Garden of Spruce by Sonata Zemguliene; my thanks to Violeta Kelertas*
VERLOREN
My first memory of German
six years old, running
through our Łodź apartment
chanting Heil Hitler
Hände hoch
petrified parents
plucking the exotic
bloodied syllables
from my happy mouth
but when I was sixteen
my neighbor from Silesia
called me Fräulein Yoasia
she taught me the caress of umlauts
long journeys of Wehmut
leiden and verloren
that music of sorrow
I stood under those vowels
as in a petal-fall
in secret to myself
*
a Mazurian village
she opens the door
on the table she puts
milk and honey and home-
-churned butter
bread fragrant with the sun
white lace blooms
in the windows
*
Memory is a translation
from a dead language
She waits for us forever
that shimmering young girl
lost mouths that kiss us
as we pass
~ Oriana
*
ON MARGUERITE DURAS
Marguerite wasn’t always Duras. She was born Donnadieu, but with the publication of her first novel, “Les Impudents,” in 1943, she went from Donnadieu to Duras and stayed that way. She chose, as her alias, the village of her father’s origins, distancing herself from her family, and binding herself to the emanations of that place name, which is pronounced with a regionally southern French preference for a sibilant “S.” The village of Duras is in Lot-et-Garonne, an area south of the Dordogne and just north of Gascony. The language of Gascon, from which this practice of a spoken “S” derives, is not considered chic. More educated French people not from the region might be tempted to opt for a silent “S” with a proper name. In English, one hears a lot of “dur-ah”—especially from Francophiles. Duras herself said “dur-asss,” and that’s the correct, if unrefined, way to say it.
Marcel Proust, whom Duras admired a great deal and reread habitually, modeled the compelling and ridiculous Baron de Charlus on Robert de Montesquiou of Gascony. Some argue that on account of Montesquiou’s origins and for the simpler reason that Charlus, here, is a place name, it should be pronounced “charlusss.”
In “Sodom and Gomorrah,” Proust himself makes quite a bit of fun of the issue of pronunciations, and how they signify class and tact, and specifically, the matter of an “S,” of guessing if it’s silent or sibilant. Madame de Cambremer–Legrandin experiences a kind of rapture the first time she hears a proper name without the sibilant “S”—Uzai instead of Uzès—and suddenly the silent “S,” “a suppression that had stupefied her the day before, but which it now seemed so vulgar not to know,” becomes the proof, and apotheosis, of a lifetime of good breeding.
So vulgar not to know, and yet what Proust is really saying is that it’s equally vulgar to be so conscious of élite significations, even as he was entranced by the world of them. Madame de Cambremer-Legrandin is, after all, a mere bourgeoise who elevated her station through marriage, and her self-conscious, snobbish silent “S” will never change that, and can only ever be a kind of striving, made touchingly comical in “Sodom and Gomorrah.” Duras is something else. No tricks, full “S.” Maybe, in part, her late-life and notorious habit of referring to herself in the third person was a reminder to say it the humble way, “dur-asss.”
Or maybe it was just an element of what some labeled her narcissism, which seems like a superficial way to reject a genius. Duras was consumed with herself, true enough, but almost as if under a spell. Certain people experience their own lives very strongly. Regardless, there is a consistent quality, a kind of earthy simplicity, in all of her novels, films, plays, screenplays, notebooks, and in the dreamily precise oral “telling” of “La Vie Matérielle,” which is a master index of Durassianisms, of “S”-ness: lines that function on boldness and ease, which is to say, without pretension.
“There is one thing I’m good at, and that’s looking at the sea.”
“When a woman drinks it’s as if an animal were drinking, or a child.”
“Alcohol is a substitute for pleasure though it doesn’t replace it.”
“A man and a woman, say what you like, they’re different.”
“A life is no small matter.”
Her assertions have the base facticity of soil and stones, even if one doesn’t always agree with them, especially not with her homophobia, which gets expressed in the section of “La Vie Matérielle” on men, and seems to have gotten worse as her life fused into a fraught and complicated autumn-spring intimacy with Yann Andrea Steiner, who was gay.
“La Vie Matérielle” was translated as “Practicalities” by Barbara Bray, but might be more felicitously titled “Material Life,” or “Everyday Life.” The book began as recordings of Duras speaking to her son’s friend Jérôme Beaujour. After the recordings were transcribed, there was much reworking and cutting and reformulating by Duras. In terms of categories, the book is unique, but all of Duras’s writing is novelistic in its breadth and profundity, and all of it can be poured from one flask to another, from play to novel to film, without altering its Duras-ness. In part, this is because speech and writing are in some sense the same thing with Duras. When she talks, she is writing, and when writing, speaking. (Some of her later work was spoken first to Yann Andrea, who typed her sentences, and the results were novels, such as “The Malady of Death.”)
The English-edition flap copy describes “La Vie Matérielle” as “about being an alcoholic, about being a woman, and about being a writer.” And it is about those things, and more or less in that order, although drinking is woven throughout. Her discussions of it are blunt. They are also accurate, and spoken by one who knows.
When Duras made this book, in 1987, she had suffered late-stage cirrhosis and lost her mind in a detox clinic, an episode she refers to, in the book, as a “coma.” She’d quit, start, quit. Later, in 1988, she was in a real coma, for five months. “It’s always too late when people tell someone they drink too much,” she writes. “You never know yourself that you’re an alcoholic. In one hundred percent of cases, it’s taken as an insult.”
Her talk of women and domestic life are of her era, although she was her own sort of early feminist, who felt that pregnancy was proof of women’s superiority to men, which she constantly reminded the men around her while pregnant with her son Jean. In a section called “House and Home,” she provides a list of important items with which she stocked Neauphle-le-Château, the country place where she wrote, and where many of her films were made. The list includes butter, coffee filters, steel wool, fuses, and Scotch-Brite. Only frivolous women, she says, neglect repairs.
For the “rough” work that men do, in counterpart to domestic chores, she is unimpressed: “To cut down trees after a day at the office isn’t work, it’s a kind of game.” And even worse, she adds, a man thinks he’s a hero if he goes out and buys a couple of potatoes. “Still, never mind,” she finishes off, and in the next paragraph announces that people tell her that she exaggerates, but that women could use a bit of idealizing.
From there she is on to the burning of manuscripts, which make the house feel virginal and clean, and her next topic, rolled into seamlessly, is the phenomenon of “sales, super sales, and final reductions” that drive a woman to purchase clothing she does not want or need. She ends up with a sartorial excess, a surplus, new to her generation, and yet this ur-woman, a figment of typicality, maintains the same role, in the home and in the world, that has persisted for all women in all times: a “theater of profound loneliness that has constituted their lives for centuries.”
Much of her publishing career was an encounter with misogyny: in the nineteen-fifties, male critics called her talent “masculine,” “hardball,” and “virile”—and they meant these as insults! (This phenomenon, sadly, has not gone away, even now.) The implication was that as a meek and feeble female, she had no right to her aloof candor, her outrageous confidence.
And it’s true that you’d have to think quite highly of your own ideas to express them with such austerity and melodrama, but that is the great paradox, the tension, of the equally rudimentary and audacious style of Duras. “People who say they don’t like their own books, if such people exist, do so because they haven’t learned to resist the attraction to humiliation,” she wrote in one of her journals. “I love my books. They interest me.”
Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, who adapted a short story by Duras into a film called “En Rachâchant,” from 1982, said of their own work that it was best understood by cavemen and children. In fact, their work is difficult to understand by anyone not versed in literature, philosophy, and art, and, moreover, anyone not trained to watch difficult films, but their intentions in making such a claim seem clear enough: “If you don’t get it, you’re judging it through an adapted set of ideologies and traditions that are obstacles, and once you unlearn your bad training, you will understand our films.”
Their caveman is a kind of negative, the inverse shadow of cultural bias, an innocent. Fittingly, the Duras story they adapted is about a boy who learns without being taught, who knows things without the corruption of intellect.
Unlike Straub and Huillet, Duras might actually have a decent chance with cave people and children. Receiving the full impact of her work has little to do with education, erudition. You either relate to it or you don’t. She could talk to anyone, and replicate any kind of voice (while somehow maintaining that tone, her “S”), like those of the curt but philosophical concierge and street sweeper, who both feature in “Madame Dodin” but made their first appearances in the posthumously published early notebooks that comprise “Wartime Writings.”
The moments of truth in her work are elemental and felt, not synthetic or abstruse. She told Delphine Seyrig she might give up writing and open a service station for trucks along the highway. Meanwhile, she was much loved and admired by many twentieth-century intellectuals, such as Jacques Lacan and Maurice Blanchot, both of whom wrote about her work (“I never understood much of him,” she said, of Lacan). Samuel Beckett credited hearing her radio play of “The Square” as a significant moment in his own creative life.
She had what both Beckett and the filmmaker Alain Resnais marveled over and admired as “tone.” Durassian. Everything she made was marked by it, and the distinct quality of that tone is certainly what led to the accusation, true enough, that she was at risk sometimes of self-caricature. But every writer aspires to have some margin of original power, a patterning and order that comes to them as a gift bestowed, and is sent to no one else. If Duras weren’t so lucky, if she weren’t such a natural writer, her critics would have no object for their envy, their policing of excess, as well as the inverse—a suspicion of her restrained economy with words.
At the end of “La Vie Matérielle,” she describes an encounter with an imaginary man, a hallucination, as if this man were perfectly real. And he is: he is part of her fictive universe, the primal scenes she spent her life rendering, and reworking, telling, and then telling again. A lot of things happened to Marguerite Duras. She lost a child while giving birth, and in that experience lost God and gained unwanted knowledge of death.
Her first husband, Robert Antelme, was deported to Dachau and came back, but weighing eighty pounds. Duras worked for the Occupation, and later joined the Resistance, then the Communist Party. Was expelled from the Communist Party but remained a Marxist. Did television interviews with both President François Mitterrand and the filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard. Aspects of her life are legends, like the destitute poverty of her childhood, in Indochina. In some writings, her mother’s ailment is madness. In others, menopause. Or financial ruin. Sometimes, the mother’s madness is her strength. Maybe these are not contradictions. 
