*
THE THIRD LANGUAGE
In high school I kept a diary
in English, so if the teacher
caught me, and she did,
she wouldn’t understand.
I had a small vocabulary
and even less to say.
“The weather’s getting warm,”
I confessed in a secret language.
My first class in Los Angeles,
on June evenings,
in the palm-plumed dusk,
was a typing course.
For rhythm, the instructor played
“The Yellow Rose of Texas”
above the cross-fire
of night students pounding
on the jamming keys.
I machined a sinister idiom:
Dear Sir: Due to circumstances
beyond our control —
College was a subordinate clause.
I was a mouse in the auditorium,
scribbling neat, useless notes.
One time I graded three hundred
freshman papers
on the death penalty.
I didn’t want to graduate.
Life was penalty enough.
To survive I had to learn
a third language,
a code in the brain
it takes nightmares to crack:
words husked from
the grain of things,
Adamic names that fit
animals like their own pelts —
fluent as flowers,
rare as rubies, occult
atoms in the lattices
of sleep. To be
silent and let it speak.
~ Oriana
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MARGARET OF VALOIS (1553 – 1615) was a French queen known both for her numerous love affairs and general licentiousness. She is also known as the first woman in history to pen her memoirs – a vivid depiction of the turbulent France of her lifetime. She was made even more famous, or perhaps infamous, by Alexander Dumas’ portrayal of her in his historical novel, Queen Margot. She was unlucky in marriage: her wedding began with a murder, and ended with a massacre.
Margaret was born to King Henry II of France and his formidable wife, Catherine de Medici. Growing up, Margaret was quite close to her brother Henry – the future king Henry III, the last of the Valois kings. So close that rumors spread about an incestuous love affair between the siblings. Closeness turned into lifelong hatred, however, when she was discovered having an affair with an aristocrat, Henry of Guise. It ended in 1570 with Margaret’s mother and her brother, King Charles IX, beating up Guise and banishing him from the court. ~ Shiv Tandon, Quora
*
EMILIA PÉREZ :CHANGE YOUR BODY, CHANGE YOUR SOUL?
It’s a movie with a hundred flaws, starting with its unbelievable plot, ending with its un-singable singing. And yet, and yet . . .
Here is one review that tries to be even-handed:
~ “Emilia Pérez” is not a Mexican film. That much is clear. It’s not really about Mexico but rather procures the context of the embattled country as a backdrop for its musical fantasia, interested in a character trying to cross the border between viciousness and tenderness. Watching “Emilia Pérez” is akin to tasting a combination of substances that haven’t previously been put together, at first being taken aback by the bizarre taste but still going in for another sip. It’s a deliriously rhapsodic concoction, at times preposterous in what the lyrics of its Spanish-language songs aim to convey, and others quite affecting.
This narco-opera is not Mexican, not only because its writer-director Jacques Audiard is French, but also because it was almost entirely shot on Parisian soundstages where the streets of Mexico City were recreated for scenes with an international cast. Even its source material—a chapter in Boris Razon‘s 2018 novel Écoute— is foreign. The result from all these layers that remove it from Mexico is a hyper-curated, phantasmagorical melodrama from the mind of an artist with no direct ties to the land in which he’s chosen to set his fiction. That built-in detachment is perhaps what allows “Emilia Pérez” to be so messily unbound.
And yet, there are enough aspects that Audiard allows into his emotionally heightened frames that, at the very least, imply a desire for a quasi-authentic portrayal—as much as his outsider gaze and artistic ambitions can allow. A TV screen shows young women protesting against femicides in the streets of Mexico City. The sensationalist newspapers typical of Mexican newsstands—their front pages bearing gruesome photos of vicious acts—and the loudspeaker from collecting scrap metal enrich the milieu of this replica. There’s a constant, fascinating friction between the movie’s inherent, often overwhelming artificiality and Audiard’s sincere attempt at unfurling something truthful about the pursuit of redemption and self-preservation.
The woman that lends the film its title exists in the body of Karla Sofía Gascón, a Spanish trans actress who found success in Mexican films and soap operas long before transitioning. Most notably, Gascón played the male antagonist in one of Mexico’s biggest homegrown box-office hits, 2013’s “Nosotros los Nobles” (“We Are the Nobles”). Now, Gascón impressively flexes her acting range and her singing voice in a double role, first as Manitas Del Monte, a feared drug lord with gender dysphoria, and later as Emilia Pérez, a philanthropist whose nonprofit helps families search for their disappeared loved ones.
This new, post-transition facet manifests her desire for atonement as the person responsible for plenty of those losses. Within the same lifetime, the victimizer desperately seeks to become the paladin [fighter for a cause], but her long-standing sins didn’t die when she buried that other version of herself. Her at-all-costs wish to evade accountability poisons her freedom. A paradox emerges from how Emilia moves through the world as her true self because she will savagely wield her power to secure the kindness and unconditional affection she so deeply craves. Ruthlessness, evidently, isn’t an exclusively male quality.
To help with the logistical aspects of her transition, Manitas hires Rita (Zoe Saldaña), a lawyer fed up with defending men she knows are guilty of crimes against women. However, her conscience doesn’t preclude her from succumbing to the temptation of a financially lavish life on the other side of her illicit assignment. The job also entails settling Manitas’ wife Jessi (an unabashedly raw Selena Gomez) and her two children in Switzerland. The musical numbers add up quickly and primarily in Saldaña’s voice and choreographed movements in sequences that often involve an ensemble around her as if the verbose tracks were swallowing the world around them into their alluringly baffling whirlwind.
As contrived as some of the lines in these tracks are, Audiard and cinematographer Paul Guilhaume partially smooth out their implementation by finding a middle ground between precision and erratic kinetic energy in the numbers, at times aiming for symmetry, at others surrendering to chaos. At their most intimate, these renditions are entrancing.
There’s a heart-wrenching earnestness to Manitas’ delicate operatic singing in front of Rita before undergoing multiple surgeries, yearning for a soft-heartedness that his existence in a hyper-masculine environment denied him. While Saldaña is the consistent standout in an expectations-defying performance, she completely disregards the format’s deliberate unnaturalness. Her turn is grounded on facial expressions that perpetually bely guilt over her involvement and the macro implications of what Rita knows about Emilia’s past.
Then there’s the question of language in “Emilia Pérez,” where none of its three main actors speak with a Mexican accent. Though Audiard himself doesn’t speak Spanish, I must admit my surprise at the use of colloquial language thanks to whoever translated the text; that’s more than most American productions set anywhere in Latin America can say (take note “Sicario”).
Furthermore, Audiard doesn’t try to pass Saldaña’s nor Gomez’s characters as women born and raised in Mexico. Through dialogue, Rita reveals she grew up in the Dominican Republic, and Jessi points to a likely Mexican-American background when she invokes her sister in the States. The casting then becomes another patch in this glamorous pastiche.
It’s then fitting that the only Mexican performer in the main ensemble, Adriana Paz, plays an understated character and the only one without blood on her hands: Epifania, Emilia’s new love interest searching for a missing family member. I didn’t go into “Emilia Pérez” seeking the type of introspective, searing humanism that Mexican filmmakers like Fernanda Valadez and Astrid Rondero delivered with “Identifying Features” and now “Sujo.” Realistic dramas are concerned not with the violence but with how its fallout creates perpetual victims, which come from their first-hand understanding of the Mexican imaginary. Those are the voices worth supporting for such narrative work.
Mexican audiences have grown accustomed to American perspectives exploiting narco-related afflictions for narratives unconcerned with addressing its root causes. Questioning the intentions of those productions will always be valid. But to decry Audiard for partaking in the common filmmaking practice of telling stories away from what’s immediately familiar to him would seem an overly simplistic assessment.
Still, it’s true that the reach of “Emilia Pérez,” given the Hollywood names attached and that it has Netflix as its distributor, is incomparable to what independent, arthouse Mexican productions can hope for. More people will watch Audiard’s vision of a Mexico in turmoil than those of Mexicans, and therein lies a larger concern about which art is championed and which isn’t. For all its prickly aesthetic and thematic components, there’s an enticing lusciousness to “Emilia Pérez” derived from that over-the-top saturation of hammered-in ideas in combination with dazzling and dizzying imagery. Like synthetic flavoring extracts, there’s no real fruit in them, but the feelings they provoke, positive and negative alike, are true. ~ Carlos Aguilar, originally from Mexico City
https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/emilia-perez-netflix-film-review
Oriana:
I’ve corrected the text: the former cartel chief’s gangster’s name was not “manita,” meaning “little hand,” but its plural, “manitas.” I think one translation that comes close to conveying the emotional tone of this nickname would be “baby hands.” For a symbol of super-machismo that a cartel chief needs to be, to bear a nickname “Baby Hands” is both surreal and surprisingly appropriate as sinister black humor. “Little hands” doesn’t convey the full emotional meaning — nor its frightfulness, when you consider that these baby hands are covered with blood.
How many deaths is “Baby Hands”* responsible for? All we can say is “many” — and these are not necessarily the deaths of members of rival cartels, but ordinary citizens who somehow or other “disappeared.” As part of his moral awakening, Manitas/Emilia tries to help the families of victims collect the remains of their loved ones.
Those hands are large and masculine — though the movie doesn’t give us a close-up. We get many close-up of Emilia’s face, however, with its large jaw that is fine as part of a man’s face, but looks bulky and awkward in a woman’s face. But that's perhaps too harsh. Emilia manages to look glamorous in spite of bulldog jaw.
I missed not seeing more of Manitas before his sex change surgery. We see him very briefly, in dim light inside a car. He seems to have an ugly, brutal-looking face, covered with tattoos. 
I’d also like to have at least a mention of what peculiar problems a former super-macho cartel chief encounters after transitioning to being a woman. What must a trans-woman learn in order not to revert to the masculine personality? Is it hard to learn to speak in a soft voice and have gentle manners?
The theme of transition of sinner to saint is the underlying “Catholic” framework of the movie. I could have said “religious,” but the last scene makes the last scene weighs heavily in favor of “Catholic.” A statue of Emilia resembling that of the Madonna is carried in a procession. The brute “Baby Hands” has managed to transition from a mega-sinner to the tender-hearted Mother of Mercy.
But these are quibbles. The movie is amazing and never boring. It’s not realistic, but it doesn’t try to be (a "realistic musical" is an oxymoron).
My overall take: IN SPITE OF AN IMPROBABLE PLOT, UNIQUE AND TOTALLY WORTH WATCHING
*
But even "Baby Hands" sounds mild compared to calling the US president "Danny Diapers."
*
Let’s take a look at a positive review:
POWERFUL AND UNIQUE
Emilia Perez: Zoe Saldaña and Karla
Written and directed by Jacques Audiard, Emilia Pérez tells the compelling story of Rita (Zoe Saldaña), a hard-working defense lawyer in Mexico. Rita is contacted by a notorious crime boss, Juan 'Manitas' Del Monte (Karla Sofía Gascón), who wishes to discreetly undergo gender-affirming surgery. Rita shows compassion for Manitas' seemingly genuine desire for the surgery and finds a doctor in Bangkok to perform it. Manitas' oblivious wife, Jessi (Selena Gomez) and children are relocated to Switzerland. Manitas fakes a death and begins her life as Emilia Pérez. Things get complicated years later when Emilia wants to reconnect with her wife and children.
It's a pretty implausible story but sold by the three leads. Zoe Saldaña really throws herself into this role emotionally and physically during some very intense musical dance numbers. The dual roles played by Karla Sofiá Gascón are also to be commended; here she plays the very glamorous Emilia and the pre-surgery Manitas (under some heavy prosthetics) with such humanity and underlying temper, a remnant of her crime boss past. This holy trinity of actors is completed by a raw and no-nonsense performance from Selena Gomez.
This is a thoughtful and thought-provoking film. Unfortunately, none of the musical tracks reach 'earworm' status like you would hope for, despite incredible dedication from the cast. This is very much a better drama than it is a musical.
https://www.rte.ie/entertainment/movie-reviews/2024/1220/1487638-emilia-perez-a-powerful-and-unique-musical-drama/
Oriana:
I agree: "Emilia Pérez" is not about Mexico and it's not really a musical.
from another source:
Emilia Pérez is far from your typical musical, and is perhaps one of the most creatively charged examples of storytelling for this storied genre of cinema. Jacques Audiard has such dynamic range as a filmmaker, and it’s hard to imagine anyone else creating a musical quite like this.
