*
THE LAUGHTER OF JOB
“Not yet, my friend,”
said Job to a raven,
yellow pus crusting his thighs.
“I’m not carrion yet.
No happiness lasts,
but here on my dunghill
I have learned one blessing:
there is no perfect unhappiness either.”
“If you can laugh,
you are never poor,”
said Job to his comfortless
comforters. “Look at my
jewelry of emerald flies!”
He patted his blistered
bald head: “See?
I have transcended my hair.”
*
“It’s already broken,”
said Job to an angel,
lifting up a potsherd
to his swollen lips.
“My friend, my friend,
let us not waste time
cursing the Nameless
for an unjust world. To life!”
*
“What fine camel droppings,”
said Job to a Levite.
“Who can say I haven’t
weatherproofed my house?”
The Levite reproved him:
“Did you get an answer?”
“Yes,” Job chuckled, “but not
from the Voice in the Whirlwind.
It was the Adversary, walking to
and fro, who winked and whispered:
Because you didn’t laugh —
meaning you were not free.
And Job began laughing,
and his sores were healed.
He got new sheep and new she-asses,
new children by a new wife.
He’d doze off during prayer;
when chided, he’d laugh,
“God loves us more
when we are asleep.”
To a servant he’d say,
“Here, have this lamb” —
laughing softly,
knowing any time
a messenger could come,
crying from afar:
“All you owned is gone;
in an instant I saw it gone” —
and Job would reply,
“Naked I came here,
naked I’ll return.
Want to know
a secret?
I like to go naked.”
~ Oriana
*
WHAT WE CAN LEARN FROM THE BOOK OF JOB (Michael Burch)
Like the book of Ecclesiastes, written by the bible’s wisest man, the book of Job refutes everything christians have been taught (or brainwashed) to believe.
Here’s why…
First, I will give a quick recap, then I will provide the details.
Job has multiple gods, the Elohim (plural), not just one god. (Job 1:6) Job has a supreme god who cannot foresee the future and thus is not all-powerful.
The God of Job is evil and lacks wisdom, judgement, foresight and a sense of justice.
Satan is not a “fallen angel” but is welcome in heaven as part of a Divine Council.
God is on friendly terms with Satan, they make a friendly bet, then together diabolically agree to murder Job’s children, slaves and livestock. So forget about human life being “sacred” as Christians like to claim.
God later admits that Satan duped him into destroying Job without cause (Job 2:3)
Obviously, none of this is compatible with the nonsense Christians are taught about god and Satan.
THE BOOK OF JOB REFUTES CHRISTIAN BELIEFS
In the book of Job, we see that Satan is not a “fallen angel” but is one of the Elohim, the “sons of god” who are welcome in heaven and have come for a meeting of the Divine Council. This Divine Council appears elsewhere in the bible and also in the Dead Sea Scrolls, the oldest extant complete bible manuscripts, circa 200 BC. This is well-known to bible scholars but is kept hidden by dishonest christian priests and pastors. Why is your priest or pastor not being honest with you?
Yes, the ancient book of Job is polytheistic! The bible originally had 72 gods:
The supreme god was El, also known as El Elyon, or God Most High.
El was called the Most High God because there were other gods.
El had a consort, or wife, called Asherah, the Queen of Heaven and the mother of all the gods other than El.
Asherah was very popular according to the bible. In fact, the bible complains that there were Asherah poles on every hill and mountain (the “high places) and it admits that Asherah was being worshiped alongside Yahweh in King Solomon’s temple!
Why was Asherah being worshiped in the temple? Because by that time she had become the consort of Yahweh. Yes, the biblical god had a wife! We know this from multiple archeological artifacts with the inscription: “Yahweh and his Asherah.”
I blush to say that Yahweh was very well endowed in his depictions.
Solomon and his father, King David, were idol worshipers. The bible relates that David’s wife Michal use a household idol to make it seem that David was sleeping in bed while he fled out a window from Saul’s assassins.
And the bible frankly admits that Solomon was an idolator. Yes, Israel’s two greatest kings were worshiping gods other than Yahweh! Betcha big bucks that your priest or pastor never told you that David, “the man after god’s own heart” according to christian dogma, had a man-sized idol in his house.
El and Asherah had 70 children who were also gods, the Elohim.
The Elohim included Yahweh and his main rivals Baal and Marduk, as well as other gods mentioned in the bible such as Chemosh, Dagon and Milcom.
We see this in Job 1:6, which says: “One day the sons of god [the Elohim] came to present themselves before the Lord, and Satan also came with them.”
In the book of Job, Satan waltzes into heaven, is on friendly terms with god, then dupes god into murdering Job’s children, slaves and livestock.
Job was a very rich man, so he had lots of slaves and there were a lot of murders.
Why were Job’s children, slaves and livestock murdered?
To test Job’s faith.
Job, Leon Bonnat, 1880
However, if christian beliefs about god were true, such a grotesque “test” would not have been needed. Why? Because god could have peered into his infallible crystal ball, then said, “Get behind me Satan because I know righteous Job will remain faithful to me.”
But the god of Job could not foresee the future, and thus was not all-wise and not all-knowing, so he agreed to allow the murders.
Satan was not allowed to harm Job initially, so god was calling the shots.
Satan could not have murdered Job’s children, slaves and livestock without god’s permission.
That made god the capo of a murderous crime family. He put out a hit on Job’s children, slaves and livestock.
So much for the christian idea that god is “good.”
The god of Job was hideously evil.
Blake: Job and his Comforters
Later in the book of Job, god admitted that Satan had duped him into destroying Job without cause:
And the Lord said unto Satan, “Hast thou considered my servant Job, that there is none like him in the earth, a perfect and an upright man, one that feareth God, and escheweth evil? and still he holdeth fast his integrity, although thou movedst me against him, to destroy him without cause.” (Job 2:3 KJV)
Then the Lord said to Satan, “Have you considered my servant Job? There is no one on earth like him; he is blameless and upright, a man who fears God and shuns evil. And he still maintains his integrity, though you incited me against him to ruin him without any reason.” (Job 2:3 NIV)
What sort of “god” gets incited to commit murder by a demon?
Thus in the book of Job, god was an evil dumbass.
Would you have fallen for Satan’s deception?
Of course not, so you are wiser, more discerning and far more moral than the biblical god.
Of course these are things your priest or pastor will never bring up, although they are well-known today among scholars. Just as your priest or pastor won’t bring up the fact that the biblical god commanded the worst crimes known to mankind: slavery, sex slavery including the sexual enslavement of young girls, ethnic cleansing, genocide, matricide, infanticide, and the ghastly stoning to death of children for misdemeanors and non-sins like girls being raped (Deuteronomy 22:23-24).~ Michael R. Burch, Quora
Robert Williams:
This is how their belief system has had its polytheistic roots airbrushed out.
Michael R. Burch:
Yes, but the truth is coming out. The dinosaurs may not admit the truth, but more and more young people will.
Coach:
I find it funny that Christians reference this book when facing trials, tribulation and suffering: “well look what happened to Job and he still had faith!" Yet they overlook some clearly concerning passages that not only allows a "satan” to exist, but quite alright with the destruction it will bring to Job. Imagine if some parents did that to their own kid, just allowed some maniac to wreak havoc on their kid's life on purpose just to hear them say "my parents are still awesome and I love them so much!”...um that would be insane!
This story is clearly poetic and unique. I think lore is the best fit. Are there good lessons within? well sure! Are there really dumb things too? Absolutely! But most concerning is that our kids can be killed then just replaced with more. Imagine that story on the news...man kills kids then replaces them with orphans that need a home.. parents are thankful and joyful ..lol
Richard Guittar:
Just more evidence the whole thing is ancient mythology.
Michael R. Burch:
Richard, I agree.
The primitive authors of the bible were trying to influence the weather, diseases and the outcome of wars with sacrifices. When bad things happened, the gods were angry. The weather was amoral, so the gods were amoral too.
Michael Rushing, the Nazarene:
What kind of God kills Job's children and thinks it cool. This God is a problem and I wouldn't worship him.
Paul Vincent:
Better to worship the Unknown God so derided by St. Paul.
Oriana: JOB'S GOD HAS NO EMPATHY
The emergence of the word “empathy” is critical to our understanding of the Book of Job. The central feature of God’s personality is his huge ego, but even more his complete lack of empathy. Job’s suffering doesn’t mean anything to this deity; he basks in his own greatness as a Creator of such mighty creatures as the Leviathan and the Behemoth, and couldn’t care less about the suffering of Job and his wife when they learn about the death of all their children. 
Blake: the behemoth and the leviathan.
The awkward happy ending, no doubt a late addition, to the effect that Job recovered both his health and wealth, and also took a new wife and new children, obviously doesn’t fit. We want to know why we suffer so much — is there a plan, a purpose? —not the names of Job’s new three daughters, the "fairest in the land." (It is, nevertheless, quite interesting that the names of the new daughters are mentioned, while the names of his first and second wives are not revealed.)
Job's god is a supreme example of Narcissistic Personality Disorder, a Trump on steroids. I am not surprised that when I was growing up, the Catholic church did not allow the laity to read the bible. "Because you might misunderstand," was the official explanation. Now I think it was because of certain shocking stories that were never mentioned in sermons or religion class, Job being at the top of list.
Mary:
I find Jung's idea that Christ died to redeem God for his sins against Job very reasonable and convincing. Yahweh, Job's judge and tormentor, is a narcissistic bully. Without empathy or mercy, or any good reason, he destroys everything Job had, including the slaughtering of his family, presumably as innocent as Job himself. Then that heartless bully spends some time preening about all his powers, Behemoth, the storehouses of frost, Leviathan, just to remind Job how small and powerless he is in comparison. All powerful, God has no need for empathy — he has created all the universe and knows its measure; he rejoices in his own power and wants to dazzle with his splendor.
He is cruel and obnoxious. He has no empathy, no understanding of Job's suffering, because he has not suffered. So, perhaps as Jung sees it, God must become incarnate so that he can suffer...can learn mercy through suffering. Christ redeems Yahweh through becoming man, living and then suffering pain and death, learning the lessons of incarnation and sacrifice. Christ does not brag and bully, he blesses the small and humble, teaches mercy and forgiveness, is born as all men are, lives in the fragility of flesh, suffers torment and the brutal execution of that body.
It is interesting to read the Sermon on the Mount in comparison with Yahweh's long intimidating castigation of Job. The one teaches us how to be blessed, the other scolds the powerless while praising its own supreme power.
Charles: JOB HAS MORE WISDOM THAN GOD
Regarding “The Laughter of Job,” I like this poem more than ever. Laughter in the face of suffering and defying death. This is light-hearted and so profound at the same time. Job has more wisdom than God.
Betcha big bucks that your priest or pastor never told you that David, “the man after god’s own heart” according to christian dogma, had a man-sized idol in his house. We never learned this in Hebrew school either. So interesting that story of Job was allowed in the Bible.
Oriana:
One of the most persistent questions in both Judaism and Christianity is why an all-powerful and all-good god allows “innocent suffering,” e.g. children dying of brain cancer, for instance — the suffering of those children and their parents. The Book of Job offers no satisfying answer — unless we assume that god has made a bet with Satan, and that’s too dark a view. Most likely, the question was so persistent that the Book of Job was admitted to the canon — not because it provides a satisfying answer or any kind of answer, for that matter, but simply because it dares to tackle the subject.
Jung’s view was that after dealing with Job, god understood that Job had a more advanced moral awareness than the Creator.
*
THE DARK SIDE OF GOD: A REVIEW OF JUNG’S ANSWER TO JOB
Regarded by Jung as his most important work, Answer to Job is a tour de force in which classical Christian doctrine is turned upside down: Jung argued that the incarnation of Christ was not to redeem humanity for its sins against God, but to redeem God for his sin against Job.
In the Book of Job it became clear to Jung that Yahweh, though omniscient, had not consulted his own omniscience, remaining ‘unconscious’ of a dark side within himself—i.e. his fallen son Satan. In the language of analytic idealism: mind at large is not meta-cognitive. In almost all of Christian theology the Book of Job is analyzed as an example of God’s mysterious ways, his unfathomable masterplan for the universe. Ergo, Job suffers purposefully, but will never be able to grasp the higher divine reason of his suffering.
Jung concluded exactly the opposite: Yahweh does not have a full picture, he is an amoral force of nature ‘that cannot see its own back.’ Job is morally superior to Yahweh as he does see the inner antinomy within Yahweh. According to Jung, if held up to his own standards, Yahweh had sinned against Job, and Job subtly confronted Yahweh with this fact. This made the incarnation of Christ not a story about the redemption of humanity for its sins against God, but a redemption of God for his sin against Job.
To Hans Busstra, who has a Christian background, this ‘blasphemous’ analysis of Jung made a deep impact, in a positive sense. Though it is highly unlikely that the Church will ever accept Jung’s reading, the new depth he saw in Christian mythology makes the tradition urgently relevant again for this day and age. Nature, God, Mind at Large becomes meta-cognitive through us, and this makes the human experience of crucial importance in our universe.
https://www.essentiafoundation.org/gods-dark-side-a-review-of-jungs-answer-to-job/seeing/
*metacognition = the awareness and understanding of one's own thinking
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A JUNGIAN ANSWER TO YAHWEH AS FREUD
~ The Jew carries the negative image of Yahweh as it has been lived out in the Christian way of life. Thus, the Jew becomes the target of the Christian's dissatisfactions and contradictions in his own life because of the inner split that he has to endure by becoming a Christian and in dealing with God the Father in Christianity.
In other words, the Christian God demands of a disciple that he split the opposites by suggesting that one live the good and right and virtuous life, yet dissociate himself from the "evil side of human nature." Still, the dark side of life with its contradictions are there in the life of the Christian with his God as well as that of the non-believer. Jung's Answer to Job explains this very split or rift in the Christian psyche.
Though this is not clearly stated in Answer to Job, the implication is there.
This would be the logical basis then for anti-Semitism as it is lived out in the psyche of the western Christian. Of course, this is interpreted concretely in a certain theological sense: Since the Jews were those who killed Christ (God incarnate), they deserve the treatment they get!
In fact, Answer to Job is the profound symbolic resolution for Jung of the contradiction in the God image and the specific problem of anti-Semitism for Western man. As James Kirsch notes: "Though Jung may have had some anti-Semitic feelings to some small degree, overall, he was not anti-Semitic and in fact worked out his aspect of the complex by his work, Answer to Job." (Personal communication.)
To underscore the crucial point of the interpretation offered here, in 1935-36(?), National Socialism was Jung’s symbolic identification with a displaced aggressor, to balance the dominating image of Freud who was the dominating "Yahweh" in his life. That is, as Yahweh dominated Job archetypally, so Jung experienced that same powerful archetypal energy in this personal relationship with Freud.
Hence, by identifying with National Socialism, he picked a third and powerful ally with which to counteract the forces of that archetypal, symbolic, and personal pressure. Since Jung had not at the time of his relationship with Freud, and certainly in later years when National Socialism came on the scene, been able to understand this consciously, he briefly fell into the trap of some anti-Semitic leanings. This approach, of course, was still unstable and incomplete. It was only later, with the writing of Answer to Job, that a resolution was worked out.
From an objective point of view, though, it must be emphatically stated that basically Jung was not anti-Semitic. (There is a good deal of evidence to back this proposition.)
What is most powerful and awe inspiring about his Answer to Job is that it reveals finally how he was able to liberate himself from the relationship with Freud as well as from his own father. He shows this in the symbolic relationship of Yahweh to Job; by using the collective images from Western culture, both Hebraic and Christian, the way out of this dilemma was through the feminine, i.e., the symbolic feminine mirrored in Sophia and Mary.
This, of course, was one of the major points made in the second half of Answer to Job and needs to be seen in that perspective.
Applying those archetypal insights in Answer to Job to the Freud-Jung relationship, it discloses what precisely was missing in that relationship: the Feminine.
Jung was an analyst who founded his own school because the theory of cure which he learned from Freud was not adequate. What was that theory of cure? Put into concise terms, it was simply that ultimately cure in the analytic process, the psychotherapeutic process in depth, comes down to being one of a symbolic inner resolution of conflicting forces.
In a sense, Jung's life as well as theory of therapy point out very clearly that ultimately the personal elements of the transference can perhaps never be completely resolved; or, even if they are, they do not in fact often effect a cure. Cure here is being used in a general sense to include even Jung's concept of individuation, i.e., to take an individual to the highest potential development in his or her life. This, of course, would include conflict resolution of symptoms.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/26303702?read-now=1&seq=7#page_scan_tab_contents
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DON’T KNOW WHAT YOU WANT TO DO? IMPROVE THESE SEVEN SKILLS
Don't worry, no one knows what they really want and there are still ways we can help each other.
What does success look like? What do you want from life? What career do you want?
Most of us answer “I don’t know.”