The erotic charge between her and the older Chinese lover in Saigon seems like art, scenes that bloomed on paper. Things happened to Duras “that she never experienced,” as she put it. The story of her life did not exist, she said. The novel of her life—yes. She obsessively read Proust, Joseph Conrad, and Ecclesiastes. She pursued a poetic absorption in the sacred and secret.
She may have popularized a French trend called autofiction, but she dismissed trends, and, more importantly, she was adamant that the genre of autobiography was base, degraded. She held the same view of “essayistic” writing. She resisted the anti-novel rhetoric of the practitioners of the nouveau roman, whom she called “businessmen.” Literature was her interest, that kind of truth.
https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/a-man-and-a-woman-say-what-you-like-theyre-different-on-marguerite-duras
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THE EASY LIFE, AN EARLY NOVEL BY DURAS
Marguerite Duras at home in Paris
Marguerite Duras was a literary phenomenon. To scroll through her bibliography is to pull up a mass of novels, stories, plays, screenplays, in a creative lifespan from 1943 until her death in 1996. In The Easy Life, the first English translation of her second novel, published in France in 1944, the quintessential Duras tone is already here – stripped-down staccato sentences, remorseless introspection.
Duras is best known today for The Lover, a novel written when she was 70; a fictional version of her own youthful love affair in French Indochina (today’s Vietnam) with a Chinese Vietnamese man, it won the Prix Goncourt and was made into a successful film. Duras often plundered her own life for subject matter: in The Easy Life she turns to the remote village in south-east France from which her father had come and which she had visited as a teenager. And it features one of the compelling themes of Duras’s own life: her passionate attachment to a brother who died young, a year before she wrote the novel.
The Easy Life centers on an isolated farming family: parents, son Nicolas, daughter-in-law Clémence, daughter Francine the narrator, and lodger/farmhand Tiène. A seventh incumbent, uncle Jérôme, is disposed of in the first few pages, killed in a fight with Nicolas. With this first death the climate is established of a ménage fraught with resentment, suspicion and betrayal. Jérôme was responsible for the family’s departure in disgrace from an earlier prosperous town life; he had been sleeping with Clémence. Francine, who is a participant but also the detached observer, is in love with Tiène, the lodger. So, a nicely dysfunctional family, and the backdrop for Francine’s narrative, which fills out past and present in the pared-down Duras style.
It seems that the editor at Gallimard who took on The Easy Life had his doubts, complaining of “a muddled narrative” and “lack of control.” Part One is eventful, kicking off with the fight, and a death, and then dipping around in time as Francine recounts what is going on at the farm, and why – why Nicolas married Clémence, the “stupid and ugly” servant girl; why he now consorts with beautiful Luce Barragues from the nearby village; why Tiène is so firmly established in the household. Why – above all – the family has washed up there in such straightened circumstances.
All this is effectively done. There is urgency and precision to the writing; Nicolas, Tiène, Luce and Francine herself are intriguing and credible characters. The style may be clipped, but the setting and lifestyle are slipped into the action. There is mention of sheep, of two cows; work with potatoes, tobacco, beans, wheat. The men are always hard at it by day, vanishing from the farmhouse out into the fields, the landscape of crops, woodland, a river where a family picnic takes place, in a seminal scene of emotional tension between Nicolas, Luce, Tiène and Francine. The parents are somewhat sidelined, though it is made clear that Francine is devoted to her mother. The action is designed to focus on the four young people, and does so with unexpected drama, so that the narrative of Part Two switches at once to a different key, a new complexity.
Francine is now desolate, mired in grief. She takes off for a seaside resort she has always wanted to visit – at 25, she has hardly known anything but the claustrophobia of home. She books herself into a boarding house for two weeks, and the reader is treated to a prolonged monologue of introspection, broken into occasionally by further accounts of the family’s decline into its present malaise.
But mainly this challenging section is an opaque commentary on Francine’s own self-absorption. You read passages again and again to tease out the meaning: “I look at my knees or my breasts that lift my dress and immediately my thought curves and returns to me, obedient. I think of myself. My knees real knees my breasts real breasts. An observation that counts.” This mannered style of deliberate abstraction can seem in one paragraph merely pretentious, and then serve up a line that is illuminating and accurate.
There is more to come, as Francine makes a clandestine return to the farm, still tormented by thoughts of past events and relationships. The ending is unexpected, and feels arbitrary: you remember the comments of that Gallimard editor. But Duras was only 30 when this novel was published. This is the writing of her youth, experimental in every sense, a precursor indeed of the sparse later style for which she was distinguished, but perhaps without its precision. And there is a significant cumulative effect. The writing creates an effective climate for the story; it has energy and self-sufficiency that nicely convey the claustrophobia and sexual tension of the group and the place. Francine can irritate, but she is also a persuasive narrator. Eight decades on, Duras’s nascent talent is on display here.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/dec/08/the-easy-life-by-marguerite-duras-review-experiments-of-youth
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THE IMAGE OF RUSSIA AFTER ITS INVASION OF UKRAINE
The attack on Ukraine has clearly confirmed the thing that only some experts have seen. Even I thought for a long time that it was exaggerated.
Russia and the Russians are going around in circles. It's a universally hateful, envious and backward society, often quite toxic in everyday interactions, and it doesn't matter what the name of the state is or what ideology rules a society that hasn't learned from its past. And even to this day it glorifies figures who mass murdered their fellow citizens. Putin is just an another one of them.
It says something about a society to have the corpse of a mass murderer [Lenin] in its most important square.
A society of mediocrity, or rather below mediocrity. From where as a slightly more capable person you basically have only three options: either collude with the establishment, run away or get killed/jailed or maybe be silent.
A society at its core depressed, whiny, mired in unrealistic false notions of its own exceptionalism and greatness, with an absence of even an elementary capacity for self-reflection. Society is riddled with decay and corruption.
By the way, even we as the West can thank God that disorder, laziness and corruption is Russia's national sport. Were it a different nation, they would be much more successful in their campaign. Indeed, in some ways, Russia's greatest enemy is Russia itself.
It is somewhat amusing when the current Russian establishment and propaganda tries to present Russia as a kind of 'alternative to the decadent West', when in fact the country is infinitely worse than the West in every way. Even in various soft metrics — crime, murders, domestic violence, rapes, the spread of sexually transmitted diseases, etc.
A society that has taken the worst of collectivism and individualism and actually created a place you don't want to live in completely. It's not that Russians are poor. Technically the country isn't so poor — it just shouldn't be ruled by a kleptocracy across levels.
What many people still don't get, Putin and his kleptocracy are not “Russia's hijackers”. They are the image of that very society in It's core.
The Russians got slightly richer (not so much by their own merit and labor, but by increasing mineral prices) before the war. So the standard of living will again be more likely to stagnate or decline for most people. Here again, it must be remembered that the developed countries are light years away in virtually everything and it would take decades to catch up. In both hard and soft metrics, moreover, developed countries would have to freeze completely.
Being Russian, I'm generally a bit nervous when the current regime significantly transforms or more precisely collapses. The power changes have never been very peaceful there. At the same time, they have always been accompanied by huge economic and social upheavals. But Russia won't be some extreme cataclysmic sinkhole. It will still be one of the richer developing countries thanks to its resources.
But just as it has been throughout its history. Will it be a pleasant, safe and overall good place to live? Certainly not, but that's kind of a local tradition too.
Do I feel sorry for the “regular nice Russians”? Certainly not, they are the only ones who could make a difference to the current situation. Many of them are fine with it and the vast majority don't care. Unfortunately what happened in Germany after 1945 for example, never happened there, a very unpleasant and long self-reflection.
Combined with laziness, irresponsibility and incompetence, this is why the country and society looks the way it does and why it will not be different for at least a few more decades for sure. ~ Vojta Rod, Quora
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Russia
is on fire almost every day. Military bloggers whining about "unknown
UAVs and debris" that cause damage by now turned into a kind of
background noise and memes.
*
WHY ARE RUSSIANS SO POOR?
80% of Russia looks the same as in 1985 — just worse for wear.
Moscow and St. Petersburg have been the cities of privilege – both were capitals of the Russian empire at different times.
Russia under Putin continued to develop the capitals, with rich Russians flocking there, while the regions kept decaying.
There are 16 cities in Russia with population over a million (including the 2 capitals) — the other 14 cities get some development as well.
But even in Moscow and St. Petersburg, there are poor people.
The richest the Russians ever lived was in 2006–2008 — on top of high oil prices and before the war on Georgia. Since then, they are getting poorer.
The reason why Russia isn’t rich (despite vast resources) is the corruption and lawlessness, which are 2 foundations of Putin’s regime.
If someone builds a successful enterprise, the FSB comes to take it over — they do offer to buy you out, giving you some money. You have to take it, or risk losing everything.
So, businessmen in Russia are trying to get rich quick: build a business, scam clients, take the money abroad and get out.
Even Putin’s buddies do the same: they take abroad the money they steal from the budget. (That’s why personal sanctions against Putin’s close circle are very effective.)
Basically, business in Russia belongs to the FSB — their family members and friends. Also to Kadyrov’s guys and top police officers — they, too, get a cut.
And none of them wants to reinvest in Russia. They want their money somewhere safe.
Joshua Woru:
Forget Putin. He is not the cause. He is the effect. Russian population is the cause. It's a rotten bunch of Stockholm syndrome individuals in their statistical mass. Putin's dead, long live another Putin. It's a damned place for eternity.
Croatian Zoltan Corso:
“If someone builds a successful enterprise, the FSB comes to take it over — they do offer to buy you out, giving you some money. You have to take it, or risk losing everything.”
Exactly how Bill Browder reveals the whole mechanism.
Joshua Woru:
My friend’s father hadn’t set foot in Saint Petersburg since they left in 1995. Naturally, he took a sentimental detour to see his childhood home in Udelnaya. Over dinner, he shared his findings: even the puddles were exactly where he left them. Nothing had changed apart from some lonely kids’ slide. Not the buildings, not the streets, not the atmosphere — just the same old third-world aesthetics frozen in time.
I visited Bangkok in 2014 and then again in 2023. The change was enormous.
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WHY AFGHANISTAN DIDN’T BECOME PART OF THE SOVIET UNION
Because the Afghans defeated the Red Army in the spring 1929.
Afghanistan is a blighted place, and we [Oriana: Dima Vorobiev, who lives in Norway, always uses “we” to refer to the Soviet Union or Russia] had to put it all off until 1979. Didn’t have too much success then either, though.
