I CAN BE A POET ONLY IN ENGLISH
Because the words might mean anything.
If you told me that table means
chair, I’d sink into a cushioned
table and lean back, on the deck
of The Titanic, which means
luxury before a fall —
Iceberg happens, but who could deny
that merde might mean
the highest grade of emerald?
In Polish “to cross yourself”
sounds almost like “to say goodbye.”
How could I write in a language
where you cross yourself before
you travel, step into water,
or commit suicide —
as if it’s not enough
to lose the future tense,
intended only for the young.
*
The Germans panicked when after the war
they got parcels from America marked
GIFT. In German, Gift means poison.
The Old Germanic root of English “gift”
is giftu, poison.
Did the frost-bound Anglo-Saxons
guess, like the marble Greeks
with their pharmakon,
that a little poison could be a cure?
— though Socrates may have gone
too far, toasting the gods with hemlock,
saying death is no misfortune.
*
When a friend tells me, I’ll drop
you off, it sounds — Splat! —
like a misfortune, but it is a gift. Even
when we pray, A gift is God in action,
we cannot know if it’s a gift or poison
until later, from the vanishing point.
As we step into the dangerous
waters of memory, having failed
to cross ourselves,
let us remember the primordial
meaning of “gift” was bride-price.
That’s why we toast To Life,
that dazzling and expensive bride —
a cup of kindness or poison
to cure us of this constant vanishing.
~ Oriana
*
CAN WE OUTGROW A LANGUAGE?
I had asked all the students in my writing class at Maastricht University in the Netherlands—where instruction was in English—to translate one of their stories into their native language. The Latvian student, B., was one of 23 who had signed up for the first year of creative writing minor I had designed for the university.
This inaugural class comprised one of the most linguistically diverse groups I had ever taught. Only one—my single American—was monolingual. The rest spoke 12 different languages among them. For most of my students, English was their second or third language and yet they used it beautifully, writing stories and poems that were among the most interesting I had come across as a teacher of writing.
So I was surprised to discover that the last assignment requiring them to write in the language they had first spoken was especially difficult. Many students found it nearly impossible to complete.
B. had been born in Latvia and had moved to the Netherlands with his family around the age of 10. He had already written an accomplished, rather adult story, a gothic tale involving a bit of violence and a bit of love.
The translation assignment nearly did him in. He was in my office every week, unable to start the project, and then when he did, unable to make any progress. Finally, I asked him to try to pinpoint what was the root of his problem. He thought for a moment and then lit up.
“The problem,” he explained, “is that this is a very dark story and Latvian is just not that kind of language.” I asked him what he meant. “You see,” he replied. “Latvian is a very sweet and beautiful language.”
A sweet and beautiful language. I smiled. And then gently broke it to him that it’s not the language that was sweet and beautiful; it was the 10-year-old boy who stopped using it exclusively when he acquired a new one. He was able to finish his translation after that. But I don’t know if he ever quite believed me. Latvian will always remain for him the sweet and innocent language of childhood. As it probably must.
A similar thing happened when I taught a different workshop in Miami in 2014. Though many students spoke other languages, all wrote exclusively in English. I asked why. A student whose parents were from Gujarat explained.
“I’ve talked about this with my other friends,” she said. “None of us write in Gujarati because it’s not a nice language for us.” I asked why. And after a moment of thought, she said, “Because it’s the language of scolding!”
Today, I ask my classes to reflect on what language means to them. I ask how many now use a language different from the one they grew up speaking. I ask: What is your language of scolding? What is your sweet language?
Eva Hoffman in her memoir Lost in Translation writes about emigrating from Poland to Vancouver at the age of 13 and encountering the shock of the new language.
She writes: “The problem is that the signifier has become severed from the signified. The words I learn now don’t stand for things in the same unquestioned way they did in my native tongue. “River” in Polish was a vital sound, energized with the essence of riverhood, of my rivers, of my being immersed in rivers. “River” in English is cold—a word without an aura. It has no accumulated associations for me, and it does not give off the radiating haze of connotation. It does not evoke.”
And yet, as an adult, she chooses to write in English. “If I’m to write about the present, I have to write in the language of the present, even if it’s not the language of the self.”
Later, she realizes that each language “modifies the other, crossbreeds with it, fertilizes it. Like everybody, I am the sum of my languages.”
In her essay collection Create Dangerously, Edwidge Danticat comes to a similar conclusion: One of the advantages of being an immigrant is that two very different countries are forced to merge within you. The language you were born speaking and the one you will probably die speaking have no choice but to find a common place in your brain and regularly merge there.
For me, language was a kind of initiation into multiple realities. For if one language could be certain of a table’s gender and another couldn’t be bothered, then what was true of the world was intimately tied, not to some platonic ideal, but to our way of expressing it.
That, to me, is the great gift of bilingualism. And I usually begin a workshop by asking students to translate a short poem into their native tongues (I usually use Alfred Tennyson’s “The Eagle,” after I learned to translate it in a charming workshop given by the Dutch poet Wiel Kusters). Those students who do not speak another language are asked to rewrite the poem without using the letter “e”, a translation hurdle in itself.
To translate, one must really understand what is being said. The translator crawls inside a text and inhabits it in a way not even the careful reader can. This is why every writer must read as the translator does.
In the 20th century, some of the most celebrated figures in literature were multilingual, either through exile, immigration, colonialism or family circumstance.
Vladimir Nabokov, who wrote his first novels in Russian, became an international star after he started writing in English. Jorge Luis Borges spoke English as a child and wrote in Spanish. The Irish Samuel Beckett, who studied English, French and Italian at Trinity College, wrote his most well known work in French, preferring that language because, as he famously noted, it allowed him to write “without style.”
This list grows longer towards century’s end when we add the refugees of the era’s great upheavals: Eva Hoffman, Charles Simic, Anchee Min, Edwidge Danticat, Milan Kundera, Nuruddin Farah, and Amin Maalouf, to name just a few. Many of them, like my uncle Dionisio Martinez, left their homeland in their early teens and went on to write in the language of a new land.
*
MISHA IOSSEL ON ANTI-ZIONISM
In the official, Party-controlled public sphere in late-stage Soviet Union circa my youth, there was relatively little overt anti-Semitism, but there was an awful lot of anti-zionism. Indeed, one would be hard-pressed, say, to encounter any pejorative references to Jews as such in the newspapers, but the latter were rife on a daily basis with Nazi Germany-style cartoons depicting the grotesquely hook-nosed, crooked-toothed, be-fanged, beady-eyed, altogether degenerate-looking subhuman creatures in colonial-type military fatigues and with six-pointed stars next to big fat black swastikas on their ugly oversized combat helmets, rivulets of blood dripping from their terrible hirsute claws.
"Zionism is the new nazism," they repeated over and over again on the radio and, scowling with anger and disgust, on TV. The so-called Anti-Zionist Committee of the Soviet Society, a Kremlin-created entity made up of prominent Soviet Jews, some (but not all) of them visibly uncomfortable on camera, amplified that message in a steady stream of ominous press-releases claiming that Israel, the vicious fascist aggressor, was an illegitimate state that had forfeited without recourse its right to exist. Recurrent waves of anti-zionist rallies, held at industrial factories and academic institutes, in small towns and large villages, rolled all across the senselessly vast country with its unimaginable eleven time zones.
Synagogue in Tykocin, Poland
And on the barely discernible micro-scale of individual human lives, a humble Soviet engineer (for instance) of Jewish extraction, having been fired from his comfortable (if very modestly salaried) middle-class job at some research institute ("PO Box," in Soviet parlance) after applying for the immigrant visa to Israel (just about the only pathway for those seeking to leave the Soviet Union and become citizens of the larger outer world without borders... pardon me for the didactic tone of this superfluous explanation), and looking without much hope for any kind of gainful employment in the meantime (one needs to eat and feed his family, plus, importantly, one cannot by law go for more than four months without having a legitimate job lest he run the risk of being brought up on charges of parasitism; "the organs" — as the KGB likes, ever so perversely, to call itself — is watching closely, gimlet-eyed), while awaiting OVIR's (the KGB-run office in charge of issuing, or indeed more frequently, denying the said visas) decision, would be likely to hear from the HR ("Otdel Kadrov") person at some dairy store, for example, looking for an additional bottle crates-carrier or packing assistant, something along the lines of, "Well, you're way overqualified for us, of course, and besides, as I'm sure you understand, we're no antisemites, but we cannot have anyone with such a zionist last name.”
(Ah, but don't lose heart, young man, imminently to become a "refusenik." There are two fail-proof opportunities available to you: a night time boiler-room operator or shift security guard... for instance, at the Central Park of Culture and Leisure, keeping non-dormant eye on the poignant diplodocus shape of the city's only, and the country's oldest, roller-coaster, or "American Hills," in Russian.)
"It was both recently and long ago," to quote a post-WWII Soviet song.
"So close, no matter how far," to quote a Metallica song.
History walks in circles, like an old blinkered piebald circus horse, dully nodding its head.
And beneath the bumpy, unlovely, crudely artificial veneer of that "antizionist" surface of Soviet life, the million-strong roiling masses of ordinary Soviet people knew the actual truth of it: namely, that Jews had crucified Jesus and then bought up all the banks and all the newspapers in the world, overthrew the God-anointed Russian tzar, and were constantly, continually seeking to do as much harm as possible to the eternally good and intrinsically naive and trusting Russian people. ~ Misha Iossel, Facebook
PS from Misha:
The purpose of redefining antisemitism is to attempt convincing people that there is no such phenomenon as the antisemitism of the left, but only of the right — to undo, in effect, the horseshoe of left-right antisemitism. Anti-Zionism — the belief that Israel has no right to exist as a Jewish state (while, for instance, over 90% of American and Canadian Jews believe that it does) — has nothing to do with antisemitism, those redefiners claim.
At a dinner event in 1968, shortly before he was assassinated in Memphis, Martin Luther King reportedly was approached by a student who issued a sharply critical statement about Zionists. Martin Luther King responded by saying, "Don’t talk like that. When people criticize Zionists, they mean Jews. You’re talking anti-Semitism.”
~ The existence of Israel is a new development and Western antisemites aren't sure how to deal with it. Their solution is to demand the destruction of Israel so that Jews can be handled with a traditional pogrom. Israeli refusal to self-destruct then justifies attacks on local Jewish communities since they share the guilt in Israel's obstinate refusal to cave in to their demands. ~ Marc Clamage, Quora
Lublin Gate at Jezuicka Street, Tadeusz Rolke
*
HOW ANTI-ZIONISM BECAME A WESTERN RITE
It’s official: Jew hatred is trending among millennials and older Gen Z. On June 28, the rapper Bobby Vylan’s chants of “Death, death to the IDF” were broadcast by the BBC and enthusiastically echoed by tens of thousands of people in the live audience of 200,000 at the Glastonbury Festival, many of whom were waving Palestinian flags. “Hell yeah, from the river to the sea,” intoned the aptly named Vylan, “Palestine must be, will be, inshallah, it will be free!”
Vylan’s performance was a coda to Zohran Mamdani’s June 24 victory in the Democratic primary for mayor of New York, a city with the largest population of Jews (1.3 million) outside of Tel Aviv. Mamdani—who supports the boycott, divest, sanctions movement, has expressed his “love” for convicted funders of Hamas, and has defended calls to “globalize the intifada”—got 52 percent of the under-45 vote among primary voters.
