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CENTRAL VALLEY INTERSTATE 5
July, 10 a.m., the Valley is bleached dry.
The temperature climbs slowly,
a truck on a steep incline.
Asphalt gleams like obsidian.
Sunshine bursts into tiny suns
on windshields of incoming traffic.
6 p.m., the Buck moon rises orange.
Sunset flows down the foot hills.
The wind makes a ruckus like mice scurrying
under fallen leaves. Evening deepens.
Nothing is left. The heat gropes,
a blind man climbing stairs.
Now is the time to clear my mind
to make room for starlight.
~ Joe Milosch
Stars over Mt. Shasta. I-5 goes past Mt. Shasta.
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UKRAINE’S SPECTACULAR DRONE ATTACK ON RUSSIA’S AIR BASES
Ukraine just disabled a primary piece of Russia’s nuclear arsenal with devices that look like they came from RadioShack.
They nicknamed it the “Bear.” It’s a military aircraft first designed in Russia in the 1950s and built to compete with the American B-52 bomber. The Tupolev Tu-95 can fly across continents before it has to stop and refuel, and it can carry eight long-range missiles.
For decades, Russia has had dozens of Tu-95 bombers and other planes like it. On Sunday, Ukrainian drones struck several Russian air bases, destroying a fleet of planes, including several Tu-95 bombers.
Russia has been hammering Ukraine with these bombers for years, and this weekend, Kyiv decided that rather than just trying to intercept the missiles that these planes keep firing from the sky, it would instead try to take out the planes.
According to NBC News, Ukraine’s Security Service smuggled more than a hundred drones into Russia. They hid them under the roofs of mobile wooden cabins in a process that took months.
Then all at once, simultaneously, with no warning, the cabin roofs were opened via remote control, and then the drones flew off to do their thing, packed with explosives.
Ukraine says they destroyed planes across four different military sites in Russia, including in Siberia at a site almost 3,000 miles away from Ukraine. Of Russia’s entire fleet of military bombers, Ukraine says they were able to destroy or severely damage about a third of them.
Now, was Russia aware that this was going to happen? Clearly no. Did they have defenses in place to protect their planes? Well, that’s a funny story.
In a video of Sunday’s drone attack, put out by Ukraine’s Security Service, you can see round objects on the wings of Russia’s bomber planes. Those circles are actually tires — like the tires you put on your car. Apparently, this is a thing Russia has been doing for a while now. One NATO military official told CNN in 2023, “We believe it’s meant to protect against drones. ... We don’t know if this will have any effect.”
Well, now we know. As Sunday’s strike shows, tires do not prevent drones from destroying your attack planes.
This whole thing is just astonishing, not just in a foreign policy way, but also in an action movie kind of way. It also has really serious implications beyond Russia and Ukraine. Those bomber planes Ukraine just torched are not only equipped to carry regular missiles, they also can carry nuclear warheads.
If you are Russia, the United States or any country with nuclear weapons, your national security policies are based around the fact that you have an impenetrable nuclear deterrent. Why would anyone attack you if you could then retaliate by blowing them off the map with your nuclear stockpile?
But Ukraine just disabled a primary piece of Russia’s nuclear arsenal with devices that look like they came from RadioShack, which means it has to contend with the fact that its impenetrable nuclear arsenal is not so impenetrable after all.
The Russians just lost 40% of their strategic bomber fleet. One more such strike, and they’ll have to deliver their missiles by train or horse carriage.
Sunday’s strike also has really important strategic consequences for every country that thinks of itself as having a nuclear deterrent.
For our country, wouldn’t this be a good time to have a robust, competent national security apparatus thinking about those kinds of implications and making smart, well-informed strategic decisions on how to react to them?
https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/ukraine-russia-drone-attack-nuclear-weapons-rcna210654
Oriana:
As for the relatively minor attacks on Russian airfields, I have lost track of them long ago. Russia tries to explain them away as “industrial fires.”
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THE AFTERMATH: EVERYTHING ACCORDING TO PLAN
In Moscow, Lieutenant General Sergei Kobylash, commander of the Russian Air Force, accidentally fell out of a window following Ukrainian attack on Russian airfields.
Kobylash was one of the most notorious figures behind the Kremlin’s so-called “unremarkable aviation.” Under his command, Russia’s strategic bombers carried out missile strikes on Ukrainian cities using X-101 and X-55 missiles. He was known for declaring, “All targets have been hit. Everything is going according to plan.”
All of them will die at the hands of their own people. ~ Salka, Quora
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AND THE RUSSIAN RETALIATION
Russia is targeting civilians because they struggle to hit military targets — and also because Putin is trying to maul the Ukrainian society into a submission, so that the public sentiment pivots into “peace at any cost” mode.
Putin’s strategists obviously believe they have more chances to turn the Ukrainian society against their own leaders — than to win on the battlefield.
Russia planned operation “Zeus' Lightning” — largest-ever cruise missile attack on all of Ukraine — for the night of June 1, with the goal to force Ukraine's hand at Istanbul “peace talks” the next day.
Instead, the Ukrainian drones destroyed many of these very bombers, which were already fueled, hours before they were due to take-off.
The fact that Russia is unable to hit military targets in Ukraine shows the crisis of Russian intelligence agencies — they simply cannot find where to hit, while Ukraine easily located Russia’s military assets. It’s a systemic crisis, not something the Russians can easily fix. They no longer have spies in Ukraine who can provide intel. Ukraine, on the other hand, knows what’s happening in Russia and able to eliminate high value military targets with surgical precision.
Russia’s attacks on civilians are basically a confession that Russia’s military has exhausted all avenues to achieve a strategic breakthrough.
The only Putin’s hope is that the Ukrainians surrender.
But Putin is losing the psychological war as well. The public sentiment “to fight for as long as necessary” is on the rise — after a dip earlier this year.
54% of Ukrainians were prepared to tolerate the war “for as long as it’s necessary” in March 2025.
In May 2025, their share jumped to 60%.
The share of population saying they were prepared to tolerate hardships “for as long as necessary” was dropping since the start of the war — it’s the 1st time the curve has reversed.
But even at its lowest, more than 1/2 of the Ukrainians were prepared to tolerate the war “for as long as it’s necessary”.
The share of those who are only ready to tolerate a few more months of the war dropped to 20% (from 24% in March 2025).
Russians claim they can fight “indefinitely.” But it’s a lie and a bluff.
Ukrainians say they want immediate ceasefire. But they have the resolve to fight until the last Russian occupier is “deleted” from their land.
Andy Edwards:
It’s an appalling situation for Ukraine.
But Putin’s indiscriminate murdering of civilians just serves to demonstrate to Ukrainians how much worse off they’d be under Putin’s jackboot.
Jan-Christophe Schlage-Puchta:
Douhet believed that you can bomb the population into submission. His ideas were taken up in WWII, most prominently by Harris. While doing significant damage to the German economy, it did nothing to break morale. In fact, the attacks on cities were mostly seen as proof that Hitler was right and the allied forces actually wanted to annihilate Germany.
It didn’t work in Vietnam either, and it will not work in Ukraine.
Hugh Pickens:
The idea that Germans during World War II became more determined under bombardment is largely a myth perpetuated by Nazi propaganda—one debunked by postwar archives.
The Allies hoped bombing would break civilian will, but Germans largely adapted through evacuation programs and decentralized industry. Postwar surveys (e.g., the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey) concluded that bombing reduced morale but didn’t cause collapse until military defeat was inevitable.
SColeman:
Putler is walking down the exact same path that defeated the Soviet Union, without a shot being fired, and he does not even see this. He is so misinformed by his own administration that he believes his own lies.
When the people of Russia have no potatoes, Putler will fall. There are still just a few potatoes, but now nobody can afford them. There are no tractors to farm them. There are no maintenance workers left to maintain even the basic farm equipment. The clock is ticking on the Russian economy which is about to collapse.
Building bombs to “boost the economy” (collecting taxes for the war machine) does not put bread on the shelves. You can't provide basic necessities by building only munitions. Fear and intimidation only works when the people of Russia are not hungry. The people of Russia are getting restless. Putler’s time is near.
Eric Lanteigne:
The way countries wage war nowadays is completely absurd: destroying each other military does nothing to convince the other country to give up (i.e stalemate). Once the war is over, countries rebuild their military and go at it again and again and again. When your civilians are gone, there is nothing else to defend and you truly have lost. That’s why Putin strategy is despicable but sound.
With that said, do not think for one nanosecond that I am for Putin. I simply do not understand why every single country of the United Nations have not send the biggest military contingent available in Ukraine to repel the Russians back to the 1991 frontier. Because, as you may have read somewhere, this is exactly why the United Nations (formerly the League of Nations) has been created. The U.N. is a joke and so far way from its primary mandate which to avoid/prevent unprovoked aggression and land grab like Hitler did back in his days.
Even better, if the UN would have massed 500000 soldiers at the Russia/Ukraine frontier on 20th of February 2022 (as part of so-called exercises), none of this would have happened. Millions of lives saved (you don’t have to be dead to have your life ruined) and also billions of dollars could have been spent more productively.
Elena Gold: WHAT THE WESTERNERS DON’T UNDERSTAND ABOUT RUSSIA
The lack of dignity, lawlessness, the corruption, the torture, the lack of compassion and widespread abuse between family members, inability to trust anyone — the brutality of everyday life, the normalization of abuse, the sadistic nature of law enforcement — things that are hard to notice if you visit flashy Moscow and its tourist sights.
The “mysterious Russian soul” doesn’t exist.
It’s not a mystery how the Russians become what they are — through abuse, from childhood and forever, by parents, mates, enforcers, employers.
And now, by the brutal Russian war machine.
Ilse Clay:
How very, very terrible and sad, it breaks my heart. All the suffering all over the world for a few people's greed for power and money.
Oriana:
As Prigozhin said: This war has nothing to do with the expansion of NATO. It’s about greed and ambition.
Matthias Heinze:
The soldiers going to Ukraine know they are not defending, not liberating, no fair maiden throws flowers at them. They are just thugs there, criminals and they make them into bonafide criminals by making them participate in atrocities. Just like the Mafia, you murder a child, torture a POW, you are now part of the gang, you implicated yourself, you can’t turn back from this. You may go “home” but your deeds will follow you.
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DIMA VOROBIEV SUPPLIES A HISTORICAL POSTER OF PEACE-LOVING RUSSIA VS WAR-MONGERING NATO (here presented as pirates)
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IT IS A TRUTH UNIVERSALLY ACKNOWLEDGED THAT JANE AUSTEN PAIRS WELL WITH TEA
Pinkies up, Janeites! We mark the bicentennial of Austen's death with a look at her relationship with a beloved cuppa.
In an essay on Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf observed, "Of all great writers she is the most difficult to catch in the act of greatness."
This observation might seem irksomely contrarian to the legions of Janeites in hats and bonnets gathered around tea and scones to pay fealty to the novelist on the bicentenary of her death, which falls today.
'Jane Austen and tea' is after all, a comely capitalist hustle that has spawned a cottage industry of crockery, tea towels, tea bags, tea rooms and boutique brews named Dashing Willoughby, Marianne's Wild Abandon and, in a nice comic touch, Compassion For Mrs. Bennet's Nerves.
Austen would have been especially amused by the latter – her mother, a vigorous hypochondriac who lived to the ripe age of 88 and who almost certainly inspired the high-strung Mrs. Bennet in Pride and Prejudice, was constantly sipping on dandelion tea to soothe her mysterious "bilious complaint."
But to turn to Austen's novels to savor her much-paraded relationship with tea is to set oneself up for disappointment. Tea is mentioned frequently but never fully. The sampling of lines below, variations of which occur throughout her six novels, illustrates the brisk indifference with which Austen treats tea.
"The tea things were brought in" (Sense and Sensibility)
"When the tea-things were removed, and the card-tables placed" (Pride and Prejudice)
"Dinner was soon followed by tea and coffee" (Mansfield Park)
"Mr. Woodhouse was soon ready for his tea; and when he had drank his tea he was quite ready to go home" (Emma)
"tea was over, and the instrument in preparation" (Emma)
"some of them did decide on going in quest of tea" (Persuasion)
"Mr. Tilney drank tea with us, and I always thought him a great addition" (Northanger Abbey)
Characters are always on their way to tea or from it and the tea things are either being brought in or cleared away. Tea serves as no more than a conjunction to join the two more significant parts of the evening: the dinner that precedes it and the recreation that follows it, involving a musical performance or card games like whist or quadrille.
But of the ceremony of tea-drinking itself, there is precious little. There is no description of the kinds of tea being imbibed – whether oolong, hyson, congou, bohea or gunpowder; nothing on the elaborate equipage – the tea caddies, silver urns, flowered china, silver teaspoons, tea tables; and no acidic observations on the affectations and gossip associated with tea drinking.
Austen's scant teaspoon of detail is surprising — and infuriating — because she did, in fact, love tea — as is amply evident from her correspondence.
"Let me know when you begin the new Tea & the new white wine," she wrote in a letter from London to her elder sister Cassandra at their Chawton cottage in Hampshire. "My present Elegancies have not yet made me indifferent to such Matters. I am still a Cat if I see a Mouse."
"Proof enough," writes Kim Wilson in her 2011 book Tea with Jane Austen, "Jane was an avid tea lover, ready to pounce on a really good cup of tea."
Wilson's slim book, which thoroughly mines Austen's letters, is excellent on the role of tea in the writer's personal life. She likely took no milk in her tea – a preference Wilson smartly surmises from a letter in which the novelist compliments an acquaintance on the pleasing trait of taking "no cream in her Tea.”
In the Austen household, the tea, an expensive imported commodity, was kept under lock and key to prevent pilfering by servants. Austen kept the key and made the morning tea and breakfast (toast, muffins or rolls with butter, homemade raspberry jam and honey from Cassandra's beehives). In rich homes, the tea-making was often entrusted to the poor relative – like Fanny Price in Mansfield Park – rather than the maid.