For us, this was another “special military operation” of the kind we ran in Donbas and other places. If it had succeeded, Afghanistan would have been well-positioned to be annexed into Soviet Turkestan the way the Bukhara Emirate was in the early 1920s.
The Invasion That Wasn’t
April 14, 1929. Two thousand armed men in Afghan clothes crossed the border into Afghanistan. Their mission: to reclaim the throne for Amanullah Khan, the deposed emir. Ousted in January by an uprising of soldiers and peasants, Amanullah had fled into exile.
The enemy was the new emir, Habibullah Ghazi. Ghazi had ditched Amanullah’s pro-Soviet policies and replaced them with hardline Islamic rule.
Leading the charge against Ghazi was Raghib Bey—better known on the Soviet side as Vitaly Markovich Primakov, a former military attaché in Kabul.
The Plan in Theory
Primakov’s troops came in hot. Twelve light machine guns, twelve heavy ones, and four mountain cannons. Enough to crush the Afghan border guards, seize Mazar-i-Sharif, and install there Amanullah’s local supporters.
This was supposed to inspire a groundswell of local support, drawing fighters to their cause like a magnet. The plan banked on momentum, on hope. The stage was set with a battalion of real Afghans, mostly Hazara tribesmen.
The Plan in Practice
But the locals weren’t buying it. The Soviets didn’t look, talk, or act like anyone’s saviors.
Suspicion turned to hostility.
Primakov found himself pinned down. He wired Moscow: “This was supposed to be a quick cavalry raid that would snowball into something bigger. But from day one, we’ve faced nothing but hostility.” His men were surrounded in Mazar-i-Sharif by an overwhelming Afghan army.
Reinforcements by Air
Moscow scrambled to send help. But dismal logistics plagued our military long until we got it right during WW2.
A cavalry squadron with machine guns tried to break through but failed and retreated back to the USSR. By April 26, supplies had to be airlifted in: ten machine guns, two hundred shells. On May 8, a 400-man Soviet unit, supported by artillery and planes, broke the siege and pushed south.
A New Commander, Same Old Disaster
On May 18, Primakov was replaced by Ali-Afzal Khan (a.k.a. Alexander Ivanovich Cherepanov). But the tides had already turned. The Afghans captured Tashkurghan, cutting off Cherepanov’s forces from their supply route.
The Red Army fought back, retaking the city on May 27, but it cost them dearly—almost all their ammunition was gone.
A Lost Cause
The same day, news broke that Amanullah’s forces in the south had been crushed. Our “Red emir” fled Afghanistan. Like under Brezhnev, we underestimated the degree of resistance.
On May 28, Moscow pulled the plug, ordering Cherepanov’s troops to withdraw. The Soviet losses were considerably less than in the 1980s war. Ten soldiers killed, thirty wounded.
Afghan casualties remained unknown, though we claimed “several thousand” killed, wounded, or captured. For all their firepower and planning, the invasion ended in nothing but blood and retreat. A fleeting campaign, a costly lesson, and a reminder that even the best-laid plans can sink in foreign sands.
Below, the leader of the Afghan Soviet insurgency, Vitaly Markovich Primakov. He’s the one in the center, with three decorative ribbons across the chest. This is from the time of his first SMO in the service of Trotsky’s Red Army in 1919 leading an assortment of volunteers that called themselves “Red Cossacks.”
~ Dima Vorobev, Quora
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SOVIET DEPORTATIONS OF BALTIC PEOPLE IN THE NINETEEN FORTIES
As everywhere else, Russian enforcers were stealing the property and homes of the deported.
Some of the residents, who were considered most dangerous political opponents of the Soviet regime, were shot — not deported.
People were loaded in cattle wagons, with little space to move around. Many died in transfer. Only one small bag per person was allowed. Still, Soviet soldiers were stealing any valuables from the deportees, before letting them on the trains.
About 100,000 people were deported from the relatively developed Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania to Siberia — banned from returning to their homeland or changing the occupation they were allocated.
A clean pair of underwear, a piece of soap, a document saying that they know that they would face a worse punishment if they try to return. Nothing else.
DEPORTATION TIMELINE
1940: The Soviet Union occupied the Baltic states after the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact.
June 1940–June 1941: The first wave of deportations took place, with an estimated 124,467 people deported.
June 1941: A large-scale deportation operation was planned, but was postponed due to the German invasion of the Soviet Union.
After 1944: Deportations resumed after the Soviet Union re-occupied the Baltic states.
On arrival, people were just dumped into a field in the middle of nowhere or near some dilapidated barracks with no heating.
After a month, the deported were eating frozen bodies of their fellow tribesmen who didn’t survive, because they were not given much food.
The deportees were forced to work in labor camps and other forced settlements.
Many deportees died in exile due to poor living conditions and lack of food.
Baltic cemetery in Siberia
After the death of Stalin in March 1953, the new leader that replaced the murderous dictator began granting amnesties to the deported.
Life didn’t become better, but it became less horrifying.
Between 1954 and 1960, 27,835 people were allowed to return home.
It was not until 1964 that most of the deported were allowed to return.
~ Elena Gold, Quora
Barbara:
The world needs to be reminded of the horrors of Soviet and Russian dictatorships. It has and can happen in other countries.
Elena Gold:
The people who were doing these deportations in 1940s are the ones who trained Putin in 1970s.
Ksawery Stojda:
Please note, that the same applies to Poles from Eastern Poland, invaded in 1939 and incorporated in 1944 into USSR after Yalta. Over 100,000 were deported to Siberia and Kazakhstan. Only a part repatriated with the Anders’ Army or soon after the War; over 30,000 of their descendants still live in Kazakhstan and many in Siberia.
E Kenny:
Not forgetting the 22,000 murdered in the forest of Katyń, approx 8000 Polish military officers, 6000 police officers and 8000 civilians considered a danger to the new regime (landowners,priests, teachers, intellectuals etc).
The cynicism of this crime was breathtaking. As was the denial of any involvement up until 1990 and even then a refusal to recognize it as a war crime with no criminal investigation ever taking place.
And in 2021 the Russian government downgraded the memorial complex at Katyń on its Register of Sites of Cultural Heritage from a place of federal to one of only regional importance.
Same ole same ole
Brad McBride:
The reconstruction and development of the Baltic states since 1991 after the Soviet nightmare is a particularly inspiring story.
Ilze Eglitis:
Here in Latvia, many people that I speak to have family members that were sent to Siberia. Many did not return, but died there. The house I am in now was built in the 30’s by a family that was deported, not as I understand, for their political beliefs but because someone in a position of power took a liking to the property and so sent them off to Siberia in a cattle car. The wife was allowed to return years later but did not get the house back. I believe she had to go live out the rest of her life in a room in a communal apartment.
Heikki Polojärvi:
Of the Finns left behind the Russian border in the 1920 peace about 20000–30000 were later executed in Stalin's purges. Including the communists who had voluntarily moved to Russia to build the worker's paradise. Excluding those who were exiled to Siberia, few of whom returned.
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RUSSIA’S FOOD PROBLEM
Russian pensioners are waiting near rubbish bins for store workers to throw away expired produce.
Vladimir Putin announced that the inflation in Russia was 9.5% in 2024, and vouched to index pensions to the same amount.
Which means, if a pensioner was getting a monthly pension of 16,000 ruble (USD $160), now they will be getting 1,440 ruble more ($14).
But a year ago the exchange rate was 89 ruble for USD $1.
So, the pension of 16,000 was $180 — now the indexed pension (if they even do it) would be $174 — USD $6 less.
Meanwhile, their bills and the prices of food are going up way more than Putin’s preposterous claim of 9.5%.
A pensioner who is getting 16,000 rub. as a monthly pension spends:
6,000 rub. on utilities and rates ($60)
5,000 rub. on medicines ($50)
The remaining $50 (5,000 rub.) is what they have to live on for the rest of the month: food, transportation, services, entertainment.
The people who worked their whole lives are now trying to survive, leading the existence devoid of dignity, in misery and fear.
Their only entertainment is the TV, which constantly threatens them with NATO invasions and nuclear war — explaining that the Russian troops heroically fight the war unleashed against Russia by the West and Americans, so they are only safe because the Russian soldiers are sent to Ukraine to fight off NATO that wants to conquer Russia and steal the Russian resources. If not for Russian soldiers sent to Ukraine, the war would be in their towns already.
The pensioners usually only survive because they have help from their adult children — or because they own a garden plot, where they grow some fresh produce — cabbage, carrots, potatoes.
They also can sell some of this produce and get some extra cash. In summer, pensioners sell some flowers — from their gardens or state forests.
Some sell potted plants.
The pensioners are cooking for themselves: vegetable soups, which they eat with bread, potatoes or pasta. For desert — tea with milk and cookies. That’s basically their diet.
They can only save on medicines and food.
And payments for utilities and rates constantly go up. ~ Elena Gold, Quora
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WHAT RUSSIANS THINK OF UKRAINIANS
The politically correct opinion in Russia: “We are not fighting Ukrainians, we are fighting to liberate them from Nazis, so that they are free to speak Russian and that Ukraine becomes Russia.”
But these who are not politically correct, they tell it as it is: Stalin should have finished them off in 1937!
They finished off the parents, but the kids survived, and now they are Banderovits, who refuse to take Russian passports and live in Russia.
The woman is genuinely infuriated: they were offered to leave, right?
Why did they refuse?
Then they deserve to be finished off!
Why don’t they want to live like Russians live? What, do they think they are better than us?
The lady is highly emotional. The fact that Ukrainians don’t want to live like she does, annoys her deeply.
Russians want everyone to suffer.
It’s not fair that some people are happier than others.
~ Elena Gold, Quora
JJM:
This old lady´s thoughts about Ukraine and Ukrainians, although emotional, do confirm a lot of what we know about the Russian invasion of Ukraine:
The Russian population’s view of Ukraine is heavily influenced by Russian state-sponsored propaganda (portraying Ukraine in a very negative light: controlled by Nazis, ungrateful for not accepting a Russian citizenship, desire to be part of NATO / EU, etc.)
Polls by Levada Center and others confirm this is the view of the majority of Russians.
Some still hold positive views towards Ukrainians (because of personal connections or cultural ties) but they are a minority.
The invasion may have been ordered by Putin but he is not alone in wanting to control and, if necessary, eliminate non-cooperative Ukrainians.