Many of Vylan’s fans and Mamdani’s base of young, white, college-educated, and affluent voters would doubtless agree that “there is only one solution, intifada, revolution!” But what problem is this globalized intifada intended to solve? Evidently, it’s not just Israel, but also the West, whose foundational values and successes the Jewish state epitomizes. The “solution,” therefore, is not simply to cleanse the land of Jews “from the river to the sea” but also to eradicate Western civilization.
Open hatred of Jews flourishes in periods of societal instability and license, when the decency and decorum that protects them from assault by their fellow citizens is suspended. The claim that Jews killed Christian children to use their blood in the preparation of Passover matzoh offered an excuse to torture and murder whole communities from the 12th century until at least 1946, when 42 Jews were slaughtered for it in Kielce, Poland.
Today, the “blood libel” is back in a new form: the allegation that Israel is targeting Gazans, particularly children, for genocide. Propagated by people who inwardly despise Christianity’s moral and spiritual teachings, including far-right antisemites, this malicious falsehood has fueled widespread indignation and outrage in the West. Some have taken matters into their own hands, targeting Jews for violence wherever they may be found.
Recent events show an accelerating pattern of accusation and attack. On May 20, the under-secretary-general for humanitarian affairs at the United Nations issued an urgent warning during an interview with the BBC: “There are 14,000 babies [in Gaza] that will die in the next 48 hours unless we can reach them” with humanitarian aid. Although this absurd claim was swiftly debunked, it immediately went viral and was spread far and wide by mainstream media in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia. High-profile figures, like the journalist Katie Couric, who has 1.6 million followers on X, reposted it.
The next day, a couple that worked at the Israeli Embassy, Yaron Lischinsky, 30, and Sarah Milgrim, 26, were executed outside the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C., by a man who told police, “I did it for Palestine. I did it for Gaza.” A few days later, on June 1, an Egyptian man shouting “They are killers! How many children you killed?” firebombed marchers in Boulder, Colorado, who were advocating for the release of Israeli hostages. He injured 15 people, including a Holocaust survivor. One of the victims, 82-year-old Karen Diamond, has died from her injuries.
The blood libel expresses ugly emotions of envy and hatred buried in the deep recesses of the psyche. How could a people slated for extermination since the time of Moses still walk the earth? The Book of Exodus answers that the people of Israel are favored by the divine might of a loving God. In his letter to the Romans, Paul, too, affirms God’s love for the Jews. Jew haters, however, invert this relationship, comparing Jews to blood-sucking insects or vampires—subhuman and inhuman parasites, so far from divine favor as to be utterly demonic.
Moreover, the blood libel perverts a foundational religious practice of Judaism and Christianity that commemorates God’s loving sustenance. Passover matzoh recalls the “bread of affliction” that was the hurried fare of the fleeing Israelite slaves, the unleavened bread God instructed them to prepare in their flight to freedom. It is what Jesus held in his hand at the Passover seder that was the Last Supper, thereby birthing the ritual that binds Christians with one another and with a God who saves and redeems. In celebrating the spilled blood and broken bodies of Jews, the motley assembly of antisemites has replaced God’s bond with a modern-day pagan cult.
The scapegoating of Jews in the West is part and parcel of a rebarbarized culture, one that endorses political violence. A recent Rutgers University poll found that “55 percent of all self-identifying ‘liberals’ believe killing is a justifiable means of pursuing their political goals”—and endows it with theological significance. If George Floyd’s death and subsequent canonization as a secular martyr justified the urban riots during which 2,000 police officers were injured, thousands of businesses and properties were looted and vandalized, and 17 people were killed, the sanctification of cold-blooded murder soon followed. After Luigi Mangione allegedly gunned down UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in 2024, images appeared of Mangione with a halo, in a green mantle with a red sacred heart, under the title “Saint Luigi, Patron Saint of Healthcare Access for All.”
These developments underscore the global convergence of militant political and religious movements. Islamists have learned to speak the language of social justice activists, while far-left radicals have learned to frame ideological struggle as a holy war. Human life holds little value for either of them. The journey from self-immolation for Palestine to so-called self-martyrdom bombings is a short stop or two on a train that long ago left the station of peaceful politics.
The ultimate aim of those who have married Islamism and Marxism, as Columbia University Apartheid Divest (a group of more than 100 anti-Israel organizations) admitted, is “the total eradication of Western civilization.” That would mean a world without political and economic liberty, freedom of speech and opinion, equal rights for women and minorities, technological advancement, philosophy, science, art, literature, music, and the blessings of the Jewish and Christian traditions.
The hatred of Israel and the Jews is at bottom a nihilistic loathing of the free and flourishing life that the West has secured for billions of people. Israel epitomizes not only the abundant fruits of Western civilization but also the conditions for their existence: strong borders, national pride, and free markets; thick social bonds and vigorous common purpose. These conditions are much maligned (particularly in the case of the Jewish state) because they impede any sort of political or religious globalization, be it of socialism, Islamism, or elite technocratic rule. While there’s no changing the minds of hard-core antisemites, Westerners who subject Israel and its people to withering criticism because they are inclined to support one or more of these causes would do well to ponder this biblical instruction: “Life and death I set before you, the blessing and the curse, and you shall choose life so that you may live, you and your seed” (Deuteronomy 30:19).
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/antizionism-became-western-rite
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MATERIALISTS (MOVIE): “A BITTER DECONSTRUCTION OF DATING AND RELATIONSHIPS”
“Materialists” is anti-romance, and despite some leaden stabs at levity (not Song's forte), it's not funny in the least. The story revolves around Lucy (Johnson), a coolly effective New York City matchmaker with a peachy track record for getting her clients hitched and a vacant, thoroughly unfulfilling personal life. In what's perhaps the film's strongest scene, she coaxes a bride with cold feet out of her trepidation by speaking to her in terms of financial assets. Crisis averted.
At this particular wedding reception, Lucy is approached by Harry (Pascal). Suave, attentive and filthy rich, Harry is what Lucy, in her Darwinian line of work, calls a unicorn. So she politely rebuffs this tall, dark and handsome suitor who's into private equity and stealing the show at other people's nuptials. Besides, it's not as if Lucy's fully gotten her ex John (Evans), a struggling actor whose money problems contributed to their breakup. She's not going back to that (financial and emotional) grind, No, siree.
But Harry has Lucy's number. He's every bit as pragmatic as she is, so he reads her like a map, and won't be deterred from acquiring this personal asset for his life portfolio. As John, still smarting over losing Lucy, watches from a distance, Lucy steps into Harry's world of privilege, as she juggles some problem clients at work, like the chronically single Sophie (Zoë Winters, the film's actual MVP).
The first half of “Materialists” is reasonably engrossing, a razor-sharp takedown of New Yorkers' obsession with capital. Yes, it's too serious, closer to Edith Wharton than Jane Austen, and the dialogue is too theatrical by half, but it's also cerebral and stimulating. Song begins to lose her way when it's clear she hasn't figured out what to do with Harry, a character with so much potential that is sadly left largely unexplored.
John presents a larger obstacle. Song has sketched Lucy's ex-boyfriend in broad strokes, thus depriving him of the complexities she has given the women in the film. She also cast Captain America as a broke-ass ne'er-do-well, which, let's face it, is not shrewd casting. Evans, to his credit, tries to give the character inner life, but he's cut off at the knees by the limitations of a script that's at once overly wordy and half-baked, especially when it comes to John.
Don't blame Johnson. The “Fifty Shades of Grey” and “Peanut Butter Falcon” star gets a bad rap for what her detractors insist is a stiff screen presence and a knack for picking bad projects, but she gives a nuanced, finely modulated performance here. Lucy's imperfections make her all the more engaging.
“Materialists” is ultimately ruined by a dark story turn, involving one of Lucy's clients, that gives the material a dramatic weight it's unable to carry. By that point, however, the film has already lost the thread, held hostage by a patronizing streak that turns it into the cinematic equivalent of a TED talk about New Yorkers wealthy enough to afford a matchmaking service.
It lacks precisely the spontaneity you see in the kind of rom-coms the marketing team at A24 would have you believe this is. When the end credits began rolling, the predominantly female audience at my showing sat in stony silence. They recognize the fizzle of a lackluster date night when they see it.
https://www.miamiartzine.com/Features.php?op=Article_17510303602616
from another source: DATING IS HARD, BUT LOVE IS EASY (???)
It’s a movie that appears to be going one direction—following this century’s trend of cynical, deconstructed, transgressive romance movies—only to end up as a fairly old-school romance akin to something like Sleepless in Seattle.
While I didn’t love everything about it, I generally found Materialists refreshing in its seriousness and earnestness. Amid our current “coupling crisis,” when the natural desire for marriage is often outweighed by the logistical, cultural, and material arguments against it, we need more movies like this that celebrate the goodness of marriage.
‘Math’ of Matchmaking
Materialists is the second feature written and directed by Song, whose 2023 film Past Lives I also praised as refreshing for its wise, mature take on romance.
Like Past Lives, Materialists (rated R for language and some nonexplicit sexual scenes) centers on a love triangle—a woman is torn between two men. Dakota Johnson plays Lucy, a professional matchmaker in NYC. She prides herself on having mastered the “math” of contemporary coupling, which in her view is all about the “value” each single has or doesn’t have in the dating pool (“Six inches of height can double a man’s value in the market”).
Unsurprisingly, as the movie progresses, Lucy’s theories are tested as she’s presented with suitors who represent extremely different value propositions. Harry (Pedro Pascal) is a dapper billionaire who wines and dines Lucy, paying the bill at every fancy restaurant without hesitation and offering her a future of penthouses, yachts, and no conflicts over money (something she witnessed in her parents’ marriage growing up). But then there’s John (Chris Evans), the ex-boyfriend Lucy still cares for deeply.
John is a destitute actor who barely gets by as a catering waiter and lives in squalor with two roommates. Lucy broke up with him because she was tired of squabbling over $25 expenses (“It’s not because we’re not in love. It’s because we’re broke”). It’s a realistic plot point.
Marriage success rates are demonstrably correlated with socioeconomic status. The poorer you are, the less likely you are to get married or stay married.
Lucy’s choice—complicated by the fact that both Harry and John are good guys who really do love her—sets up the film’s main drama. It’s not as simple as the “on paper” choice versus the “risky but romantic” option. Happy futures could be envisioned with either man. So Lucy—and the audience—is forced to think through the nature of love.
Lucy tells one of her clients that dating is hard but love is easy. She’s getting at the reality that modern dating is horribly broken, in large part due to digital apps and social media. The endless choices, algorithmic matchmaking, and “math” permutations of it all complicate what used to be simpler dynamics in coupling—confined to more limited pools of people you know through friends, family, or church.
Love is easier than dating in the sense that love is a choice that closes off other options and brings simplicity in the form of commitment to one person (the “forsaking all others” part of traditional wedding vows). But love is also hard because it requires fidelity, forbearance, selflessness, and sacrifice—values and vows that can carry a couple forward even when the “material” assets ebb and flow.
Lucy may have a rosy view of marital love as “easy” in comparison to dating. But as the movie ends (spoiler alert) she chooses the “for better or worse” commitment of seeing just what love in marriage will require. As I reminded a couple whose wedding I officiated a few weeks ago, the wedding altar may represent the end of one roller-coaster journey (dating). But it’s the beginning of a new, even more shaping journey with its own ups and downs.