Zoe Saldaña stars as Rita Moro Castro, a disgruntled attorney tasked with helping Manitas Del Monte (Karla Sofía Gascón), a murderous Mexican kingpin, transition from man to woman. Plotting a staged murder, Manitas’ wife (Selena Gomez) and kids are relocated, and he becomes Emilia Pérez. As Emilia, she’s finally able to live a full and true life, falling in love with Epifanía (Adriana Paz), while trying to rewrite her past sins.
Best known for its four actresses sharing the Best Actress award at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, it’s Saldaña who clearly shines the brightest. Serving as the film’s moral compass, her dramatic intensity anchors the narrative, while her singing and dancing seems is bathed with the same level of fervor.
Being actively involved in both the Marvel Cinematic Universe and Avatar films has, to some degree, relegated Saldaña as a highly commercialized performer, even though she’s clearly much more than that. Seeing her as a potential player this awards season is much deserved. Gomez, who continues to expand her filmography, is also unapologetically bold in what is clearly her most challenging role to date. As a collective, the performers craft a convincing narrative about acceptance and love, all wrapped in the sobering reality of one’s inescapable past.
Surprisingly, the musical numbers in Emilia Pérez aren’t actually particularly memorable on first viewing, but the thematic and emotional gestures created by the music is what stands out. For such an intricate narrative, Clément Ducol and Camille (who also received accolades at Cannes) have somehow created pieces that match the story’s constantly evolving feverish intensity. It encompasses everything from opera to pop, and complimented by the film’s kinetic dance choreography and crisp cinematography (by Paul Guilhaume). The end result is a film that bathes in its own dramatic energy.
It’s rare when a filmmaker is able to find ingenuity in something that is as storied as the musical, but leave it to Audiard to do exactly that. Emilia Pérez is a vibrant cinematic experience that excites and invigorates in the best ways possible.
https://www.filminquiry.com/tiff-2024-assessment-emilia-perez/
*
WHY HASN’T WW3 BROKEN OUT YET?
While it sounds nice to say it is because of the U.N or other peacekeeping forces, the truth is much simpler. Weapons have just got too big, and too destructive.
As the Cold War heated up in the 60s, the concept of mutually assured destruction was clear. If one side fired nuclear weapons, the other would too, and neither country would really exist.
This was established with the concept of a nuclear triad. This included missiles in submarines, silos on land and nuclear bombs in the air (airplanes). This ensured that both sides had a reality check about the effects of a war.
Even in a traditional land war, weapons like the ‘Mother of All Bombs (US)’ and the ‘Father of All Bombs (USSR)’ made it way too destructive. This is why superpowers generally only fight much weaker states in the post WW2 era.
In today’s world, thanks to globalization, there is also economic mutually assured destruction. An example would be a U.S.-China trade war. This would significantly harm both economies through inflation and unemployment. ~ James Hill, Quora
Oriana:
"Mutually assured destruction" (MAD) and the "Balance of Terror" — how odd that we are back to the Cold War, and we alive thanks to the fact that humanity's weapons have become too horrible to use.
*
THE FIRST COUPLE: “She f*cking hates him”
Bombshell’s new book reveals what Melania Trump really thinks about her sexual predator husband and it's absolutely brutal: "She f*cking hates him."
And it gets so much worse....According to the new book "All or Nothing: How Trump Recaptured America" by journalist Michael Wolff, a source revealed to him the aforementioned opinion and was "bewildered that this needed saying."
Wolff writes that Trump chose during his campaign to never acknowledge that "the most public marriage in the nation was breaking down, even if by every standard indication, it was breaking down, and doing so in public."
Trump's staff didn't even know where Melania lived and she was conspicuously absent from most of his campaign events — a remarkable decision for a former first lady.
In fact, Melania didn't make a single campaign appearance in the 18 months leading up to the Republican National Convention in 2024. She "flatly refused" to make a "showstopper" speech at the convention. Instead, she appeared briefly on stage beside Trump during his acceptance speech and refused to speak for herself.
"Whatever was going on–and no one had any idea what was going on, at least no more than what was plainly obvious–it had certainly not been helped by the Stormy [Daniels] trial," Wolff writes. Melania refused to appear beside him in court.
"But that seemed hardly the only thing to explain the colder and colder winter," Wolff states.
When Trump's staffers asked Melania to appear by his side for his first indictment in New York she laughed in their faces and said, "Nice try."
Trump's staff worked on crafting a plan for Melania's role in a second Trump White House, coining the idea of "part-time First Lady" role that would allow her to spend more time in New York.
Wolff says of the Donald-Melania relationship that "in some sense, this is the darkest Trump hole."
"Nobody knows the answer to the what-about-Melania question. Not even the people closest to him. What is the nature of the marriage? Nobody can tell you," he writes.
When word first began spreading that Wolff was working on a book about Trump's 2024 campaign, his aides panicked.
"A number of us have received inquiries from the disgraced author Michael Wolff, whose previous work can only be described as fiction," said campaign co-chairs Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita in a statement along with other MAGA figures. Wiles is now Trump's Chief of Staff.
"He is a known peddler of fake news who routinely concocts situations, conversations, and conclusions that never happened," they added. "As a group, we have decided not to respond to his bad-faith inquiries, and we encourage others to completely disregard whatever nonsense he eventually publishes. Consider this our blanket response to whatever he writes."
Of course, if Wolff was as unreliable as they claim they wouldn't feel the need to address his book with such a lengthy statement. They're spooked because they know the journalist manages to get reliable sources. ~ by Occupy Democrat, Quora
Anna Gillingham:
The woman showed up to the inauguration in mourning gear. Can't argue with that.
John Carlton:
And the inauguration hat, a brim so wide that he had no chance of getting his lips anywhere near her.
Unlike, of course, when she was close to Trudeau.
Paul M:
Going back to the Obama not born in the US days she’s been a Cruella Deville.
Judy Crawford:
You do realize the book uncovers so much more. And you do realize who the author is. And you do realize that he interviewed Epstein and has the audio tapes to prove it.
Oh and you do know their marriage was a business deal, right?!
Oriana:
I was particularly struck by Wolff's statement (in paraphrase): "Nobody likes him. To know him is to dislike him. He has a toxic presence."
*
WHY THE TWO-STATE SOLUTION IS DEAD
“Listen up. I am Jordanian, and I tell you that the two-state solution is dead, stone cold. And I’ll tell you why.
Bibi’s argument was simple: You don’t hand a state to people who openly declare that your country has no right to exist and that their ultimate goal is to wipe you off the map. That’s not a “peace process”, that’s national suicide.
He understood the security risks. A Palestinian state in Judea and Samaria (the West Bank) would leave Israel a mere 9 miles wide at its narrowest point. That’s nothing. That’s an easy invasion route. That’s a security nightmare. It would take minutes to cut Israel in half and massacre its people.
But did Israel listen? Of course not. In 2000, Ehud Barak came back and sweetened the deal. He offered Arafat a state again. Thank God Arafat said no. And why did he say no? Because he never wanted a state, he wanted Israel gone.
Fast forward to 2005. Ariel Sharon tried another approach. He said, “Fine, let’s give them a test run.” So he pulled every single Jew out of Gaza, 70,000 settlers, forcibly removed. He even went so far as to dig up Jewish graves to ensure Gaza was 100% Judenrein. No excuses left. The Palestinians had a chance to prove they could run a state.
So what did they do? Did they build hospitals, schools, and infrastructure? Did they work on nation-building? Did they take this golden opportunity and create a thriving mini-state to prove to the world that they were ready for independence?
Nope. Instead, they turned Gaza into a terrorist launchpad. Since 2005, Gaza has been a rocket factory, a jihadist training camp, and a tunnel network straight out of a horror movie. Billions in aid poured in, and instead of building a future, Hamas built weapons to destroy Israel.
So let’s go back to the original question: Who was right, the dreamers who kept offering the Palestinians a state or Bibi Netanyahu, who warned them this would be a disaster?
The answer is clear. Bibi was right. The Palestinians never cared about statehood. They only cared about destroying the Jewish state.
And this is the part most people don’t want to say out loud: This conflict was never about “occupation.” That was always a lie. The West Bank and Gaza are just convenient excuses. The real issue is Islamic jihad.
Bibi understands this better than anyone. The people Israel has been negotiating with for decades don’t want borders. They want annihilation. It’s not about compromise. It’s about erasing Israel from the map.
So, no, the two-state solution isn’t “dying.” It’s already dead. And it’s been dead since the first time Israel tried to make peace with people who don’t believe in peace.”
~ Danny Burmawi, Quora
Rodger Hempfing:
They have to be pacified, gasp, nasty word. It worked on Germany and Japan and Malaysia. The ideology rife in Gaza does not permit peace.
*
RUSSIA IS BURNING
A series of unusual fires and explosions have occurred in Russia since the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, which have not been formally explained. There have been many notable arson attacks on military recruitment offices in Russia since the beginning of the war, and there has been speculation that some of the fires or explosions have been the result of sabotage efforts by Russian partisans (such as Svoboda Rossii or Atesh partisan legion) or Ukrainian saboteurs.
Fire in Kursk region
A "yellow" (medium) terrorist threat level was introduced in Bryansk, Kursk, and Belgorod oblasts, as well as some districts of Voronezh Oblast, Krasnodar Krai, and northern Crimea. Starting from the end of March, a series of incidents and explosions were reported in border regions of Bryansk, Kursk, Belgorod, and Voronezh Oblasts. Russian officials reported mortar shelling, drone attacks, and helicopter gunship attacks allegedly coming "from the Ukrainian side."
The Ukrainian side refused to confirm or deny involvement in incidents at strategic locations. There were allegations that some of the fires or explosions were the result of Ukrainian sabotage.
In May, a series of incidents on railway lines in Russia impeded the deployment of troops and military equipment to Ukraine; responsibility for these incidents was claimed by the Internet movement "Stop the Wagons" (a reference to the Russian anti-war slogan "Stop the War")
[a very long list follows]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_mystery_fires
Oriana:
Russia also has a lot of fires in Siberia. These seem related mostly to climate change.
But the fires enumerated in this article were caused by the war — and there will be more of them to come. Ukraine has been amazingly effective hitting oil refineries, munitions factories, and similar targets. And this time no one is talking about careless smokers.
*
“OUR OWN OFFICERS KILL US” — THE BRUTAL REALITY OF THE WAR IN UKRAINE
KANAL 13 — FEB 22, 2025 — Reports from the front line in the Zaporizhzhya region continue to reveal the brutal reality of Russian military operations.
A serviceman from the 503rd regiment of the Russian Armed Forces, speaking in an online chat with a pro-Russian blogger, disclosed the grim situation.
According to the soldier, entire units are being wiped out in futile assaults. Soldiers are ordered to advance into enemy positions with little to no intelligence or support, with nearly 100 percent of some battalions being eliminated.
The soldier also described how Russian forces lack heavy armored vehicles, forcing them to rely on unprotected civilian transport such as outdated UAZ-452 vans (“Loaves”) and Gazelle trucks. “Our battalion commander told the general that we are a heavy battalion, but the only heavy equipment we have is 'Loaves'. That’s how we fight,” he said.Additionally, soldiers are reportedly forced to repair damaged vehicles at their own expense. Those who refuse are threatened with being sent on near suicidal assaults as punishment.
Russian commanders attempted a surprise offensive along the Psel River in the Kursk region. The operation was a disaster, with Ukrainian forces obliterating the attacking units. Russian military linked sources admitted the failure, contradicting claims made by Russian war criminal Vladimir Putin, who boasted of supposed successes in the region.
The dictator falsely asserted that Russian troops had broken through into Sumy, but it quickly emerged that the so called breakthrough was actually the destruction of a Russian sabotage and reconnaissance group.
Numerous Russian war bloggers admit that commanders are misleading the Kremlin about the reality of the battlefield while the Kremlin is in turn misleading the public about the war.
Russian Military Failures in Ukraine
Almost 100 percent losses in certain assaults
Soldiers forced to fight using civilian vehicles
Troops required to repair equipment at their own cost
Ukrainian forces crushing Russian offensives, defensive positions adopted
Russian military bloggers turning against the Kremlin narratives about war
(Video) “Almost 100% Losses” – Russian Soldier Claims Commanders Are Killing Their Own Troops in Zaporizhzhia
~ Foxmeister, Quora
*
“LENIN PLACED AN ATOM BOMB UNDER RUSSIA” ~ PUTIN
Putin has spoken out about the reasons for the collapse of the USSR on numerous occasions since 1991.