The conclusion is clear: if Ukraine loses this war, their future is not bad — it will be genocide or very close to genocide. The Holodomor all over again.
Oswald Campesano: “It’s not fair that some people are happier than others.”
This attitude is what I call “reverse Schadenfreude”: becoming miserable because other people are happy.
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THE BRUTALIST (MOVIE) CAUSES A BACKLASH FROM ARCHITECTS
It has graced tea towels and cushions, mugs and socks, and spawned numerous Instagram accounts and coffee table books galore. Now brutalism, the once-maligned postwar architectural style of chiselled concrete forms, has finally reached Hollywood, in the form of an epic three-and-a-half-hour film that looks set to sweep the Oscars. You would think that architecture fans would be thrilled to have their subject in the limelight for a change. But they are raging.
There is nothing more irritating to enthusiasts than when the mainstream tries to portray their niche world and gets it wrong. And The Brutalist gets an awful lot wrong. Just as Gladiator II recently vexed classicists with its inaccurate portrayal of the emperors and its anachronistic scenes of people reading the newspaper and drinking at cafes (neither of which, apparently, existed at the time), so too has director Brady Corbet riled the architecture world by playing fast and loose with his interpretation of brutalism, the Bauhaus, postwar immigration and the basic process of architecture itself.
While the film world has showered the movie with five-star reviews – praising its heroic ambition, and drooling at the “authenticity” of shooting with hulking 1950s VistaVision cameras – architecture critics have been up in arms. “The Brutalist gets architecture wrong,” declared the Washington Post. It “perpetuates a colossal cliche,” fumed the Financial Times.
Three prominent American architecture critics even got together to record a dedicated podcast, titled Why the Brutalist Is a Terrible Movie. For almost an hour, they railed against everything from the stereotypical depiction of the architect as a lone male genius to the Bauhaus-inspired graphic design of the credits, as well as (spoiler alert!) the idea that anyone would design a community center and chapel based on the form of a Nazi concentration camp. At the screening I attended, one leading figure from the 20th-century heritage movement could barely contain their fury during the (very welcome) half-time intermission: “It’s just utter tosh!”
The film has aroused this much ire because, for all its claims to be fictional, it is so clearly based on a real historical figure: Marcel Lajos Breuer. Like Corbet’s fictional László Tóth (played by a tortured, quivering Adrien Brody), Breuer was a Hungarian-Jewish architect who trained at the Bauhaus in Germany before emigrating to the US, where he became a prominent proponent of brutalism.
He and his contemporaries, including Walter Gropius and Mies van der Rohe, all emigrated in 1937 – crucially, before the second world war, not after, as Corbet has it – and built very successful careers, receiving deanships at major universities, and shaped the following century of modern architecture. None had to queue for free bread. Corbet consulted the architectural historian Jean-Louis Cohen, the leading authority on the period, to try to find the tragic figure that he had in mind, but none came to Cohen’s mind because none existed.
Marcel BreuerBreuer is best known for designing the former Whitney Museum in New York, which lurches above the street like an inverted ziggurat, and the striking trefoil-shaped Unesco headquarters in Paris. But he first made his name designing curved tubular steel furniture, of a kind practically identical to Tóth’s in the film’s early scenes. “It looks like a tricycle,” the furniture store owner’s wife remarks of the novel bent-steel design in the movie – just as Breuer’s chairs were compared to, and inspired by, bicycle frames at the time.
The similarities don’t stop there. Indeed, one of Breuer’s lesser-known building projects turns out to be the chief inspiration for the film. In the early 1950s, Breuer was commissioned to design a big brutalist church on a hill, just like Tóth – only it was in Minnesota, rather than Pennsylvania, and the clients were Benedictine monks, rather than a millionaire psychopath industrialist. The epic project went through similar agonies to those portrayed in the movie, a fraught process that was meticulously documented in a fascinating book, Marcel Breuer and a Committee of Twelve Plan a Church: A Monastic Memoir, written by Fr Hilary Thimmesh, who served as a junior member of the building committee.
“Our first concern was the novel architecture,” he writes of Breuer’s uncompromising proposal for an angular concrete box, flanked by an abstract bell tower – complete with a cross-shaped void, just like one in the roof of Tóth’s fictional building. “We needed assurance that it was all right to build this odd structure and call it a Catholic church.”
From the very outset of the project, there was suspicion of Breuer who, just like Tóth, had never designed a church, as a Hungarian Jew. “He wasn’t Catholic,” Thimmesh recounts. “His manner was certainly not midwestern.” As in the film’s depiction of a community consultation event, where Tóth shows off a big model of his bulky design to local residents, “biases were noted in the community”, writes Thimmesh, “some against Breuer as a non-Catholic”. Just as the God-fearing people of Pennsylvania in the movie are “worried [the building] is going to ruin the hillside”, and complain that “concrete isn’t very attractive”, so too did the monks of St John fret about the “less than wholehearted support for the plan in the community” and that their Catholic brethren were generally “down on modern architecture”.
Corbet has cited Thimmesh’s book as a key precedent, admitting that “narratively, that was one of the biggest inspirations” – before going on to describe the memoir dismissively as “a pretty dry account of the struggles Breuer went through.” The reality clearly wasn’t spicy enough for his melodramatic intentions. Breuer wasn’t a heroin addict, and the monks didn’t rape him in a quarry. Nor did the real life architect really lose his temper much, beyond the occasional politely worded letter.
In the movie, Brody’s tortured Tóth bristles with single-minded egotism, driven to the edge of sanity by his dogged devotion to the project, choosing to quit and shovel coal rather than see his vision compromised. He regularly erupts with prima-donna fits of screaming when he doesn’t get his way (giving us ample opportunities to learn the Hungarian for “fuck!”), throwing papers around and storming off in blind rage. As his long-suffering wife Erzsébet puts it at one point: “László worships only at the altar of himself.”
By contrast, Breuer was evidently well-versed in navigating the necessary compromises of a building project, as all architects must, while remaining firm in his convictions. At the most heated point during the design of the Minnesota church, when the abbot asked Breuer to sketch out an alternative design, Thimmesh recalls the architect’s measured reaction.
“Breuer responded with something close to emotion,” he writes. “To produce another design, he said, would take time and the same intensity he put into this one. The end result would probably be worse confusion. In choosing a building one does not have the luxury of selecting one of several existing things, he said.”
The nuances played out in the decade-long development of this landmark building would have made for a much more interesting story than the film’s hackneyed portrayal of the tempestuous architect-client relationship; but such nuance would be lost on Corbet’s two-dimensional characterization. Instead, he has his architect spouting meaningless platitudes, such as: “Is there a better description of a cube than that of its construction?” To which his wealthy industrialist client unconvincingly replies: “I find our conversations intellectually stimulating.”
Perhaps the most glaring anachronism is in the film’s bizarre epilogue, set years later at the 1980 Venice Architecture Biennale. Titled Presence of the Past, it was the moment that postmodernism took ascendancy, seeing a colorful parade of architects indulging in cartoonish historical references, embracing wit, humor and knowing pastiche. It was a stage for the new generation’s gleeful dance on the grave of their modernist and brutalist forebears, ushering in a period of buildings like the pink confection of No 1 Poultry in the City of London, and the green-glass Maya temple of the MI6 headquarters in Vauxhall.
Not in Corbet’s world. Instead, he portrays the landmark exhibition as a moment when his fictional, now wheelchair-using Tóth enjoys a heroic retrospective. His stripped-back concrete buildings are evaluated afresh, as “machines with no superfluous parts” – a reappraisal of brutalism that didn’t happen, in reality, until at least two or three decades later.
The architecture world awaits with bated breath the director’s five-hour marathons, The Postmodernist, The Deconstructivist, and The Parametricist – each to be shot with period-appropriate equipment and based on a brief skim through a coffee-table book.
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2025/jan/29/architecture-the-brutalist-marcel-breuer
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WHAT AN AMERICAN WOMAN FOUND DISTURBING AFTER RETURNING TO AMERICA
I had my first panic attack on I-85 in Atlanta.
Gripping the steering wheel of my huge SUV rental car, surrounded by six lanes of aggressive traffic near Midtown, my chest tightened as my brain struggled to process the sensory overload. Eight months in the Netherlands had rewired me in ways I hadn’t realized until that moment – when the sheer American-ness of it all came crashing down around me.
When I left America last spring for a safer home for my family and a better quality of life, I thought the hardest part would be adapting to life in the Netherlands. Learning Dutch, navigating the health care system, building a new community — these were the challenges I’d prepared for. Nobody warned me that coming back would be what left me in tears.
The traffic incident was just the first crack in the façade. Later that week, I drove 20 minutes to meet my oldest friend for lunch at a restaurant. As the waiter arrived with plates piled impossibly high with food, the conversation turned to her daughter’s college preparations.
“We just hired Riley’s college consultant,” my friend Jackie mentioned casually, sipping her drink. “Five thousand for the basic package, but you know how it is these days. Everyone needs an edge.”
Eight months ago, I would have been right there with her, strategizing about my own teenager’s future. Instead, I felt the room spinning.
In Utrecht, my son’s secondary school mentor had recently spent time explaining how important it was to help him find his passion, not just chase credentials. “What makes his eyes light up?” she’d asked. “That’s what we build on.” The contrast hit me like a physical blow.
“Are you OK?” Jackie asked, noticing my silence. “You look pale.”
How could I explain that everything — from the massive portions before us to the casual acceptance of paying thousands to game the education system — suddenly felt alien? That I’d spent the past eight months in a place where success wasn’t measured by the size of your house or the prestige of your child’s college acceptance letters?
The Netherlands showed us a different way almost immediately. Instead of hours trapped in traffic, my children now bike safely to school on protected lanes. Our weekends transformed from rushed errands and structured activities to trips to Innsbruck or Brussels. The Dutch principle of “niksen” ― the art of doing nothing ― replaced our American addiction to busyness. The biggest adjustment wasn’t learning to live with less ― it was realizing how much more we gained: time, connection, and a sense of safety I didn’t even know we were missing. Even simple things like grocery shopping became a daily pleasure rather than a weekly marathon, with fresh bread from the corner bakery and conversations with neighbors who never seemed too rushed to chat.
