain this century are the result not of unsuccessful family planning but of better health policy. People live longer, and their children die less often in infancy—both outcomes that are inarguably welcome.
If there are reasons for concern, they lie in where populations are growing and declining, said Manoj Pradhan, who founded Talking Head Macroeconomics, a research firm in London. Pradhan, the co-author of a book called “The Great Demographic Reversal,” pointed out that the big demographic dividends—the surges in working-age populations—will come in countries that aren’t yet driving the world economy. The demographic drag, on the other hand, is unfolding in “the economic superstars, if you will,” Pradhan said.
This differential, he said, will likely have huge effects for how our economies and societies function in the next hundred years. This original and panoramic book proposes that the underlying forces of demography and globalization will shortly reverse three multi-decade global trends – it will raise inflation and interest rates, but lead to a pullback in inequality.
“Whatever the future holds”, the authors argue, “it will be nothing like the past”. Deflationary headwinds over the last three decades have been primarily due to an enormous surge in the world’s available labor supply, owing to very favorable demographic trends and the entry of China and Eastern Europe into the world’s trading system. This book demonstrates how these demographic trends are on the point of reversing sharply, coinciding with a retreat from globalization. The result? Aging can be expected to raise inflation and interest rates, bringing a slew of problems for an over-indebted world economy, but is also anticipated to increase the share of labor, so that inequality falls.
Which countries are driving the world’s population growth?
By 2050, the world will hold around 9.8 billion humans. More than half of the 1.8 billion people added between now and then will live in just eight countries: the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Egypt, Ethiopia, India, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Philippines, and Tanzania.
Africa will, in fact, drive half of the world’s growth in population between 2022 and 2062. Fertility rates are still high in many African countries, averaging 4.5 children per woman, according to UN data. In Pattaya, Kanem explained how these nations are heading into the grip of a giant dilemma. As hot, low-income countries, they are first in line in suffering the fallout of dramatic climate events, even though they’re also among the least responsible for carbon emissions over the centuries. At the same time, they must grow their economies to make the most of their demographic dividend.
Rich countries will have to pay for the world’s demographic shift
Part of the solution to help low-income countries deal with the climate-population dilemma is the kind of financing outlined under the Paris Agreement. One analysis suggests that the US and other major carbon polluters should be presented with a bill of $4.3 trillion to help the global energy transition and climate adaptation efforts.
But these wealthy countries will also have to fund the changes in their own demographics. Working-age populations—taxable populations, in other words—will shrink, while the elderly will become more numerous. “You can see this everywhere,” Pradhan said. “Even in a relatively young economy like Brazil, you see that about 40 years ago, when public pensions were first defined, life expectancy was around 60, and now it’s 76 or so.”
Over the next three days, Quartz will explain three crucial economic impacts of the coming swings in population. The first: the persistence of inflation, and the grudging acceptance of it. The second: the translocation of manufacturing and labor. And the third: the inevitability of cross-border migration. Almost everything about the global economy in the decades to come will depend upon how wealthy countries manage their shift from youthful societies to aging ones—and, in tandem, how poorer countries handle their swelling populations.
https://qz.com/gateway/decline-declining-birth-rate-hits-new-low-1850500506
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MERLE BOMBARDIERI: HELPING PEOPLE MAKE THE BABY DECISION
Merle Bombardieri learned she was a micro-celebrity in 2020, when she happened to Google her own name. Her search led her to a Reddit group of “fence sitters”—people who aren’t sure whether they want to have children—where she is a very big deal. Post after post mentions her book The Baby Decision: How to Make the Most Important Choice of Your Life and its power to help people get off the fence, one way or the other. “It’s a sort of bible,” says Christy Starr, a 36-year-old member of the Reddit community who lives in Wisconsin.
Bombardieri, a 75-year-old therapist who also coaches people about whether they should have kids, was tickled by her VIP status among a group of people young enough to be her children or even grandchildren. She joined the r/Fencesitter message board and now spends about five hours per week answering people’s questions for free. (She could easily spend even longer: once, she hosted an “ask me anything” thread, and it took her 10 weeks to answer every question.)
She sees her involvement in the group, which today has about 70,000 members, as a moral obligation. “Not everybody can buy a book. A lot of people can’t afford a coach or a therapist,” she says. “And I really want the information to be out there.”
There’s clearly a need. Most U.S. adults eventually have children. But more people—both men and women—are thinking critically about a major life choice that not too long ago was basically seen as a given.
About a third of U.S. adults under 35 who don’t already have kids say they don’t know whether they want them, and only 22% of people in that age group say having kids is very important or extremely important for living a fulfilling life, according to 2024 statistics from Pew Research Center.
A stunning half of U.S. adults under 50 who don’t already have kids think they’ll stay child-free forever. Most say they simply don’t want kids. But financial strain and concerns about the state of the world and the environment are also common reasons, according to other Pew data. People are feeling so much angst about when, how, and whether to procreate that new psychological concepts have emerged to help make sense of how people make these decisions.
Bombardieri, herself a mother of two and grandmother to one, was far ahead of that curve. She published The Baby Decision in 1981, decades before fence sitting was mainstream. It flew largely under the radar before blowing up in 2016, when Bombardieri self-published an updated version. “At the age of 67,” Bombardieri says, “I became more well-known, more financially successful, than I was when I was younger.”
Not only did she have the internet on her side the second time around, which helped more people find the book, but the world had also changed in other ways. Shifting cultural norms; evolving ideas about gender, sexuality, and partnership; concerns about politics, climate change, and gun violence; and the aftermath of a brutal economic recession had left many 20- and 30-somethings unsure about parenting and desperate for a book like The Baby Decision. Bombardieri has sold about 60,000 copies of the updated version and plans to release a new book, Baby or Childfree?, in early 2026.