"I think that it was the leaders of October 1917 who planted a time bomb under the building of the unitary state called Russia. After all, what they did was: they divided our Fatherland into separate principalities, which had not previously appeared on the map of the globe at all, endowed these principalities with governments and parliaments, and now we have what we have." ~ Putin 1991
“Vladimir Lenin placed an atomic bomb under the building called Russia, and then it exploded." ~ Putin 2016
“They (amendments to the Constitution) will strengthen statehood, since it is necessary to avoid such things as the “time bomb planted back in 1922 during the formation of the Soviet Union.” ~ Putin 2020
In an article published in July 2021, "On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians," Putin again called the right of republics to secede from the USSR "the most dangerous time bomb" under the country's statehood.
In a televised address to citizens on February 21, 2022, Putin emphasized that, "from the point of view of the historical destinies of Russia and its peoples, Lenin's principles of state building," which implied, among other things, the possibility of republics leaving the country, "turned out to be not just a mistake. It was, as they say, much worse than a mistake."
According to him, "under the conditions of a totalitarian regime," everything worked, but "the bacillus of nationalist ambitions did not go away, and the bomb that was initially planted, undermining the state's immunity against the infection of nationalism, was just waiting for its time.”
~ Alex Karolev, Quora
Mogens Møller:
Lenin described the Russian Empire as a “prison of nations”. He was wrong in many ways, but in that he was correct. What kept the Soviet Union together in the formation years and the civil war (1920 - 24) was the absence of nationalism as a defining power. Stalin was actually commissar for the national question in the first Soviet government, as he himself was not Russian, but from Georgia. In all the three Constitutions of the Soviet Union the right to secede was inscribed. All the 15 Union Republics bordered either to the sea or to a foreign country in order to secure that the right to secede actually were possible. Had Lenin and Stalin not given those formal rights — along with respect for national languages and identity — the civil war would have been nationalist and not ideological, and that kind of war would have been lost by the Bolsheviks.
*
TAKING CONTROL OF YOUR EMOTIONS
Ever since he was a child, Ethan Kross has been "an observer of emotion" and the often counter-productive ways that we deal with difficult feelings. "It seemed as if we were all just stumbling along, occasionally finding an accidental or Band-Aid solution to help us manage our emotional lives. Sometimes our improvised tools helped. Sometimes they made things worse. It seemed so haphazard, isolating, and inefficient," he says.
As a psychologist at the University of Michigan and director of the Emotion and Self-Control Laboratory, Kross hopes to change this sorry state of affairs. In his new book Shift: How to Manage Your Emotions So They Don't Manage You, he aims to equip us all with a set of tools that will help us to navigate our ups and downs more constructively.
Kross spoke to science writer David Robson about the benefits of "negative" feelings, creating safe spaces and emotional oases — and the surprising upsides of distraction.
What are the most common misconceptions about emotions?
One big misunderstanding is that there are good emotions and there are bad emotions and that we should strive to live our lives free of all the bad emotions. This is an error, as far as I'm concerned: we evolved the ability to experience all emotions for a reason.
Anger can motivate us to correct an injustice if there's still an opportunity to fix things. Sadness can lead us to introspect and make new meaning out of situations that have fundamentally been altered. Envy can motivate us to strive for things that we want to achieve. In the right proportions — that is such a key phrase — all emotions are useful.
One way of driving this point home is to think about physical pain, which is about as negative an emotional state as we can imagine. Many of us yearn to live lives free of any kind of physical pain. But some people are born without the capacity to experience pain, due to a genetic anomaly, and those kids end up dying younger than people who can experience pain. If they get their hand stuck in the fire, there's no signal that tells them to pull the hand away. The same principle is true for all our negative emotions.
People often find it liberating to know that they don't have to strive to live a life without negativity. What you want to strive to achieve is just keeping these emotional experiences in check, and I think that's a much more tenable goal.
Many people believe that their emotions are beyond their control. Where do you think this defeatist attitude comes from? And what are the consequences?
I think it depends on the facet of our emotional experiences that we're talking about. We often don't have control over the thoughts and feelings that are automatically triggered as we live our lives throughout the day, but we can control how we engage with those thoughts and feelings once they're activated, and that's where the promise of emotion regulation resides.
But if you don't think you can do something, then you're not going to make the effort to practice it. If you don't think exercising is going to make you more fit, for example, why on Earth would you devote effort to exercising? And if you don't think that you can use different strategies to manage your emotions, why would you ever avail yourself of them?
So how can we change our responses to difficult feelings?
Listening to music is one example of a tool that's underutilized. If you ask people why they listen to music, almost 100% of participants will say that they like the way it makes them feel. But if you then look at what people do when they are struggling with their emotions — such as the last time they were angry, anxious or sad — only a small minority report using music.
It's just one category of what I call "shifters", which are the tools that can push our emotions around. And once you know how they work, you can be a lot more strategic in how you use them in your life.
You also describe how a change in environment can boost our wellbeing. We might have experienced this on holiday, but how can we apply this principle to our day-to-day lives?
As you say, a lot of people feel restored when they go to an entirely different place that is free of associations with work. But we can't always take that vacation, and what I like to remind people is that there are often places locally that can shift our mood.
We talk a lot about getting attached to other people, and when things aren't going well, being in the presence of that figure can be a source of comfort and resilience. But it turns out we also become attached to places in our environment. Mine include the arboretum near my home, the tea house where I wrote my first book and one of my offices on campus. From the moment I am in that space, I have positive associations that help me manage my emotions.
I think that they're not unlike the safe houses you have in spy movies or books. We all have these safe houses in our lives, and we want to be strategic about going to them when we're struggling. It's a way of managing ourselves from the outside in.
You can also curate your environment. We know that plants and images of green spaces can be restorative. So can photos of loved ones. We've done research where we expose people to pictures of loved ones while they're struggling with a problem. We find it speeds up the rate at which they "repair" following the experience.
Is the aim to be more conscious of what we can do to change how we're feeling — rather than just leaving it to chance?
One of my hopes for this book is that we can get people to be much more deliberate about incorporating these tools into our lives.
I was surprised to find that distraction and avoidance can be a productive way of dealing with emotions. How so?
Avoidance – trying actively not to think about something by distracting yourself or engaging in other behaviors – is generally derided as an unhealthy tool. And there's no question that chronically avoiding things has been linked with negative outcomes; it's not an approach that I would advocate for anyone to adopt.
But we do not have to choose between either approaching or avoiding our emotions; we can be flexible and do both. There's research showing that people who are effective at both approaching and avoiding their emotions, expressing and suppressing, often fare well in the long term.
What might that look like in our lives? Well, let's say you're triggered by something. You get emotional about an argument you have had with someone. One approach might be to address it right there at that moment, but it might make sense to take some time away from thinking about that problem or confronting it.
I say that as the kind of person who, in general, does like to confront things right in the moment, just get to the bottom of it, and move on. But sometimes I've benefited from immersing myself in something totally unrelated for a day and then coming back to the problem. I might come back and realize it's not a problem at all, or I'll find that the intensity of the problem is diminished, and I can approach it from a broader perspective.
How should we deal with that killer of joy, social comparison?
We often hear that we shouldn't compare ourselves to other people. Good luck! We're a social species; part of the way we make sense of ourselves and our place in this world is to compare ourselves to others.
It is true that we often engage in the kinds of comparisons that lead us to feel bad about ourselves, but you can reframe it in ways that make the comparison work for you rather than against you. If I find out that someone is outperforming me, I can say to myself, well, they were able to achieve that, so why can't I? Now it's almost like a target for something that I can shoot towards.
DISTANCED SELF-TALK AND MENTAL TIME TRAVEL
Do you have a favorite strategy that you would typically turn to in times of difficulty?
When I'm struggling, my first line of defense is to use distanced self-talk. I'll use my name and the second person pronoun — you — to silently coach myself through a problem, as if I'm advising a friend. (Read more: Illeism: The ancient trick to help you think more wisely.) And then I'll also engage in mental time travel. I'll ask myself, 'How am I going to feel about this in a day, 10 days, 10 months from now?' And I'll also go back in time. 'How does this compare to other difficult things I've been through?’
Oftentimes, those tools get me to where I want to be emotionally, but if they're not sufficient, I'll go to my emotional advisors, people in my network who are pretty skilled at empathizing with me and advising me. And I'll go for a walk in a green space, or visit one of my emotional oases.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20250226-the-expert-guide-to-taking-control-of-your-emotions
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HOW TO DEAL WITH AUTOMATIC NEGATIVE THOUGHTS
When your own thoughts discourage and undermine you, it’s easy to get stuck. A change of strategy could get you past it
You know the kind of day. You wake up late, spill coffee on your new shirt, forget to pack your child’s lunch, or otherwise get off to a rough start, and by the time you sit down for a busy day of work, your mind is already in overdrive. ‘You can’t handle this,’ it might whisper. Or even: ‘You’re useless.’ Thoughts like these creep in, uninvited, and suddenly they’re not just thoughts – they feel like facts.
Perhaps you try to push the difficult thoughts away, telling yourself to ‘snap out of it’ or ‘stay positive’, but the harder you fight, the louder they seem to become. Maybe you get fully caught up in them, replaying the times you’ve messed up in the past, spiraling deeper into self-criticism.
If you’ve ever found yourself caught in a loop like this, you’re not alone. Our minds are brilliant, busy machines, but they have a tendency to get tangled up in self-defeating thoughts. Many of us have these kinds of thoughts daily as we face our responsibilities and challenges, worry about whether we’re up to them, and experience inevitable setbacks and mistakes. These include thoughts such as:
‘I’m not good enough’
‘I’m bound to fail’
‘I probably look like an idiot’
‘There’s no point in trying’
In a fast-paced and often overwhelming world, it’s common to have thoughts like these, which can promote anxiety and stress. But you don’t have to allow these thoughts to consume you; there are more skillful ways to respond. Ways that don’t involve constantly fighting with them or pushing them away.
Why these thoughts are so ‘sticky’
Before we get into better ways of responding, there are some key things to know about how the mind tends to operate, and they help explain why certain thoughts have such a powerful hold on us.
The mind is naturally drawn to negative information, especially when it’s about you. This tendency likely evolved as a survival mechanism. Human ancestors who were anxious about potential threats were more likely to avoid danger – and to survive long enough to pass on their genes. As a result, the modern brain is wired to focus on perceived threats, problems and mistakes.
The mind is also a storyteller. It excels at making sense of complex information quickly, even if it means oversimplifying or jumping to conclusions. This ability helps people make decisions, but it also leaves one vulnerable to cognitive distortions. For instance, if someone looks at their life so far and comes to believe that they are ‘a failure’, they might hold tightly to this story about themselves, even in the face of strong evidence to the contrary. Why would someone do this, especially when it causes them pain? Because coherence, the feeling that the story ‘fits’, often matters more to the mind than accuracy. The mind prioritizes keeping a story intact over questioning whether it’s actually true.
A related difficulty has to do with our ability to learn by association. To give an example, see if you can answer the following question: how are a whale and an eggplant similar? You probably haven’t been asked this before, but your mind can likely come up with some creative answers – perhaps their shape, or the fact that both are edible (in theory). This ability to relate even seemingly unrelated things is central to language and thought.
However, this same ability can cause trouble when it comes to negative thoughts about yourself. If someone once told you that you were ‘not good enough’, for example, your mind might have started linking this evaluation to other experiences of failure or rejection. Over time, these connections can form a tangled web of associations that reinforces a belief like ‘I’m a failure’. Even small challenges might trigger this belief, not because it’s objectively true, but because your mind has derived this connection repeatedly.
In short, thoughts such as these stick because they’re part of a vast relational network built on past learning. They feel familiar and logical, but that doesn’t mean they serve you.
The more you argue with a thought, the more attention and power you give it
Why grappling with thoughts doesn’t always help
When you have a self-defeating thought, one possible response is to try to argue with it. For example:
Thought: ‘I’m not good enough.’
Response: ‘That’s not true – I’ve achieved things.’
Thought: ‘Maybe, but what if I fail this time?’
Response: ‘No, I’ll be fine. I’ve got this…’
While this sometimes helps in the short term, it often leads to a mental tug-of-war. The more you argue with a thought, the more attention and power you give it.
Relational frame theory (RFT) explains this well. When you engage with a thought by arguing or rationalizing, you strengthen its relational connections. It’s like adding more threads to an already tangled web. Each argument can also spawn new worries: ‘If I fail, maybe they’ll judge me,’ or ‘Even if I succeed, what if I can’t maintain it?’
The ‘solution’ to tricky thoughts isn’t just more thinking. Instead, it involves
changing how you relate to the thoughts. Let’s explore how to do this now.