When I came back to the U.S., the differences weren’t just in the big things. They showed up in small, daily moments that highlighted how much I’d changed. The way my friend apologized for only having an hour for coffee because she had to get back to work. The constant checking of phones at dinner. The proud declarations of being “crazy busy” that I once viewed as normal but now heard as cries for help.
Living abroad hadn’t just changed my zip code — it had fundamentally altered how I viewed success, relationships and the American Dream itself. In the Netherlands, I’d learned that a society could prioritize collective well-being over individual achievement. That “enough” could be a destination, not just a pit stop on the way to “more.”
A week later, I caught up with former colleagues who shared updates about their lives — the 60-hour workweeks, the missed family dinners, the pride in their ability to “push through” exhaustion. Before moving, I would have nodded along, maybe even one-upped their stories of dedication. Instead, I burst into tears.
“I can’t watch you live like this anymore,” I blurted out, mascara streaming down my face as they stared in shock. “This isn’t normal. None of this is normal.”
The silence that followed was deafening. How do you tell the people you love that what they see as inevitable trade-offs of “success” look like unnecessary suffering from the outside?
The contrasts became impossible to ignore. While my Dutch neighbors enjoyed six weeks of paid vacation without checking email once, my American friends bragged about working through their holidays. While my son’s Dutch classmates focused on discovering their interests, his friends back home sacrificed sleep for Advanced Placement classes and travel sports. While I’d grown accustomed to long, leisurely dinners with friends who never checked their phones, my American gatherings felt like exercises in divided attention.
The hardest part wasn’t seeing these differences — it was realizing I could never unsee them. Every conversation became an exercise in biting my tongue. When friends complained about burnout, I had to stop myself from ranting about the 29-hour Dutch workweek. When they talked about their crushing student debt, I restrained myself from mentioning European university costs.
The guilt was overwhelming. Who was I to judge? I’d gotten out — left my family, my friends, my whole support system behind for a better life. I felt like a deserter, watching from a safe distance as everyone I loved continued to navigate a system designed to keep them overwhelmed and overworked.
Eight months abroad hasn’t just changed where I live — it has changed who I am. And while I can’t go back to seeing the world the way I used to, I’m not sure I want to. Sometimes loving your country means seeing it clearly, even when that vision breaks your heart.
But perhaps there’s power in this new perspective. Each time I share my experience with others contemplating a similar journey, I see the same recognition in their eyes — that quiet knowing that something isn’t quite right with the way we’re living. They too feel the weight of a system that prioritizes productivity over peace, achievement over authenticity.
What I’ve learned is that feeling like a stranger in your own country doesn’t have to be purely painful — it can be illuminating. It shows us that another way of life isn’t just possible, it’s already happening elsewhere. My culture shock wasn’t just discomfort; it was my mind and body recognizing that we have choices. We can choose to build our lives differently. We can choose to value time over money, connection over career, being over doing.
For those feeling trapped in the endless cycle of American hustle culture, know this: Your exhaustion is not a personal failing. That nagging feeling that there must be more to life than this? Listen to it. Whether or not moving abroad is your path, understanding that alternatives exist is the first step toward creating change — whether in your own life or in your community.
I may never feel completely at home in America again. But maybe that’s OK. Maybe we need more people willing to step outside the fishbowl and then return with fresh eyes. Maybe we need more voices saying, “This isn’t normal, and it doesn’t have to be this way.”
As I sit in a café on a Tuesday morning working before I go to lunch with my son, I carry these revelations not just as stones in my pocket, but as seeds of possibility. Because while culture shock can break us open, what matters most is what we choose to grow in the cracks.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/moved-abroad-came-back-to-america-culture-shock_n_67995724e4b0535cbc5f7c13?utm_source=firefox-newtab-en-us
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From another ex-pat
In hindsight, growing up in white, middle-class suburbia in 1980s America was kind of like being brainwashed. I grew up believing that having money was an objective to strive for and that life was a ruthless competition. I worked hard in school and got a good job because that was what was expected of me. That was the path that was supposed to bring me happiness, except I followed that path, and I wasn’t happy.
At 23, I was already living the corporate rat race, working nearly 60 hours a week for a huge multinational conglomerate in Washington, D.C., and I felt too young for the lifestyle I was leading. In the course of my two years there, Washington had turned me from a naive political science graduate with aspirations of single-handedly changing a failing political system into a jaded, disenchanted old lady.
I had friends who were working hard to prepare for early retirement, and even though I had no idea what else I could do, there was no way I was waiting that long to enjoy life.
One of the obvious alternatives pointed out to me, constantly and mostly by men, was to find a husband. That may have been the logical next step to most people, but after I read The Grown-Up’s Guide to Running Away From Home by Rosanne Knorr, I was convinced I needed to move away. I had traveled extensively on family vacations throughout my childhood and had recently returned from a work-related trip to Honduras. I thought about those experiences and dreamed of seeing the world, learning a language and being immersed in different cultures.
It seemed that I needed to do something radical to find the happiness I hadn’t found via the “American dream,” and what could be more radical than leaving behind my country to live in another?
From Guadeloupe I traveled around the Caribbean and Latin America before settling in Europe. It hasn’t always been easy, but it has always been mine. On more than one occasion I questioned moving back to the U.S., but why I never did can only be explained by a combination of changing ideals — mine and the country’s — that to this day have not been reconciled.
Living abroad helped me see that life is not a race or a competition. The people I met abroad showed me how to find pleasure in leisurely lunches and long conversations. While I had always felt my life in the States was like a hierarchical ladder, with work being on the top rung, my life abroad felt more like a circle ― work was important but so were friends, hobbies and personal happiness. My lifestyle abroad felt more natural and focused on enjoying the present moment rather than a constant struggle to achieve “success” at some undetermined time in the future.
I grew up believing that the United States was the greatest country on Earth. In school I read that we were founded by pioneers with grand democratic ideals. We were the instigators of change, the protectors of justice and the leaders of the free world. It never occurred to me that the nature of us flaunting ourselves as No. 1 meant everyone else was second best. And when I experienced firsthand that “second best” was actually a whole lot better than what I was taught to believe, I felt a profound sense of betrayal.
The U.S. is not the same country today that it was when I left it 20 years ago. I didn’t live in the America that’s scared to send its children to school for fear that they’ll be massacred by an adolescent with access to assault weapons. When I went back for a visit in the spring of 2017, I was horrified to learn that my high school in upstate New York has become a kind of gated community — no unauthorized visitors are allowed on the premises. Students need to pass through metal detectors to get inside and are patted down as if they are about to board a plane. My former elementary school is now littered with security cameras. It deeply saddens me that my teacher friends have to worry that they may need to start bringing guns into their classrooms for self-defense. It feels like the situation has gotten out of control and that America has spiraled into a gun-slinging Westworld.
Living in Europe has afforded me a luxury I never thought would matter — gun control. There’s nothing better than knowing that no one I know owns a gun. In the south of France, where I live, it is absolutely impossible to walk into a store, buy a gun and ammo, and leave with them in the same day. And beyond all of that, the military-grade weapons you can buy anywhere in the U.S. are illegal for ordinary citizens to purchase.
Of course gun control is not the only benefit I enjoy living in Europe. I certainly could say more about the work-life balance provided by the 35-hour workweek, the five weeks of paid vacation I enjoy each year, the two years paid unemployment benefits I would receive should I lose my job, my access to free health care, paid maternity leave, affordable child care, free education from age 3 through to university or the state-provided retirement pension I will receive at age 65.
Living abroad is not a choice for everyone, and I’m certainly not advocating that people massively immigrate elsewhere. However, it should be cause for reflection: Why is everyone taught to seek something better for their future rather than enjoy the present? Why is the U.S. government unwilling to fix issues around mental health, gun control and education, when those things will clearly improve the lives of its citizens? How many people have to die before something is done? Why is health and well-being for all not a national priority?
I love America but I hate what it is becoming. I’m sad that I cannot share the protection and benefits I enjoy daily with my American loved ones who are as deserving of them as I am. So while I chose to leave it, if others don’t want to, I now try to encourage them to fight for change.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/personal-proffitt-lemarchand-why-i-left-the-us-20-years-ago-and-why-i-wont-be-coming-back_n_5adf7407e4b07be4d4c57b26
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KRAKATOA ERUPTION: THE SOUND THAT CIRCLED THE EARTH
A lithograph of the massive 1883 eruption of Krakatoa
On 27 August 1883, the Earth let out a noise louder than any it has made since.
It was 10:02 a.m. local time when the sound emerged from the island of Krakatoa, which sits between Java and Sumatra in Indonesia. It was heard 1,300 miles away in the Andaman and Nicobar islands (“extraordinary sounds were heard, as of guns firing”); 2,000 miles away in New Guinea and Western Australia (“a series of loud reports, resembling those of artillery in a north-westerly direction”); and even 3,000 miles away in the Indian Ocean island of Rodrigues, near Mauritius (“coming from the eastward, like the distant roar of heavy guns.”) In all, it was heard by people in over 50 different geographical locations, together spanning an area covering a thirteenth of the globe.
Think, for a moment, just how crazy this is. If you’re in Boston and someone tells you that they heard a sound coming from New York City, you’re probably going to give them a funny look. But Boston is a mere 200 miles from New York. What we’re talking about here is like being in Boston and clearly hearing a noise coming from Dublin, Ireland. Traveling at the speed of sound (766 miles or 1,233 kilometers per hour), it takes a noise about 4 hours to cover that distance. This is the most distant sound that has ever been heard in recorded history.
So what could possibly create such an earth-shatteringly loud bang? A volcano on Krakatoa had just erupted with a force so great that it tore the island apart, emitting a plume of smoke that reached 17 miles into the atmosphere, according to a geologist who witnessed it. You could use this observation to calculate that stuff spewed out of the volcano at over 1,600 miles per hour—or nearly half a mile per second. That’s more than twice the speed of sound.
This explosion created a deadly tsunami with waves over a hundred feet (30 meters) in height. One hundred sixty-five coastal villages and settlements were swept away and entirely destroyed. In all, the Dutch (the colonial rulers of Indonesia at the time) estimated the death toll at 36,417, while other estimates exceed 120,000.
The British ship Norham Castle was 40 miles from Krakatoa at the time of the explosion. The ship’s captain wrote in his log, “So violent are the explosions that the ear-drums of over half my crew have been shattered. My last thoughts are with my dear wife. I am convinced that the Day of Judgement has come.”
