FRANKENSTEIN: MISUNDERSTOOD? HOW RUSSIA DEVOLVED INTO A GANGSTER STATE; ELIE WIESEL’S SON WARNS AGAINST MAMDANI; THE COUNTERCLOCKWISE STUDY; HAPPY WHILE GROWING OLDER;

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GREETING THE FIRST SECRETARY

Again workers and schoolchildren 
three-deep along the boulevards.
This time it was not 
a cosmonaut,
not the Abyssinian emperor,
it was Brezhnev

who stood,
Caesar-in-chariot,
monolithic three-quarters profile,
in a long open
black car,
next to the nervous host —
himself a first secretary,
but so slight!
And Brezhnev an impassive mound.
His eyebrows
underlined his hat.

He stood heavy,
rotund,
flesh caped by a black coat.
Now and then, his pale
pudgy hand
flopped slowly up and down
like a disturbed mollusk;
he did not bother to smile.

We stomped our feet 
in the chill;
at his passage, when signaled,
feebly clapping.

For news and documentaries,
they used a soundtrack
with its own hurrah
applause and shouts
of  long live.
His huge dark back
took over the screen.

~ Oriana



Oriana:
After his stroke in 1975, Brezhnev became a pathetic figure, still officially the head of the Soviet Union, still wheeled out to read speeches. There were moron-type jokes about him. He died in 1982. He was briefly followed by Andropov, then Chernenko, both of whom were old and ailing. Gorbachev, an ambitious reformer, at first inspired hope; after the collapse of the Soviet Union, for which he was blamed, he became universally hated in Russia but continued to be admired in the West. 

Here is an event that took place in the last phase of his rule:

~ According to Nursultan Nazarbayev’s memoir, My Life, an incident occurred in Alma-Ata [the capital of Kazakhstan] during a reception for Brezhnev at the Auezov Theater. About a thousand guests had gathered, and after they were seated, Dinmukhamed Kunaev proposed a toast to Brezhnev. However, as soon as the guests raised their glasses, Brezhnev unexpectedly stood up and headed toward the exit, prompting the entire republic's leadership to follow him. Brezhnev walked outside, approached his car, and within a minute, the motorcade was on its way. Nazarbayev noted that it was evident Brezhnev had forgotten the purpose of his visit, but those around him pretended not to notice his frail state. ~ Wikipedia

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FRANKENSTEIN: MISUNDERSTOOD?



As Guillermo del Toro's new film starring Oscar Isaac and Jacob Elordi is released, why is the message of Mary Shelley's 1818 novel still overshadowed by its success, more than two centuries on?

One night during the strangely cool and wet European summer of 1816, a group of friends gathered at the Villa Diodati on the shores of Lake Geneva. "We will each write a ghost story," Lord Byron announced to the assembled party, which included Byron's doctor John Polidori, the poet Percy Shelley and the 18-year-old Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin (later Shelley).

"I busied myself to think of a story," she wrote. "One which would speak to the mysterious fears of our nature and awaken thrilling horror." Her tale became a novel, published two years later as Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus, the story of Victor Frankenstein, a young natural philosophy student, who, burning with crazed ambition, brings a body to life but rejects his horrifying "creature" in fear and disgust.

Frankenstein is simultaneously the first science-fiction novel, a Gothic horror, a tragic romance and a parable all sewn into one towering body. Its central tragedies – the dangers of "playing God" on one hand; parental abandonment and societal rejection on the other – are as relevant today as they ever were.

Mary Shelley

And are there any other fictional characters more powerfully cemented in the popular imagination? The two central archetypes Mary Shelley brought to life, the "creature" and the overambitious "mad scientist", lurched and ranted their way off the page and on to stage and screen, electrifying theater and filmgoers as two of the most enduring icons not just in the horror genre – but in cinematic history.

Frankenstein spawned interpretations and parodies that reach from the very origins of the moving image in Thomas Edison's horrifying 1910 short film, through Hollywood's Universal Pictures and Britain's Hammer series, to The Rocky Horror Picture Show – and it foreshadowed others, such as 2001: A Space Odyssey. There are Italian and Japanese Frankensteins and a Blaxploitation film, Blackenstein; Mel Brooks, Kenneth Branagh and Tim Burton all have their own takes. The characters or themes appear in or have inspired comic books, video games, spin-off novels, TV series and songs by artists as diverse as Ice Cube, Metallica and T'Pau's China in Your Hand: "It was a flight on the wings of a young girl's dreams/ That flew too far away… And we could make the monster live again." And now sci-fi/horror director Guillermo del Toro has finally realized his childhood dream of bringing Frankenstein to the screen, a true labor-of-love project that has been more than 30 years in the making.

Thomas Edison’s 1910 short film was the first time the story of Frankenstein appeared on screen

As a parable, the novel has been used as an argument both for and against slavery and revolution, vivisection and empire, and as a dialogue between history and progress, religion and atheism. The prefix "Franken-" thrives in the modern lexicon as a byword for any anxiety about science, scientists and the human body, and has been used to shape worries about the atomic bomb, GM crops, strange foods, stem-cell research and both to characterize and assuage fears about AI. In the more than two centuries since she wrote it, Mary Shelley's tale, in the words of Bobby Pickett's 1962 novelty song, Monster Mash (itself inspired by Boris Karloff's performance), has truly been "a graveyard smash" that "caught on in a flash.”

'Mysterious fears of our nature'

"All them scientists – they're all alike. They say they're working for us but what they really want is to rule the world!" – Young Frankenstein (dir: Mel Brooks, 1974).

But why was Mary's vision of "science gone wrong" so resonant at the time? She certainly captured the zeitgeist: the early 19th Century teetered on the brink of the modern age, and although the term "science" existed, the concept of a "scientist" didn't. Great change brings fear, as Fiona Sampson, author of In Search of Mary Shelley, tells the BBC: "With modernity comes a sense of anxiety about what humans can do and particularly an anxiety about science and technology." Frankenstein fused these contemporary concerns about the possibilities of science with fiction for the very first time – with electrifying results. Far from a completely outrageous fantasy, the novel imagined what might conceivably happen if people – and in particular overreaching or out-of-control scientists – went too far.

Several points of popular 19th-Century intellectual discourse appeared in the novel. Mary Shelley's writings reveal that in that 1816 Villa Diodati tableau, Shelley and Byron discussed the "principle of life". Contemporary debates raged on the nature of humanity and whether it was possible to raise the dead. In the book's 1831 preface, Mary Shelley noted "galvanism" as an influence, referring to Luigi Galvani's experiments using electric currents to make frogs' legs twitch. Galvani's nephew Giovanni Aldini would go further in 1803, using a newly dead murderer as his subject. Many of the doctors and thinkers at the heart of these debates – such as the chemist Sir Humphry Davy – were connected to Mary Shelley's father, the pre-eminent intellectual William Godwin, who had developed principles warning of the dangers and moral implications of “overreaching”.


Luigi Galvani’s experiments using electricity to reanimate dead frogs was possibly one of the inspirations for the novel

Despite these nuggets of contemporary thought, though, there's little in the way of tangible theory, method, or scientific detail in Frankenstein. The climactic moment of creation is described simply: "With an anxiety that almost amounted to agony, I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet." The "science" of the novel is rooted in its time and yet timeless. It is so vague, therefore, as to provide a malleable reference point for the following two centuries' moments of great change and fear.

Monster mash-up

But surely the reason Frankenstein became a shorthand for anxieties about science is down to the impression the "monster" and "mad scientist" have had on its audience. How did this happen? Just as the science is vague in the book, so is the description of the creature as he comes to life. The moment is distilled into a single, bloodcurdling image:

"It was already one in the morning; the rain pattered dismally against the panes, and my candle was nearly burnt out, when, by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs."

With his "yellow skin", "watery eyes" and "shriveled complexion", the creature is far from the beautiful ideal Victor Frankenstein had imagined. This spare but resonant prose proved irresistible to theater, and later film-makers and their audiences, as Christopher Frayling notes in his book, Frankenstein: The First Two Hundred Years. The shocking novel became a scandalous play and a huge hit, first in Britain and then abroad. These early plays, Frayling writes, "set the tone for future dramatizations". They condensed the story into basic archetypes, adding many of the most memorable elements that audiences would recognize today, including the comical lab assistant, the line "It lives!" and a monster who barely speaks.

James Whale’s 1931 film for Universal Pictures starred Boris Karloff as the creature

It's perhaps a double-edged sword that the monstrous success of Hollywood's incarnations (notably James Whale's 1931 film starring Boris Karloff as the creature) in many ways secured the story's longevity but somewhat obscured Shelley's version of it. "Frankenstein [the film] created the definitive movie image of the mad scientist, and in the process launched a thousand imitations," Frayling writes. "It fused a domesticated form of Expressionism, overacting, an irreverent adaptation of an acknowledged classic, European actors and visualizers – and the American carnival tradition – to create an American genre. It began to look as though Hollywood had actually invented Frankenstein." And so, a movie legend was born.

And just as Hollywood cherry-picked from Mary Shelley to cement its version of her story, she had borrowed from historical and Biblical stories to create her own message and mythology. The subtitle of the novel, "The Modern Prometheus", recalls the figure of ancient Greek and Latin myth who variously steals fire from the gods and gives it to man, and represents the dangers of overreaching. The novel's other great allusion is to God and Adam, and a quote from Paradise Lost appears in the book's epigraph: "Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay / To mould me man?" 

It is arguably the creature's humanity – and his tragedy – that in his cinematic transformations into a mute but terrifying monster, has often been forgotten.

Shelley gave the creature a voice and a literary education in order to express his thoughts and desires (he is one of three narrators in the book). Like The Tempest's Caliban, to whom Shakespeare gives a poetic and poignant speech, the creature's lament is haunting: "Remember that I am thy creature; I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel, whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed. Everywhere I see bliss, from which I alone am irrevocably excluded. I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend. Make me happy, and I shall again be virtuous.”

If the creature is perceived as a misshapen human rather than a monster, his tragedy deepens. He is first rejected by his creator, which Christopher Frayling called "that post-partum moment", and is often identified as a parental abandonment. Considering that Mary Shelley had lost her own mother Mary Wollstonecraft at birth, had just buried her own baby girl, and was looking after her pregnant step-sister as she was writing the book – which took exactly nine months to complete – birth (and death) is pertinent. 

The newborn creature is alienated further as society recoils from him; he is made good, but it is the rejection that creates his murderous revenge. It's a robust allegory for a responsibility to children, outsiders or those who don't conform to conventional ideals of beauty. "The way that we sometimes identify with Frankenstein – as we've all taken risks, we've all had hubristic moments – and partly with the creature, they are both aspects of ourselves – all our selves" Fiona Sampson says. "They both speak to us about being human. And that's incredibly powerful.”

The empathy and humanity that has often been lost at the heart of Shelley's novel is reinstated in the latest adaptation, however, which arrives in cinemas this week. Before its premiere at the Venice Film Festival in August, director Guillermo Del Toro told Variety that his version, which stars Oscar Isaac as Victor Frankenstein and Jacob Elordi as the creature, was less a horror than about "the lineage of familial pain", with Isaac the abusive father abandoning his son, the creature.

Guillermo del Toro's new film stars Oscar Isaac as Victor Frankenstein

"He was an outsider. He didn't fit into the world. He was out of place in the same way that I felt as a kid," Del Toro said of the creature, going on to describe Shelley's story as being central to his own life and work. "Frankenstein is a song of the human experience… There's so much of my own biography in the DNA of the novel." When he was collecting a Bafta in 2018 for a different monster fable, The Shape of Water, Del Toro thanked Shelley for inspiring him. "She picked up the plight of Caliban and she gave weight to the burden of Prometheus, and she gave voice to the voiceless and presence to the invisible, and she showed me that sometimes to talk about monsters, we need to fabricate monsters of our own, and parables do that for us".

"And now, once again, I bid my hideous progeny go forth and prosper," she wrote in the preface to the 1831 edition. The creator and creature, parent and child, the writer and her story – they went forth, and did they prosper? More than two hundred years since its publication, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is no longer a tale of "thrilling horror" but its own myth, sent out into the world.

https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20180611-why-frankenstein-is-the-story-that-defined-our-fears


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AS A RUSSIAN, DO YOU FEEL EMPATHY FOR UKRAINIANS?