Starr, from the Reddit fence sitters’ community, credits an exercise in The Baby Decision—acting out an argument between your pro-baby and anti-baby sides—with helping her decide to become a mother. It nudged her to realize that she really did want a kid, and that most of her reasons for being child-free were rooted in fear. “It was surprising, how much the side that wanted a child was arguing for it,” Starr says. “It really made me feel more secure.”
Bombardieri isn’t alone in doing this work. Others have made a name for themselves in the space, such as Ann Davidman, a California-based psychotherapist who wrote a book on parenthood decision-making and offers workshops and coaching sessions, for one. And there’s now a bona fide industry of “decision coaches,” along with traditional therapists, who help people work through all manner of difficult choices, including whether to have children.
But Bombardieri is the OG. People from all over the world—most of them women—pay $200 to $300 per session to hash out the parenthood question with her. Once upon a time, Bombardieri says, most of her clients ultimately decided to have kids. But these days, the breakdown is closer to 50-50.
People with kids know that it’s impossible to truly grasp what you’re in for before you become a parent. Making this life-altering decision is always, on some level, about coming to terms with uncertainty. You can’t really know how you’ll feel about waking up in the middle of the night to feed a screaming baby until you have to do it.
How can anyone, even a trained mental-health professional, help someone make a decision so momentous and personal? “There are people who think that no one else can help them,” Bombardieri says, but she disagrees. She sees herself as a guide for people who are “lost in their own thinking,” paralyzed by endless worry about all the ways their lives will change and all the questions that are impossible to fully answer. “It’s never just about ‘Baby or no baby?’” she says. “It’s about everything. It’s about acknowledging that you’re going to die someday, and what do you want to have happen in between?”
Bombardieri tries to help people interrogate their preconceived notions about parenthood and visualize what they’d gain or give up on either path. Perhaps most importantly, she helps people grapple with the idea of regret, which haunts many fence sitters. Most people will have at least occasional pangs for the road not taken, and that’s OK, Bombardieri says. The goal is to figure out which road will lead to fewer regrets, and to grieve those feelings rather than suppress them. “The people most likely to regret a decision are the people who don’t make a decision”—people who run out their biological clock or accidentally-on-purpose forget to take birth control because they can’t bring themselves to fully commit to a choice, Bombardieri says.
Katie Wilson, a 46-year-old living in Washington, D.C., had all but committed to the child-free life until she hit her mid-30s. Spooked by the reality that she was running out of time to change her mind, Wilson spiraled into indecision. “I felt alone,” she remembers. “I felt like I was the only person I knew who wasn’t clear.”
Wilson learned about Bombardieri’s book in her search for clarity. And in 2014, she flew to Boston to attend Bombardieri’s parenthood-decisionmaking workshop. For hours, Bombardieri led attendees through exercises and discussion groups meant to help them make sense of their inner turmoil.
She seemed to Wilson like “a vessel for all of these questions that have come before mine,” an unbiased and quietly confident voice helping her make sense of her own scrambled thoughts. Eventually, after the workshop and additional one-on-one coaching sessions with Bombardieri, Wilson and her husband decided to stay child-free.
Today, Wilson and Bombardieri together moderate a Facebook group called The Decision Café, where hundreds of people in the throes of making their choice can lean on one another for support. For Wilson, the group is a way to democratize the experience that Bombardieri offered her years ago. “A lot of people are looking for role models,” she says. “They’re looking for people like them.”
Almost half of U.S. non-parents younger than 50 think they'll stay child-free forever.
Bombardieri knows what she’s talking about because she’s lived it. While an undergrad at Michigan State University, she turned down a marriage proposal from her now husband Rocco because he wanted kids and she wasn’t sure. Her mother had always seemed bored in her role as a housewife, and Bombardieri, who dreamed of getting a doctorate in literature and becoming a professor, worried motherhood might hold her back.
Plus, Bombardieri just wasn’t positive she’d enjoy the daily realities of parenthood. When Rocco proposed, “I had just come back from being a counselor at a summer camp with really, really spoiled 12-year-old girls, and my favorite part of the day was when the camp day was over and the campers were asleep,” she says. Bombardieri loved solitude and tranquility, time to read and reflect, and she couldn’t envision where screaming babies or angsty teens fit in.
This was also the 1970s, the era of consciousness-raising groups and second-wave feminism, when some women were chafing against their roles as mothers and housewives. “There was kind of a feeling of ‘If you have a child, you’re going to be a traitor to the movement,’” Bombardieri says.
Slowly, though, her opinion changed. She found role models who’d successfully balanced interesting careers in academia with motherhood and got more comfortable around children while working in day-care centers. She also devised early versions of the exercises that eventually appeared in The Baby Decision, like the one that helped Starr: staging an argument between your two minds on the matter. “It would have been nice to have the book,” she says with a laugh.
Eventually, Bombardieri concluded that she could have kids without losing herself. After marrying Rocco, she had her first daughter in 1977, then her second in 1979. In 1981, The Baby Decision was born. She was pregnant with Vanessa, her youngest, while writing it on her typewriter. “I’d be going, ‘Click, click, click,’ and she’d be going, ‘Kick, kick, kick,’” Bombardieri says.
She hoped the book would help other people unsure about parenthood and destigmatize the choice not to have children—which she argues should be the default position unless people are confident they want to bring kids into the world. Bombardieri hated the stereotype that child-free adults were selfish Peter Pans who just wanted to “lie in the sun and go on vacations,” because she felt the exact opposite tended to be true.
“If you’re not going home and spending all weekend nurturing a young child, you have time and energy to do other things that make the world a better place,” she says.
Even 40 years later, with the U.S. fertility rate falling to record lows and heteronormative family structures no longer necessarily the standard, so-called pronatalism has surprising staying power. Bombardieri still considers people who choose not to have children “mavericks”— and although her book is neutral about the question of having kids, Bombardieri says the most emphatic thanks she gets are from child-free people who feel relieved that someone validated their choice.
