*
IN THE MUSEUM OF THE DREAM
WHERE I AM FALLING FROM THE SKY
And waking, realize I’ve gotten my suffering all wrong.
But startled, feel miraculous, mastering flight somehow.
A superhero three hundred feet up like that martyred son
with wings made of dreadful wax and a scientist’s heart
eating sunbeams and treetops. The clouds, my roller skates
at the edge of the world. I gaze down on peoples’ heads, familiar
crowds from past lives I want desperately to avoid. I worry
in my feathered trusses about what they’ll say if I’m seen
up close and human. Then my dream flings opens and vision
crashes. I land dead center of the group that is crossing a bridge,
but they turn leisurely from my disaster, my silent cry, my
melting failure. They could care less, and their indifference
stings in relief. I am among them and my clothes are off,
my pale legs a delicate ship with do-it-yourself kegs
of anxiety and torture stowed in every visible pore. You may
have heard the splash and been amazed, me and my not-so
innocent behind scratching green water. More likely, though,
you, like the others, had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
~ Michelle Bitting
Oriana:
I especially like “my / melting failure.” (Finally, a poem in which Icarus acknowledges his arrogant idiocy.) And of course I like the way the poem flirts with being a parody of Auden’s famous poem.
But I continue to be surprised that Icarus is so lauded in poetry, presented as a hero rather than a reckless fool, a role model for the young — unlike his wise father, who actually engineered the wings (for the moment, let’s ignore the fact that humans — like all mammals except for bats — don’t have the right anatomy for flight; at best they can paraglide given the right equipment).
To the ancient Greeks, the greatest moral failure was hubris — presuming to have godlike powers, over-reaching. Yet without our tendency to “dream the impossible dream,” we’d still be living in caves.
So, I've managed to say something positive about Icarus after all. He's perhaps the only mythological character that I truly despise. Poems that mindlessly celebrate him disgust me.
I say, let us praise Daedalus, the brilliant engineer.
And let’s re-read Auden, truly one of the greats. Truly great poets don’t just have a good sense of verbal music; above all, they have a mind and thus something memorable to say.
*
CATHERINE DICKENS
And yet, Catherine Hogarth — the wife of Charles Dickens — was pushed aside, blamed, and forgotten.
Dickens, praised as a great writer of the Victorian era, called her “fat, lazy, jealous, and dull.” He even shared their private troubles with the public, writing a letter that made him look like the victim. The world felt sorry for him. Few felt sorry for her.
But who wouldn’t be tired after ten pregnancies? Who wouldn’t gain weight or grieve deeply after burying children? Catherine was not weak — she was strong. She kept going.
Her marriage ended not because of her, but because Dickens fell in love with a much younger actress, Ellen Ternan. Divorce was nearly impossible at the time, so Catherine was made the one to blame. Dickens even built a wall inside their house to keep her apart from him.
One day, Catherine put on her hat, walked out the door, and never returned. She lost her children, her home, and her place in society.
Before she died, her only wish was for the love letters Dickens once wrote her to be published, to show the world she had been loved. That wish was never granted.
But her story still lives.
*
GAVIN NEWSOM WARNS THERE MAY NOT BE A 2028 ELECTION
"I fear that we will not have an election in 2028. I really mean that in the core of my soul − unless we wake up to the code red, what's happening in this country, and we wake up soberly to how serious this moment is," Newsom said during a Sept. 23 appearance on “The Late Show” with Stephen Colbert.
One of the Democratic party’s most forceful critics of President Donald Trump and a prospective candidate for the next White House race, Newsom blasted the Republican administration for taking “authoritarian actions” amid a nationwide immigration enforcement crackdown.
Federal agents have arrested immigrants in courthouses and other places across the United States, including in Florida, stripping them of due process protections, as NBC News reported. Family members and pro-immigration advocates have said that in some of the arrests, immigration judges dropped active cases against migrants, potentially expediting the deportation process.
Newsom recently signed a bill barring local and federal officials from wearing masks during operations.
“I mean if some guy jumped out of an unmarked car and a van with a mask on and tried to grab me. I mean by definition, you’re going to push back,” Newsom said. “And so these are not just authoritarian tendencies. These are authoritarian actions by an authoritarian government.”
White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson in a statement called Newsom's remarks about the 2028 election "absurd" and a "conspiracy theory."
Trump has previously said he "probably" won't run for a third term in 2028. The Constitution restricts presidents to two terms in office. Trump also suggested to reporters that Vance was “most likely” the heir to the MAGA movement, though Vance has said it's "way too early" to consider the 2028 election.
Newsom also criticized Trump for pushing a redistricting effort in Texas aimed at helping Republicans win as many as five more seats in the 2026 midterms. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott signed Texas’ new congressional map into law in August.
In response, Newsom is spearheading his own redistricting effort in California that could give Democrats up to five new seats in the 2026 midterms. Voters are set to weigh in on Newsom's proposal in November through a ballot measure.
Newsom previously said during an Aug. 27 interview at Politico’s “The California Agenda: Sacramento Summit” that he thinks Trump will seek to remain in office beyond his constitutional term limit in 2028, and use federal agents to try to rig future elections in his and his Republican supporters’ favor.
“I don’t think Donald Trump wants another election,” he told a Politico moderator at the time. “I have two dozen Trump 2028 hats his folks keep sending me.” Newsom didn't go into details on how he thinks a 2028 election would be canceled.
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WHY ARE SHOOTERS LEAVING MESSAGES ON SHELL CASINGS?
The use of markings on ammunition is a new trend of shooters trying to ensure their messages are disseminated publicly, experts say
In the past month, the US has had to reckon with three deadly, high-profile shootings, and in each one, investigators have dealt with a seldom-seen piece of evidence in shooting cases, high-profile and otherwise: messages the shooter left on shell casings and firearm magazines.
The suspect in the 27 August shooting at Annunciation Catholic school in Minneapolis allegedly left several firearm magazines with messages like “suck on this” written in white marker. Tyler Robinson, the man who’s accused of killing Charlie Kirk, allegedly engraved his bullet casings with “Hey fascist! Catch!” and “Bella ciao.” Authorities say the man who’s suspected of opening fire at an US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) facility in Texas this week wrote “Anti-Ice” on his bullet casings.
While investigators have long scoured manifestos, online interactions and comments to establish what led someone to shoot others on campuses, nightclubs and in places of worship, messages written on shell casings and firearm magazines are adding to the materials law enforcement, reporters and researchers pour over after an incident.
It’s an ongoing phenomenon that shooters seek to leave their final messages behind to be regurgitated in the national news and, in some cases, send signals to the digital communities they are embedded in, said Jonathan Lewis, a research fellow at the program for extremism at The George Washington University.