~ Absolutely. Every day and from the very start.

I remember the first day of war. On the streets of Moscow I saw people who were upset, didn’t look each other in the eye, didn’t talk much. No one celebrated it and nothing like this ever happened later.

Most famous people, leaders of opinion, didn’t support the war in any way. Some had to emigrate to raise their voice against the war, some are keeping silent on the matter just to be able to stay in the country. Criticizing the war in Russia means instant work ban, and if you insist you go to prison.

Many simple people left the country, struggling with visas, having to start a new life — just because they opposed the war so much. It’s a tough task — no one welcomes Russians in EU or the US, getting visas is harder than usual, credit cards and bank transfers don’t work. But a lot of people left anyway.

Even those people who support the war itself, explain that it’s needed to keep NATO out of Russian borders and protect Russians in Eastern Ukraine — but almost nobody thinks this is a war against Ukrainians themselves. If there’s a rocket killing peaceful people in Ukraine no one celebrates it in Russia — it’s equally painful as when a rocket kills people in Russia. And the people are mostly the same. ~ Valentin F, a Russian from St Petersburg, Quora

Lorenzo Lodi:
People are not “almost the same” and it’s shameful Russians are still going on with this offensive slogan three years into the war. Drop this shit!

And also drop the “nobody thinks this is a war against Ukrainians themselves”. NOBODY THINKS, period. Apart, perhaps, from a very small part of the population (which anyway as you demonstrate is still Russian and goes on with justifying Russians, calling Ukrainian brothers etc.)

Valentin F:
I’m Russian, but I have Ukrainian roots. My wife’s father is from Odessa. Probably a third of Russians have this or that connections to Ukraine. Why? Because for 350 years there was no border — political, religious, cultural, ethnic — between Russia and Ukraine. People would move both ways and make families. So in pure scientific sense we are the same people (excluding Western Ukrainians who always lived behind the border and belonged to a different religion).

In Ukraine, you’ll see the same. A lot of people have connections to Russia or are Russians themselves. Chief Ukrainian commander Syrsky is Russian, and his parents live in Russia. And many other prominent people.

Taramafor Haikido:
Russia is losing steam because a lot of Russians aren’t willing to fight a pointless war. You can conscript as much as you want, but if people don’t see a point in the war then you’re not inspiring the troops.

Trump fails to inspire. Putin fails to inspire. But Ukraine? They got a good leader.

Meanwhile Putin can’t even get his own troops to not fight each other. Then there was the whole Wagner situation (PMCs turning on him).

It’s a matter of unity. And Putin isn’t unified. Surviving assassination attempts is one thing. But being a leader is another. And he’s used to KGB tactics. Not big wars. It’s a different ball game.

Putin’s past of deception conflicts with the more honest battlefields. So he might be struggling with honesty as a result (the spy life can do that).

A really good leader, like Sun Tzu, will be able to inspire troops. Because they know that while the art of warfare is assumptions it’s also about being prepared to lose. And that’s a game I know very well.

Then there’s the fact Putin has health conditions. He’s desperate. Wants to do something before he dies. What choice did he have though? Is he to wait for old age when he does nothing?

So while the war might seem like a pointless mess, Putin had to make a move. He’s older. He’s got health conditions. And he wants to do something. He might have his flaws but I can understand why he wants to get things done sooner. He’s not going to wait and wallow.

So Putin’s going to do something. Mistake or not. Worst that can happen is you fuck up and learn from it.

Meanwhile Ukraine has been playing the long game. Planned ahead. The patient hunter gets the prey.


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SURGE IN UKRAINIAN ATTACKS ON OIL REFINERIES SPARKS RUSSIAN FUEL SHORTAGES

Ukraine has dramatically increased the number of attacks launched against Russian oil refineries in recent months, sparking fuel shortages and price rises in some parts of the country, BBC Verify and BBC Russian have found.

Drone strikes on refineries — some deep inside Russia — soared in August and remained high in September, an analysis of Russian media reports and verified footage showed.

Some 21 of the country's 38 large refineries — where crude oil is converted into usable fuel like petrol and diesel — have been hit since January, with successful attacks already 48% higher than the whole of 2024.

Ordinary Russians appear to be feeling the impact of the strikes, with verified videos showing long queues at gas stations. Some garages have suspended operations to "wait out the crisis" rather than work at a loss, one manager told Russian media.

Ukraine's security service, the SBU, did not respond to a request for comment. But President Volodymyr Zelensky has said damaging Russia's oil industry is a key means of forcing Russia to the negotiating table.

"The most effective sanctions — the ones that work the fastest — are the fires at Russia's oil refineries, its terminals, and oil depots," the Ukrainian leader said in a September address. "We have significantly restricted Russia's oil industry, and this significantly restricts the war."

Our analysis shows reported attacks reached a record level in August, with 14 refineries targeted by Ukrainian drones, and eight in September. The increase came after a brief lull coinciding with a flurry of diplomacy, during which President Donald Trump attempted to broker a ceasefire deal between Kyiv and Moscow.

Some of the strikes have been launched against facilities deep inside Russia. In late September, the SBU successfully hit the Gazprom Neftekhim Salavat oil refinery in the Bashkortostan region twice.

Satellite images showed smoke billowing from the facility — which is more than 1,100km (683 miles) from the Ukrainian border — after the attack.

Kyiv has also attacked some of Russia's most lucrative facilities. A refinery near Volgograd has been targeted six times this year — with an attack in August forcing it to halt operations for a month. The large Ryazan plant near Moscow — capable of producing 340,000 barrels per day — has been hit five times since January.

Ukrainian strikes appear to be pursuing two targets — large refineries essential to civilian supplies and those closer to the border used to supply troops fighting in Ukraine, Vladimir Milov, a former deputy energy minister under Vladimir Putin and now an exiled opposition politician, told BBC Verify.

Ukraine's general staff has previously claimed that refineries in Samara and Saratov have been used as part of military logistics operations. Both regions have been hit by drone strikes in recent weeks, with two of the three plants in Samara region taken offline.

Justin Crump, an ex-British army officer and CEO of the risk consultancy Sibylline, told BBC Verify that Ukraine had long targeted Russia's oil and gas industry. But he noted that the flurry of strikes showed that the military and security services have now settled on the tactic as a "core campaign."

"This campaign has obviously been the focus of significant investment and is driven by an intelligence assessment of what will hurt Russia the most," Mr Crump said.

It is difficult to measure the extent to which the strikes are impacting the output of petrol and diesel as Russia classified statistics relating to gasoline production in May 2024 amid an earlier spate of attacks on refineries.

But BBC Verify's analysis found that at least 10 oil refineries have been forced to fully or partially suspend operations since August, and the Reuters news agency has reported that on certain days national production has declined by as much as a fifth.

A drone strike at the Ryazan oil refinery near Moscow in January caused a massive blast, forcing it to temporarily suspend operations.

There is some evidence that the refinery strikes are having an impact on civilian life in parts of Russia. Videos confirmed by BBC Verify have shown long lines at petrol stations in the far east and on a highway between St Petersburg and Moscow, while Kremlin-installed officials have introduced rationing of gasoline in occupied Crimea.

Owners of small and independent petrol stations in Siberia have told Russian media they have had to shut down due to ongoing issues with fuel supply. A manager in the Novosibirsk region compared the situation to the hyperinflation experienced by post-Soviet Russia.

"In my opinion we haven't had a crisis like this since 1993-1994," he told local outlet Precedent TV. "Many petrol stations have now suspended their operations. Perhaps it is better to wait out the crisis than take a loss."

While Russia has traditionally seen price increases spurred on by summer traveling and oil refinery maintenance, the drone strikes are exacerbating it.

Retail petrol prices have surged, while wholesale prices — the cost at which retailers buy from producers — have risen even faster, growing by 40% since January.

The tightly controlled domestic media has hinted that drone strikes are a key factor for the shortages, with the daily business newspaper Kommersant attributing the shortfall to "unscheduled refinery shutdowns."

But civilians in western Russia — including the Moscow and Krasnodar regions — appear to be largely unaffected. Some of those who spoke to the BBC said they were unaware of the shortages elsewhere in the country.

Russian officials have insisted that the situation remains under control. Last month Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said that the government had taken "active measures to ensure that the price level for energy and petrol remains stable."

But Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak announced last week that a partial ban on petrol exports had been extended to the end of 2025. Opposition politician Mr Milov noted that the export suspension was relatively small and "won't save the domestic market."

The extent to which the strikes are impacting Moscow's ability to use oil revenues to fund its war in Ukraine is also unclear.

The vast majority of Russia's oil exports are in the form of unrefined crude oil, which do not appear to have been impacted by the strikes. An analysis carried out by Bloomberg at the end of September showed that crude oil exports — while less profitable than petrol and diesel — had reached a record high.

Mr Crump observed that the impact of the strikes could be strengthened if "further measures" and sanctions targeting oil exports were adopted by the West, but emphasized that the attacks were undermining Moscow's ability to fight the war.

"This campaign alone will not bring Russia to its knees, but is definitely increasing the pain of the protracted conflict."

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/czx020k4056o

Oriana:
And meteorologists predict a particularly cold winter for Russia. Russia defeated by its own winter? That would indeed be a historical paradox.

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WHY DID THE COLLAPSE OF USSR LEAD TO A GANGSTER STATE?

Russian music fans are absolutely OK to pay a lot of money to go to a concert of their favorite star to watch him lipsync to a bad recording of his studio album songs.

Consider aging heartthrob and stage 2 alcoholic Grigory Leps recent concert in Vladivostok. In two hours he earned 42 million rubles (half a million dollars) from his fans for lumbering about the stage absolutely drunk as the recording of his songs blasted from the badly tuned amps.

In mid-performance, he asked his audience if anyone had some liquor for him. The answer was “no” and he began to curse them out. Bad serfs! He couldn’t go on, and the show finished without Leps pretending to sing.

You’d think that Leps’ fans would demand their money back. Not quite. They attributed the shortcomings to the singer's poor health, and promised to come back to his next concert this time with some medicines.

No matter the abuse and humiliation from its superiors, Russian people would admit that they deserve this treatment and find ways to justify it.

A young Russian heartthrob Shaman performed the track "Comrade Kim Jong-un" in Pyongyang. The song dedicated to the North Korean leader. This was in gratitude to the provision of soldiers and laborers to make glorious Motherland. An excerpt from the new hit: “Comrade Kim Jong-un, he leads Korea forward. And the entire nation marches in step with him.”

It is important to note that Russia is governed by retirement-age communist apparatchiks —
bureaucracy in service of the sprawling empire of the steppes.

They began their career in the Soviet Union. They had gone through stages of religious indoctrination beginning with admittance into Little Leninist Organization, followed in high school by Youth Communist Organization. As adults they were sworn into the Communist Party. Each stage was accompanied by solemn pledges pronounced in the presence of watchful elders, priests of the ideology that had spread to half the globe.

This explains social cohesiveness of the kleptocrats in power. They stick together like superglued fingertips.

The one thing that was missing in their lives was material well-being. Hankering after material goods was attributed to the influence of corrupt enemy. This was in contrast to the very fact that they pursued government service in order to have access to things denied to the populace.

The sudden granting of the apparatchiks’ wishes caused chaos because those wishes were selfish. They didn’t care that people would acquire material things or have freedom to elect leaders from their own ranks. The apparatchiks wanted everything for themselves.

This is why the “shock therapy,” free market reforms of the 1990s, backfired so spectacularly.
Soviet apparatchiks wanted everything for themselves and nothing for the people, and turned into gangsters.

Mafia state was created on the ruins of the Soviet Union. It was disorganized until Putin took over.

This cunning demon brought order to the hungry ghosts. He divided and conquered to rule over them.

Only Russian people can stop this kleptocratic regime. On the condition that they awaken from serfdom slumber, discover agency, and get pro-active. ~ Misha Firer, Quora

Mitch Verschuera:
Garry Kasparov, the chess master, came to Antwerp yesterday. In an interview he said: “Russians will have to choose: stop the war, or become a colony of China”

Stanislaw Zalewski:
The same applies to EU. EU politicians are in pockets of US and Chinese lobbies. They will wait till we bleed out. US will conveniently wait out again before they join the war, after EU and Russia dissolves into gazillion republics, US and China will take what they want. And we will join Russians in serfdom, although we're probably already there too.