“When I wrote my book in 1981, I would have assumed that by now there would be a lot more acceptance of child-free people than there is,” she says. But as it turns out, even in 2024—and perhaps especially in 2024, when Vice President–elect J.D. Vance’s suggestion that “childless cat ladies” shouldn’t have the same voting privileges as parents got a huge new platform during his campaign—child-free people need a voice, she says. That’s partly why she’s writing her new book. But it’s also a recognition that people’s worries about parenthood have changed even since the 2016 version of The Baby Decision.
Back in the ’80s, she says, people were still awakening to the reality that there are many ways to achieve happiness and that procreating is only one. Her book helped further that idea. The 2016 rerelease rose from a desire to share the wisdom won from her decades of coaching and therapy work, and to speak to the concerns of a generation that felt politically, economically, and socially unsettled. “I hope I have a long life,” she remembers thinking when it came out, “but if I died tonight, I’m so glad that I have these ideas out in the world.”
In recent years, however, she began getting peppered with questions from her clients and Reddit followers that even the newer book couldn’t answer. Climate-crisis projections continue to intensify, leading some people to question the morality of having a child and others to fear what kind of world their future offspring would inherit.
The rollback of reproductive rights has many people worried about what could happen if their pregnancy went wrong. Even many women in states with robust reproductive care now report deep fears about the risks of pregnancy and childbirth—because the news and social media are so full of horror stories that many women now think outcomes that are bad, but rare, are likely, Bombardieri believes.
And many potential parents are worried about how a baby would change the division of labor in their partnership, a particularly relevant concern now that women outnumber men in the college-educated workforce.
It’s a fraught time for could-be parents. They are confronted, from one angle, with people like billionaire (and father many times over) Elon Musk arguing that declining birth rates will lead to societal collapse. On the other side, there’s a small but growing anti-natalism movement that argues it’s irresponsible to bring children into a violent and overpopulated planet plagued by a worsening climate crisis.
These forces clearly weigh on people, as more seem to be struggling with the baby decision than ever—enough that Bombardieri is training a handful of clinicians (including her daughter Vanessa) to continue her work in this burgeoning specialty.
Bombardieri is a decade postretirement age, after all. Once she finishes her forthcoming book, she’d like to get to a place where she can finally wrap up a long-gestating novel about surrogacy, write poetry, draw, and simply slow down, enjoying time with her friends, family, and husband.
The life she is heading toward, full of meaningful relationships and time for rest, relaxation, and contemplation, sounds an awful lot like the one she imagined for herself before deciding to have kids all those years ago. She gave up the peace and quiet of her daydreams for the messy unknown, making the leap that scares so many fence sitters.
Did she ever regret it?
“You know, certainly in the earliest years of parenting, when it was really taxing and two kids were crying at the same time or whatever, I would think, Life would be easier if I didn’t have a child,” Bombardieri says. “But I didn’t regret the decision. I just love my daughters so much and enjoy them so much.”
That’s not to say Bombardieri hasn’t wondered, from time to time, what a different life might have brought with it. More travel and less financial stress, probably. More published books, maybe even an M.F.A.
Bombardieri can clearly visualize that alternate route, and she seems neither guilty for admitting to its existence nor wistful about not having taken it. It’s merely a different ending to the choose-your-own-adventure book of her life—exactly the kind she’s trying to help fence sitters everywhere write for themselves.
https://time.com/7174932/merle-bombardieri-profile-baby-decision-book/?utm_source=roundup&utm_campaign=20230202
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MADNESS AND METROPOLIS — THE MYSTERY OF URBAN SCHIZOPHRENIA
Nanjing Pedestrian Street in Shanghai, China.
Southwyck House in South London is a block of flats so intimidating that it is often mistaken for a prison. Locally known as the Brixton ‘barrier block,’ it has a stark exterior of brick and concrete that literally looms over you, giving the impression that unseen people are staring down through the sparse rectangular windows.
It was built as a social housing project, designed to shield its residents from the noise of a phantom motorway that was intended to run from Blackheath to Battersea. The road was never built due to petty political squabbles, but the building now stands as a seven-story barricade against its illusory traffic.
If you’re not used to the built-up environment of the inner city, the block can certainly feel unsettling. But here, urban alienation may run deeper than mere architecture. The area was found to have the highest rate of diagnosed schizophrenia in a large study of South London, even when compared with directly adjacent neighborhoods.
The research that found this striking variation was led by epidemiologist James Kirkbride, now at University College London. Kirkbride’s work is but one in more than a century of studies that have found higher rates of psychosis in cities and which have sparked an intense debate over whether—to put it in its original terms —‘cities cause madness’ or whether those affected by ‘madness’ just tend to end up in cities.
The link between psychosis and city living was first noticed by American psychiatrists in the early 1900s who found that asylum patients were more likely to come from built-up areas. This association was sporadically rediscovered throughout the following century until researchers verified the association from the 1990s onwards with systematic and statistically controlled studies that tested people in the community as well as in clinics.
One particularly extensive study using health records for almost the entire population of Denmark found that the risk of being diagnosed with schizophrenia increased in a small but proportional way as people spent more time spent living in urban environments. Many studies have since replicated this finding, with neighborhood levels of social deprivation seeming to amplify the association and levels of social integration seeming to reduce it.
To many, this provides evidence that cities are universally bad for our mental health—something that chimes with a strong cultural belief that associates the natural world with tranquillity. It might seem like common sense that living in a run-down, inner-city neighborhood would wear away at your psychological wellbeing. But here is where the cultural cliché breaks down, because the effect is surprisingly selective.