And you know what? There’s nothing wrong with that. And yet, we think it’s the worst thing in the world if you don’t know what you want to do in life.
We say: “OMG! I don’t know what I want!” And then we have a full-on panic attack. Be honest — it happens to all of us.
Especially when you see that your old college friend just got married. Or that your co-worker, who started at the same time as you, just got promoted.
It’s at those moments of weakness when we shine a spotlight on our own uncertainty about life.
One of the biggest thinking errors that I’ve made was that I thought I needed to know what I exactly wanted to do with my life. The truth is that no one knows what they truly want.
Accept The Uncertainty
You could get killed by a cow tomorrow (really happened). You could lose half of your money on the stock market. Your property could go up in flames.
I don’t have to tell you all those things. But we must realize that we don’t have the answers to most things in life.
Will you stay healthy? Will the stock market crash? Will your business continue to prosper?
NO ONE KNOWS!
That’s the beauty of life. Eleanor Roosevelt said it best: “If life were predictable it would cease to be life, and be without flavor.”
Some people ask me, “Why do you read so many books? There’s no way you can apply everything you learn.”
They are right. I cannot. Why do I still read about all kinds of different topics?
There might come a time in my life where I will need one particular piece of knowledge. And that one time I need it might just change the whole outcome of my life.
I‘ll give you an example. In 2015, after my friends and mentors told me I should share my ideas about productivity, life, and business with others, I seriously started thinking about doing it.
But there are many ways you can share your knowledge with others. You can give training to groups and host seminars. You can coach people individually. You can create videos for YouTube. You can give talks at conferences. The possibilities are endless.
But because I’ve always had an interest in writing and had read so much about it in the past, I realized that I should start with written ideas. That was the easiest way for me to get started.
I had also learned all about creating websites in the past. So it was very easy for me to get started with all of this. In fact, I created a website in a day.
And I started writing every day for a month. The result? A book and a bunch of articles.
Know Your Direction, Not Your Destination.
When I read about writing and building websites years ago, I didn’t know I would use that knowledge to build my own blog.
To be honest, I didn’t know what I wanted. I only knew what direction I wanted to go in. I knew I wanted to make a contribution and do work that I enjoyed.
So it’s not important to know exactly what you want to do with your life. People change. Economies change. So, it’s not even realistic to boldly claim “I know what I want!”
The only thing every person needs is a sense of direction. A vision of where you’d like to go.
Look, you don’t need to know your exact destination.
You often read about people who say they always knew what they wanted.
But that’s just a small portion of the population. I’ve personally never met someone like that.
Most of us don’t have that conviction from day one. It grows over time.
If you can’t decide what direction you want to go in life, that’s automatically your #1 goal in life — to figure out where you want to go.
That’s what Jay Abraham also recommends in Getting Everything You Can Out of All You’ve Got (which is one of my favorite business books of all time):
“Your first priority is to identify what you want and then make sure you take the path that’s going to give you that. There’s nothing sadder than to see someone get to be seventy-five or eighty years old and look back regrettably because they pursued the wrong target.”
You see that he doesn’t say you should know exactly what you want? That would not be realistic.
Instead, we need to roughly know where we’re going. I know, it remains intangible. But that’s the only helpful answer that I’ve found in life.
Work On Universal Skills
While you’re figuring everything out, don’t waste your time watching hours of TV, drinking booze, or eating junk food. Spend your time usefully.
Learn skills you can always rely on. Need some inspiration? Here are a few skills that I’m constantly working on:
Self-Discipline: Get better at ignoring the negative voice in your head. Get out of your bed. Go to the gym. Don’t listen to “I don’t want to.”
Personal Effectiveness: Learn how to maximize the results you can get during the 16–18 hours you’re awake. Get more done — effectively.
Communication: We think we’re all master communicators. But the truth is that we suck.
Communication is both art and science. And our ability to work with others depends on it.
Negotiation: You negotiate all the time. With your spouse, kids, parents, teachers, friends, co-workers, managers, etc. Learn to get the best deal for all parties.
Persuasion: Learn how to get what you want in an ethical way.
Physical Strength & Stamina: Getting stronger is a skill. Pull your own weight. It’s something every human should be able to do.
Flexibility: Sitting all day long behind your computer or in your car turns you into a stiff being. Learn how to stretch your hips, lower back, hamstrings, and calves — the most common weak points of desk workers.
That’s enough to keep you busy for a lifetime if you want to do it well. Pick a skill that excites you. Get better at it. Then, pick another. And keep on repeating that process.
Soon enough, you’ll know what you want. And if you don’t, it’s not the end of the world. There’s still plenty to learn. ~ Darius Foroux
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/don-t-know-what-you-want-improve-these-7-universal-skills?utm_source=firefox-newtab-en-us
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Proust says, "Beautiful books are written in a kind of foreign language. Under every word each of us puts its meaning or at least its image, which is often a contradiction. But in beautiful books all the counter-meanings we make are beautiful.”
This is the right way to read: all contradictions are good, provided they do not consist of interpretations, but concern the use of the book, multiply the use of it, and make another language within the language. “Beautiful books are written in a kind of foreign language…”
~ Gilles Deleuze
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ALDRIDGE AMES: THE MOST DAMAGING DOUBLE AGENT
Aldrich Ames spent nearly a decade selling secret information to the Soviet Union, compromising more than 100 clandestine operations, and leading to the deaths of at least 10 Western intelligence assets. On 28 April 1994, the double agent was jailed for life. In February of that year, the BBC spoke to one of the spies who was betrayed by Ames, but who lived to tell the tale.
In 1985, Soviet agents working for the CIA suddenly began to disappear. One by one, these Western intelligence sources were picked up by the Soviet intelligence service, the KGB, interrogated and, very often, executed.
Oleg Gordievsky was one of those double agents. As the KGB's station chief in London, he had been secretly working for the UK's foreign intelligence service, MI6, for years. But one day he found himself in Moscow, drugged, exhausted after five hours of questioning, and facing the very real possibility of death by firing squad. Gordievsky narrowly escaped with his life after MI6 smuggled him out of the Soviet Union in the trunk of a car.
Afterwards, Gordievsky tried to work out who had given him up. "For nearly nine years I have been guessing who was the man, who was the source who betrayed me, and I didn't know any answer," he told the BBC's Tom Mangold in an interview with Newsnight on 28 February 1994. Two months later, Gordievsky would get his answer when veteran CIA officer Aldrich Ames stood up in a US courtroom, and confessed to compromising "virtually all Soviet agents of the CIA and other American and foreign services known to me."
On 28 April 1994, Ames admitted that he had divulged the identities of more than 30 agents spying for the West, and compromised more than 100 clandestine operations. Known to the KGB by his code name, Kolokol (The Bell), Ames's betrayal had resulted in the execution of at least 10 CIA intelligence assets including General Dmitri Polyakov, a senior official in Soviet army intelligence, who had supplied information to the West for more than 20 years. Ames, the most damaging KGB mole in US history, was convicted and sentenced to life without parole.
Just as British spy Kim Philby's exposure as a Soviet agent in the 1960s had rocked the UK establishment, it was "now Washington's turn to stare in disbelief at the extent of Ames's damage", said Mangold in 1994.
It gave him almost unfettered access to classified information about the US's covert operations against the USSR and, crucially, the identities of its agents in the field. Ames's position had also meant that he could sit in on debriefings from other Western spy agencies. This is how the UK's most valuable spy, Gordievsky, a KGB colonel who was passing vital intelligence to two British services, MI6 and MI5, came into contact with him. These meetings would create the outlandish situation wherein "the top KGB defector was debriefed by the top KGB mole", said Mangold.
"The Americans were very thorough and really very good at debriefings," said Gordievsky. "I was enthusiastic. I liked the Americans. I wanted to share my knowledge with them, and now I realize [Ames] was sitting there. Which means that everything, all the new answers of my information, he must have passed to the KGB."
Alcohol and divorce
Ames had been exposed to the spy world at an early age. His father was a CIA analyst who helped his son get a job at the Agency after he had dropped out of college. But Ames's later decision to betray the intelligence service would be driven less by ideological misgivings as by his need for money.
Initially, Ames showed promise as a counterintelligence officer. He was first posted with his wife Nancy Segebarth, a fellow CIA agent, to Turkey in the late 1960s, where he was tasked with recruiting foreign agents. But by 1972 his superiors had called Ames back to CIA headquarters, feeling that he wasn't cut out for field work. Back in the US, he studied Russian, and was assigned to planning field operations against Soviet officials.
His father's struggles with alcohol had stalled his CIA career, and, similarly, Ames's own heavy drinking began to derail his progress. In 1972, he was discovered by another agent, intoxicated and in a compromising position with a female CIA employee. The situation was not helped by Ames's lackadaisical attitude to work, which saw him leave a briefcase full of classified information on a subway in 1976.
In an effort to get his career back on track, Ames accepted a second overseas posting to Mexico City in 1981, while his wife stayed at home in New York. But his behavior and continued excessive drinking meant that he failed to distinguish himself as a CIA officer. In 1981, he was involved in a traffic accident in Mexico City, and was so inebriated that he was unable to answer the police's questions or even recognize a US embassy officer sent to help him. After a particular drunken profanity-laden argument with a Cuban official at a diplomatic reception at the embassy, his superior recommended the CIA assess him for alcohol addiction on his return to the US.
Ames also continued to engage in extramarital affairs, one of which would prove to be a turning point for him. Toward the end of 1982, he began a relationship with a Colombian cultural attaché recruited to work for the CIA, Maria del Rosario Casas Dupuy. Their romance grew increasingly serious until Ames decided to divorce his first wife, marry Rosario and bring her back to the US with him.
Despite his less than stellar performance at the CIA, Ames continued to fail upwards. On his return to the Agency's headquarters in 1983, he was made counterintelligence branch chief for Soviet operations, giving him widespread access to information about clandestine CIA activities.
Ames had agreed as part of his divorce settlement to Nancy to pay the debts they had accrued as a couple, as well as paying monthly support. Compounded by his new wife Rosario's expensive tastes, her love of shopping sprees and her frequent phone calls to her family in Colombia, Ames's money problems spiraled out of control. He would later tell Arizona senator Dennis DeConcini that it was his escalating debts that led him to contemplate selling the secrets he had access to. "I felt a great deal of financial pressure, which, in retrospect, I was clearly overreacting to," Ames said.
BETRAYING HIS COUNTRY
"It was about the money, and I don't think he ever really tried to lead anybody to believe it was anything more than that," FBI agent Leslie G Wiser, who was involved in the investigation that led to Ames's arrest, told the BBC's Witness History in 2015.
On 16 April 1985, having had a few drinks to build up his courage, Ames walked straight into the Russian embassy in Washington DC. Once inside, he passed the receptionist an envelope containing the names of some double agents, documents showing his credentials as a CIA insider, and a note demanding $50,000. He would claim in a Senate report that he had initially believed this to be a one-time deal to get him out of his financial black hole, but he soon realized that he had "crossed a line, [and] I could never step back.”
For the next nine years, Ames was paid to pass over a wealth of top secret information to the KGB. He would take classified documents – detailing everything from listening devices connected to Moscow's space facility to new state-of-the-art technology that was able to count Soviet missiles' nuclear warheads – wrap them in plastic bags, and simply carry them out of the CIA. Since his role involved official meetings with Russian diplomats, he was often able to meet his handlers face-to-face without arousing suspicion. He would also leave packets of classified documents in secret pre-arranged sites called dead drops.
"If he was going to make a dead drop, earlier he would place a chalk mark on a mailbox, for instance, and the Russians would see that chalk mark, and then they would know that the drop had been loaded with the documents," said Wiser. "Later, when they retrieved the documents, they would go and erase the chalk mark. He would then know that the transfer of documents was done safely and securely."
It was through Ames's leaking of secret intelligence information that the KGB would identify virtually all of the CIA's spies in the Soviet Union, effectively shutting down its US covert operations there. "I'm not aware of any other spy or mole in the US that has caused such a loss of human life in terms of human assets," said Wiser. The sudden disappearance of so many CIA assets did raise alarms and trigger the search for the mole within the Agency in 1986, but Ames would continue to slip under the radar for the best part of a decade.
For the next nine years, Ames was paid to pass over a wealth of top secret information to the KGB. He would take classified documents – detailing everything from listening devices connected to Moscow's space facility to new state-of-the-art technology that was able to count Soviet missiles' nuclear warheads – wrap them in plastic bags, and simply carry them out of the CIA. Since his role involved official meetings with Russian diplomats, he was often able to meet his handlers face-to-face without arousing suspicion. He would also leave packets of classified documents in secret pre-arranged sites called dead drops.
Ames is the highest-ranking CIA officer ever to be exposed as a double agent
And he was paid handsomely for his treachery, receiving a total of about $2.5 million from the Soviet Union. Ames made little attempt to hide his newfound wealth. Despite never having a salary of more than $70,000 a year, he bought a new $540,000 house in cash, spent tens of thousands of dollars on home improvements and purchased a Jaguar car. It would be his lavish lifestyle and spending that would place him in the spotlight, and lead to his eventual arrest by Wiser's FBI team in 1994.
After he was picked up by the FBI, Ames cooperated with the authorities. He detailed the extent of his spying activities in exchange for a plea deal that secured a lenient sentence for Rosario, who admitted that she had known about the cash and his meetings with the Soviets. She was released after five years. Ames, the highest-ranking CIA officer ever to be exposed as a double agent, continues to serve out his life sentence at a US federal penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana.
To this day, Ames has shown very little remorse for his actions or for the deaths that they led to. "He had a very high opinion of himself," said Wiser about Ames. "He regrets getting caught. He doesn't regret being a spy.”
https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20250424-how-aldrich-ames-became-the-uss-most-damaging-double-agent
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“It is right that he too should have his little chronicle, his memories, his reason, and be able to recognize the good in the bad, the bad in the worst, and so grow gently old down all the unchanging days, and die one day like any other day, only shorter.” ~ Beckett, "Malone Dies"
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THE ODD PERSONALITY OF THE PHYSICIST PAUL DIRAC (ASPERGER’S SYNDROME?)
The expression “the strangest man” is a quote from the Danish physicist Niels Bohr after their meeting in Copenhagen. A bond was formed between the two, first professional and then human. One anecdote (among many) concerns the English genius and the Danish physicist.
Dirac's writing was famous for its clarity and simplicity. When Bohr was writing a scientific article, which presented many hesitations and uncertainties, he stopped and said “I don't know how to go on.” Then Dirac replied “I was taught in school that you should never start a sentence without knowing the end of it.”
His way of living in society was the reflection of his logically precise and impeccable way of thinking. One dinner companion addressed him saying “nice evening, isn't it?”. Dirac stood up, went to check the weather at the window and returned to the table with a laconic “Yes.”
Being a theoretical physicist, Dirac loved to theorize about the problems of everyday life. Once, at a party in Copenhagen, he proposed a theory according to which there was a certain distance at which a woman’s face appeared at its best. At infinite distance one cannot see anything, while at a distance d=0 the oval of the face is deformed due to the small aperture of the human eye plus many other imperfections. Gamow (a Russian physicist), interrupting, asked how close he had ever seen a woman’s face. Dirac, holding his palms about a meter apart, exclaimed “About that close!”
Another very famous anecdote involving Dirac is when, at the end of a lecture given at the University of Toronto, he asked if there were any questions. Someone in the audience said “Professor Dirac, I don’t understand how you derived the formula in the upper left part of the blackboard”. The icy response was not long in coming: “This is not a question, it is an observation. Next question please.”
Apathetic and taciturn, he was also awkward with the female gender. When in 1929 he traveled with Heisenberg on a transatlantic liner to Japan, he saw his traveling companion constantly flirting and dancing with girls; “Why are you dancing?” asked Dirac. “When there are pretty girls it is always a pleasure” was the answer he received. After a few moments of reflection Dirac replied “But Heisenberg, how do you know in advance that girls are pretty?”
Another story told of Dirac is that when he first met the young Richard Feynman at a conference, he said after a long silence, "I have an equation. Do you have one too?"
He displayed an almost contempt for philosophy, literature and poetry. Of the latter he said that if science is the attempt to say in comprehensible words things that people did not know before, poetry is saying something that everyone already knows in words that no one can understand.
He was also refractory to any religious faith or belief in the transcendent, he commented by saying that he could not understand why people were discussing religion; scientists must be honest and admit that religion is a mixture of false assertions with no basis in reality. He said, however, that God had used extraordinary mathematics to create the world, so much so that, with amusing irony, the Austrian physicist Wolfgang Pauli thus summarized the bizarre scientist's credo: "God does not exist and Dirac is his prophet."
~ Alessandro13, Quora
Asperger's Syndrome (AS) is a diagnostic label that has historically been used to describe a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by significant difficulties in social interaction and nonverbal communication, along with restricted, repetitive patterns of behavior and interests. Asperger syndrome has been merged with other conditions into autism spectrum disorder.