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“TRADITIONAL VALUES” IN RUSSIA

It’s hard to sell Russia as a bastion of traditional family values when it has one of the highest divorce rates in the WORLD. Seven out of ten marriages end in divorce.

The official data on births and deaths is so bad that it has been classified.

140 kindergartens and about 400–500 schools closed down in 2025, while only 43 new schools opened primarily in the new massive apartment complexes in big cities that draw people from rural areas.

While propaganda continues to proudly boast that Russia is the biggest country in the world, population lives on smaller and smaller territory retreating from villages and towns into a handful of large cities located roughly on the same latitude.

In January 12 new schools opened but 0 kindergartens. There were 25% fewer first graders this year, the largest drop in country’s history. Low birth rates are accelerating and as an anecdotal evidence, I stopped seeing any pregnant women in Moscow.

Couples get married less frequently, fearing painful divorce and lacking housing due to high mortgage rates. 

Russian authorities live in denial and continue to repeat like mantra “traditional values” with about as much faith in it as they had in communist ideals, and try to bribe brides into having children (In Russia, bribes bride you). As long as Putin doesn’t get mad at them and they keep their jobs, officials don’t care.

Kremlin professes traditional family values while in reality this society is giving up its ghost. I think I made it very clear. If Russia is invaded, do you think men will go to war for the sake of ex wives who abandoned and fleeced them and took children with them? Or do you think women will join the military? Look at the frontlines — grownup men playing with the drones for three years with the frontline sitting frozen and minimal casualties.

Others are desperately seeking creative ideas how to solve the demographic crisis other than utilize the good old Soviet method of lying about its existence.

Russian Press headlines

Putin’s special friendship with Supreme Leader Kim causes Russian parliament to imitate social practices of North Korea. Will they regulate Botox injections? President will be in big trouble.

The North Korean restaurant "Pyongyang" has opened in Moscow. You can watch North Korean TV programs, read North Korean magazines are listen to North Korean pop bands.
Admission is by passport only, and you have to prove that you have never been to South Korea. The staff is entirely North Korean.

Waitresses in North Korean restaurant are pretty. Food is vegan, out of necessity, not choice.

~ Misha Firer, Quora

Pamela Sage:
What about the soldiers who just missed being unalived in Ukraine and come back maimed? Will they qualify for plastic surgery? For that matter, you say you see no pregnant women on the streets, but are you seeing wounded and disabled ex-soldiers on the streets or are they still sending them all back to the frontline on crutches or prosthetics for the Ukrainians to finish the job, so no compensation or social welfare funds need to be spent?

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ELIE WIESEL’S SON WARNS AGAINST MAMDANI

WSJ Opinion 

~ By propagating lies about ‘occupation,’ ‘apartheid’ and ‘genocide,’ Mamdani helps promote antisemitism. ~

An Irishman and a Jew walk into a Japanese restaurant. It sounds like a joke setup, but there was nothing funny about this near-terminal event for our longstanding friendship—this vignette of being a Jewish New Yorker in 2025. The stark choice we’d each be making between Zohran Mamdani and Andrew Cuomo, divisiveness or unity, loomed throughout.

We talked and laughed about travel, cycling and our loved ones. Then he asked: “Isn’t it terrible where we’ve ended up in the Middle East?”

I was still elated from the Israeli hostages’ release the previous day, and it took me a minute to realize he didn’t share my relief. “It’s been a terrible war,” I agreed, “but I’m optimistic. Thank God President Trump stood with Israel and took out the Iranian nuclear facilities. The Abraham Accords will grow from here.”

“But who’s going to force Israel to make peace?” he asked. “They’re as bad as Hamas.”

We’ve discussed world affairs for 30 years, and I know he reads Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky. But this was the first time I wondered if I had misheard him.

“Are you really both-sides-ing this conflict?” I asked, incredulous. “Are you suggesting the rape, murder and kidnapping by Hamas on Oct. 7—with Gazan civilian participation—is equivalent to Israel’s defensive war?”

Mr. Mamdani’s messaging has made class war and hatred of Jews great again. Smiling, polished, articulate, Mr. Mamdani lies. He lies about Israel as easily as he lies that he can freeze rent and offer free goods through higher taxes, as though the corporations and billionaires he targets can’t relocate.

New Yorkers aren’t dumb, but we’re busy. Mr. Mamdani is lying to those too busy to learn the truth. His attack points: “occupation,” “apartheid,” “genocide.” The casualties: truth, friendships, coexistence for New York’s Jews. Unlike Andrew Cuomo, he seeks to “other” us and divide the city.

Mr. Mamdani blamed Hamas’s butchery on the “occupation” on Oct. 8, while Israel was reeling. He omitted the fact that Israel pulled out of Gaza in 2005 and that Hamas built rockets and tunnels with billions in aid.

“Why couldn’t Israel just accept the Balfour Declaration so many years ago?” my friend asked. I took a breath. How much history was he missing?

Judea and Samaria (the West Bank) belonged to Jordan in the 1947 partition Israel accepted. Jordan, warned to stand down in 1967, attacked anyway and lost the territory. I didn’t add that an al‑Qassam rocket from Ramallah, in the center of the West Bank, could hit Jerusalem in 10 seconds. Israel’s detractors rarely acknowledge its security concerns.

Mr. Mamdani’s apartheid charge also lies by omission. Members of Israel’s 15% Arab minority have sat on its supreme court, run banks and represented the country at Eurovision, and they dominate medicine. The Islamic-majority states around Israel are Judenrein—free of Jews—or nearly so.

“Can’t you just be civilized?” my friend said. “It’s so frustrating watching Israel mistreat the Palestinians.’

“How many Jews live in Gaza?” I asked.

“Zero.”

“Why, do you think?”

“I don’t know. Maybe they don’t want to be there.”

The answer: They’d be killed.

Ugliest and most dangerous of all, this Oct. 7 Mr. Mamdani accused Israel of genocide—normalizing the lie that Israel seeks destruction, not security.

“Elisha, tens of thousands of Gazans died,” my friend said. “Nothing is worth that.”

Genocide requires intent. The Nazis aimed to annihilate all Jews. Israel’s intent is to destroy Hamas, not Palestinians. Before Oct. 7, 18,000 Gazans worked in Israel. Mr. Mamdani knows this even if my friend doesn’t.

After Oct. 7, Israel faced a terrible choice: destroy Hamas or face endless attacks. Hamas hides behind civilians; Israel drops leaflets and sends texts to cellphones before dropping bombs. Who is genocidal—Israel or Hamas?

“For me this isn’t theoretical,” I said. “My nephew, an infantry soldier, is sent into those booby-trapped tunnels whenever we can’t use an airstrike. Does his life matter less?”

My friend was resolute: “Your nephew signed up for this. Nobody else did.”

Mr. Mamdani’s lies endanger Jews everywhere. Incendiary, false and deadly, they spread hatred. More than half of New York’s hate crimes last year were antisemitic. One attacker, shouting “Free Palestine,” stabbed a Jew. Another tried to run Jews over with a car.

I was assaulted last week by anti-Israel marchers at the kind of rally Mr. Mamdani attended, then encouraged, and then endorsed only tacitly as he came under pressure. The signs read: “Glory to the martyrs.” “Violence is resistance.” “Kill the Jews.”

I’m voting for Andrew Cuomo. We need a uniter, not a divider. His support matters at a time when we feel so isolated.

My friend and I left the restaurant, a seam of our friendship unraveling.

“I’m sorry I can’t be with you on this,” he said.

“That’s OK. Jews have been alone for millennia. We’re used to it.”

“Was it worth it—all this fighting?” he asked, his eyes sad. “Do you think you’re winning?”
“Yes. We’re still here.”

Hamas hoped Israel would crumble.

But Israeli water condensation and waste management technology are saving lives, turning haters in Syria into new allies. My Israeli nephew is back in medical school. He’ll be a doctor, like his father and grandfather, healing Jews and Arabs alike. My niece will give birth in December. We love life so much.

Ruth Wisse told me recently that the Jewish superpower is coexistence. As individuals and a nation, we look to encourage abundance, whether economic, cultural or spiritual. Mr. Cuomo champions that ethos. With the city under his leadership, the Jewish community will stand unafraid, contributing the best of ourselves—along with every other precious community—to the melting pot that is our beloved New York. ~ Elisha Wiesel

David Hardinger:
The majority of Jews in NYC do NOT support Mamdami. This is fiction pushed by his campaign to try to normalize him to other Jewish voters. 75% of Jewish NYC voters in recent polling oppose this Islamist antisemite.

Jean Gordon:
There is no "independent Country of Palestine," never was, and never will be.

That is a fiction invented by Yasser Arafat, as is " the Palestinian people,” who, before 1964, called themselves Arabs as did everyone else.

The misnamed "West Bank"( real name = Judea and Samaria) is actually the heartland of Israel and belongs to Israel.

Alan Boyar:
I live in TX, am Jewish and had a neighbor, friend who is liberal and hates Trump.  We still were friends and played golf together.  Then one day we had a nearly identical conversation which became much more heated.  He hasn't spoken to me since and we are not longer friends. Obama's drone strikes killed many innocent children and other civilians, yet only Israel is held responsible for causing any collateral damage.  

Richard Smith:
Let's face it, Israel wants ALL of Palestine, including the West Bank. The situation in the West Bank is similar to the U.S. as it expanded into the lands of native Americans. After signing a well-meaning treaty guaranteeing this or that tribe land and safety, gold prospectors and/or settlers streamed into the treaty lands. When native American tribes attacked the illegal settlers, the U.S sent in soldiers to "protect" the settlers. 

Eventually the Anglo-Americans got it all. Manifest Destiny. But in both cases, don't try to tell me it's just or fair. It's just the sad outcome of the tribal nature of the human species. I don't blame the Palestinians for fighting and I don't blame the Israelis for fighting back. 

Unfortunately, the Jewish population of Israel is using up all the sympathy capital accrued during the Holocaust.

Oriana:
What struck me here is that this is a mayoral race, and yet the only issue that seems to be of interest is the support or non-support of Israel. Rents and the cost of living in New York, crime, education, transportation, public health — relatively speaking, these seem non-issues next to the candidates’ views on the West Bank, for instance. So it is in the spirit of astonishment that I chose to post this. 

I find Richard Smith’s post interesting — “Eventually the Anglo-Americans got it all.” This reminds of a remark I read somewhere (sorry to be so vague) — a prominent Israeli saying, “We came too late.” A few centuries ago one could indeed cite “Manifest Destiny,” and deny that Native Americans (back then called “Indians” because Columbus kept insisting that he discovered the west shore of India) had any rights to the land. And back and in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth century non-whites basically didn’t count. As for "All men were created equal," a history professor explained that it meant white male property owners. 

Nevertheless, human culture, including ethics, kept on evolving, and at some point it wasn’t just fine to arrive somewhere, plant one’s flag, and declare the land to be now the property of the newcomer. 

Now there is talk of “equal rights” and the young almost automatically tend to take the side of whoever they perceived as “the oppressed.”  The times, they are a-changing. 

Still, when I look at the United States, I am tempted to say that the most successful countries seem to thrive on being a mix of ethnicities. But maybe the plural should be avoided. The United States has many unique features, and it came into being at just the right time, historically speaking.  

I think of the United States as the luckiest country in the world. Not perfect, but certainly lucky. 

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MISHA IOSSEL ON THE DESTRUCTION OF THE EAST WING OF THE WHITE HOUSE

In 1979, in order to erect his trashy monument to himself, his Tower, Trump purchased for $15 million the historic Bonwit Teller building and then promptly proceeded to destroy the priceless Art Deco friezes on its facade and the bronze latticework above its entrance. He also demolished, for good measure, the rest of the artwork both on the outside and inside the building.

In 2001, the Taliban exploded Afghanistan's ancient Buddhas of Bamiyan statues.

The destruction of the East Wing is not just a metaphoric or, conversely, strictly pragmatic affair for Trump — it is the living manifestation of his unquenchable urge to express his disdain for the American history, for tradition, for the spirit of order and civility, legacy, humility, and constitutional checks and balances. It's yet another one of his FU's to America. He is a miserable, self-loathing vandal. ~ Facebook

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POLAND’S NAZI UNDERGROUND LABYRINTH

What was once an underground Nazi city is now Europe's largest bat reserve.