The refreshing message that comes through in Materialists (and that Lucy assures her single clients of) is that marriage, however hard, is absolutely worth the arduous work of dating. And that’s probably a message today’s marriage-leery, anxious generation needs to hear.
https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/materialists-christian-movie-review/
MONEY VERSUS “TRUE LOVE”
Song has done her research when it comes to the cold calculations involved in matchmaking companies such as the one at the center of Materialists. It seems Song worked as a matchmaker in the 2010s and “learned more about people in those six months than at any other time in my life.”
Out of that bruising experience, she created the narrative following the love life of Lucy (Dakota Johnson), a leading rep at the New York City–based matchmaking company Adore. Lucy is a smooth cynic when it comes to “doing the math” — rating prospective “matches” in hard-edged calculations of age, height, weight, fitness, profession, educational level, conventional notions of physical attractiveness, and above all, income.
The greedy, calculating demands of Lucy’s clients are driven by their elaborate fantasies of what they think they “deserve,” which are presumably influenced by the movies. Everyone’s seeking dream dates and regards themselves as entitled to perfect love, no matter how manifestly imperfect they are themselves.
But then Lucy herself meets a “unicorn,” Harry Castillo (Pedro Pascal), a man who’s tall, handsome, and rich, a perfect ten in terms of the “math.” He inspires Lucy to reenter the dating game herself, regarding Harry with the frank objective of marrying him for his money. She finds Harry’s opulent Manhattan apartment so desirable it first distracts from — and then ignites — her first sexual encounter with him.
Though as a professional, she feels compelled to warn Harry, in a businesslike, honest-broker way, that he could do better. She’s in her thirties, and younger women in their twenties are valued much higher. Plus she makes a mere $80,000 per year, chicken feed in NYC, which means she’s carrying a lot of debt. But Harry assures her she has “intangible” value that makes up for these deficits. She’s reached the status of a “luxury good.” Such a romantic!
It seems like a perfect match. But the trouble is, Lucy’s still drawn to her ex-boyfriend, John (Chris Evans), an aspiring actor working catering jobs who’s perpetually poor and still living with obnoxious roommates in a horribly run-down but rent-controlled apartment. He’s also still driving the same beater car with the whining engine and “the same smell” she remembers with both affection and trepidation after having leaped from that car years before, publicly breaking up with him because, she shouts, “You’re always broke!”'
But John still loves her as helplessly as ever, and she’s called him in the past whenever she really needed a confidante. She phones him immediately when something terrible happens at work. One of the clients she’s working hardest for is Sophie (Zoe Winters), a mature professional who is also “a nice girl” being harshly rejected by her dates. “She’s fat and forty,” says one appalling git after a date with Sophie. “I’d never swipe right on a woman like that.”
Then — SPOILER, I suppose — Sophie is assaulted by a “match” Lucy made for her. It’s a grimly common risk of dating through matchmaking companies — or any other way.
The way Materialists moves abruptly into drama later in the story is a common trait of the romantic comedy genre, which differs from wildly irreverent screwball comedy by tending to seek, ultimately, a solemn validation of conventional notions of heterosexual love. However, romantic comedies don’t ever plunge into as dark an abyss as Materialists does.
It should be noted that Materialists in general isn’t delivering a lot of laughs. It’s not exactly chuckle-worthy, for example, when we see the montages of people seeking matches who list their ever-more unrealistic and appalling criteria for dates. As Lucy finally acknowledges, it’s impossible to ethically cooperate with such despicable demands as “no black people, no fatties.”
Yet grating against such realistic horrors in Materialists are the distracting fantasy elements required for romantic comedies. For example, the standard torn-between-two-lovers plot pivots on Dakota Johnson, who looks like a fashion model. She’s so tall and svelte and perfectly planed, she might’ve convincingly played a “fembot” in the old Austin Powers movies. The daughter of Don Johnson and Melanie Griffith and the granddaughter of Tippi Hedren, Dakota Johnson is a glossy product of Hollywood entertainment-industry breeding. To see her deciding between the overwhelmingly attractive and sympathetic Pedro Pascal and the absurdly handsome former Captain America Chris Evans is to be presented with one of those glamorous Hollywood problems one can only dream of having.
It makes you recall that one of the great strengths of Song’s Past Lives is recognizing how attractive people can be who are recognizably “ordinary.” That is, they could pass you on the street without causing your neck to snap just trying to get a second look at them.
In other ways, Materialists really tests the limits of how much grim 2020s reality a movie can reflect while still functioning in the fantasy realm of romantic comedy. Though if you’re going to take on current Western world realities, why not address the vaster spread of love’s possibilities? Also note that the title might mislead you into thinking this movie is going to do something savvier about bleak material conditions — like how is Lucy living so nicely and dressing so fabulously in NYC on $80,000 a year? Even indebtedness can’t quite account for it.
But Materialists (once again, despite the promising title) treads very lightly on this subject.
There’s just something wrongheaded and wrong-hearted about the whole Materialists project. I especially hated the prelude featuring a prehistoric couple tenderly courting in front of their cave dwellings. It’s irrational perhaps, but I felt somehow outraged on behalf of the cave dwellers being held up for sappy idealizing, these noble savages enacting “natural” love for us jaded modern types.
Needless to say, we can’t go back to the cave. But we don’t have to be complete assholes about human relationships either. Surely that’s plain, without trying to blame Tinder or Bumble or eHarmony for our coldhearted callousness. People sucked at dating before there were any apps or matchmaking services to aid us in acting like creeps. That they facilitate our rottenness is the most you can say, but it hardly seems worth saying in these weirdly narrow, old-fashioned, and falsely glamorized terms.
This isn’t the first time, and won’t be the last, that someone tries to work the Jane Austen magic and finds it’s a lot tougher than they figured.
https://jacobin.com/2025/06/materialists-rom-com-dakota-johnson
From an audience critic:
This is the Cats of rom-coms. The amount of suspended disbelief to buy this story will cause your brain to fry. Caught between Pedro and Chris, there's no way anyone is making that pick in real life.
Oriana: TO HELL WITH THE PRINCE, I CHOOSE THE BEGGAR
Materialists is a well-made movie that, for me at least, is totally unconvincing. Unlike the reviewer above, I did not find John (the impoverished actor) to be “absurdly handsome,” or to have any other redeeming quality — a great sense of humor, say, or knowing how to cook.
Almost instantly, the couple fall into their old pattern: bickering about money. Given John’s underwhelming sex appeal and overall lack of potential (and he’s already 37), I don’t know a single woman who’d not have chosen the rich man instead. Add to this that the rich man is good-looking, and seems to have the makings of a pleasant life companion (except for the morning-after scene, when he pays no attention to Lucy — which I find hard to believe, since this is precisely the time when he'd want at least a quickie).
True, it’s a mystery why we’re attracted to some potential partners and not others (one theory is that we — both men and women — “marry our mother”). But there is no mystery as to why wealth is so attractive — particularly to a woman like Lucy, who's getting older, and surely realizes that with a man like Pedro she could afford to have children, with he help of a nanny if she so chooses. Furthermore, she could then send those children to the best schools, and give them what she herself could not have in childhood, having been born in a poor family.
Nor is it a secret that girls are socialized to dream about the “Prince” (and a prince, by definition, is never poor). You simply can't undo centuries of Cinderella-type fairy tales. So I can easily understand why, in one reviewer’s words, “as the ending credits started to roll, the mostly female audience sat in stony silence.”
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CAN LOS ANGELES FIREPROOF ITSELF?
Six months after the wildfires tore through Los Angeles, residents are tussling with the urban destruction left behind – and a debate over the future of the city's buildings.
Countless Los Angeles streets still contain the charred remains of homes that succumbed to wildfire six months ago. Many of their inhabitants are still living with friends and relatives or in hotels, hostels and shelters.
With more than 16,000 homes and buildings destroyed in the January 2025 wildfires, the LA neighborhoods and nearby communities affected have been left contemplating how best to balance the need to get their homes back as soon as possible with future resilience to wildfire.
Today, even as the city faces the new turmoil of immigration raids ordered by President Donald Trump and the extensive protests that have followed, LA is clearing debris and preparing to rebuild.
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In January 2025, a series of devastating wildfires tore through Los Angeles, leaving a wake of urban destruction. The Eaton and Palisades fires, the second and third most destructive in California's history, caused at least 30 deaths, forced more than 200,000 people to evacuate and destroyed more than 16,000 structures.
Progress so far has been slow, however, with few permits issued to rebuild (in Palisades, for example, just 125 rebuild permits have been issued out of 558 applications, the LA Department of Building and Safety told the BBC). Many residents have moved to communities far from the homes they lost, according to an investigation by the New York Times.
Faced with a daunting rebuild, many contractors and homeowners want to build quickly, with some working to loosen environmental protection code and permit requirements. Meanwhile, wildfire experts tell the BBC they want to ensure new construction is compliant with fire and energy codes, while sustainability advocates say they hope greener methods and materials will enter the market.
"There are going to be hard decisions on how we want to rebuild versus what is technically required," says Ian Giammanco, managing director for standards and data analytics at the Insurance Institute for Business and Home Safety (IBHS), a South-Carolina-based research group funded by the insurance industry.
California's building code was updated in 2008 to establish standards for wildfire-resistant construction. It requires the use of non-combustible materials and for homeowners to maintain defensible space around the home, such as by creating a safety buffer cleared of vegetation or debris. California is one of only five US states to apply a specific building code to areas designated as having very high wildfire risk.
Progress so far has been slow, however, with few permits issued to rebuild (in Palisades, for example, just 125 rebuild permits have been issued out of 558 applications, the LA Department of Building and Safety told the BBC). Many residents have moved to communities far from the homes they lost, according to an investigation by the New York Times.
In March, the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, a state agency often referred to as Cal Fire, expanded its maps of areas required to use the code, with existing homes at a minimum creating defensible space by clearing brush. The expansion means about 500 additional homes affected by the Eaton Fire will be covered by the code by late July 2025, according to analysis by US broadcaster NPR, but still leaves about 7,800 structures outside the high-risk zone.
Some of the proposed methods are already being used in the wider US. In Colorado, for example, where a 2021 wildfire destroyed nearly 1,000 homes in the Denver suburb of Superior, some homeowners have opted to rebuild using compressed earth blocks that have a high resilience to fire.
And CalEarth, a California-based nonprofit that pioneered a type of earthbag construction called super adobe, has drawn renewed attention from residents, says Khalili, and is urging state and local officials to work with them on making their designs code-compliant.
"Let's do the full tests… and build back prepared for these climate events," Dastan Khalili, president of CalEarth, tells the BBC. "It's insane to build the same thing and expect different results."
But bringing alternative building methods to market is costly, especially in California, where materials must prove to be fire-resistant while also passing stringent seismic testing.
Any alternative material, such as rammed earth – a building technique using compacted soil mixed with water and stabilizers which has been used for over 1,000 years, including, in recent decades, in California – must be submitted for testing, typically by manufacturers, says Crystal Sujeski, chief of code development and analysis for CalFire. This testing needs to prove they are equivalent to or exceed the standard set by conventional, widely used materials. "A lot of [testing] options are out there," she says.
New building materials that pass multiple tests can also be added to a register of approved materials, she says.