Recognize when a thought is unworkable
One reason negative thoughts can feel so powerful is that they often contain a grain of truth. For example, the thought ‘I might fail’ is true – failure is always a possibility. The thought ‘I’m not good enough’ might have a bit of truth to it, in the sense that you (like everyone else) probably have room for growth and improvement. But just because a thought is true, or partly true, doesn’t mean it’s helpful to you.
Acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) encourages people to evaluate thoughts not based on their truth, but on their workability. This means asking yourself:
Does holding on to this thought help me live the life I want?
Does it move me toward what is important to me?
If the answer to these questions is ‘no’, it might be worth letting the thought go, even if it feels true. For example, the thought ‘I’m not good enough’ might feel true, especially if it echoes how you perceive your past experiences. But if this thought leads to self-doubt and avoidance (not engaging with a new hobby, skill, friendship, etc), it’s not workable. That is, it is not helping you live the life you want, nor is it moving you toward what is important to you. Instead of debating how true or untrue the thought is, you can recognize that it is not serving you — and decide to respond to it in a different, more skillful way.
This approach involves grounding yourself in the present, distancing yourself from the thought, and then choosing actions that line up with your values. The next steps will help you put these ideas into practice.
Connect to the present moment
Self-defeating thoughts often take you out of the present: your mind drags you into the past with rumination (‘I can’t believe I messed that up’), or into the future with worry (‘I won’t be able to manage’). Cultivating present-moment awareness can help you regain a sense of clarity.
Here’s how:
Notice what’s happening: acknowledge when your mind is spinning into worry or self-criticism. Pause and tell yourself that you are having a difficult thought, but you don’t need to fight it or fix it.
Focus on your surroundings and your breath: bring your attention to your immediate environment. What can you see, hear or feel right now? You can also ground yourself by paying attention to the sensation of your breath as you inhale and exhale. This can be brief, just for a few seconds, or longer if you have the time and space.
Repeat: each time your mind pulls you back into a spiral, return to this process.
By refocusing your attention on the present – allowing yourself even just a moment of peace – you’ll be better positioned to choose how you respond to distressing thoughts.
Create distance from your thoughts
When you’re caught up in tricky thoughts, they can become all-consuming and start to feel like facts. But thoughts are just that: thoughts. They are fleeting mental events, not necessarily accurate reflections of reality. By building some distance from your thoughts, you can see them for what they really are. This distance can take the sting out of the tail of the thoughts and give you the space to consider your actions more fully.
Practical techniques for building this distance include:
Notice the thought without judging it. Observe the thought as if you were an outsider. For example: ‘Ah, there’s the thought that “I’m not good enough.”’ Here, you are moving away from judgments about the thought as either good or bad, and merely acknowledging that you are having the thought. If judgment creeps in, acknowledge that too, with kindness: ‘There’s the thought that I’m judging myself for having this thought.’ The goal isn’t to stop the thought but to create some distance, allowing you to respond rather than react.
Use distancing language to step back from the thought. You can add an additional mental buffer by thinking to yourself: ‘I’m noticing I’m having the thought that I’m not good enough.’ In doing so, you create a metaphorical distance between the thought and yourself, such that it seems less a part of you and merely something that your brain is throwing at you.
Try for a moment, starting with a thought such as ‘I’m not good enough’ – notice how it feels to have the thought.
Now try: ‘I notice the thought “I’m not good enough”’ – how does that feel?
Now try: ‘I notice I’m having the thought that “I’m not good enough”’ – how does that feel?
Acknowledge the thought with humor. For example, you might say: ‘Thanks, mind, for trying to protect me!’ Our minds are not always good at differentiating between genuine threats (such as being in danger right now) and hypothetical threats related to your thoughts (such as the possibility that you will fail). Therefore, by thanking your mind in this example, you try to acknowledge that the mind has a function here, but not one that is currently helpful or practicable. Thanking your mind can interject some humor into this misapplied process.
Make a choice that aligns with your values
Once you’ve grounded yourself and created some distance from your thought, the next step is to choose how you will act. By reminding yourself of what is important to you in life, you can focus your actions on moving toward these things, rather than just moving away from what you would like to avoid.
Ask yourself:
How would I like to act in this moment?
What’s important to me right now?
If I could choose to be the kind of person I want to be, what steps would I take?
Instead of letting the difficult thought you’ve had dictate your behavior, reconnect with what you value. Consider again the thought ‘I’m not good enough’, which may come with an urge to avoid something – for example, to quit a hobby or give up on learning a new skill. You can ask yourself: what is it about engaging in that hobby or learning that skill that’s important to you? What values or qualities underlie it, for you? Creativity? Self-expression? Exploration? Self-development?
Reflecting on what’s important to you can help you see past a self-defeating thought and act in a way that aligns with your values — which, in this case, might look like persisting in your endeavor and seeking some tutoring or support, rather than quitting.
Other key values that might inform your behavior could include empathy, fairness, loyalty and many more. By unpicking your underlying values, you can use them to focus your actions, instead of being steered by negative thoughts or fear of those thoughts.
Tune into the emotion behind the thought
If you feel sadness, allow yourself to sit with the feeling for a while, offering yourself kindness
Even after you’ve gone through the preceding steps, you might find that some unpleasant or distressing feelings require attention. Self-defeating thoughts are deeply intertwined with emotions, and true freedom requires attending to your emotional world. This means noticing the emotions related to your thoughts, allowing yourself to feel them, and responding with compassion, rather than avoidance.
For example, if you’ve been having the thought ‘I’m not good enough,’ you might pause and ask: ‘What am I feeling right now?’ The emotions might be uncomfortable, but by turning toward them with openness, you can begin to process them, rather than getting stuck once more in a loop of unhelpful thinking.
Once you’ve identified the emotions, you can respond in ways that help you cope. For instance:
If you notice fear, you might take a moment to ground yourself by focusing on your breath or reminding yourself of your values and why you’re doing what you’re doing.
If you uncover shame, you could practice self-compassion by acknowledging that everyone struggles and that it’s OK to not be perfect.
If you feel sadness, you might allow yourself to simply sit with the feeling for a while, offering yourself kindness and recognizing that it’s part of being human.
Attending to the emotions connected to negative thoughts is another way to shift from battling with your thoughts to taking care of yourself in a meaningful way. This helps loosen the grip of a thought and allows you to act based on what truly matters to you.
Final notes
Having negative, challenging thoughts is a natural part of life. Our minds are wired to focus on negativity, create stories and form associations, which can sometimes leave us feeling stuck or overwhelmed. But with a better understanding of how the mind works, you can begin to approach your thoughts with greater curiosity and compassion.
The steps we’ve described are simple but powerful tools for responding to difficult thoughts in a way that promotes clarity, resilience and purpose. While you can’t always control the thoughts that your mind produces, you can choose how to respond to them. The next time your mind whispers that you’re not good enough, that you’re bound to fail, or some other thought that you find unworkable, take a breath, notice the thought with some appropriate distance, and then ask yourself: ‘What really matters to me right now?’
https://psyche.co/ideas/instead-of-wrestling-with-self-defeating-thoughts-try-this?utm_source=firefox-newtab-en-us
I use a vastly simpler approach. I don't connect with the here-and-now or review my values. I simply say to myself, “I can cope.”
The idea that “I can cope” certainly connects of my values of being strong and competent. If I just spilled coffee, however, I don’t start analyzing my values. I reach for a paper towel (Kleenex and paper towels are the two greatest achievements of capitalism, in my opinion).
I developed the “I can cope” response when I ended my decades-long engagement with depression. An “or” type of sentence ended many (practically all my adult life) years of suffering: “You can practice falling apart, or you can practice being strong.”
Being strong means coping. Instead of focusing on yourself and what a total failure you are [or whatever your typical key thought may be], you do something about the situation. You take a step toward fixing it. This may involve calling your handyman. It may involve lying down, knowing that a little rest can do wonders for restoring mental clarity and knowing what to do next.
But there’s no need to belabor the point. Yet no matter what the crisis happens to be, “I can cope” is for me the beginning of a productive response.
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A PHRASE THAT CAN CALM ANY CHILD
Based on my parent coaching experiences, here’s a simple phrase that works wonders for defusing a child’s anger at any age: "I see you're upset right now. I'm here for you."
This phrase may seem simple, but it carries profound psychological power. It does three things at once: It acknowledges their feelings, reassures them that they’re not alone, and creates space to calm down without feeling judged.
Why This Phrase Works
It Validates Their Feelings. As I explain in my book 10 Days to a Less Defiant Child, when a child—whether 5 or 25—is angry, they often feel misunderstood, ignored, or powerless. Saying, "I see you're upset," shows them that their emotions matter. Children (and adults) often escalate their emotions when they feel like no one is listening. Validating their feelings prevents that.
It Provides Reassurance Instead of Resistance. Instead of jumping into correction mode—saying things like "Calm down!" or "Stop overreacting!"—this phrase assures them that you’re there for them. Anger often masks underlying feelings of fear, sadness, or frustration.
It Invites Connection Instead of Control. People resist control, especially when they’re overwhelmed. Telling them what to do in their angriest moments can make them dig in their heels. By simply offering your presence and support, you shift the dynamic from a power struggle to an opportunity for connection.
Examples in Action
For a Toddler: Lena, 3, screams and throws her toy when she’s told it’s time to leave the playground. Instead of saying, “Stop that right now!” her parent kneels and says, “I see you’re upset right now. I’m here for you.” Lena still cries but clings to her parent instead of kicking, slowly settling down.
For a School-Age Child: Micah, 8, slams his homework shut and shouts, “This is stupid! I hate math!” Instead of saying, “Don’t talk like that!” his mom sits beside him and says, “I see you're upset right now. I’m here for you.” He sighs heavily, but after a moment, he says, “It’s just so hard.” Now, his mom can help problem-solve.
For a Teen: Sienna, 15, storms into the house, throwing her backpack down and muttering, “I can’t stand my teacher!” Instead of responding with “Watch your attitude,” her dad says, “I see you’re upset right now. I’m here for you.” Sienna rolls her eyes but doesn’t escalate. Later, she opens up about how she feels unfairly treated.
For an Adult Child: Jared, 28, calls his mom, venting, “You never supported me the way you should have when I was younger!” His mom’s first instinct is to defend herself, but instead, she takes a deep breath and says, “I see you’re upset right now. I’m here for you.” Jared doesn’t immediately calm down, but her response diffuses his rage. Later, he opens up about feeling pressure to succeed and how old wounds are resurfacing. The conversation shifts from attack mode to understanding.
Tips for Using This Phrase Effectively
Stay Calm Yourself. Your tone matters. Say it with warmth, not frustration.
Use Gentle Body Language. Kneel for younger kids and give space to teens or adults if needed.
Give Them Time. They may not respond immediately, but your words will register.
Follow Up When They’re Ready. Help them process their emotions and find solutions after they cool down.
Final Thoughts
This one phrase won’t magically erase every meltdown or angry moment, but it creates the foundation for trust, emotional regulation, and connection. Over time, your child—no matter their age—will learn that you are a safe place even in their worst moments. And that can make all the difference.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/liking-the-child-you-love/202502/a-magic-phrase-to-instantly-calm-an-angry-child-at-any-age
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WHAT HAPPENED TO THE CARPAL TUNNEL SYNDROME?
Diana Henriques was first stricken in late 1996. A business reporter for The New York Times, she was in the midst of a punishing effort to bring a reporting project to fruition. Then one morning she awoke to find herself incapable of pinching her contact lens between her thumb and forefinger.
Henriques’s hands were soon cursed with numbness, frailty, and a gnawing ache she found similar to menstrual cramps. These maladies destroyed her ability to type—the lifeblood of her profession—without experiencing debilitating pain.
“It was terrifying,” she recalls.
Henriques would join the legions of Americans considered to have a repetitive strain injury (RSI), which from the late 1980s through the 1990s seized the popular imagination as the plague of the modern American workplace. Characterized at the time as a source of sudden, widespread suffering and disability, the RSI crisis reportedly began in slaughterhouses, auto plants, and other venues for repetitive manual labor, before spreading to work environments where people hammered keyboards and clicked computer mice.
Pain in the shoulders, neck, arms, and hands, office drones would learn, was the collateral damage of the desktop-computer revolution. As Representative Tom Lantos of California put it at a congressional hearing in 1989, these were symptoms of what could be “the industrial disease of the information age.”
By 1993, the Bureau of Labor Statistics was reporting that the number of RSI cases had increased more than tenfold over the previous decade. Henriques believed her workplace injury might have had a more specific diagnosis, though: carpal tunnel syndrome.
Characterized by pain, tingling, and numbness that results from nerve compression at the wrist, this was just one of many conditions (including tendonitis and tennis elbow) that were included in the government’s tally, but it came to stand in for the larger threat.