The countryside around the little Polish village of Pniewo looks serene, with its yellow crops and patches of forest, but beneath the surface lies a sprawling 20-mile maze of tunnels, shafts, underground railway stations and combat facilities.

This is the Ostwall, a fortified subterranean complex built by the Nazis and abandoned in 1945. In the 1980s and ‘90s, a subculture known as the Bunker People took over the tunnels, hosting unauthorized and often dangerous events here, from raves to weddings. Today, bats are its inhabitants, some 40,000 of them taking refuge in the darkness.

In the 21st century, it’s been given new life as a dark tourism destination, with 19 miles of tunnels open to explore in the Międzyrzecz Fortified Region Museum.

The complex consists of a 20-mile maze of tunnels, underground railway stations, and combat facilities built by the Nazis. It was built starting in 1934 as a defensive line to stop a potential Soviet attack on Germany. 

After the war, the Polish army briefly used the site, but it was largely abandoned again. In the 1980s, it was a hangout for "Bunker People" who hosted unauthorized events. 

Today, it is a major bat sanctuary, with around 40,000 bats using the tunnels for hibernation. Some parts have been opened to the public as the Międzyrzecz Fortified Region Museum, offering both guided tours and "extreme" trekking through the tunnels. 

There is a different Nazi underground complex located in the Owl Mountains of southern Poland. It is also open to tourists and includes sites like the Osówka Underground City. 

(From another source)

When the Nazis built the imposting Ostwall Fortification in the mid-1930s the intention was to create a defense against invading Russian forces, but they clearly could not have foreseen the invasion of bats that would overtake the tunnels once they were abandoned.   

The Ostwall Fortification, otherwise known as the tongue twisting "Festungsfront Oder-Warthe-Bogen," was constructed as a massive self-sufficient bunker defense system that was connected by almost 25 miles of tunnels and underground support chambers. The underground complex connected around a hundred pillbox bunkers creating one of the largest and most extensive defense lines Nazi Germany ever created. It was estimated that at full capacity and operation the system could house 24,000 soldiers comfortably. 

The bunker system was seen as a bit of a revolutionary endeavor at the time, both in terms of efficiency and efficacy. However when the attack on the base actually came, there were just 1,000 soldiers manning the massive defense. The Nazi's impressive defensive juggernaut fell in just three days.

 
After the Nazi's fled from their bunker city the site was essentially abandoned by humans but became home to some new tenants: tens of thousands of bats! Attracted to the tunnels thanks to the dark, temperate atmosphere and shelter for their winter hibernation, the flying mammals took to the tunnels in droves.

Today the tunnel complex has become the largest man-made bat reserve in Europe, holding around 37,000 bats during the packed winters during which tourists are not allowed in the tunnels. Many portions of the tunnels are open to visitors at other times of the year, but during bat season the Ostwall Fortification provides a safe space for the animals to rest, defended from the outside world. The Nazis could only have wished it would've been so effective for them.   

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MARK TWAIN ON HIS IMPRESSIONS OF THE LAND OF PALESTINE (the term used in Twain’s times)

It is in Mark Twain’s book The Innocents Abroad, and you’ll find most of what you want in chapters 45 through 56. Twain made his journey in 1867.

In chapter 46, for example, Twain has crossed from Syria into Palestine (as he calls it), and retells the story of the Biblical meeting between Jael and Sisera. He writes: “Stirring scenes like these occur in this valley no more. There is not a solitary village throughout its whole extent—not for thirty miles in either direction. There are two or three small clusters of Bedouin tents, but not a single permanent habitation. One may ride ten miles, hereabouts, and not see ten human beings.”

In general, what some people seem to find controversial is Twain’s description of a barren landscape, almost completely devoid of people, and those few people mainly living in grinding poverty.

He was describing, in short, what an American Christian found in Ottoman-era Palestine, circa, 1867, just before the rise of modern Zionism. 

The early Zionists found a land suffering heavily from malaria, among other things. It was so bad that, in some villages, the infant mortality rate approached 100%.

To fix the problem, swamps needed to be drained, and kept from coming back. This was a decades-long backbreaking project. (It is not for nothing that the second Zionist mass migration, the Second Aliyah, was called “the Aliyah of suicides”. Life was unbelievably grim.)

You can find maps, made by the British right after World War One, showing where malaria was most prevalent. It’s a close match with the map of the UN’s 1947 Partition Plan… because where malaria was strongest was exactly the land the Zionists would purchase, in order to fight the disease.

But the project succeeded. And in modern Israel, there is rich farmland where the malaria swamps had been. ~ Daniel Schwartz, Quora

Ronald Alan Perry:
Neither Mark Twain, nor anyone who’s been quoted here or commented said that Palestine was uninhabited or a barren desert. Palestine was, however, a neglected, sparsely populated and disease-ridden province of the Ottoman Empire, much of whose land was owned by absentee “effendies.” Bahá’ís are familiar with the story of how our Prophet/Founder, Bahá’u’lláh, was sent as a prisoner to Acre in 1868 n hopes that the city’s foul climate will make an end of him and those who accompanied him there. 

When, at a later time, the conditions of Bahá’u’lláh’s imprisonment were relaxed, his son was able to purchase, very cheaply, properties whose owners had fled cholera epidemics, as well as extensive tracts on Mt. Carmel in nearby Haifa, upon which the Bahá’í World Center and gardens now stand. 

After Bahá’u’lláh had lived for some time in Acre and won the esteem of its inhabitants, some were heard to attribute an improvement in the climate to his presence there. I rather suspect (with apologies to my Bahá’í co-religionists) that the influx of Zionists around that time, and their draining of malaria-breeding marshes offers a more likely explanation.

Oriana:
There were certainly villages and towns in pre-Israel Palestine. There was Jerusalem with its Church of the Holy Sepulcher. There was Jericho, and Bethlehem.

Here is a view of Bethlehem in 1872:


Image from Henry Baker Tristram’s Scenes in the East: Consisting of Twelve Coloured Photographic Views of Places Mentioned in the Bible (1872)

*
HOW TO TELL AI PHOTOS FROM THE REAL ONES

You don’t need advanced technology to dupe people online. We showed over 3,000 high schoolers a grainy video of poll workers dumping ballots to rig an election. A slapped-on caption, blaring in red font and caps lock, was enough to hoodwink students into believing U.S. voter fraud—even though the footage was from Russia. Only three students figured that out. 

We’ve long warned that cheap fakes were more dangerous than deepfakes: nearly as effective but far easier to make. This past election, even with AI tools available to the masses, it was old-school videos spliced with digital duct tape that fueled debates about President Joe Biden’s fitness to serve. 

Now, the era of cheap fakes is ending. Viral deep fakes made with new video tools mark an even more treacherous informational terrain. Thanks to products such as Google’s Veo 3, OpenAI’s Sora 2, and Meta’s Vibes, AI slop is now so easy to produce that it is metastasizing across our screens, aided by platforms’ wholesale retreat from fact-checking. To navigate today’s internet, we need guidance from ancient wisdom: Muslim, Jewish, Buddhist, and other faiths’ age-old emphasis on the centrality of reputation. 

Devout Muslims trace back the sayings of Muhammad through a “chain of narration,” or “isnad.” Religious Jews interpret Talmudic teachings in the context of the rabbi who intoned them. Tibetan Buddhists orally transmit tenets in a lineage from the Buddha to the present. All of these traditions encourage us to reason about information, but only after we trace it back to where it comes from and assess the reputation of the sages who stood behind it.

Reputation matters in secular contexts as well: it’s the mechanism we use to make decisions when we lack knowledge and expertise. We rely on reputation when choosing a therapist or a plumber, a restaurant to go to or a hotel to book. We ask people we trust and consult reviews because we recognize that no one is likely to disclose their flaws or ulterior motives.

Reputation is crucial in so many areas of our lives. Why, then, on the internet, do most people ignore it?

Our research group has tested thousands of young people’s ability to evaluate information online. Again and again, we’ve seen them judge content while disregarding where it comes from. One student from rural Ohio trusted the voter fraud video because they thought their naked eye was able to detect “fraud in multiple different states.” A student from Pennsylvania wrote that the video clearly “showed people entering fake votes into boxes.”

The same pattern gets supercharged when it comes to AI. A teacher who shared their experience with 404 Media recounted asking a student how they knew if information from ChatGPT was accurate. The student shoved the phone in the teacher’s face: “Look, it says it right here!'" Our pilot studies in high school and college classrooms point to a similar trend: many students put their trust in AI chatbots, even when those chatbots omit context about where information comes from. 

Too many internet users fail to consider reputation or mistake Google or ChatGPT for vetted sources rather than flawed aggregators. When people try to evaluate reputation, they’re swayed by easily-gamed signals provided by the source itself: a dot.org domain, official-sounding language on the “about” page, the quantity of data irrespective of its quality, or gut feelings about how something looks.

These features glitter like fool’s gold. Anyone can get a dot-org domain, including hate groups. Holocaust denial sites claim in their about pages to “provide factual information.” Posts with fancy charts can contain noxious misinformation. And reports suggest that AI is so realistic that it forces us to doubt  our own senses: from clones that sound like our parents to hyper-realistic fakes of a blaze engulfing Seattle’s Space Needle.

This information landscape presents a no-win choice between submission and solipsism: not caring what’s true, or insisting that nothing is. The former leaves us vulnerable to bad actors who weaponize realistic clips. The latter leaves us devoid of good information. Both options erode informed citizenship at a time when it’s in short supply. 

Here’s what we can do: instead of focusing on the content itself, first ask who’s behind it, much as faith traditions consider teachings in the context of who said them. 

And when wielded skillfully, the very tools that mislead us can help us out of this conundrum. Not by outsourcing our thinking to technology—but by using technology to establish reputation and sharpen our thinking.

The three students who figured out that the voter fraud video was from Russia didn’t engage in any kind of technical wizardry. They just opened up a new tab, entered a few choice keywords, and found articles from credible sources such as the BBC and Snopes debunking it. And with a few canny pointers on how LLMs work and how to effectively structure prompts, AI can actually aid us in verifying posts on social media and offer missing context.

Major AI tools include throwaway disclaimers telling users to verify information. “Gemini can make mistakes, so double-check it,” Google says. “ChatGPT can make mistakes. Check important info,” advises OpenAI. But from Generation Alpha to Baby Boomers, almost everyone struggles at verifying the information they encounter. 

The good news is that all of us can get better. Even a few hours of instruction on how to gauge reputation can move the needle—as we saw in studies we’ve conducted everywhere from high school classrooms in Nebraska and California to college courses in Georgia and Texas. Before, students trusted their eyes to figure out if something was reliable. After, they learned to get a bead on the source’s reputation. Studies in Canada, Germany, India,  and elsewhere have found similar positive results. 

When we can no longer distinguish real from AI-generated content, it can feel downright futile trying to decide what to trust. But we can better cope with today’s knowledge ecosystem by doubling down on an ancient lesson: the importance of reputation. 

https://time.com/7327697/ancient-principle-help-spot-ai-fakes/

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WHEN EVERYTHING’S FAKE, WHAT’S THE POINT OF SOCIAL MEDIA?

 Earlier this week, a heartwarming post about a girl, a puppy, and a police officer went viral across social media platforms. The post consisted of two dashcam images of a distraught 12-year-old who, desperate to heal her sick puppy, got behind the wheel for the first time and tried to drive to the vet. She was pulled over, but commended by a police officer for being “amazing, strong, compassionate, and smart,” and the puppy was saved. Comments flooded in celebrating the bond between a girl and her furry best friend. 

But when social media users took a closer look, they noticed a few strange things: the steering wheel was on the right side of the car, which also lacked a dashboard. And the image hadn’t originated on any news platform or official police page, but rather simply appeared on Facebook on its own. 

The image, perhaps predictably, was another example of AI slop: images created via AI, designed for maximum engagement on social media, slipping into user feeds with no signal of whether they’re real or fake. As far as AI slop goes, this instance was relatively harmless. But increasingly more AI slop churned through social media this week thanks to the arrival of Sora 2, OpenAI’s new advanced text-to-video model. 