In general, sounds are caused not by the end of the world but by fluctuations in air pressure. A barometer at the Batavia gasworks (100 miles away from Krakatoa) registered the ensuing spike in pressure at over 2.5 inches of mercury. That converts to over 172 decibels of sound pressure, an unimaginably loud noise. To put that in context, if you were operating a jackhammer you’d be subject to about 100 decibels. The human threshold for pain is near 130 decibels, and if you had the misfortune of standing next to a jet engine, you’d experience a 150 decibel sound. (A 10 decibel increase is perceived by people as sounding roughly twice as loud.) The Krakatoa explosion registered 172 decibels at 100 miles from the source. This is so astonishingly loud, that it’s inching up against the limits of what we mean by “sound.”
When you hum a note or speak a word, you’re wiggling air molecules back and forth dozens or hundreds of times per second, causing the air pressure to be low in some places and high in other places. The louder the sound, the more intense these wiggles, and the larger the fluctuations in air pressure. But there’s a limit to how loud a sound can get. At some point, the fluctuations in air pressure are so large that the low pressure regions hit zero pressure—a vacuum—and you can’t get any lower than that. This limit happens to be about 194 decibels for a sound in Earth’s atmosphere. Any louder, and the sound is no longer just passing through the air, it’s actually pushing the air along with it, creating a pressurized burst of moving air known as a shock wave.
Closer to Krakatoa, the sound was well over this limit, producing a blast of high pressure air so powerful that it ruptured the eardrums of sailors 40 miles away. As this sound traveled thousands of miles, reaching Australia and the Indian Ocean, the wiggles in pressure started to die down, sounding more like a distant gunshot. Over 3,000 miles into its journey, the wave of pressure grew too quiet for human ears to hear, but it continued to sweep onward, reverberating for days across the globe. The atmosphere was ringing like a bell, imperceptible to us but detectable by our instruments.
By 1883, weather stations in scores of cities across the world were using barometers to track changes in atmospheric pressure. Six hours and 47 minutes after the Krakatoa explosion, a spike of air pressure was detected in Calcutta. By 8 hours, the pulse reached Mauritius in the west and Melbourne and Sydney in the east. By 12 hours, St. Petersburg noticed the pulse, followed by Vienna, Rome, Paris, Berlin, and Munich. By 18 hours the pulse had reached New York, Washington DC, and Toronto.
Amazingly, for as many as 5 days after the explosion, weather stations in 50 cities around the globe observed this unprecedented spike in pressure re-occurring like clockwork, approximately every 34 hours. That is roughly how long it takes sound to travel around the entire planet.
In all, the pressure waves from Krakatoa circled the globe three to four times in each direction. (Each city felt up to seven pressure spikes because they experienced shock waves traveling in opposite directions from the volcano.)
Meanwhile, tidal stations as far away as India, England, and San Francisco measured a rise in ocean waves simultaneous with this air pulse, an effect that had never been seen before. It was a sound that could no longer be heard but that continued moving around the world, a phenomenon that people nicknamed “the great air-wave.”
When the volcano erupts, it produces a sudden spike in air pressure; you can actually watch as it moves through the air, condensing water vapor into clouds as it travels. At Krakatoa, the ‘gunshot’ could be heard not just three but three thousand miles, away, a mind-boggling demonstration of the immense destructive power that nature can unleash.
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/the-sound-so-loud-that-it-circled-the-earth-four-times?utm_source=firefox-newtab-en-us
“Since the 1883 eruption that ripped Krakatoa apart, the volcano has regrown to a height of 1,500 feet. It is still active and experts predict that it will explode violently again in the future.” ~ Wikipedia
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MICROBES THAT DETOXIFY AIR
Melbourne researchers have discovered crucial new information about how microbes consume huge amounts of carbon monoxide (CO) and help reduce levels of this deadly gas.
Over two billion tons of carbon monoxide are released into the atmosphere globally each year. Microbes consume about 250 million tons of this, reducing CO to safer levels.
The Monash University-led Study, published in Nature Chemical Biology, reveals at an atomic level how microbes consume CO present in the atmosphere. They use a special enzyme, called the CO dehydrogenase, to extract energy from this universally present but highly toxic gas.
Co-first author Ashleigh Kropp, from the Monash Biomedicine Discovery Institute’s (BDI) Greening lab and the University of Melbourne’s Grinter lab, said the study showed for the first time how this enzyme extracted atmospheric CO and powered cells.
“This enzyme is used by trillions of microbes in our soils and waters. These microbes consume CO for their own survival, but in the process inadvertently help us,” Ms Kropp said.
Co-first author Dr David Gillett, who completed his PhD research in the Greening Lab, said this was a fantastic example of microbial ‘ingenuity’: how life has evolved ways to turn something toxic into something useful.
“These microbes help clean our atmosphere,” Dr Gillett said. “This counteracts air pollution, which kills many millions of people each year, and also reduces global warming given CO is indirectly a greenhouse gas.”
While this discovery is unlikely to be directly used to combat or monitor CO emissions, it deepens our understanding of how the atmosphere is regulated and how it might respond to future changes.
Professor Chris Greening, co-senior author and head of BDI’s Global Change Program, said the discovery highlighted the broader importance of microbes.
“Microbes play countless roles essential for both human and planetary health. Yet, because they’re invisible and often misunderstood, their contributions frequently go unnoticed,” he said.
Ms Kropp said microbes were a big reason why our air was breathable. “They make half the oxygen we breathe and detoxify various pollutants like CO. It’s crucial we better understand and appreciate how they support our own survival,” she said.
About microbes
Microbes are microscopic living things found in water, soil, the air and our bodies. Also known as microorganisms, some microbes make us ill, while others are important for health. The most common types are bacteria, viruses and fungi.
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1071969
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A NEUROSCIENTIST ON THE POWER OF MANIFESTATION
You’ve likely heard about manifestation, the idea that you can literally will a dream or goal into existence via aspirational thoughts. The trend, which has a humble 6 million posts on TikTok and counting, exploded during the pandemic as people started sharing stories about how they supposedly manifested major life wins like a dream job, $7,500 bucks in the bank, and the perfect partner.
If you’ve scrolled by such reels and rolled your eyes, thinking as if, we get it. Privileged influencers attributing their cushy lives to “good vibes” isn’t the most…inspirational (or believable) content. But if you’ve completely written the practice off as a result, you might be missing out, physician and neuroscientist James R. Doty, MD, founder of the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education (CCARE) at the Stanford University School of Medicine, tells SELF. There’s actually plenty of science behind manifestation, and it’s a legitimate self-development technique that, when done correctly, can be life-altering, Dr. Doty says.
But there’s way more to it than magical or wishful thinking. Here’s why manifesting can actually work—and how to go about it the right way.
The brain science behind manifestation
If you think the practice is simply Mind Magic: The Neuroscience of Manifestation and How It Changes Everything, about asking the universe to reward you in some way, you can pretty much expect it to be a waste of time. As Dr. Doty bluntly puts it in the first sentence of his new book, “The universe doesn’t give a fuck about you.”
Manifesting, from a neuroscience perspective, is about rewiring your brain so it’s primed to subconsciously seek out something you want or the steps you need to take to reach a certain goal. When you spend a lot of time thinking about an intention, you end up convincing yourself it’s within reach. You change your mindset and, along the way, create and strengthen neural pathways that motivate your brain to make your dream come true, Dr. Doty explains. He calls this embedding your intention—basically, you teach your brain that certain things are super important, so it becomes hell-bent on turning them into your reality.
Say you’re writing a thesis about how invasive mosquitoes are becoming more prevalent in the Northeast, for example. You’ve been researching and thinking about the bugs nonstop but get stuck because you need to interview a couple of entomologists and can’t find anyone with the right background who’s willing to speak with you. Then, one day you’re at a noisy coffee shop, and amidst the chatter, you hear someone across the room say the words aedis aegypti—the exact type of mosquito you are investigating—and think, Ha! What are the odds? You walk over, introduce yourself, and wind up interviewing this professor for your project. Voilà!
This scenario captures how manifestation works: As Dr. Doty explains, you embedded your project in your brain, which subconsciously created new “task-positive networks” (or systems of neurons that help you achieve high-level tasks) that were extra attuned to your goal. As a result, you picked up on helpful cues and tools in your environment—that you’d normally probably never pay attention to. Was it a coincidence you found the perfect expert in this random café? Or did you manifest it (by training your brain to automatically help you get what you wanted)?
Another example: You want to become a veterinarian but bombed the GREs and were rejected by a few programs, so you’ve concluded it’s not gonna happen for you. But then you decide, you know what, I am going to be a vet. You set an intention and regularly picture yourself as an animal doctor and all the emotions you might feel when you save a pet’s life. Your brain then realizes this is a super meaningful life goal and starts (subconsciously) focusing on what you can do to make it a reality.
You finally feel motivated to retake the GREs and reapply. You study every week and, as your practice test scores increase, you become more confident you’re on the right path. You run into some vets at parties and ask them how they got to where they are and get some useful advice. You nail the GREs and put together a first-class application based on those tips and one day get an acceptance letter in the mail.
This was not the supernatural at play. The universe didn’t put you on the right path. “You activated certain cognitive brain networks that increased the likelihood of you manifesting your intention,” Dr. Doty says.
Setting the right kind of intention makes all the difference.
Dr. Doty says people often make the mistake of creating intentions that are selfish or motivated by external affirmation. Maybe you want a prestigious career or a fancy car because people—like your mom or your friends—will think highly of you
Wanting an impressive job or a Tesla aren’t necessarily bad goals, but Dr. Doty says they’re (most likely) rooted in insecurity and fear. And when you’re fixated on what other people think, you get stressed out and your body shifts into fight-or-flight mode. Your sympathetic nervous system takes control and your brain doesn’t think or function as well, so you’re unable to focus your attention on your intention. “As a result, your ability to manifest is limited,” Dr. Doty says. Human beings (and our brains) function optimally in the calm “rest-and-digest” mode—i.e. when your parasympathetic nervous system, the network of nerves that helps your body relax and conserve energy, is in charge, he explains.