Khalili says CalEarth has always designed structures to comply with international building codes and has planned tests to meet the fire and seismic requirements of California's code. "All of that is ready to be executed," he says. "The only thing that's stopping us is the funding to go after it and make it happen." Burn tests in a fire lab for a single new material, he says, run at around $40-50k (£30-37k), and the required seismic testing can triple or quadruple this bill.
As a result, rammed earth homes and other alternative structures can be costlier than using more conventional methods – and even then, the process of approving construction at the state and municipal levels is arduous.
Ann Edminster, a green building consultant and author based in northern California, says that the ease and cost of the permitting process is highly dependent on the jurisdiction and who you work with. "The building official will either be your best friend or your worst enemy," she says.
It creates a wall of inertia boxing out those with interest in experimenting with alternative materials, she says. And in any case, if you have just lost your home to fire and don't have a place to live, "you're probably not going to be super enthusiastic about testing some brand new material", she says.
Still, there are relatively straightforward options for fire-proofing new builds – especially considering the risks of not doing so. A 2022 report by IBHS and Headwaters Economics, a Montana-based research institute, found that wildfire-resistant construction adds from 2% to 13% to the cost of a new home in California, with the upper cost here going well above current required codes. "Increasing home loss and growing risks require reevaluating the wildfire crisis as a home-ignition problem and not a wildland fire problem," the report said, noting that a home's building materials, design and nearby landscaping all influence its survival.
Stephen Quarles, an advisor emeritus at the University of California who has spent decades researching how building materials perform during wildfires, says it's more straightforward to obtain approval for smaller alternative projects.
Quarles emphasizes that wildfire building codes are flexible and allow for traditional construction to be adapted and use more sustainable materials. For instance, a homeowner constructing a straw bale home can coat the exterior with a fireproof material to get approval from a code official.
"You could say, 'My cladding is stucco, which is non-combustible,' and you would be good to go," he says.
But he also acknowledges that most homeowners just want to rebuild as quickly as possible.
When the June 2007 Angora fire destroyed 280 homes in neighborhoods around Northern California's Lake Tahoe, some residents raced to rebuild before the stricter code regulations took effect the following January, Quarles recalls. Later that same year, after the Tubbs fire ripped through the Coffey Park neighborhood of Santa Rosa, the community "built back as if there [hadn't been] a wildfire there," he says.
But he believes the latest Los Angeles wildfires – along with the 2023 Lahaina fire on Hawaii's Maui island, which were called the "largest natural disaster in Hawaii state history" – have alerted people to the importance of hardening their homes in the future.
A January 2025 study found that the hot, dry weather that gave rise to the LA fires was made about 35% more likely by climate change. The LA wildfire season is getting longer, the study noted, while the rains that normally put out the blazes have reduced.
"There's an acknowledgement that these fires can happen in places where you don't expect fires to happen," Quarles says. "I think that's taking hold and there is a desire to genuinely build back better.”
Giammanco, who contributed to a March 2025 report by IBHS documenting which types of homes survived the fire, agrees. "If you look back at our history of construction, there are inflection points," he says.
The report showed that homes compliant with California building codes had a higher survival rate than those which were not. But some homes that took preparatory steps, such as clearing brush and creating defensive space, still succumbed when enough of their neighbors had not taken these steps.
"Even the most hardened materials when subject to extreme fire exposure will reach their limit," Giammanco says. "Defending a community is sort of a system that builds on itself.”
When wildfires spread in urban areas, the homes they ignite become "fuel bombs" and intensify the blaze, says Kimiko Barrett, lead wildfire research and policy analyst at non-profit research group Headwaters Economics. "The home itself is the fuel," she says. "Once your neighbor's house starts to burn, the radiant heat means that your home is threatened as well." This is a particular problem in LA, which despite its sprawling footprint is actually still a densely populated area, especially relative to more rural communities.
Slow progress in retrofitting existing homes remains a major problem, says Giammanco – and homes that predate California's 2008 wildfire code are not mandated to do it.
But there is precedent for incentive and rebate programs in the US to help make homes more resilient to extreme weather, from initiatives in arid south-western cities for residents to collect rainwater to an Alabama program providing grants up to $10,000 (£7,400) to install roofing resilient to wind and rain. Giammanco says similar programs for wildfire protection could incentivize residents to make their homes more resilient to fire. "I think that's the missing link," he says.
Adding fire-resistant materials in retrofits such as fiber cement siding and enclosing roof eaves to make it code compliant costs just a few thousand dollars, Barrett says. Other steps are even easier, such as clearing bark mulch from a home's defensive space.
"A lot of these mitigation measures can be done over the weekend by the homeowner," she says.
It's still early days in LA for the thousands of homeowners preparing to rebuild, but there are signs that the construction industry is starting to adapt. The LA-based homebuilder KB Home, for example, has designed a fire-resilient community with 64 homes that comply to IBHS standards.
When it comes to building new homes, Edminster emphasizes that simple structures with minimal openings and overhang can be best, comparing an ideal fire-resistant home to an aerodynamic car. "The same principle could and should apply to homes," she says. "Obviously we don't want to live in little round spaceships or something, but… get your outer shell so that it works really well."
Sustainable building advocates are also pushing for greener materials and methods to become commonplace, arguing that they can be used in fire-hardened homes while also reducing emissions and bringing costs down in the longer term. For existing houses, simple retrofitting steps can improve the sustainability as well as the resilience of a home – even when they don't use the greenest materials possible. Some of Edminster's clients have retrofitted homes to be fire-resistant without stripping everything out. "That's a terrible waste of material and the embodied carbon in them," she says. "So there's a trade-off."
Edminster is adamant that building codes should stay in place after a disaster. "The whole idea of relaxing code to make it easier for people to rebuild, I think, is nonsense," she says. "[They] have been put in place to protect people and to protect us as a society."
And while many of the structures lost in the Eaton fire remain outside the boundaries of California's wildfire code, Barrett believes there is precedent for drastic change. US cities began mandating fire hydrants and sprinkler systems around the turn of the 20th Century after major urban fires in Chicago and San Francisco. Earthquake codes became stiffer in the 1970s, requiring buildings to retrofit for seismic risk reduction
"We can do this. We have done it before," Barrett says. "We just need to now think of it through a wildfire lens."
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20250626-can-la-fire-proof-itself
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WHEN WILL THE RUSSO-UKRAINIAN WAR COME TO A TIPPING POINT?
The tipping point won’t be some arbitrary number of troops and equipment. It will be political, in Moscow.
Yevgeny Prigozhyn
Russia won’t buckle in Ukraine because its bleeding men and material, because they’re fighting the war abroad. It’s not Russian cities being bombed to smithereens and if recruitment efforts come up short they’ll just do fewer attacks. There won’t be a Ukrainian breakthrough of significance for a while yet, so Russia can play the long game.
However not even the Kremlin can play the long game indefinitely. Yes Russia has a military-industrial complex and manpower pool that can completely swamp Ukraine, but foreign aid to Ukraine is keeping them in the fight and the excessive military spending is running Russian economy into the ground. Even Russian sources are saying there will be a “cooling” of the economy, a recession, starting later in this year. If you have a recession at times of extreme government spending, your economy is in the shitter. Not gutter, shitter.
Nor can Russian extraction industries keep this up forever. Yes they’re still running hot and Russia manages to sell oil and gas, but at lower profit margins than usual and at the cost of skimping maintenance due to sanctions. The effect of this will be profound, Russian oil and gas production will collapse as a result, but the effect is delayed and can take 10–15 years to fully manifest.
But things will break before that. Their banking system has been drained of resources, oligarch assets can only last you so long and there isn’t that much left to loot inside Russia. You can’t usefully tax an unproductive population and their economy can’t produce anything useful beyond basic resources. This recession they’re suffering this year is the beginning, I expect Russia to start monetary expansion next — printing money to pay for the war. This will lead to inflation and if Russia keeps the monetary expansion going a hyperinflation is in the cards, but can prolong the war for six months by keeping the lid on.
If the Kremlin wants to keep things going at that point they’ll likely introduce all sorts of price controls and nationalize means of production next. This will loot storehouses dry and conceal the problem for another six months. After that it’s shortages and breadlines. It’s difficult to fight a foreign war under those circumstances.
At some point the Kremlin will have to call the effort off. They’ve proven completely unreasonable at every turn thus far, so maybe it will go on for another year. However the longer this lasts the more profound and long-lasting the damage becomes. It’s talked about a lot, but spending essentially all the government money on the war and none of it on essential infrastructure, healthcare and useful education (singing songs that hail the victory is not useful education) causes generational damage down the line.
Russians may not rebel over poor roads, nonexistent healthcare and nonsensical education, but economy will suffer with the lack of infrastructure, people will fall sick and die or become disabled with poor healthcare and idiotic pseudoeducation won’t produce a new generation of innovators and engineers to power your country forward. Russia will regress over this and badly, but again this effect won’t be truly visible for several more years.
Knowing this damage is coming could bring about a break in the Kremlin. The knyaz is 72 — perhaps someone younger and more powerful will make the play for the ivory throne and succeed, thus ending the war. If not, the eventual fall of Russia will make the fall of the USSR seem like an orderly transition from one government to another. This is cold comfort to Ukrainians suffering from nightly terror raids, but it’s the best I can say at this point.~ Tomaž Vargazonn, Quora
Jacek Placek:
Exactly my point of view. However Misha Firer points out that Putin wanted to punish Ukraine for breaking away from Russian zone of influence, and show the Russians that democracy is not for them. Still price seems to be very high, and not worth paying. I hope, that Russia will remain stable, but that cannot be guaranteed.
Andrew Puckering:
A few items of huge significance this week. The head of the Russian central bank tells Putin publicly to his face that all the reserves are exhausted. Another official openly uses the word ‘recession’. And Putin himself openly says the economy will hopefully be in for a ‘soft landing’ (acknowledging that its present direction is unsustainable and at real risk of a catastrophic crash) and even says defense spending will have to be reduced — in the middle of a supposedly existential conflict that he personally cannot afford to lose. And that is even before Lindsey Graham finally gets Trump’s approval for a bone-crushing sanctions package on Russia that already has overwhelming support in the House.
This is it. The beginning of the end of this war really is on the horizon and coming closer. And Ukraine is about to actually win a war of attrition against mighty Russia!
Rick Bouwman:
The problem is that Putin can’t end the war. Not without something to show for it anyway. If Ukraine would accept a peace deal where they would have to give up the territories Russia occupies now Putin would probably jump at the opportunity. Putin could claim victory, the imaginary threat of Nazi’s in Donbas has been eliminated.
But Ukraine will never agree to that so he has to keep fighting. If he doesn’t he will no longer be able to keep up the charade of being the all powerful magnificent leader everybody has to look up to. It will be the end of his political career and in Moscow that often also means the end of your life.
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RUSSIA NEARS ONE MILLION WAR CASUALTIES IN UKRAINE
Nearly 1 million Russian soldiers have been killed or injured in the country’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, according to a new study, a grisly measure of the human cost of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s unprovoked three-year assault on his neighbor.
Russia will likely hit the 1 million casualty mark this summer, said the study, published Tuesday by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a think tank in Washington, DC. It said the “stunning” milestone was a “sign of Putin’s blatant disregard for his soldiers.”