Some videos were clearly fabricated, like Pope John Paul II wrestling Tupac in the ring. Others were harder to discern, like a boy being swept away by a tornado, or homeless men being inserted into people’s homes. Sora became the most downloaded free app in Apple’s App Store in its first week. 

Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, says he hopes these Sora 2 videos will “feel fun and new,” while also helping train his AIs about how the 3D world works. Critics, on the other hand, see them as a potential death knell for social media. What was supposed to be a revolutionary medium for maintaining friendships and relationships has now become a fake content generation machine—where it’s impossible to tell what’s real and what’s not. 

“For years, the internet has been a place where people go to feel connected. But if everything online starts to feel fake, and our For You pages are all Sora-generated videos, people will start retreating back into what's physically provable,” says Kashyap Rajesh, a vice president at the youth-led organization Encode. “The irony is that AI might end up saving human connection and human relationships because they're making us so desperate for that real thing.”

Short-term growth

Realistic AI-generated images and videos have been an important goal for every major AI lab over the last few years. AI leaders hope that users will be able to create music videos, movies, and advertisements quickly and cheaply, spurring a new age of creativity. Some also believe that video models are the key to ushering in artificial general intelligence, or AGI—ultra-smart AI that understands physics perfectly, and thus can move seamlessly through the world. 

In order to hone their models, these companies need users to create large amounts of content that can be used for training data. This year alone, Meta has released a dedicated AI video feed called Vibes; Google released Veo 3; and Bytedance released Seedance, to name a few AI video offerings. These apps can be viewed as part of a larger flywheel: to gain mainstream usage that simultaneously improves their products. 

In the short term, these products are seeing heavy use, and generating significant traffic creators who have embraced the medium. For instance, Gnomo Palomo, a Spanish language video series about a GoPro-wearing gnome embarking on magical adventures, has garnered hundreds of thousands of likes and followers in the last four months alone. And video game spinoffs of the Italian Brainrot cinematic universe have broken all sorts of records on Roblox and Fortnite. 

But Ben Colman, the CEO and co-founder of the deepfake detection platform Reality Defender, says that while these videos may be generating jumps in revenue for the platforms, their success may be short-lived. "I think history has proven this kind of race to the bottom in terms of quality of content tends to be negative for the platforms themselves,” he says.

Colman points to MySpace as an example of a platform that suffered when it didn’t prioritize its users, instead cluttering its pages with ads and tedious experiences. “If you’re just gonna see a bunch of noise, it becomes less of a personal connection,” he says.  

Altman, in a blog post, wrote that Sora 2 would be optimized for “long-term user satisfaction,” and that OpenAI would shut the product down if they felt it was making users feel worse. 

Social dangers

The decline of social media, if it happens, will inevitably be a slow one. Until then, critics worry about how the rise of AI slop will impact society. Rajesh, at Encode, argues that realistic AI videos will threaten our shared understanding of reality. Videos on social media used to be understood as proof that events actually happened—and could change the course of history, like in the case of George Floyd. Now, real events will be dismissed as fake, and fake events will be believed as real; disinformation and misinformation campaigns could run rampant.

“It’s making a lot of our feeds high-noise, low-trust spaces, where every emotional moment becomes suspect,” Rajesh says. “It kind of creates this low-level paranoia within people that kills the spontaneity and magic of social media to begin with.”

Sora videos come with a watermark, signifying their AI origins. But tools have already been created to either add or remove watermarks from videos. This means that it’s now easy to create, for instance, fake dashcam footage for insurance fraud. 

Colman conducted a security experiment with his team at Reality Defender and found that he was able to use Sora to create AI impersonations of prominent people—and then “authenticate” them as if they originated from the celebrities themselves. “When you have a multi-billion dollar company claiming they’ve already done the identity checking, that makes all this danger a millionfold more dangerous,” he says. 

It’s no secret that social media algorithms reward divisive content. Colman worries that AI will only exacerbate this dynamic. “The platforms are effectively marketplaces for attention. It’s a better return on investment if you’re trying to generate attention on extreme views,” he says. “It creates this infinitely more polarizing echo chamber of giving mass market consumers what they need to become more extreme in all things.”

Meanwhile, Rajesh says that the pervasive rise of deepfakes could escalate the usage of “proof of identity” systems in which people need to prove they’re a human in order to engage online. (Sam Altman actually has one such solution, Worldcoin, which verifies users by scanning their eyes.) 

Going offline

In response to these changes, a growing number of disenchanted people are taking the leap and renouncing their phones altogether. Earlier this year, Grant Besner co-organized an educational program in D.C. called Month Offline, in which participants are encouraged to turn off their smartphones for a month and interrogate their relationships with their devices. 
To advertise for the program this summer, Besner put up flyers around D.C. reading: “fake images of real people, real images of fake people, discontent with content… Ditch the doomscroll. Call 1-844-OFFLINE.”

Besner says the hotline received hundreds of calls in response. “I’ve had conversations with so many people who have a very fraught relationship with their touch screen, and a big part of that is their relationship to content itself: mindlessly scrolling through things that aren't adding anything to their life,” Besner says. 

Other organizations are testing similar approaches. The Aspen Institute, for example, organized an “Airplane Mode” gathering this year. Andrew Yang, the former presidential candidate, has been hosting phone-free parties in New York, and hawking a new phone plan, Noble Mobile, which reimburses users for their leftover data. 

Besner adds that the advent of Sora 2 and hyper-realistic video “may be the breaking point where humans kind of reclaim some of their agency and say, ‘You know what, this whole frictionless way of relating to information and to each other and to ourselves maybe isn't producing better outcomes.’” 

https://time.com/7326718/sora-2-ai-fake-videos-social-media/?itm_source=parsely-api

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THE PARENTAL HAPPINESS FALLACY


Money is supposed to make life easier. But whether it makes life easier for parents has become a surprisingly contentious question.

A couple of years ago, Pew Research Center published a survey about American parenting that stumbled on a somewhat counterintuitive finding: Lower-income parents were more likely than middle- or higher-income parents to say that they found parenting enjoyable and rewarding “all or most of the time.” 

The difference was pretty marginal—most parents, regardless of income level, reported finding parenthood enjoyable all or most of the time—but that one data point got people talking. Think pieces proliferated, in which people reflected on why the most disadvantaged parents were “less exhausted and stressed and more rewarded by parenthood,” and why women with more advantages were “the unhappiest mothers,” reporting “the highest levels of dissatisfaction with motherhood.” 

Simone and Malcolm Collins, the venture capitalists turned pronatalists, hosted a podcast episode on the Pew research, “debunking the bias that poorer people must be miserable raising children” and arguing that “cultural factors like faith and insulation from the childless urban monoculture better enable them to find meaning in parenting.”

But these accounts tended to downplay (or ignore) another important finding in that Pew report: “Lower-income parents are also more likely than those with upper incomes to say parenting is stressful all or most of the time”—and by a much bigger margin. At higher rates than well-off parents, they consistently reported worrying that their children would struggle with anxiety and depression; get bullied, kidnapped, beaten, or shot; struggle with substance abuse; or run into trouble with the law.

That is, even the Pew study contradicted the claims people were making about wealthier moms being the most miserable and stressed. And although some evidence really does suggest that higher-income moms face a certain flavor of stress that lower-income moms do not, quite a bit of the evidence goes in exactly the direction you might expect: Better-off moms are, well, better off.

A more thorough rundown of Pew’s and other data suggests that the question of which moms struggle most in the United States is much more complex than many commentators have asserted. When I reached out to Jennifer Glass, a sociology professor at the University of Texas at Austin who studies family and gender issues, to ask how parental well-being and socioeconomic status interact, she said she does not believe that the evidence supports the idea that wealthy, highly educated parents struggle with parenthood more than lower-income, less-educated ones. “There’s simply no data on mental health, subjective well-being, or happiness that I have ever seen showing this,” Glass told me.

In Glass’s own research on how partnership and higher levels of income and education influence parental well-being, she has found that “all three significantly improve happiness for parents,” she told me. Data that the Institute for Family Studies shared with me likewise suggest that the proportion of mothers who say they are somewhat or completely satisfied with their lives rises in lockstep with their household income. Put another way: Wealthier moms are in fact happier moms.

Things get a bit more complicated when you stop asking which parents are “happiest” and start asking how parenthood affects a person’s well-being. The research on this question is mixed. And pretty much all of the data suffer from the reality that, as any stats teacher will remind you, correlation does not necessarily imply causation. “At the end of the day, we can’t be 100 percent confident that what we are attributing to being a parent is not related to some sort of third variable that we haven’t accounted for,” Jennifer Augustine, a sociology professor at the University of South Carolina who studies inequalities in family well-being, told me.

Researchers do have some evidence suggesting that higher-income parents, and in particular higher-income moms, take a distinct kind of hit to their well-being that lower-income parents don’t—perhaps on account of heightened social pressure to engage in intensive parenting. It’s well established, for example, that although college-educated mothers spend about the same amount of time with their kids as do moms with less education, they spend more of it engaged in “developmentally stimulating” activities such as reading or playing, Ariel Kalil, a professor of public policy at the University of Chicago, told me. 

Using data from the American Time Use Survey—which asks respondents what they did the previous day and how they felt while doing it—various researchers have posed this question: Do highly educated moms enjoy focused time with their kids more than lower-educated moms do? The studies took slightly different approaches to testing the question, but their results pointed in the same direction: “The answer is a very precise no,” Kalil told me. If anything, higher-educated moms enjoy it less.

Another study, co-written by Augustine, used the same data in a slightly different way, examining how parents of different education levels felt throughout the day compared with how nonparents felt. Building on previous research finding that parenting was “associated with a ‘mixed bag’ of emotions,” with parents experiencing more daily happiness and meaning but also more stress than their nonparent peers, it found that this was true only for highly educated moms. Lower-educated moms did not report higher levels of stress (or happiness) than their child-free counterparts.

A multitude of factors seem to be at play here. “If you go to any playground in any middle-class neighborhood, the No. 1 thing that moms will be talking about—because they’re the ones who are most often at the playground—is what activities their kids are involved in,” Augustine told me. Arranging and managing those activities takes a lot of cognitive energy and carries its own stress. “It’s kind of like more money, more problems,” she said. Highly educated parents are also more likely to have moved away from family in pursuit of educational and professional opportunities, leaving them without nearby grandparents or siblings to help with child care, Daniela Negraia, a behavioral scientist and the other co-author of Augustine’s study, told me. 

And of course, “the alternatives to parenthood for moms are vastly different by class,” Glass said. For instance, highly educated moms, who are more likely to work white-collar jobs, might have the chance to answer emails in the relative peace of an air-conditioned office and consider that a welcome break from waiting out toddler tantrums. For lower-income moms, who are more likely to work in the service and hospitality industries, “the chaos at the dinner table might be music to your ears,” Glass told me, “compared to the noise and pollution of your worksite, where you might be disrespected or harassed.”

If you are struggling to piece together a simple narrative based on these data points, that makes sense. Each of these analyses measures different things, in different ways. Asking someone how stressed or happy they felt while feeding their toddler yesterday is quite different from asking how stressful they find parenthood in general, or how satisfied they are with their life overall. When you pluck one data point from that Pew study on parenting, it seems to suggest one thing. When you pluck out another, it suggests something else entirely. When you take those points together, along with the broader body of research on class and parenthood, the only clear deduction is that people’s feelings about parenthood are pretty complicated.

And when you compare parents and nonparents using broader indicators? Having money and education starts to look pretty good—or, at least, not bad. Take, for example, this study published in January. Its goal was to figure out whether and how the pandemic affected the so-called parental-happiness gap. 

Historically, parents have had lower happiness levels than nonparents, at least in the U.S. The study found that by the time the pandemic began, that gap had closed—and no differences emerged in the happiness gap between parents of different education levels. (This changed during the pandemic, when the happiness of nonparents declined more than that of parents, leaving parents with a happiness advantage—perhaps because their children helped to buffer them against isolation, or because the broad expansion of public support for families provided them more of a financial cushion.)

Another recent study, drawing on a survey of 30 European countries, explored the ways in which parenthood is associated with both “life satisfaction” and “meaning in life.” It found that although parenthood is pretty uniformly associated with people feeling a greater sense of meaning, regardless of gender or socioeconomic status, it is linked to lower life satisfaction for women, especially for the most vulnerable ones—young moms, those without a partner, and those with the least education.