The data shows that urban environments reliably increase the chances of being diagnosed with schizophrenia or having related experiences like paranoia and hallucinations. This is not the case for other mental health problems primarily caused, for example, by depression or mood instability. If it was a general effect on wellbeing, you would expect the chance of being diagnosed with any mental health problem to increase at an equal rate, but this isn’t the case.
There are good reasons to think that city living might be the cause of some of these problems. The two big psychological negatives of city living, social isolation and social threat, are already well studied in mental health. They are risk factors for a range of psychological difficulties but have been particularly associated with misperceptions and paranoia. And for people who are already experiencing paranoid delusions, there is good evidence that urban environments amplify anxieties, increase the intensity of hallucinations, and weaken self-confidence.
But none of this conclusively proves that cities cause schizophrenia and some argue the causal arrow actually goes round the other way. People with psychosis, the alternative explanation goes, are just more likely to end up living in poor city neighborhoods—something first labeled the ‘social drift’ hypothesis.
Originally, this was a simple stereotype of someone hitting ‘rock bottom’ due to the disabling effects of psychosis. But we know this can’t explain what we see in modern studies because time spent in the city is also associated with your future chance of developing these experiences. A study led by Joanne Newbury at King’s College London even found this effect in children, who have little say where they live.
A more nuanced take is that the same factors that increase your chance of getting diagnosed with schizophrenia also increase your chances of ending up in living in a deprived urban area. Poverty and neglect might be the obvious candidates but a study led by Oxford University epidemiologist Amir Sariaslan using more than two million Swedish health records suggests the effect can be better explained by shared genetic risks which could be common across the whole family.
The idea that genetics could influence something so complex as finding a house might seem counter-intuitive but Sariaslan explains that it is best understood in terms of limiting life choices rather than affecting decision making. “Living in a deprived neighborhood in adulthood partly reflects academic achievements and labor market position, which are in turn largely influenced by cognitive abilities, impulsivity and personality traits” he says, “[all of] which have all been found to be moderately to considerably heritable.”
Kirkbride welcomes the study but cautions against a solely genetic explanation for the high risk of psychosis in more urban, deprived communities. He adds that even if genetic factors are involved in shaping where people live, “it is only through improving our social environment that we can reduce the additional burden of mental health, and break the cycle of socioeconomic disadvantage often faced by families living in such neighborhoods over successive generations.”
For those of us who live in cities, the cause of the urban psychosis effect remains comfortably unconfirmed, but the scientific interest is having wider reaching consequences. Des Fitzgerald, a sociologist at Cardiff University who studies the social impact of neuroscience, has described how this scientific question is motivating researchers to work across disciplinary boundaries with an intensity rarely seen before. Social scientists are turning to biology to understand the impact of cities, and neurobiologists are now becoming interested in the neuroscience of the urban environment.
Fitzgerald highlights how studying the city is pushing psychiatry researchers to think more widely about what are too commonly pigeon-holed as environmental factors. “You just can't talk about social life without some accounting for its richness, its complexity, its contests, its ambiguity” says Fitzgerald. “If there's going to be a meeting point anywhere” he says, “I think, it's there.”
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/the-mystery-of-urban-psychosis?utm_source=firefox-newtab-en-us
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A FISH THAT GETS HEALTHIER AS IT AGES
Recent findings show bigmouth buffalo fish have perplexingly long lives and appear to get healthier as they age. But scientists are worried their population is about to crash.
If you ever find yourself on the shores of Minnesota's Rice Lake in May time, you may be able to spot swarms of large fish bodies mingling among the wild rice plants in water barely a few feet deep.
These are bigmouth buffalo fish, and they are the world's longest-lived freshwater fish. Some live for over 100 years.
Every year, these huge fish – which can weigh more than 50lb (23kg) – traverse through Rice River to spawn and reproduce in the lake. But the regularity of this spawning belies a hidden conservation concern: for more than six decades now, no new generations of young fish here have made it to adulthood.
Bigmouth buffalo have remained understudied for decades. In the last few years, however, scientists have begun to realize how unique these huge and incredibly long-lived fish truly are – even as they also uncover how imperiled they may be.
Bigmouth buffalo fish are native to North America and can be found from Southern Saskatchewan and Manitoba in Canada all the way down to Louisiana and Texas in the US. They're often viewed by the public and anglers as "rough fish" – a long-lived but non-scientific term used to imply that they're not particularly desirable – since they're not commercially fished and therefore not economically important.
It's this view of bigmouth buffalo that has long led them to be overlooked by scientists. Over the last five years, however, researchers have made a spate of new and surprising discoveries about them.
For one thing, individuals have been documented to reach up to 127 years of age, making them the world's longest-lived freshwater fish. They also don't seem to decline biologically with age. Most recently, researchers have realized that their stable population sizes over recent decades could be thanks to the fact that these old fish are not dying, even as they fail to produce young that survive into adulthood.
The few experts who study these fish worry that a severe drop in their population may be imminent, if not unavoidable. What's clear from the research so far is just how little we know about bigmouth buffalo, and how many unanswered questions remain.
"It's one of the oldest populations of animal in the world, and there's no management or protection of the species," says Alec Lackmann, a fish researcher at the University of Minnesota, Duluth, and one of the foremost experts on bigmouth buffalo fish and their aging.
Lackmann led the research, published in a 2019 paper, which first discovered the centenarian lifespan of bigmouth buffalo in Minnesota. Prior to this, it was thought that the fish only lived to be about 26 years old. He later confirmed large numbers of centenarian individuals in other buffalo fish species in other parts of North America.
Lackmann's interest in these fish is a departure from his previous doctoral research, which involved studying non-biting midge flies in the Alaskan Arctic. Out of curiosity, he took some ichthyology (fish zoology) courses and learned how to determine the age of fish using the otolith, the stone-like structures found in the ears of most fish species. Otoliths grow rings over time, like those of a tree. By dissecting them into thin slices, scientists can count and analyze these rings and get an accurate look at a fish's age.