“They want people to go on Fox News and say, ‘if you’re reading this you’re gay,’” they want this to be their moment in the sun,” he said. “Not only is it an ‘I did it,’ it’s an, ‘I did it for my guys. I’m wearing my team’s jersey so everyone knows.’
“Bullet inscriptions, manifestos, the use of wearing a skull mask or other iconography: it’s all performative.”
There are some historic analogies. Second world war soldiers wrote messages on artillery shells, and in more recent history, Americans have paid to have bespoke notes written on Ukrainian bombs meant to be fired at Russian forces and in 2024, Nikki Haley wrote the phrase “finish them” on an Israeli artillery shell.
But Lewis cites the 2019 shooting at two New Zealand mosques as a watershed moment for the most recent wave of shooters writing on shell casings or guns that will later be discovered by authorities. “When you trace it back you can look at the Christchurch shooting as a moment where this trend really emerged out of containment, out of these online spaces,” he said.
After 51 people were killed and across two New Zealand mosques in March 2019, investigators found a rifle scrawled with white supremist memes. Three years later a shooter who killed 10 Black people and injured three others in Tops grocery store in Buffalo, New York left behind several rifles with nazi symbols, including some of the same markings used in the New Zealand massacres, and references to racist descriptions of Black people.
“They’re very nonsensical if you’re not a part of that online sphere,” said Kristen Elmore-Garcia, a Buffalo-based attorney, who along with her father, John Elmore, is representing one survivor and the family members of three of the victims in lawsuits against the parents of the convicted shooter, 10 tech companies including Meta; Alphabet, the parent company of Google and YouTube; Discord; 4chan; Reddit; and Amazon. They are also suing firearm and gun-accessory retailers RMA Armament, Mean LLC and Vintage Firearms, where the shooter bought his gun.
Since the lawsuit began, Elmore-Garcia has had to become a kind of expert in the internet spaces that the Buffalo shooter frequented, she said, including places like 4Chan where she’s seen users call her a “she-boon lawyer.” This experience, she said, has shown her how these phrases and ideas transfer from one isolated person to another and eventually come to real-world prominence through violence.
“You see them taking these completely online-native words and expressions and bringing them into the real world with shootings,” she added.
Two years after the Buffalo shooting, shell casings would be back in the headlines following the December killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. The suspected shooter, Luigi Mangione, allegedly wrote the words “deny”, “depose” and “defend” in permanent marker on the shell casings found after the fatal shooting.
And while these incidents – from Christchurch to the most recent shooting at the Texas Ice facility – are united by the use of writing on shell casings and firearms, the specifics of the writings point to distinctions in the motivations of these shooters and alleged gunmen, or to no motivation at all.
In the case of Mangione and Robinson, the inscription points to targeted violence directed at one person or organization, while those found after the Christchurch, Tops and Annunciation shootings are more in-line with neo-Nazi, nihilistic, edgelord internet culture, Lewis adds.
(An edgelord is someone, typically on the Internet, who tries to impress or shock by posting exaggerated opinions such as nihilism or extremist views.)
Despite the variants in purpose, location and target, these shooters and the specific use of markings on their weapons and ammunition point to “a new trend that is a part of a broader package” of shooters trying to ensure their final messages will be thoroughly disseminated through the news and statements by public officials, the experts said.
“It is something else that the perpetrator wants to be seen along with a manifesto or livestream. And the most recent shootings let people know that they can ask the FBI director to tweet a picture of everything they say”, said Lewis.
Experts warn it’s now important for investigators and policy makers to familiarize themselves with the history and internet culture behind these inscriptions. Many Americans continue to have little knowledge of the dark corners of online forums like 4chan and Telegram. For the victims of these shootings that involve inscribed casings, firearms and magazines, the insider meme language can add to the confusion and pain of victims and their families, Elmore-Garcia adds.
“It can be distressing and disturbing. You are looking at the loss of human life and for a victim, it can feel even more nonsensical for them to see these bizarre words and phrases used in the context of a killing of their loved one.”
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/sep/26/shooting-engraved-shell-casing
EASTERN FLANK ALLIES TELL TRUMP: DON'T PULL U.S. TROOPS
Eastern European leaders are urging President Donald Trump to keep U.S. troops on NATO’s eastern flank after a wave of Russian air and drone incursions, warning that Vladimir Putin is "pushing the limits" and will "believe only what he sees" from allied defenses.
In interviews with Fox News Digital, ministers from Estonia, Lithuania and Romania said the alliance must harden its posture — moving from air policing to integrated air and missile defenses, sharpening rules of engagement and sustaining U.S. troop rotations — to prevent Russia from normalizing violations and eroding Article 5 credibility. They paired the military message with calls for tighter sanctions and an end to European energy dependence that funds the Kremlin’s war machine.
Their appeals land as Washington weighs a new national security strategy aimed at prioritizing homeland defense. Before the most recent incursions, U.S. officials had cautioned allies to prepare for a reduction of the American footprint, pressing Europe to take on a greater share of the burden.
"We hope U.S. troops remain in the region. Their presence secures peace and sends a clear signal," Estonia’s foreign minister Margus Tsahkna said. "Putin understands only the language of strength. His goal is the restoration of the Soviet empire.”
This month Russian drones were detected in Polish and Romanian airspace, while Russian missile-carrying MiG-29s crossed briefly into Estonian territory. For the ninth time this year, Russian jets were also spotted inside the Alaskan Air Defense Identification Zone.
Ahead of the U.S. expected global review of force posture, Lithuania’s foreign minister Kęstutis Budrys said deterrence must be visible, not theoretical.
He said he has been making the case to U.S. counterparts: "This presence makes the difference. It forces Russia to change its calculations."
"Russia they have to see. They don't believe in our plans and our protocols. They believe in what they see. So they are crossing our airspace, and they see no reaction," he went on. "With the presence of the troops. When they see that they are stationed there, and they are training. And they're interacting with the local armed forces. For them, this is the message that, okay, we are not getting in there."
"U.S. rotational deployments are one of the most effective deterrents," Budrys said. "Russia doesn’t believe in our plans; it believes what it sees.”
Romanian foreign minister Oana Țoiu echoed the Baltics, adding that security on the Black Sea is tied to U.S. interests.
"Every country sets its priorities, but the security of the eastern flank also serves U.S. security and financial interests — there’s real potential for joint investment, cyber, energy and infrastructure if security is ensured," she said.
RUSSIA SHIFTS FROM TALK TO ACTION, TARGETING NATO HOMELAND AMID FEARS OF GLOBAL WAR
Țoiu noted Romania has authorized its forces to shoot down Russian drones that threaten its territory and economy, and stressed the importance of NATO’s U.S. presence. Bucharest is also positioning itself as a regional energy supplier, expanding nuclear power with U.S. support and tapping natural gas fields in the Black Sea.