It may be a little off base to believe that wealthier moms struggle the most with parenthood. But even to the degree that they face unique stressors, this does not mean, as so much commentary on wealthier, stressed-out moms has suggested, that those stressors are of the moms’ own making. No amount of money can buy an American parent out of the reality that they will have to raise kids capable of surviving without much of a social safety net. The conclusion to draw from the struggles of well-off moms is not that they have it harder than other parents or that they’re putting a ridiculous amount of pressure on themselves, but that all parents would benefit from more robust family-friendly policies.

After all, the study based in Europe found that the motherhood life-satisfaction penalty varies considerably by region: In the famously family-friendly Nordic countries, moms report a life-satisfaction bonus. Although parenthood in many places is a trade-off between happiness and meaning, “it doesn’t have to be,” Ansgar Hudde, a professor at the University of Cologne and a co-author of the study, told me. When conditions are broadly supportive, parents can have both.

https://www.theatlantic.com/family/2025/10/mom-happiness-survey-data/684636/?utm_source=firefox-newtab-en-us

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HOW TO BE HAPPY AS YOU GROW OLDER

1. Savor Small Moments

Happiness doesn’t have to come from big events or achievements, particularly as we get older. Research in positive psychology shows that savoring small daily pleasures can boost mood and build emotional resilience. Even (and especially) the little things, like the warmth of your cup of tea, a bird’s song, or the feeling of sunlight on your skin. It’s about slowing down enough to truly notice, and not rushing through life on autopilot.

Try this: Today, pick one ordinary moment—like your morning coffee, your walk to the mailbox, or the sound of rain. Give it your full attention for 60 seconds. Notice every detail, let yourself enjoy it fully, and see how it shifts your mood. You’ve just experienced presence, which has been scientifically linked to reducing inflammation, lowering stress response and regulating emotions.

2. Reframe the Story of Aging

The stories we tell ourselves determine the way we live our lives. And the same goes for aging—how we talk about getting older shapes how we feel about it. Instead of thinking of aging through a lens of loss or decline, it can be helpful to switch it up and think of it as a phase of growth, reflection, and contribution.

Studies on narrative identity reveal that people who embrace aging as a new chapter full of new opportunities experience better mental health and life satisfaction. 

Try this: Write down or reflect on one way you’ve grown wiser, braver, or more creative in the last 10 years. You can keep it to yourself, or choose to share that story with a friend or family member. It’s a powerful way to remind yourself that aging is adding, not subtracting.

3. Bring Play Back into Your Life

Play isn’t just for kids. Adults who engage in play see real benefits, whether engaging in a hobby, having a game night, or trying something new just for kicks. Studies show that leisure activities help older adults maintain cognitive function, physical health, and mental wellbeing.

Beyond that, playful aging also improves attention, working memory, mood and social connection according to a study conducted by Frontiers in Human Neuroscience. And, as we’ve all experienced at least a handful of times across our lives, play and joy produce feel-good chemicals (such as dopamine) while lowering stress and strengthening relationships.

Try this: This week, choose one playful activity that feels fun—not useful. It could be a quick game, a gentle walk in a new place, a dance to an old favorite song, or doodling something silly. Do it purely for joy, for at least 10 minutes. Notice how it shifts your mood or sparks a connection with someone. Then, plan one more joyful moment for next week!

4. Connect with Nature

Spending time in nature benefits both body and mind. It can reduce stress hormones, improve mood, sharpen attention, and even lower blood pressure. For older adults, these benefits can translate into better sleep, improved mobility, and reduced feelings of isolation.

And here’s encouraging news for those with mobility challenges, or those who live in areas where weather or location limits access to outdoor spaces: Nature doesn’t have to be natural for you to reap the benefits!

Emerging research shows that virtual nature experiences can offer many of the same mental health benefits, whether you take an immersive forest walk or pull up next to the ocean via virtual reality. In care home settings, VR nature programs have been shown to boost mood, reduce loneliness, and spark conversations and memories.

Even simple nature videos or live-streamed webcams of beaches, gardens, or forests can create a restorative sense of calm. Pairing these visuals with natural soundscapes enhances the effect.
Try this: If you can, take 10–15 minutes this week to step outside, even if it’s just onto a balcony or porch. Focus on what you can see, hear, and feel. Bonus points if you can step on the grass or sit or stand under a tree!

If that’s not possible, choose a virtual alternative: search YouTube for ‘4K nature walk’ or ‘relaxing ocean sounds.’ For added benefits, look at nature imagery while breathing slowly and deeply for 2–3 minutes—you might be surprised how refreshed you feel.

5. Find Purpose in Small Ways

Purpose doesn’t have to mean building a legacy or changing the world. Instead, we can find it in the small, consistent ways we show up for others and ourselves. Research from the University of Michigan found that just two to three hours of purposeful activity per week can significantly boost mental health, increase feelings of meaning, and even extend longevity— whether it’s helping a neighbor with errands, volunteering at a local charity, mentoring someone, or sharing your skills.

Psychologists believe this is because purposeful activity gives us a sense of identity, social connection, and contribution, all of which are essential for emotional wellbeing as we age.
Try this: Think of one skill, interest, or strength you already have, and find a simple way to share it with others this week. It could be baking for a neighbor, calling an old friend to check in, reading to children at a library, or offering your expertise to a local group. Aim for a total of two hours this week and notice how your mood shifts.

Happiness Is a Skill You Can Build

While happiness may be more native to older people, it doesn’t just happen in old age—it’s something you can create, shape, and grow. The secret isn’t in chasing perfection or denying challenges but in choosing to savor, connect, play, and contribute in ways that feel authentic to you.

https://www.thecareside.com.au/post/finding-happiness-as-we-age/

Oriana:
This is actually a radical change in thinking: “happiness is a skill you can build.” What I lacked for a long time — and I mean decades of what might be regarded as my prime — was the motivation to be happy. It seemed an unworthy, meaningless goal, completely uninspiring. 

What I wanted was not happiness, but meaningful work. I wanted to pursue excellence, not happiness (whatever that was). I wanted to learn new things. I was hoping for something unusual to happen to me, so that I could write about it. It was only later in life that I realized that happiness itself is a challenging achievement, built through skillful self-talk and the choice of right activities (depending quite a bit on the stage of life -- only my love of learning has remained a constant). 

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THE COUNTERCLOCKWISE STUDY

Every year, the Happiness and Its Causes conference in Sydney brings together some of the world’s best scientists, educators, psychologists and artists to explore happiness and fulfillment from all possible angles.

In 2012, psychology professor Ellen Langer appeared on the event’s stage to discuss her book Counterclockwise: Mindful Health and the Power of Possibility and some of its most illuminating revelations.

‘The study of possibility is the study of what might be rather than a mere description of what is’, she said during her presentation. ‘Possibility opens up when we recognize the difference between uncontrollable and indeterminate… trying is the key’.

Langer is a pioneering researcher in aging. In 1981, she became the first woman ever to be tenured in psychology at Harvard University in the U.S., where she continues as a professor of psychology today. A social scientist with little regard for convention, Langer earned the moniker ‘The Mother of Mindfulness’ for her work exploring the human mind and all of its untapped potential.

‘When we’re mindless, we’re not there to notice we’re not there’, she said during her appearance. Langer has built her entire 50-plus-year career on that premise, time and again claiming—and proving through original scientific experiments—that mindset matters. A lot!
Our beliefs and expectations about aging, specifically, can have a monumental impact on our health as we get older.

In 1979, Langer conducted an experiment to demonstrate just that.

The Counterclockwise Study

For her experiment, Langer accompanied a group of eight elderly men in their 70s to a residential retreat that was set up to recreate the social-physical environment of 1959.

Her question was: If we turn the clock back psychologically, can we also do it physically?

As Langer explained in her Happiness and Its Causes presentation, the experiment started somewhat inadvertently the moment the group arrived at the retreat. The elderly men had brought heavy suitcases for the week-long stay, and with only Langer there to assist them, they had no choice but to carry their bulky luggage on their own.

What seemed like an oversight at first—not having younger, stronger people present to help unload things—actually set a precedent for the entire retreat. The elderly men couldn’t take a defeatist attitude, or else their suitcases would have been left in the van.

Despite their advanced age, the group successfully hauled the luggage into a residence that was actually more like a time machine. They spent the week sequestered there, in 1959, speaking in the present tense about the past while truly living, believing and behaving as though the clock had turned back two decades. They didn’t simply remember what life was like in 1959—they lived it.

They listened to Perry Como and Jack Benny songs on a 1950s radio. They watched Ed Sullivan on a black-and-white television. They discussed current events, watched movies, flipped through magazines, and even dressed like it was two decades prior. There weren’t any mirrors in the house to disrupt the illusion, either; the only reminders the men had about their appearance were portraits they’d brought of their younger selves.

Outside that residence, it was still 1979.

But inside it, the eight elderly men involved in Langer’s experiment became young again. And by the end of the week, their physical health reflected that psychological reversal of time: they showed substantial improvements in flexibility, dexterity, memory, hearing, posture, cognitive ability and general wellbeing. They even looked younger to outside observers who were shown photos of them before and after the experiment.

The Power of Possibility

To this day, more than 50 years after the experiment, Ellen Langer argues  the physical limitations we encounter as we get older are largely determined by how we think about ourselves and our capabilities.

The moment those eight men arrived at her experimental retreat in 1979, they were no longer elderly and feeble—if they had been, their suitcases would’ve never made it inside.

They spent the rest of the retreat immersed in such a different mindset, that by the end of the week, post-experiment tests showed marked, measurable improvements in a multitude of physical attributes. It wasn’t just psychological anymore: the men quite literally shifted their states of mind and altered their wellbeing.

‘Health is more than the absence of illness’, Langer told the audience at Happiness and Its Causes in 2012. ‘Our mindsets may be the cause of unnecessary limits’.

She goes into greater detail about all of this in her book, Counterclockwise: Mindful Health and the Power of Possibility, which was published in 2009 and provides a detailed analysis of the counterclockwise study. But many of Langer’s other experiments have made waves over the years and speak to the power of the mind.

Her famed chambermaid study, for instance, saw a group of hotel maids drastically change their health via the placebo effect. With a simple tweak in perception, the maids began viewing their laborious jobs as exercise, which led to weight loss, blood pressure improvements and increased wellbeing throughout the group.

In another study Langer cites, participants read a list of negative words associated with aging—and within 15 minutes, they were walking more slowly than they had before.

That’s what happens when we mindlessly accept possibilities and probabilities as absolutes without asking, ‘Is that really the case?’ The counterclockwise experiment presented an alternative possibility to the group of elderly men—a possibility that they were actually younger, stronger, and more capable than they’d come to believe—and their bodies responded physically to that new frame of mind.

The argument here isn’t that having a certain mindset will prevent aging; rather, it’s that we don’t need to accept, believe and surrender to the concepts that we’ve been conditioned to hold as absolute truths.

As Ellen Langer said, we have the choice to reorient our attitudes, challenge ingrained beliefs about our health and aging, and take control of our own wellbeing even as we get older. Her counterclockwise study has been connected to and even credited for the emergence of some of today’s most effective mindfulness practices, including types of reminiscence therapy, which itself borrows from different branches of modern science.

And science is often the great equalizer.

It can shed light where there was none previously, and it can flip our doubt or skepticism by helping us consider things from different perspectives. The fact is, when it comes to aging and health in general, emerging sciences—much like the counterclockwise experiment in 1979—point a decisive finger to potential while revealing that we are far more powerful than we’re often led to believe.

Neuroplasticity

Data shows that we think 60,000–70,000 thoughts per day, and up to 90% of those thoughts are the same as the day before.

Ellen Langer’s message—in her experiments, books and presentations—is that we need to become mindful of those thoughts to affect change in our lives. In other words, we need to start thinking about what we’ve been thinking about. That’s mindfulness!

On the topic of ageing, many of us have been conditioned to associate ‘getting older’ with frailty, rigidity, and incompetence. It’s probably not a leap to say those associations have become hardwired attitudes, beliefs and perceptions in the public consciousness—and in our own minds.

Fortunately, that doesn’t have to be permanent.