Everyone who worked in front of a monitor was suddenly at risk, it seemed, of coming down with carpal tunnel. “There was this ghost of a destroyed career wandering through the newsroom,” Henriques told me. “You never knew whose shoulder was going to feel the dead hand next.”
But the epidemic waned in the years that followed. The number of workplace-related RSIs recorded per year had already started on a long decline, and in the early 2000s, news reports on the modern plague all but disappeared.
Two decades later, professionals are ensconced more deeply in the trappings of the information age than they’ve ever been before, and post-COVID, computer use has spread from offices to living rooms and kitchens. Yet if this work is causing widespread injury, the evidence remains obscure. The whole carpal tunnel crisis, and the millions it affected, now reads like a strange and temporary problem of the ancient past.
So what happened? Was the plague defeated by an ergonomic revolution, with white-collar workers’ bodies saved by thinner, light-touch keyboards, adjustable-height desks and monitors, and Aeron chairs? Or could it be that the office-dweller spike in RSIs was never quite as bad as it seemed, and that the hype around the numbers might have even served to make a modest problem worse, by spreading fear and faulty diagnoses?
Or maybe there’s another, more disturbing possibility. What if the scourge of RSIs receded, but only for a time? Could these injuries have resurged in the age of home-office work, at a time when their prevalence might be concealed in part by indifference and neglect?
If that’s the case—if a real and pervasive epidemic that once dominated headlines never really went away—then the central story of this crisis has less to do with occupational health than with how we come to understand it. It’s a story of how statistics and reality twist around and change each other’s shape. At times they even separate.
The workplace epidemic was visible only after specific actions by government agencies, employers, and others set the stage for its illumination. This happened first in settings far removed from office life. In response to labor groups’ complaints, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration began to look for evidence of RSIs within the strike-prone meatpacking industry—and found that they were rampant.
Surveillance efforts spread from there, and so did the known scope of the problem. By 1988, OSHA had proposed multimillion-dollar fines against large auto manufacturers and meatpacking plants for underreporting employees’ RSIs; other businesses, perhaps spooked by the enforcement, started documenting such injuries more assiduously.
Newspaper reporters (and their unions) took up the story, too, noting that similar maladies could now be produced by endless hours spent typing at the by-then ubiquitous computer keyboard. In that way, what had started playing out in government enforcement actions and statistics morphed into a full-blown news event. The white-collar carpal tunnel crisis had arrived.
In the late 1980s, David Rempel, an expert in occupational medicine and ergonomics at UC San Francisco, conducted an investigation on behalf of California’s OSHA in the newsroom of The Fresno Bee. Its union had complained that more than a quarter of the paper’s staff was afflicted with RSIs, and Rempel was there to find out what was wrong.
The problem, he discovered, was that employees had been given new, poorly designed computer workstations, and were suddenly compelled to spend a lot of time in front of them. In the citation that he wrote up for the state, Rempel ordered the Bee to install adjustable office furniture and provide workers with hourly breaks from their consoles.
Similar injury clusters were occurring at many other publications, too, and reporters cranked out stories on the chronic pain within their ranks. More than 200 editorial employees of the Los Angeles Times sought medical help for RSIs over a four-year stretch, according to a 1989 article in that newspaper.
In 1990, The New York Times published a major RSI story—“Hazards at the Keyboard: A Special Report”—on its front page; in 1992, Time magazine ran a major story claiming that professionals were being “Crippled by Computers.”
But ergonomics researchers like Rempel would later form some doubts about the nature of this epidemic. Research showed that people whose work involves repetitive and forceful hand exertions for long periods are more prone to developing carpal tunnel syndrome, Rempel told me—but that association is not as strong for computer-based jobs. “If there is an elevated risk to white-collar workers, it’s not large,” he said.
Computer use is clearly linked to RSIs in general, however. A 2019 meta-analysis in Occupational & Environmental Medicine found an increased risk of musculoskeletal symptoms with more screen work (though it does acknowledge that the evidence is “heterogeneous” and doesn’t account for screen use after 2005).
Ergonomics experts and occupational-health specialists told me they are certain that many journalists and other professionals did sustain serious RSIs while using 1980s-to-mid-’90s computer workstations, with their fixed desks and chunky keyboards. But the total number of such injuries may have been distorted at the time, and many computer-related “carpal tunnel” cases in particular were spurious, with misdiagnoses caused in part by an unreliable but widely used nerve-conduction test. “It seems pretty clear that there wasn’t a sudden explosion of carpal tunnel cases when the reported numbers started to go up,” Leslie Boden, an environmental-health professor at the Boston University School of Public Health, told me.
Such mistakes were probably driven by the “crippled by computers” narrative. White-collar workers with hand pain and numbness might have naturally presumed they had carpal tunnel, thanks to news reports and the chatter at the water cooler; then, as they told their colleagues—and reporters—about their disabilities, they helped fuel a false-diagnosis feedback loop.
It’s possible that well-intentioned shifts in workplace culture further exaggerated the scale of the epidemic. According to Fredric Gerr, a professor emeritus of occupational and environmental health at the University of Iowa, white-collar employees were encouraged during the 1990s to report even minor aches and pains, so they could be diagnosed—and treated—earlier.
But Gerr told me that such awareness-raising efforts may have backfired, causing workers to view those minor aches as harbingers of a disabling, chronic disease. Clinicians and ergonomists, too, he said, began to lump any pain-addled worker into the same bin, regardless of their symptoms’ severity—a practice that may have artificially inflated the reported rates of RSIs and caused unnecessary anxiety.
Henriques, whose symptoms were consistent and severe, underwent a nerve-conduction test not long after her pain and disability began; the result was inconclusive. She continues to believe that she came down with carpal tunnel syndrome as opposed to another form of RSI, but chose not to receive surgery given the diagnostic uncertainty.
New York Times reporters with RSIs were not at risk of getting fired, as she saw it, but of ending up in different roles. She didn’t want that for herself, so she adapted to her physical limitations, mastering the voice-to-text software that she has since used to dictate four books. The most recent came out in September.
As it happens, a very similar story had played out on the other side of the world more than a decade earlier.
Reporters in Australia began sounding the alarm about the booming rates of RSIs among computer users in 1983, right at the advent of the computer revolution. Some academic observers dismissed the epidemic as the product of a mass hysteria. Other experts figured that Australian offices might be more damaging to people’s bodies than those in other nations, with some colorfully dubbing the symptoms “kangaroo paw.”
Andrew Hopkins, a sociologist at the Australian National University, backed a third hypothesis: that his nation’s institutions had merely facilitated acknowledgment—or stopped suppressing evidence—of what was a genuine and widespread crisis.
“It is well known to sociologists that statistics often tell us more about collection procedures than they do about the phenomenon they are supposed to reflect,” Hopkins wrote in a 1990 paper that compared the raging RSI epidemic in Australia to the relative quiet in the United States. He doubted that any meaningful differences in work conditions between the two nations could explain the staggered timing of the outbreaks. Rather, he suspected that different worker-compensation systems made ongoing epidemics more visible, or less, to public-health authorities.
In Australia, the approach was far more labor-friendly on the whole, with fewer administrative hurdles for claimants to overcome, and better payouts to those who were successful. Provided with this greater incentive to report their RSIs, Hopkins argued, Australian workers began doing so in greater numbers than before.
Then conditions changed. In 1987, Australia’s High Court decided a landmark worker-compensation case involving an RSI in favor of the employer. By the late 1980s, the government had discontinued its quarterly surveillance report of such cases, and worker-comp systems became more hostile to them, Hopkins said. With fewer workers speaking out about their chronic ailments, and Australian journalists bereft of data to illustrate the problem’s scope, a continuing pain crisis might very well have been pushed into the shadows.
Now it was the United States’ turn. Here, too, attention to a workplace-injury epidemic swelled in response to institutional behaviors and incentives. And then here, too, that attention ebbed for multiple reasons. Improvements in workplace ergonomics and computer design may indeed have lessened the actual injury rate among desk workers during the 1990s. At the same time, the growing availability of high-quality scanners reduced the need for injury-prone data-entry typists, and improved diagnostic practices by physicians reduced the rate of false carpal tunnel diagnoses.
In the blue-collar sector, tapering union membership and the expansion of the immigrant workforce may have pushed down the national number of recorded injuries, by making employees less inclined to file complaints and advocate for their own well-being.
But America’s legal and political climate was shifting too. Thousands of workers would file lawsuits against computer manufacturers during this period, claiming that their products had caused injury and disability. More than 20 major cases went to jury trials—and all of them failed. In 2002, the Supreme Court ruled against an employee of Toyota who said she’d become disabled by carpal tunnel as a result of working on the assembly line. (The car company was represented by John Roberts, then in private appellate-law practice.)
Meanwhile, Republicans in Congress managed to jettison a new set of OSHA ergonomics standards before they could go into effect, and the George W. Bush administration ended the requirement that employers separate out RSI-like conditions in their workplace-injury reports to the government. Unsurprisingly, recorded cases dropped off even more sharply in the years that followed.
Blue-collar workers in particular would be left in the lurch. According to M. K. Fletcher, a safety and health specialist at the AFL-CIO, many laborers, in particular those in food processing, health care, warehousing, and construction, continue to suffer substantial rates of musculoskeletal disorders, the term that’s now preferred over RSIs. Nationally, such conditions account for an estimated one-fifth to one-third of the estimated 8.4 million annual workplace injuries across the private sector, according to the union’s analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics reports.
From what experts can determine, carpal tunnel syndrome in particular remains prevalent, affecting 1 to 5 percent of the overall population. The condition is associated with multiple health conditions unrelated to the workplace, including diabetes, age, hypothyroidism, obesity, arthritis, and pregnancy. In general, keyboards are no longer thought to be a major threat, but the hazards of repetitive work were always very real.
In the end, the “crippled by computers” panic among white-collar workers of the 1980s and ’90s would reap outsize attention and perhaps distract from the far more serious concerns of other workers. “We engage in a disease-du-jour mentality that is based on idiosyncratic factors, such as journalists being worried about computer users, rather than prioritization by the actual rate and the impact on employment and life quality,” Gerr, the occupational- and environmental-health expert at the University of Iowa, told me.
As for today’s potential “hazards at the keyboard,” we know precious little. Almost all of the research described above was done prior to 2006, before tablets and smartphones were invented. Workplace ergonomics used to be a thriving academic field, but its ranks have dwindled. The majority of the academic experts I spoke with for this story are either in the twilight of their careers or they’ve already retired. A number of the researchers whose scholarship I’ve reviewed are dead. “The public and also scientists have lost interest in the topic,” Pieter Coenen, an assistant professor at Amsterdam UMC and the lead author of the meta-analysis from 2019, told me. “I don’t think the problem has actually resolved.”
So is there substantial risk to workers in the 2020s from using Slack all day, or checking email on their iPhones, or spending countless hours hunched at their kitchen tables, typing while they talk on Zoom? Few are trying to find out. Professionals in the post-COVID, work-from-home era may be experiencing a persistent or resurgent rash of pain and injury. “The industrial disease of the information age” could still be raging.
Oriana:
I remember the year I started suffering from carpal tunnel. My hands and wrists, with shooting pains up to the elbow and even the upper arm, were capable of doing only so much typing before I had to quit — and I remembered old-fashioned typewriters (I learned touch typing on a mammoth manual machine), and how I was able to work for hours and hours. Then came the flat keyboard . . .
Ultimately I discovered the ergonomic keyboard. I also learned to take more frequent breaks. I started to pay attention to my posture: to slump is human. I did hand exercises.
And then it’s possible that I recovered, or at least 90% recovered, thanks to something about which I have no clue — possibly my body making some kind of automatic adjustment.
I also noted that these days I hardly ever see people, especially cash register workers, with a bandaged hand and wrist. Where did that nasty, painful epidemic go? Yes, something changed — maybe several things did. Maybe we’ve adjusted without really trying, and started doing more off the keyboard fidgeting and taking breaks.
Personally, I swear by my ergonomic keyboard. Yes, my hands still hurt every time I engage in long periods of typing, but I'm much more aware of posture and hand-and-arm exercises, and the need for rest breaks.
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THE PRODUCTIVITY PARADOX
Why doing less could make you more successful
Working harder doesn’t always mean working smarter—our brains aren’t designed for nonstop output.
Strategic rest and "subtraction thinking" enhance creativity, decision-making, and performance.
High-achievers must unlearn the belief that busyness equals success.