Three Russian MIG-29 fighter jets entered Estonian airspace last week
About 80,000 American troops are stationed across Europe, according to U.S. European Command — down from roughly 105,000 just after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Thousands rotate through Lithuania, Estonia hosts a persistent U.S. contingent and roughly 3,000 are based in Romania, according to the State Department.
Despite speculation about U.S. drawdowns, Trump and senior officials have sharpened their rhetoric. On Monday, U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Mike Waltz pledged Washington would defend "every inch" of NATO territory. Trump suggested intruding Russian aircraft should be shot down and insisted Ukraine, with European support, can take back all of its territory.
Rep. Joe Wilson, R-S.C., a senior member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said those statements have resonance.
"The unity of NATO has never been clearer," Wilson told Fox News Digital. "Sweden and Finland are now members. Trump correctly pointed out allies weren’t reaching 2 percent, now he’s moving to 5 percent. That means peace through strength.”
Eastern Sentry
In response to Russia’s provocations, NATO launched Eastern Sentry on September 12, 2025. The multidomain activity, led by Allied Command Operations, brings together fighter jets, naval assets and counter-drone systems from multiple allies to plug gaps and rotate forces across the eastern flank — from the Baltics to the Black Sea. Unlike a static buildup, the mission is designed to adapt quickly to emerging threats and demonstrate flexible deterrence.
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/putin-pushing-limits-eastern-allies-warn-trump-not-pull-us-troops
AN “EMOTIONALLY IMMATURE” PARENT
In an ideal world, adults would be more mature than their kids. They would be better at handling stress, resolving conflicts with others, or talking about their feelings. In the opening chapter of the book Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents, therapist Lindsay Gibson presents an unsettling alternative.
“What if,” she wrote, “some sensitive children come into the world and within a few years are more emotionally mature than their parents, who have been around for decades?”
Tolstoy wrote that every happy family is alike, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. In Gibson’s book, all unhappy families share the same flaw: the emotionally immature parent. They shy away – or sprint – from their feelings. It’s difficult to be vulnerable with them. They rarely introspect about the reasons behind their behaviors, and are dismissive of the emotional needs of others. Gibson proposes that when these interactions happen over the course of a childhood, an adult (or an “adult child”) will be affected in such areas as emotional processing and intimate relationships.
The book was first published in 2015, but it has reached a new, younger audience, recently surpassing a million sales – it’s also a top Amazon bestseller in the category of parent-adult child relationships. In TikToks and Instagram reels, readers pluck out their favorite passages.
The phrase “emotionally immature parent” has gained its own life outside the book, appearing in posts that offer advice, identify signs that you have such a parent and outline the consequences of having one. In one video skit, one person says to another: “I’m so sorry you grew up with parents who didn’t make time for you, so now as an adult you try to prove your worthiness of love by obsessing over work and achievements.”
Like other popular psychology books, Adult Children can be supremely general in places. Cases of parental misbehavior and abuse sit alongside less extreme interactions. For example, John, a 21-year-old, spends a lot of time with his parents, who were “tone-deaf when it came to respecting and fostering his autonomy”, Gibson wrote. Contrast this with another of the book’s examples, Rhonda. “I was with my family, but I didn’t feel like I was with them,” she told Gibson. “They were totally unavailable to me. I was too anxious to share anything with them.”
Emotional abuse and neglect are very real, and the way parents act does have an impact on children. Adult Children’s surging popularity reflects this truth, and something else too. In the era of “therapy speak”, people are increasingly making sense of themselves through psychological language. This can flatten the multidimensional parent–child dynamic. When parents and children emotionally misunderstand each other, is it always because of “immaturity” – or are there other factors? Is it sometimes relevant to consider different roles that emotions and psychology play for people from different generations and cultures?
What is an emotionally immature parent?
Gibson lives and works in Virginia Beach, where she maintains a small private practice, though her writing schedule takes up most of her time these days. Her voice is soothing and calm, her words unrushed. Often she would say my name when replying to a question; it made me feel listened to, considered. Gibson told me she had seen clients for about 15 years into her 35-year-long career when she started to notice a commonality. After hearing hundreds of people talk about the difficult people in their lives, she found herself thinking, “she’s describing behavior that you might expect to see in a 10-year-old,” she said.
The American Psychological Association characterizes emotional immaturity as “a tendency to express emotions without restraint or disproportionately to the situation”, or having an emotional reaction that a child would have. It is a developmental term; a typical use might refer to a child whose emotion regulation or social interactions weren’t progressing as expected.
Gibson started to tell her clients that the way their parents acted reminded her of a child’s tantrum. Framing their behavior as immaturity or underdevelopment helped her clients understand what was going on, and stop blaming themselves, she said.
There are four kinds of emotionally immature parents, according to Gibson: driven parents, who try to perfect everyone around them; passive parents, who avoid all conflict; rejecting parents, who don’t seem to enjoy being with their child at all; and emotional parents, who have mood swings, are emotionally inconsistent and need others to stabilize them.
An adult child of emotionally immature parents might end up an internalizer, a people-pleaser who self-sacrifices their own needs to take care of others. Or they might become an externalizer, who is reactive, looks to others to self-soothe and can be emotionally disruptive.
Adult Children is a hot topic in subreddits like r/raisedbynarcissists or r/estrangedadultchild.
Readers say they experienced profound moments of recognition. “I’m finally understanding so much about how I perceive other people’s feelings and my own, and how I act with others,” one person wrote.
“I knew my parents sucked, I knew they didn’t care and that they weren’t there for me at all. They put a roof over my head and clothes on my back and that was where things ended,” a reader said.
Are there other ways to think about the ‘emotionally immature parent’?
In 2021, Katy Waldman wrote about the general rise of therapy speak in the New Yorker. “We ‘just want to name’ a dynamic. We joke about our coping mechanisms, codependent relationships, and avoidant attachment styles.” Labels contain truth but they also give us a sense of security and certainty about what will happen, or why things are the way they are.
Framing a parent’s emotional style as immature is relatable, but in some cases risks missing out on a larger context. To speak very generally, older generations – boomers, generation X – have been found less likely to interrogate their mental states so closely, or have a rich arsenal of therapy-adjacent language.
A 2024 study on generational differences towards mental health attempted to explain why. “The silent generation, [people born between 1928 to 1945], instilled characteristics in baby boomers that encouraged them to be self-sufficient in providing for themselves and their families, in the potential wake of disaster,” the authors wrote.
If parents lack emotional skills, this may come from differences in upbringing and culture. In Permission to Come Home, clinical psychologist Jenny Wang’s book about mental health in Asian American families, she explained how some of the emotional disconnects between parents and their children arise from parents not having had the opportunity to cultivate emotions, or having grown up in situations where those skills were not prioritized – and could even be detrimental.