Of the estimated 950,000 Russian casualties so far, as many as 250,000 are dead, according to the study. “No Soviet or Russian war since World War II has even come close to Ukraine in terms of fatality rate,” it said. Ukraine has sustained nearly 400,000 casualties, it added, with between 60,000 and 100,000 deaths.
Although Kyiv does not disclose its own combat losses in any detail and Moscow is believed to drastically underestimate its own casualties, the CSIS figures are in line with British and United States intelligence assessments.
In March, the British defense ministry estimated that Russia had sustained around 900,000 casualties since 2022. For months, it has judged that Russia is losing about 1,000 soldiers each day, whether killed or wounded. Based on that trend, Russia would be expected to surpass the 1 million threshold in the coming weeks.
Rebutting claims from some Western lawmakers that Russia holds “all the cards” in the war in Ukraine, the CSIS study used Russian casualty figures – as well as estimates of its heavy equipment losses and sluggish territorial gains – as evidence that Moscow’s military “has performed relatively poorly on the battlefield” and failed to achieve its main war goals.
After Ukraine repelled Russia’s initial “blitzkrieg” assault in 2022, the war has since become attritional. While Kyiv dug in with trenches and mines, Moscow funneled more and more troops into what have become known as “meat grinder” assaults, throwing soldiers into campaigns for only marginal territorial gains, the study said.
In the northeastern Kharkiv region, Russian forces have advanced an average of only 50 meters per day, according to the study. That is slower than the British and French advance in the Battle of the Somme in the trench warfare of World War I.
The slow rate of advance has meant Russia has seized only 1% of Ukrainian territory since January 2024, which the authors called a “paltry” amount. Russia now occupies around 20% of Ukraine’s territory, including the Crimean peninsula that Moscow annexed in 2014.
But Russia’s dwindling territorial gains have not led to a change in strategy.
To sustain Russia’s staggering rate of casualties, the Kremlin has enlisted convicts from its prisons and welcomed more than 10,000 troops from its ally North Korea, but it has left the children of Moscow and St. Petersburg elites largely untouched.
Instead, Moscow has recruited in the far north and far east of the country, where men have been lured by pay packages that are life-changing among poorer communities in those regions. “Putin likely considers these types of soldiers more expendable and less likely to undermine his domestic support base,” the study noted.
Whereas Ukraine, a democracy with a population less than a quarter the size of Russia’s, has faced some pushback in its attempts to mobilize more troops, Russia, where criticism of the war has been outlawed, has faced no significant dissent. But, with the war now well into its fourth year, the authors warned that the “blood cost” of its protracted campaign was a potential vulnerability for Putin.
Although Russia has had the “initiative” in the conflict since early 2024, the authors said the attritional nature of the war has left “few opportunities for decisive breakthroughs.”
Instead, Russia’s main hope to win “is for the United States to cut off aid to Ukraine” – as President Donald Trump briefly did earlier this year – and “walk away from the conflict” – as officials in his administration have threatened to do.
https://www.cnn.com/2025/06/04/europe/russia-war-casualties-1-million-ukraine-intl#:
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THE JEWISH WOMAN JOURNALIST WHO WORKED FOR IRANIAN TV
On the eve of Iran’s 2017 presidential election, Ebrahim Raisi, who would become president in 2021, sat down to give an interview to the Russia Today news outlet. His interlocutor was a French citizen, Catherine Perez-Shakdam, then a practicing Shi’a Muslim.
The veiled, religiously observant Perez-Shakdam had become a regular figure in Iranian state media, giving favorable coverage to the regime and its proxies around the region. She wrote dozens of articles in English in the Iranian press and rubbed shoulders with some of the Middle East’s most notorious figures.
“Zionists are planning to annihilate Islam,” trumpeted the headline of one 2014 piece she wrote for the Iranian state mouthpiece. In the article, she vilified religious Israelis ascending to pray at the Temple Mount, Judaism’s holiest site, as “rabid dogs.”
What Raisi likely did not know at the time was that Perez-Shakdam had been born to a Jewish family. Five years after her interview with the Iranian leader, Perez-Shakdam has become an atheist and reconnected with her long-discarded Jewish identity.
“It started to dawn on me that for years I had played into the hands of the very people who want us gone… For years, I was motivated by a kind of self-hate. But you realize that you can’t deny who you are,” Perez-Shakdam told The Times of Israel in an interview.
Perez-Shakdam wrote three posts on the Times of Israel’s blog platform in November, the third of which described her interview with Raisi. It went largely unnoticed for three months, but in recent days has started to make headlines in Persian and Arabic media, causing a social media firestorm even amid the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Iranian media quickly declared her an Israeli Mossad spy, and broadcasters who had been spotted with her were forced to issue clarifications.
Iranian chief cleric Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s office quickly disavowed any connection with her. Many of her media appearances and articles were wiped from state websites, although archived versions of some can still be found.
Perez-Shakdam dismisses the espionage allegations as nonsense. “I’m used to it. When they don’t like what you have to say, they come for your character — although I didn’t expect it to become quite this kind of circus,” she said.
“The only thing that really irks them is that they woke up to the fact that I’m Jewish after they let me into the circle, now that they realize that I’m the enemy — or what they perceive as the enemy,” she said.
‘I never spoke about my heritage ever’
For Perez-Shakdam, who now resides in London with her two children, the current media attention has been another step in a winding, complex life story.
Born in Paris to Jewish parents who fled Nazi persecution, Perez-Shakdam converted to Islam and spent years as a journalist and commentator in the Middle East.
“I was raised very, very secular. It wasn’t that I was cut out of the Jewish community, but I had no sense of religious belonging. I never grew up with a sense of Jewish identity,” she said.
At first, Perez-Shakdam wrote, from the UK and from Yemen, for international publications. But as her career went on, she appeared mostly as a talking head on Iranian state media. She presented Iran’s talking points to the world, but stresses she now holds very different views.
“I was really in the club. I was on television all the time. I think I’ve written for every media outlet they have, and I met quite a few people,” Perez-Shakdam said with a chuckle during her Zoom interview with The Times of Israel. “To have a Jew be featured on Press TV — the mouthpiece of the regime — bothers them.”
Catherine Perez-Shakdam speaks to The Times of Israel from London via Zoom on March 7, 2022
In 1999, as a young student at the London School of Economics, Perez-Shakdam had met her future husband, a Sunni Muslim from Sana’a in Yemen. They were married six months later. Although Perez-Shakdam converted to Islam, her Jewish background was a source of friction with her in-laws and eventually became a source of shame for her, she said.
While her husband was a Sunni Muslim, Perez-Shakdam found herself drawn to Islam’s second main branch, Shi’ism. Shi’ite Muslims revere a separate set of Islamic leaders — the prophet Mohammad’s son-in-law Ali and his descendants.
A strong theme of sacrifice resonates through the Shi’ite religious tradition, often centering around the figure of Hussein, Mohammad’s grandson. Hussein was killed alongside his brother Hassan by Sunni leaders at the battle of Karbala during the factional struggle in early Islam.
Every year, millions of Shi’a gather in Iraq to observe the Arba’een march. The worshipers walk to Karbala to mark the anniversary of Hussein’s martyrdom, sometimes traveling long distances on foot.
“It’s 20 million people walking, not because they have to, not out of religious duty, but out of love for this one imam that means everything to them,” Perez-Shakdam says, her voice filled with religious devotion, in a video filmed during one of the pilgrimages.
https://twitter.com/javeedalikmr/status/1497261765742120962
It was after her divorce, in 2014, that Perez-Shakdam got involved in Iranian media. “It snowballed really quickly. Iran is so starved for Western support that they’ll talk to anyone with a Western passport,” she said.
Even at the time, she said, she was aware that Iranian media was attempting to draft her into a “propaganda machine.”
“To a certain extent, I played along,” she said, although she said she was never compensated for her articles.
Hearing Khamenei in Tehran
In 2017, Perez-Shakdam took a trip to a mass conference on the Palestinian cause in Tehran — one of about five trips she made to Iran. She moved around apparently unhindered: by that point, she’d already been vetted by the regime, she said.
Khamenei opened the conference with a fiery diatribe condemning Israel as a “cancerous tumor.” The leader — the most powerful man in Iran — vowed that Tehran would never stop supporting Hamas and Hezbollah, to whom he attributed the successes of the Palestinian national movement.
Hamas terror chief Khaled Mashal was in attendance, as was top Iranian general Qasim Soleimani, who would be assassinated in 2020 by the United States in a drone strike in Iraq. For Perez-Shakdam, the atmosphere dovetailed nicely with her own views at the time.
“With Hamas stands the idea of resistance against oppression, and I think it’s very important today. I think that Israel fails to understand that – it has nothing to do with politics per se, but more to do with an idea or philosophy that people were born free,” Perez-Shakdam said in one of many interviews she did with Press TV, the Iranian state mouthpiece, in 2018.
“In the case of the Palestinians, I think that the only way forward is through armed resistance,” she added.
But Perez-Shakdam said she was always sensitive to what Iranians and others around the Middle East said about Jews. In her telling, Iran is a conflicted society, torn between liberal impulses and its conservative leadership. But antisemitism is widespread and can be found at all levels of society.
“It’s insane what people say about Israel and the Jews in Iran. I’ve been told by educated people that the Jews have horns and a tail. It’s quite scary how far the hatred runs,” she said.
A kind of mea culpa
Perez-Shakdam credits her now 17-year-old daughter with opening her mind about Israel. Her daughter, who was first exposed to pro-Israel videos on YouTube, began developing Zionist views as a teenager. When she challenged Perez-Shakdam, it sparked an intellectual journey that brought her to her current worldview.
“She kept telling me ‘I don’t get it. You’re always telling me to look at both sides of the story. Why do you keep attacking Israel, when whenever people attack Jews in general, you get angry?’” Perez-Shakdam said.
“There was this guilt I was carrying, this shame about my background, and I did a lot of reading. And I realized that I was just wrong, 100 percent wrong,” she said.
According to Perez-Shakdam, her daughter hopes to serve in the Israeli army.
“It’s been important for me to do a kind of mea culpa, to own what I’ve done and own the mistakes I’ve made. But also, I have something important to say, as someone with my journey: I’ve seen the other side of things, and I have a fuller perspective,” she said.
“My intent isn’t to defame anyone, or to become the poster girl for Israel,” said Perez-Shakdam. “But it’s important to break people out of their narrative, which is a narrative of hate.”
https://www.timesofisrael.com/im-no-mossad-spy-says-jewish-journalist-who-interviewed-raisi-worked-for-iran-tv/
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GAMMA RAYS AND LIGHTNING
A flash of lightning. A roll of thunder. These are normal stormy sights and sounds. But sometimes, up above the clouds, stranger things happen. Our Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has spotted bursts of gamma rays – some of the highest-energy forms of light in the universe – coming from thunderstorms. Gamma rays are usually found coming from objects with crazy extreme physics like neutron stars and black holes. So why is Fermi seeing them come from thunderstorms?
About a thousand times a day, thunderstorms fire off fleeting bursts of some of the highest-energy light naturally found on Earth. These events, called terrestrial gamma-ray flashes, last less than a millisecond and produce gamma rays with tens of millions of times the energy of visible light.
The top of the storm becomes positively charged, and the bottom becomes negatively charged, like two ends of a battery. Eventually the opposite charges build enough to overcome the insulating properties of the surrounding air – and zap! You get lightning.