You wake up, glance at your phone, and the mental to-do list starts screaming. Emails, deadlines, meetings, a workout, meal prep, side hustle—go, go, go. You push through exhaustion, fueled by coffee, willpower, and the fear of falling behind.
Sound familiar? If so, you’re not alone. The modern world glorifies the hustle—but here’s the paradox: pushing harder isn’t making you more successful. It might be holding you back.
New research in cognitive neuroscience, performance psychology, and ultradian rhythms suggests that peak productivity isn’t about cramming more in—it’s about strategically doing less.
Let’s bust the myth that busyness equals success.
The Science of Doing Less (and Achieving More)
Your brain isn’t built for constant output. Studies show that after 90 minutes of focused work, cognitive performance declines dramatically (Akerstedt et al., 2009). Ultradian rhythms, the brain’s natural cycles of peak focus and recovery, demand periodic rest—but most of us ignore them, plowing through work fueled by caffeine and sheer willpower.
The result? Decision fatigue, mental fog, and burnout—which make you less effective.
Look at some of the most successful innovators in history:
Einstein played the violin when he got stuck on a problem.
Winston Churchill took afternoon naps during wartime.
Steve Jobs was known for long walks to stimulate creativity.
They weren’t slacking off—they were activating the brain’s default mode network (DMN), which boosts problem-solving and innovation (Fox et al., 2015).
High performance isn’t about working harder—it’s about understanding when to push and when to pause.
Subtraction Thinking: The Secret to Peak Performance
Most high-achievers approach productivity with addition thinking—if you want to accomplish more, do more. Work longer hours, add more goals, and increase your effort.
But subtraction thinking flips the script: Instead of adding, what if success requires removing what no longer serves you?
A 2021 study from the University of Virginia found that people naturally default to addition-based problem-solving—even when removing something would lead to a better outcome (Adams et al., 2021). This explains why so many high-performers overcomplicate their success—instead of eliminating inefficiencies, they just pile on more.
Consider these game-changing productivity shifts:
Don’t add another meeting—cut unnecessary ones.
Don’t extend work hours—shorten them and focus intensely.
Don’t add another self-improvement habit—master the ones that already work for you.
Subtraction isn’t laziness—it’s optimization.
Willpower vs. Flow: Why Effort Alone Won’t Save You
Most of us are conditioned to believe that willpower is the answer—just push harder, hustle longer, and outwork the competition.
But willpower is a finite resource—it depletes throughout the day, leading to exhaustion, poor decisions, and motivation crashes.
Instead of relying on willpower, high-achievers need to tap into flow states—those moments where work feels effortless and time disappears. Flow researcher Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi found that people in flow are 500% more productive than those grinding through tasks in a distracted state (Kotler, 2014).
How to trigger flow?
Eliminate distractions—multitasking kills deep work.
Align tasks with challenge & skill balance—too easy is boring, too hard is stressful.
Work in cycles—intense effort followed by true recovery.
When you master flow, you don’t need endless willpower—because you’re working in sync with your brain’s optimal performance state.
The 3-Step Productivity Reset
Ready to ditch the hustle trap and work smarter? Here’s how:
1. Identify and Eliminate Energy Leaks
Look at your daily schedule. What low-value tasks drain your time and mental energy? Meetings, emails, unnecessary admin? Cut ruthlessly.
Ask: If I could only work 4 hours a day, what would I focus on?
2. Work in Focused Sprints
Replace marathon workdays with 90-minute deep work sprints, followed by intentional recovery (exercise, meditation, stepping outside).
Use the Pomodoro Technique (25-minute focus, 5-minute break) or the 90/30 rule (90-minute work, 30-minute reset).
3. Build a Subtraction Habit
Instead of asking What else can I do? start asking What can I remove?
Every week, subtract one thing—a habit, obligation, or task that doesn’t serve you.
Your highest impact work happens when you strip away the noise.
The Bottom Line: Success Isn’t About Doing More—It’s About Doing the Right Things
The world rewards busyness. But the most successful, fulfilled people? They think differently.
They subtract. They rest strategically. They don’t rely on willpower—they build systems that work with their brain’s natural rhythms.
Your ability to succeed isn’t about how much you do—it’s about what you choose to focus on.
So, what will you subtract today?
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/total-self-trust/202502/the-productivity-paradox
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MORE YOUNG PEOPLE ARE GETTING CANCER
Dr. Frank Frizelle has operated on countless patients in his career as a colorectal surgeon. But there’s one case that stayed with him.
In 2014, he was treating a woman in her late 20s suffering from bowel cancer—already a rare situation, given her age. But it became even more unusual when her best friend visited her in the hospital and told Frizelle that she had many of the same symptoms as his patient. Subsequent testing revealed that his patient’s friend had a lesion that, had it not been caught early, likely would have become cancerous.
“That really brought it home to me—how it’s much more common than you think,” says Frizelle, a professor of surgery at the University of Otago in New Zealand.
Still, like any good scientist, Frizelle was skeptical. Was it simply a fluke that he kept treating strikingly young patients? Or was his practice one tiny data point in a larger trend?
He found his answer after sifting through national health data: colorectal cancer, he discovered, was indeed being diagnosed more often than in previous years among New Zealanders under 50. Further research by Frizelle analyzing populations in Sweden and Scotland showed the same thing. A bigger picture was emerging. Here were three different countries, with different populations and health challenges—but united by a spike in colorectal cancers among young adults.
In the years since, it’s become clear that the problem isn’t limited to those three countries, nor to colorectal cancer. Researchers have found that young people around the world are getting many different kinds of cancer at alarmingly high rates. And as the diagnoses of celebrities and public figures like Kate Middleton, Chadwick Boseman, Dwyane Wade, and Olivia Munn bring mass attention to the issue, scientists are racing to answer a question on the minds of many outside the medical profession: Why is cancer, historically a disease of old age, increasingly striking people in the primes of their lives?
Globally, diagnoses and deaths related to early-onset cancers—those affecting patients younger than 50—rose by 79% and 28%, respectively, from 1990 to 2019, according to a recent study published in the medical journal BMJ Oncology. In the U.S., breast cancer is the most common type of early-onset disease, but recent surges in cancers affecting digestive organs—including the colon, rectum, pancreas, and stomach—are particularly dramatic within this age group. In fact, today’s young adults are about twice as likely to be diagnosed with colon cancer—and four times as likely to be diagnosed with rectal cancer—as those born around 1950, research suggests.
Overall, cancer is still overwhelmingly an older person’s disease. As of 2025, 88% of people in the U.S. diagnosed with cancer were 50 or older, and 59% were 65 or older, according to data from the American Cancer Society. But there is no question that the demographics are shifting. Under 50s are not only at increasing risk of suffering from cancer; theirs is the only age group for which the risk is rising. All told, 17 types of cancer are on the rise among U.S. adults in this age group.
“When we were younger, we assumed the climate would be the same forever. The same applies in cancer,” says Dr. Thomas Powles, a U.K.-based oncologist and cancer researcher who edits the journal Annals of Oncology. “We just assumed that cancer incidence was something that is relatively static. But it’s not.”
There is some good news in the data. Advances in disease detection and treatment, as well as dramatic declines in smoking, mean that far fewer people die from cancer now than once did. Although the disease still ranks as the second most common cause of death in the U.S., killing more than half a million people each year, mortality rates have dropped by about a third since 1991.
Less encouragingly, the rate of new cancers diagnosed has remained stubbornly consistent, declining only modestly from 1999 to 2021. Across the U.S., roughly 2 million new cancer cases are detected each year, diagnoses that, on top of the emotional toll, force patients to cumulatively fork out billions of dollars in out-of-pocket costs—more than $16 billion in 2019 alone, according to federal data. Today, about 40 out of every 100 U.S. adults can expect to be diagnosed with cancer at some point in their lifetimes. For an estimated 1 in 17 U.S. women and 1 in 29 U.S. men, that news will come before their 50th birthdays.
The rise in early-onset diagnoses partly comes down to advances in our ability to detect and diagnose different kinds of cancers. “With much more sophisticated tools now, inevitably we’re doing more tests on younger people [and] we’re using more accurate imaging,” which leads to more cancers detected, Powles says. Some screening protocols have also been modified in recent years to include younger adults; since 2018, for example, the American Cancer Society has recommended colonoscopies starting at age 45, down from 50.
But this is only one part of what scientists say is a more complex web of factors they are still attempting to understand. The data suggest that some element—or perhaps combination of elements—of modern life is sickening progressively younger adults. And right now, no one knows for sure what that is.
There are plenty of known risk factors for cancer, from the genes someone is born with to the unhealthy lifestyle habits they pick up, such as smoking, drinking lots of alcohol, or spending time in the sun. Such habits can speed up the natural degradation of cells, which over time acquire genetic mutations as they lose their ability to repair damage.
As that damage accumulates with age, cells may become cancerous, growing and -multiplying too fast for the body’s immune system to keep them in check and potentially choking out vital organs. The immune system also loses some of its strength with age, making it easier for cancer cells to colonize the body.
But classic risk factors do not seem to fully explain the recent rise in early-onset cancers, says Dr. Cathy Eng, director of the Young Adult Cancers Program at Vanderbilt University’s Ingram Cancer Center in Tennessee. Some of the trends are baffling; young, nonsmoking women, for example, are being diagnosed with lung cancer in strangely high numbers. Many times, Eng’s patients were extremely healthy: vegetarians, marathon runners, avid swimmers. “That’s why I really believe there’s other risk factors to account for this,” she says.
There’s no shortage of theories about what those may be. Many scientists point to modern diets, which tend to be heavy on potentially carcinogenic products—including ultra-processed foods, processed red meat (bacon, hot dogs, salami, ham, and bologna), and alcohol—and may also contribute to weight gain, another cancer risk factor. The foods we eat can also affect the gut microbiome, the colony of microbes that lives in the digestive system and appears linked to overall health. Alterations to the gut microbiome via diet, or perhaps exposure to drugs like antibiotics, have also been implicated.
Other researchers blame the microplastics littering our environment and leaching into our food and water supplies, some of which, according to a 2024 study, have even shown up in cancer patients’ tumors. Other environmental factors could also be to blame, given that everything from cosmetics to food packaging contains substances that many researchers aren’t convinced are safe. Even our near constant exposure to artificial light could be messing with normal biological rhythms in ways that have profound health consequences, some research suggests.
For now, these are all just hypotheses. Some may turn out to be wrong, and more theories will emerge in time. It’s also likely that different risk factors are linked to different cancers, Frizelle says. Even in a single patient, multiple overlapping triggers may be in play.
Frizelle’s research on colorectal cancer, for example, suggests there may be a dysfunctional relationship between microplastics, certain foods, and some types of gut bacteria. Studies suggest that when microplastics get into the body, they can penetrate the mucous lining that protects the bowels and carry bacteria and toxins to the bowel lining. This leaves the bowel more susceptible to damage from pathogens inside the body—including strains of gut bacteria that are known to become more virulent when they interact with compounds found in red and processed meat. In some patients, this perfect storm of invaders may result in cancer, Frizelle thinks.
He believes this overlapping puzzle of risk factors is a likelier explanation than any one lifestyle habit driving a dramatic uptick in cancers—especially since younger generations are, in many respects, healthier than their ancestors. In the U.S., for example, tobacco use has plummeted in recent decades, and young adults are increasingly unlikely to drink. “How is the health-conscious generation getting more bowel cancer?” Frizelle asks.
Dr. Andrea Cercek, co-director of the Center for Young Onset Colorectal and Gastrointestinal Cancers at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City, agrees that some early-onset cancer cases defy easy explanation. She’s treated patients in their 20s and even teens with tumors that, biologically, “look just like a regular 80-year-old’s tumor.” These cases stump her. “Even if they drank as a teenager, it just doesn’t make sense,” she says. A few years of drinking alcohol, following an unhealthy diet, or having obesity should not be enough to produce the kind of tumor typically seen in a senior citizen, Cercek says. And yet, there they are.
To Cercek, these advanced tumors suggest that people have been exposed to damaging substances for a long time, perhaps even longer than they were aware of. Research and awareness about early-onset cancer is accumulating now, but the source of the problem may not be new, Cercek says. It can take years for even the most toxic exposures to result in health problems—which means that the source of a problem in the public eye now may have emerged decades ago, silently sickening people until the trend became too pronounced to ignore.
Giancarlo Oviedo-Mori, 32, is one of many patients whose cancer defies obvious explanation. When he was in high school, Oviedo-Mori developed a persistent cough that didn’t respond to medication. Eventually, at just 18 years old, he was diagnosed with Stage IV lung cancer.