Austen was also in charge of buying the family tea, which she did directly from Twinings, the reputed tea-merchants at the Strand in London, a wise move at a time when tea was adulterated with everything from arsenic to sheep's dung.
But Wilson runs out of material when it comes to Austen's novels, though she valiantly squeezes every drop of significance from the weak brew on offer. "At the center of almost every social situation in her novels one finds – tea," she writes. "In Emma, does Miss Bates drink coffee? Of course not: "Not coffee, I thank you, for me – never take coffee. – A little tea if you please.”
In Sense and Sensibility, what is everyone drinking when Elinor notices Edward's mysterious ring set with a lock of hair? Tea, of course. And in Pride and Prejudice, what is one of the supreme honors Mr. Collins can envision Lady Catherine bestowing on Elizabeth Bennet and her friends? Why, drinking tea with her, naturally?"
This is certainly true, but again, the opportunity to lampoon tea-time manners is blithely passed over. One feels a keen sense of loss at being deprived of Austen's sly commentary of Mr. Collins fawning over her ladyship's Sèvres and lapsang souchong.
Instead, what we do get from Austen's novels is the role of this extremely popular national beverage in upper class Regency society. Tea was served after dinner, which took place in the early evening at about four or five o'clock — though in fashionable homes it was served later. The afternoon ceremony that we know today as tea-time was a Victorian invention.
In Austen's day, tea was also served as a refreshment at stylish balls, with women hoping that a gentleman would offer to escort them to the tea-room in the way that a man today would offer to fetch a woman a drink from a crowded bar. At a grand ball in Bath, Catherine Moreland of Northanger Abbey, and her friend Mrs. Allen, feel awkward and out of place until "they received an offer of tea from one of their neighbors; it was thankfully accepted, and this introduced a light conversation with the gentleman who offered it..."
Tea historian Bruce Richardson, in a talk titled Jane Austen's Tea Things, notes that Austen was born on December 16, 1775, the second anniversary of the Boston Tea Party. He doesn't elaborate on the symbolism of this coincidence — because there isn't any.
Austen kept politics and flag-waving out of her novels. But at one point, a flash of economic patriotism manifests itself, and it is triggered by tea things. It occurs when Catherine Moreland compliments her future father-in-law General Tilney on the "elegance of the breakfast set" at Northanger Abbey. The general, writes Austen:
"was enchanted by her approbation of his taste, confessed it to be neat and simple, thought it right to encourage the manufacture of his country; and for his part, to his uncritical palate, the tea was as well flavored from the clay of Staffordshire, as from that of Dresden or Sèvres.”
Though Austen doesn't mention the make of the breakfast set, she was almost certainly referring to Wedgwood. The Wedgwood factory was set up in Staffordshire in 1759 by England's most famous potter, Josiah Wedgwood. It produced excellent china, but the snobs still exalted imported Sèvres and Dresden over the local rival.
The Austens were loyal Wedgwood patrons, and Jane wrote happily to Cassandra about "the pleasure of receiving, unpacking & approving our Wedgwood ware." She no doubt shared the general's nationalistic pride in its English origins, and like him, relished sipping her tea from Staffordshire clay.
Austen lived at a time when tea, which had become popular in England in the late 1600s, was drunk by everyone, from the elite to the working classes, and from young children to the old invalid Mrs. Bates, who is "almost past every thing but tea and quadrille." One can only hope that it brought some ease and cheer to Austen's grim last weeks, when she was almost past everything herself.
Despite being stricken with fever and severe pains in her back and face, Austen continued to write in her cool, ironic style, refusing to surrender to despair or self-pity. Days before she died at the premature age of 41, she dictated 24 lines of comic verse from her sickbed. In her last letter, written from the sofa to which she had been confined, she joked about being "promoted to a wheel-chair if the weather serves.”
That never happened. But to the last, her prose remained as bracingly astringent as a cup of tea unsoftened by drivelings of cream.
https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2017/07/18/537247637/it-is-a-truth-universally-acknowledged-that-jane-austen-pairs-well-with-tea
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THE ENDURING LEGACY OF AUSTEN’S “TRUTH UNIVERSALLY ACKNOWLEDGED”
Shortly after Amazon introduced the Kindle, they put up a page with a ranked list of the most frequently highlighted passages across all the books. It's not there anymore, but when I first looked at the list in 2013, the opening sentence of Pride and Prejudice was in third place. That was all the more impressive because eight of the other top 10 finishers were passages from the Hunger Games series, which was the hit of the season that year, as Austen's novel had been exactly 200 years earlier.
"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife."
We can argue about whether that's the most famous first line in English literature or whether the honor belongs to the opening sentence of Moby Dick or A Tale of Two Cities or 1984. But there's no other opening sentence that lends itself so well to sampling, mash-ups and adaptation.
If you're looking to add a literary touch to your article on pension schemes or emergency contraceptives, you're not going to get very far with "Call me Ishmael." But "It is a truth universally acknowledged" is always available as an elegant replacement for "As everybody knows" when you want to introduce some banal truism.
The phrase is ubiquitous in the age of Jane-o-mania. Rummage around on the Internet and you'll learn that it is a truth universally acknowledged that a "pop star in possession of a good fortune must be in want of baubles," that business class is more comfortable than economy, that "online dating sucks" and, needless to say, that Jane Austen "has left quite a mark on pop culture.”
Here's the puzzling thing. Those adaptations of Austen's sentence are almost never ironic or facetious. They only underscore the prevailing wisdom, rather than throwing it into question.
Yet my guess is that a large portion of the people who adapt that sentence know perfectly well that the original version is anything but straightforward. It may be the single most celebrated example of literary irony in all of English literature. Pick up a paperback of Pride and Prejudice at a garage sale and it's even money you'll find the first sentence underlined with "IRONY" written in the margin.
The sentence may look like a truism, but the first part actually undermines the second. In her book Why Jane Austen, Rachel Brownstein points out that if the novel had begun simply with "A single man possessed of a good fortune must be in want of a wife," we'd snuggle in for a stock romantic story. We might expect the next sentence to describe an aristocratic Colin Firth lookalike galloping full-tilt toward the Bennets' house at Longbourn.
But prefacing that clause with "It is a truth universally acknowledged" implies that's only what most people say they believe — after all, if everybody really does accept it, why bother to mention the fact? In fact, as Austen says in the following sentence, nobody really cares what the wealthy man himself thinks he needs. There's only one truth that matters to Mrs. Bennet and the other families in the neighborhood — that a daughter who has no fortune must be found a well-to-do husband to look after her, which Mrs. Bennet has made "the business of her life.”
But we suspect that Austen has her reservations about that single-minded pursuit of an advantageous marriage, even if she doesn't say so outright. And we're flattered to think that she counts on astute readers like us to pick up on that, while others will miss it. It makes us feel complicit with her. As the modernist writer Katherine Mansfield wrote in 1920, "every true admirer of [Austen's] novels cherishes the happy thought that he alone — reading between the lines — has become the secret friend of their author." (That pronoun "he" gives us a start now, but bear in mind that back then the most prominent Austen devotees were the male literati of the Bloomsbury set.)
Austen's sentence is a masterpiece of indirection, and it's no wonder that people keep trying to repurpose it in the hope that they can pluck it from its original context and its irony will somehow cling to its roots. But that can't happen without the covert wink, the tip-off to the sharp reader that the truth isn't as pat as the rest of the sentence makes it seem. Otherwise, the phrase is an empty gesture. It merely signifies irony, the way an empire waistline or a neck cloth signifies Regency gentility.
OK, it's just a sentence. But it points to what always happens when Austen is repackaged for export. There have been some wonderful stage, film and TV adaptations of Pride and Prejudice over the years. But as charming as they are, they can only depict the second half of that opening sentence, the Colin Firth bits. We get a beguiling story of romance and courtship. But we don't see it at Austen's skeptical remove. We miss the arched eyebrow, the sly and confiding voice.
That's the paradox of Austen's novels. Like the opening sentence of Pride and Prejudice, they cry out for adaptation. They seem infinitely resilient: You can relocate them to Beverly Hills or Delhi; rewrite them as murder mysteries or erotica; populate them with vampires or zombies — they'll always retain some trace of their original appeal. Yet there are few other novels so unwilling to give up their souls.
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“JANE AUSTEN WRECKED MY LIFE” DOESN’T MEASURE UP TO AUSTEN
On the stock exchange of literary acclaim, reputations rise, fall, go bust and sometimes rise again. These days, few writers have a higher valuation than Jane Austen, who's gone from being merely a great novelist to becoming a marketable brand.
Beyond the scads of adaptations, we've had movies titled Austenland and The Jane Austen Book Club, Anne Hathaway playing the young Jane, and Mr. Darcys popping up everywhere from Bridget Jones' Diary to the Hallmark Channel's Mr. Darcy Trilogy. As I speak, the Keira Knightley Pride and Prejudice is enjoying a 20th anniversary re-release, while over on Masterpiece, that queen of British television, Keeley Hawes, stars as Jane's sister, Cassandra, in the series Miss Austen.
Even France is getting into the act with the release of Jane Austen Wrecked My Life, an amiable new romance written and directed by Laura Piani. Steeped in the filmmaker's love of the writer, the movie — whose title is just a tease — embodies the pleasures and limitations of the Austen Boom.
The appealing Camille Rutherford stars as the 30-something Agathe, a would-be romance writer who works at the renowned Paris bookstore Shakespeare and Company. Profoundly blocked in her writing, emotions, and romantic life, Agathe spends her time hanging out with her co-worker Félix — played by the amusing Pablo Pauly — a likable womanizer who's her best friend.
Agathe is headed nowhere until she gets invited to a writer's retreat at the Jane Austen Residency in England. There, she meets — you guessed it — a grumpy attractive man with whom she doesn't get along. His name is Oliver and he's played by Charlie Anson, an actor who's like the house-brand version of Hugh Grant. We sense that they're destined for each other, even as we wonder whether she's better suited to Félix, with whom she shared an unexpectedly passionate kiss as she left for England.
Austen is rightly admired and beloved for creating enduringly memorable heroines who are strong, smart, principled, often witty and willful. They have character. Even when they're wrongheaded, they're never trivial, especially about romance.
You see, in Austen's world a woman's freedom to act was profoundly constrained. The choice of a man was a decision not just about chemistry but financial security and social status. Indeed, Austen portrays the society that limits her heroines with X-ray eyes, showing us the greed, vanity and class snobbery of a rigid social order where only a few live in comfort.
And, Austen's consciousness is a thrillingly powerful presence. She writes like the most dazzling of her own creations — with immaculately wrought sentences, a stinging satirical eye and a sense of judgment that can be positively ruthless. There's nothing vague or wishy-washy about her.
The risk in explicitly evoking Austen is that it instantly raises our standards. And sadly, Piani — like nearly all of today's Austenites — can't match her model's clarity or élan. Her movie is tamer and more sentimental, and utterly unconcerned with society.
In Agathe, Piani replaces the brilliance and verve of Elizabeth Bennet or Emma Woodhouse with low-key neurosis, as if fearing we wouldn't like a modern woman who's sharp or sometimes unlikable. You keep waiting for Agathe to act boldly or at least say something genuinely witty.
The movie is weighed down by all its allusions and borrowings, which become a substitute for creating something new. Doing this is hardly impossible. Hollywood worked Austen territory marvelously during the '30s and '40s — check out The Shop Around the Corner or The Philadelphia Story — while over in post-war France, Eric Rohmer made a score of sharp movies about romantic desire and illusion without ever needing to resurrect Mr. Darcy for one last bout of pride and prejudice.
Virginia Woolf famously wrote of Austen that "of all great writers she is the most difficult to catch in the act of greatness." One measure of her greatness is that, two centuries on, filmmakers like Piani are still so inspired by her work that they want to make their own versions. As an Austen lover myself, I understand the temptation. And anyway, better that than constantly remaking Batman.
https://www.npr.org/2025/06/03/nx-s1-5422227/jane-austen-wrecked-my-life-review
from another source:
BAIT AND SWITCH
In a way, Jane Austen Wrecked My Life feels like a case of bait-and-switch. By putting the celebrated 19th century author’s name in such a prominent position, there might be an expectation that the film would be a little more Austen-centric than it is. Instead, although Austen is name-dropped quite a few times, there’s little in this film to distinguish it from the many “sophisticated” rom-coms that have dotted the art house landscape over the years. That’s not to say that the movie is bad, but it’s pretty generic and certainly nothing for Austen-lovers to get excited about.
For lack of a better descriptor, Jane Austen Wrecked My Life qualifies as a very French rom-com, which is to say it’s high-brow and low-key. In fact, the categorization might be unfair since Laura Piani’s feature debut is neither especially romantic nor particularly comedic. It’s more of a drama about a woman’s journey of self-discovery as she attempts to work through a serious case of writer’s block.
Played by Camille Rutherford, Agathe Robinson is presented as someone who, by her own admission, has let life pass her by (in one of the most explicit Austen reference, she compares herself to Persuasion’s Anne Elliot). She is haunted by a past tragedy (she was the sole survivor of a car crash that claimed the lives of her parents), has been unlucky in love, and has run into a seemingly insurmountable roadblock in her writing, causing her to question her legitimacy as an author. So the French bookseller heads to England for a two week stay at the Jane Austen Regency, a retreat owned and operated by aging Austen distant relative Beth (Liz Crowther), her companion Todd (Alan Fairbairn), and their grumpy son, Oliver (Charlie Anson).
Agathe and Felix
What about the romantic element? It’s a key aspect of Jane Austen Wrecked My Life’s DNA although the execution isn’t as compelling as one might hope. Agathe has two suitors: her long-time best friend and co-worker, Felix (Pablo Pauly), and Oliver. During the first half-hour, the movie focuses on Agathe’s companionable relationship with Felix, which leads up to a kiss.
Then, as the setting switches to England, there’s a focus on a traditional “love/hate” thing with Oliver. Finally, as the movie starts to head down the final stretch, it puts the two rivals together on screen. Alas, Camille Rutherford lacks chemistry with Pablo Pauly and Charlie Anson. In the end, despite the abundance of rom-com tropes, Jane Austen Wrecked My Life works better as a character study than a romance.