This reminded me of a client from Gibson’s book named Hannah, who wanted to feel closer to her “stern, hardworking mother.” One day, she asked her mother to tell her something about herself she had never shared. “This caught her mother off guard,” Gibson wrote. “First she looked like a deer in headlights, then she burst into tears and couldn’t speak. Hannah felt that she had simultaneously terrified and overwhelmed her mother with this innocent inquiry.”
“For many cultures or countries in Asia, there was war, poverty, deep historical trauma that our parents were contending with,” Wang said. “In those environments, it does not necessarily help to sit around and talk about suffering. It doesn’t support coping, or action in the immediate moment, especially if there’s urgency or safety concerns.”
This contrast can still be upsetting to a child of such parents, especially one who inhabits a cultural context where emotions are foregrounded. Yet, dubbing someone who speaks a different emotional language than you “immature” speaks to a narrow focus. “In calling your mother a narcissist when she isn’t, for example, you might be inadvertently dismissing other important aspects of your relationship that don’t clearly map to that definition,” Allie Volpe wrote in an article about therapy speak in Vox.
“Emotional and interactional styles can be cultural, no question,” Gibson said. But she added that culture can be separated out from the emotional relationship between parent and child. “We’re all taught certain cultural practices that we carry forward unthinkingly, and for that we can all be excused. But if someone tells us our behavior is hurting or angering them, and we continue to insist that we are right and entitled to treat them that way, then to me, that is emotional immaturity full-force.”
Did we always think of parenting from a psychological point of view?
Adult Children is “a book that only could have been written around this time,” said Naomi Hodgson, Reader in Education at Edge Hill University.
“All of this psychological and neuropsychological expertise is readily available to us now,” Hodgson said. “We can diagnose ourselves, diagnose our parents, diagnose our children – perhaps in ways that are not necessarily appropriate.”
Hodgson has been researching parenting, a term that didn’t exist until surprisingly recently. “Parenting” wasn’t added to the Merriam-Webster dictionary until 1958, and only came to wide use in the 1970s. Every aspect of our lives is now seen as something that can be developed or improved, and that includes raising children, Hodgson said.
The concept of the emotionally immature parent is catching on, but the “helicopter parent” – a term from 1990 about a parent who “swoops in to rescue them at the first sign of trouble or disappointment” – still reigns. Parents spend more time and money on their kids now than they ever have before, and “child-centered, time-intensive parenting” has become the norm, according to a 2022 review.
This can have consequences too. Children whose parents are supremely involved in their lives can have more anxiety, while children who engage in independent activities like unsupervised play use that time to strengthen their emotional maturity.
Hodgson has studied parenting apps that outline best practices for children’s “stages,” “milestones” and “brain-building moments.” The rise of such parenting advice is part of a pivot to what she calls “the responsibilized parent”, who “sees the need for learning in order to be able to raise her children correctly, or according to the latest scientific findings.”
This way of talking about parenting characterizes the parent-child relationship as a one-way street: parents do something and it causes something to happen to their child. When paired with language of psychology, that sense of causality is unavoidable, creating a sense “that if you don’t do certain things by a particular age with your children, then potentially they’re going to become these adult children who are needing to heal themselves from what they didn’t get”, Hodgson said.
According to this model, if I feel lonely, maybe that’s because my mother rarely said I love you. But, zooming out, there could be other reasons. Maybe I have to work too many hours to pay my rent because of housing costs, and I don’t have time to spend with friends or develop hobbies.
Lucy Foulkes, an academic psychologist at the University of Oxford, has said that the words we use and how we make sense of our identities and emotions matter, especially if that meaning-making is very rigid. In an interview I did with her in 2022, she said, “I was really fascinated by this idea that once you give something a name…and you label a person with that name, then that name and that concept kind of becomes a real entity in a way that it wasn’t before.”
When I asked Gibson if she ever felt that people were using her categories too generously online, she said that telling someone who relates to psychological terminology that they’re taking it too far would be acting in a similar way to an emotionally immature parent.
“When [someone] finds a description or a term that seems to explain something about themselves to themselves, as a therapist I have to support that, and be happy that they have found something that has helped to explain them to themselves,” she said. “And we can worry about the fine points of it and the degrees of it later, if we need to.”
What do you do once you’re aware of the ‘emotionally immature parent’?
In Adult Children, Gibson addresses how to handle an emotionally immature parent – for instance, how to accept it when a parent’s behavior won’t change or how to be detached while observing their behavior. Gibson has also written other books that explain in more detail what you should do after you realize your emotional interactions with others left you wanting. This includes tips on how to avoid “emotional takeovers” from parents by pushing back against their emotional emergencies, or knowing when to distance yourself from their demands or behaviors. These books have sold well, she told me, around 200,000 copies, but are not blockbuster hits like Adult Children.
When Sam, a 44-year-old from Chicago, read Adult Children, the discussion of how emotionally immature parents often come from similar situations themselves stood out. Parents, too, are “adult children” reacting to the parenting they received. Gibson acknowledges this: “Based on my observations and clinical experience, it seems likely that the parents of many of my clients were emotionally shut down as children.”
Sam saw some of the “emotionally immature” qualities reflected in himself, as well. The book ended up validating Sam’s decision to not have children, he said. I’d had a similar, slightly defensive, thought while reading the book. Adult Children’s focus on the child’s experience builds a tacit expectation that a parent should be emotionally mature all the time. Can anyone ever be emotionally mature enough to raise a child? I’m not yet sure if I want to have kids, but it adds a lot of pressure to the decision.
Some of the conclusions about parents are a little damning. “Such a parent can probably never fulfill your childhood vision of a loving parent,” Gibson wrote. “You can’t win your parent over, but you can save yourself.”
The popularity of the book ultimately represents a recognition of the limitations of the nuclear family. Sophie Lewis, author of Abolish the Family: A Manifesto for Care and Liberation, said we need new infrastructures where people’s needs are met in a much more distributed way.
“Does a grownup have to be somehow perfect at all times?” Lewis said. “Why are we in his situation in the first place, where too much is being asked of too few? It seems to me like these things become so high stakes because there is no distribution or sharing of the labor and responsibility.”
The British psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott introduced the idea of the “good enough” mother in 1953. He wrote that even when mothers don’t meet all of their children’s needs, they can still be good enough that their children survive those mistakes unscathed. This was in some ways a response to Freudian notions that childhood events, even small ones, continued to haunt us into adulthood.
“A mother is neither good nor bad nor the product of illusion, but is a separate and independent entity,” Winnicott wrote. “The good-enough mother ... starts off with an almost complete adaptation to her infant’s needs, and as time proceeds she adapts less and less completely, gradually, according to the infant’s growing ability to deal with her failure. Her failure to adapt to every need of the child helps them adapt to external realities.” For instance, an infant can gain from the experience of frustration, and learn to tolerate the results of it.