When he moved back to Minnesota, again following curiosity, Lackmann began dissecting the otoliths of the native species around him. "The first bigmouth buffalo I aged was almost 90 years old," he says. "I was like 'wow, holy smokes'… It was hard to believe at first.”
The discovery led Lackmann to ask more questions about this strange but little-known fish. A couple of years later, he collaborated with experts in biological aging to assess known markers of stress and aging in bigmouth buffalo fish of various ages.
The researchers looked at immune cell ratios as well as the length of telomeres (a region DNA found at the end of a chromosome which limit the number of times a cell can divide), both indicators of biological aging, and compared them with the otoliths rings showing the true age of the fish.
The research, published in 2021, only provided a snapshot of each fish's health at one moment in time, says Britt Heidinger, co-author of the paper and a biologist at North Dakota State University, who focuses on why organisms age at different rates. But it suggested that "we're really not seeing a decline with age in these organisms", she says.
Increased age in the fish was not associated with telomere shortening (a biological sign of aging), as would normally be expected. Instead, it seemed to be linked with better immune functioning, including a decreased neutrophil-to-lymphocyte ratio – a change which suggests that these fish get better at handling bodily stress and see increased immunity as they age.
There's still a lot that's not known about how these fish manage to stay healthy in old age, says Heidinger, but it's possible that they might be maintaining their telomeres through an enzyme that prevents these from shortening. Unfortunately, however, telomeres can't tell us what the maximum lifespan of the bigmouth fish might be or give assurances that the trend of getting better with age will continue. After all, "aging is a nonlinear process", Heidinger says.
But there is another puzzle unfolding in this recent research. Since such a high proportion of the fish sampled were exceptionally old, it begged another question: where are all the younger fish?
Lackmann and collaborators decided to sample fish ages in Minnesota's Rice Lake, while also annually observing spawning behaviors. In a recent paper, they reported that 99.7% of the fish they had sampled and aged – 389 out of 390 fish – were more than 50 years old. The median age was 79, meaning most of the fish in this population were born before the end of World War Two.
But what was really shocking was the fact that despite bigmouth buffalo fish successfully spawning every year around May, yielding many new young fish, by late summer all evidence of those young disappears. In fact, there hasn't been a successful generation of young fish there for more than 60 years, says Lackmann. "Every young fish that has survived after 1957 is a statistical outlier.”
The researchers believe the reason for this dismal survival rate is likely predation by another native fish: pike. These also spawn in Rice Lake, just a little earlier in the year, so it's likely that young pike fish are predating on the baby buffalo fish, says Lackmann. The scientists theorize that the inordinately long lives of the fish are in fact an adaptation to the fact that their young only succeed once in a long while. But more research is needed to know for sure.
"To me, it's sort of like the chicken and the egg question," says Walt Ford, the refuge manager at Rice Lake National Wildlife Refuge and a co-author of the paper. On one hand, he says, they could have always been a long-lived species, and so the need to produce young might have never been urgent. On the other hand, maybe the difficulty of getting their young into adulthood has nudged the species to live longer and longer.
Regardless of the reason, no one knows how anomalous the current 60-year gap is, or even what the maximum lifespan of these fish might be. The Rice Lake population is not isolated, so it's possible it mixes with other populations from elsewhere. Most, if not all, populations of bigmouth buffalo fish studied so far appear similarly skewed toward very old fish – an indication that this situation might be widespread. With the current generation getting ever older, these populations could be vulnerable.
"That's the really scary thing about [Lackmann's new] paper," says Heidinger – the realization that high levels of adult mortality "could wipe that population out". Currently, no one knows how many bigmouth buffalo fish there are, or how many distinct populations exist, adds Lackmann.
Adult bigmouth buffalo fish have no adult predators – except humans. While they are listed as a species of special concern in Canada, and as endangered in Pennsylvania, throughout the rest of the US little to no protections are in place for them. They are popular bowfishing targets, and in Minnesota there are no limits to how many bowfishers are allowed to kill at a time, says Ford. "Oftentimes we'll find piles of them dumped a short distance away," he says.
Protections and awareness are key, says Lackmann. People will often mistake bigmouth buffalo fish for invasive carp species and think they're helping the ecosystem by removing them. Ironically, bigmouth buffalo are native species that can help protect these ecosystems from their invasive counterparts, he says.
Knowing what we know now – that these fish are incredibly old with young that are struggling to survive – Ford says he hopes states like Minnesota will soon put much needed limits on their fishing, while scientists learn more and figure out how to help this species. "We need to hurry our research on this," he says. "It seems urgent."
So long as bigmouth buffalo fish are not widely considered an important or interesting species, however, it will be hard to conduct that research. Bigmouth buffalo are also not considered ecologically important, which contributes to them being overlooked. It's a cycle: bigmouth buffalo are ignored, no funding goes toward their protection or research, and then the dearth of research prevents us from seeing their importance and vulnerabilities, so they stay ignored.
A similar story is seen in many other overlooked fish species – new research has only just started to reveal the previously unknown complexities of other "rough fish" like quillback suckers, bowfins and redhorse suckers.
There's still so much to learn before experts can know how to help bigmouth buffalo. "A lot of the elementary biology of bigmouth buffalo is not known," says Eva Enders, a fish ecologist at the National Institute of Scientific Research in Québec City, Canada. "We have very little understanding about their metabolic rate, or what temperature ranges they can tolerate – all really important variables to know if you want to do predictions or modeling of the species distribution with climate change."
For the Minnesota population specifically, Lackmann adds, scientists don't even know where they migrate from, nor where they spend the rest of the year before and after spawning.