The syndrome was named in 1976 by English psychiatrist Lorna Wing after the Austrian pediatrician Hans Asperger, who, in 1944, described children in his care who struggled to form friendships, did not understand others' gestures or feelings, engaged in one-sided conversations about their favorite interests, and were clumsy. (Wikipedia)
More on Dirac and religion:
"One could perhaps describe the situation by saying that God is a mathematician of a very high order, and He used very advanced mathematics in constructing the universe."
Dirac explained that the existence of God could be justified only if an improbable event were to have taken place in the past:
It could be that it is extremely difficult to start life. It might be that it is so difficult to start a life that it has happened only once among all the planets... Let us consider, just as a conjecture, that the chance of life starting when we have got suitable physical conditions is 10−100. I don't have any logical reason for proposing this figure, I just want you to consider it as a possibility. Under those conditions ... it is almost certain that life would not have started. And I feel that under those conditions it will be necessary to assume the existence of a god to start off life.
I would like, therefore, to set up this connection between the existence of a god and the physical laws: if physical laws are such that to start off life involves an excessively small chance so that it will not be reasonable to suppose that life would have started just by blind chance, then there must be a god, and such a god would probably be showing his influence in the quantum jumps which are taking place later on. On the other hand, if life can start very easily and does not need any divine influence, then I will say that there is no god. (Wikipedia)
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EXPERTS ALARMED BY CHINA’S ENORMOUS ARMY OF ROBOTS
As Donald Trump's trade war brings new levels of uncertainty to American manufacturing sector, one issue seems to have been vastly overlooked: China's massive legion of robot workers.
New reporting by the New York Times on Chinese robotics is shedding light on the enormous scale of automation happening across the Pacific. The article highlights the fact that China is currently one of the most automated countries in the world, with more capacity than the US, Germany, or even Japan — and more robots per worker than any other country besides South Korea and Singapore.
Automation on such a massive scale enables Chinese factories to pump out consumer and industrial goods at ever-decreasing costs, while fine-tuning product quality.
The US, by comparison, is quickly falling behind in robotics. In the past years, American manufacturing has shifted from consumer and industrial goods to high-tech products like airplanes, medical devices, and advanced machinery. These gigs call for highly specialized skills that can't easily be turned over to robot underlings — at least, not without dramatically shifting our robotics industry away from pie-in-the-sky startups to practical manufacturing efforts.
As it turns out, that's exactly what China did to become the robo-mecca, starting in 2015 with a national strategy called "Made in China 2025." As the name implies, the government-led effort laid out performance and quality benchmarks for Chinese manufacturing to hit by this current year, including in sectors like shipbuilding, electric vehicles, and high-speed rail.
Among the goals was capacity to produce 100,000 industrial robots a year, according to the state-run outlet China Daily. A recent report by the International Federation of Robotics found that between 2022 and 2023, China deployed over 276,00 roboworkers — over half of all robots installed throughout the globe, and the second highest annual industrial robotics deployment ever recorded.
Further complicating things for the US is unique access to heavy rare earth metals, which are crucial for high-tech manufacturing, particularly robotics. US factories are heavily reliant on these materials, giving China a huge bargaining chip in Trump's trade war.
Case in point, China halted the export of rare metals to the US earlier this month in response to Trump's tariffs — prompting an outcry from his close ally Elon Musk, who said it would hinder his own robotics efforts — on top of other measures meant to strengthen Beijing's position at the negotiating table.
Weeks later, Trump made the announcement that threatened tax rates on Chinese goods will "come down substantially," suggesting that the Chinese government played their cards well.
It'll likely be a while before we see who emerges the victor of this trade war, if anyone really "wins" at all. But if US leaders want to get serious about stepping up their manufacturing game, it seems there's one obvious choice: stop quarrelling, and start cooperating with the clear winner in the robotics arms race.
https://futurism.com/china-robot-army-tariffs?utm_source=firefox-newtab-en-us
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HOW DEMONOLOGY WON THE 2024 ELECTION
In the days leading up to the 2024 presidential election, Donald Trump accused the Democratic Party of being “demonic,” said that former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was an “evil, sick, crazy” word-that-starts-with-a-B (“Buh-,” he teased), and openly fantasized about his enemies being shot. These statements aligned with the Trump campaign’s final messaging push about enemies within and enemies at the gates.
Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally, held a week before the election, embodied this spirit; speakers called Democratic nominee Kamala Harris “the devil” and “the antichrist” and described the “whole fucking” Democratic Party as “a bunch of degenerates,” among other invectives.
The fact that Trump won swiftly and decisively, and beyond that, gained votes across almost every demographic group despite all the vitriol and controversy that swirled in the lead-up to November 5, seems to point to a powerful and growing cult of personality. We make a very different argument in our book, “The Shadow Gospel.” Trump hasn’t built a cult of personality.
Trump has inherited a cult of demonology, the origins of which extend back to the Cold War and center on a shape-shifting liberal devil mapped sometimes onto nefarious “elites,” sometimes onto economic leftism (which also rails against elites, but that’s just details), sometimes onto the institutional Democratic Party, and sometimes, simply, onto things demonologists don’t like. This is a devil that spans partisan lines and defies logical coherence.
Throughout the 2024 campaign, Trump and his surrogates, boosted by a sprawling rightwing media apparatus, seized every opportunity to highlight how the family, God, conservatives, and America were endangered by the liberal devil. All discursive roads inevitably lead back to that threat: what the liberal-leftist-elite-Democrat-Marxist them was doing to pull the country into hell, a framing that simultaneously allowed Trump to position himself as the nation’s savior.
To tell this story, especially after the July 2024 near-miss attempt on Trump’s life in Butler, Pennsylvania, Trump would at times use explicitly religious symbolism and visuals. He posted one such image to X, formerly Twitter, of the Archangel Michael, a stand-in for Trump, raising a sword to slay Satan, a stand-in for Trump’s enemies.
More often, Trump and his allies cast off religious rhetoric entirely to make wholly secular claims about liberals’ corrosive influence in schools, Big Tech, media, and the government. Whether forwarded by Trump or his MAGA faithful, whether outright religious or secular, these claims typically had very little to do with policy. In fact, the less specific detail or evidence the claims contained, the better, including what, exactly, made someone one of the liberal them.
As incessant as it was in its messaging about liberal/leftist evil, indeed as disciplined as it was in that messaging, the Trump campaign was not pursuing a conventional electoral strategy centered on broad public outreach. Trump stuck to MAGA-friendly audiences. He did not actively court swing voters. He simply wasn’t focused on persuading lots of different kinds of people to vote for him.
Instead, he focused on making the liberal devil bigger by attaching its threat to more people (anyone who challenged Trump) and more places on the map (anywhere that didn’t support Trump) and more ideas (anything that didn’t align with Trumpism). The center became the left. The right became the left (the “wrong” kind of right, anyway; just ask Liz Cheney). And it all needed to be vanquished. If anti-liberal demonology were a normal electoral strategy, then Trump and his deputies could put down their swords, having handily slain their devil.
But for demonologists, the enemy is never vanquished. Once one issue or group of people is crushed, the threat will simply hop to another issue or group. There will always be more liberals to fight.
As scholars watching this unfold in real time, we were struck by just how old these “new” developments really were. So many of the things that were assumed to be new lows, or at least new weirdnesses, during the last few months can be traced back 10, 20, 50, 80 years, including claims that centrist politicians are Communists, the equation of diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts with the apocalypse, and endless talk about Satan among us, particularly when that talk is secular.
The collapsing of religious and secular messaging has a similarly long history. For decades, claims about threats to Christians, Christmas, or children have been filtered through cable television and other mass media. Sometimes these messages retain their religious focus; sometimes they don’t mention God at all.
However sanded-down their Christian references, the messages carry all the weight and moral authority of a sermon from the pulpit or passage from the Bible. The result, which we chronicle throughout the book, isn’t just to attack “liberals,” however that term might be defined. It’s to fundamentally undermine theological Christianity and ideological conservatism. Demonology is the bipartisan enemy of anything that is grounded.
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So what exactly is happening? We call the not-quite-religion on display the shadow gospel. The gospel part of the shadow gospel refers to 80 years of densely overlapping messages about a historically ungrounded, hyperbolized liberal devil.
Three frames shape the gospel’s messages. The first is outright conspiracism, which posits cadres of scheming liberals in the government or within institutions such as journalism, with granular detail given to the alleged plots and ringleaders themselves. Outright conspiratorial messages are most likely to be designated as “extreme” and tend to be most salient within far-right networks, though they also filter into mainstream conservative spaces.
The second is the anti-frame, which forwards staunch if abstract opposition to all things liberal, whether those things are described as such by self-identifying liberals or are coded as liberal by conservatives. Anti-messages are predicated on grievance, feed into narratives about beleaguered conservatives, and are a recurring focus of rightwing media.
The third is the pro-frame, which is expressed as positive support for ideals such as the family, freedom, and America. These messages are least obviously partisan and most likely to spread beyond rightwing circles.
The shadow part of the shadow gospel refers to the versions of conservatism and Christianity that have been conjured through anti-liberal messages. Just as a shadow is tethered to but cannot be equated with the solid object casting it, the shadow gospel is tethered to but cannot be equated with conservative ideology or Christian theology. What emerged in the mid-century media environment and expanded over the decades is a shadow realm of false histories and half-truths that uses the language of faith and family — and caricatures of what a liberal is — to exalt the category of “real” Americans, to hell with everyone else.
Our analysis begins with mid-century Evangelical and rightwing activist — and later, institutional Republican — networks because that is where shadow gospel messages first emerged and thrived. Although the messages were swiftly adopted toward partisan political ends (namely, to help elect more Republicans), they were not the product of partisan politics.
Their origins were, instead, strikingly nonpartisan. It is therefore unsurprising that, in the end, the messages that eventually were politicized did not stay confined to the political right; and neither did their implications. Shadow gospel messages have also circulated widely within the political left — at least, what gets called “the left.”
The relationship between left and right is central to the story we’re telling. But the polarization frame, which posits a basic coherence and enduring essence to “left” and “right,” misses something important when it attributes the chaos of the U.S. political landscape to intensifying clashes between leftwing liberals and rightwing conservatives. People are obviously clashing, and intensely. Our claim is that the left/right polarization framework does not fully explain why.
The shadow gospel helps tell a clearer story about that clash. It begins with (but ultimately deviates from) the conventional account of Evangelical influence. That account goes like this. vangelicals were an untapped but increasingly powerful voting bloc that would give the Party In the 1970s, very conservative Republican and Evangelical leaders came together to push the Republican Party platform toward more conservative positions on issues like abortion and same sex marriage. This was an advantageous arrangement for both groups; Republicans benefited because Evangelics gave them an electoral advantage, and Evangelicals benefited because it put them and their interpretation of biblical teachings in the driver’s seat of policy-making. The synergy between Evangelicals and Republicans is what allowed Evangelicalism’s “Three Bs” of belonging, belief, and behavior to remake U.S. politics.
The unquestionable influence of Evangelicalism is, quite literally, where the book project started on January 6, 2021. Like many people in the United States and around the world, we were both trying to make sense of the violence and chaos at the U.S. Capitol as it unfolded. But the more we talked about the role of religion, or at least the role of Christian symbology, within rightwing political networks, the more we realized that there was something strange about the relationship between religious and secular media, and something even stranger about the relationship between religious and secular belief.
The conversations that followed uncovered another oddity: the anomalies generated by the conventional account of Evangelical influence. Most conspicuous is the fact that since the early 1980s — the time of Evangelical Christianity’s supposed rise in cultural influence — Evangelicalism has remained stagnant in terms of the number of believers. Measured as a percentage of the population, there are no more Evangelicals today than there were in the 1980s; Evangelicals now, as then, make up about a quarter of the population. Evangelicals have not even grown as a percentage of the Republican Party since the Reagan era. What has changed is the secular population, which has risen sharply since the 1980s.
The numbers suggest that the last 40 years have been a conversion and outreach failure for Evangelicals, rather than a period of increasing influence and power. Indeed, the only significant rise in Evangelical identification during the last four decades came under the Trump presidency, but, critically, that was not accompanied by a similar rise in church attendance.
Further, while activists might have been able to link Republican Party machinery with Evangelical leadership during the 1970s, the full fusing of Republican and Evangelical identity within the churchgoing public didn’t happen until the 1990s. This is to say nothing of how improbable the forging of Republicanism with Evangelicalism was in the 1970s; it might seem like a natural fit from our contemporary perspective, but pre-Reagan Republicans and Evangelicals were far from monolithic.
The idea that a few rightwing activists single-handedly changed the course of U.S. politics in the 1970s is compelling, but is complicated by the fact that these same activists were unable to make overwhelming electoral headway for another 20 years. Social science research conducted by Clyde Wilcox in the 1980s adds to this complication. In his study of the Religious Right, Wilcox identified significant demographic and attitudinal similarities between Christian rightwingers of the 1950s and the Religious Right of 1980s that couldn’t have been engendered by Republican organizing because it predated that organizing by decades. Wilcox’s work suggests that the Republican Party inherited a powerful (if ideologically slippery) coalition, but can’t be credited with building it.
What became clear to us was that the existing stories — about Evangelicalism and about rightwing activism — were incomplete. Something besides Evangelical believers, churches, and theological tenets themselves had powered Evangelical influence within the Republican Party and U.S. culture. The argument we developed over the subsequent two years was that a gospel had fueled the relationship between the religious and the secular; a gospel had fundamentally shaped, and was continuing to shape, the American landscape.
But it wasn’t the church gospel. What looks like “church gospel” Evangelicalism is often just the shadow gospel in disguise.
The prognosis our book offers isn’t a good one. What it provides, we hope, is a way to make sense of what just happened, starting with the insight that Trump’s victory wasn’t actually a victory for Trump. It was a victory for demonology. As a mode of thinking and political ethos, demonology can be resisted. But it has to be identified as a possessing spirit first.
https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/how-demonology-won-the-2024-election/
from Amazon:
When people talk about the chaotic, increasingly precarious political landscape in the United States, they often blame polarization and the culture wars. In The Shadow Gospel, Whitney Phillips and Mark Brockway tell a very different story. Analyzing eighty years of densely overlapping religious and secular messages preaching the dangers of liberalism, the book argues that the fracture and chaos in U.S. politics isn’t the result of a clean split between left and right. Instead, it’s a split between the shadow gospel’s quasi-religious anti-liberal demonology—the vague sense that an evil leftist force is threatening to destroy American society—and the people accused of being the liberal devil.
A shadow gospel framework helps contextualize the violence of January 6, 2021, the fervor of Satanic conspiracy theorizing, and the crusade against “wokeness” and LGBTQ existence. But it also helps explain the most vexing elements of our politics: that the most potent source of religious messaging and influence in the United States is secular, that the most ruthless destroyers of Republicans are other Republicans, and that anti-liberal fear and loathing span the political spectrum.
By offering new ways of thinking about religious influence, the left/right dichotomy, and the appeal of Donald Trump, The Shadow Gospel reveals the true roadblocks to pluralistic democracy and emphasizes what people across the religious and political spectrum stand to lose if we don’t exorcise our anti-liberal demons.
There are no easy solutions to our vast and complicated political problems. But those solutions will remain elusive if how we frame our problems is part of the problem. It is long past time to drag the shadow gospel out into the light.
Oriana:
It’s been not years but decades since I first heard the call to abolish the Electoral College, impose term limits on the justices of the Supreme Court, and reform the Senate and the Congress — and yet nothing happens. A strange sense of helplessness seems to prevail, while the country has become, in anything but name, the Divided States of America.
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YOUNG MEN ARE STRUGGLING
Young men in the US are struggling. There's no shortage of statistics – about academic achievement, income levels, loneliness, even lack of sex – which indicate that the boys are not alright. Compared to young women, boys are getting left behind.
But even having the conversation about how to tackle the young man crisis is complicated, and can leave girls feeling, well, put out. After all, girls and women have had centuries of inbuilt disadvantages to contend with, don't they finally deserve a moment to shine?
Add in the bad actors online, those who try to spin the plight of struggling young men into a zero-sum rallying cry for vengeance against women, and the conversation becomes trickier still.
One person trying to bring the discussion into a more positive space, for young men and women alike, is Scott Galloway, a professor at New York University who's become a media powerhouse in recent years. He hosts several podcasts – including Lost Boys, which debuts in May. He's now counseling the Democratic Party on messaging around boys and men. And he has a new book coming out this autumn, titled Notes on Being a Man.
I wanted to talk to Scott about what's going on with young men today and how all of this affects the lives of young women.
We had a really thought-provoking conversation.
Katty Kay: Set out the landscape for me on why you're looking at men, what the crisis is as you see it in the mental and physical health of young men.