Despite what the TikToks might say, Gibson doesn’t expect parents to be perfect. She hopes that the book will help people have more realistic expectations of their parents, and deal with the limitations to the relationship. When I brought up Winnicott, and how I worried I wouldn’t be mature enough to be in charge of a child someday, she assuaged my fears. She said that being concerned about how we affect family members, regardless of different emotional repertoires, skills and language, is a promising sign.
In some ways, the way to handle it is quite simple. Parents will make mistakes – when they do, they should say sorry, and explain what happened. “The kid knows that even when things don’t go right, [they] can reach that parent,” she said. “If I express my feelings, that parent pays attention, that parent notices, and they will make amends or reconcile with me.”
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THE IMPACT OF “GRAY DIVORCE” ON ADULT CHILDREN
Divorce in later life is becoming more common – and scientists are beginning to explore the surprisingly deep impact this can have on adult children and their relationships.
Divorce is greying
The US has one of the highest divorce rates in the world, even though over the past four decades, it has fallen among younger couples. Instead, middle-aged and older adults have taken over. In fact, adults aged 65 and older are now the only age group in the US with a growing divorce rate. For the over-50s, the rate also rose for decades, but has now stabilized.
Today, roughly 36% of people getting divorced are 50 and older, compared to only 8.7% in 1990. This is known as a "grey divorce".
This tilt towards later-in-life divorce is happening for a mix of reasons, studies suggest. Lives are longer than they used to be, for a start, and older couples may be less willing to put up with unfulfilling marriages than before. Meanwhile, young people are getting married later and have become more selective when choosing a partner. As one researcher puts it, "the United States is progressing toward a system in which marriage is rarer and more stable than it was in the past.”
The rise in grey divorce isn't exclusive to the US – it's also happening in ageing populations around the world. One Korean expression says that a marriage should last "until black hair becomes the roots of green onions" – meaning that it is a lifelong commitment. But since the 2000s, more older adults in Korea have been going through hwang-hon divorce, or twilight divorces, to end unfulfilling marriages. Given an average life expectancy of over 80 years for Korean men and women, "those in their 50s and 60s can anticipate another 30 or 40 years of life, and grey divorce can offer a chance at a new chapter in life," the study says. Japan has also seen a rise in "mature" divorces since 1990, and today, grey divorces account for 22% of all divorces there.
Amid this trend, one aspect of grey divorce is beginning to receive more attention: the surprisingly deep and wide-ranging impact the split can have on adult children – and on their relationships with their parents, especially, their fathers.
'Like an earthquake'
While researchers have widely studied how young children are affected by divorce, the impact on adult children was long neglected, perhaps because they were assumed to be more mature and better able to cope. However, already in the late 1980s, emerging research found that just like young children, adults reacted to parental divorce with anger, shock and "lingering sadness."
"Many times I've heard adult children say, 'it felt like the rock that was my family […] my support network system that I grew up with […] was sucked into an earthquake fault'", says Carol Hughes, a marriage and family therapist based in southern California and the co-author of Home Will Never Be the Same Again: A Guide for Adult Children of Grey Divorce. "All of a sudden, their parents are divorcing, and they feel like the bottom has fallen out of their lives," she adds.
Reflecting on the memories shared with their family, adult children may wonder: "Was it all smoke and mirrors? Were they ever really happy?" Hughes says. Some of her clients have ended relationships and engagements because of their parents' divorce, or questioned their identity and self-esteem, she says.
"A parental divorce can be a difficult experience for any individual […] no matter the age, no matter the marriage duration. The experience [or] transition is simply different," says Joleen Greenwood, a professor of sociology at Kutztown University of Pennsylvania, in the US.
In her research based on interviews with 40 men and 40 women going through a grey divorce, Crowley found that the women faced an "economic penalty" after divorce, having typically taken a break from employment to care for their children.
The men, in contrast, faced a "social penalty" after divorce, she says. This is because the wives were often the 'kin-keepers' in the marriage, meaning, they invested time and energy into their relationships with family and friends, whereas the husbands had relied on their wives to build their social lives.
"Women are basically the social directors of family life still in 2025, and when that goes away men become like islands in the sea," says Crowley.
After a divorce, those husbands lost their social networks, and had less contact with their children, who often sided with their mother. The men she interviewed went through "an experience of enormous grief" after the break-up, Crowley says. "[They] expressed a lot of sadness.”
This pattern of children turning towards the mother after a divorce is known as the matrifocal tilt. For younger children, it can be a consequence of custody arrangements that leave the children with the mother. But studies across different countries, and spanning several decades, have also found this matrifocal tilt away from the father in grey divorces with grown-up children.
For example, a longitudinal study in Germany of adult children aged 18-49, published in 2024, found that grey divorce brought the grown children closer to their mothers, in terms of contact and emotional closeness, while weakening the bond with the fathers. "Adult-child solidarity intensified for mothers but eroded for fathers" following the divorce, the study found.
The impact was strongest for changes in the frequency of contact between the grown children and each parent, and moderate for changes in emotional closeness. Ultimately, a grey divorce "tilts adult-child solidarity toward mothers and puts fathers at a higher risk of social isolation", the study concluded.
Other papers have also suggested that parental divorce in later life results in less contact between fathers and their children, decreasing even further when a father re-partners. By contrast, when a mother re-partners, it does not seem to change the mother-child contact.
(Interestingly, women are more likely to file for divorce, and are less likely to remarry after a grey divorce.)
The post-divorce tilt away from the father may happen even if the father is generally supportive of the grown children: one study found that following a divorce, "fathers' frequent contact with their adult children decreased" even as the dads' "financial support to their adult children increased,” for example.
Some adult children may reduce contact to avoid being caught in conflict: one study of 930 grey-divorced individuals showed that 7% of parents had no contact with at least one child.
Such ruptured family dynamics may affect the parents' as well as the children's well-being, with one study finding that having no contact with at least one adult child "aggravated the negative effect of divorce on parents' mental health."
However, bonds can be re-strengthened, Crowley says, and some fathers do reconnect with their children later, even after long periods of absence.
As researchers around the world continue to grapple with the rise of late-in-life divorce, and the often-painful transition, understanding how it affects families is crucial. For adult children struggling with their parents' divorce, Hughes says joining support groups of others going through the same experience can help, and may reduce feelings of loneliness and isolation.
Of course, experts do point out that some parent-child relationships are not affected negatively at all. Indeed, some adult children will not be surprised or shocked when their parents' divorce, and may even be supportive of it. It all depends on the circumstances for each family. Many of the adult children Greenwood interviewed were relieved that the parents were finally divorcing, often because there was conflict and fighting as they were growing up.