One theory for why baby fish are having trouble making it to adulthood is that there could be some kind of habitat disruption through dam construction, says Lackmann. If that's the case, whether they can figure out what the bottleneck is, and how to reverse it in time, remains to be seen.
If researchers and conservationists don’t work fast enough, we risk losing a species with fascinating and potentially unique biological secrets for staving off aging. It's not clear whether there are decades left on the clock or just a few years, but time is ticking.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20250109-bigmouth-buffalo-the-mysterious-fish-that-lives-for-a-century-and-doesnt-decline-with-age
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YES, THE COLOR OF YOUR EGG-YOLK MATTERS
It can be jarring to crack an egg and see a bright orange yolk instead of the expected pale yellow, or vice versa. Americans eat on average nearly 300 eggs a year, making it likely you’ll stare down an unusual (for you) shade of yolk at some point.
While poultry researchers note that an orange yolk isn’t necessarily better than a yellow one, the shade can indicate how the hen might have been raised. We tapped four poultry experts to explain what’s behind the spectrum of egg yolk shades, and what each one means.
What colors can the egg yolk be?
There are a lot of possibilities when it comes to egg yolk color. “Egg yolk color can range anywhere from almost white to a blood-red color,” says Richard Blatchford, PhD, a poultry researcher and associate specialist in Cooperative Extension: Small to Industry Scale Poultry at the UC Davis Department of Animal Science. “But the extremes are pretty rare to see.”
Grocery store eggs usually have a bright yellow or pale orange yolk, but there are variations within these colors, he says.
Poultry experts and farmers even keep track of yolk color. The DSM Yolk Color Fan is a 16-scale color index that distinguishes yolk color and is widely used in the poultry industry. Under the scale, each number corresponds with a different shade. Number one, for example, is a pale yellow, while 16 is a deep shade of orange. “People really tend to like the rich, dark-colored yolks,” says Blatchford.
What influences the color of an egg yolk?
There are a lot of factors that can influence the egg yolk color a hen produces, and most of it comes down to diet, says Sunoh Che, DVM, PhD, assistant professor of poultry management at University of Maryland. These are the biggest factors, according to experts:
The composition of the hen’s feed: The amount of yellow-orange carotenoids [plant pigments], like lutein from alfalfa meal and zeaxanthin from marigold flower extract, “significantly affects yolk color,” says Che.
The amount of corn in the feed: Corn can influence how yellow a yolk is, says Blatchford. “Hens that make grocery store eggs are usually fed a corn-based diet,” he says. “That’s why most of our grocery store eggs are a yellow color, but not really bright.”
Xanthophyll content: Xanthophyll is a yellow compound that influences egg yolk color, says Hillary Ayers, family and consumer sciences agent with University of Florida, Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences Extension Orange County. “Xanthophyll is found throughout the world, but is commonly found in leaves and grain,” she says. “Not all plant material is equal when it comes to containing xanthophyll — some have higher concentrations and different types.” The type of xanthophyll-containing plants a chicken eats can influence the color of the yolks, she says.
Access to a fresh pasture: “Hens with access to fresh grass and pasture tend to produce eggs with more vibrant yolk colors,” says Che. That’s because these hens generally have a more varied diet with sources of protein from bugs and carotenoids and xanthophyll from plants.
What does the color of your egg yolk mean?
The color of your egg yolk can suggest a few things about the hen that laid the egg. Again, a lot has to do with what the hen ate. “A hen’s diet is highly specialized, and most egg farms employ animal nutrition specialists to oversee those diets,” says Jen Houchins, PhD, RD, director of nutrition research at The American Egg Board’s Egg Nutrition Center.
“Egg-laying hens are fed a high-quality, nutritionally balanced diet of feed, typically made up mostly of corn or other grains, soybean meal, vitamins, and minerals in order to produce quality eggs.” But the exact ingredients in the diet may vary based on what crops end up in the feed, she says.
Here’s what the shade of your egg yolk might mean:
Pale yellow: This color suggests the hen had a diet heavy in wheat, barley, or white cornmeal, says Houchins.
Bright yellow: A bright yellow or yellow-orange yolk usually suggests that the hen ate a lot of corn and/or alfalfa meal, per Houchins.
Orange: A few factors can explain an orange yolk. “This color can be achieved by adding marigold petals or red pepper to the chicken feed,” says Houchins, noting that artificial color additives are not allowed in the U.S. “A deeper orange color may also reflect a diet that includes foraging, where hens can access different plants and insects whose pigments can impact color,” she adds.
Another influence might be the season in which the egg was laid. “In the spring and summer, the hens might be outside more,” says Blatchford. That can raise the odds of foraging, leading to a more orange yolk.
A hen’s age may also play a role in yolk color, although that’s still up for debate. “The relationship between hen age and yolk color is not straightforward,” says Che. “While some studies indicate that older hens produce darker yolks, others show more complex patterns.”
Are orange egg yolks more nutritious?
Yolk color doesn’t necessarily indicate that the egg is more nutritious. “The nutritional content of eggs — including fat-soluble vitamins A, D, E, and K — depends more on the hen’s diet, health, breed, age, and environment than on yolk color,” says Che. “Pasture-raised hens often produce eggs with higher levels of nutrients like omega-3 fatty acids and vitamins due to their diverse diet, not the intensity of yolk color.”
That said, yolk color can indicate how much carotenoids are in the egg, says Houchins. Carotenoids are linked with good eye health, along with a lowered risk of cancer, diabetes, and bodily inflammation. “Most egg yolks in the U.S. are bright yellow or yellow-orange due to the carotenoids, lutein and zeaxanthin, that typically come from the corn in the hens’ diet,” says Houchins. Generally, deeper orange egg yolks suggest a higher concentration of carotenoids. “Beyond carotenoids, though, yolk color does not indicate a more or less nutritious egg,” she says.