Oviedo-Mori and his doctors were stunned. He’d had asthma as a child growing up in Peru, but he had no family history of cancer and had never been a drinker or smoker; he was barely even old enough to buy cigarettes and still years shy of his 21st birthday. Oviedo-Mori’s family spent a day observing the site of the 9/11 terrorist attack when toxic particles were still in the air, but it had been a brief visit and no one else in the family had developed health problems. That was the only exposure he could think of. The diagnosis didn’t make sense. “It was so weird,” he says.
As he went through cancer treatment—including chemotherapy, radiation, and a surgery that removed his entire left lung—he’d look at his fellow patients, and, seeing how much older they were, feel out of place. “I didn’t belong there,” he says.
More than a decade later, Oviedo-Mori is still in treatment, participating in a clinical trial at Memorial Sloan Kettering (where all the patients pictured in this article have received care) in hopes of ridding his body of cancer for good. But, though he’s still fighting cancer, he is in good health—he can even play soccer, despite having only one lung, and chase after his almost 2-year-old son. “Sometimes, I don’t believe it,” he says. “I think about [my son] and I’m like, ‘Oh my gosh, you’re really a miracle.’”
Figuring out how young people like Oviedo-Mori fall prey to cancer is not easy, given the sheer number of potential health hazards in the modern world. It is a puzzle with an unknown number of pieces—one that Dr. Shuji Ogino, a pathologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, is trying to solve with a technique he pioneered.
Ogino and his team are making their way through about 4,000 colorectal tumor samples that came from people who developed the disease at various points in their lives. Each sliver of tissue holds innumerable clues about the person it belonged to, from what they ate and drank to the bacteria that lived in their body before cancer took root.
To unearth these clues, the researchers stain the tissues, so that under the lens of a powerful microscope, they can see the different types of cells in the tumor in brilliant color. Using these cell-level insights, they can distinguish between the tumors of young vs. older patients and—with the help of AI—search reams of scientific literature for environmental exposures, lifestyle habits, or health conditions linked to particular cellular traits. Repeating this painstaking detective work enough times helps reveal patterns among young cancer patients, giving Ogino and his team clues as to what may have caused their diseases.
Their research has already pointed to some possible answers for early-onset colorectal cancer. The big three so far are eating a typical Western diet (high in sugar, processed foods, and red meat, low in fresh produce), developing insulin resistance (a precursor to diabetes also linked to poor diet), and having a particular type of E. coli bacteria in the gut. Nothing is proven yet, Ogino says. But since there’s no harm in eating healthfully, he believes dietary changes are worth making now.
Ogino personally drinks very little and eats a healthy diet. He makes sure his young son eats well too, since his research makes him acutely aware of the importance of developing healthy habits starting from a very young age. But even for children as young as Ogino’s son, some damage may already be done—at least according to Dr. George Barreto, a surgeon and cancer researcher at Flinders University in South Australia.
Barreto—who started researching early-onset cancer after not just his patients, but also several of his relatives and friends, were diagnosed at young ages—has theorized that damage may start in the womb. It’s well established that the pre-natal period can have long-term effects on a baby’s health, and Barreto believes that phenomenon may extend to cancer risk if parents are exposed to carcinogens during this critical developmental time. This theory could help explain mysterious cases like those Cercek describes, involving patients who seemingly haven’t lived long enough for even their riskiest habits to catch up with them.
Proving his theory won’t be simple, Barreto acknowledges. It would require collecting data on huge numbers of people, starting before they were even born, then sifting through that data to pinpoint relevant prenatal and early-life triggers. To speed up the process, Barreto has contacted more than 20 research groups around the world that are tracking groups of people beginning at or before birth, in hopes of using their data to jump-start his research. “If we start [from scratch] now, it will take us 40 years to find answers,” Barreto says. That’s too long to wait, with patients already getting sick at an alarming rate.
There is yet another question for researchers to answer: whether, on a molecular level, young patients’ cancers are dramatically different from those that occur in older people. If so, these findings may guide researchers toward new treatment approaches.
Some research, including by Eng, has pointed to molecular differences, at least among patients with early-onset colorectal disease. But other scientists are less convinced. Powles, the U.K. oncologist, says he hasn’t seen strong evidence to suggest that early-onset cancers are much different or more aggressive than later-in-life cancers; they just happen to strike patients at younger ages.
Even if there is no medical requirement to stray from classic treatment methods—like chemotherapy, radiation, and surgery—younger patients have unique needs. Standard treatments, while often effective, can be destructive for people with decades of life ahead of them, potentially leading to life-altering physical changes, like permanently needing a colostomy bag or enduring early menopause and infertility. “The worst thing [for an oncologist to hear] is, ‘I’m cured and my cancer’s gone, but I wish that I’d just lived with my cancer because living like this isn’t living,’” Cercek says.
Kelly Spill was blindsided when she was diagnosed with Stage III colorectal cancer in 2020. She was only 28, had no family history of colorectal cancer, and had recently given birth to her first child. She was even more stunned when she learned that her treatment would force her to permanently use a colostomy bag and leave her unable to carry more children. “That completely broke me,” she says. “I’d always wanted a big family.”
Just before she was set to start chemotherapy, however, a research nurse told her she might be a fit for an experimental trial that Cercek was leading. Cercek was testing a new approach among patients whose tumors had a specific genetic mutation: using intravenous medication to boost their immune systems’ abilities to recognize and attack cancerous cells, ideally sparing patients from chemotherapy, radiation, and surgery.
Despite all the unknowns that came with participating in a clinical trial, Spill says it was a “no-brainer” to try Cercek’s approach instead of therapies that would leave her with lifelong physical side effects. Her gamble paid off: by her ninth treatment session, her tumor had entirely disappeared. Spill is still cancer-free and expecting her third baby in May.
In June, Cercek reported that out of 41 rectal cancer patients who completed the full regimen, 100% were cancer-free and required no additional treatment. She is now also studying the method against a variety of different cancers, ranging from stomach to bladder. A patient of any age could benefit from this approach, Cercek says, but it could be particularly impactful for young patients, like Spill, who are desperate to avoid permanent side effects.
Even without novel medical approaches, cancer centers are beginning to recognize that, compared with elderly patients, “adolescents and young adults have very different experiences, and therefore need very different approaches to their treatment,” says Alison Silberman, CEO of Stupid Cancer, a nonprofit that supports young people with the disease.
Physical fallout isn’t the only hurdle to overcome, Silberman says. Compared with older patients, young people are more likely to struggle to pay for their care and to develop mental-health issues as a result of it.
Silberman witnessed these challenges when her brother was diagnosed with advanced cancer in his 20s. “He was yanked out of his life,” forced to leave his job and apartment to move back in with their parents, Silberman remembers. Cancer made him grapple with his own mortality, largely on his own. “He was too old to be a pediatric patient, too young to be an adult patient,” she says. “That was very isolating for him.”
“Care of early-onset cancer patients becomes complex even beyond [medicine],” says Dr. Veda Giri, an oncologist and co-director of Yale Cancer Center’s Early Onset Cancer Program in Connecticut. This spring, the program will launch new services meant to address that very problem. Patients in the program will be contacted by coordinators who can help guide them through issues that commonly affect young-adult patients, from ways to preserve fertility to deciding whether to pursue genetic testing or enroll in a clinical trial.
Patients can also participate in support groups with others in their age group, in hopes of improving social and mental health. The goal: to “support patients and their families from diagnosis all the way through their cancer journey and beyond into survivorship,” since young adults cured of cancer may have continuing needs for decades to come, Giri says.
The ultimate goal, of course—and the ultimate win for doctors and researchers working in this field—will be for early-onset cancer centers to be rendered unnecessary. But it likely won’t happen anytime soon. Proponents of sophisticated new artificial-intelligence technologies have raised expectations, promising new tools that could transform cancer research. AI gives scientists the ability to sift through mountains of data with hitherto unimaginable levels of precision. And the hope is that these tools will unlock a cascade of new discoveries—illuminating unrecognized risk factors, for example, and turbocharging the development of new treatments.
But cancer researchers remain cautious. There is hope, no doubt—but like the legions of scientists grappling with complex medical puzzles in other fields, they are wary of overstating the pace of progress and raising the hopes of patients, even with new technologies at their disposal.
“It will be impossible to design a clinical trial that can test all different possible causes of early-onset cancer,” says Dr. Andrew Chan, director of cancer epidemiology at Mass General Cancer Center. AI and other technologies may help land on those possible causes faster. But to really understand exactly what’s driving the disease and how to stop it, researchers must work slowly and methodically, studying various potential triggers—from diet to alcohol to microplastics—one by one.
Chan’s team is starting with a trial that will study whether losing weight with the help of GLP-1 drugs like Wegovy and Zepbound affects future cancer risk among people who have survived early-onset cancer and who are overweight. Future research may study the effects of specific dietary changes, he says. But not all potential cancer triggers are as straightforward to modify as weight and diet.
Take microplastics, which Frizelle, the New Zealand surgeon, believes are contributing to early-onset cancer. Frizelle is realistic about their ubiquity. Avoiding them is all but impossible in a world where water supplies are tainted and babies suckle on plastic bottles from their earliest days on earth.
Barreto’s research on cancer risk starting in the womb paints an even bleaker picture, suggesting that the deck may be stacked against some people before they are really people at all. (He chooses to see it more optimistically, noting that everyone can still “take the power into their own hands” by avoiding known carcinogens.)
The upshot of all this: it could take years, if not decades, to sort out what’s causing early diagnoses, and perhaps even more time to figure out how to stop them. What seems so obvious to us now—the conclusion that smoking cigarettes causes lung cancer, for example—took some 40 years for scientists to solidify. Even once they did, change didn’t happen overnight. Smoking rates have fallen steadily since public-health warnings escalated in the 1960s, but they didn’t plummet all at once. Still, change is possible. Today, smoking is at historic lows, and lung cancer diagnoses have declined with them.
If the challenge sounds daunting, for researchers like Ogino, from Brigham and Women’s, the complexities are part of the process. He is reminded every day that good science takes as long as it takes. Many of the tumor samples he relies on in his research came from participants enrolled in a study that launched in 1976. The researchers who started it couldn’t have known that, 50 years later, their work would be critical in the quest to reverse the rise of early-onset cancer, Ogino says.
“That’s the kind of legacy you can make in science,” he says. “That’s a great, rewarding way to contribute”—even if it takes a lot of time to get there.
https://time.com/7213490/why-are-young-people-getting-cancer/?utm_source=roundup&utm_campaign=20230202
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STUDIES SUGGEST THE SHINGLES VACCINE MAY DELAY DEMENTIA
The shingles virus is often associated with painful rashes and nerve discomfort, but recent research suggests getting vaccinated against its effects can protect more than just your skin.
Two studies from July 2024 revealed that the shingles vaccine may help prevent dementia, underscoring the virus’s broader effects on the brain. To better understand the connection, we spoke with neurology experts who shed light on how shingles affect the body, its potential link to dementia and whether the vaccine offers protection.
forearm shingles“The varicella-zoster virus (VZV), or shingles, is the same virus that causes chickenpox,” explains Mike McGrath, MD, a Board Certified Psychiatrist and Chief Clinical Officer at The Oasis Recovery. “The virus lies dormant within the nerve cells in anyone who has had chickenpox.”
For people over 50 or with weakened immune systems, he adds that the virus “can reactivate,” causing shingles. This condition leads to a painful rash, blisters and nerve pain that can persist for weeks or even months.
“The shingles virus resides in clusters of nerve cell bodies near the spinal cord and cranial nerves,” says David Perlmutter, MD, a Board-Certified Neurologist. “When the virus reactivates, it travels along the nerve fibers to the skin, causing painful rashes. In some cases, it can affect cranial nerves or even spread to the brain, leading to encephalitis (brain inflammation). This can result in serious complications such as confusion, seizures and even long-term neurological problems if left untreated.”
The connection between shingles and dementia is complex, but several theories help explain the link. “The idea that chronic infectious agents like bacteria or viruses might play a role in dementia has been postulated for at least the past 20 years,” says Dr. Perlmutter.
“Chronic infections may induce persistent low-grade inflammation that threatens the brain’s neurons over time,” he explains. “This inflammation ultimately leads to neurons undergoing a process of self-directed death—a mechanism now thought to be pivotal in what makes a good brain go bad.”
The shingles virus may also contribute to vascular changes, increasing the risk of stroke, another condition linked to dementia.
That said, most people with shingles don’t experience brain complications, and currently, there is no definitive evidence linking shingles and dementia.