"Even for those relationships that were negatively strained, over time, the strained relationships mended," she says.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20250912-how-grey-divorce-affects-adult-children
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JONI MITCHELL ON MONOGAMY
“But along with developing my superficial side, I always nurtured a deeper longing, so even when I was falling into the trap of that other kind of love, I was hip to what I was doing. I recently read an article in Esquire magazine called ‘The End of Sex,’ that said something that struck me as very true. It said: “If you want endless repetition, see a lot of different people. If you want infinite variety, stay with one.” What happens when you date is you run all your best moves and tell all your best stories — and in a way, that routine is a method for falling in love with yourself over and over.
“You can’t do that with a longtime mate because he knows all that old material. With a long relationship, things die then are rekindled, and that shared process of rebirth deepens the love. It’s hard work, though, and a lot of people run at the first sign of trouble. You’re with this person, and suddenly you look like an asshole to them or they look like an asshole to you — it’s unpleasant, but if you can get through it you get closer and you learn a way of loving that’s different from the neurotic love enshrined in movies. It’s warmer and has more padding to it.”
~ Irfan Ahmed, Facebook
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TASHLICH: THROWING BREAD Into WATER
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On the Jewish New Year, Rosh Hashanah, there is a ceremony called Tashlich. Jews traditionally go to the ocean or a stream or river to pray and throw bread crumbs into the water. Symbolically, the fish devour their sins. Occasionally, people ask what kind of bread crumbs should be thrown. Here are suggestions for breads which may be most appropriate for specific sins and misbehaviors.
For ordinary sins...................White Bread
For erotic sins......................French Bread
For particularly dark sins......Pumpernickel
For complex sins.....................Multi-Grain
For twisted sins………………….Pretzels
For sins of indecision..............Waffles
For sins committed in haste....Matzoh
For sins of chutzpah..............Fresh Bread
For substance abuse...........Stoned Wheat
For use of heavy drugs...........Poppy Seed
For petty larceny......................Stollen
For committing auto theft........Caraway
For timidity/cowardice.............Milk Toast
For ill-temperedness...............Sourdough
For tasteless sins...................Rice Cakes
For tasteless sins...................Rice Cakes
For sins of indecision..............Waffles
For sins committed in haste....Matzoh
For sins of chutzpah..............Fresh Bread
For substance abuse...........Stoned Wheat
For use of heavy drugs...........Poppy Seed
For petty larceny......................Stollen
For committing auto theft........Caraway
For timidity/cowardice.............Milk Toast
For ill-temperedness...............Sourdough
For silliness, eccentricity.........Nut Bread
For not giving full value............Shortbread
For jingoism, chauvinism.Yankee Doodles
For excessive irony..................Rye Bread
For unnecessary chances........Hero Bread
For telling bad jokes/puns.......Corn Bread
For war-mongering................Kaiser Rolls
For dressing immodestly.........Tarts
For causing injury to others......Tortes
For lechery and promiscuity.....Hot Buns
For promiscuity with gentiles....Hot Cross Buns
For racist attitudes.....................Crackers
For sophisticated racism...........Ritz Crackers
For being holier than thou..........Bagels
For abrasiveness........................Grits
For dropping in without notice....Popovers
For over-eating............................Stuffing
For impetuosity.....................Quick Bread
For raising your voice too often..Challah
For pride and egotism..............Puff Pastry
For sycophancy, ass-kissing.......Brownies
For being overly smothering........Angel Food Cake
For laziness.........................Any long loaf
from the page of D. Goska
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HOW COME HONEY NEVER SPOILS?
Honey never spoils! Archaeologists have dug up jars of the stuff from ancient civilizations, perfectly edible after thousands of years in the earth. The secret is honey's hostile environment for bacteria and fungi. It’s essentially concentrated sugar syrup with moisture levels so low they're almost nonexistent. Any microbe that attempts to enter is dehydrated immediately. The sugar molecules suck every last bit of water from invading cells, which dry up and die.
But honey doesn't even leave it at that. It also has a pH of approximately 4, rendering it an acidic wasteland in which most pathogens cannot survive.
On top of that, bees leave behind glucose oxidase during production. This enzyme slowly converts sugars into hydrogen peroxide, rendering honey an ongoing antiseptic factory. So bacteria are dehydrated, acid burned, and chemically attacked simultaneously. It’s biologic overkill that keeps honey indefinitely.
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KIDNEY CANCER CASES ARE PROJECTED TO DOUBLE BY 2050
Modifiable risk factors such as obesity, smoking, lack of exercise, diabetes and hypertension are projected to be one of the main drivers of a steep rise in kidney cancer cases, doubling the amount worldwide over the next 25 years, according to a new study recently published in European Urology.
In 2022, nearly 435,000 new kidney cancer cases and 156,000 deaths were recorded worldwide. Researchers at Fox Chase Cancer Center were part of an international team that found if current trends continue, those numbers could potentially double by 2050.
“Kidney cancer is a growing global health problem, and both clinicians and policymakers need to prepare for this steep rise,” said senior author Alexander Kutikov, MD, FACS, Chair of the Department of Urology at Fox Chase Cancer Center. “This review is a reference point for the field, summarizing what we know about kidney cancer incidence, survival, genetics, and risk factors.”
Key findings from the review include:
Survival Disparities: Five-year survival rates vary from 40% to 75%, depending on geography and access to care. Wealthier regions see improved survival due to earlier detection through routine imaging and greater access to surgery, systemic therapies, and radiation treatments.
Genetic Risk: An estimated 5% to 8% of kidney cancers are hereditary, often linked to mutations in specific genes. Genetic testing is recommended for individuals diagnosed at a young age, patients with cancer in both kidneys, and those with a family history of the disease.
Modifiable Risk Factors: More than half of kidney cancer cases worldwide can be attributed to preventable factors including obesity, diabetes, hypertension, chronic kidney disease, smoking, environmental exposures, and lack of physical exercise.
Prevention: Lifestyle changes such as weight control, blood pressure and blood sugar management, and smoking cessation can significantly lower risk.
“Lifestyle changes like weight control, blood pressure and blood sugar management, and especially smoking cessation, can significantly lower risk,” said Kutikov. “These are prevention strategies that can make a real difference.”
In addition to Kutikov, researchers from the Fox Chase - Temple Urologic Institute contributed to the review. As part of the executive management team of the Institute, Kutikov noted the importance of having trainees participate in research, highlighting Fox Chase’s impact on the field of kidney cancer research and care.
The study, “Epidemiology of Renal Cancer: Incidence, Mortality, Survival, Genetic Predisposition, and Risk Factors,” was published in European Urology.
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1099953
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HOW OFTEN SHOULD WE EAT?
The idea that we should eat three meals a day is surprisingly modern. How many meals a day is best for our health?
It's likely you eat three meals a day – modern life is designed around this way of eating. We're told breakfast is the most important meal of the day, we're given lunch breaks at work, and then our social and family lives revolve around evening meals. But is this the healthiest way to eat?