Ayers agrees. “No matter the color of the yolk, the nutritional value is the same. “[Eggs are a] nutrient-dense food that contains high amounts of vitamin A, D, E, K, as well as other essential nutrients,” she says.
Do orange egg yolks taste better?
The answer is likely yes. The varied bug- and plant-rich diet of pasture-raised hens tends to result in a richer and more flavorful egg yolk. With that said, you can’t know from looking at an egg yolk that a hen was pasture-raised.
“The best tasting eggs come from happy hens that get to forage free-range on grass, bugs, and vegetable scraps,” says F&W senior food editor Breana Killeen, who raises egg-laying hens at Killeen Crossroads Farm in Shelburne, Vermont. “Chicken feed can create yolks with an orange color, but the flavor doesn’t compare to yolks from chickens that are actually foraging.”
Your best bet for flavorful eggs? Buy ones labeled pasture-raised, directly from a farmers market or farmer if you can.
EGGS WITH A DOUBLE EGG YOLK
Without any outside interference, the odds of getting a double-yolker are about one in every thousand eggs.
Double-yolk eggs are a byproduct of rapid ovulation. That means two yolks are released in quick succession into a hen's oviduct (aka fallopian tube) and end up in the same shell. Typically, yolks are released about an hour apart, but hormonal changes or a hyperactive ovary will cause double releases.
Usually, young hens are responsible for double-yolkers, but heavier breeds like the Buff Orpington are also known to produce double-yolk eggs more regularly than other breeds. Additionally, hens that experience an abrupt, drastic increase in hours of light exposure are more prone to laying eggs with two yolks.
Can you get more than two yolks?
Yes! The most yolks ever found in one egg is nine. That's a mighty big omelet. Conversely, there are also yolkless eggs, which are called dwarf or wine eggs. Those are usually the first eggs laid by very young hens.
https://www.foodandwine.com/does-egg-yolk-color-matter-8768342?utm_source=firefox-newtab-en-us
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FOR ALZHEIMER’S SUFFERERS, INFLAMMATION IGNITES A NEURON-KILLING “FOREST FIRE”
— and it could also be the kindling sparking Parkinson’s and other neurodegenerative maladies
For decades researchers have focused their attacks against Alzheimer’s on two proteins, amyloid beta and tau. Their buildup in the brain often serves as a defining indicator of the disease. Get rid of the amyloid and tau, and patients should do better, the thinking goes.
But drug trial after drug trial has failed to improve patients’ memory, agitation and anxiety. One trial of a drug that removes amyloid even seemed to make some patients worse. The failures suggest researchers were missing something. A series of observations and recently published research findings have hinted at a somewhat different path for progression of Alzheimer’s, offering new ways to attack a disease that robs memories and devastates the lives of 5.7 million Americans and their families.
One clue hinting at the need to look further afield was a close inspection of the 1918 worldwide flu pandemic, which left survivors with a higher chance of later developing Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s. A second inkling came from the discovery that the amyloid of Alzheimer’s and the alpha-synuclein protein that characterizes Parkinson’s are antimicrobials, which help the immune system fight off invaders.
The third piece of evidence was the finding in recent years, as more genes involved in Alzheimer’s have been identified, that traces nearly all of them to the immune system. Finally, neuroscientists have paid attention to cells that had been seen as ancillary—“helper” or “nursemaid” cells. They have come to recognize these brain cells, called microglia and astrocytes, play a central role in brain function—and one intimately related to the immune system.
All of these hints are pointing toward the conclusion that both Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s may be the results of neuroinflammation—in which the brain’s immune system has gotten out of whack. “The accumulating evidence that inflammation is a driver of this disease is enormous,” says Paul Morgan, a professor of immunology and a member of the Systems Immunity Research Institute at Cardiff University in Wales. “It makes very good biological sense.”
The exact process remains unclear. In some cases the spark that starts the disease process might be some kind of insult—perhaps a passing virus, gut microbe or long-dormant infection. Or maybe in some people, simply getting older—adding some pounds or suffering too much stress could trigger inflammation that starts a cascade of harmful events.
This theory also would explain one of the biggest mysteries about Alzheimer’s: why some people can have brains clogged with amyloid plaques and tau tangles and still think and behave perfectly normally. “What made those people resilient was lack of neuroinflammation,” says Rudolph Tanzi, a professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School and one of the leaders behind this new view of Alzheimer’s. Their immune systems kept functioning normally, so although the spark was lit, the forest fire never took off, he says.
In Tanzi’s fire analogy, the infection or insult sparks the amyloid match, triggering a brush fire. As amyloid and tau accumulate, they start interfering with the brain’s activities and killing neurons, leading to a raging inflammatory state that impairs memory and other cognitive capacities. The implication, he says, is that it is not enough to just treat the amyloid plaques, as most previous drug trials have done. “If you try to just treat plaques in those people, it’s like trying to put out forest fire by blowing out a match.”
Lighting the Fire
One study published earlier this year found gum disease might be the match that triggers this neuroinflammatory conflagration—but Tanzi is not yet convinced. The study was too small to be conclusive, he says. Plus, he has tried to find a link himself and found nothing. Other research has suggested the herpes virus could start this downward spiral, and he is currently investigating whether air pollution might as well. He used to think amyloid took years to develop, but he co-authored a companion paper to the herpes one last year, showing amyloid plaques can literally appear overnight.
It is not clear whether the microbes—say for herpes or gum disease—enter the brain or whether inflammation elsewhere in the body triggers the pathology, says Jessica Teeling, a professor of experimental neuroimmunology at the University of Southampton in England. If microbes can have an impact without entering the brain or spinal cord—staying in what’s called the peripheral nervous system—it may be possible to treat Alzheimer’s without having to cross the blood–brain barrier, Teeling says.