Scott Galloway: Look, the data's overwhelming: Four times as likely to kill themselves. Three times as likely to be addicted, 12 times as likely to be incarcerated. Record levels of depression. We're raising the most obese, anxious and depressed generation in history. For the first time, a 30-year-old isn't doing as well as his or her parents were at 30. Women are making more money in urban centers under the age of 30 than men. And by the way, I think that's a wonderful thing. I think that's a sign of victory and [there's] also more women-owned single homes than men. I don't think we should do anything to get in the way of that.
While loneliness is an issue for both genders, it seems to be especially hard, or a lack of a romantic relationship seems to be especially damaging, for a young man. Women tend to channel some of that romantic energy if they don't have it into their friendships and into the professional career, whereas men tend to, young men tend to channel it into things like video games or porn – or begin sequestering from society. So, we just have a group of emotionally and economically unviable young men.
And just on a personal level, I sort of relate to it because I was one of those men. And had it not been for just some of the incredible offerings of America, access to affordable higher education. And I've been very open about this, my mother had access to family planning. My mother got pregnant at 47, and had we not had access to family planning and my mum had been forced to carry a baby to term, I would have not gone to college. I would have done what I should have done. I was the only man of the house.
KK: I want to look at this from the point of view of what this means for girls: A third of American women now earn more than their partners. But according to my research, and I've spent quite a lot of time writing books about women and girls, in couples where the wife earns more than the husband, they will often lie about it in the US census data to make it look like the man earns more than the wife. So, what does it mean for couples navigating a situation where women are doing better, earning more, getting better educated while men are falling behind?
SG: Men have not kept pace in terms of picking up the slack. If they're not adding as much economically, are they picking up the slack emotionally or logistically or domestically around the house? And the reality is, the man's contribution to the relationship, in general, has not kept pace with the woman's ascent and increased contribution. So, basically, women are just sort of doing the math and saying, I'm not getting as much out of this. So, I'm opting out. Two-thirds of women under the age of 30 has a boyfriend. One-in-three men has a relationship. Women are dating older because they want more economically and emotionally viable men.
KK: Part of me gets very depressed by this conversation –
SG: Tell me about it!
KK: Does this just not work, then? Is it zero-sum that if women are going to progress financially and educationally, somehow it's not going to work between men and women?
SG: I think there are solutions. I think we should do nothing to get in the way of women being financially independent. I think it's wonderful and women, at the end of the day, should not have to lower their standards. They should be able to reap the rewards of their hard-fought victories, the fact that they work harder, they have better executive function, they're doing well in school, they're footing their skills to an information age economy. Good for them. Go girl. Way to go, sister. Do nothing to get in the way of that.
At the same time, I do think there's a series of programs that would level up young people in general that would create more economic viability such that if two people get together, they're economically viable. And right now, that's not the case.
I think if we raise minimum wage to $25 an hour such that in an economy where unemployment is at historic lows, such that people could just make more money. Mandatory national service such that we could demonstrate heroism and more than anything, I think men and young people need more third places: religious institutions, nonprofit, more freshmen seats, vocational programming, mandatory national service.
Let me throw out a very provocative idea: I think young people need to drink more. There is an anti-alcohol movement that has gotten a lot of purchase. Forty per cent of all nightclubs in London have closed down, because young people don't have money and there's an anti-alcohol movement. I think the risk to the 25-year-old liver of alcohol is dwarfed by the risk of anxiety and social isolation. My advice to young people – and I'm being somewhat humorous here – is to go out, get out of the house more and drink more and make a series of bad decisions that might pay off.
KK: One of the things that we've talked about and written about in our research was this notion of kind of broadening the concept of care and that obviously women are still doing the majority of the housework and the chores and the caregiving for both kids and for elders.
I feel like you are looking at something similar, but in a slightly different way, which is redefining almost the concept of being a provider and a protector. Talk a bit about those two words, because you've done it in a way that I think we're actually getting you and I at something similar, which is understanding what it means to be a provider and a protector in a slightly different way from the traditional words which might be a little off-putting to some women.
SG: I'm trying to figure out a way to thread the needle here. I think everybody needs a code to help them guide them through the thousands of decisions that they make every day professionally and personally. Some people get their code from their church, from their family, from their work, from the military. And I'd like to think that young men, if they're so inclined, could really lean into this notion of masculinity. But we need to define it aspirationally. And I think of it as three very basic pillars: provider, protector and procreator.
Provider: I think every man at the outset of his career in a capitalist society should assume or aim to take economic responsibility for his household. And by the way sometimes that means realizing your partner is better at this whole money thing and being more supportive of her career. When my partner and I had kids, she was working at Goldman Sachs making a lot more money than me. So, I stepped up. I was home for bath time. I organized the house, because I realized how important economic responsibility was for our house.
KK: Did you find that emasculating in any way? Did any part of you struggle with the role of being the sort of primary provider?
SG: A little bit, and also we can talk about this, but the hard reality is and I don't think we want to admit this: I think women are less sexually attracted to men when they lose their economic viability.
Two: protector. I think your default mechanism as a man should be a protector. Men need to be strong. They need to be protectors. Think about the jobs that you think of as being masculine: firemen, cop, military. What do they do? They protect. And it's not only just physical. It breaks my heart that women in New York say they don't feel safe on the subway or that if they see a group of men coming down the sidewalk, they cross the street. We have to train our boys from an early age –
KK: Well, that is physical. I mean that is what we're afraid of.
SG: 100%, but I think it's more than that. I think being a man is when people are gossiping and criticizing other people behind their back, your default mechanism as a man is you defend that person.
You may not agree with the transgender community. You may not think we need a law forcing a third bathroom for corporations. But when you see a community being demonized, your default as a man is to defend, to protect. That's what we do. We protect.
And then let me go to the third thing, procreator. I think sexual desire, want, wanting to find a mate, I think if channeled correctly, that can be a fantastic motivator and means for being a better man.
I mean, what is this all for? We talk about AI, we talk about GDP, we talk about income inequality. The whole point of all of this is so you can establish deep and meaningful relationships. And most people would say the deepest and most meaningful relationships they have are the relationships that have been fostered by finding someone to mate with and their kids. I mean, I'll ask you, what is the most rewarding thing in your life?
KK: Hands down, having four children. Not even a question. It's my relationship with my husband and the four children that we have.
SG: Sixty per cent of 30 year olds had a kid in their house 40 years ago. Now, it's 27%. Is it because they've decided they don't want a family or maybe they can't afford it? Or maybe the dynamics of online dating? And I want to be clear, I love the fact that women are killing it. And I'm not asking women to lower their standards. I'm asking us to raise the viability to level up all young people.
KK: Scott, I appreciate the fact that you're tackling stuff that is awkward, both for men and for women to talk about. But there are bad actors online who are taking some of this disconnect between the achievement levels of young men and young women and turning it into a victim story and turning it into a vengeance story.
A lot of my women friends, and particularly younger women, have said to me in recent months, 'God, you know, we feel like we had 2,000 years of disadvantage inbuilt. We were finally getting ahead and now we're being put back in a box again.' How do you navigate that?
SG: Well, first off is to acknowledge that the gag reflex is understandable and natural and maybe even makes sense, because from 1945 to, call it 2005, America registered unbelievable prosperity and economic growth. And all of that prosperity was crammed into a third of the population, specifically white dudes born heterosexual. So, my generation just registered massively unfair prosperity. I always acknowledge the majority of my success is not my fault. So, it's understandable that people say, OK, you've got a 3,000-year head start, and now your hair's on fire when men aren't doing well.
But what I would urge is the following: empathy is not a zero-sum game. If you go into a morgue, and there's five people who died by suicide, four are men. And you know who wants more economically and emotionally viable men? Women. Our country and our women are not going to continue to flourish unless we have more viable men.
And also just to recognize a 19-year-old male, maybe his mother's addicted to opiates, his father's incarcerated, has had a lot of middle class on-ramps, sequestered, is really struggling, has big tech companies trying to get him to engage in porn, gambling, he's got a much more risk-aggressive brain. We can have empathy for these people. Civil rights didn't hurt white people. Gay marriage didn't hurt heteronormative marriage. Our young men are struggling.
When I had this conversation five years ago, I was called Andrew Tate with a graduate degree. I was called a misogynist. And the conversation has become so much more productive, because the people who are leading the conversation now are mothers. And what I tell young men when I'm coaching is the way you know you have failed as a man is when you start blaming other people. You start blaming women for your lack of sexual prospects and you start blaming immigrants for your economic problems. That means you have jumped the shark and you really have lost the script.
So, there is an aspirational form of masculinity and I'd like to think it'll be a fantastic code for young men. But it all starts with empathy. This is not a zero-sum game. Women still face huge challenges, but we can also acknowledge our young men are struggling and they need our help.
https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20250430-scott-galloway-men-struggling-katty-kay-interview
Mary:
On the question of young men struggling, I agree we have to address this problem, and at the same time I think it is essential to recognize that this problem, like our political divisions, is not, or must be recognized as not being " a zero-sum game."
Too often problems are approached as though there is only so much "stuff" (success, love, prosperity, respect etc) to be divided, and one person's gain is always and only at the cost of another's loss. It's a big world and there's room for everybody. Women gaining freedom and independence does not require men losing respect or opportunity. We have to find a way that one person's success does not mean another's failure.
How we do this is yet unclear, because we are so in the habit of framing things as zero-sum..where my every win is your loss, your every win is my loss. Maybe framing reality as a continual contest with winners and losers is the heart of the problem — that kind of constant competition and opposition. We need some new models — of co-operation, coordination, alliance. Of solving problems as a team. Good marriages work that way.
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MATHEMATICIANS HAVE SOLVED TRAFFIC JAMS
Most traffic jams are unnecessary, and this deeply irks mathematicians who specialize in traffic flow. They reserve particular vitriol for local transport engineers. “They do not have competencies in the field of system-related increases in traffic performance,” says Alexander Krylatov, a mathematics professor at St. Petersburg University. “If engineers manage to achieve local improvements, after a while the flows rearrange and the same traffic jams appear in other places.” Burn!
Krylatov would like to solve urban traffic jams forever, so much so that he has coauthored a book of new math approaches to traffic and ways to implement them. (Translation: Engineers, Let Us Handle This.) Four takeaways:
All drivers need to be on the same navigation system. Cars can only be efficiently rerouted if instructions come from one central hub. One navigation system rerouting some drivers does not solve traffic jams.
Parking bans. Many urban roads are too narrow and cannot be physically widened. Traffic-flow models can indicate where parking spots should be turned into lanes.
Green lanes. For cities that want to increase electric car use, special lanes should be created for electric cars, providing an incentive for their use.
Digital twins. Traffic demands and available infrastructure can only be balanced with digital modeling that creates an entire “twin” of existing roadways. The software will be “an extremely useful thought tool in the hands of transport engineers.”
Traffic modeling is a complex branch of applied mathematics, partially because it assumes that drivers are selfish and pursuing their own goals, rather than any predictable or shared efforts. “Every year a considerable budget is allocated for improving roads. [Our models] suggest a set of solutions for the efficient management of these funds.”
And just in case you were wondering, “The mathematical approach in this case is superior to the engineering and economic one.”
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/mathematicians-have-solved-traffic-jams-and-they-re-begging-cities-to-listen?utm_source=firefox-newtab-en-us
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WHY THE U.S. HAS SO MANY TRAFFIC-RELATED DEATHS
U.S. crash deaths are much more common than in other rich countries, leading many public leaders to proclaim that “Road safety is a shared responsibility.”
Safety nonprofits say it. Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer says it. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg says it. The message is community-spirited if anodyne: The quest for safer roads requires everyone to contribute, whether they be transportation professionals or commuters simply trying to get to the office.
Innocuous though it may seem, the refrain encapsulates much of what’s wrong with road safety in the U.S., where crash death rates are at least double other rich countries, from Japan to Finland to Canada.
In reality, the duty to prevent collisions should fall on the road engineers, car companies, and public officials who create the system in which people drive, bike, or walk—and not on road users themselves. By lumping everyone together, the phrase blurs that distinction, allowing those who can do the most to save lives to dodge accountability.
The idea of a shared responsibility for road safety comes from the Safe Systems approach, a framework that has gained adherents in recent decades. As the Department of Transportation’s website explains, collective involvement is central to Shared Systems: “All stakeholders—including government at all levels, industry, nonprofit/advocacy, researchers, and the general public—are vital to preventing fatalities and serious injuries on our roadways.”
The problem is that some of those groups have far more leverage over road safety outcomes than someone driving or walking down a street. Highway engineers, for instance, can design a roadway with sidewalks and bike lanes, or they can force pedestrians and bicyclists to share a lane with motor vehicles whizzing by. Automakers can produce modest-size vehicles that prevent reckless speeding, or they can sell hulking SUVs and pickups that exceed the highest U.S. speed limit by more than 50 mph. State legislators, for their part, can fully fund transit systems whose passengers are orders of magnitude safer than those in a car, or they can choose not to.
“If we were going to ‘share responsibility’ among those who have power over the system itself—auto companies and road designers and so on—I’d say fine,” says Seth LaJeunesse, a senior research associate at the University of North Carolina’s Highway Safety Research Center. “But why are we including the public? They’re just using the system. They’re not actually changing it.”
To his point, a traveler can choose to wear a seat belt or bike helmet, but individual actions can only go so far. There isn’t much that a pedestrian can do to protect herself if walking home from the bus stop requires traversing a six-lane arterial where cars whiz by at 50 mph. And nothing can protect occupants of a sedan struck by a legally lifted monster truck. Individual road users who violate reasonable road rules should be punished, but sporadic enforcement undercuts those rules’ ability to deter reckless behavior. That failure underscores flawed policies (like banning automatic traffic cameras) and underperforming criminal justice systems, which elected officials can fix.
Ignoring the underlying causes of crashes and instead laying blame on individual road users is an ingrained and counterproductive American habit supported by powerful groups eager to escape the spotlight. Car companies, for instance, make disproportionate profits from oversized SUVs and pickups that researchers have linked to pedestrian deaths, which in 2022 hit a 40-year high in the U.S. Many highway engineers trained to prioritize traffic flow prefer to continue ignoring the inevitable tension between speed and safety.
Such stakeholders are happy to emphasize individuals’ role in crash reduction, which helps to explain the enduring popularity of highway messaging boards sharing public service announcements like “buckle up, windshields hurt,” despite a dearth of evidence suggesting that they do anything to enhance road safety. Since some people will inevitably choose not to wear a seat belt, a better safety approach would adjust road and vehicle designs to mitigate the damage when collisions do happen.
That idea of harm reduction is central to Vision Zero, the road safety strategy that has been wildly successful in northern European cities like Warsaw, where crash fatalities recently reached an all-time low. Rather than attempt to change human behavior, Vision Zero revolves around the idea that people will inevitably make mistakes, which should not be fatal. Prioritized policies include lower speed limits and narrower lanes that can prevent catastrophic outcomes when something goes wrong on the road.
“The idea is that if there are too many crashes, too many injuries, and too many deaths, the system designers go back and redesign the system,” said Anine Hartmann, an urban planner who works on road safety in Oslo, which recently went a full year without a single pedestrian or cyclist fatality. People walking, biking, and driving should be treated separately from transportation professionals, Hartmann said, since they are simply consumers of that system.
Policymakers who accept road users’ fallibility will naturally gravitate toward certain safety tactics and away from others (e.g., guardrails are more effective than a “curve ahead” sign). In contrast, “Safety is a shared responsibility” is an exhortation rather than a strategy. Even if government officials concur, how does it help them choose among various tactics?
In fact, LaJeunesse thinks the phrase’s vagueness explains much of its appeal among safety professionals, many of whom see it as reinforcing the status quo. “It leads people to believe that what they’ve been doing all along is just fine, and that there is no reason to change,” he told me. To his point, transportation executives have invoked the “shared responsibility” line as a shield, deflecting criticism by pointing to the need for others to act, too.
By attempting to hold everyone accountable for safety outcomes, the shared responsibility framework effectively holds no one accountable. The psychologist Albert Bandura described how diffusion of responsibility makes people less likely to act when they believe others could do so instead. Laying the blame for America’s uniquely dangerous roads on individuals undercuts the urgency that transportation engineers, car companies, and policymakers should feel to change course.
For another recent example of the same pernicious tendency, consider the false idea that human error causes 94% of crash deaths. In a 2015 fact sheet, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration stated that in 94% of crashes, human error was “the last failure in the causal chain of events leading up to the crash.” This makes sense, as crashes usually have many contributing factors (a dangerous intersection, a distracting infotainment system, and so on). Although NHTSA specified that the road user’s role is “not intended to be interpreted as the cause of a crash,” a slew of autonomous vehicle executives and state transportation officials chose to ignore that guidance.