Scientists suspect that lightning reconfigures the cloud’s electrical field. In some cases, this allows electrons to rush toward the upper part of the storm at nearly the speed of light. That makes thunderstorms the most powerful natural particle accelerators on Earth!
When those electrons run into air molecules, they emit a terrestrial gamma-ray flash, which means that thunderstorms are creating some of the highest energy forms of light in the universe. But that’s not all – thunderstorms can also produce antimatter! Yep, you read that correctly! Sometimes, a gamma ray will run into an atom and produce an electron and a positron, which is an electron’s antimatter opposite.
There are an estimated 1,800 thunderstorms occurring on Earth at any given moment. Over its first 10 years in space, Fermi spotted about 5,000 terrestrial gamma-ray flashes. But scientists estimate that there are 1,000 of these flashes every day – we’re just seeing the ones that are within 500 miles of Fermi’s regular orbits, which don’t cover the U.S. or Europe.
Fermi has also spotted terrestrial gamma-ray flashes coming from individual tropical weather systems. In 2014 Tropical Storm Julio produced four flashes in just 100 minutes!
https://science.nasa.gov/universe/whats-made-in-a-thunderstorm-and-faster-than-lightning-gamma-rays/
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ANCIENT ROMANS IDEAS ABOUT HEALTH AND DIET
From peaches and lentils to your favorite herb, ancient Mediterranean doctors had strong opinions about what you should (and shouldn’t) eat – and their verdict on some of today’s staple foods might surprise you
Today, there are few foods as uncontroversial, health-wise, as fresh fruit, pulses and herbs. A ripe peach, a handful of lentils and a fragrant basil garnish could form the basis of a very healthy Mediterranean-inspired diet.
So why did some of the most influential physicians in history warn against what we now consider basic nutrition?
According to Dr Claire Bubb, a historian of ancient science and literature, these views existed within the context of a broader dietary philosophy.
“They don’t think in terms of vitamins,” she explains. Instead, she says, “they’re trying to pay attention to what food seems to do to the body.” The conclusions might sound strange now, but they were based on close empirical observation of food, digestion and health – at least, the version of health that was understood by ancient science.
Why the ancients hated fruit
“Fruit is pretty universally viewed with skepticism,” says Bubb.
She explains that Galen of Pergamon, one of the most celebrated physicians of the Roman empire, eyed fruit (and especially peaches) with a wary eye, because they “decompose like crazy.”
From the modern perspective that might sound obvious (especially if you’ve ever left fruit in a lunchbox too long) and mostly an inconvenience rather than a cause for avoidance. But for ancient doctors, that spoilage could be much more than an unpleasant but inconsequential disappointment. It was seen as actively harmful.
“[Galen] says, ‘Look, it’s also decomposing in your stomach and it’s causing everything else in there to decompose,’” Bubb explains. “So, you need to be thoughtful about eating it.”
But as well as stemming from observation about how quickly fruit could spoil – and drawing conclusions about what impact this could have on the inside of the body – Galen’s take was also based on personal experience.
During Galen’s youth, his consumption of fruit was strictly regulated. “His father dictated his diet and said, well, you can only have [fruit] one time a year,” says Bubb. But like many teenagers, Galen rebelled.
“He and his friends just went crazy. He had these bad influence, fruit-loving friends… and then he develops some sort of chronic infection, which he links to the fruit eating, that takes forever to heal from.” Years later, Galen would swear off fruit entirely – and insisted that his father had been right.
Therefore, due to its quick decomposition, fruit was viewed by ancient dieticians as a risky indulgence. Especially in a world without refrigeration or sanitized water, where foodborne illness was common and hygiene standards varied greatly, the softer and wetter varieties of fruit were seen as a potentially serious threat to health.
This 1st-century AD fresco from Pompeii captures a lively Roman banquet, offering a glimpse into the social life of the city before its destruction in AD 79.
The cursed herb: why basil was best avoided
“Basil is poisonous,” says Bubb, summarizing ancient medical opinions. “If you leave it out in the sun, you let it rot, [and] either worms or scorpions, depending on who you talk to, will spontaneously generate from the basil.”
This idea – known as spontaneous generation – was widespread in antiquity. The belief was that decaying matter could spontaneously produce insects or vermin.
Why did such an extreme theory take hold? “Rotten basil is foul,” Bubb adds. “It goes from delicious to really gross pretty quickly.”
To the ancient observer, the smell of decomposing basil, the sudden appearance of larvae or insects, and the speed with which it spoiled all pointed to something deeply unnatural. “They see and smell the decomposition of it and think, ‘Is it decomposing in my body?’” Bubb explains. “Is that what’s happening when I eat it? We should avoid this at all costs.”
The belief wasn’t short-lived, either. It persisted in various medical and herbal texts for centuries, influencing both diet and pharmacology well into the medieval period.
Lentils and flatulence
Unlike basil, lentils were considered acceptable to Greco-Roman medical thinkers – but only in moderation. Too many, and the body would suffer serious imbalances.
In ancient Greek medicine, particularly after the writings of Hippocrates (c460–c370 BCE) and his followers, food was understood through the lens of humoral theory – the idea that health depended on the balance of four bodily fluids: blood, phlegm, black bile and yellow bile. Foods were classified as hot or cold, dry or wet, and their properties could tip that balance in dangerous ways.
Taking lentils as an example, the ancients believed that “lentils [could be] bad for you,” Bubb says. “They’re fine in moderation, but if you go all in on the lentil diet, like [some] philosophers are telling you to, you’re going to get all these things building up, and you’re not going get the right quality of nutrition and flesh in your body.”
The digestive responses to lentils – and other pulses – were also considered valuable diagnostic tools.
“If most foods don't give you gas, but then you eat a bunch of beans and suddenly the flatulence is out of control, that's going to suggest to you that beans are doing something in your digestive tract that other foods aren't. And maybe there's a problem,” says Bubb.
So, the next time you enjoy a light lentil soup, or a basil pesto pasta, bear in mind that the Greco-Romans might have considered it a medical disaster waiting to happen.
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THE GREAT DYING AND THE LETHAL HEAT THAT FOLLOWED
The Great Dying, also known as the Permian-Triassic extinction event, was a period of catastrophic mass extinction that wiped out roughly 90% of life on Earth around 252 million years ago. Following this event, the planet experienced a prolonged period of extreme heat, lasting for approximately 5 million years. New fossil evidence suggests that the collapse of tropical forests played a crucial role in sustaining this prolonged hothouse climate.
The Great Dying
This event, the most severe mass extinction in Earth's history, eliminated a vast majority of marine and terrestrial species. It marked the end of the Permian geological period.
Volcanic Activity:
Volcanic activity, specifically massive eruptions in Siberia, is widely considered a primary driver of the Great Dying, the largest mass extinction event in Earth's history. These eruptions, which occurred during the Permian-Triassic boundary, released vast quantities of greenhouse gases, primarily carbon dioxide, into the atmosphere. This led to significant climate change, including global warming and ocean acidification, ultimately causing widespread ecological collapse and the extinction of a majority of species.
The Siberian Traps, a large igneous province, experienced extensive volcanism at the end of the Permian period. These eruptions were not a single event but rather a series of eruptions that lasted for roughly 2 million years.
Greenhouse Gas Release:
The volcanic activity released massive amounts of carbon dioxide (CO2) and sulfur dioxide (SO2) into the atmosphere. These gases are greenhouse gases, meaning they trap heat and contribute to global warming.
Climate Change and Ocean Acidification:
The increased atmospheric CO2 led to a rapid increase in global temperatures and caused ocean acidification. The warming oceans experienced a decrease in oxygen levels, leading to the death of marine life.
Impact on Life:
The combination of extreme heat, ocean acidification, and oxygen depletion created a hostile environment for most species, resulting in the extinction of approximately 81% of marine species and 70% of terrestrial vertebrate species.
Not the Only Cause:
While volcanism is considered the primary driver, other factors like an asteroid impact, though likely minor, and changes associated with the formation of a supercontinent, may have also contributed to the severity of the extinction event.
Prolonged Hothouse Conditions:
While the volcanic activity eventually ceased, the planet remained in a state of extreme heat for millions of years. This long-lasting heat puzzled scientists.
Collapse of Tropical Forests:
New research indicates that the destruction of tropical forests, which act as vital carbon sinks, contributed significantly to the prolonged hothouse conditions. When these forests collapsed, they released stored carbon dioxide, further exacerbating the warming and creating a positive feedback loop.
Climate Tipping Point:
This event highlights a critical climate tipping point, demonstrating how the collapse of a major ecosystem can lead to long-term, catastrophic changes in the Earth's climate.
Warning for the Future:
The Great Dying serves as a stark warning about the potential consequences of human-caused climate change, particularly the risk of triggering similar tipping points by releasing greenhouse gases and damaging vital ecosystems.
Timing: Approximately 252 million years ago, marking the end of the Permian period.
The 5 Million Years of Lethal Heat:
Post-extinction Period: Following the Great Dying, the Earth experienced a prolonged period of extremely high temperatures, lasting for about 5 million years.
Reason: Recent fossil discoveries suggest this prolonged heat was due, in part, to the collapse of tropical forests during the mass extinction. Forests play a vital role in regulating the carbon cycle by absorbing and storing CO2. Their absence meant high levels of carbon remained in the atmosphere, preventing the planet from cooling down.
Consequences of the Event:
Ecosystems: Both marine and terrestrial ecosystems were severely impacted, with numerous long-lived lineages disappearing.
Slow Recovery: Recovery from the Great Dying was a prolonged process, taking millions of years for biodiversity to rebound. This was likely exacerbated by factors like persistent volcanism, recurring anoxia events, and the loss of ecological niches.
New Life Forms: Despite the widespread devastation, some species survived and new ones emerged, forming the basis of today's biodiversity. The end-Permian extinction event is seen as a turning point, with the rise of modern marine fauna and the eventual emergence of dinosaurs and mammals in the Triassic period.
The Great Dying and the subsequent period of intense heat serve as a stark reminder of the devastating consequences of unchecked climate change and ecological collapse.
~ generated by AI (Google)
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THE BODY PARTS EVOLUTION CAN’T EXPLAIN
Human testicles are much smaller, in proportion, to some of our primate cousins. Evolution can tell us why. But the size of other body parts is a little bit more of a mystery.
The human body is a machine whose many parts – from the microscopic details of our cells to our limbs, eyes, liver and brain – have been assembled in fits and starts over the four billion years of our history.
But scientists are still puzzling over why we evolved into this particular form. Why do humans uniquely have a chin, for example? And why, relative to body weight, is a human testicle triple the size of a gorilla's but a fifth that of a chimpanzee? As I show in my new book, The Tree of Life, we are still searching for the answers to many of these "why" questions. But we are starting to find answers to some of them.
The story of evolution tells us how, starting from simple beginnings, each species was built – when each of the components that make a living creature was added to its blueprint. If we climb the evolutionary tree of life, we can follow a twisting path that visits the increasingly specialized branches that a species belongs to.
We humans, for example, were animals before we became vertebrates; mammals before evolving into primates and so on.
The groups of species we share each of these branches with reveal the order our body parts appeared in. A body and a gut (inventions of the animal branch) must have come before backbone and limbs (vertebrate branch); milk and hair (mammals) came before fingernails (primates).