Neuroplasticity is one of the most important scientific breakthroughs in modern history. It proves that the brain is a ‘plastic,’ living organ capable of changing its own structure and function even into old age. This completely overturns the centuries-old concept that brains are fixed and unchanging; put another way, it makes the well-known adage ‘You can’t teach an old dog new tricks’ totally obsolete.

Psychiatrist and researcher Norman Doidge, M.D. wrote a groundbreaking book on neuroplasticity called The Brain that Changes Itself. This collection of case histories explores the astonishing progress of people who leveraged neuroplasticity to regain wellness, including stroke patients who recovered all of their faculties and older people who rejuvenated their aging brains.

Reminiscence Therapy & Mental Rehearsal

The human body is so unbiased, it can’t tell the difference between real-life experiences and ones being created by thought alone.

In a famous experiment, scientists took two groups of people and asked them to learn to play piano: one group practiced finger exercises on actual keys, and the other group simply rehearsed the exercises in their minds without ever touching a piano. After five days, brain scans revealed people from both groups had developed the necessary fine motor skills at almost the same rate.

Mental rehearsal is a form of mindfulness that can quite literally alter our neurology and even our biology; it’s proof that we can change our states of being by thought alone, similar to how the elderly men in the counterclockwise study improved their health by thinking and behaving like their younger selves.

Reminiscence therapy works in similar fashion.

Frequently practiced by people living with dementia and memory impairment, reminiscence therapy utilizes photographs, music and other everyday objects to help someone remember past events and experiences—and, most importantly, feel the warm and fuzzy emotions associated with those positive recollections. Research shows that reminiscence therapy can help with mood, self-esteem, communication skills and interpersonal relationships.

Epigenetics

In Greek, ‘epi’ means ‘on’ or ‘above’—epigenetics literally translates to ‘above the gene.’
This branch of science studies how our behaviors and environment influence the function of our genes. Epigenetic changes in the body affect gene expression, causing genes to switch ‘on’ and ‘off’ like little lights. That suggests we aren’t captives of our genetics; on the contrary, we’re actually capable of altering our gene expression given the proper conditions.

The activating and deactivating nature of genes stems from signals in the environment, which can mean the environment outside the cell but inside the body or the environment outside the body altogether. Either way, such genetic changes aren’t coming from DNA but rather from messages outside of our cells.

In the counterclockwise study, the bodies of the elderly men began receiving new messages: the men adopted elevated mindsets while thinking, speaking and behaving much differently than their ‘normal,’ elderly selves, and their bodies physically changed as a result.

After just one week in that environment, they experienced meaningful improvements in everything from flexibility and memory to hearing and cognitive function. They didn’t age in reverse like Benjamin Button, but they opened the door to possibility while exhibiting just how much mindset affects our health and wellbeing.

Now, can you imagine if they’d stayed in that mindset for longer than a few days?

https://www.thecareside.com.au/post/counterclockwise-study-the-science-behind-mindset-and-ageing/


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SINGLE AND HAPPY — BUT PEOPLE DON’T WANT TO BELIEVE ME 

Self-portrait by Judith Leyster, circa 1630

I’m 54 years old and, although I was married for 22 years, I’ve been single for the past 14. I did remarry briefly a few years ago, but that chapter was short-lived.

At this stage of my life, I feel genuinely content. I’m on my own, but by no means lonely. I have a fulfilling balance between work and personal life, and I’m deeply grateful for my three daughters and my grandchildren, who bring me joy and purpose.

My question is: how do I make people understand that I’m happy as I am? Friends and family often tell me I “need” to find someone, or that I shouldn’t be on my own, as if my single status must mean something is missing. Some assume I’m simply waiting to meet the right person, but that’s not the case. Their comments are beginning to wear me down, leaving me questioning myself and feeling low at times.

How do I cut out the noise and the unsolicited advice from those who think they know what’s best for me, and return to simply enjoying my life as it is – peaceful, independent, and full in its own way?

Eleanor says: What a hard time people have when someone says: “I don’t need that to be happy.” Anyone whose life deviates from mainstream expectations gets this, even from well-meaning loved ones. Wait, you’re saying you don’t need a lot of money to be happy? Why aren’t you making more choices in pursuit of money? Oh, you’re saying you don’t need kids to be happy? But what will you do about having kids?

It can feel patronizing, like you’re wrong about whether your own life is going well.

People don’t always realize how presumptive these questions feel when they’re about having a partner. Swap out the topic, though, and it shows up as if back-lit. Imagine saying to someone who was married, happy, with a rewarding job, “now we just need to find you a best friend” – cheerily, as though helping them keep their chin up. It’s only an accident of our culture that it seems any less peculiar to say, “now you need to find a partner!”

To push back against this stuff – including, perhaps, in your own head – I wonder whether you could play with different ways to describe things.

Sometimes people think they’re describing things accurately when actually they’re painting their own minds on to the world. They look at a scene and think, because I’d feel lonely there, it’s lonely. Or, because I’d feel bored with that, it’s boring. Perhaps people look at your life and think, because I’d feel incomplete without a partner, it’s incomplete.

But different people can describe the same scene in completely different ways. The risk is you believe other people’s description when actually they’re just saying how they’d feel.
How would you describe your life if you said what you feel? Where other people see the absence of one kind of relationship, maybe you see the value of variety. Where they see “a bit lonely”, you see the calm confidence of self-sufficiency. Where they see someone who could have more, you see someone with more than enough.

Using those descriptions when talking about your life, even to yourself, can make a big difference. It’s the difference between thinking, “I come home to an empty house”, and “I come home to peace.” If people really push it, you could explicitly tell them how a scene from your life looks to you. “For me, what I see in a morning with my grandkids is pure joy and undivided attention. It doesn’t feel like anything’s missing.” Or, even, if my maths is correct, “you see someone without a marriage. I see someone who had one at 18”. The point isn’t to say “believe me, I’m happy with this”, but to change their sense of what this is – to help them see your life under your description, instead of theirs.

It sounds like you really are happy. The fact some people prefer to have a partner does not mean a partner is objectively preferable. Don’t let other people’s descriptions of your life persuade you that you’re not happy.

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2025/oct/24/happy-being-single-how-do-i-make-people-understand-advice?utm_source=firefox-newtab-en-us

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A DARK TURN IN THE LIFE OF FRANZ LISZT

In the autumn of 1862, Franz Liszt received a letter that shattered his heart. His beloved daughter, Blandine, had died suddenly at the age of 26, just months after giving birth to her first child. The news arrived like a cruel echo of the previous year when his son, Daniel, had also passed away. Now, in the space of just over a year, two of his three children were gone.

Liszt had always been a distant father, his life consumed by music and travel, but he loved his children deeply. Blandine, with her gentle spirit and sharp mind, had been a source of pride and warmth for him. She had married Émile Ollivier, a rising politician, and for a brief moment, her future had seemed bright. Then, suddenly, it was over.

Unable to bear the weight of his grief, Liszt withdrew from the world. He sought solace in the Church, retreating to monasteries and adopting the robes of an abbé. Though he still composed, his music darkened, filled with longing and sorrow. Pieces like La Lugubre Gondola and Nuages Gris reflected the emptiness he carried.

Even in his final years, as he traveled between Weimar, Rome, and Budapest, the weight of loss never left him. He performed less, smiled less, and spoke often of death. When he died in 1886, some believed he had been ready for a long time—his heart had already been buried with his children.


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IS GOD EVIL?


The bible admits over and over again that its god was an idiotic miserable failure whose “divine plan” never worked out.

The bible also confesses that its god couldn’t defeat primitive iron chariots, couldn’t foresee the future and was thus duped by Satan, and was a hideously evil serial mass-murderer of men, women, children, toddlers, infants, babies, unborns and animals.

Richard Dawkins called the biblical god Yahweh the “most unpleasant character in all fiction.”
But that is massive understatement — like calling Hitler merely “unpleasant” — because Yahweh was the most malevolent character in all fiction and nonfiction, and was far worse than Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Sauron, Voldemort, Darth Vader, Palpatine and the Devil.

I’m sure christian apologists will leap to the defense of their Sauron, so I will provide evidence to back up my assertions, quoting book, chapter and verse…

Here’s evidence that the biblical god Yahweh was an idiot:

If someone dies mysteriously, behead a heifer. This will make me happy, no one knows why. I AM THE LORD! (Deuteronomy 21:1-9)

In the book of Job, the not-fallen-angel Satan waltzes into heaven, has a chat with Yahweh, then dupes him into murdering Job’s children, slaves and livestock (PETA ALERT!). Yahweh later admits to Satan that he was duped, proving he’s not infallible as Christians claim:

And the Lord said unto Satan, “Hast thou considered my servant Job, that there is none like him in the earth, a perfect and an upright man, one that feareth God, and escheweth evil? and still he holdeth fast his integrity, although to destroy him without cause against him, thou movedst me.” (Job 2:3)

What sort of god is moved by Satan to destroy a “perfect and an upright man” without cause?

Jesus murdered 2,000 innocent pigs to accommodate demons. (Mark 5:1-13)

If Jesus was a prophet or an all-knowing god, he must have known the demons were tricking him into becoming their accomplice in murdering 2,000 innocent pigs.

Here’s evidence that the biblical god Yahweh did his best, but was unable to defeat primitive iron chariots. Yahweh was “with” the tribe of Judah and did his best, as the bible admits, but failed miserably:

And the Lord was with Judah; and he drave out the inhabitants of the mountain; but could not drive out the inhabitants of the valley, because they had chariots of iron. (Judges 1:19)

How embarrassing!

In conclusion, the bible admits the truth about its evil, pitifully incompetent god, but Christians refuse to admit what the bible confesses time and time again. ~ Michael Burch, Quora

John Eaton:
You are aware that the word ‘Satan’ is only found in the Christian Bible? The Jewish texts refer to ‘him’ as either the ‘Tempter’ or the ‘Adversary’.

Ergo, you need to be a Christian in order to believe in Satan; a very convenient way to put the blame for your evil doings on someone else…Something that politicians are past-masters at doing.

Ski King:
Not only that, the Satan in the Old testament is very different than the Satan of the New testament (as is ‘hell’) mostly due to a Satan ‘makeover’ during the Second Temple Period created by borrowing pagan concepts (Persian Zoroastrianism and Greek mythology). Funny that Jesus never noticed this corruption and just went along with the flow/what was popular at the time.

Vince Mazziotti:
As always, you point out the things that make you wonder what is the deal with God. There are numerous examples in the bible where it’s clear that his “divine plan” wasn’t really well thought out. How can anyone put faith in the bible if an all-knowing god would destroy a “perfect and an upright man” without cause?


Daria:
Omg, the Job story! The message I took away from it as a child was that wives and children were disposable and easily replaced. Even after realizing I didn’t believe, it took a while to get past that programming.

Natthan Spoerr:
I never understood Jacob and Esau. “Jacob I love and Esau I hate.” Do you remember how beloved Jacob wouldn't give his starving brother a bowl of stew unless he sold him his birthright? And how did that story go when their father was dying and was giving out Esau’s blessing? Yes, beloved Jacob tricked his dying father into giving Esau’s blessing to him instead. So this man beloved by god with his dying breath blessed the wrong son.

Am I the only person who thought this moral was way off? What's the lesson here? “Be contemptible and mischievous, take from your own family if it gets you ahead”.

Cess Romer:
So, if Adam and Eve are just a myth and there's no original sin, it's not a big deal. Except to Catholics, Protestants, and other western denominations, who need it to make sense of the Jesus story. So, you know, just a foundational pillar of belief for about half the world's Christians. But don't worry—the rest of us can still feel guilty about stuff for no reason, just without all the paperwork.

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THE MAN WHO WAS SUPPOSED TO HAVE ALZHEIMER’S DISEASE, BUT DIDN’T

(The New York Times profiled Doug Whitney, a man who was destined to get Alzheimer's disease based on his rare genetic mutation but did not.)

Before dawn on a March morning, Doug Whitney walked into a medical center 2,000 miles from home, about to transform from a mild-mannered, bespectacled retiree into a superhuman research subject.

First, a doctor inserted a needle into his back to extract cerebral spinal fluid — “liquid gold,” a research nurse called it for the valuable biological information it contains. Then, the nurse took a sample of his skin cells. After that came an injection of a radioactive tracer followed by a brain scan requiring him to lie still for 30 minutes with a thermoplastic mask over his face. 