The film’s tone attempts to maintain an aura of lighthearted whimsy but it often slips into the shadows. It’s unclear whether Todd’s dementia-induced naked romps are intended to be sad or amusing. Maybe a little of both. Agathe’s struggles with her personal demons sometimes make the character morose and unapproachable. Then there’s the music score, which relies on piano pieces that often seem jarringly inappropriate for the scenes in which they are used. I can’t help but wonder whether a more energetic score might have transformed the movie.
The central problem with Jane Austen Wrecked My Life is simply that the romantic elements often fail. Outside of Agathe, none of the thinly-written characters escapes two-dimensionality. There just isn’t enough time. As a result, it’s difficult to care which of the men Agathe ends up with (although, following the rom-com rules, we know who it will be) and there’s actually a thought she might be better off by herself. The movie wants to be thoughtful and cultured but it ends up dispersing the delightful froth that makes the best movies of the genre so spirited.
As an art-house trifle, this movie is okay, but there’s nothing special about what it offers. This is one of those instances when the characters could have benefitted from more exposure. The “colorful” secondary characters are background clutter and even the male co-leads feel more like flotsam in Agathe’s stream of consciousness than potential partners. Jane Austen Wrecked My Life is too low-key for its own good and could have benefited from a stronger connection to the titular author than the finished product delivers.
https://www.reelviews.net/reelviews/jane-austen-wrecked-my-life
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“JANE AUSTEN WRECKED MY LIFE” IS LIT
Agathe learns to deals with love and llamas
Do you know someone who is addicted to romance novels, but never seems to find a sigh-worthy guy or gal? The French film “Jane Austen Wrecked My Life” might be for them or maybe it’s best for the pals who offer a shoulder to cry on. An awkward 30-something is torn between a cranky English gent and her French bestie, forcing her outside the safe world of Jane Austen’s Regency era literature. This romantic comedy does have a happy ending, but not before our heroine makes some embarrassing sometimes adult-rated mistakes (nudity and sexual situations).
Historic Background
The Regency period in England (1811-1820) is not the same as in France. For the English, this was the time went George IV was the Prince Regent because his father, King George III, was not able to rule.
The French Regency period (1715-1723) was when King Louis XV was too young to rule and the Duke of Orléans, Philippe II served as regent. During the English Regency period, France was under the leadership of Napoleon Bonaparte. Crowned emperor of France in 1804, by the beginning of the English Regency, Bonaparte had already parted ways with his Josephine (m. 1796; ann. 1810) and married Marie Louise of Austria in 1810 and his first son was born in 1811.
The next year, Napoleon invaded Russia. That would culminate in his forced abdication in April 1814 when Prussia and Austria joined Russia as a coalition and invaded France. Napoleon didn’t rest in exile, he escaped Elba and again took Paris with an army, but by June 1815, he would be defeated again. This time he would be exiled to Saint Helena island where he died in 1821.
Jane Austen (1775-1817) died before the Prince Regent would become king. Her anonymously published novels were “Sense and Sensibility” (1811), “Pride and Prejudice” (1813), “Mansfield Park” (1814) and “Emma” (1816).
George IV would ascend to the throne 29 January 1820 (coronation on 19 July 1821) and reign until 26 June 1830. He had married Caroline of Brunswick in 1795. She died in 1821. George only had one legitimate child, Princess Charlotte, but she died in 1817, the same year as Jane Austen. His younger brother, Prince Frederick, also died childless (1827) so George IV was succeeded by his younger brother William IV.
Jane Austen died before George IV’s attempt to divorce his wife in 1820. Jane Austen lived during the time of the Napoleon (1769-1821). The Napoleonic Wars stretched from 1803 to 1815. That’s following the French Revolution (1789-1799) and the French Revolutionary Wars (1792-1802). Peacetime France only had a brief respite from war (1802-1803). While England was involved in the Napoleonic Wars, the war action did not reach the shores of England.
Other authors wrote about the Napoleonic Wars. Leo Tolstoy’s “War and Peace” looks at the wars from the Russian side (1805-1812). Victor Hugo’s “Les Misérables” takes place during that time. English novelist C. S. Forester wrote about the fictional Hart Hornblower.
Austen wrote about the Homefront, touched by war (e.g. Jane Fairfax being orphaned in the 1816 “Emma”), but not involved in the action. Her novels never take us to the battlefields and none of the characters are torn by battlefield angst or public support or denouncements, so much so, it is often thought Austen showed no awareness of the raging wars which was changing the continental Europe during her lifetime. Yet this isn’t entirely true. Jane Austen’s brother Henry Austen was the second husband of Eliza de Feuillide, whose first husband was guillotined in 1794. Eliza was Jane and Henry’s cousin.
In her essay, “Jane Austen: Wartime Writer,” Kathryn Sutherland wrote:
~ Throughout the twentieth century, Austen’s domestic negotiations with history were conscripted to serve a narrative of English identity. Her high reputation was tightly bound to a particular view of culture that her novels were understood to embody. She was safe to read because she was disengaged from public events. At the same time, her social vision gained traction because it appeared to represent an England worth defending and even fighting for: England imagined as the timeless village clustered around the great house and the church.
Jane Austen Wrecked My Life
Writer/director Laura Piani isn’t the first to think how the novels of Jane Austen may have affected the love life of a protagonist. In the 2009 novel “Jane Austen Ruined My Life” by Beth Patillo an English professor, Emma Grant, who specializes in Jane Austen struggles to both find a job and new love after a divorce. Someone claims to possess the lost letters of Jane Austen that were believed to have been destroyed by her sister and Emma travels to examine them.
The protagonist in the film “Jane Austen Wrecked My Life” doesn’t seem to contemplate the ruined romances of Jane Austen (Tom Lefroy) or her sister Cassandra fiancé Thomas Fowle who died in the Caribbean of yellow fever in 1797).
In the film, “Jane Austen Wrecked My Life” (“Jane Austen a gâché ma vie”), the often awkward Agathe Robinson (Camille Rutherford) works in a bookstore, Shakespeare and Company, which specializes in books in English with her best friend, Félix (Pablo Pauly). Agathe lives with her sister Rosemarie (Laurence Pierre) and Rosemarie’s son, Tom (Roman Angel). Félix often chums around, but their relationship is strictly platonic and Agathe is well aware that Félix is a serial dater and commitment shy. Agathe is clearly on her way to spinsterhood without the excuse of devotion to her art.
Agathe does write stories, but she never finishes. Félix submits one of her promising stories to a British writers program: Jane Austen two-week residency. When she’s accepted, Félix insists she go and drives her to the ferry, departing after giving her a non-friend kiss.
A confused Agathe arrives in England, met by Oliver (Charlie Anson), the son of the couple who manage the residency, Beth (Liz Crowther) and Todd (Alan Fairbarn). There are other writers there: Cheryl (Annabelle Lengronne), Olympia (Lola Peploe) and Mona (Alice Butaud). Agathe is a-flutter, trying to discern whether Félix is her true love, embarrassed by a variety of faux pas committed in front of Oliver who feels Austen is over-rated, and her continued writer’s block.
This is a quiet comedy that derives most of its humor from Agathe’s social awkwardness and personal distress. Rutherford’s Agathe isn’t far from her own experiences yet because of Agathe’s guileless earnestness we are on her side. Anson’s Oliver with his ready scowl serves as her foil. One might recognize Anson as one of the unredeemed villains of “Downton Abbey.”
In “Jane Austen Wrecked My Life,” Anson’s Oliver has a brusque edge that is softened as a man who is burdened by his ancestry and faces the unhappy reality of his father’s failing health.
"Jane Austen Wrecked My Life” is a sweet rom-com that encourages us all to take a leap into life beyond books and accepting the ruins that make us better people. I liked it better than my husband but I’ve read and watched movies about and inspired by Jane Austen and I also have an interest in France. The film had its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival (September 2024). It was released in France in January 2025 and in the US on 23 May 2025. In French (with English subtitles) and English.
Oriana: LOVE AND LLAMAS
The movie is relatively pleasant to watch and disappointing at the same time. As my companion observed, it’s a wasteland of missed opportunities to introduce quotations from Jane Austen’s novels. Yes, Austen is remotely present in the form of the writers’ residency, and above all, in the person of her grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-nephew, Oliver. But we miss her incomparable sentences, so simple yet so charged with with wit and insight.
In a movie whose title is bound to draw Jane Austen’s lovers, it’s an unpardonable omission. It is a wasteland of missed opportunities. Austen was both a subtle philosopher and psychologist, a treasury of life wisdom, especially when it comes to the fraught matters of romantic love. The introduction of two naughty llamas can’t compensate for the lack of witty quotations, nor the glimpse of the famous white cliffs of Dover — gone in a twinkling of an eye, rather than lovingly lingered upon. Just when we yearn to for something our mind can feast on (definitely not the unexpected llamas, at least not during the first hostile encounter), it’s snatched away from us.
Don’t get me wrong: the movie does deliver. In the end, even the seemingly irrelevant llamas suddenly make sense. The landscapes and interiors are very British and quite satisfying, as are the glimpses of Parisian streets and the famous Shakespeare and Co bookstore. But Austen isn’t famous for her descriptions of landscapes, any more than Charles Dickens is. It’s her vivid characters and pithy satirical assessments and witty phrases that made her famous — that’s why we still read her today. (And mind you, Austen's vivid characters were female — that's why we sense she was a secret radical.)
In the movie it’s the minor characters that are forced to be eccentrically amusing, while the heroine and her two rival suitors are rather timid and pale — especially the heroine. True, before her transformation she is supposed to be timid, but the contrast between her and Austen’s spirited female characters feels a tad oppressive. You almost want to applaud the llama who spits on Agathe.
Agathe, a romance writer, does undergo a transformation, both literary and real-life: she finally opens herself to love. Just before leaving the Austen writers’ residency, she even gets assertive with the llamas. “Which one of you spat on me?” she interrogates them with just a trace of menace. Silence is the correct answer in that particular scene — but in most other scenes, we want just the right words — words we can remember, words which will become part of our psyche.
There is one such sentence — “Literature is an ambulance rushing to the reader’s broken heart.” This seems like a half-truth universally unacknowledged. Pondering the movie later, I find myself slightly nodding my head. Let’s see if I still do a week from now.
Still, with the caveat that a true Austen devotee is bound to be disappointed with the movie, I cautiously recommend it — not as an “Austen movie,” but as a more generic romance that transports us into the magical world of movies and literature, those alternate realities that have the power of transporting us into imagined realities. Not as a rushing ambulance, but rather like a boat gently rocking on a lake somewhere far away from the mundane.
So, alas, there isn’t much Austen in this supposedly Austen-inspired movie, but it’s still a surprising trip into the realm of near-enchantment.
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NAMES THAT PLEASE, NAMES THAT REPEL
Have you ever noticed how some names make you smile while others make you shudder? Luke or Leia may stir feelings of happiness. Rocky or Taylor may spark inspiration. Donald or Hillary might make you cringe.
Many parents agonize over what to name their child because they realize that it is often the basis of a first impression. Names made famous (or infamous) because of celebrity in fiction or the real world may unconsciously rouse emotions tied to that character. Disturbingly, names can also provoke implicit bias against individuals based on racial and ethnic stereotypes.
Unique names are on the rise despite studies suggesting that common names bestow significant advantages. Because they are familiar, simple, and common names tend to breed trust and camaraderie. One study showed that we are more altruistic toward those who share our name. Another showed that immigrants who Americanized their names were more successful in their new country.
Other potential downsides to a unique name include the pressure to stand out from the crowd or narcissism.
Some researchers have suggested that a person’s name may become a self-fulfilling prophecy, predicting their vocation later in life. This is known as nominative determinism. Examples include someone named Art becoming an artist or someone with the last name Butz becoming a proctologist. Another study suggests that people tend to alter their appearance to be in sync with their names.
As a father and a scientist, I’m intrigued by the psychology underlying the naming of a child as well as how that name is perceived. Recent studies suggest that the individual sound components of words, including names, trigger unconscious feelings in our brain.
THE BOUBA-KIKI EFFECT
Certain sounds, or phonemes, seem to carry specific meaning. Researchers have shown that people associate nonwords with certain shapes. We associate a made-up word like “bouba” with round shapes and “kiki” with sharp shapes. This phenomenon has been dubbed the Bouba/Kiki effect.
The human brain appears to have been wired through evolution to respond to certain sound waves and rhythms. Particular sounds are crucial for survival: A scream indicates danger while a laugh can ease a tense situation. Specific sound waves induce conserved responses in the brain, which raises the idea that a person’s name can elicit universal sensations when heard.
A 2015 study provided evidence that the sound components within names can produce a Bouba/Kiki effect. How “round” or “sharp” a name sounds can factor into judgment of that person’s personality. One of the researchers commented, “So a name like Bob or Molly, for example, it’s a bit smoother when you say it versus a name like Kirk or Kate, which kind of has this abruptness to it…People will match those kinds of qualities, like abruptness or smoothness, metaphorically with these traits like being easy going or maybe being rude.”
NAMES WHAT SOUND THE MOST PLEASING
Bodo Winter, an associate professor in cognitive linguistics at the University of Birmingham, set out to determine which names sound the “most beautiful” when spoken out loud. He recruited hundreds of diverse individuals to listen to pronunciations of the most popular names for 2022 in the UK and US.
Scoring of the names was based on a system devised by James Adelman, who conducted a similar study in 2018 on basic words (not including names). Adelman’s findings were consistent with the Bouba/Kiki effect, leading him to conclude that “human languages signal emotions via individual phonemes.”
Winter’s study extends Adelman’s findings to common names in the US and UK. Some names are perceived as more pleasing than others, based on the emotional responses to the sounds heard when a name is enunciated.
Results indicated that Sophia, which means “wisdom” in Greek, is the “most beautiful” sounding name in both countries. Commenting on the result, Winter stated, “The name Sophia contains a combination of sounds that are treated as pleasant by the brain, because of their smoothness and softness.” Zoe placed second for girls in each country.