The shingles vaccine, such as Shingrix or Zostavax, has been proven to dramatically reduce the risk of developing shingles and its complications, including postherpetic neuralgia, or nerve pain. “[The] recent studies suggest that receiving the shingles vaccine, particularly the newer recombinant version known as Shingrix, may significantly reduce the risk or delay the onset of dementia,” says Dr. Perlmutter.
For example, one of the studies conducted by the University of Oxford found that out of more than 200,000 participants, those who received the vaccine spent 17 percent more time free of a dementia diagnosis, translating to about 164 additional days lived without dementia.
“The studies suggest that getting the shingles vaccine may delay a dementia diagnosis,” notes Dr. McGrath. “People who were vaccinated couldn’t avoid dementia altogether, but the vaccine did seem to delay the diagnosis.” However, he notes that more research is still needed.
“For now, we are far more certain about the relationship between metabolic conditions like obesity, type-2 diabetes and elevated blood pressure and increased risk for dementia,” adds Dr. Perlmutter.
If you’re over 50 or at higher risk for shingles, getting vaccinated is a proactive step for both your physical and cognitive health. While the vaccine’s dementia-protective benefits aren’t yet definitive, its ability to prevent shingles and related complications is well-established.
Additionally, maintaining a healthy lifestyle—such as managing blood pressure, exercising regularly and staying mentally active—can further reduce dementia risk. If you have concerns about shingles and cognitive health, consult your doctor for personalized advice.
https://www.womansworld.com/aging/brain/can-the-shingles-vaccine-prevent-dementia-doctors-weigh-in
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OZEMPIC MAY REDUCE THE RISK OF DEMENTIA BY 48%
GLP-1 drugs show promise in curbing the risk of cognitive problems
Odds are you’ve heard of GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic for managing type 2 diabetes and shedding pounds. But have you ever wondered what Ozempic does to your brain? Recent research suggests it might do far more than regulate blood sugar. It could also play a role in reducing the risk of dementia. We asked the experts to weigh in on the latest research and clinical trials.
GLP-1 drugs do more than manage glucose and aid weight loss
Medications known as GLP-1 agonists are FDA-approved for diabetes management and some for weight loss. GLP-1 agonists mimic a natural hormone to regulate insulin production, digestion and appetite.
But the drug used to manage diabetes is now potentially offering unexpected benefits.
Semaglutide — the active ingredient in Ozempic and Wegovy — shows promise in reducing the risk of cardiovascular and kidney diseases, fatty liver disease and even obesity-related cancers.
Any brain-related benefits remain speculative at this stage, explains Gregory Barone, DO, an endocrinologist with New Jersey-based Cooper University Health Care. “The outcome-based data is really promising for this drug class,” Dr. Barone says. “But a lot is still up for the scientists of the world to sort out.”
Emerging studies suggest the diabetes drug might protect against the risk of cognitive decline, including dementia, Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s. It could also curb addictive behaviors, such as problems with nicotine dependence. However, the exact mechanisms behind these effects are still unclear.
“The question is, ‘why?’” Dr. Barone says. “Is it something inherent about the semaglutide molecule itself, or are these benefits due to secondary effects like weight loss, decreased inflammation, or changes in consumption habits?”
The idea that diabetes medication could protect against cognitive decline might seem surprising, but the evidence is growing. A recent University of Oxford study, published in Lancet eClinicalMedicine, suggests that GLP-1 agonists like Ozempic may lower the risk of developing dementia in patients with diabetes by 48 percent compared to those taking sitagliptin (Januvia).
Patients prescribed semaglutide had a reduced risk of developing 22 brain and psychiatric disorders within one year of treatment compared to those on other diabetes drugs. Since diabetes is a known risk factor for cognitive decline, this makes GLP-1 medications like Ozempic especially promising, says Dr. Barone.
However, important questions remain, including how GLP-1 agonists like Ozempic protect the brain and to what extent. The Oxford study was observational, meaning it shows associations but doesn’t prove cause and effect, Dr. Barone notes.
“Dementia can develop through various pathways, one of the more common being vascular dementia, which is related to blood vessel health,” Dr. Barone says. “Since these medications improve cardiovascular outcomes — like reducing the risk of heart disease and stroke — it’s not a big leap to think they might also help maintain vascular health in the brain, potentially reducing the risk of vascular dementia.”
“But dementia progresses at different rates in different people, so it’s challenging to say if a patient’s trajectory has changed,” he adds.
While the focus of recent studies has been on the risk of cognitive problems, researchers are also exploring Ozempic’s potential in treating other brain-related conditions, including addictions like gambling and alcohol dependence.
The University of Oxford study also found that Ozempic significantly reduced nicotine dependence in patients, suggesting it may play a role in reducing addictive behaviors.
GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic act on cravings in the brain
GLP-1 agonists reduce constant thoughts about hunger. This allows patients to think more clearly and stay focused, says Dr. Barone. The reduction in food preoccupation could extend to other cravings as well.
“People who struggle with obesity often have abnormal brain signaling, where food is perceived as an addiction — similar to how smokers or alcoholics crave or depend on their fixes,” says Dr. Barone.
“We know semaglutide works primarily at the appetite center, but it’s suspected that the nearby reward center could also be involved,” he notes. “There may be some cross-signaling that blunts cravings not just for food, but for other addictive behaviors.”
While the science behind these additional Ozempic benefits is plausible, Dr. Barone says it’s far too early to say if and how GLP-1 drugs can be repurposed to protect the brain. [Oriana: these drugs also protect your eyes; new benefits keep getting discovered, though it's also possible that it's all due to eating less, thus avoiding obesity]
“The outcome-based data we have is incredibly promising, particularly for diabetes, heart disease and kidney health,” Dr. Barone adds. “As for cognitive benefits, we’re still waiting for more concrete evidence.”
Oriana:
The price of Ozempic and related drugs (Tirsezapide seems particularly promising) is certainly discouraging. But it seems that the supplement sold as berberine can be a partial substitute — especially when combined with a diet rich in non-starchy vegetables.
Berberine is known to lower blood sugar and optimize cholesterol profile. Like metformin, is also shows anti-cancer activity.
There is some difference of opinion about the effective dose of berberine. It’s not an expensive supplement, and it appears to be safer than metformin, the most commonly prescribed drug for diabetes (metformin also happens to be a life-extension drug). I suggest at least 1200mg of berberine a day; a large person might required 1500mg in order for blood sugar to plummet and the lipid profile to optimize.
I personally favor the MCT-gel berberine (and my blood tests confirm its dramatic effectiveness, at least for me). But ordinary powdered berberine is probably also fine, if taken in sufficient dose.
As part of appetite control, some experts suggest eating protein and leafy vegetables before consuming any starches.
Also, don’t forget to feed your friendly bacteria. Fermented foods such as sauerkraut help nourish the microbiome, which in turn plays a significant role in maintaining healthy weight.
Finally, coffee has been shown to increase the release of GPL-1.
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MORE ON THE BENEFITS OF COFFEE
Research shows coffee can make you healthier, smarter, and more productive
Science says coffee is really, really good for you. For one thing, coffee can make you healthier. A study published in Circulation found coffee can reduce the risk of stroke by 20 percent. A meta-analysis of over 125 studies published in the Annual Review of Nutrition found that coffee can reduce the risk of Type 2 diabetes by 30 percent, the risk of Parkinson’s disease by 30 percent, and the risk of cancer by up to 20 percent.
Coffee can also keep you trimmer. A study published in the Journal of Functional Foods indicates caffeine can slow the weight gain from an obesogenic diet—”obesogenic” is a fancy way of saying “likely to make you gain weight”—by reducing the storage of lipids in fat cells and the production of triglycerides. Coffee can even help counteract some of the negative health consequences of sitting all day, according to a study just published in BMC Journal.
Coffee can also make you happier. A study of over 260,000 people published in the Annals of Internal Medicine found that people who drank four or more cups of coffee a day were nearly 10 percent less likely to become depressed than those who drank none.
Coffee can also (say hello to Captain Obvious) kick-start your day. The caffeine in your first cup of coffee attaches to the part of your neurons that normally attracts adenosine, the hormone that makes you sleepy. Caffeine also causes those neurons to fire more rapidly. Combine adenosine-blocked receptors with heightened neuron stimulation, and boom: You’re perkier.
But coffee provides at least two more performance benefits.
Coffee Can Make You Smarter
The key word is “after.” While there’s no research showing ingesting caffeine prior to creating new memories will enhance retention, ingesting caffeine after a learning task improved memory recall for up to 24 hours later.
More specifically to coffee, a study published in GeroScience found that the plant alkaloid trigonelline helped mice acquire, retain, structure, and apply information related to their surrounding physical environment. (The experiment focused on remembering their physical environment; it’s tough to get mice to do math problems.)
After ingesting trigonelline—a substance found in coffee—the average mouse showed significant memory and memory application improvement. (Because hey, the best knowledge is useful knowledge.) Trigonelline also appeared to change mice brains. As my Inc. colleague Bill Murphy Jr. writes, mice who had ingested trigonelline had better neurotransmitter release and “less neuroinflammation,” a “common phenomenon of cognitive aging.”
In short, coffee can improve your memory and help you better apply what you’ve learned.
But not indefinitely. (More on that in a moment.)
potted coffee plant: not the lush foliage and red fruit -- coffee beans
Coffee Can Make You a Better Problem Solver
A study published in Consciousness and Cognition found the caffeine equivalent of one cup of coffee boosts problem solving via convergent thinking—in this case, determining the best answer to a question.
Keep in mind study participants didn’t generate more ideas, but they were quicker to sift through ideas to find the best one. They weren’t more creative, but they were more alert, focused, and in a better mood.
That’s because caffeine seems to improve convergent rather than divergent thinking. Convergent thinking involves finding the “correct” answers to relatively standard questions by using knowledge and experience to spot patterns and apply solutions. (Divergent thinking involves coming up with new ideas and new solutions.)
But you can blend the two. As Square co-founder Jim McKelvey writes in The Innovation Stack, you can use convergent thinking to come up with new ideas: try to do something new, encounter a series of problems, create solutions that lead to more problems, solve those problems—in short, use a problem-solving cycle to be more creative.
Which caffeine, and therefore coffee, can help you do. But not indefinitely.
As Long as You Take the Occasional Break From Coffee
Remember how caffeine blocks adenosine from binding to receptors in your brain? When adenosine can’t bind, you feel (or keep feeling) alert and awake.
That’s one reason why drinking a lot of coffee makes you feel really awake.
But not indefinitely. When your body recognizes that adenosine isn’t binding, your body responds by creating more receptors.
A study published in Archives Internationales de Pharmacodynamie et de Therapie found that within three days of consistent caffeine ingestion, the number of adenosine, nicotinic, and muscarinic (a chemical that modulates neuronal excitability) receptors in your body significantly increases.
That’s why you need an extra cup of coffee to get going. That’s why you need an extra cup after lunch. That’s why you want another cup late in the day. The effect diminishes as your body builds up its tolerance. (That’s where “I haven’t had coffee all day” headaches come from—more receptors means your body really craves caffeine.)
The result? While coffee still provides the health benefits described above, the effect on memory, problem-solving, and energy levels largely disappears. When a highly caffeinated state is your steady state, boosts are no longer available.
Unless you periodically hit the reset button. The Belgian study determined that changes in adenosine receptor levels typically reverse after a seven-day caffeine break. Take a week off, and you reduce your tolerance and increase the boost you feel when you start drinking coffee again.
Or you could take a more moderate approach. For a week you could drink one cup in the morning, rather than two. Or skip your post-lunch cup. Or limit yourself to just one cup a day. The key is to periodically reduce your intake so your body doesn’t see, for example, four cups a day as “normal” and increase adenosine receptor levels in response.
Also keep in mind that, as with most things, timing is everything. If you need to learn something new, wait until after you’ve studied (in whatever form “study” might take) before you drink a cup of coffee. If next week is a really important week, consider limiting your coffee intake this week.
coffee plant in bloomIf you want to be a better team player, have a cup of coffee before a meeting. A study published in the Journal of Psychopharmacology found that drinking coffee helps teams work more efficiently and effectively (and improves their perception of how people on their team performed during the meeting or task.)
Think of it that way, and timing really is everything.
Even where coffee is concerned.
https://www.inc.com/jeff-haden/8-life-changing-benefits-of-coffee-from-9-scientific-studies/90997951?utm_source=pocket-newtab-en-us
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ending on beauty:
DEEP RED GLASS
Hours shrouded in black and dove
secrets of Tuesday
buried in the rain
River windows in sepia
and silver cascading
from April’s naked arms
~ Sutton Breiding
(photo: John Guzlowski)