Like the “shared responsibility” refrain, the 94% misinterpretation allows those with real power over road safety to elude accountability. As National Transportation Safety Board Chair Jennifer Homendy pointed out, it “relieves everybody else of responsibility they have for improving safety.” Under pressure, in 2022, the Department of Transportation removed a prominent reference to the figure from its website.
American roads became a little bit safer when USDOT acknowledged that the 94% line was not an accurate or constructive road safety framework. It should do the same with the notion that crash reduction is a shared responsibility. Sure, everyone can do something to make collisions less likely. But some can—and should—do far more than others.
https://www.fastcompany.com/91233037/whos-really-to-blame-and-who-isnt-for-americas-traffic-death-epidemic
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PIETRO BATTISTA PIZZABALLA — ONE OF THE PAPABILI
In Italian, Pizzaballa’s last name literally means “pizza dance.” Merely contemplating the dancing pizza memes his election would generate suggests he would also be a compelling figure from a media point of view, perhaps affording him the chance to pick up the cultural megaphone left behind by Francis.
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When Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa heard the news Easter Monday that Pope Francis had died, he immediately cancelled his appointments and packed his bags for Rome. As he was leaving the headquarters of the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem, where he has led the Catholic flock in the Holy Land for the last decade, a small group of aides, employees and friends gathered outside as he was getting in the car to head to the airport.
A visibly touched Pizzaballa watched as they sang to him in Arabic: “May the Lord guide your steps with his wisdom, fill your heart with his spirit, and be with you if it’s his prayer that you should lead his Church.”
Aside from being a sweet gesture, the impromptu serenade also had the feel of a farewell, since the people making up that cluster knew there’s a decent chance they won’t be seeing the 60-year-old Pizzaballa again anytime soon except on a TV screen as pope.
Pizzaballa was born in 1965 in the small community of Castel Liteggio in Bergamo, the same province that gave the Church St. John XXIII, “Good Pope John,” whose memory still lives in countless ways in the region. He felt a religious vocation at a young age and entered the minor seminary, eventually becoming a member of the Franciscan order.
In Bologna the young Pizzaballa studied philosophy and theology, where he came to the attention of Cardinal Giacomo Biffi, an archconservative and a man of deep learning and culture who would eventually ordain Pizzaballa to the priesthood in 1990.
Shortly thereafter Pizzaballa made his way to Jerusalem, where he studied at the Studium Biblicum Franciscanum and earned a degree in Biblical theology. He later studied modern Hebrew and Semitic languages at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem before entering into the service of the Franciscan Custody of the Holy Land, with primary responsibility for the Hebrew-speaking Catholic population.
Pizzaballa became the 167th Custodian of the Holy Land in 2004, and for the next twelve years he would become known as one of the few figures in that perennially divided corner of the world to forge friendships across the usual divides. He earned trust among Israelis, Palestinians, Jordanians and Egyptians alike, developing a reputation as a moderate man of patience, listening and dialogue.
As one fruit of that profile, in 2014 Pope Francis entrusted Pizzaballa with organizing a peace prayer in the Vatican Gardens between then Israeli president Shimon Peres and Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas, in the presence of both the pope and Orthodox Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople.
In 2016, Pizzaballa was named the apostolic administrator of Jerusalem, effectively taking over the governance of the Church in the Holy Land from Jordanian Patriarch Fouad Twal. At the time the appointment raised some eyebrows, since the appointment of Patriarch Michel Sabbah in 1987, and then Twal, was believed to have ended the Italian monopoly on the position and marked a transition to elevating patriarchs from the local Catholic population.
Yet those who knew the situation on the ground reported that the local clergy was divided, and in any event, they no longer regarded Pizzaballa as an outsider.
His frst challenge was to address a deep financial crisis caused by Twal’s insistence on pouring money – some estimates claim as much as $100 million – into the construction of a Catholic university in Jordan without a clear business plan. Pizzaballa eventually righted the ship through a combination of aggressive fundraising, cutting costs and selling off assets, including real estate holdings in Nazareth.
In 2020 Pizzaballa formally took over as patriarch, and in 2023 he was created a cardinal by Pope Francis. Almost immediately the war in Gaza broke out, and ever since Pizzaballa has found himself trapped between his friends in Israel and the Jewish world on one side and his largely Palestinian and Arabic-speaking flock on the other. To the extent anyone can, he’s tried to show sympathy and understanding for both sides: He’s sharply criticized what he sees as the excesses of the Israeli military operation, but he also offered himself as a hostage in exchange for the Israeli citizens held by Hamas.
Personally, Pizzaballa sometimes comes off as a bit brusque upon first contact, but progressively warmer and with a keen sense of humor as one gets to know him. He’s also said to have a prodigious work ethic.
The case for Pizzaballa as pope?
First of all, precisely because his life has been dominated by the complexities of the Middle East and the Israel/Palestinian divide, he’s never really been forced to take clear public positions on divisive doctrinal and pastoral issues. Where he might stand on, say, the blessing of people in same-sex unions or the ordination of women deacons is something of a mystery.
As a result, he doesn’t bring a lot of baggage into the conclave in terms of past ecclesiastical controversies, potentially making him attractive both to those seeking continuity with Pope Francis and those hoping for change.
Moreover, Pizzaballa’s record of straddling the Israeli/Palestinian divide, sometimes achieving the rare feat of seeming to be on both sides at once, could be a selling point in a conclave in which healing the internal Catholic divisions unleashed by the Pope Francis era may well seem a priority.
Certainly Pizzaballa’s reputation for astute financial management would come in handy at a time when the Vatican is facing a deep fiscal crisis, including looming shortfalls in its pension funds. The hope might be that if he bailed the Patriarchate of Jerusalem out of debt, maybe he could so the same thing for the Holy See.
Utterly unscientifically, you just look at Pizzaballa and you sort of see a pope. He’s tall, with a distinguished-looking Van Dyke and the bearing of a serious man. Taken together with his background and reputation, it’s a compelling package.
One final consideration: A pope is also the Bishop of Rome, and although Pizzaballa isn’t Roman he does have a claim on local affections. His uncle, Pier Luigi Pizzaballa, was a goalkeeper in Italy’s top-flight soccer league, Serie A, in the 1960s and 70s, including a stint with the Roma squad from 1966 to 1969. Given how passionate Romans are about their soccer, they’d might be inclined to transfer some of that to their new bishop.
The case against?
The argument against Pizzaballa generally begins with his age, 60, which could augur for a longer papacy than some cardinals may wish. Yet his age could also work the other way, assuring cardinals wishing stability that they won’t have to go through the upheavals of a papal transition again anytime soon.
In addition, the lack of a clear indication of where Pizzaballa stands on many contested Catholic issues could frighten some voters, leading them to reject a Pizzaballa papacy as too much a journey into the unknown.
For all those who feel the election of another Italian pope would be a step back rather than forward, Pizzaballa obviously would be disqualified on those grounds, even if he’s spent most of his adult life outside Italy.
https://cruxnow.com/papal-transition/2025/04/papabile-of-the-day-cardinal-pierbattista-pizzaballa
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HOW AFRICAN POPES GAVE US EASTER SUNDAY AND VALENTINE’S DAY 
Pope Victor I (L), Pope Gelasius I and Pope Miltiades (R) are all believed to be of North African descent
Now predominantly Muslim, North Africa was once a Christian heartland, producing Catholic popes who left their mark on the Church to this day.
Their papacies were in the era of the Roman Empire, which stretched across modern-day Tunisia, the north-east of Algeria and the coast of western Libya.
"North Africa was the Bible Belt of ancient Christianity," says Prof Christopher Bellitto, a historian at Kean University in the US.
Many Catholics in Africa are hoping that the papacy will return to the continent for the first time in more than 1,500 years, as a successor to Pope Francis is chosen.
Here, we look at the three previous African popes — and how they got Christians to celebrate Easter Sunday and St Valentine's Day.
All three have been recognized in the Church as saints.
Victor I (189-199)
Thought to be of Berber origin, Pope Victor I was in charge of the Catholic Church at a time when Christians were sometimes being persecuted by Roman officials for refusing to worship Roman gods.
He is perhaps best known for ensuring Christians celebrate Easter on a Sunday.
In the 2nd Century, some Christian groups from the Roman province of Asia (in modern-day Turkey) celebrated Easter on the same day that Jews celebrated Passover, which could fall on different days of the week.
However, Christians in the Western part of the Empire believed that Jesus was resurrected on a Sunday, so Easter should always be celebrated on that day.
The debate over when the resurrection took place made it an extremely contentious issue.
The "Easter controversy" was symbolic of larger conflicts between East and West, and whether or not Christians should follow Jewish practices.
Victor I called the very first Roman Synod —- a gathering of Church leaders — to resolve the impasse.
He did this by threatening to excommunicate from the Church those bishops who refused to comply with his wishes.
"He was a rather forceful voice for getting everyone on literally the same page," Prof Bellitto told the BBC.
This was an impressive feat, the historian said, because "he was the Bishop of Rome when Christianity was illegal in the Roman empire."
Another important part of Victor I's legacy was to introduce Latin as the common language of the Catholic Church. Previously Ancient Greek was the primary language of the Catholic Liturgy as well as official communication for the Church.
Victor I himself wrote in — and spoke — Latin, which was widely spoken in North Africa.
MILTIADES (311-314)
Pope Miltiades is believed to have been born in Africa.
During his reign, Christianity gained increasing acceptance from successive Roman emperors, eventually becoming the Empire's official religion.
Before this, the persecution of Christians had been widespread at different points in the Empire's history.
However, Prof Bellitto pointed out that Miltiades was not responsible for this change, saying the Pope was the "recipient of the Roman benevolence" rather than being a great negotiator.
Miltiades was given a palace by the Roman Emperor Constantine, becoming the first pope to have an official residence.
He was also granted permission by Constantine to build the Lateran Basilica, now the oldest public church in Rome.
While modern popes live and work in the Vatican, the Lateran church is sometimes referred to in Catholicism as "the mother of all churches.”
GELASIUS I (492-496).webp)
Gelasius I is the only one of the three African popes who historians believe was not born in Africa.
"There's a reference to him being... Roman-born. So we don't know if he [ever] lived in North Africa, but it seems clear that he was of North African descent," Prof Bellitto explained.
He was the most important of the three African church leaders, according to Prof Bellitto.
Gelasius I is widely recognized as the first pope to officially be called the "Vicar of Christ", a term that signifies the Pope's role as Christ's representative on Earth.
He also developed the Doctrine of the Two Swords, which emphasized the separate-but-equal powers of the Church and the state.
Gelasius I made the critical distinction that both powers were given to the Church by God, who then delegated earthly power to the state, making the Church ultimately superior.
"Later on, in the Middle Ages, popes sometimes tried to veto the selection of an emperor or a king, because they said God gave them that power," said Prof Bellitto.
Gelasius I is remembered, too, for his response to the Acacian Schism a split between the Eastern and Western Christian Churches from 484 to 519.
During this period, Gelasius I asserted the supremacy of Rome and the papacy over the entire Church, East and West, which experts believe went further than any of his predecessors.
Gelasius is also responsible for a popular celebration which is still marked every year establishing St Valentine's Day on 14 February in 496 to commemorate the Christian martyr St Valentine.
Some accounts say Valentine was a priest who continued to perform weddings in secret when they were banned by Emperor Claudius II.
Historians believe that Valentine's Day is rooted in the Roman love and fertility festival, Lupercalia, and was a move by Gelasius I to Christianize pagan traditions.
WHAT DID AFRICAN POPES LOOK LIKE?
Prof Bellitto says there is no way of knowing with any degree of accuracy what the three popes looked like.
"We have to remember that the Roman Empire, and indeed the Middle Ages, didn't think of race as we think of it nowadays. It had nothing to do with skin color," he told the BBC.
"People in the Roman Empire didn't deal with race, they dealt with ethnicity."
Prof Philomena Mwaura, an academic at Kenya's Kenyatta University, told the BBC that Roman Africa was very multicultural, with local Berber and Punic groups, freed slaves and people who had come from Rome found there.
"The North African community was quite mixed, and it was a trade route also for many people who were involved in trade in the earlier antiquity," she explained.
Rather than identifying with specific ethnic groups, "most people who belonged to areas within the Roman Empire regarded themselves as Roman", Prof Mwaura added.
Why hasn't there been an African pope since?
None of of the 217 popes since Gelasius I are believed to have come from Africa.
"The church in North Africa was weakened by very many forces, including the fall of the Roman Empire and also the incursion of Muslims [into North Africa] in the 7th Century," Prof Mwaura said.
However, some experts argue that the prevalence of Islam in North Africa does not explain the absence of a pope from the entire continent over more than 1,500 years.
Prof Bellitto said the process of electing a new pontiff became an "Italian monopoly" for many years.
However, he said there was a strong chance of a pope from Asia or Africa in the near future because Catholics in the southern hemisphere outnumber those in the north.
In fact, Catholicism is expanding more rapidly in sub-Saharan Africa today than anywhere else.
The latest figures show there were 281 million Catholics in Africa in 2023. This accounts for 20% of the worldwide congregation.
Three Africans are in the race to succeed Pope Francis — the Democratic Republic of Congo's Fridolin Ambongo Besungu, Ghana's Peter Kodwo Appiah Turkson and Guinea's Robert Sarah.
But Prof Mwaura argued that "although Christianity is very strong in Africa, the power of the Church is still in the north, where the resources have been".
"Maybe, as it continues to be very strong within the continent and supporting itself, then a time will come when there could be an African pope," she said.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c787y082l47o
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EARLY CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY
Christian theology changed a LOT between the writing of the first gospel, Mark, and the last gospel, John.
The Jesus of Mark was nothing like the Jesus of John.
The Jesus of Mark was fully human and was adopted as the Messiah at his baptism by John the Baptist. —BUT— The Jesus of John was a divine being who was “with god” before the universe was created and, indeed, was the Creator of the Universe!
John doesn’t describe the baptism of Jesus because his Jesus was divine and perfect. The baptism of John was for the remission of sins, so Jesus didn’t need to be baptized.
The Jesus of Mark taught in short, pithy parables. —BUT— The Jesus of John never told a parable, but preached long, tedious, boring, repetitive sermons (undoubtedly like the author of John).
The Jesus of Mark kept his real identity secret. —BUT— The Jesus of John told anyone who would listen that he was a divine being.
So it’s no surprise that Jesus said things in the gospel of John that were not said in the earlier gospels.
At the time Mark was written, Christians were expecting Jesus to return to earth while they were alive, as he had promised according to the synoptic gospels.
But by the time John was written, it was obvious that Jesus was not going to “return” to earth. So the meaning of “salvation” changed from salvation from Roman rule here on earth, to being made ready for “heaven.” Since heaven is a spiritual dimension, Christians needed to purify their spirits, hence being born again via cleansing water (baptism) and spiritual rebirth (being “born again”).
The big fish kept getting bigger and bigger and fishier and fishier. By the time John was written, the Jesus who needed to be baptized was passé and Christians needed to prepare themselves for heaven.
~ John Burch, Quora
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ULTRA-PROCESSED FOOD MAY BE LINKED TO EARLY DEATH
People who eat lots of ultra-processed foods (UPF) may be at greater risk of dying early, a study in eight countries including the UK and the US suggests.
Processed meats, biscuits, fizzy drinks, ice cream and some breakfast cereals are examples of UPF, which are becoming increasingly common in diets worldwide.
UPFs tend to contain more than five ingredients, which are not usually found in home cooking, such as additives, sweeteners and chemicals to improve the food's texture or appearance.
Some experts say it's not known why UPFs are linked to poor health; there is little evidence it's down to the processing itself and could be because these foods contain high levels of fat, salt and sugar.
‘Artificial ingredients’:
The researchers behind the study, published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, looked at previous research to estimate the impact of ultra-processed food intake on mortality.
The study cannot definitively prove that UPFs caused any premature deaths.
This is because the amount of ultra-processed foods in someone's diet is also linked to their overall diet, exercise levels, wider lifestyle and wealth, which can all also affect health.
The studies looked at surveys of people's diets and at data on deaths from eight countries — Australia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, UK and US.
The report estimates that in the UK and the US, where UPFs account for more than half of calorie intake, 14% of early deaths could be linked to the harms they cause.
In countries such as Colombia and Brazil, where UPF intake is much lower (less than 20% of calorie intake), the study estimated these foods are linked to around 4% of premature deaths.
Lead study author Dr Eduardo Nilson, from Brazil, said UPFs affected health "because of the changes in the foods during industrial processing and the use of artificial ingredients, including colorants, artificial flavors and sweeteners, emulsifiers, and many other additives and processing aids."
By their calculations, in the US in 2018, there were 124,000 premature deaths due to the consumption of ultra-processed food. In the UK, nearly 18,000.