Matthew was the top-ranked name for boys in the US. In the UK, it was Zayn. I was happy to see my name on both lists, although I go by Bill and not William. Maybe I should change that?
The 10 most beautiful-sounding names in the US were:
Matthew; Sophia
Julian; Zoe
William; Everly
Isaiah; Sophie
Leo; Riley
Levi; Ivy
Joseph; Paisley
Theo; Willow
Isaac; Ellie
Samuel; Emily
The 10 most beautiful-sounding names in the UK were:
Zayn; Sophia
Jesse; Zoe
Charlie; Rosie
Louie; Sophie
William; Ivy
Freddie; Phoebe
George; Violet
Ali; Willow
Daniel; Hannah
Riley; Ellie
The next ten names most popular in Britain were:
11. Omar, Emily
12. Arthur, Evelyn
13. Rowan, Rose
14. Leo, Eliza
15. Joseph, Eva
16. Theo, Chloe
17. Harry, Penelope
18. Noah, Lucy
19. Toby, Ruby
20. Jude, Lily
The name Zayn was popularized in the UK over a decade ago, thanks to One Direction member Zayn Malik. (Frankly, I prefer Malik as the first name: Malik Zayn sounds musical to me.)
While these studies suggest that our subconscious starts to make assumptions about people based on their name alone, it is crucial that we never judge a book by its cover. Be aware of your unconscious biases and get to know someone’s character before leaping to conclusions about them.
This Olivia will end up as Ollie or Livvy. Parents should pay attention to the nicknames as well.
I wanted to go by Veronika, in honor of my maternal grandmother, but was warned that people would call me Ronnie. That was simply insufferable. I can give no rational explanation for my revulsion to “Ronnie”; let’s just say “it wasn’t me.” The heart has its reasons, which remain a mystery. That’s Mystery, and not Missy.
"Gabrielle" is a beautiful name, but imagine ending up as Gabby.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/pleased-to-meet-me/202505/the-most-pleasing-names-to-hear-according-to-science
Oriana:
Names can indeed shape our perception of a person, or even influence how we act toward them. There is a neighbor I avoid simply because I can never remember if it’s Dan or Don. Rick and Pat seem to be a perfect couple simply because their names sound so natural together. Art and Una, on the other hand, were indeed an odd couple (I’m using the past tense because both are gone by now).
I stopped revealing my Polish name, too discordant with the Anglo phonetics. People tend to misremember it as Sasha, whose sibilance I can't endure. But I’m used to going by several names, which feels perfectly natural. Like Whitman, I’d like to say that I am many, I contain multitudes.
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SKEPTICAL THINKING AND BEING IN GOOD VS BAD MOOD
A study found that those in a good mood were less able to think skeptically and were significantly more gullible.
The author of the study used a first-person shooter game to test if good moods might also lead people to rely on stereotyping. As he predicted, those in a good mood were more likely to aim at targets wearing turbans.
Of all the positive emotions, optimism about the future may have the most ironic effects. Like happiness, positive fantasies about the future can be profoundly de-motivating. “People feel accomplished, they relax, and they do not invest the necessary effort to actually realize these positive fantasies and daydreams,” says Gabriele Oettingen from New York University.
Graduates who fantasize about success at work end up earning less, for instance. Patients who daydream about getting better make a slower recovery. In numerous studies, Oettingen has shown that the more wishful your thinking, the less likely any of it is to come true. “People say ‘dream it and you will get it’ – but that’s problematic,” she says. Optimistic thoughts may also put the obese off losing weight and make smokers less likely to plan to quit.
Defensive Pessimism
Perhaps most worryingly, Oettingen believes the risks may operate on a societal level, too. When she compared articles in the newspaper USA Today with economic performance a week or a month later, she found that the more optimistic the content, the more performance declined. Next she looked at presidential inaugural addresses – and found that more positive speeches predicted a lower employment rate and GDP in during their time in office.
Combine these unnerving findings with optimism bias – the tendency to believe you’re less at risk of things going wrong than other people – and you’re asking for trouble. Instead, you might want to consider throwing away your rose-tinted spectacles and adopting a glass half-empty outlook. “Defensive pessimism” involves employing Murphy’s Law, the cosmic inevitability that whatever can go wrong, will go wrong. By anticipating the worst, you can be prepared when it actually happens.
It works like this. Let’s say you’re giving a talk at work. All you have to do is think of the worst possible outcomes – tripping up on your way to the stage, losing the memory stick which contains your slides, computer difficulties, awkward questions (truly accomplished pessimists will be able to think of many, many more) – and hold them in your mind. Next you need to think of some solutions.
Psychologist Julie Norem from Wellesley College, Massachusetts, is an expert pessimist. “I’m a little clumsy, especially when I’m anxious, so I make sure to wear low-heeled shoes. I get there early to scope out the stage and make sure that there aren’t cords or other things to trip over. I typically have several backups for my slides: I can give the talk without them if necessary, I email a copy to the organizers, carry a copy on a flash drive, and bring my own laptop to use…” she says. Only the paranoid survive, as they say.
So the next time someone tells you to “cheer up” – why not tell them how you’re improving your sense of fairness, reducing unemployment and saving the world economy? You’ll be having the last laugh – even if it is a world-weary, cynical snort.
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/why-it-pays-to-be-grumpy-and-bad-tempered
Oriana:
I have seen too many bad consequences of anger to swallow the idea that an unrestrained expression of anger (or even simple grumpiness) should be encouraged. Rather, in most cases it should be transformed into intelligent action — or dignified silence. When that’s impossible, then we need to look at the benefits of acceptance. Yes, it’s complicated. And silence is indeed the most clever thing to say in many, many instances. It has the eloquence of Mona Lisa's smile.
To me anger is indeed the emotion of a victim. It’s not an enlightened emotional state. It can be disastrous to speak or act when angry. In men anger can become rage, and male rage and the desire to kill are closely elated. Of course most men can restrain themselves, but that’s because they don’t want to end up in prison. It’s not a sudden moral awakening, but the fear of severe consequences.
There is also the matter of looking ridiculous. During the years when I occasionally worked as a secretary, I sometimes witnessed angry “boss-types” (usually not the top bosses, but the low-ranking bosses) rushing out of their offices, red in the face and screaming. They could put on quite a show, which broke the office tedium, but certainly didn’t earn these men any respect — quite the opposite. A red face with bulging veins is not dignified, to put it mildly.
Staying cool under pressure, not taking the bait — in my eyes, that’s a lot more powerful. Nothing says "alpha" (male or female) as much as the perfection of silence.
Being prepared for bad scenarios is a different matter. To me and many others, that comes naturally. Even so, life is unpredictable, and what actually happens may be radically different from what you expected, and the various back-up scenarios turn out to be useless as well. Rather than “think positive” — or “think negative,” as this article suggests — let’s try to drop expectations and be flexible, while preserving good manners. Better a pasted-on smile than a crude remark escaping one’s lips. Writers as especially lucky, since they can save it up for the page. Ah, material: the worse it is in real life, the better it is when confided to one's trusty no-tell computer.
Health and positive emotions go hand in hand. For me that translates into living alone. The immaculate silence of it, So many trivial arguments can be avoided! So much tension never intrudes, draining energy from creative tasks and verbal orgies in one's head.
I realize that not everyone has the freedom and resources to avoid stress that way. But if you’re motivated enough, miracles can happen: you can build a private space — a whole private universe — where no one watches you, criticizes you . . . ah, freedom.
A few years back, when debates on religion raged on Facebook, a staunch theist asked me, "What is it like not to feel you're being watched all the time?" ~ "It's heaven," I replied.
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But apparently there is also something to be said for not suffering fools gladly and not always seeing the bright side.
BEING GRUMPY MAY PAY OFF
Being bad-tempered and pessimistic helps you to earn more, live longer and enjoy a healthier marriage. It’s almost enough to put a smile on the dourest of faces.
On stage he’s a lovable, floppy-haired prince charming. Off camera – well let’s just say he needs a lot of personal space. He hates being a celebrity. He resents being an actor. To his ex-girlfriend Elizabeth Hurley's friends he was apparently known as ‘Grumpelstiltskin.’
Hugh Grant may be famed for being moody and a little challenging to work with. But could a grumpy attitude be the secret to his success?
The pressure to be positive has never been greater. Cultural forces have whipped up a frenzied pursuit of happiness, spawning billion-dollar book sales, a cottage industry in self-help and plastering inspirational quotes all over the internet.
Now you can hire a happiness expert, undertake training in ‘mindfulness’, or seek inner satisfaction via an app. The US army currently trains its soldiers – over a million people – in positive psychology, and optimism is taught in UK schools. Meanwhile the ‘happiness index’ has become an indicator of national wellbeing to rival GDP.
The truth is, pondering the worst has some clear advantages. Cranks may be superior negotiators, more discerning decision-makers and cut their risk of having a heart attack. Cynics can expect more stable marriages, higher earnings and longer lives – though, of course, they’ll anticipate the opposite.
Good moods on the other hand come with substantial risks – sapping your drive, dimming attention to detail and making you simultaneously gullible and selfish. Positivity is also known to encourage binge drinking, overeating and unsafe sex.
At the center of it all is the notion our feelings are adaptive: anger, sadness and pessimism aren’t divine cruelty or sheer random bad luck – they evolved to serve useful functions and help us thrive.
Take anger. From Newton’s obsessive grudges to Beethoven’s tantrums – which sometimes came to blows – it seems as though visionary geniuses often come with extremely short tempers. There are plenty of examples to be found in Silicon Valley. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is famed for his angry outbursts and insults (such as “I’m sorry, did I take my stupid pills today?”) yet they haven’t stopped him building a $300 billion company.
For years, the link remained a mystery. Then in 2009 Matthijs Baas from the University of Amsterdam decided to investigate. He recruited a group of willing students and set to work making them angry in the name of science. Half the students were asked to recall something which had irritated them and write a short essay about it. “This made them a bit angrier, though they weren’t quite driven to full-blown fits of rage,” he says. The other half of the group were made to feel sad.
Next the two teams were pitched against each other in a game designed to test their creativity. They had 16 minutes to think of as many ways as possible to improve education at the psychology department. As Baas expected, the angry team produced more ideas – at least to begin with. Their contributions were also more original, repeated by less than 1 percent of the study’s participants.
Crucially, angry volunteers were better at moments of haphazard innovation, or so-called “unstructured” thinking. Let’s say you’re challenged to think about possible uses for a brick. While a systematic thinker might suggest ten different kinds of building, it takes a less structured approach to invent a new use altogether, such as turning it into a weapon.
In essence, creativity is down to how easily your mind is diverted from one thought path and onto another. In a situation requiring fight or flight, it’s easy to see how turning into a literal “mad genius” could be life-saving.
“Anger really prepares the body to mobilize resources – it tells you that the situation you’re in is bad and gives you an energetic boost to get you out of it,” says Baas.
To understand how this works, first we need to get to grips with what’s going on in the brain. Like most emotions, anger begins in the amygdala, an almond-shaped structure responsible for detecting threats to our well-being. It’s extremely efficient – raising the alarm long before the peril enters your conscious awareness.
Then it’s up to chemical signals in the brain to get you riled up. As the brain is flooded with adrenaline it initiates a burst of impassioned, energetic fury which lasts for several minutes. Breathing and heart rate accelerate and blood pressure skyrockets. Blood rushes into the extremities, leading to the distinctive red face and throbbing forehead veins people get when they’re annoyed.
Though it’s thought to have evolved primarily to prepare the body for physical aggression, this physiological response is known to have other benefits, boosting motivation and giving people the gall to take mental risks.
Beethoven was easily frustrated and would throw objects at his servants. [Oriana: The difference is, he was a genius.]
All these physiological changes are extremely helpful – as long as you get a chance to vent your anger by wrestling a lion or screaming at co-workers. Sure, you might alienate a few people, but afterwards your blood pressure should go back to normal. Avoiding grumpiness has more serious consequences.
The notion that repressed feelings can be bad for your health is ancient. The Greek philosopher Aristotle was a firm believer in catharsis (he invented the modern meaning of the word); viewing tragic plays, he conjectured, allowed punters to experience anger, sadness and guilt in a controlled environment. By getting it all out in the open, they could purge themselves of these feelings all in one go.
His philosophy was later adopted by Sigmund Freud, who instead championed the cathartic benefits of the therapist’s couch.
Then in 2010 a team of scientists decided to take a look. They surveyed a group of 644 patients with coronary artery disease to determine their levels of anger, suppressed anger and tendency to experience distress, and followed them for between five and ten years to see what happened next.
Over the course of the study, 20 percent experienced a major cardiac event and 9 percent percent died. Initially it looked like both anger and suppressed anger increased the likelihood of having a heart attack. But after controlling for other factors, the researchers realized anger had no impact – while suppressing it increased the chances of having a heart attack by nearly three-fold.
It’s still not known exactly why this occurs, but other studies have shown that suppressing anger can lead to chronic high blood pressure.
And not all benefits are physical: anger can help with negotiating, too. A major flashpoint for aggression is the discovery that someone does not value your interests highly enough. It involves inflicting costs – the threat of physical violence – and withdrawing benefits – loyalty, friendship, or money – to help them see their mistake.
Support for this theory comes from the faces we pull when angry. Research suggests they aren’t arbitrary movements at all, but specifically aimed at increasing our physical strength in the eyes of our opponent. Get it right and aggression can help you advance your interests and increase your status – it’s just an ancient way of bargaining. [Oriana: But get it wrong, and all is lost.]
In fact, scientists are increasingly recognizing that grumpiness may be beneficial to the full range of social skills – improving language skills, memory and making us more persuasive.
“Negative moods indicate we’re in a new and challenging situation and call for a more attentive, detailed and observant thinking style,” says Joseph Forgas, who has been studying how emotions affect our behavior for nearly four decades. In line with this, research has also found that feeling slightly down enhances our awareness of social cues. Intriguingly, it also encourages people to act in a more – not less – fair way towards others.