So how can you engage your parasympathetic nervous system to become an A+ manifester? By setting goals that are grounded in compassion, kindness, and generosity, Dr. Doty says. You tend to be calmer when you’re pursuing things that give you purpose and ultimately benefit the greater good, he adds. Your body releases feel-good neurotransmitters like oxytocin when you care for others, which stimulate your pleasure and reward centers. Your brain craves these hormones, so it assigns more cognitive resources to achieving your goals, according to Dr. Doty.
I needed clarity on what makes a “good” versus “bad” intention, so I asked Dr. Doty about my big life goal—which is to write (and, fingers crossed, publish) a book. Isn’t that kind of selfish, I wondered, to have this dream where I’m a published author? He said it’s all about what’s behind my objective. Do I want to be rich and famous or do I simply love writing and want to educate and entertain people? If it’s the latter (it is), then that’s actually a very good intention, he assured me. The former, however, would likely lead to disappointment because I’d be operating from a stressed-out place (which makes it harder for your brain to get anything done), he told me.
A few quick tips to help you successfully manifest your goals
The biggest obstacle Dr. Doty sees is negative self-talk. “If you tell yourself something is not possible then it’s not possible,” he says. So step one: Quit convincing yourself you can’t do or have something. The way you overcome that? With positive affirmations—a.k.a short, encouraging statements about what you’re capable of accomplishing.
If you think you don’t have what it takes to run a half marathon? Tell yourself you absolutely do, and you will cross that finish line. If you worry you’ll never be able to make money off your art, remind yourself you have the talent to be a successful illustrator.
Then you want to embed your intention in your brain. “Write it down, read it silently, read it aloud, visualize yourself achieving it, and repeat the intention over and over again,” Dr. Doty recommends. The more your senses are engaged, the greater the chances you will embed your intention and be a superb manifester, he explains. So try to say, look at, and think about your intention whenever you get the chance. Start with a few minutes a couple of days a week. Then ramp it up to every morning, and then a couple of times a day.
Finally, try—as best you can—to manifest calmly. The truth is, even if you follow all of the advice above, this process is not a guarantee, Dr. Doty says. Sometimes, life gets in the way of your dreams, and they may not come true in your ideal time frame (or at all). Still, if you’re anxious about whether or not your life will actually change or you’re overly attached to the end result, you’re gonna fall into fight-or-flight mode and have a slim to none chance of reaching your goal, he adds.
So sit back, put your feet up, and start reflecting on what you want your life to look like. Be patient but persistent. And, when in doubt, take everything in stride. “Ultimately, it will all work out as it should,” Dr. Doty says. Happy manifesting.
https://www.self.com/story/neuroscientist-science-behind-manifestation
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DIFFERENCES BETWEEN SCHIZOPHRENIA AND ALZHEIMER’S
Alzheimer’s disease is the most common form of dementia and usually manifests around the age of 65 or after. The disease’s destruction of brain cells causes progressive problems with memory and other cognitive functions, such as spatial orientation, reasoning, language and abstract thinking. Individuals with Alzheimer’s experience many physical and psychological difficulties and often become anxious, agitated, aggressive and, at times, psychotic.
Scientists do not know how to treat the pathological process that causes Alzheimer’s. However, psychiatric difficulties can be treated, and medications can slow the disease process, but only for months rather than years.
Schizophrenia is a psychotic illness that generally manifests in individuals between the late teens and the early 30s.
Symptoms include hallucinations and delusions (also experienced by individuals with Alzheimer’s), difficulty organizing thoughts and a decreased ability to show or express emotion. Additionally, individuals diagnosed with schizophrenia have attention deficits, and problems with being able to use recently learned information. The inability to access recent memories is a somewhat smaller part of the illness, whereas in Alzheimer’s, memory problems are fundamental to the disease.
And, unlike Alzheimer’s disease, there are medications to treat schizophrenia and significantly reduce the symptoms.
Though Alzheimer’s disease and schizophrenia are radically different disorders, new research suggests that each disorder affects the same areas of the brain.
Severe tissue loss in advanced Alzheimer's
When investigators at Oxford University examined subjects and performed MRI scans, they found that the regions of the brain that developed last were also the first to deteriorate with advanced age. These areas seem to be more vulnerable than the rest of the brain to both schizophrenia and Alzheimer’s, even though the two diseases have different origins and appear at almost opposite and very different times of life. Schizophrenia was once labeled “premature dementia,” and some researchers considered that the two conditions were linked. The Oxford study now confirms that the same regions of the brain are affected in Alzheimer’s disease and schizophrenia.
https://www.theadvocate.com/baton_rouge/entertainment_life/louisiana_health/understand-the-difference-between-schizophrenia-and-alzheimer-s/article_f0d50d72-f5d4-5f96-b7cd-8a5a114a87ff.html
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THE BENEFITS OF WALKING BACKWARDS
During the 19th Century, the activity of "retro-walking" was little more than an eccentric hobby, but today research is revealing it can have real benefits for your health and brain.
On an apparent wager to win $20,000 (about £4,250 at the time), a 50-year-old cigar-shop owner called Patrick Harmon embarked on a curious challenge in the summer of 1915 – he planned to walk backwards from San Francisco to New York City.
With the aid of a friend and a small car mirror attached to his chest to help him see where he was going, Harmon made the 3,900 miles (6,300km) journey in 290 days, apparently walking every step backwards. Harmon claimed the journey made his ankles so strong that "it would take a sledge hammer blow to sprain them.".
Perhaps he was onto something.
According to research, walking backwards can have surprising benefits for both your physical health and your brain, as Michael Mosley recently explored in a recent episode of the BBC podcast and Radio 4 show Just One Thing.
Retro-walking, as walking backwards is known in academic circles, has a rich history. There are reports dating back to the early 19th Century of people walking hundreds, and sometimes thousands of miles, in reverse. Many were the result of impulsive bets and others were simply attempts to claim the bragging rights to a bizarre new record.
But due to the difference in biomechanics, backwards walking can actually bring some physical benefits. It is often used in physiotherapy to relieve back pain, knee problems and arthritis. Some studies even suggest that backwards walking can positively affect cognitive abilities such as memory, reaction time and problem-solving skills.
The practice of walking backwards for health purposes is thought to have originated in ancient China, but it has received attention from researchers more recently in the US and Europe as a way of improving sports performance and to build muscle strength.
Janet Dufek, an expert in biomechanics at the University of Nevada in the US, has been researching backwards locomotion for more than 20 years. She and her colleagues have found walking backwards for just 10-15 minutes per day over a four-week period increased the hamstring flexibility of 10 heathy female students. Backwards walking can also strengthen the muscles in the back responsible for spine stability and flexibility. And in another study led by Dufek, a cohort of five athletes self-reported a reduction in lower back pain after periods of backwards walking.
"Our research has shown that, indirectly, backward walking has some benefits relative to lower back pain simply because you're stretching the hamstrings," says Dufek. "Often one of the pieces that's tied to lower back pain is tight hamstrings."
Backwards walking and backwards running drills are already used in some sports training, particularly team and racquet sports which require the agility to quickly move forwards, backwards and laterally. As it reduces the stress placed on the knee joints while building strength, retro-running is also useful for helping to protect athletes from injury.
As well as athletes, retro-walking has been found to benefit the elderly, young, obese individuals, sufferers of osteoarthritis, and post-stroke patients with walking impairments. Backwards walking has also been found to burn more calories than walking forwards.
But why is it so beneficial?
"The biomechanics of walking backwards is very different than forward walking," Dufek told Mosley. "In backward walking, there is a reduced range of motion at the knee that can have some benefits for individuals who may be rehabilitating from knee surgery, for example."
One recent study found that the range of motion at both the hip and knee joints is greatly reduced during backwards walking. Whilst the forwards gait begins with heel contact, the backwards gait begins with toe contact and the heel sometimes never lowers to the ground. As a result, less impact is felt at the knee joint and it uses different muscles compared to normal walking.
It is actually the ankle joint which absorbs the most shock during backwards walking. Muscles activated in plantar flexion movement (used when pointing or standing on your toes) play a greater role in backwards walking to decelerate the ankle and absorb shock.
So it seems there is more than a grain of truth in Harmon's claim to superior ankle strength, even if it was likely he took a few train journeys along the way.
But the benefits don't end with stronger ankles.
Researchers have also found differences in the location of neural activity when stepping backwards compared to stepping forwards. The prefrontal cortex, responsible for cognitive skills such as decision making and problem solving, is especially active when stepping backwards.
One Dutch study tested 38 participants' ability to solve a Stroop test – which uses conflicting stimuli such as the word "blue" in red letters to interfere with how quickly people respond to a prompt – whilst stepping backwards, forwards or sideways. It found that participants stepping backwards had the fastest reaction times, perhaps because their brains were already used to performing an incongruous task.
Another study strongly concluded that different forms of backwards locomotion, including backwards walking, watching a video of a backwards train journey, and even just imagining moving backwards, improved participants' ability to recall information.
With larger studies of healthy populations as well as those who are unwell starting to add to the mix of research on retro-walking, the evidence for its benefits and limitations are becoming clearer.
"I think that technology is driving a lot of biomechanics research, presently," says Dufek, "In the day when I was trained if you did a study that had 10 participants, that was huge. And now, I mean even me and my groups are doing work with big data because it's much easier to collect a lot of information, and get some very sound statistical outcomes."
But there's also an element of risk when it comes to retro-walking. Care needs to be taken to avoid unseen obstacles and there are cases where walking backwards during physiotherapy has resulted in falls and serious injuries.
There are also other ways of achieving the same results. Scientists in China, for example, found that tai chi and swimming are more effective rehabilitation activities for athletes with lower back pain than backwards walking, jogging, or no exercise at all.
But as Dufek says, there is another reason to give retro-walking a try – the novelty.
"I mean there are other ways you can stretch your hamstrings, you can just do hamstring stretches" says Dufek, "But, you may as well do something fun, right?”
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20231110-why-walking-backwards-can-be-good-for-your-health-and-brain
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AMBIEN INTERFERES WITH BRAIN WASTE CLEARING DURING SLEEP
As many as 70 million people have consistent sleeping issues.
Not getting enough sleep each night can raise a person’s risk for several health concerns, including cognitive decline and dementia.
For the first time a new study describes the synchronized oscillations during sleep that power the brain’s glymphatic system to help remove ‘waste’ associated with neurodegenerative diseases, via a mouse model.