The study says governments should update their dietary advice to urge people to cut back on these foods.
But the UK government's expert panel on nutrition recently said there wasn't any strong evidence of a link between the way food is processed and poor health.
What is ultra-processed food?
There is no one definition that everyone agrees on, but the NOVA classification is often used.
Examples include:
cakes, pastries and biscuits
crisps
supermarket bread
sausages, burgers, hot dogs
instant soups, noodles and desserts
chicken nuggets
fish fingers
fruit yogurts and fruit drinks
margarines and spreads
baby formula
STILL QUESTIONS TO ANSWER
The numbers in the study are based on modeling the impact of ultra-processed foods on people's health.
Prof Kevin McConway, emeritus professor of applied statistics, Open University, said the study makes lots of mathematical assumptions which make him cautious about what the findings mean.
"It's still far from clear whether consumption of just any UPF at all is bad for health, or what aspect of UPFs might be involved.
"This all means that it's impossible for any one study to be sure whether differences in mortality between people who consume different UPF amounts are actually caused by differences in their UPF consumption.
"You still can't be sure from any study of this kind exactly what's causing what."
Dr Nerys Astbury, an expert in diet and obesity at the University of Oxford, also agrees there are limitations to the research.
It's been known for some time that diets high in energy, fat and sugar can increase the risk of diseases, such as type 2 diabetes, obesity, heart conditions and some cancers, which can lead to premature death.
"Many UPF tend to be high in these nutrients," she says, adding that studies to date haven't been able to prove that the effects of UPFs are due to anything more than "diets high in foods which are energy dense and contain large amounts of fat and sugar.”
This type of research cannot prove that consumption of ultra-processed foods is harmful, says Dr Stephen Burgess at Cambridge University.
How physically fit someone is may be the main cause of poor health instead. But when numerous studies across many countries and culture suggest UPFs could be a risk to health, Dr Burgess says "ultra-processed foods may be more than a bystander.”
The Food and Drink Federation, which represents manufacturers, said the term 'ultra-processed food' "demonizes a wide variety of food that can help people achieve a healthy balanced diet, such as yogurt, pasta sauces or bread.”
It said all additives used by food manufacturers are approved by the Food Standards Agency, who ensure they are safe to eat and drink.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/crm30kwvv17o
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THE ANSWER TO LACTOSE INTOLERANCE MIGHT BE IN MONGOLIA
Mongolians subsist on a dairy-heavy diet, even though most are lactose intolerant.
Lake Khövsgöl is about as far north of the Mongolian capital of Ulaanbaatar as you can get without leaving the country. If you’re too impatient for the 13-hour bus ride, you can take a prop plane to the town of Murun, then drive for three hours on dirt roads to Khatgal, a tiny village nestled against the lake’s southern shore. The felt yurts that dot the surrounding green plains are a throwback to the days—not so long ago—when most Mongolians lived as subsistence herders.
In July 2017, archaeogeneticist Christina Warinner headed there to learn about the population’s complex relationship with milk. In Khatgal, she found a cooperative called Blessed by Yak, where families within a few hours’ drive pooled the bounty from their cows, goats, sheep, and yaks to supply tourists with heirloom dairy products.
Warinner watched for hours as Blessed by Yak members transformed the liquid into a dizzying array of foods. Milk was everywhere in and around these homes: splashing from swollen udders into wooden buckets, simmering in steel woks atop fires fueled by cow dung, hanging in leather bags from riblike wooden rafters, bubbling in specially made stills, crusting as spatters on the wood-lattice inner walls. The women even washed their hands in whey.
“Working with herders is a five-senses experience,” Warinner says. “The taste is really strong; the smell is really strong. It reminds me of when I was nursing my daughter, and everything smelled of milk.”
Each family she visited had a half-dozen dairy products or more in some stage of production around a central hearth. And horse herders who came to sell their goods brought barrels of airag, a slightly alcoholic fizzy beverage that set the yurts abuzz.
Airag, made only from horse milk, is not to be confused with aaruul, a sour cheese, created from curdled milk, that gets so hard after weeks drying in the sun that you’re better off sucking on it or softening it in tea than risking your teeth trying to chew it. Easier to consume is byaslag, rounds of white cheese pressed between wooden boards. Roasted curds called eezgi look a little like burnt popcorn; dry, they last for months stored in cloth bags. Carefully packed in a sheep-stomach wrapper, the buttery clotted cream known as urum—made from fat-rich yak or sheep milk—will warm bellies all through the winter, when temperatures regularly drop well below zero.
Warinner’s personal favorite? The “mash” left behind when turning cow or yak milk into an alcoholic drink called shimin arkhi. “At the bottom of the still, you have an oily yogurt that’s delicious,” she says.
Her long trip to Khatgal wasn’t about culinary curiosity, however. Warinner was there to solve a mystery: Despite the dairy diversity she saw, an estimated 95 percent of Mongolians are, genetically speaking, lactose intolerant. Yet, in the frost-free summer months, she believes they may be getting up to half their calories from milk products.
Scientists once thought dairying and the ability to drink milk went hand in hand. What she found in Mongolia has pushed Warinner to posit a new explanation. On her visit to Khatgal, she says, the answer was all around her, even if she couldn’t see it.
Sitting, transfixed, in homes made from wool, leather, and wood, she was struck by the contrast with the plastic and steel kitchens she was familiar with in the US and Europe. Mongolians are surrounded by microscopic organisms: the bacteria that ferment the milk into their assorted foodstuffs, the microbes in their guts and on the dairy-soaked felt of their yurts. The way these invisible creatures interact with each other, with the environment, and with our bodies creates a dynamic ecosystem.
That’s not unique. Everyone lives with a billions-strong universe of microbes in, on, and around them. Several pounds’ worth thrive in our guts alone. Researchers have dubbed this wee world the microbiome and are just beginning to understand the role it plays in our health.
Some of these colonies, though, are more diverse than others: Warinner is still working on sampling the Khatgal herders’ microbiomes, but another team has already gathered evidence that the Mongolian bacterial makeup differs from those found in more-industrial areas of the world. Charting the ecosystem they are a part of might someday help explain why the population is able to eat so much dairy— and offer clues to help people everywhere who are lactose intolerant.
Warinner argues that a better understanding of the complex microbial universe inhabiting every Mongolian yurt could also provide insight into a problem that goes far beyond helping folks eat more brie. As communities around the world abandon traditional lifestyles, so-called diseases of civilization, like dementia, diabetes, and food intolerances, are on the rise.
Warinner is convinced that the Mongolian affinity for dairy is made possible by a mastery of bacteria 3,000 years or more in the making. By scraping gunk off the teeth of steppe dwellers who died thousands of years ago, she’s been able to prove that milk has held a prominent place in the Mongolian diet for millennia. Understanding the differences between traditional microbiomes like theirs and those prevalent in the industrialized world could help explain the illnesses that accompany modern lifestyles—and perhaps be the beginning of a different, more beneficial approach to diet and health.
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Nowadays, Warinner does her detective work at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History’s ancient DNA lab, situated on the second floor of a high-rise bioscience facility overlooking the historic center of the medieval town of Jena, Germany. To prevent any errant DNA from contaminating its samples, entering the lab involves a half-hour protocol, including disinfection of foreign objects, and putting on head-to-toe Tyvek jumpsuits, surgical face masks, and eye shields. Inside, postdocs and technicians wielding drills and picks harvest fragments of dental plaque from the teeth of people who died long ago. It’s here that many of Warinner’s Mongolian specimens get cataloged, analyzed, and archived.
Her path to the lab began in 2010, when she was a postdoctoral researcher in Switzerland. Warinner was looking for ways to find evidence of infectious disease on centuries-old skeletons. She started with dental caries, or cavities—spots where bacteria had burrowed into the tooth enamel. To get a good look, she spent a lot of time clearing away plaque: mineral deposits scientists call “calculus,” and that, in the absence of modern dentistry, accumulate on teeth in an unsightly brown mass.
Around the same time, Amanda Henry, now a researcher at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands, put calculus scraped from Neanderthal teeth under the microscope and spotted starch grains trapped in the mineral layers. The results provided evidence that the population ate a diverse diet that included plants as well as meat.
Hearing about the work, Warinner wondered if looking at specimens from a medieval German cemetery might yield similar insights. But when she checked for food remains under the microscope, masses of perfectly preserved bacteria blocked her from doing so. “They were literally in your way, obscuring your view,” she recalls. The samples were teeming with microbial and human genes, preserved and protected by a hard mineral matrix.
Warinner had discovered a way to see the tiny organisms in the archaeological record, and with them, a means to study diet. “I realized this was a really rich source of bacterial DNA no one had thought of before,” Warinner says. “It’s a time capsule that gives us access to information about an individual’s life that is very hard to get from other places.”
The dental calculus research dovetailed with rising interest in the microbiome, rocketing Warinner to a coveted position at Max Planck. (In 2019, Harvard hired her as an anthropology professor, and she now splits her time between Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Jena, overseeing labs on two continents.) Her TED talks have racked up more than 2 million views. “I never expected to have an entire career based on something people spend lots of time and money trying to get rid of,” she quips.
That grimy dental buildup, Warinner has learned, preserves more than just DNA. In 2014, she published a study in which she and her colleagues looked at the teeth of Norse Greenlanders, seeking insight into why Vikings abandoned their settlements there after just a few hundred years. She found milk proteins suspended in the plaque of the area’s earliest settlers—and almost none in that of people buried five centuries later. “We had a marker to trace dairy consumption,” Warinner says.
This discovery led Warinner to turn to one of the biggest puzzles in recent human evolution: Why milk? Most people in the world aren’t genetically equipped to digest dairy as adults. A minority of them—including most northern Europeans— have one of several mutations that allows their bodies to break down the key sugar in milk, lactose, beyond early childhood. That ability is called lactase persistence, after the protein that processes lactose.
Until recently, geneticists thought that dairying and the ability to drink milk must have evolved together, but that didn’t prove out when investigators went looking for evidence. Ancient DNA samples from all across Europe suggest that even in places where lactase persistence is common today, it didn’t appear until 3000 BCE—long after people domesticated cattle and sheep and started consuming dairy products. For 4,000 years prior to the mutation, Europeans were making cheese and eating dairy despite their lactose intolerance. Warinner guessed that microbes may have been doing the job of dairy digestion for them.
To prove it, she began looking for places where the situation was similar. Mongolia made sense: There’s evidence that herding and domestication there dates back 5,000 years or more. But, Warinner says, direct evidence of long-ago dairy consumption was absent—until ancient calculus let her harvest it straight from the mouths of the dead.
Ancient plaque shows Mongolians have eaten dairy for millennia
Starting in 2016, in her Jena lab, Warinner and her team scraped the teeth of skeletons buried on the steppes thousands of years ago and excavated by archaeologists in the 1990s. Samples about the size of a lentil were enough to reveal proteins from cow, goat, and sheep milk. By tapping the same remains for ancient DNA, Warinner could go one step further and show that they belonged to people who lacked the gene to digest lactose— just like modern Mongolians do.
Samples of the microbiome from in and around today’s herders, Warinner realized, might offer a way to understand how this was possible. Though it’s estimated that just 1 in 20 Mongolians has the mutation allowing them to digest milk, few places in the world put as much emphasis on dairy. They include it in festivities and offer it to spirits before any big trip to ensure safety and success. Even their metaphors are dairy-based: “The smell from a wooden vessel filled with milk never goes away” is the rough equivalent of “old habits die hard.”
Down the hall from the ancient DNA lab, thousands of microbiome samples the team has collected over the past two summers pack tall industrial freezers. Chilled to minus 40 degrees F—colder, even, than the Mongolian winter—the collection includes everything from eezgi and byaslag to goat turds and yak-udder swabs. Hundreds of the playing-card-size plastic baggies new mothers use to freeze breast milk contain raw, freshly squeezed camel, cow, goat, reindeer, sheep, and yak milk.
Warinner’s initial hypothesis was that the Mongolian herders— past and present— were using lactose- eating microbes to break down their many varieties of dairy, making it digestible. Commonly known as fermentation, it’s the same bacteria-assisted process that turns malt into beer, grapes into wine, and flour into bubbly sourdough.
Fermentation is integral to just about every dairy product in the Mongolian repertoire. While Western cheeses also utilize the process, makers of Parmesan, brie and Camembert all rely on fungi and rennet— an enzyme from the stomachs of calves—to get the right texture and taste. Mongolians, on the other hand, maintain microbial cultures called starters, saving a little from each batch to inoculate the next.
Ethnographic evidence suggests that these preparations have been around a very, very long time. In Mongolian, they’re called khöröngö, a word that’s derived from the term for wealth or inheritance. They are living heirlooms, typically passed from mother to daughter.
And they require regular care and feeding. “Starter cultures get constant attention over weeks, months, years, generations,” says Björn Reichhardt, a Mongolian-speaking ethnographer at Max Planck and member of Warinner’s team responsible for collecting most of the samples in the Jena freezers. “Mongolians tend to dairy products the way they would an infant.” As with a child, the environment in which they’re nurtured is deeply influential. The microbial makeup of each family’s starters seems to be subtly different.
After returning from Khatgal in 2017, Warinner launched the Heirloom Microbe project to identify and catalog the bacteria the herders were using to make their dairy products. The name reflected her hope that the yurts harbored strains or species ignored by industrial labs and corporate starter-culture manufacturers. Perhaps, Warinner imagined, there would be a novel strain or some combination of microbes Mongolians were using to process milk in a way that Western science had missed.
So far, she’s found Enterococcus, a bacterium common in the human gut that excels at digesting lactose but was eliminated from US and European dairy commodities decades ago. And they’ve spotted some new strains of familiar bacteria like Lactobacillus. But they haven’t identified any radically different species or starters—no magic microbes ready to package in pill form. “It doesn’t seem like there is a range of superbugs in there,” says Max Planck anthropologist Matthäus Rest, who works with Warinner on dairy research.
The reality might be more daunting. Rather than a previously undiscovered strain of microbes, it might be a complex web of organisms and practices—the lovingly maintained starters, the milk-soaked felt of the yurts, the gut flora of individual herders, the way they stir their barrels of airag—that makes the Mongolian love affair with so many dairy products possible.
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Warinner’s project now has a new name, Dairy Cultures, reflecting her growing realization that Mongolia’s microbial toolkit might not come down to a few specific bacteria. “Science is often very reductive,” she says. “People tend to look at just one aspect of things. But if we want to understand dairying, we can’t just look at the animals, or the microbiome, or the products. We have to look at the entire system.”
The results could help explain another phenomenon, one that affects people far from the Mongolian steppes. The billions of bacteria that make up our microbiomes aren’t passive passengers. They play an active—if little understood—role in our health, helping regulate our immune systems and digest our food.
Over the past two centuries, industrialization, sterilization, and antibiotics have dramatically changed these invisible ecosystems. Underneath a superficial diversity of flavors— mall staples like sushi, pad thai, and pizza— food is becoming more and more the same. Large-scale dairies even ferment items like yogurt and cheese using lab-grown starter cultures, a $1.2 billion industry dominated by a handful of industrial producers. People eating commoditized cuisine lack an estimated 30 percent of the gut microbe species that are found in remote groups still eating “traditional” diets. In 2015, Warinner was part of a team that found bacteria in the digestive tracts of hunter-gatherers living in the Amazon jungle that have all but vanished in people consuming a selection of typical Western fare.
“People have the feeling that they eat a much more diverse and global diet than their parents, and that might be true,” Rest says, “but when you look at these foods on a microbial level, they’re increasingly empty.”
A review paper in Science in October 2019 gathered data from labs around the world beginning to probe if this dwindling variety might be making us sick. Dementia, diabetes, heart disease, stroke, and certain cancers are sometimes termed diseases of civilization. They’re all associated with the spread of urban lifestyles and diets, processed meals, and antibiotics. Meanwhile, food intolerances and intestinal illnesses like Crohn’s disease and irritable bowel disease are on the rise.
Comparing the microbiome of Mongolian herders to samples from people consuming a more industrialized diet elsewhere in the world could translate into valuable insights into what we’ve lost—and how to get it back. Identifying the missing species could refine human microbiome therapies and add a needed dose of science to probiotics.
There might not be much time left for this quest. Over the past 50 years, hundreds of thousands of Mongolian herders have abandoned the steppes, their herds, and their traditional lifestyle, flocking to Ulaanbaatar. Around 50 percent of the country’s population, an estimated 1.5 million people, now crowds into the capital.
In summer 2020, Warinner’s team will return to Khatgal and other rural regions to collect mouth swabs and fecal specimens from herders, the last phase in cataloging the traditional Mongolian microbiome. She recently decided she’ll sample residents of Ulaanbaatar too, to see how urban dwelling is altering their bacterial balances as they adopt new foods, new ways of life, and, in all likelihood, newly simplified communities of microbes.