Harsh, but Fair
Though happiness is often thought of as intrinsically virtuous, the emotion brings no such benefits. In one study, a group of volunteers was made to feel disgusted, sad, angry, fearful, happy, surprised or neutral and invited to play the “ultimatum game.”
In the game, the first player is given some money and asked how they’d like to divide it between themselves and another player. Then the second player gets to decide whether or not to accept. If they agree, the money is split how the first player proposed. If not, neither player gets any money.
The ultimatum game is often used as a test of our sense of fairness by showing whether you expect to get a 50-50 share or whether you are happy for each person to be in it for themselves. Interestingly, all negative emotions led to more rejections by the second player, which might suggest that these feelings enhance our sense of fairness and the need for everyone to be treated equally.
Reversing the set-up reveals this is not just a case of sour grapes, either. The “dictator game” has exactly the same rules except this time the second player has no say whatsoever – they simply receive whatever the first player decides not to keep. It turns out that happier participants keep more of the prize for themselves, while those in a sad mood are significantly less selfish.
“People who are feeling slightly down pay better attention to external social norms and expectations, and so they act in a fairer and just way towards others,” says Forgas.
In some situations, happiness carries far more serious risks. It’s associated with the cuddle hormone, oxytocin, which a handful of studies have shown reduces our ability to identify threats. In prehistoric times, happiness would have left our ancestors vulnerable to predators. In modern life, it prevents us paying due attention to dangers such as binge drinking, overeating and unsafe sex.
“Happiness functions like a shorthand signal that we’re safe and it’s not necessary to pay too much attention to the environment,” he says. Those in a continuous happy haze may miss important cues. Instead, they may be over-reliant on existing knowledge – leaving them prone to serious errors of judgement.
In one study, Forgas and colleagues from the University of New South Wales, Australia, put volunteers in either a happy or sad mood by screening films in the laboratory. Then he asked them to judge the truth of urban myths, such as that power lines cause leukemia or the CIA murdered President Kennedy. Those in a good mood were less able to think skeptically and were significantly more gullible.
Next Forgas used a first-person shooter game to test if good moods might also lead people to rely on stereotyping. As he predicted, those in a good mood were more likely to aim at targets wearing turbans.
Of all the positive emotions, optimism about the future may have the most ironic effects. Like happiness, positive fantasies about the future can be profoundly de-motivating. “People feel accomplished, they relax, and they do not invest the necessary effort to actually realize these positive fantasies and daydreams,” says Gabriele Oettingen from New York University.
Graduates who fantasize about success at work end up earning less, for instance. Patients who daydream about getting better make a slower recovery. In numerous studies, Oettingen has shown that the more wishful your thinking, the less likely any of it is to come true. “People say ‘dream it and you will get it’ – but that’s problematic,” she says. Optimistic thoughts may also put the obese off losing weight and make smokers less likely to plan to quit.
Defensive Pessimism
Perhaps most worryingly, Oettingen believes the risks may operate on a societal level, too. When she compared articles in the newspaper USA Today with economic performance a week or a month later, she found that the more optimistic the content, the more performance declined. Next she looked at presidential inaugural addresses – and found that more positive speeches predicted a lower employment rate and GDP in during their time in office.
Combine these unnerving findings with optimism bias – the tendency to believe you’re less at risk of things going wrong than other people – and you’re asking for trouble. Instead, you might want to consider throwing away your rose-tinted spectacles and adopting a glass half-empty outlook. “Defensive pessimism” involves employing Murphy’s Law, the cosmic inevitability that whatever can go wrong, will go wrong. By anticipating the worst, you can be prepared when it actually happens.
It works like this. Let’s say you’re giving a talk at work. All you have to do is think of the worst possible outcomes – tripping up on your way to the stage, losing the memory stick which contains your slides, computer difficulties, awkward questions (truly accomplished pessimists will be able to think of many, many more) – and hold them in your mind. Next you need to think of some solutions.
Psychologist Julie Norem from Wellesley College, Massachusetts, is an expert pessimist. “I’m a little clumsy, especially when I’m anxious, so I make sure to wear low-heeled shoes. I get there early to scope out the stage and make sure that there aren’t cords or other things to trip over. I typically have several backups for my slides: I can give the talk without them if necessary, I email a copy to the organizers, carry a copy on a flash drive, and bring my own laptop to use…” she says. Only the paranoid survive, as they say.
So the next time someone tells you to “cheer up” – why not tell them how you’re improving your sense of fairness, reducing unemployment and saving the world economy? You’ll be having the last laugh – even if it is a world-weary, cynical snort.
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/why-it-pays-to-be-grumpy-and-bad-tempered
Oriana: I have seen too many bad consequences of anger to swallow the idea that the expression of anger should always be encouraged. Rather, in most cases it should be transformed into intelligent action. When that’s impossible, then we need to look at the benefits of acceptance.
Yes, it’s complicated. I don't think that either grumpiness or enthusiasm are necessarily the best response. It depends on the situation. But staying true to one's values, be it in silence, can be the best solution. Being emotionally intense myself, I've always admired the British cool. But I've also been told that others envy me the ease with which I express my emotions.
To me anger is the emotion of a victim. It’s not an enlightened emotional state. It can be disastrous to act when angry. In men anger can turn into rage, and rage and the desire to kill closely elated. Of course most men can restrain themselves, but that’s because they don’t want to end up in prison. It’s not a sudden moral awakening, but the fear of severe consequences.
There is also the matter of looking ridiculous. During the years when I occasionally worked as a secretary, I sometimes witnessed angry “boss-types” (usually not the top bosses, but the low-ranking bosses) rushing out of their offices, red in the face and screaming. They could put on quite a show, which broke the office tedium, but certainly didn’t earn these men any respect — quite the opposite. A red face with bulging veins is not dignified, to put it mildly. It’s clownish, ridiculous.
Staying cool under pressure, not taking the bait — in my eyes, that’s a lot more powerful.
Being prepared for bad scenarios is a different matter. That comes naturally. Even so, life is unpredictable, and what actually happens may be radically different from what you expected, and the different back-up scenarios turn out to be useless as well.
Rather than “think positive” — or “think negative,” as this article suggests — let’s try to drop expectations and be flexible. Having Plan B is not enough. We need plans C and D. Barring that, we need the faith that we can handle whatever life brings. If we can't dance through it, we can muddle through somehow. Just being alive is a victory (this is strictly a post-youth insight).
I never heard the expression "Think positive" until I arrived in the US. My automatic reaction was cynical laughter. My homeland's history was not conducive to positive thinking. Ah, but the joy when something positive really does happen! I know how to bask in joy precisely because I know how fragile joy is.
But then there is beauty, and there are the pleasures of one's own complex mind. Neither automatic "positivity" nor automatic negative bias seem as satisfying as simply "going with the flow," trying to steer with one's hard-earned life wisdom. And that means being one's own therapist and providing oneself with positive emotions, since we never know how little time remains.
Health and positive emotions go hand in hand. For me that means living alone. I realize that not everyone has the freedom and resources to avoid stress that way. But if you’re motivated enough to bask in solitude, miracles can happen.
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THORNS AND ROSES — WE PURSUE HAPPINESS
Happiness is an electrifying and elusive state. Philosophers, theologians, psychologists, and even economists have long sought to define it. And since the 1990s, a whole branch of psychology—positive psychology—has been dedicated to pinning it down. More than simply positive mood, happiness is a state of well-being that encompasses living a good life, one with a sense of meaning and deep contentment.
Feeling joyful has its health perks as well. A growing body of research also suggests that happiness can improve your physical health; feelings of positivity and fulfillment seem to benefit cardiovascular health, the immune system, inflammation levels, and blood pressure, among other things. Happiness has even been linked to a longer lifespan as well as a higher quality of life and well-being.
Attaining happiness is a global pursuit. Researchers find that people from every corner of the world rate happiness more important than other desirable personal outcomes, such as obtaining wealth, acquiring material goods, and getting into heaven.
How to be happy
Happiness is not the result of bouncing from one joy to the next; researchers find that achieving happiness typically involves times of considerable discomfort. Genetic makeup, life circumstances, achievements, marital status, social relationships, even your neighbors—all influence how happy you are. Or can be. So do individual ways of thinking and expressing feelings. Research shows that much of happiness is under personal control.
Regularly indulging in small pleasures, getting absorbed in challenging activities, setting and meeting goals, maintaining close social ties, and finding purpose beyond oneself all increase life satisfaction. It isn't happiness per se that promotes well-being, it’s the actual pursuit that’s key.
Happy people live with purpose. They find joy in lasting relationships, working toward their goals, and living according to their values. The happy person is not enamored with material goods or luxury vacations. This person is fine with the simple pleasures of life—petting a dog, sitting under a tree, enjoying a cup of tea. Here are a few of the outward signs that someone is content.
Is open to learning new things
Is high in humility and patience
Smiles and laughs readily
Goes with the flow
Practices compassion
Is often grateful
Exercises self-care
Enjoys healthy relationships
Is happy for other people
Gives and receives without torment
Lives with meaning and purpose
Does not feel entitled and has fewer expectations
Is not spiteful or insulting
Does not hold grudges
Does not register small annoyances
Does not stew in angst over yesterday and tomorrow
Does not play games
Is not a martyr or victim
Is not stingy with their happiness
Myths of happiness
Misperceptions abound when it comes to what we think will make us happy. People often believe that happiness will be achieved once they reach a certain milestone, such as finding the perfect partner or landing a particular salary.
Humans, however, are excellent at adapting to new circumstances, which means that people will habituate to their new relationship or wealth, return to a baseline level of happiness, and seek out the next milestone. Fortunately, the same principle applies to setbacks—we are resilient and will most likely find happiness again.
Regarding finances specifically, research shows that the sweet spot for yearly income is between $60,000 and $95,000 a year, not a million-dollar salary. Earnings above $95,000 do not equate to increased well-being; a person earning $150,000 a year will not necessarily be as happy as a person earning a lot less.
The type of thoughts below exemplify these misconceptions about happiness:
"I’ll be happy when I’m rich and successful."
"I’ll be happy when I’m married to the right person."
"Landing my dream job will make me happy."
"I can’t be happy when my relationship has fallen apart."
"I will never recover from this diagnosis."
"The best years of my life are over."
Positive Psychology
Every person has unique life experiences, and therefore unique experiences of happiness. That being said, when scientists examine the average trajectory of happiness over the lifespan, some patterns tend to emerge. Happiness and satisfaction begin relatively high, decrease from adolescence to midlife, and rise throughout older adulthood.
What makes someone happy in their 20s may not spark joy in their 80s, and joy in someone’s 80s may have seemed irrelevant in their 20s. It’s valuable for people to continue observing and revising what makes them happy at a given time to continue striving for fulfillment throughout their lifetime.
Happiness over lifespan
Every person has unique life experiences, and therefore unique experiences of happiness. That being said, when scientists examine the average trajectory of happiness over the lifespan, some patterns tend to emerge. Happiness and satisfaction begin relatively high, decrease from adolescence to midlife, and rise throughout older adulthood.
What makes someone happy in their 20s may not spark joy in their 80s, and joy in someone’s 80s may have seemed irrelevant in their 20s. It’s valuable for people to continue observing and revising what makes them happy at a given time to continue striving for fulfillment throughout their lifetime.
Happiness and health
Health and happiness are completely intertwined. That’s not to say that people with illnesses can’t be happy, but that attending to one’s health is an important—and perhaps under-appreciated—component of well-being.
Researchers have identified many links between health and happiness—including a longer lifespan—but it’s difficult to distinguish which factor causes the other. Making changes to diet, exercise, sleep, and more can help everyone feel more content.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/happiness
Oriana:
Please see Herbert’s “Thorns and Roses,” the closing poem of this blog.
On a somewhat different note, why talk about happiness at all? If you have contentment, that’s a world of riches to be grateful for.
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A NEW TWIST IN OUR THINKING ABOUT THE ORIGINS OF LIFE
In a new peer reviewed analysis, scientists quantify amino acids before and after our “last universal common ancestor.”
The last universal common ancestor is the single life form that branched into everything since.
Earth four billion years ago may help us check for life on one of Saturn’s moons today.
Scientists are making a case for adjusting our understanding of how exactly genes first emerged. For a while, there’s been a consensus about the order in which the building-block amino acids were “added” into the box of Lego pieces that build our genes. But according to genetic researchers at the University of Arizona, our previous assumptions may reflect biases in our understanding of biotic (living) versus abiotic (non-living) sources.
In other words, our current working model of gene history could be undervaluing early protolife (which included forerunners like RNA and peptides), as compared to what emerged with and after the beginning of life. Our understanding of these extremely ancient times will always be incomplete, but it’s important for us to keep researching early Earth. The scientists explain that any improvements in that understanding could not only allow us to know more of our own story, but also help us search for the beginnings of life elsewhere in the universe.
In this new paper, published in the peer reviewed journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, researchers led by senior author Joanna Masel and first author Sawsan Wehbi explain that vital pieces of our proteins (a.k.a. amino acids) date back four billion years—to the last universal common ancestor (LUCA) of all life on Earth. These chains of dozens or more amino acids, called protein domains, are “like a wheel” on a car, Wehbi said in a statement: “It’s a part that can be used in many different cars, and wheels have been around much longer than cars.”
The group used specialized software and National Center for Biotechnology Information data to build an evolutionary (so to speak) tree of these protein domains, which were not theorized or observed until the 1970s. Our knowledge of these details has grown by leaps and bounds.
One big paradigm shift proposed by this research is the idea that we should rethink the order in which the 20 essential genetic amino acids emerged from the stew of early Earth.
The scientists argue that the current model overemphasizes how often an amino acid appeared in an early life form, leading to a theory that the amino acid found in the highest saturation must have emerged first. This folds into existing research, like a 2017 paper suggesting that our amino acids represent the best of the best, not just a “frozen accident” of circumstances. In the new paper, the scientists say that amino acids could have even come from different portions of young Earth, rather than from the entire thing as a uniform environment.