Genetics clearly play a role in Alzheimer’s, too. Rare cases of Alzheimer’s occurring at a relatively young age result from inheriting a single dominant gene. Another variant of a gene that transports fats in brain cells, APOE4, increases risk for more typical, later-onset disease.
Over the last five years or so large studies of tens of thousands of people have looked across the human genome for other genetic risk factors. About 30 genes have jumped out, according to Alison Goate, a professor of neurogenetics and director of the Loeb Center for Alzheimer’s Disease at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City. Goate, who has been involved in some of those studies, says those genes are all involved in how the body responds to tissue debris—clearing out the gunk left behind after infections, cell death and similar insults.
So, perhaps people with high genetic risk cannot cope as well with the debris that builds up in the brain after an infection or other insult, leading to a quicker spiral into Alzheimer’s. “Whatever the trigger is, the tissue-level response to that trigger is genetically regulated and seems to be at the heart of genetic risk for Alzheimer’s disease,” she says. When microglia—immune cells in the brain—are activated in response to tissue damage, these genes and APOE get activated. “How microglia respond to this tissue damage—that is at the heart of the genetic regulation of risk for Alzheimer’s,” she says.
But APOE4 and other genes are part of the genome for life, so why do Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s mainly strike older people? says Joel Dudley, a professor of genetics and genomics, also at Mount Sinai. He thinks the answer is likely to be inflammation, not from a single cause for everyone but from different immune triggers in different individuals.
Newer technologies that allow researchers to examine a person’s aggregate immune activity should help provide some of those answers, he says. Cardiff’s Morgan is developing a panel of inflammatory markers found in the blood to predict the onset of Alzheimer’s before much damage is done in the brain, a possible diagnostic that could point to the need for anti-inflammatory therapy.
Like Threads
A similar inflammatory process is probably also at play in Parkinson’s disease, says Ole Isacson, a professor of Neurology at Harvard Medical School. Isacson points to another early clue about the role of inflammation in Parkinson’s: people who regularly took anti-inflammatory drugs like ibuprofen developed the disease one to two years later than average. Whereas other researchers focused exclusively on genetics, Isacson found the evidence suggested the environment had a substantial impact on who got Parkinson’s.
In 2008–09, Isacson worked with a postdoctoral student on an experiment trying to figure out which comes first in the disease process: inflammation or the death of dopamine-producing neurons, which make the brain chemical involved in transmitting signals among nerve cells. The student first triggered inflammation in the brains of some rodents with molecules from gram-negative bacteria and then damaged the neurons that produce dopamine. In another group of rodents, he damaged the neurons first and then introduced inflammation.
When inflammation came first, the cells died en masse, just as they do in Parkinson’s disease. Blocking inflammation prevented their demise, they reported in The Journal of Neuroscience.
Other neurodegenerative diseases also have immune connections. In multiple sclerosis, which usually strikes young people, the body’s immune system attacks the insulation around nerve cells, slowing the transmission of signals in the body and brain.
The spinal fluid of people with MS include antibodies and high levels of white blood cells, indicating the immune system is revved up—although it is not clear whether that immune system activation is the cause or result of MS, says Mitchell Wallin, who directs the Veterans Affairs Multiple Sclerosis Centers of Excellence. People with antibodies to the Epstein-Barr virus in their systems, especially if they caught the virus in late adolescence or early adulthood run a higher risk of developing MS—supporting the idea that an infection plays a role in MS.
Thanks to newer medications and improvements in fighting infections, people with MS are now living longer. This increased longevity puts them at risk for neurological diseases of aging, including Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, Wallin says. Lack of data has left it unclear whether people with MS are at the same, higher or lower risk for these diseases than the general population. “How common it is, we’re just starting to explore right now,” Wallin says.
Coming Soon?
It will be years before the concept of a neuroinflammatory can be fully tested, but there are already some relevant drugs in development. One start-up, California-based INmune Bio, recently received a $1-million grant from the Alzheimer’s Association to advance XPro1595, a drug that targets neuroinflammation. The company is beginning its first clinical trial this spring, treating 18 patients with mild to moderate-stage Alzheimer’s who also show signs of inflammahtion. The company plans to test blood, breath by-products and cerebral spinal fluid as well as conduct brain scans to look for changes in inflammatory markers.
The first trial will just explore if XPro1595 can safely bring down inflammation and change behaviors such as depression and sleep disorders. Company CEO and co-founder Raymond Tesi says he expects to see those indicators improve, even in a short, three-month trial.
The best way to avoid Alzheimer’s is to prevent it from ever starting, which might require keeping brain inflammation to a minimum, particularly in later life. Preventative measures are already well known: eat healthy foods, sleep well, exercise regularly, minimize stress and avoid smoking and heavy drinking.
You can’t do anything about your genetics but living a healthy lifestyle will help control your inheritance, says Tanzi, who, along with Deepak Chopra, wrote a book on the topic, The Healing Self: A Revolutionary New Plan to Supercharge Your Immunity and Stay Well for Life. “It’s important to get that set point as high as possible.”
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/for-alzheimer-s-sufferers-brain-inflammation-ignites-a-neuron-killing-forest-fire?utm_source=firefox-newtab-en-us
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Ending on beauty:
WHITE LIKE THE SHIPS OF DREAMERS
White like the ships of dreamers,
clouds float across the sky.
The sun slants into the deep
tapestry of houses.
The wind blows down the gray and sandy streets,
an invisible painting that paints itself,
carving the great towers,
tugging at hats.
Leaves and newspapers dance,
windows rattle, doors shake,
the awnings. The huge canvas wings
over the bones of half-finished
buildings tremble under the touch —
the wind like polished silk,
the brush of hair along expectant bodies,
a thousand inescapable tongues.
~ Sutton Breiding
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