Researchers also found that a commonly prescribed sleep aid might suppress those oscillations, disrupting the brain’s waste removal during sleep.
Looking at all the possible factors that might contribute to potential cognitive decline risk is important, particularly as new research estimates that dementia risk the risk after the age of 55 among Americans has now more than doubled.
Although doctors recommend that adults over the age of 18 get at least 7 hours of quality sleep each night, the most recent data suggest that many may face consistent sleep issues, such as insomnia and sleep apnea.
Data from 2022 suggest that, in the United States alone 39% of over the age of 45 were not getting sufficient sleep.
Past studies report that not getting enough sleep each night can increase a person’s risk for several health concerns, including brain-related conditions, such as cognitive decline and dementia.
“Sleep allows the brain to go offline, shut down processing of the external world and focus on maintenance tasks, such as immune surveillance and removal of waste,” Natalie Hauglund, PhD, a postdoctoral fellow at the Universities of Copenhagen in Denmark, and Oxford in the United Kingdom, explained to Medical News Today. “The lack of sleep is associated with cognitive impairment and disease development.”
But could some sleep aids also contribute to poorer brain health as we age? It is now more important than ever to study all the possible factors that might contribute to cognitive decline, particularly seeing that a new study published in Nature Medicine estimates that dementia risk after the age of 55 among Americans has more than doubled, compared to past figures.
Hauglund is the first author of another study, which appears in the journal Cell, and that, for the first time, describes the synchronized oscillations during sleep that power the brain’s glymphatic system to help remove “waste” associated with neurodegenerative diseases, via a mouse model.
The study also reports that the commonly prescribed sleep aid zolpidem — marketed under the name Ambien — may suppress those oscillations, disrupting the brain’s waste removal during sleep.
What powers the brain’s ‘waste-removal’ system?
For this study, researchers used various technologies to record brain activity while mice were both awake and asleep.
Scientists observed that slow synchronized oscillations of the neurotransmitter norepinephrine, along with cerebral blood and combine during non-rapid eye movement (non-REM) sleep, essentially power the brain’s waste-removing glymphatic system.
“Our brain is unique in that it does not have lymphatic vessels, which remove waste products such as dead cells and bacteria from the rest of our body,” Maiken Nedergaard, MD, PhD, professor at the Universities of Rochester and Copenhagen and lead author of this study told MNT.
“Instead, the brain uses cerebrospinal fluid, a brain fluid that is produced inside the brain, to flush the brain tissue and wash away unwanted molecules,” she explained.
The cleaning system of the brain is called the glymphatic system. Importantly, the glymphatic system is only on during the deep part of sleep called non-REM sleep. This is because of a neuromodulator called norepinephrine, which during non-REM sleep is released in slow cycles roughly every 50 seconds.
“Norepinephrine binds to the muscle cells of the arteries, which makes them constrict,” Nedergaard told us. “Therefore, the slow oscillation in norepinephrine concentration drives a slow fluctuation in the diameter of the arteries and in the blood volume in the brain.”
”This dynamic change in blood volume works like a pump to transport cerebrospinal fluid along the arteries towards the brain and through the brain tissue. Thus, norepinephrine coordinates the synchronized constriction and dilation of the blood vessels which drives the glymphatic system,” she detailed.
Sleep aids may disrupt brain’s glymphatic system
Researchers also examined if sleep aids might replicate the natural oscillations needed for glymphatic function. They focused their research on the sedative zolpidem.
They discovered that zolpidem appeared to halt norepinephrine oscillations, interrupting the glymphatic system’s waste removal in the brain during sleep.
“Sleep aids may provide a short-cut to sleep, but our study shows that the sleep you get with sleep medication may lack the beneficial effects of natural, restorative sleep,” Hauglund said. “Our findings underscore that sleep aids should only be used for short periods of time and as a last resort.”
Nedergaard explained that sleep is crucial as it gives the brain time to perform homeostatic housekeeping tasks such as waste removal. On the contrary, sleep aids block the neuromodulators that drive the waste removal system and prevent the brain [from] properly preparing for a new day.”
Medical News Today also spoke with Clifford Segil, DO, a neurologist at Providence Saint John’s Health Center in Santa Monica, CA, about this study.
According to Segil, who was not involved in the recent research, “it is extremely unlikely the benefits of increased sleep which occurs when patients use a sleep aid like zolpidem are outweighed by any claimed potential adverse effect of this medication decreasing REM sleep, which then in turn decreases brain neurotransmitter levels, [which] then in turn decreases brain protein levels.”
“There are too many ‘in turn’ claims to cause me any concern [that] there is any clinical significance to the research,“ he told us. “Clinical neurologists like me are not concerned [that] using zolpidem appropriately in elderly patients who can’t sleep will cause dementia.”
Furthermore, he pointed out: “In the year 2025, there remains no accepted response on why we sleep. Different researchers make different claims and sometimes these are the same and sometimes they are different. We know healthy sleep makes us healthy and poor sleep makes us unhealthy.”
“For clinical neurologists like me, it is challenging to agree that a sleeping medication will cause dementia, and I would reassure my patients the benefits or a good night sleep outweigh any claimed potential risk these can cause memory loss as you age or dementia,” Segil added.
Finally, MNT spoke with Peter G. Polos, MD, PhD, FCCP, FAASM, an assistant professor of sleep medicine at the Hackensack Meridian Neuroscience Institute at JFK University Medical Center in New Jersey, about this research.
“If more work were to be done in this area, we certainly would like to see if studies could assess the impact of sleep aids on human glymphatic flow,” Polos continued. “This of course would require noninvasive techniques and perhaps some advanced imaging. Such information, even if in small numbers, would be of benefit.”
“The interaction between the brain, quality sleep, and overall health cannot be understated,” he added. “The rhythmic nature of sleep and the regular cycling of sleep stages have been well studied. We have learned much about the effects of alterations in the brain and their impact on sleep. We do have much more to learn and so we, as sleep physicians, fully support continued research in the relationship between the brain, sleep, and overall health.”
https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/common-sleep-medication-may-prevent-brain-from-clearing-waste#The-interaction-between-brain-health-quality-sleep-and-overall-health
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BENEFITS OF CONSUMING MORE FIBER
“Fiber feels like the forgotten nutrient,” says Dr Samantha Gill, a specialist gastroenterology dietitian for the British Dietetic Association. “It has a reputation for being bland, boring and tasting like cardboard. On top of that, fiber is often related to bloating and flatulence.”
With an image like that, it is no wonder we don’t eat enough of it. Most countries have a recommended daily fiber intake of 30g for adults; the UK increased its target from 24g to 30g a decade ago. All countries are falling short. Just 3% of people in Canada, 5% of those in the US and 9% of those in the UK meet the guidelines. Even in Germany, where people eat the most fiber in Europe, intake tops out at about 25g. “There is a big fiber gap,” says Gill. “In the UK, we’re only eating about 19g fiber daily.”
Fiber is a type of carbohydrate found in plants: besides whole grains, it is in vegetables, fruit, nuts, seeds, herbs, spices and legumes. “Fiber isn’t easily broken down in the gut, unlike other carbohydrates,” says Gill. “Instead, it travels down your gut, passing through your small and large intestine.” Its best-known health effect is preventing constipation. “Some types of fiber bulk out stools and improve consistency, which makes them soft and easy to pass,” she says.
But there is far more to fiber than keeping you regular. A landmark study published in 2019 showed that a fiber-rich diet reduces the risk of heart disease, stroke, type 2 diabetes and colon cancer by 16-24%. In 2015, the Scientific Advisory Committee on Nutrition in the UK found that every 7g daily increase in fiber (half a can of baked beans) can lower your risk of noncommunicable diseases by up to 9%. More recent studies have found that fiber also contributes to a healthy gut microbiome and brain.
“The reason fiber can affect so many areas of health is because it is not a single entity,” says Gill. “Fiber is an umbrella term and there are many different types that behave in different ways when they reach the gut.”
Yet despite these manifold benefits, UK fiber consumption has remained static, says Bridget Benelam, a communication manager for the British Nutrition Foundation (BNF). “Since the guidelines changed in 2015, there has been no increase in fiber intake. We’re not shifting the dial at all. If we did, there would be so many health benefits, and it would likely be a more sustainable diet.”
James Collier, the co-founder of Huel and author of Well Fed, believes we are facing a fiber crisis. “Fiber’s not very sexy, is it? I come from the gym scene, where everyone talks about protein. No one says: ‘Oh, have you had your fiber today?’ But why not, because it is fundamental to living well.” What’s more, he adds, “it’s not actually that hard to get 30g a day. If you’re having a plant-rich diet, it’s super-easy.”
Is it? A study looking at whether 30g a day was achievable found barriers including “a lack of awareness regarding the health benefits of fiber beyond bowel health”, and “negative perceptions of starchy foods”, which are often perceived as fattening.
“Sadly, the modern-day diet is a low-fiber diet,” says Gill. “Typically, in the UK, diets are high in salt, sugar, and fat.” Only 27% of UK adults eat their 5-a-day, according to the BDA. Looking on the bright side, that leaves a lot of room for improvement. “Things we need to reduce in our diet are often front of mind,” says Benelam, “but eating fiber is a more positive message.”
In Denmark, the Danish Whole Grain Partnership, a public-private enterprise to increase whole grain consumption, has been a massive success. Between 2008 and 2019, the average daily intake of whole grains rose by 128%, and the share of the population eating the recommended amount of whole grains daily increased from 6% to 54%.
In the absence of any similar program in the UK, how can you up your fiber intake? Experts advise doing it gradually to avoid side-effects such as discomfort, bloating and wind, and drinking lots of water (fiber draws water into the bowel, so you can become dehydrated if you don’t drink enough). Those with conditions such as irritable bowel syndrome may find their tolerance varies, but for everyone else, says Gill, “the more fiber the better.”
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/the-fibre-phenomenon-30-easy-ways-to-get-your-fill-of-this-life-changing-nutrient?utm_source=firefox-newtab-en-us
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ending on beauty:
ANAMNESIS
When I stood there beside her
looking into the claret cup of the mirror,
I wondered how I could paint us there
so that the next time we came to look,
we would see two lovebirds
unchanged by time and strife,
or so the thought until remembering
that every portrait, every life
made of clay, gathers dust, gathers stains.
~ Kerry Shawn Keys
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