Tryptophan, the maligned “sleepy” amino found in Thanksgiving turkey, was a particular standout to the scientists (its letter designation is W). “[T]here is scientific consensus that W was the last of the 20 canonical amino acids to be added to the genetic code,” the scientists wrote. But they found 1.2% W in the pre-LUCA data and just .9% after LUCA. Those values may seem small, but that’s a 25% difference.
Why would the last amino acid to emerge be more common before the branching of all resulting life? The team theorized that the chemical explanation might point to an even older version of the idea of genetics. As in all things evolutionary, there’s no intuitive reason why any one successful thing must be the only of its kind or family to ever exist.
“Stepwise construction of the current code and competition among ancient codes could have occurred simultaneously,” the scientists conclude. And, tantalizingly, “[a]ncient codes might also have used noncanonical amino acids.” These could have emerged around the alkaline hydrothermal vents that are believed to play a key role in how life began, despite the fact that the resulting life forms did not live there for long.
To apply this theory to the rest of the universe, we don’t have to go far, either. “[A]biotic synthesis of aromatic amino acids might be possible in the water–rock interface of Enceladus’s subsurface ocean,” the scientists explain. That’s only as far as Saturn. Maybe a Solar System block party is closer than we think.
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A MASSIVE MAYA CITY BEING EXCAVATED
Researchers excavated an ancient Maya complex that spanned three cities in Guatemala.
Each city featured its own unique architectural advancement: an observatory, a pyramid, and a canal system, respectively.
Important archaeological sites often naturally reveal themselves after disasters like earthquakes and floods. However, it isn’t always that easy; many important remains are found thanks to organizations dedicated to preserving history. Over the past 17 years, the Uaxactun
Archaeological Project (PARU) has identified over 170 archaeological sites related to the Maya civilization’s past. Of the 176 sites, only 20 have been excavated. Some of the most recent and most notable sites included three cities in Guatemala, and what researchers found there provides an incredible snapshot into what Maya civilization once looked like. The results were presented to the public at a press conference held in the Banquet Hall of the National Palace of Culture.
The complex—spanning across Los Abuelos, Petnal and Cambrayal—revealed pyramids, altars, and intricate canal systems dating all the way back to the Preclassic period, according to a press release from Guatemala’s Ministry of Culture and Sports. The ancient Maya civilization is known for its innovation: math, astronomy, calendars, written language, agriculture—you name it, and the people living during the Classic Maya period probably accomplished it.
The ministry explained that the most important of the three cities is Los Abuelos, which translates to “the Grandparents.” The city is named after two statues discovered there that depict a grandmother and a grandfather, likely representing an “ancestral couple.” On top of the statues, archeologists also discovered what was likely an astronomical observatory in Los Abuelos. The ancient Maya would have used the buildings to precisely record solstices and equinoxes, both crucial parts of the accurate calendar system.
And Los Abuelos wasn’t just a place for researching the stars—it was also a ceremonial center. Archaeologists discovered a human burial, feline remains, and offerings including shells and arrowheads at the site, all suggesting the ritual purpose of the complex. According to the press release, the city was likely occupied during the Preclassic period, abandoned, and later rebuilt in the Late Classic.
The other two cities, Petnal and Cambrayal, saw similar habitation and desertion patterns. However, unlike Los Abuelos, Petnal wasn’t a spiritual epicenter; in fact it was quite the opposite. Researchers believe Petnal served as a political hub for Maya civilization, and the impressive pyramid archeologists found there supports the theory. The structure is 33 meters (roughly 108 feet) high and features a “well-preserved” room at the top. The room houses the remains of a black, white, and red stucco painting—a find that is an “extraordinary discovery in the area,” according to the ministry.
Like the other cities, Cambrayal is also architecturally impressive—except, instead of buildings like in Los Abuelos and Petnal, the city is home to an elaborate canal system 57 meters (187 feet) long. Researchers believe the stucco-lined channels were used to transport waste—not water—functioning like a drainage system.
According to the ministry, the findings in all three cities help to further our contemporary understanding of the region.
“Every little piece we can obtain from the excavations is fundamental,” project co-director Dora García explained at the conference, “like a piece of the larger puzzle we are putting together.”
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WE STILL DON’T KNOW WHY THE REIGN OF THE DINOSAURS ENDED
The asteroid strike on the Yucatán Peninsula 66 million years ago is only part of the story.
The reason our planet lost the terrible lizards of eras long past may seem self-evident. About 66 million years ago, an asteroid came screaming out of the sky and smacked into what is now the Yucatán Peninsula of Mexico. The devastation that followed was unprecedented, with tsunamis, an overheated atmosphere, darkened skies, a terrible cold snap, and other apocalyptic ecological events clearing away an estimated seventy five percent of known life on Earth.
Paleontologists know this catastrophe as the K/Pg extinction event because it marks the transition from the Cretaceous into the Paleogene period of Earth's history. But even though it has been studied constantly, the details of this event still puzzle experts. The case wasn’t closed with the recognition of the impact crater in the 1990s, and exactly how the extinction played out—what differentiated the living from the dead—continues to inspire paleontologists to dig into the cataclysm of the Cretaceous.
To better understand the full story, researchers are pulling back from the moment of impact to examine the broader patterns of life at the time. Dinosaurs were not living in a stable and lush Mesozoic utopia, nor were they the only organisms around at the time—far from it. The world was changing around them as it always had.
As the Cretaceous drew to a close, sea levels were dropping, the climate was trending toward a cooler world, and a part of prehistoric India called the Deccan Traps was bubbling with intense volcanic activity. Sorting through how these changes affected life on Earth is no simple task, particularly after the cataclysmic meteorite mixed things up in the rock record, but paleontologists are sifting through the wreckage to better understand what happened.
“In order to get an idea of what happened in the wake of the asteroid impact, we need solid baseline data on what rates of background extinction were like before the K/Pg took place,” Natural History Museum paleontologist Paul Barrett says. A moment of catastrophe can only make sense within the broader context of life before and after.
“This would make the difference between the cataclysmic events at Chicxulub being either the primary cause of the extinction or merely the coup de grace that finished off an ecosystem whose resilience had been gradually worn away.” While the K/Pg extinction was a global crisis, how it played out at various locales around the planet is largely unknown. The amount of information at any given location depends on how well the relevant rock layers are preserved and how accessible they are to scientists. Some of the best exposures happen to be located in western North America, where there’s a continuous sequence of sedimentary layers recording the end of the Cretaceous straight through to the beginning of the Paleogene.
These rocks offer before and after shots of the extinction, and it’s these exposures that has allowed Royal Saskatchewan Museum paleontologist Emily Bamforth to investigate what was happening in the 300,000 years leading up to the explosive close of the Cretaceous.
Looking at the geologic record of southwest Saskatchewan, Bamforth says, local conditions such as the frequency of forest fires and the characteristics of a particular habitat were as important as what was happening on a global scale when determining patterns of ancient biodiversity. “I think this is an important message to keep in mind when thinking of causes of the extinction,” Bamforth says. “Each different ecosystem could have had its own smaller scale biodiversity drivers that were in operation before the extinction, which underlay the big, global factors.”
What was good for turtles, amphibians, plants, dinosaurs and other organisms in one place might not have been beneficial in another, underscoring that we can’t comprehend global shifts without the foundation of local diversity. “Ecosystems are complicated things, and I think that is worth keeping in mind when considering the cause and duration of the mass extinction,” Bamforth says.
As far as Saskatchewan goes, the ecological community at the time leading up to the extinction was like a big game of Jenga. “The tower remains standing, but factors like climate change are slowly pulling blocks out from it, weakening the system and making it vulnerable,” Bamforth says. The constantly shifting ecological stability made major upsets—like an asteroid striking at the wrong place, at the wrong time—especially disastrous.
This picture of shifting ecosystems inverts the focus of the K/Pg disaster. While the reason non-avian dinosaurs and other organisms died off always grabs our attention, it’s been harder for scientists to determine why the survivors were able to pass through to the next chapter of life’s history.
Species that survived the impact were typically small, semi-aquatic or made burrows, and able to subsist on a variety of foods, but there are some key contradictions. There were some small non-avian dinosaurs that had these advantages and still went extinct, and many reptiles, birds and mammals died out despite belonging to broader groups that persisted. The badger-sized mammal Didelphodon didn’t make it, for example, nor did the ancient bird Avisaurus, among others. “This is something I struggle to explain,” Barrett says. Generally speaking, smaller dinosaurs and other animals should have had better chances at survival than their larger relatives, but this was not always the case.
Pat Holroyd of the University of California Museum of Paleontology likens these investigations to what happens in the wake of airline accidents. “They go in and they gather all the data and they try to figure out, ‘Well, ok, why did the people in the tail section survive, and the people in the other parts of the plane didn’t make it?’” Holroyd says. And while such disasters may be singular events with unique causes, it’s still possible to look at multiple incidents collectively to identify patterns and inform what we may think of as a singular event.
As far as the K/Pg extinction goes, the patterns are still emerging. Holroyd estimates that much of the relevant research about which species survived the impact has only been published or uploaded to the Paleobiology Database in the last decade. This new information allowed Holroyd and colleagues to study patterns of turnover—how long species persisted on land and in associated freshwater habitats—long before and after the asteroid impact. The team’s findings were presented earlier this fall at the annual Society of Vertebrate Paleontology meeting in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Some of the patterns were familiar. Fish, turtles, amphibians and crocodylians all generally fared better than strictly terrestrial organisms. “People have been observing this pattern since at least the 50s, and probably before,” Holroyd says. But the resilience of waterbound species had never been quantified in detail before, and the new analysis is revealing that the solution to the extinction pattern puzzle may have been right in front of us all along.
The surprise, Holroyd found, was that the difference between the survivors and the extinct of the K/Pg event mimicked a pattern that has held true for tens of millions of years before and after the asteroid impact. Species living on land, particularly large species, tend not to persist as long as those living in freshwater environments. Terrestrial species often go extinct at a greater rate than those in aquatic environments even without a massive catastrophe to take them out of the picture. Species that lived in and around freshwater habitats appear to have persisted longer even when there wasn’t a crisis, and when the extinction at the end of the Cretaceous struck in full force, these organisms had an advantage over their purely terrestrial neighbors.
But even in their relatively safe aquatic environments, everything wasn’t peachy for water-faring animals. Holroyd notes that Cretaceous turtles, for example, lost fifty percent of their diversity globally, although only about twenty percent in the more localized area of western North America, further underscoring the importance of understanding local versus global patterns. Even lineages that can be considered “survivors” still suffered losses and may not have bounced back to their former glory. Marsupial mammals, for example, survived the mass extinction as a group but had their diversity and abundance drastically cut back.
How local ecosystems were affected by these changes is the next step toward understanding how the extinction event affected the world. Holroyd points to the familiar “three-horned face” Triceratops as an example. This dinosaur was ubiquitous across much of western North America at the end of the Cretaceous and was clearly a major component of its ecosystem.
These animals were the bison of their time, and, given how large herbivores alter their habitats through grazing and migration, the extinction of Triceratops undoubtedly had major implications for ecosystems recovering in the wake of the Cretaceous catastrophe. Plants that may have relied on Triceratops to disperse seeds would have suffered, for example, whereas other plants that were trampled down by the dinosaurs might have grown more freely. How these ecological pieces fit, and what they mean for life’s recovery after the extinction, have yet to fully come into focus.
“The western interior of North America gives us our only detailed window on what happened to life on land during the K/Pg extinction, but it’s totally unclear if this was typical,” Barrett says. “We don’t know much about how the intensity of the extinction varied around the world,” especially in locations that were geographically distant from the asteroid strike.
“It seems unlikely that a one-size-fits-all model would be responsible” for cutting down organisms as different from each other as Edmontosaurus on land and coil-shelled ammonites in the seas, among so many other species lost to the Cretaceous. Research in Europe, South America, Asia and Australia is just beginning to form the basis of a much sought-after global picture of the most famous extinction event in history.
“It’s like one gigantic jigsaw puzzle that we’ve started to turn up more of the pieces to,” Bamforth says. The resulting picture of this critical moment in Earth's history will only be revealed in time.
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/we-still-don-t-know-why-the-reign-of-the-dinosaurs-ended
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WHY EVE WAS BLAMED FOR EATING THE FORBIDDEN FRUIT
To understand why Eve was blamed for eating the forbidden fruit, we have to understand the mentality of the men who wrote the bible.
The primitive men who wrote the bible treated women and children as chattel, as possessions.
Think I’m exaggerating?
Fathers could sell their daughters as sex slaves, with an option to buy them back if they didn’t “please” their new masters. If the new master tired of his sex slave, he could give her to his son, or put her on the street “without any money.” (Exodus 21:7-11)
If girls didn’t bleed on their wedding nights, these barbaric men stoned them to death. Never mind that 40% of girls don’t bleed the first time they have sex. Just stone them to death on the suspicion that the girls were not virgins. A daughter was only as good as her intact hymen.
Hell, stone her to death in front of her father’s house, to warn him about the need to breed girls with intact hymens.
Why was Eve was blamed for eating the forbidden fruit?
Pure, unbridled misogyny.
The bible is misogynistic from Genesis to Revelation. In the bible’s last book, it is prophesied that only 144,000 virgin male Jews who have not been “defiled” by women will be saved.
According to the bible, men are defiled by having sex with women, or by coming into contact with menstrual blood.
If a woman gave birth to a girl, she was “unclean” for 66 days, versus 33 days after giving birth to a son.
~ Michael Burch, Quora
If their children were stubborn, or talked back, or ate and drank too much, these barbaric men stoned them to death. (Deut. 21-22) [Oriana: Or rather, the Bible (Deuteronomy) told the parents to stone disobedient children; whether this was the actual practice is another issue.]
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THE “PURITY” COMMANDMENTS IN LEVITICUS
Leviticus 15:16: "If a man has an emission of semen, he shall bathe his whole body in water, and be unclean until the evening."