There is a way we can study the separate problem of just why we evolved each of these body parts, but it only works if the feature in question has evolved more than once on separate branches of the tree of life. This repeated evolution is called convergence. It can be a source of frustration for biologists because it confuses us as to how species are related.
Bonobos are regarded as our closest primate relatives, along with chimpanzeesSwallows and swifts, for example, were once classified as sister species. We now know from both DNA and comparisons of their skeletons that swallows are really closer relatives of owls than swifts.
Size matters when it comes to evolution
But convergent evolution becomes something useful when we think of it as a kind of natural experiment. The size of primate testicles gives us a classic example. Abyssinian black and white colobus monkey and bonnet macaque adult males are roughly the same size. But, like chimps, humans and gorillas, these similar monkeys have vastly dissimilar testicles. Colobus testicles weigh just 3g (0.1oz). The testicles of the macaques, in contrast, are a whopping 48g (1.7oz).
You could come up with several believable explanations for their different testicle sizes. Large testicles might be the equivalent of the peacock's tail, not useful per se but attractive to females. But perhaps the most plausible explanation relates to the way they mate.
A male colobus monkey competes ferociously for access to a harem of females who will mate exclusively with him. Macaques, on the other hand live in peaceful mixed troops of about 30 monkeys and have a different approach to love where everyone mates with everyone else: males with multiple females (polygamy) and females with multiple males (polyandry).
The colobus with his harem can get away with producing a bare minimum of sperm – if a droplet is enough to produce a baby, then why make more? For a male macaque the competition to reproduce happens in a battle between his sperm and the sperm of other males who mated before or after. A male macaque with large testicles should make more sperm, giving him a higher chance of passing on his genes.
It's a sensible explanation for their different testicle sizes, but is it true? This is where convergent evolution helps.
If we look across the whole of the mammal branch of the tree of life we find there are many groups of mammals that have evolved testicles of all different sizes. In almost all these separate cases, larger testicles are consistently found in promiscuous species and smaller in monogamous.
A small-testicled, silverback male gorilla has sole access to a harem. Big-testicled chimps and bonobos are indeed highly promiscuous. Dolphins, meanwhile, may have the biggest mammalian testicles of all, making up as much as 4% of their body weight (equivalent to human testicles weighing roughly 3kg (9.9lb)). Although wild dolphins' sex lives are naturally hard to study, spinner dolphins at least fit our expectations, engaging in mass mating events called wuzzles.
It was thanks to the multiple observations provided by convergent evolution that we were able to discover this consistent correlation between testicle size and sex life right across the mammals. And as for humans, we have testicle size somewhere in the middle – you can make of this what you want!
But what of the human chin?
The human chin has been fertile ground for arguments between scientists over its purpose. As with testicles, there are half a dozen plausible ideas to explain the evolution of the human chin. It could have evolved to strengthen the jaw of a battling caveman. Maybe the chin evolved to exaggerate the magnificence of a manly beard. It might even be a by-product of the invention of cooking and the softer food it produced – a functionless facial promontory left behind by the receding tide of a weakening jaw.
Intriguingly, however, a chin can be found in no other mammal, not even our closest cousins the Neanderthals. Thanks to the uniqueness of the Homo sapiens chin, while we have a rich set of possible explanations for its evolutionary purpose, in the absence of convergent evolution, we have no sensible way of testing them.
Some parts of human nature may be destined to remain a mystery.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20250703-the-body-parts-evolution-still-cant-explain
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WHY SOME CATS ARE LOUD AND OTHERS QUIET
Some cats are quiet, while others meow loudly for attention. What makes the difference may be buried deep in their genes.
If you've ever shared your home with more than one cat, you'll know how different their personalities can be. One might chirp for food, purr loudly on your lap and greet visitors at the door. Another might prefer quiet observation from a distance.
So why do some cats become chatty companions while others seem more reserved?
A recent study led by wildlife researcher Yume Okamoto and his colleagues at Kyoto University in Japan suggests that part of the answer may lie in cat genes.
Cat owners from across Japan were asked to complete a questionnaire about their cat (the Feline Behavioral Assessment and Research Questionnaire), and to take a cheek swab from their pet to provide a DNA sample. The survey included questions about a range of cat behavior, including purring and vocalizations directed at people.
The researchers in the recent Japanese study focused on the cats' androgen receptor (AR) gene, located on the X chromosome. This gene helps regulate the body's response to hormones such as testosterone and contains a section where a DNA sequence is repeated. AR is an essential part of vertebrate biology.
The most ancient form of AR appeared in the common ancestor of all jawed vertebrates, over 450 million years ago. AR controls the formation of male reproductive organs, secondary sexual characteristics and reproductive behavior. The number of these sequences alters how responsive the gene is. Shorter repeats make the receptor more sensitive to androgens. In other species, including humans and dogs, shorter repeats in the AR gene have been linked with increased aggression and extraversion.
Among 280 spayed or neutered cats, those with the short AR gene variant purred more often. Males with the variant also scored higher for directed vocalizations such as meowing to be fed or let out. Females with the same genotype, however, were more aggressive towards strangers. Meanwhile, cats with the longer, less active version of the gene tended to be quieter. This variant was more common in pedigree breeds, which are typically bred for docility.
Close proximity to humans hasn't led to lower aggression in some animals, such as seagulls.
Domestication is generally thought to have increased vocal behavior in cats, so it may seem odd that the version of the gene linked to increased communication and assertiveness is the one also found in wild species such as lynx.
But this study doesn't tell a straightforward narrative about how cat domestication selects for sociable traits. Instead, it points to a more complex picture. One where certain ancestral traits like aggression may still be useful, especially in high-stress or resource-scarce domestic environments.
Some animals spend a lot of time around humans because they are attracted by our resources rather than bred as companion animals or farmed. Urban gulls offer an interesting example of how close proximity to humans doesn't always make animals more docile. In cities, herring and lesser black-backed gulls (both often referred to as seagulls) have become bolder and more aggressive.
Researchers at Liverpool John Moores University found that urban gulls were less fearful of humans and more prone to squabbling compared to their rural counterparts. In urban areas, where food is highly contested, being assertive gets results. Gulls are often vilified in the UK press during breeding season as urban villains, swooping down to snatch your lunch or chase pedestrians. This suggests that life alongside humans can sometimes favor more confrontational behavior.
The parallels with cats raise broader questions about how environment and genes shape behavior. Okamoto and colleagues' findings may reflect a trade-off. Traits linked to the short AR variant, such as greater vocalization or assertiveness, might offer advantages in gaining human attention in uncertain or competitive settings. But these same traits may also manifest as aggression, suggesting that domestication can produce a mix of desirable and challenging traits.
It's worth bearing in mind that this kind of variation between individuals is fundamental to the evolution of species. Without variation in behavior, species would struggle to adapt to changing environments. For cats, this means there may be no single ideal temperament, but rather a range of traits that prove useful under different domestic conditions.
From cats to gulls, life alongside humans doesn't always produce gentler animals. Sometimes, a little pushiness pays off.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20250626-how-loud-a-cat-meows-might-be-down-to-their-genes
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THE FAILED PROPHECY OF IMMINENT SECOND COMING
Why do many christians ignore what Jesus said about his imminent return?
I chalk it up to intensive brainwashing.
Many christians are sheep who believe what they are told to believe, even when what they are taught blatantly contradicts what Jesus said himself, according to the bible.
Jesus clearly promised his disciples that he would return to earth, descending from the clouds with a host of angels, while the disciples standing before him were still living.
When this didn’t happen and christians started dying, the evangelist Paul had to “talk down” his followers, as he did in 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18.
Here are the bible verses in question…
This was Jesus’s prophecy: “Verily I say unto you, This generation shall not pass, till all these things be fulfilled.” (Matthew 24:34)
Here is that verse in context, explaining what was to be fulfilled while the generation listening to Jesus was still alive.
29 Immediately after the tribulation of those days shall the sun be darkened, and the moon shall not give her light, and the stars shall fall from heaven, and the powers of the heavens shall be shaken. 30 And then shall appear the sign of the Son of man in heaven: and then shall all the tribes of the earth mourn, and they shall see the Son of man coming in the clouds of heaven with power and great glory. 31 And he shall send his angels with a great sound of a trumpet, and they shall gather together his elect from the four winds, from one end of heaven to the other. 32 Now learn a parable of the fig tree; When his branch is yet tender, and putteth forth leaves, ye know that summer is nigh: 33 So likewise ye, when ye shall see all these things, know that it is near, even at the doors. 34 Verily I say unto you, This generation shall not pass, till all these things be fulfilled. (Matthew 24:29-34)
Elsewhere Matthew makes it clear that “this generation” means the disciples standing before Jesus:
“27 For the Son of man shall come in the glory of his Father with his angels; and then he shall reward every man according to his works. 28 Verily I say unto you, There be some standing here, which shall not taste of death, till they see the Son of man coming in his kingdom.” (Matthew 16:27-28)
Luke agrees:
“But I tell you of a truth, there be some standing here, which shall not taste of death, till they see the kingdom of God.” (Luke 9:27)
“Verily I say unto you, This generation shall not pass away, till all be fulfilled.” (Luke 21:32)
Mark agrees:
“Verily I say unto you, That there be some of them that stand here, which shall not taste of death, till they have seen the kingdom of God come with power.” (Mark 9:1)
“Verily I say unto you, that this generation shall not pass, till all these things be done.” (Mark 13:30)
“And ye [the people Jesus was talking to] shall see the Son of man sitting on the right hand of power, and coming in the clouds of heaven.” (Mark 14:62)
Revelation’s author was a false prophet because he said "the time is at hand" and that the horrors he predicted would "shortly come to pass" and that “every eye” of all people alive at the time — including those who pierced and murdered Jesus — would see him descend from the clouds. (Revelation 1:1-7, 22:10)
Nothing could be clearer, and it’s obvious the earliest Christians were expecting Jesus to return during their lifetimes, which is why Paul had to talk them down. And Paul echoed the claim that some Christians living at that time (“we”) would still be alive when Jesus returned. (1 Thessalonians 4:15, 1 Corinthians 15:51-52)
“Listen, I tell you a mystery: We will not all sleep [die] but we will all be changed.” (1 Corinthians 15:51-52)
To recap, the things to be fulfilled while the people of that generation were still alive included:
The sun darkened.
The moon no longer shining.
Stars falling from the sky and the heavens shaken.
Jesus appearing in the clouds with power and great glory, to be seen by all the people of the earth.
The angels appearing with the great sound of a trumpet to gather the elect from every part of the earth.
Michelangelo: Angels blowing their trumpets to wake up the dead
Quite obviously, none of these things happened during the first century AD, when that generation was alive. ~ Michael Burch, Quora
Oriana;
The clumsy efforts to smooth over the lack of Second Coming were an important part of my own secularization. I also discovered that it still shocks even former believers when I plainly state that Jesus is never coming back. Never, never, never.
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THE NON-FAT AND LOW-FAT VERSUS WHOLE DAIRY PRODUCTS
As for the difference between full-fat dairy and nonfat, well, it’s all in the name, and it has to do with how dairy products are processed—mainly via a process called skimming where some (or all) of the fat is removed, depending on the final fat percentage. “The only major difference between full-fat dairy and low-fat or nonfat dairy is the fat content, and therefore the total amount of calories per serving,” Jessica Garay, PhD, RDN, an assistant professor in the department of nutrition and food studies at Syracuse University, tells SELF.