Before considering how frequently we should eat, scientists urge us to consider when we shouldn't.
Intermittent fasting, where you restrict your food intake to an eight-hour window, is becoming a huge area of research.
Giving our bodies at least 12 hours a day without food allows our digestive system to rest, says Emily Manoogian, clinical researcher at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in California, and author of a 2019 paper entitled "When to eat."
Rozalyn Anderson, an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin's School of Medicine and Public Health, has studied the benefits of calorie restriction, which is associated with lower levels of inflammation in the body.
"Having a fasting period every day could reap some of these benefits," she says. "It gets into the idea that fasting puts the body in a different state, where it's more ready to repair and surveil for damage, and clear misfolded proteins." Misfolded proteins are faulty versions of ordinary proteins, which are molecules that perform a huge range of important jobs in the body. Misfolded proteins have been associated with a number of diseases.
Intermittent fasting is more in line with how our bodies have evolved, Anderson argues. She says it gives the body a break so it's able to store food and get energy to where it needs to be, and trigger the mechanism to release energy from our body stores.
Fasting could also improve our glycemic response, which is when our blood glucose rises after eating, says Antonio Paoli, professor of exercise and sport sciences at the University of Padova in Italy. Having a smaller blood glucose increase allows you to store less fat in the body, he says.
Intermittent fasting is more in line with how our bodies have evolved, Anderson argues. She says it gives the body a break so it's able to store food and get energy to where it needs to be, and trigger the mechanism to release energy from our body stores.
Fasting could also improve our glycemic response, which is when our blood glucose rises after eating, says Antonio Paoli, professor of exercise and sport sciences at the University of Padova in Italy. Having a smaller blood glucose increase allows you to store less fat in the body, he says.
"Our data suggests that having an early dinner and increasing the time of your fasting window increases some positive effects on body, like better glycemic control," Paoli says.
It's better for all cells to have lower levels of sugar in them because of a process called glycation, Paoli adds. This is where glucose links to proteins and forms compounds called "advanced glycation end products", which can cause inflammation in the body and increase the risk of developing diabetes and heart disease.
But if intermittent fasting is a healthy way to eat – how many meals does this leave room for?
Some experts argue it's best to have one meal a day, including David Levitsky, professor at Cornell University's College of Human Ecology in New York, who does this himself.
This is because, before we had fridges and supermarkets, we ate when food was available.
Throughout history, we consumed one meal a day, including the Ancient Romans who ate one meal around midday, says food historian Seren Charrington-Hollins.
Wouldn't one meal a day leave us feeling hungry? Not necessarily, Levitsky argues, because hunger is often a psychological sensation.
"When the clock says 12pm, we may get feelings to eat, or you might be conditioned to eat breakfast in the morning, but this is nonsense. Data shows that if you don't eat breakfast, you're going to eat fewer calories overall that day.
"Our physiology is built for feasting and fasting," he says. However, Levitsky doesn't recommend this approach for people with diabetes.
Some people find just one meal a day works best for their body and health
But Manoogan doesn't recommend sticking to one meal a day, since this can increase the level of glucose in our blood when we're not eating – known as fasting glucose. High levels of fasting glucose over a long period of time is a risk factor for type 2 diabetes.
Keeping blood glucose levels down requires eating more regularly than once a day, Manoogan says, as this prevents the body thinking it's starving and releasing more glucose when you do eventually eat in response.
Instead, she says, two to three meals a day is best – with most of your calories consumed earlier in the day. This is because eating late at night is associated with cardio-metabolic disease, including diabetes and heart disease.
"If you eat most of your food earlier on, your body can use the energy you feed it throughout the day, rather than it being stored in your system as fat," Manoogan says.
But eating too early in the morning should be avoided, too, she says, as this wouldn't give you sufficient time to fast. Also, eating too soon after waking up works against our circadian rhythm – known as our body clock – which researchers say dictates how the body processes food differently throughout the day.
Our bodies release melatonin overnight to help us sleep – but melatonin also pauses the creation of insulin, which stores glucose in the body. Because melatonin is released while you're sleeping, the body uses it to make sure we don't take in too much glucose while we're sleeping and not eating, Manoogan says.
"If you take in calories when your melatonin is high, you get really high glucose levels. Consuming a lot of calories at night poses a significant challenge to the body because if insulin is suppressed, your body can't store glucose properly.”
And, as we know, high levels of glucose over long periods of time can increase the risk of developing type 2 diabetes.
This doesn't mean we should skip breakfast altogether, but some evidence suggests we should wait an hour or two after waking up before we crack open the eggs. It's also worth remembering that breakfast as we know and love it today is a relatively new concept.
"The Ancient Greeks were the first to introduce the concept of breakfast, they'd eat bread soaked in wine, then they had a frugal lunch, then a hearty evening meal," says Charrington-Hollins.
Initially, breakfast was exclusive to aristocratic classes, says Charrington-Hollins. It first caught on in the 17th Century, when it became the luxury of those who could afford the food and the time for a leisurely meal in the morning.
"The concept today of breakfast being the norm [came about] during the Industrial Revolution in the 19th Century and its introduction of working hours," says Charrington-Hollins. Such a routine lends itself to three meals a day. "The first meal would be something quite simple for the working classes – it might be street food from a vendor or bread.”
But after war, when availability of food diminished, the idea of eating a full breakfast wasn't possible and a lot of people skipped it. "The idea of three meals a day went out the window," says Charrington-Hollins. "In the 1950s breakfast becomes how we recognize it today: cereal and toast. Prior to that we were happy to eat a piece of bread with jam."
So, the science seems to say the healthiest way to eat throughout the day is to have two or three meals, with a long fasting window overnight, to not eat too early or too late in the day, and to consume more calories earlier on in the day. Is this realistic?
Manoogan says it's best to not specify the best times to eat, as this can be difficult for people with responsibilities and irregular time commitments, such as those working night shifts.
"Telling people to stop eating by 7pm isn't helpful because people have different schedules. If you try to give your body regular fast nights, try to not eat too late or early and try to not have huge final meals, this can usually help. People can at least adopt parts of this," she says.
"You could see a dramatic change just from a small delay in your first meal and advancing your last meal. Making this regular without changing anything else could have a big impact."
But whatever changes you make, researchers agree that consistency is crucial.
"The body works in patterns," says Anderson. "We respond to the anticipation of being fed. One thing intermittent fasting does is it imposes a pattern, and our biological systems do well with a pattern." She says the body picks up on cues to anticipate our eating behaviors so it can best deal with the food when we eat it.
When it comes to how many meals we deem normal, Charrington-Hollins is seeing change on the horizon.
"Over the centuries, we've become conditioned to three meals a day, but this is being challenged now and people's attitude to food is changing. We have more sedate lifestyles, we're not doing the level of work we were doing in the 19th century, so we need fewer calories.