Leviticus 15:19: "When a woman has a discharge of blood that is her regular discharge from her body, she shall be in her impurity for seven days, and whoever touches her shall be unclean until the evening."
Leviticus 17:12: "No person among you shall eat blood, nor shall any alien who resides among you eat blood."
Leviticus 18:19: "You shall not approach a woman to uncover her nakedness while she is in her menstrual uncleanness."
Leviticus 18:22: "You shall not lie with a male as with a woman; it is an abomination."
Leviticus 19:19: "You shall not let your animals breed with a different kind; you shall not sow your field with two kinds of seed; nor shall you put on a garment made of two different materials."
Leviticus 19:27: "You shall not round off the hair on your temples or mar the edges of your beard."
Leviticus 19:28: "You shall not make any gashes in your flesh for the dead or tattoo any marks upon you..."
Christians are not bound by the entire Mosaic Law. It is not clear which parts Christians are required to follow. ~ Erich Stolz, Quora
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BEFORE THE POLIO VACCINE (EXCESS HYGIENE THEORY)
Polio is a digestive system virus polio It evolved to grab onto proteins found on the surface of the epithelial cells that comprise the lining of the throat, esophagus, stomach and small intestine. It can then merge with the cell membrane, dumping its genetic contents into the host cell. The host cell’s machinery is tricked into manufacturing more copies of the virus. The cell fills up with copies and bursts open. Rinse and repeat.
It really is a stomach bug, and not terribly different from norovirus. The majority of people who catch it experience no symptoms. It is very good at its job, which is to replicate without being caught. Viruses do not want you to know you’re infected, because you’ll change your behavior and not spread them. Some people experience stomach-flu-like symptoms, as well as fever, sore throat and headaches.
Because the virus is so small, it typically finds its way into the bloodstream. It pretty much can’t find anything major to infect there, though, except… …in a small number of cases the virus will slip across the blood-brain barrier. And due to what amounts to an evolutionary coincidence, the specific protein it is designed to “grab” has a very similar cousin that is found on motor nerve cells. So the virus is able to infect the central nervous system if it gets that far. That’s when a person gets poliomyelitis.
The virus is able to cause significant damage to motor neurons, which leads to varying levels of paralysis, up to and including respiratory arrest and death.
This occurs in about 1% of cases without pre-existing immunity. And here’s the kicker: It almost never happened to babies, because babies would still have polio antibodies from their mother.
So throughout human history, virtually everyone contracted polio as a baby. Mother’s antibodies from breast milk ensured an asymptomatic or mild infection, which produced durable and lasting immunity. Subsequent infections for the same individual would also be mild, and would “update” immunity. And so severe polio infections were rare, and poliomyelitis was extremely rare.
So why was there a sudden surge in poliomyelitis in the mid-20th century?
In short: Improved sanitation.
Yep. Surprising, but true.
See, after germ theory gained prominence in the late 19th century and became mainstream medical wisdom by the 20th century, people began to improve their hygiene habits. We recognized the importance of sanitation, the dangers of unsafe human waste management practices, and the power of simply keeping our hands, faces and bodies clean.
And no class of people was more stringently subjected to cautious sanitation practices than innocent, vulnerable babies. Please note: I’m not saying this was a bad thing, but it did have this unanticipated side effect.
Polio is a fecal-oral virus. It gets into your system when you ingest an infected person’s poop, basically, even a tiny amount.
Mothers and caregivers began washing their hands frequently when handling their babies. At the same time, water purity became something people actively worried about. Infrastructure to protect drinking water from sewage contamination became ubiquitous. Suddenly, babies weren’t being exposed to polio anymore.
And then they’d get older, and they’d start playing outside and with other kids. And I think we can all agree: Kids have poor hygiene habits. So starting in the mid-20th-Century, kids’ first exposure to polio began to be during early and middle childhood, long after Mommy’s breastmilk antibodies were gone. This dramatically increased the odds of symptomatic illness and the rare complication of poliomyelitis.
Even at that 1% rate, if literally every kid catches first-time polio in childhood, that’s a huge number of poliomyelitis cases. A lot of paralyzed kids.
And so a vaccine became a public health imperative, although it would be decades before medical scientists figured out that it was good personal hygiene practices and clean water infrastructure that precipitated the poliomyelitis outbreaks of the mid-20th-century. ~ Seam Thomas, Quora
We can state with reasonable confidence that excessive sanitization of a young child’s environment tends to lead to a lifetime of health problems. The literature bears this out: there is a critical period of “immune hyperactivity” in early childhood. The immune system switches into a kind of “active” mode, which is very energy-intensive, but helps prevent children from becoming deathly ill as they explore their local environment and contract the pathogens that are endemic to it.
However, this “active mode” is unsustainable in the long term. Actually, it’s not unsustainable in modern life with our caloric abundance. But our bodies are designed for a much scarcer, harsher world. To conserve calories, around age 3–4 the immune system switches back to something like a “passive” mode, which is where it stays for the rest of our lives.
Children who are exposed to a variety of pathogens during the “active mode” phase have generally better health outcomes, because their immune system has been properly trained and tuned to reality. The child of the germophobe, who aggressively sanitizes and actively prevents their child from getting exposed to anything, will sort of “conclude” that the world is much safer than it is, and when it goes to “passive mode” it will be underprepared to handle many of the pathogens nature will throw it at when Mommy isn’t around with her can of Lysol.
I have pretty strong feelings about this because my sister-in-law did this to her first child and the poor kid is constantly sick now. We tried to warn her… she understands now and feels guilty but the damage is done. She’s not repeating that mistake with her other children.
Allergies work similarly. In that early phase, the histamine system is learning what’s “normal,” and after that anything new and unfamiliar can trigger allergic reactions.
There was an explosion in peanut allergies between 2004 and 2019 because in 2001 the APA — based on NOTHING AT ALL!!!! — advised parents to avoid exposing their kids to peanuts prior to age 4.
Now the formal guidance is deliberate, careful, repeated exposure between 11 months and age 4.
The APA unfortunately has a long history of opining from a version of “common sense” because it felt a responsibility to provide guidance on questions that lack an evidence-based answer. And then quite often the evidence eventually mounts that their “common sense” guidance was exactly wrong.
Improved sanitation has led to several unforeseen consequences, including:
Microbial Diversity Loss: Enhanced sanitation has reduced exposure to a variety of microbes, which can negatively impact the immune system and lead to increased allergies and autoimmune diseases.
Antibiotic Resistance: With improved sanitation, the selective pressure on bacteria has shifted, leading to increased antibiotic resistance as pathogens adapt to the absence of competition from non-pathogenic bacteria.
Reduced Natural Immunity: Children raised in ultra-sanitized environments may not develop natural immunity as effectively, resulting in higher susceptibility to infections later in life.
Changes in Gut Microbiota: Improved sanitation can alter the gut microbiome, potentially leading to digestive issues and disorders like obesity as beneficial microbes diminish.
Increased Waterborne Disease Risk: In some areas, improved sanitation may lead to complacency in water quality management, inadvertently increasing the risk of waterborne diseases if clean water sources are not maintained.
Social Disparities: While sanitation improvements benefit many, they can exacerbate disparities if marginalized communities lack access to these enhancements, leading to increased health inequities.
These consequences highlight the complex interplay between sanitation, health, and the environment.
RISE IN LUNG CANCER AMONG NON-SMOKERS
The number of lung cancer cases in people who have never smoked is increasing. The disease is different from lung cancer caused by smoking, so what causes it?
Martha first realized that something was wrong when her cough changed and the mucus in her airways became increasingly viscous. Her doctors put it down to a rare disorder she had that caused her lungs to become chronically inflamed. "No worry, it must be that," she was told.
When she finally had an X-ray, a shadow was detected on her lung. "That set the ball rolling," Martha recalls. "First, a CT scan was done, then a bronchoscopy [a procedure that involves using a long tube to inspect the airways in a person's lungs] to take tissue samples." After the tumor was removed, about four months after she'd first reported symptoms to her GP, she received the diagnosis: Stage IIIA lung cancer. The tumor had infiltrated the surrounding lymph nodes but had not yet spread to distant organs. Martha was 59 years old.
"It was a total shock," says Martha. Although she would occasionally light up a cigarette at a party, she never considered herself a smoker.
Lung cancer is the most common cancer worldwide and the leading cause of cancer death. In 2022, about 2.5 million people were diagnosed with the disease and more than 1.8 million died. Although tobacco-related lung cancers still account for the majority of diagnoses worldwide, smoking rates have been declining for several decades. As the number of smokers continues to fall in many countries around the world, the proportion of lung cancer occurring in people who have never smoked is on the rise. Between 10 and 20% of lung cancer diagnoses are now made in individuals who have never smoked.
"Lung cancer in never-smokers is emerging as a separate disease entity with distinct molecular characteristics that directly impact treatment decisions and outcomes," says Andreas Wicki, an oncologist at the University Hospital Zurich, Switzerland. While the average age at diagnosis is similar to that of smoking-related lung cancers, younger patients with lung cancer are more likely to have never smoked. "When we see 30- or 35-year-olds with lung cancer, they are usually never-smokers," he says.
Another difference is the type of cancer being diagnosed. Until the 1950s and 1960s, the most common form of lung cancer was squamous cell carcinoma – a type which begins with the cells that line the lungs. In contrast, lung cancer in never-smokers is almost exclusively adenocarcinoma – a type which starts in mucus-producing cells – which is now the most common form of lung cancer in both smokers and never-smokers.
Like other forms of lung cancer, adenocarcinoma is usually diagnosed at an advanced stage. "If there's a 1cm (0.4in) tumor hidden somewhere in your lungs, you won't notice it," says Wicki. The early symptoms, which include persistent coughing, chest pain, shortness of breath or wheezing, often only appear when the tumor is larger or has spread. In addition, the historically strong link between smoking and lung cancer may inadvertently lead non-smokers to attribute symptoms to other causes, says Wicki. "Most cases in never-smokers are therefore only diagnosed at stage 3 or 4."
The smoke from cooking fuel and fumes from cooking oil can increase a person's risk of lung disease, including lung cancer
Lung cancer in never-smokers is also more common in women. Women who have never smoked are more than twice as likely to develop lung cancer as male never-smokers. Aside from lung anatomy and environmental exposures, at least part of the answer may lie in genetic mutations that are more common in women, especially in Asian women. One of the most prevalent is a mutation known as EGFR.
Lung cancer cells in people who have never smoked usually have a number of mutations that could be causing their cancer, explains Wicki – so-called driver mutations. These genetic changes drive tumor growth, such as the EGFR gene which codes for a protein on the surface of cells and is called epidermal growth factor receptor. The reasons why these driver mutations are more frequently found in female patients, particularly those of Asian descent, are not entirely understood. There is some evidence that female hormones may play a role, with certain genetic variants that affect estrogen metabolism being more prevalent in East Asians. This could potentially explain the higher incidence of EGFR-mutant lung cancer in Asian women, although the data is very preliminary.
Following the discovery of mutations which can lead to lung cancer in non-smokers, the pharmaceutical industry began to develop drugs that specifically block the activity of those proteins. For example, the first EGFR inhibitors became available around 20 years ago and most patients showed an impressive response. However, treatment often led to resistant cancer cells, resulting in tumor relapse. In recent years, much effort has been put into overcoming this problem, with newer types of drugs now entering the market.
As a result, the prognosis for patients has steadily improved. "The median survival rate of patients who carry such driver mutations is now several years," Wicki explains. "We have patients who have been on targeted therapy for more than 10 years. This is a huge step forward when you consider that the median survival rate was less than 12 months about 20 years ago."
As the proportion of lung cancer in never-smokers increases, experts say it is crucial to develop prevention strategies for this population. A number of risk factors have been implicated. For example, studies have revealed that radon and second-hand smoke can elevate the risk of lung cancer in non-smokers. Additionally, exposure to cooking fumes or to stoves burning wood or coal in poorly ventilated rooms may also increase this risk. Since women traditionally spend more time indoors, they are particularly vulnerable to this type of indoor air pollution. However, outdoor air pollution is an even more significant factor in the development of lung cancer.
How air pollution may trigger lung cancer in never-smokers carrying the EGFR mutation has been the focus of research at the Francis Crick Institute in London. "When we think about environmental carcinogens, we usually think about them as causing mutations in the DNA", says William Hill, a post-doctoral researcher in the cancer evolution and genome instability laboratory of the Francis Crick Institute. Cigarette smoke, for example, damages our DNA, thus leading to lung cancer. "However, our [2023] study proposes that PM2.5 doesn't directly mutate DNA, rather it wakes up dormant mutant cells sitting in our lungs and starts them on the early stages of lung cancer."
In their experiments, the researchers showed that air pollutants are taken up by immune cells called macrophages. These cells normally protect the lung by ingesting infectious organisms. In response to PM2.5 exposure, macrophages release chemical messengers known as cytokines, which wake up cells carrying the EGFR mutation and causes them to proliferate.
"Both air pollution and EGFR mutations are needed for tumors to grow," says Hill. Understanding how PM2.5 acts on the microenvironment of cells carrying EGFR mutations to promote tumor growth, he adds, could pave the way for new approaches to preventing lung cancer.
The association between air pollution and lung cancer is not new. In a landmark paper establishing the link between smoking and lung cancer in 1950, the authors suggested outdoor pollutants from the burning of fossil fuels as a possible cause. But policies to date have focused almost exclusively on tobacco control. But 75 years later, air pollution is finally coming into focus.
Air pollution levels in Europe and the US have fallen in recent decades. But the effect of changes on lung cancer rates has not yet become apparent. "It probably takes 15 to 20 years for changes in exposure to be reflected in lung cancer rates, but we don't know for sure," says Christine Berg, a retired oncologist from the National Cancer Institute in Maryland, US. Moreover, the picture is not static: climate change is likely to have an impact in the future.
"With the increasing risk of wildfires, air pollution and PM2.5 levels are rising again in certain regions of the US," says Berg. "At least one study has shown an association between wildfire exposure and increased incidence of lung cancer. Transitioning away from coal, oil and gas is therefore crucial not only to slow global warming but also to improve air quality."