Compared to nonfat dairy, the full-fat dairy can also help your body better absorb fat-soluble vitamins like A, D, E, and K, Lauren Manaker, RD, a registered dietitian based in Charleston, South Carolina, tells SELF. Indeed, a 2016 study of children in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition found that the kids who drank full-fat milk had higher blood levels of vitamin D, Dr. Garay says.
Fat content also affects taste and texture, which makes for another difference between the two types of dairy. Higher fat allows dairy products to taste richer and gives a creamier consistency. Prime example? Consider digging into a gelato versus a fat-free frozen yogurt. Very different! “Fat in foods provides us with a feeling of satiety or satisfaction,” Dr. Garay says. So if you feel a hankering for another scoop (or even a different kind of treat) after polishing off a cone of the fat-free stuff, that lack of fat might be why.
So why has fat-free dairy been touted as healthier?
Speaking of fat: One of the main reasons why health pros have historically warned against eating full-fat or whole milk dairy products is due to the saturated fat content found in full-fat dairy products. The American Heart Association recommends limiting saturated fat to less than 6% of your total calories (about 13 grams or less per day, on average). For context, a cup of whole milk contains about five grams of saturated fat, making it very easy to nudge up against your daily max recommended intake with just a glass of it with breakfast and a bowl of cereal for a nighttime snack.
“Traditionally, low-fat or fat-free dairy has been recommended to limit saturated fat and reduce cardiovascular risk,” Michelle Routhenstein, RD, a cardiology dietitian and heart health expert at Entirely Nourished, tells SELF. That’s because too much of it can raise levels of “bad” cholesterol in your blood, which could increase your chances of heart attack or stroke.
But as new research has shown, it’s not quite so black and white, at least in the case of milk products. It’s possible that the saturated fats in dairy simply affect the body differently, which may help explain some of its health benefits. Case in point: After crunching the numbers, a 2025 analysis published in Nature Communications concluded that total dairy consumption was linked to a 4% reduction in risk of cardiovascular disease and a 6% decrease in stroke risk.
As for the fat content? A 2020 review of other previously published studies, reviews, and meta-analyses concluded that full-fat dairy has no “harmful effects” on cardiometabolic disease outcomes—and may even be protective against cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes. It’s important to note, though, this study did disclose funding from dairy sources. However, it echoes findings from other research, including a 2018 review published in the journal Foods, which had no conflicts of interest disclosed.
The authors point to links between full-fat dairy and better heart-health scores, as well as a lack of evidence that full-fat dairy causes type 2 diabetes or insulin resistance. “Considering current scientific evidence, after years of controversy, the negative image of milk fat is weakening,” the authors write. “Therefore, consumers can continue to moderately consume full-fat dairy products as part of a healthy and balanced lifestyle.”
“There are different types of saturated fats in different food sources, and those found in dairy are different from those found in processed meats or tropical oils like coconut oil,” Lauren Manaker, RD, tells SELF. “Research suggests that the saturated fats in dairy might have a more neutral or even potentially beneficial effect on cardiovascular health when consumed as part of a balanced diet.”
And dairy products that are fermented—a process by which milk is heated and combined with certain bacteria that break down the milk and convert it into a new product, like in yogurt and most cheeses—might be extra beneficial.
“Fermented dairy seems to have a unique effect, possibly due to beneficial compounds and its influence on the gut microbiome, which might reduce inflammation and cardiovascular risk,” Routhenstein says. “In some cases, full-fat dairy appears to be metabolically neutral or even beneficial, possibly due to the presence of beneficial fatty acids and bioactive compounds.”
So should you stick with nonfat dairy or try the full-fat kind?
At the end of the day, deciding if and how full-fat dairy fits into your diet is an individualized choice, and it depends on a bunch of things, including your overall health (and any health conditions you may have) and your overall diet. For example, folks with cardiovascular risk factors or existing heart disease (or who are worried about saturated fat for other reasons) might want to meet with a registered dietitian to discuss which type of dairy best fits into their daily diet, Dr. Garay says.
If you’re generally healthy, though, it might be more beneficial to take a look at the bigger picture—how dairy fits into your overall diet and lifestyle—instead of focusing solely on the amount of fat your dairy is providing.
If you’re generally healthy, though, it might be more beneficial to take a look at the bigger picture—how dairy fits into your overall diet and lifestyle—instead of focusing solely on the amount of fat your dairy is providing.
“It’s not just about fat content, it’s about context,” Routhenstein says. “If full-fat dairy helps someone feel more satisfied and nourished while supporting intake of essential vitamins and taking into account total saturated fat intake, it may potentially be a better fit for their overall health.”
What’s more, if you find yourself skimping on dairy because you’re not loving the consistency or taste of the low-fat versions, you could be missing out on an easy vehicle to get in those nutrients. So in that case, swapping to a whole-milk version might be a solid for you.
“Because the fat in full-fat dairy may make these products more appealing based on mouthfeel and overall feelings of satiety, I would rather someone choose a full-fat yogurt over low-fat yogurt if it means they will more consistently eat it and therefore have a better chance of meeting their daily calcium, vitamin D, and protein needs,” Dr. Garay says.
And finally! If you are lactose intolerant, you don’t necessarily need to skimp on milk, either—whether full-fat or nonfat—as long as you choose a lactose-free kind. According to Manaker, these options still contain the same essential nutrients, including calcium, protein, and vitamin D, as traditional types of milk, just without the lactose. (And if you want to bump the protein even more while avoiding the lactose, might we suggest ultra-filtered milk?) We’ll drink to that!
https://www.self.com/story/low-fat-vs-full-fat-dairy?utm_source=firefox-newtab-en-us
Oriana:
The milk that seems most compatible with my body is goat milk. It’s easiest to digest and less likely to cause an allergic response. Goat milk is delicious added to coffee, intensifying its anti-inflammatory benefits.
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EXERCISE AND CANCER RISK
We all know that regular exercise has many benefits, including reducing the risk of chronic diseases such as diabetes and heart disease.
Exercise also improves outcomes in patients with cancer, according to a new study published in the New England Journal of Medicine. Patients with cancer who participated in a structured exercise program in a randomized-controlled trial lived longer without cancer recurrence and had a lower risk of dying within the trial period compared with people in the control group.
I was curious why and how exercise reduces cancer risk, and what everyone should know about incorporating exercise programs in their lives. To find out, I spoke with CNN wellness expert Dr. Leana Wen. Wen is an emergency physician and adjunct associate professor at George Washington University. She previously served as Baltimore’s health commissioner.
CNN: Why are the results of this study so important?
Dr. Leana Wen: Previous research suggested that exercise could be beneficial for cancer survivors, but this is the first randomized trial that demonstrates exercise after cancer treatment can reduce recurrence and improve survival.
Researchers recruited nearly 900 patients from 55 cancer centers across six countries who had been treated for either stage III or high-risk stage II colon cancer. Even after cancer treatments such as surgery followed by chemotherapy, colon cancer comes back in an estimated 30% of patients, according to the American Society of Clinical Oncology. Many patients with recurrence of their colon cancer end up dying from their disease.
The patients in the new study were randomized to two groups. The control group received standard health education materials promoting healthy eating and physical activity. This is the current standard-of-care that is provided to patients in remission from their cancer.
The other group participated in a structured exercise program that involved working with a health coach for physical activity guidance and supervised exercise sessions. During the initial six months, patients had twice-a-month coaching sessions. After that period, they met with coaches once a month, with extra sessions available if needed.
Participants randomized to the structured exercise group had significantly higher improvements in physical function as measured by distance they could walk in six minutes and predicted VO2 max (your oxygen uptake), both indicators of cardiovascular fitness.
The two groups were followed for an average of about eight years. During this period, 131 patients in the control group had recurrence of their cancer, compared with 93 in the structured exercise group. In the control group, 66 people died, compared with 41 in the structured exercise group.
People in the structured exercise group had a 28% lower risk of developing recurrent or new cancers compared with those who followed standard-of-care protocols. Members of the exercise group also had a 37% lower risk of death in the trial period.
This study is important because its rigorous methodology confirms what previous research had suggested: Exercise extends disease-free survival for patients with cancer and should be incorporated as part of holistic treatment for patients to reduce their risk of recurrent and new cancers.
CNN: How might results of the study change treatment for patients with cancer?
Wen: Imagine if there were a clinical trial for a new drug that found it lowered the risk of developing recurrent or new cancers by 28% and lowered the risk of death in the trial period by 37%. Patients and doctors would hail this as a tremendous development and would be eager to try this new therapeutic.
That’s the magnitude of the findings in this study. I believe they have the potential to substantially change cancer treatment protocols. Currently, after patients receive treatments such as surgery, chemotherapy and radiation, they are given advice to exercise, but many probably do not engage the services of a health coach or trainer. Their oncologists and primary care doctors may not be asking about their physical activity regimen during follow-up care.
I hope this will change in view of these results. Patients can be counseled to have an “exercise prescription,” and health care providers can follow up to track their exercise activity. Perhaps insurance companies could even consider reimbursement for a health coach for patients with cancer; this could be seen as an investment to reduce the need for costlier chemotherapy and other treatments down the line.
CNN: Why and how does exercise reduce cancer risk?
Wen: Population studies have long shown that regular physical activity is associated with lower risks of developing certain cancers. There are several theories as to why this is the case. One is that physical activity helps people stay at a healthy weight, which is notable because obesity is a risk factor for developing some cancers. In addition, exercise is thought to help regulate some hormones that are implicated in cancer development and to reduce inflammatory response that could also be involved in cancer.
CNN: How much exercise do people need?
Wen: The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends that adults participate in at least 150 minutes of moderate to high-intensity exercise per week. For someone who is exercising five times a week, that’s about 30 minutes at a time of exercises such as a brisk walk or jog, riding a bike or swimming.
The benefits of these exercise minutes are cumulative, meaning that individuals don’t need to do them all at once to have an effect. People who are unable to commit a period of time to exercise could consider how they could incorporate physical activity into their daily routines. Could they take the stairs instead of the elevator at work? If they do this five times a day, that could be as many as 10 minutes of exercise. Could they take a 10-minute phone meeting while walking in their neighborhood instead of sitting at a desk? Could they park a bit farther away to get in a few more minutes of physical activity? Small changes add up.
CNN: What other advice do you have for people who want to begin exercise programs?
Wen: Many studies show that while it’s ideal to get the recommended 150 minutes a week of exercise, there is a significant benefit from even a small amount of physical activity. The best advice I can offer is to not let the perfect be the enemy of the good — start with what you can.
For instance, consider the idea of “exercise snacks,” or bursts of activity that could be as short in duration as 15 or 30 seconds. These are as simple as doing a few squats or performing household chores. Getting up from your chair and just moving around helps, which is especially important for desk-bound workers to counter the negative health impacts of sitting.
https://www.cnn.com/2025/07/03/health/exercise-cancer-reduction-wellness
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ending on beauty:
HABITATION
Marriage is not
a house or even a tent
it is before that, and colder:
the edge of the forest, the edge
of the desert
the unpainted stairs
at the back where we squat
outside, eating popcorn
the edge of the receding glacier
where painfully and with wonder
at having survived even
this far
we are learning to make fire
~ Margaret Atwood