"I think, long-term, we'll be reducing back to a light meal then a main meal, depending on what happens work-wise. Our working hours will be the driving force.
"When we came off rations, we embraced three meals a day because there was suddenly an abundance of food. But time goes on – food is everywhere now.”
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/should-we-be-eating-three-meals-a-day?utm_source=firefox-newtab-en-us
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CAN CERTAIN FOODS SUPPRESS APPETITE?
Some foods promise the ability to stave off hunger pangs. Can any foods really suppress our appetite?
It's likely that your weekly shop is packed with packaging promising that the food inside will taste great, stay fresh and be good for you. You might also find some products telling you they'll fill you up for longer. But is it really possible for a food to suppress our appetites?
While some research suggests that consuming some foods, such as chili peppers and ginger, can make us feel less hungry afterwards, these studies often use large quantities of foods and test the effects on animals, says Gary Frost, lead of the Imperial Nutrition and Food Network at Imperial College London. Translating these effects over to humans hasn't happened, he adds.
But one study looked at the appetite-suppressing properties of capsaicin in chili peppers, (the active ingredient that gives chillies their heat) using quantities that more closely resemble an average human diet. Mary-Jon Ludy, associate professor of food and nutrition at Bowling Green State University in Ohio, US, experimented first at home, by adding chili to her meals until she decided what was a palatable and realistic amount for someone living in the US Midwest.
She then invited 25 people into her lab six times, and she fed them bowls of tomato soup. After the soup, they stayed in the lab for four-and-a-half hours so their appetite and energy expenditure could be regularly measured. They were then served another meal and told they could eat as much as they wanted.
When they consumed soup containing 1g of chili, the participants burned an extra 10 calories in the four-and-a-half hours afterwards. Participants who usually only ate chili once a month reported having fewer thoughts about food afterwards, and ate 70 calories less when served the second meal, compared to those who usually ate chili three times a week or more.
Ludy ran the same experiment with chili in a capsule instead of soup, but the increase in fat-burning was only found after they ate the chili-tomato soup.
"This says something important about experiencing the oral tingling/burning sensation," she says.
However, burning 10 extra calories after a spicy meal is minute, and won't have any long-term effects. Frost points out that studies like this, showing short-term effects on appetite, haven't been able to show any long-lasting effects.
In accordance with this study, a review of 32 studies found that chilli, as well as green tea, hasn't been consistently found to suppress appetite.
Another staple in our diets that's been rumored to make us less hungry is coffee. Matthew Schubert, assistant professor in the department of kinesiology at California State University, reviewed what research has been done so far to see if there could be something in coffee that suppresses our appetite.
Some studies found that drinking coffee led to a slightly faster rate of gastric emptying, which is the time it takes for a meal to move from the stomach to the small intestine and is associated with increased hunger. But no studies showed anything specific happening physiologically that could dampen appetite.
Even if future research does uncover a way that coffee suppresses our appetite, it would probably only translate to consuming 100 or 200 fewer calories a day, Schubert adds, which isn't significant.
Aside from specific ingredients, researchers have also looked at macronutrients, and how they might influence our appetites. Fiber is known to make us feel fuller for longer, and some population studies show that as people eat more fiber, their weight gain slows down – but this is only when they're eating really high amounts of fiber, says Frost.
"It's recommended we consume 30g of dietary fiber per day, but most people in the UK consume around 15g. If you push it up to 30g you'd get an effect [on appetite] but it wears off after a while," he says.
Tea plant. Green tea has long been thought of as an appetite suppressant, but evidence hasn’t been consistent
There has been a lot of research trying find out which macronutrients make you feel more full, but there's no clear answer. Findings seem to suggest that protein is more likely to satiate you, but they're not so clear and usually the effects are tiny, and it's hard to compare across different types of macronutrients," says Yann Cornil, associate professor of marketing and behavioral science at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada.
Research has found that people who drink two glasses of water before eating end up eating less.
But any changes to our appetite on a physiological level will be small and short-lasting, Frost says, because it doesn't make physiological sense that there would be a food that drives us to eat less.
"It's only very recently that in our Western society we've had excess food," says Frost. Throughout evolution we lived with very little food, and it came in fits and starts. Our physiology is geared to driving us to eat.
"If there was a food component that suppressed appetite, to survive you'd need to totally avoid it."
Another reason that no food or drink could substantially suppress our appetite long-term is because our bodies are designed to maintain a near-constant weight, says Kohlmeier.
"The body has mechanisms that defend weight viciously. From an evolutionary perspective, the biggest risk to humanity was starvation, not just because it'd kill you but because it also weakens the body and makes you more vulnerable to infectious diseases," he says.
"If you see the body as a big machine, with all the different components that need to come from the outside; you need to get enough water, macronutrients and micronutrients, on top of knowing what not to eat."
There are several nutrients that will drive our appetite if we're deficient in them, he adds.
"It's a whole system you need to loop and rebuild constantly. How should anyone know what they need and what's in which foods? There are very powerful important systems in place that drive appetite.”
Therefore, the best way to manage appetite is to have a balanced diet, so the body isn't driven to eat more to make up for any deficiencies, Kohlmeimer says.
The loophole here is how our appetite can be influenced psychologically, which has interested researchers for decades. A paper from 1987 explained that seeing and smelling food sends signals to the body to prepare to digest it. Food will have the biggest effect on appetite when we expect it to satiate us, the paper states.
Hunger is driven by beliefs, expectation and memory, says Cornil, mostly by how well you remember what you've eaten. This means that we eat less following what we perceive to be a bigger meal than if we believe we've eaten a smaller one.
One study found that labeling a meal as "filling" has been found to influence us to eat less compared to when the same meal is labelled "light."
Your weekly shop might contain foods that promise to fill you up for longer, but it seems there's only one way to work with your body's evolutionary processes: eat a balanced diet filled with all the nutrients and water you need.
While you can't cheat nature and stave off hunger for long, you can try to avoid craving those extra calories required to make up any nutrient deficiencies.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220913-can-certain-foods-suppress-your-appetite
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ending on beauty:
ATLANTIS
We’re wreathed in robes of seaweed,
air bladders’ amber beads,
the hood of water
over the face of things.
Fish weave in rainbow veils.
Kelp sways like soundless bells.
we cannot tell one day
from a thousand years.
Here are our amulets,
diadems and crowns.
Here tilts the headless
statue of our god,
Lord of Mercy in whose name
we killed. Mudworm burrows
in the marble palaces.
Our purses fill up with silt.
We remember pine forests,
resin scent of the wind.
We remember having held
someone’s hand.
This glitter like bent echoes
on dark waves,
these are our last words:
Hold hands. Hold hands.
~ Oriana
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