In 2021, the WHO halved the annual mean air quality guideline for PM2.5, meaning it has adopted a more stringent approach to particulate matter. "But 99% of the world population lives in areas where air pollution levels exceed [these updated] WHO guideline limits," says Ganfeng Luo, a postdoctoral researcher at the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) in Lyon, France.
In a recent study, IARC researchers estimated that approximately 194,000 cases of lung adenocarcinoma worldwide were attributable to PM2.5 in 2022. "The highest burden is estimated in East Asia, especially in China," says Luo.
In the future, the number of lung cancer deaths attributable to air pollution could increase in countries such as India, which currently has some of the highest levels of air pollution, according to the WHO. In Delhi, the average PM2.5 levels are above 100 micrograms per sq m, which is 20 times above the WHO air quality guidelines.
In the UK, 1,100 people developed adenocarcinoma of the lung as a result of air pollution in 2022, the IARC study found. "But not all of these cases will be in never-smokers," says Harriet Rumgay, an epidemiologist and a co-author of the study. Adenocarcinoma also occurs in smokers, especially in those using filtered cigarettes. "There's still a lot we don't know," says Rumgay. "More research is needed to disentangle the different factors and also to understand, for example, how long you would need to be exposed to air pollution before developing lung cancer."
As treatments continue to improve, lung cancer in never-smokers is becoming more survivable. It is conceivable that this type of lung cancer will one day become the most common form of a disease that has historically been associated with older male smokers, changing the way we think about the disease in popular culture; "…the idea that they [patients] are at least partly to blame for their disease is unfortunately still widespread," says Wicki.
Martha was found to have an EGFR mutation and has been taking an inhibitor since her diagnosis almost three years ago. "It's definitely not a vitamin pill," she says. The drug has some nasty side effects: chronic fatigue, muscle pain, skin problems. Balancing the risks and benefits of drug treatment and maintaining a reasonable quality of life is not always easy, she says. But the drug is working. "And the fatalistic view of the disease is changing, and that is good.”
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20250605-the-mystery-rise-of-lung-cancer-in-non-smokers
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CREATINE: NOT JUST FOR MUSCLE-BUILDING
Creatine is often taken by people looking to build muscle. Now scientists are investigating the effects this chemical has on our cognition and mood.
Creatine is a substance naturally found in your body. It’s produced in your liver from the two amino acids glycine and arginine, and is also found in foods like red meat and fish. Creatine is found throughout your body, with 95% of it stored in your muscles. Once you fill your muscle’s creatine stores, any extra is broken down into creatinine, metabolized by your liver, and excreted in urine.
If you've heard of creatine, it's likely because it's one of the most well-researched supplements. It has long been associated with improved endurance and performance during exercise, and is commonly taken in the form of creatine monohydrate by bodybuilders. But the compound isn't just potentially useful to those looking to expand their muscles.
Creatine is a vital chemical ingredient in our bodies, where it is produced naturally within the liver, kidneys and pancreas and stored in our muscles and brains. The creatine we produce typically isn't enough for our total requirements on its own, so most people also rely on sources in their diet – certain foods, such as meat and oily fish, are rich in this nutrient.
Creatine helps to manage the energy available to our cells and tissues, and there's emerging evidence that some people might benefit from creatine supplementation.
From reducing post-viral fatigue to improving cognitive function in people who are stressed, and even boosting memory, creatine supplements may provide some people with a significant cognitive boost. It's also been speculated that creatine might help to alleviate symptoms in patients with Alzheimer's disease and improve mood. So, are you getting enough creatine? And when is it a good idea to take a supplement?
The birth of creatine research
The benefits of creatine supplementation were first discovered in the 1970s by the late Roger Harris, a professor from Aberystwyth University in Wales. Creatine has since become well established in the sporting world, with a wealth of research behind it linking it to improvements in our physical function.
But over the last two decades, studies have been starting to reveal other potential health benefits of creatine supplements. One of the biggest areas of research is cognitive function, given that creatine plays a role in neogenesis – the formation of new neurons in the brain.
When Ali Gordjinejad started to notice studies linking creatine supplementation to working and short-term memory in sleep-deprived people, he saw that they were suggesting that a person had to take creatine for weeks or months to see any benefits.
"It was assumed that the body's uptake of creatine cells is marginal, therefore it wouldn't work for only one night of sleep deprivation – until we did our study," says Gordjinejad, a research scientist at the Forschungszentrum Jülich research center, in Germany.
It's thought that creatine may help to protect unborn babies from a lack of oxygen in the womb
Gordjinejad decided to test the effects of one dose of creatine on cognitive performance following only one night of sleep deprivation. He recruited 15 people, and gave them either a creatine supplement or a placebo at 6pm. He tested their cognitive performance – including reaction times and short-term memories – every two-and-a-half hours until 9am.
Gordjinejad found that processing speed was much faster in the creatine group compared with the placebo group. Gordjinejad doesn't know exactly why, but he suspects it's because the sleep deprivation and cognitive tasks put participants' neurons under stress, and this triggers the body to take in more creatine.
"If the energy demand is high from cells, then phosphocreatine (which provides energy for short bursts of effort) comes in and acts like an energy reservoir," says Gordjinejad, who explains that dietary creatine can help this reserve to fill up again.
If cells need a lot of energy for a short period of time, phosphocreatine can come in and act as an energy reserve, Gordjinejad explains.
Though Gordjinejad's study was small, he believes his findings show that creatine could potentially help to overcome the negative effects of sleep deprivation – but only in the short-term, until you sleep.
However, the participants in Gordjinejad's study took 10 times the recommended daily dose of creatine – they had 35g, which is around half a glass full of the powdered supplement. (Do not try this at home.) This dose, Gordjinejad says, would pose a risk to people with kidney problems, and in the general population it could cause stomach pains.
Gordjinejad plans to conduct a similar trial where he gives participants a smaller dose. He hopes that, in the future, creatine could be used in this way by people who have an unexpected prolonged period of being awake, such as emergency service workers, or students doing their exams.
However, Terry McMorris, professor emeritus at the University of Chichester, carried out a review of 15 studies in 2024, and found that research so far fails to support the theory that creatine supplements can improve cognitive function.
However, McMorris says this may be because studies he looked at used various different creatine supplement regimens. Also, he explains that many studies relied on outdated cognition tests. "Some date back 1930s – they're too easy, we don't push people enough," he says.
But while McMorris says there's not enough evidence to draw any conclusions, he believes it's an area worth more research.
Cognitive performance aside
Studies are showing a range of other potential health benefits of creatine, including stopping the progress of tumors in some animal studies, and improving menopause symptoms. One reason for this may be that creatine could have a protective antioxidant effect that can help our bodies to weather the effects of stressors.
One recent study involving 25,000 people found that, among participants aged 52 and above, for those who had the highest levels of creatine in their diets, each additional 0.09g of creatine over a two-day average was linked to a 14% reduction in cancer risk.
Creatine may also have benefits to our mental health. In one study, people with depression were given creatine powder alongside a course of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT). The researchers found that, over eight weeks, their symptoms improved more than those who had CBT without creatine.
"One reason creatine might help people with depression is that it's used to a significant degree for energy production and usage in the brain," says Douglas Kalman, adjunct professor of graduate sports nutrition at Florida International University. If creatine levels are low, this affects energy production in the brain, but also the levels of neurotransmitters – chemical signals that allow nerve cells to communicate with each other – he says. This, in turn, can affect a person's mood.
This finding may be especially important for vegans, says Sergej Ostojic, professor of nutrition at the University of Agder in Norway. According to some research, this group is at higher risk of depression. Creatine might be at play here, he adds, as vegans have been found to have less creatine in their muscles than those with omnivorous diets.
There is even some research suggesting that creatine could even help with chronic conditions. In 2023, Ostojic and colleagues from the University of Novi Sad, Serbia, tested the effects of creatine supplements in 19 patients with long Covid.
The researchers gave 4g of creatine to half the participants, and a placebo to the other half. Then they monitored their symptoms, and the levels of creatine in their brain and muscles. After six months, the team found that those who received extra creatine had improved symptoms, including less brain fog and concentration difficulties. The more severe the disease, the lower levels of creatine in their bodies had been at the beginning of the study.
"The hypothesis was that the brain, under the stress of long Covid, depletes levels of creatine, which is a critical energy-supplying substance," Ostojic says.
While creatine isn't a cure for long Covid, Ostojic concludes, it could provide some benefits. But there's more work to do; he wants to better understand potential gender differences at play when it comes to creatine and conditions such as long Covid.
Women are more likely to develop long Covid than men and have a different creatine metabolism. Due to fluctuations in hormones, it's thought that the transport, bioavailability and synthesis of creatine in the body can change throughout a woman's life.
Ostojic adds that women tend to lose more creatine through their urine and have lower levels of muscle mass compared to men. Since this is where most creatine is stored, it makes sense that women would have less creatine overall. "My preliminary feeling is that women with long Covid might respond better to creatine supplementation [than men]," he says.
One shift in the way creatine has been researched recently is that its role is now being looked at through a person's entire lifecycle, says Kalman. For example, there's a growing body of research showing the important roles creatine may play from conception to a baby's first few years of life.
The cells and tissues in our bodies use creatine as an energy source at every stage of reproduction, says Stacey Ellery, an NHMRC Peter Doherty early career research fellow at Monash University Australia. This includes sperm motility, uterine and placental development, as well as fetal growth and breastmilk.
Creatine may also have an important role in reducing the damage caused by a lack of oxygen, says Ellery, such as to fetuses during birth or in the womb. A lack of oxygen can restrict the ability of cells to generate sufficient energy in crucial tissues, such as the placenta and fetal brain, which can stunt their growth or impact their long-term health, she explains. But in the very short term, creatine can allow cells to release energy without needing oxygen. "
"A creatine supplement can boost the creatine available to cells for energy production during oxygen deprivation," says Ellery. "Consider it like charging a spare battery for a power outage. Keeping the cells energized lowers the risk of serious harm to the developing baby."
And creatine may be critical in complicated pregnancies. Ellery has seen in her research how, in pregnant women with the potentially life-threatening condition pre-eclampsia, for example, the placenta can adapt to increase creatine levels in the mother's body. However, the safety of supplementing with creatine during pregnancy has not been studied directly yet in humans and it’s important to discuss any supplements with your doctor first.
More creatine seems to be sent from the mother to the baby during long and difficult labors, says Ellery, and lower levels of creatine in mothers' blood during the final months of pregnancy have been linked to a higher incidence of stillbirth, preterm birth, smaller babies and admission to intensive care. However, it is unclear why this is the case, or whether supplementing with creatine would be helpful.'
While research in this area is in the early stages, Ostojic recently published the first calculations of recommended daily creatine intake for infants up to 12 months old. He estimated that exclusively breastfed infants require 7 mg per day up to six months old, then 8.4 mg per day for infants aged 7-12 months. He says more data is needed.
And at the other end of the lifecycle, creatine may also help with our muscle health as people develop sarcopenia, an age-related condition that reduces muscle strength and mass. "As people get older, they have less muscle tone," Kalman says. "And studies have shown that creatine could help reduce the amount of sarcopenia."
Are we getting enough creatine?
There is emerging evidence that most women eating a Western diet don't eat enough creatine-rich foods, says Ellery. A recent study found that six out of 10 women didn't consume the daily creatine intake recommended by researchers (13mg per kg body mass per day) and nearly one fifth of pregnant women consumed no creatine at all.
Preliminary studies suggest adults require around 1g of creatine per day. Early data from population studies suggests that depression, cardiometabolic disorders and cancer are more prevalent in people who consume less than 1g of creatine per day. However, there are no official public health recommendations regarding daily creatine intake.
Creatine is a naturally occurring compound in the body, which means it isn't defined as "essential". Essential nutrients can't be synthesized by the body and, therefore, must be supplied from foods. However, some researchers, including Ostojic, argue that creatine should be categorized as semi-essential, as it appears we can't synthesize enough.
"A couple of studies suggest people who don't get any creatine from food have lower levels of creatine in their muscles, suggesting they're not able get it to the optimum point," says Ostojic. Creatine is not a silver bullet, he says, but argues it should be evaluated properly and evidence-based guidance should given to the population.
Despite being the focus of many studies – and lacking in many people's diets – research on creatine's health benefits throughout our lives is still in its early stages.
Researchers including Ellery are hopeful, though, that the rising academic interest in creatine will eventually translate into public health interest, so that we know which population groups would benefit from creatine supplements.
Caution: People with kidney or liver disease should not take creatine.
Creatine alters your body’s stored water content, driving additional water into your muscle cells, but the effect is relatively minor. Based on the current evidence, creatine does not cause dehydration or cramping. It may even protect against these conditions.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20250523-the-surprising-health-benefits-of-taking-creatine-powder
Oriana:
Creatine is abundant in the Western diet. Here are the best food sources:
Red Meats: Beef, lamb, and pork are all good sources of creatine.
Fish: Herring, salmon, and tuna are known for their creatine content.
Poultry: Chicken and turkey can also provide some creatine.
Other Sources: Dairy products like milk and eggs contain creatine, but in smaller amounts than red meat and fish,
Our bodies also produce creatine from amino acids such as methionine, arginine, and glycine. Methionine's role is to provide a methyl group.
ending on beauty:
THORNS AND ROSES
Saint Ignatius
flaming and white
threw himself against a rosebush
to mortify his flesh
with the bell of his black habit
he wanted to drown out
the beauty of the world
gushing from the earth
as from a wound
but lying at the bottom
of the cradle of thorns he saw
that the blood flowing down his forehead
congealed on his eyelashes
in the shape of a rose
and his blind hand
seeking thorns
had been pierced
with the sweet touch of petals
the deceived saint wept
amidst the mockery of blossoms
thorns and roses
thorns and roses
we pursue happiness
~ Zbigniew Herbert, tr by Oriana
Rio Samba in my backyard
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