Something important, if invisible, is being lost, Warinner believes. On a recent fall morning, she was sitting in her sunlit office in the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnography on Harvard’s campus. Mostly unpacked from her latest trans-Atlantic move, she was contemplating a creeping, yurt-by-yurt extinction event.
It’s a conundrum vastly different in size, but not in scale, from those facing wildlife conservationists the world over. “How do you restore an entire ecology?” she wondered. “I’m not sure you can. We’re doing our best to record, catalog, and document as much as we can, and try to figure it out at the same time.”
Preserving Mongolia’s microbes, in other words, won’t be enough. We also need the traditional knowledge and everyday practices that have sustained them for centuries. Downstairs, display cases hold the artifacts of other peoples— from the Massachusetts tribe that once lived on the land where Harvard now stands to the Aztec and Inca civilizations that used to rule vast stretches of Central and South America—whose traditions are gone forever, along with the microbial networks they nurtured.
“Dairy systems are alive,” Warinner says. “They’ve been alive, and continuously cultivated, for 5,000 years. You have to grow them every single day. How much change can the system tolerate before it begins to break?”
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/the-answer-to-lactose-intolerance-might-be-in-mongolia?utm_source=firefox-newtab-en-us
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COULD MAMMALS EVOLVE TO BE AS BIG AS DINOSAURS?
The simple answer is No.
Meet Paraceratherium
This is the largest known land mammal, and believed to represent the upper limit of how big, in terms of both mass and scale, that terrestrial mammals can achieve.
The largest specimens’ skull, recovered from Xinjiang, China, is over 4 feet long.
Notice how much bigger the sauropod is?
The problem is twofold.
First is the square-cube law: as a shape grows in size, its volume increases faster than its surface area. That means that something is going to weigh much more long before it “looks” bigger.
The second is lung capacity. Mammals have a two way, tidal lung system; air full of oxygen comes in, is stripped of oxygen for the blood, and then the depleted air is expelled. In, out.
Large mammals already have to have special adaptations to get around this, otherwise they'd suffocate, running out of oxygen before all the old air was expelled so they can take fresh air in.
Dinosaurs (including birds) got around both issues. They have pneumaticized skeletons; air sacks that are extensions of the lungs run throughout their skeletons, making their bones hollow (and therefore lighter) and providing extra support.
They also had what are called “flow-through” lungs. They don't have distinct “in and out” breaths, but just breathing in forces the old air back out.
Basically dinosaurs were just more efficient than mammals, so without the specific circumstances of aquatic life removing the square-cube barrier, mammals can't even come lose, let alone exceed, to the largest dinosaurs. ~ Jonathan Grafer, Quora
Greg Hughes:
Also the level of oxygen in the air has varied throughout history — as low as 15% but as high as 30% (currently around 21%). A higher level of oxygen in the air means less effort required for any given size, so you get bigger mammals as well as other animals like insects.
Jonathan Greifer:
The rules are a little different for marine life, as buoyancy removes the issues of weight, and water pressure assists with the breathing issue. The blue whale is irrelevant to the question, because there are no fully-aquatic dinosaurs, so by definition the circumstances under which giant cetaceans evolved are completely different than those of dinosaurs. In fact the most aquatic-adapted birds, like penguins, have largely *lost* the pneumaticization of their skeletons in order to be able to dive the way they do.
George O. Aloe:
What really ended the reign of dinosaurs was the emergence of grasses. Dinos couldn't digest them, but mammals developed a rumen that enabled them to use grass as a food source. So mammals that could feed on grass could evolve into large grazing animals, filling the role that sauropods and ceratops had filled in the Mesozoic.
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WHAT EAR WAX CAN REVEAL ABOUT HEALTH AND DISEASE
From Alzheimer's to cancer, earwax can contain valuable indicators to a person's health. Now scientists are analyzing its chemistry in the hope of finding new ways of diagnosing diseases.
It's orange, it's sticky, and it's probably the last thing you want to talk about in polite conversation. Yet earwax is increasingly attracting the attention of scientists, who want to use it to learn more about diseases and conditions like cancer, heart disease, and metabolic disorders such as type 2 diabetes.
The proper name for the gloopy stuff is cerumen, and it's a mix of secretions from two types of glands that line the outer ear canal; the ceruminous and sebaceous glands. The resulting goo is mixed with hair, dead skin flakes, and other bodily debris until it reaches the waxy consistency we all know and try our best not to think about.
Once formed in the ear canal, the substance is transported by a kind of conveyer belt mechanism, clinging on to skin cells as they travel from the inside of the ear to the outside – which they do at a speed of approximately one-20th of millimeter every day.
The primary purpose of earwax is debated, but the most likely function is to keep the ear canal clean and lubricated. However, it also serves as an effective trap, preventing bacteria, fungi and other unwelcome guests such as insects from finding their way into our heads. So far, so gross. And yet, possibly due to its unpalatable appearance, earwax has been somewhat overlooked by researchers when it comes to bodily secretions.
For example, the vast majority of people of European or African descent have wet earwax, which is yellow or orange in color and sticky. However, 95% of East Asian people have dry earwax, which is grey and non-sticky. The gene responsible for producing either wet or dry earwax is called ABCC11, which also happens to be responsible for whether a person has smelly armpits. Around 2% of people – mostly those in the dry earwax category – have a version of this gene which means their armpits have no odor.
However, perhaps the most useful earwax-related discoveries relate to what the sticky stuff in our ears can reveal about our health.
Important clues
In 1971, Nicholas L Petrakis, a professor of medicine at University of California, San Francisco, found that Caucasian, African-American and German women in the USA, who all had "wet earwax", had an approximately four-fold higher chance of dying from breast cancer than Japanese and Taiwanese women with "dry" earwax.
More recently in 2010, researchers from the Tokyo Institute of Technology took blood samples from 270 female patients with invasive breast cancer, and 273 female volunteers who acted as controls. They found that Japanese women with breast cancer were up to 77% more likely to have the gene coding for wet earwax than healthy volunteers.
Nevertheless, the finding remains controversial, and large scale studies in Germany, Australia and Italy have found no difference in breast cancer risk between people with wet and dry earwax, although the number of people in these countries with dry ear wax is very small.
What is more established is the link between some systemic illnesses and the substances found in earwax. Take maple syrup urine disease, a rare genetic disorder that prevents the body from breaking down certain amino acids found in food. This leads to a buildup of volatile compounds in the blood and urine, giving urine the distinctive odor of maple syrup.
The molecule responsible for the sweet-smelling pee is sotolone, and it can be found in the earwax of people with the condition. This means the condition could be diagnosed through simply swabbing someone's ears, a much simpler and cheaper process than doing a genetic test. Although such a test may not even be necessary.
"The earwax literally smells like maple syrup, so within 12 hours of the birth of the baby, when you smell this distinct and lovely smell it tells you that they have this inborn error of metabolism," says Rabi Ann Musah, an environmental chemist at Louisiana State University.
Covid-19 can also sometimes be detected in earwax, and a person's earwax can also tell you whether they have type 1 or type 2 diabetes. Early work has suggested that you can tell if someone has a certain form of heart disease from their earwax, although it's still easier to diagnose this condition from blood tests.
There's also Ménière's disease, an inner ear condition that causes people to experience vertigo and hearing loss. "The symptoms can be very debilitating," says Musah. "They include severe nausea and vertigo. It becomes impossible to drive, or to go places accompanied. You eventually suffer complete hearing loss in the ear that is afflicted."
Musah recently led a team which discovered that the earwax of patients with Ménière's disease has lower levels of three fatty acids than that of healthy controls. This is the first time anyone has found a biomarker for the condition, which is usually diagnosed by excluding everything else – a process which can take years. The finding raises the hope that doctors could use earwax to diagnose this condition more quickly in the future.
"Our interest in earwax as a reporter of disease is directed at those illnesses that are very difficult to diagnose using typical biological fluids like blood and urine or cerebral spinal fluid, and which take a long time to diagnose because they're rare," says Musah.
But what is it about earwax that makes it such a treasure trove of health information? The key, it turns out, is down to the waxy secretions' ability to reflect the inner chemical reactions taking place inside the body – a person's metabolism.
"Many diseases in living organisms are metabolic," says Nelson Roberto Antoniosi Filho, a professor of chemistry at the Federal University of Goiás in Brazil, who lists diabetes, cancer, Parkinson's, and Alzheimer's disease as examples. "In these cases, mitochondria – the cell organelles responsible for converting lipids, carbohydrates, and proteins into energy – begin to function differently than those in healthy cells. They start to produce different chemical substances and may even stop producing others."
Antoniosi Filho's lab have discovered that earwax concentrates this great diversity of substances more than other biological fluids such as blood, urine, sweat, and tears.
"It makes a lot of sense because there's not a lot of turnover in earwax," says Bruce Kimball, a chemical ecologist at the Monell Chemical Senses Centre, a research institute based in Philadelphia. "It kind of builds up, and so there's certainly a reason to think that it might be a good place to capture long-term snapshots of changes in metabolism.”
Tricky diagnoses
With this in mind, Antoniosi Filho and his team are developing the "cerumenogram" – a diagnostic tool they claim can accurately predict whether a person has certain forms of cancer based on their earwax.
In a 2019 study, Antoniosi Filho's team collected earwax samples from 52 cancer patients who had been diagnosed with either lymphoma, carcinoma, or leukemia. The researchers also took earwax from 50 healthy subjects. They then analyzed the samples using a method which can accurately detect the presence of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) – chemicals that evaporate easily in air.
The researchers identified 27 compounds in earwax that served as a kind of "fingerprint" for cancer diagnosis. In other words, the team could predict with 100% accuracy whether someone had cancer (either lymphoma, carcinoma, or leukemia) based on the concentrations of these 27 molecules. Interestingly, the test could not distinguish between different types of cancer, suggesting that the molecules are produced either by, or as a response to, cancer cells from all these types of cancer.
"Although cancer consists of hundreds of diseases, from a metabolic point of view, cancer is a single biochemical process, which can be detected at any stage through the evaluation of specific VOCs," says Antoniosi Filho.
While in 2019 the team identified 27 VOCs, they are currently focusing on a small number of these that are exclusively produced by cancer cells as part of their unique metabolism. In as-yet unpublished work, Antoniosi Filho says they have also shown that the cerumenogram is able to detect the metabolic disturbances that occur in pre-cancerous stages, where cells exhibit abnormal changes that could potentially lead to cancer, but are not yet cancerous.
"Considering that medicine indicates that most cancers diagnosed at stage 1 have up to a 90% cure rate, it is conceivable that the success in treatment will be much higher with the diagnosis of pre-cancer stages," says Antoniosi Filho.
In the future, we hope that the cerumenogram will become a routine clinical examination, preferably every six months, that allows, with a small portion of earwax, to simultaneously diagnose diseases such as diabetes, cancer, Parkinson's, and Alzheimer's, as well as evaluate metabolic changes resulting from other health conditions," says Antoniosi Filho.
In Brazil, the Amaral Carvalho Hospital has recently adopted the cerumenogram as a diagnostic and monitoring technique for cancer treatment, says Antoniosi Filho.
Musah is also hopeful that her research will one day help people suffering from Ménière's disease, a condition for which there is currently no cure. She first hopes to validate her test on a larger sample of patients in the clinic, before producing a diagnostic test that could be used by clinicians in their offices.
"We are currently working on developing a test kit very similar to what you would see in over-the-counter types of kits that you can buy for Covid-19 testing," says Musah.
Understanding earwax
Just the observation that three fatty acids are very low compared to normal earwax may also provide some clues that can be further investigated, Musah explains. "It might help us understand what causes the disease, or perhaps even suggest ways in which it can be treated," she says.
Musah says that a lot of foundational work is still needed to understand the chemical profile of normal, healthy earwax – and how this changes in different disease states. But she hopes that one day it may be routinely analyzed in hospitals to diagnose diseases, in much the same way as blood.
"Earwax is a really wonderful matrix to use because it is very lipid rich, and there are lots of diseases that are a consequence of dysregulation of lipid metabolism," says Musah.
Perdita Barran, a chemist and professor of mass spectrometry at the University of Manchester in the UK, doesn't study earwax specifically, but does analyze biological molecules and investigate if they could be used to diagnose diseases. She agrees that, theoretically at least, it makes sense that this substance would be a good place to look for signs of illness.
"The compounds that you find in blood tend to be water soluble, whereas earwax is a very lipid-rich substance, and lipids don't like water," says Barran. "So if you only study blood, you only get half the picture. Lipids are the canary in the coal mine molecules. They're the ones that really start changing first.”
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20250424-what-your-earwax-can-reveal-about-your-health?at_objective=awareness&at_ptr_type=email&at_email_send_date=20250430&at_send_id=4347811&at_link_title=https%3a%2f%2fwww.bbc.com%2ffuture%2farticle%2f20250424-what-your-earwax-can-reveal-about-your-health&at_bbc_team=crm
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THE SWEATING DISEASE
It was a disease that appeared suddenly in 1485, had a few pandemics, the last one in 1551, then disappeared. It was an infectious disease that hit you with sudden cold shivers, dizziness, headache, and severe pains in the neck, shoulders, and limbs, then with great exhaustion. The “cold” stage lasted from half an hour to three hours, after which the “hot and sweating” stage began with a sense of heat, headache, delirium, rapid pulse, and intense thirst that accompanied the sweat. Palpitations and pain in the heart were frequent symptoms. In the final stages there was either general exhaustion and collapse, or an irresistible urge to sleep. The disease killed you in less than one day. If you survived there was no immunity and you could suffer the disease again and again. We now think it could have been some form of unknown hantavirus.
Many think that one of the reasons why the disease disappeared is this: it was so quick that it didn’t have time to infect a whole lot of people. At least when it comes to infectious diseases, a long mild incubation, or the presence of a lot of very mild cases that may not feel all that great but are healthy enough to go around and spread the disease is essential. But a disease that hits suddenly and with very strong symptoms doesn’t spread well, the patients are easy to isolate, and the disease is less likely to spread very far. ~ Alice Twain, Quora
Sarah Carter:
The eldest son of Henry VII died of this awful disease — and so the course of history changed.
Thomas Carr:
Henry was much less reserved and calm of temperament prince than Arthur, who perished from the sweating sickness. So, I would agree with you that history would have been changed. In my view, had Arthur been king, there would have been no Church of England. In turn, no Pilgrims nor Lord Baltimore setting up colonies in North America. There mightn’t have been an America as the American Revolution might not have happened.
Michael C Moritz:
I’d note that the medieval folks who blamed ‘vapors’ for the spread of the disease were right in that they sensed it was airborne. Hence masking. They didn’t know about bacteria and viruses, but still they got it right.
Peter:
I caught the flu H1N1, it was just like that. It hit very suddenly, with a massive attack of shivering that rattled my teeth and shot my temperature up. The high fever caused delirium.
The doctor told me he could easily determine who had that strain of flu with a simple question —What time did the symptoms start?”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweating_sickness
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THE GENETIC MYSTERY OF WHY SOME PEOPLE DEVELOP AUTISM
Until the 1970s, the prevailing belief in psychiatry was that autism was a consequence of bad parenting. In the 1940s, the Austrian psychiatrist Leo Kanner had coined the controversial "refrigerator mother" theory suggesting that autism arose from early childhood trauma, created by mothers who were cold, uncaring and rejected their children.
Daniel Geschwind, a neuroscience and genetics professor at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), says that this is now rightly recognized as being deeply damaging and wrong — but it took the better part of three decades for Kanner's theory to be debunked. It was not until 1977, when a couple of psychiatrists carried out a landmark study demonstrating that autism often runs in identical twins, that a more nuanced and accurate picture of autism's origins began to emerge.
That 1977 study was the first time that a genetic component of autism had been identified. Research has since shown that when one identical twin is autistic, the likelihood that the other twin will be too can be more than 90%. Meanwhile, the chances of fraternal twins of the same sex each sharing a diagnosis of autism are around 34%. These levels are substantially higher than the typical rate of occurrence among the wider population, of around 2.8%.
It is now widely accepted that there is a strong genetic component to autism. But which genes are involved and how their expression is influenced by other factors are only just starting to be unraveled.
Tiny differences
Even after the twin study in 1977, it would take several more decades for the full subtleties of the interaction between autism and the human genome to become apparent.
Between any two individuals, the amount of genetic variation is around 0.1%, meaning that approximately one letter or base pair out of every 1,000 in their DNA will be different.
"Sometimes these variations have no effect at all," says Thomas Bourgeron, a neuroscience professor at the Institut Pasteur in Paris. "Sometimes they have a little effect, and sometimes they have a super strong effect."
Currently, "super strong" variations have been identified in up to 20% of all cases of autism, with a single mutation in a single gene being largely responsible for driving critical neurodevelopmental differences. The role of these single gene mutations and how they arise is one of the most heavily studied areas in autism research, because as Bourgeron explains, they often result in severe and life-limiting disabilities.
For most autistic people, their neurodiversity is thought to arise from the combined action of thousands of different gene variants.
"This is not like the autism you see in the movies," Bourgeron says. "If you're born with one of these major mutations, there's a high likelihood you'll end up with intellectual disability or motor delay [the ability to coordinate muscle groups] or epileptic encephalopathy. It has a major impact on their quality of life and their family in most cases."
So far scientists have identified at least 100 genes where these mutations can occur. Bourgeron himself made one of the first discoveries in March 2003 when he identified two gene mutations linked to autism. Each impacted proteins involved in synaptogenesis, the process of forming connections between neurons in the brain. It was a major breakthrough, although it barely made a ripple in the media at the time, with Bourgeron recalling how former US President George W Bush had recently declared war on Iraq.
But more discoveries were to come, including mutations in the Shank3 gene which are estimated to occur in less than 1% of people with autism. We now know that some of these mutations are known as de novo variants, which means that they occur through random chance in a developing embryo and aren't present in the blood DNA of either the mother or father. Geschwind describes de novo variants as being akin to a "bolt of lightning", that is both unexpected and rare.
However, in other cases, these mutations can have been passed on by one of the parents, even if both appear to be neurotypical, a more complex phenomenon which researchers have only begun to understand in the past decade.
"You might wonder, if an autistic child has inherited a rare gene mutation from one of their parents, why doesn't the parent have autism too?" says Geschwind. "What seems to happen is that in the parent, it's not sufficient to be causal, but in the child, that major gene mutation combines additively with other, less individually impactful gene variants to drive neurodevelopment differences," he says.
Of course, there are also thought to be environmental factors involved in the development of autism – even among identical twins where one has been diagnosed, 10% of the time the other one will not be.
Historically, identifying the environmental factors behind autism has led to pseudoscientific beliefs such as the idea – now widely debunked – that certain vaccines might be involved. Now the US Health Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr has pledged a massive research effort to identify the causes of autism before September 2025. This includes hiring the vaccine sceptic David Geier as a data analyst at the US Department of Health & Human Services. The Autism Society of America have expressed concerns that the plans are unrealistic, as well as potentially harmful and misleading.
According to the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), potential non-genetic causes of autism include prenatal exposure to air pollution and certain pesticides, extreme prematurity, and birth difficulties leading to oxygen deprivation in the baby's brain, among other factors.
EARLY DEVELOPMENT
Today genetic research is leading progress into how neurodevelopment can lead to autism. It appears that many of these genes become functional during the formation of the cortex – the wrinkly outer layer of the brain responsible for many high-level functions, including memory, problem-solving and thinking.
This critical part of brain development occurs in the fetus as it is developing in the womb, and according to Geschwind, peaks somewhere between 12 and 24 weeks. "You can think of these mutations as disrupting the normal patterns of development, knocking development off of its normal track so to speak and maybe onto another tributary, instead of the normal, neurotypical pattern of development," says Geschwind.
Because they cause such severe disability, the information about these gene mutations has enabled parents to form support groups, for example the FamilieSCN2A Foundation which serves as a community for families of autistic children where the autism diagnosis has been linked to a genetic change in the SCN2A gene. Discussions have also been held regarding the idea of using such genetic information to influence future reproductive decisions.
"If it's a de novo variant, then you can tell the parents that the risk would be low [of having another child with the same neurodevelopmental challenges], because there is a limited contribution from inherited factors, if they decided to have subsequent children," says Geschwind. "We can also give the family a sense of the spectrum of how their child might develop over time, and for parents of a two-year-old that's non-verbal and has some walking delay, they want to know what to expect."
But while this can offer huge benefits for these families, the concept of genetic research is not viewed with universal positivity across the autistic community. Autism is a vast spectrum, ranging from those with severe impairments in physical and mental development which will never allow them to live independently, to others with far fewer support needs who view their autism as an identity and advantage, and oppose depictions of autism as a disorder.
Because of this, for some autistic people, their families and a number of academic researchers, the compilation of genetic data has yielded ongoing concerns about how it might be used.
A complex picture
In the past half century, genetics studies have shown that in the majority of autistic people, their neurodiversity arises through the additive effects of hundreds or even thousands of relatively common gene variants which they have inherited from both parents.
These gene variants exist throughout the population of both neurotypical and neurodivergent people, and the individual contribution of any one of these genes to neurodevelopment is negligible. But in combination, they have a significant effect on the wiring of the brain.
Bourgeron says that it is not uncommon for one or both parents, who carry some of these gene variants, to display autistic traits such as a preference for order, difficulties in detecting emotions, and being hyperaware of patterns; but unlike their child, these traits do not manifest to such a significant degree that they themselves could be diagnosed as autistic.
Over the last 20 years, autism researchers have devised some ingenious ways of identifying some of these more subtle variants. In the early 2000s, Simon Baron-Cohen, a professor of psychology and psychiatry at the University of Cambridge, and colleagues, devised a test called Reading the Mind in the Eyes. This is intended to assess a person's ability to detect emotions such as looking playful, comforting, irritated or bored – based on a photograph which shows only the person's eyes.
The idea is that poorer performance on the test indicates a higher likelihood of a person being autistic. "Autistic individuals have a different way of looking at the face, and they seem to get more information from a person's mouth," says Bourgeron. "Neurotypical individuals get more information from the eyes."
More recently, in partnership with the DNA testing site 23andMe, which agreed to host the Reading the Mind in the Eyes test on their website, Bourgeron and Baron-Cohen were able to gather data on the abilities of more than 88,000 people to read thoughts and emotions from a person's eyes, and compare this performance with their genetic information. Through this dataset, they were able to identify large groups of gene variants associated with poorer emotion recognition, many of which are thought to be carried by autistic people.
Other research studies have found that common gene variants associated with autism tend to be negatively correlated with empathy or social communication. But they are positively correlated with the ability to analyze and construct systems as well as rules and routines. Most intriguingly, they are also often linked to higher educational attainment, along with greater spatial or mathematical or artistic abilities. "This perhaps explains why these genetic variants, which come from very distant ancestors, have remained in the population throughout human history," says Geschwind.
Geschwind and Baron-Cohen are now embarking on a project to try to understand whether some of the common gene variants linked with autism can explain why autism seems to be more prevalent in men, and why autistic women are thought to be more adept at masking their neurodivergent traits compared with autistic men.
"The likelihood is that differences in male and female brain development and function make the men more susceptible and the women protected from the genetic susceptibility to autism to some degree, but we don't fully understand that yet," says Geschwind.
However, some experts believe that autism may be much more common in women than is currently thought, and that the experiences of this group are being overlooked.
Geschwind suggests that understanding sex differences in autism could help identify protective factors which could be used as future treatments, yet this very concept remains deeply divisive and reflective of one of the core underlying tensions within autism research. While some scientists pursue treatments, other researchers and some autistic people believe that autism is not a disorder to be fixed, but an identity and a shared experience.
"Autism isn't a biological phenomenon that has to be tested for, and where you get a categorical outcome or prognosis," says Sue Fletcher-Watson, professor of developmental psychology at the University of Edinburgh. "It isn't something, like cancer, that is universally agreed to be bad and for which everyone wants a cure. In my opinion, it never will be."
In particular, Fletcher-Watson says that many autistic people fear that the ultimate outcome of autism genetic research will be a prenatal test, which could pose an existential threat to autism. Beginning in 2005, one activist created the Autistic Genocide Clock, stating that if such a test existed, it would represent a continuation of historic attempts to eliminate minority groups. Two decades later, such fears remain.
"Genetic researchers on the whole have done little to listen to, and address, the fears of the autistic community regarding security and future use of genetic data," says Fletcher-Watson. These fears are heightened by political contexts, she says, such as the strength of certain far-right parties, which make the possibility of eugenic use of genetic data seem much more real.
Prenatal tests are already established practice in the UK for conditions caused by having an extra copy of a chromosome in some or all of the body’s cells. These include Down's syndrome (where there's an extra copy of chromosome 21), Edward syndrome (where there's an extra copy of chromosome 18), and Patau syndrome (where there's an extra copy of chromosome 13), and in some countries like Iceland, termination rates following a positive screen are close to 100%," she says.
A broad spectrum
Joseph Buxbaum, a psychiatry professor at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, who founded the Autism Sequencing Consortium, an international group of scientists who share samples and genetic data, feels that some autistic activists are missing the point.
"When I get challenged by somebody who says, 'Well I have autism and I don't think I need be researched,' I'm like, 'Well, how about somebody who has no language, an IQ of 50 and will never be able to live alone and unsupervised,'" says Buxbaum. "What are your thoughts about that person? So, when I think about interventions, I'm thinking about these people, as opposed to someone who has trouble maintaining eye contact, unusual interests and conflicts in social situations."
Geschwind agrees, also citing the marked differences which exist across the autistic spectrum. "The majority of the spectrum is a condition that has to be accommodated like any other disability," he says. However, he adds that another cohort – those who are more severely impacted – would warrant treatment. "These are different things," he says.
To try and better stratify the broad spectrum of autistic traits, the Lancet Commission formally recognized the term "profound autism" in 2021, as a way of describing autistic people who are unable to advocate for themselves and are likely to require 24-hour support throughout their lives. Since then, a variety of clinical trials have begun, all using various therapeutic strategies to try and target the single genes underpinning physical and intellectual disability in different individuals with profound autism.
The main idea for these treatments surrounds the fact that all of us have two copies or alleles, or variants, of every single gene, one from each parent. A recent study from Geschwind's lab leveraged the understanding that most of the de novo gene mutations linked with profound autism only knock out one of these copies, suggesting it might be possible to reduce the degree of disability by boosting the unaffected copy. "That means you have one unaffected copy, [the activity of which] which we showed could be turned up to compensate," says Geschwind.
Bourgeron has recently been running a clinical trial using the metal lithium to boost a version of the Shank3 gene in autistic children who are known to have Shank3 mutations. In the future, Geschwind suggests that a technology such as Crispr, which allows scientists to edit a person's DNA, could be used to intervene at an even earlier stage of life. For example, gene therapy could be delivered to unborn babies found to have various mutations, while they are still in the womb. "We've recently figured out a way of doing this," he says. "It might not fully correct the impacted gene, but it could at least partially correct it."
The FDA has recently granted approval for the US-based biotechnology company Jaguar Gene Therapy to run a clinical trial where a gene therapy is administered to autistic children with a Shank3 gene mutation along with a co-occurring genetic condition called Phelan-McDermid syndrome which affects development, speech and behavior.
"This trial is only possible because all the children participating have genetic diagnoses," says Buxbaum. "And because researchers at Mount Sinai and elsewhere have spent the past 15 years studying how these children develop when they have these mutations. We can then use this natural history data as a control in the study."
But while such trials could undoubtedly result in enormous benefits for the children involved and their families, Fletcher-Watson is still skeptical about their depiction as therapies for autism, profound or otherwise. She would prefer to see them characterized as treatments for intellectual disability.
"I believe that when people talk about these single-gene cases of autism, they are being disingenuous," says Fletcher-Watson. "They are talking about single-gene causes of intellectual disability, perhaps many of whom are also autistic. But there is funding available for research to address autism, active parent campaign groups and all sorts of resources, in a way that there is not for intellectual disability."
At the same time, Fletcher-Watson is more optimistic about the potential of genetic research to devise novel treatments for some of the co-occurring conditions with which autistic people are often diagnosed, including epilepsy, sleep disturbances, OCD and gastrointestinal disorders.
Bourgeron now coordinates a European project on risk, resilience and developmental diversity in mental health, collaborating with autistic people and their families to better understand why autism rarely comes in isolation, and what makes different individuals prone to these conditions.
At the same time, Bourgeron says that we also need to better recognize neurodiversity and reduce stigma relating to autism. "I think that for us as geneticists we need to go back to the needs of each person" he says. "Some autistic individuals with Shank3 mutations are so severely impacted that they need round the clock care. For others, they might only need specific support at school.
"Overall, we need to do a better job of recognizing neurodiversity, and doing everything we can to make sure that people who function differently from the majority can flourish in our societies.”
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20250415-the-genetic-mystery-of-why-some-people-develop-autism?at_objective=awareness&at_ptr_type=email&at_email_send_date=20250416&at_send_id=4337572&at_link_title=https%3a%2f%2fwww.bbc.com%2ffuture%2farticle%2f20250415-the-genetic-mystery-of-why-some-people-develop-autism&at_bbc_team=crm
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WEIGHT LOSS PROTECTS EVEN WHEN WEIGHT IS REGAINED
Having lost a great deal of weight appears to offer some protection against ill health even for those who have regained some of their weight loss. This is shown in a study at the University of Gothenburg of people who have undergone weight-loss surgery.
The study, published in The Lancet Region Health – Europe, focuses on the health consequences of regaining some weight following significant weight loss, an area in which scientific knowledge is described as extremely limited.
The study analyzed mortality, cardiovascular disease, cancer, and microvascular disease, which affects the body's smallest blood vessels, in people who had initially lost a great deal of weight and then regained a substantial amount.
The study included 1,346 participants from the SOS (Swedish Obese Subjects) study at the University of Gothenburg, the world's most comprehensive study of the long-term effects of bariatric surgery compared to conventional obesity treatment. Additional health data on the participants were retrieved from several national registries held by Sweden's National Board of Health and Welfare.
Same cancer risk and life expectancy
One year after surgery, the participants had lost an average of about 30 kilograms. Four years after the procedure, just over half of them had regained at least 20 percent of the weight lost during the first year.
Accordingly, the researchers compared two groups: one in which the participants had regained at least 20 percent of their earlier weight loss, and one in which the participants had maintained their lower weight or gained only a little.
In terms of cancer risk and life expectancy, no differences were found between the groups.
Cancer incidence and mortality remained at the same levels regardless of partial weight regain. However, differences were observed regarding microvascular disease, with those who regained weight being at greater risk. The incidence rate was 11.0 per 1,000 person-years, as compared to 8.7 in the group that maintained their lower weight.
A similar pattern, albeit less distinct, was seen for cardiovascular diseases (heart attack, stroke, and heart failure combined). The incidence rate was 15.7 per 1,000 person-years in those who had regained a lot of weight, as compared to 13.0 in the group who had maintained their lower weight.
Long-lasting positive effects
One of the lead researchers behind the study is Kajsa Sjöholm, an associate professor at the Department of Molecular and Clinical Medicine at Sahlgrenska Academy at the University of Gothenburg:
"Until now, the effects of weight regain following major weight loss on long-term health and mortality have remained unknown. What we're now seeing is that even those who regain some of their weight loss experience long-lasting positive effects with the same life expectancy as those who maintain their lower weight," she says.
"As for cardiovascular disease, we see that weight regain worsens the risk factors, underlining the need for patients to receive effective support to prevent significant weight gain. Weight regain also leads to other challenges that can reduce quality of life, such as hip and knee pain and the stigma associated with obesity," says Kajsa Sjöholm.
Fact box: Bariatric surgery in Sweden
More than 5,000 procedures each year
37 surgical units throughout Sweden
Gastric bypass the most common procedure
Considerable variations in availability and waiting times
23 percent pay for surgery themselves
Source: SOReg (Scandinavian Obesity Surgery Registry) Annual Report for 2023
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1077776
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KEFIR HELPS FIGHT ALZHEIMER’S
As researchers learn more about how to combat Alzheimer’s disease, more evidence piles up to support the notion that gut health may play an important role in brain health, including helping prevent and reduce characteristics of dementia.
With that in mind, Brazilian researchers recently reviewed several studies to see whether kefir could be beneficial as a supplement for someone with Alzheimer’s disease. Since probiotics support gut health, which is suspected to impact brain health, the scientists wanted to look into kefir specifically since it has a “unique microbial composition.”
While the scientists were limited in the number of studies they included in their review, they still found the results promising. One study in humans showed that supplementing kefir improved cognitive functioning and memory tests.
The findings appear in the journal Brain Behavior and Immunity Integrative.
The fermentation process converts lactose into lactic acid, giving kefir its slightly sour taste and fizzy texture.
https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/could-probiotic-kefir-help-fight-alzheimers-disease
Oriana:
Fermented food in general (e.g. sauerkraut, pickles, kimchi, tempeh, sourdough bread) appears to have a neuroprotective effect, most likely due to nourishing the "good bacteria" in the gut microbiome.
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ending on beauty:
ALCESTIS RETURNS
How is he to greet her,
her husband, an everyday
coward who begged,
“I don’t want to die — not yet — ”
what welcome to give
her who in his stead
went down into Hades, a flame
among the shadows of flames —
how is he to touch her
as she returns
from beyond the flesh —
whose eyes have
turned to diamonds,
who sets fire
to the marble
columns with her hair.
~ Oriana
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