Then, another tracer injection and another brain scan.

During his three-day visit to the center, at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, he also had cognitive assessments, neurological evaluations and blood draws that extracted multiple tubes for analysis.

For 14 years now, Mr. Whitney has been the one-person focus of exceptionally detailed scientific investigation, for which he travels periodically to St. Louis from his home in Port Orchard, Wash. It is not because he is ill. It is because he was supposed to be ill.

Mr. Whitney, 76, is a scientific unicorn with potential to provide answers about one of the world’s most devastating diseases. He has a rare genetic mutation that essentially guaranteed he would develop Alzheimer’s disease in his late 40s or early 50s and would likely die within a decade.

His mother and nine of her 13 siblings developed Alzheimer’s and died in the prime of their lives. So did his oldest brother, and other relatives going back generations. It is the largest family in the United States known to have an Alzheimer’s-causing mutation.

“Nobody in history had ever dodged that bullet,” Mr. Whitney said.

But somehow, he has done just that. Something has shielded him from his genetic destiny, allowing him to escape Alzheimer’s for at least 25 years longer than anyone expected.

Scientists are searching for the recipe for his biological secret sauce. Its discovery could potentially lead to medications or gene therapies to prevent, treat or possibly even cure Alzheimer’s, goals that continue to frustrate researchers despite decades of efforts.

“This is an amazing case,” said Dr. Kenneth Kosik, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who is not part of Mr. Whitney’s research team. “There are huge implications in the answers and in posing the questions.”

Now, after years of studying Mr. Whitney, researchers are unearthing clues about his magic combination of genes, molecules and environmental influences.

Alzheimer’s afflicts about seven million Americans and about 32 million people worldwide. In most cases, the direct cause is unknown and symptoms begin after age 65.

About 1 percent of cases, however, are known to be caused by one of three genetic mutations. Inheriting one of those almost always causes early-onset Alzheimer’s, which often progresses quickly toward death.

Because genetic early-onset Alzheimer’s closely resembles typical late-onset Alzheimer’s, studying these families can yield important insights.

“Almost everything we know about Alzheimer’s today comes from these rare mutations,” Dr. Kosik said.

‘I should have got sick’

Mr. Whitney’s family has the rarest mutation, Presenilin 2. The mutation has been traced to German immigrants who settled in two villages near the Volga River in Russia in the 18th century. Mutation carriers in Mr. Whitney’s family, whose roots are in the farmlands of Oklahoma, usually began exhibiting memory and thinking problems between ages 44 and 53.

When Mr. Whitney turned 50, his wife, Ione, said, she and their two children began watching for signs.

She had been bracing herself since the early 1970s, when Mr. Whitney’s mother suddenly forgot how to make her beloved pumpkin pie for Thanksgiving, and the couple learned that doctors had determined that the Alzheimer’s afflicting his relatives was hereditary. They were expecting their first child at the time.

“I was just so angry at Doug, at the world, how unfair that was,” she recalled.

Mr. Whitney, whose laconic, unruffled temperament reflects his experience serving for two decades in the Navy, responded with characteristic calm. “‘We’ve got some choices,’” his wife recalled him saying. “‘You can be angry all your life. Do you want to not have this child? Or do we want to enjoy life and have a family?’”

Her anger faded, and she embraced his outlook. “Doug’s attitude was, ‘We don’t have to worry about this till there’s something to worry about,’” she said.

When he reached 55, the age his mother and brother died, his family’s antennae became even more attuned.

“‘How’s Dad doing?’” their son and daughter asked whenever they called home.

“‘I don’t see anything,’” Mrs. Whitney replied.

“When he turned 60,” she recalled, “it was like, ‘We are good.’”

Then, a cousin, Gary Reiswig, contacted them saying that he was writing a book about the family and that researchers were seeking more members of families with early-onset Alzheimer’s mutations to study.

Mr. Whitney agreed to participate and to undergo genetic testing, assuming that he did not have the mutation. But on his 62nd birthday, he learned that he did.

“I was speechless,” he said. “I mean, I was at least 10 or 12 years past when I should have got sick.”

Dr. Randall Bateman, a neurologist who directs the Dominantly Inherited Alzheimer Network, known as DIAN, at Washington University, was stunned, too.

“We tested him three different times,” he said. “We didn’t believe the results that he was positive.”

Year after year, researchers became increasingly perplexed that Mr. Whitney remained unimpaired. He continued at his job, organizing submarine maintenance procedures for a military contractor.

“We’re like, ‘What’s going on?’” Dr. Bateman said. “He’s still doing OK, still working, still driving around.”

They set out to determine what was protecting him.

“We came up with a bunch of these crazy ideas,” Dr. Bateman said. “We just started pulling everything off the shelves and anything that we thought we could have him do.” They tested and analyzed. They gave him surveys about his childhood, work history and environmental exposures.

“We just kind of threw the kitchen sink at him,” Dr. Bateman said.

Escaping genetic destiny

Researchers call Mr. Whitney an Alzheimer’s escapee. Scientists have so far conclusively identified two others in the world who were resilient to the early-onset dementia their mutations should have caused.

Both had another mutation, Presenilin 1, and belonged to a large extended family in Colombia. They remained cognitively unimpaired for at least two decades longer than expected and died in their 70s from other illness.

Alzheimer’s is characterized by abnormal accumulations of two proteins in the brain: amyloid, which starts clumping into plaques at least 20 years before symptoms emerge, and tau, which forms tangles after amyloid accumulate. Tau is much more correlated with cognitive decline.

The brains of both Colombian “escapees” were laden with amyloid but had little tau in regions associated with Alzheimer’s, said Yakeel Quiroz, a neuropsychologist at Boston University.

She and other scientists believe the Colombian woman was protected by having two copies of an extremely rare genetic variant called the Christchurch mutation. They say the Colombian man’s resilience might have come from another variant called RELN-COLBOS.

Not all Alzheimer’s researchers are convinced that Christchurch and RELN-COLBOS mutations helped deter Alzheimer’s in those cases.

Dr. Michael Greicius, a neurologist at Stanford University School of Medicine who studies the genetics of Alzheimer’s, said identifying a mutation that protects one person is difficult without analogous cases for comparison.

“You just can’t winnow down the millions of variants that every individual has with one subject and nobody to filter against,” said Dr. Greicius, whose lab is analyzing data on the two Colombians. Nonetheless, he said, “there’s incredible potential for these rare, protected individuals to provide critical new insights.”

Mr. Whitney’s brain is full of amyloid, probably even more than other mutation carriers in his family because he has lived so long, said Dr. Jorge Llibre-Guerra, a neurologist at Washington University who coauthored a recent study on Mr. Whitney’s case. But he has very little tau.

“He’s resistant to tau aggregation and tau spread,” said Dr. Llibre-Guerra, who helps lead DIAN’s clinical trials. “That’s where his resilience is.”

Mr. Whitney has tau accumulation in only one brain region, the left occipital lobe. That area is involved in visual-spatial functions and does not play a major role in Alzheimer’s, Dr. Llibre-Guerra said.

Dr. Quiroz said the Colombian woman’s tau accumulated in the same general area. The cases show that “people can actually have amyloid pathology without having the tau, and that amyloid is not enough to actually create a decline,” she said.

Determining how progression from amyloid buildup to tau accumulation was interrupted could provide a guide for treatment.

“They have now shown the decoupling of amyloid from tau tangles and, when that happens, the sparing of dementia,” said Dr. Kosik, who reviewed the Whitney study for Nature Medicine. “That’s where the science lies.”

Unraveling the riddle of Mr. Whitney’s resilience has revealed an intricate neurological ballet.
There is his D.N.A., which researchers have found includes several gene variants his afflicted relatives don’t have. Most interesting are three mutations possibly involved in neuroinflamamation or tau pathology, Dr. Llibre-Guerra said.

There is Mr. Whitney’s immune system. “Your inflammatory response is lower than other mutation carriers,” Dr. Llibre-Guerra told him during the March visit, explaining that his immune system may be shielding him by not overreacting to amyloid.

And there is an especially surprising discovery: Mr. Whitney has an excess of heat shock proteins, which help keep other proteins from folding incorrectly, a defect associated with many neurological disorders.

“The levels you have are significantly higher than what you would expect,” Dr. Llibre-Guerra told him. “It may be that those proteins are preventing the misfolded proteins, especially tau, from spreading throughout the brain.”

Mr. Whitney’s Navy role — working for about a decade in the engine room of a steam-propelled ship — might have driven his accumulation of heat shock proteins, researchers said.

“The heat down there, you can expect temperatures of 110 degrees for four hours at a time,” Mr. Whitney recalled. “We’d do a lot of sweating.”

It was so hot, he would sometimes need to be hosed down to cool off.

All those factors, possibly with others that remain undiscovered, may be acting in combination to protect him, researchers said.

His case is so complex that Dr. Bateman described his team’s recent published study as “a call to arms” intended “to draw attention from other researchers to say ‘Hey, here’s a really important person, a really important case, and you need to help figure this out.’”

Researchers wonder if Mr. Whitney's accumulation of heat shock proteins, perhaps acquired from years in the Navy working in the engine room of a steam-propelled ship, might be helping to protect him from Alzheimer’s.

A generational puzzle

Researchers are also interested in the Whitneys’ son, who inherited the mutation from his father.

At 53, Brian Whitney, who works for a flooring store and is a volunteer firefighter in Manson, Wash., remains cognitively healthy. Researchers say he does not have any of the possibly protective gene variants identified in his father. And he didn’t have the same years-long exposure to high heat.

It is possible he has benefited from anti-amyloid drugs he received in a clinical trial led by DIAN, Dr. Bateman said. Researchers recently reported that out of 73 trial participants, the 22 who received anti-amyloid drugs the longest — eight years on average — had half the risk of developing cognitive problems as people who didn’t receive the drugs. Researchers cannot disclose if Brian was among those 22 who received a drug and not a placebo in the trial’s early phase. But in later phases, he received an anti-amyloid drug, and he currently gets infusions of another one.

“Why am I still asymptomatic?” Brian mused. “Is it because I’m like my dad? Is it because of the drug therapies?”

Brian is acutely aware that a cousin his age developed Alzheimer’s at 50, had to move in with relatives and needs accommodations at his manufacturing job.

Brian plays word games and Sudoku to keep his mind sharp. “Sometimes I’ve had a bad day and forgotten a couple people’s names and sort of got a little concerned,” he said. Then, he’ll test himself on the names, and “usually, I’ll come back around and go, ‘Oh that was so and so.’”
Generally, though, “I don’t really feel like I dwell on it every single day,” he said. “Early on, I really did, but maybe I’ve gotten to the point where this is what it is.”

That approach seems to have been absorbed by Brian’s 15-year-old daughter. Brian and his wife have not emphasized the family’s Alzheimer’s history, but their daughter has watched nurses give him drug infusions at home and has accompanied him to St. Louis. She has told her parents that she isn’t afraid to be tested for the mutation, a decision she can make after turning 18, and that if she has it, she will participate in studies.

“We’re just grateful for being a part of any sort of research regarding Alzheimer’s,” Brian said.
Some relatives are less open about the disease. “There are people in the family who don’t want to talk about it,” Ione Whitney said. “It really is hard to put your medical information out there, to be public about it because everybody’s got a theory — like, if you ate right, this wouldn’t happen to you.”

But, she said, “Somebody’s got to talk about this because we’re getting nowhere with everybody sitting in their home or family trying to deal with it one on one.”

They are so dedicated that Mrs. Whitney, 75, made a quilt that hangs in the researchers’ offices.
“It’s a chance for you to give back to humanity,” Brian said. “It is scary getting involved in research,” he said. But “it’s been almost freeing in a way because I can face that in a community of other people who are going through the same things.”

During Doug Whitney’s recent testing in St. Louis, he told Dr. Llibre-Guerra he wasn’t experiencing difficulties, except for sometimes forgetting names and recent events.

He accurately answered questions during a cognitive assessment. Asked the difference between a lie and a mistake, he replied, “a mistake is generally unintentional; a lie is generally intentional.”

Later, Dr. Llibre-Guerra said that compared with four years ago, Mr. Whitney’s cognitive scores showed no significant decline, only a slight overall drop, probably attributable to his age. On some tests, he actually scored better, Dr. Llibre-Guerra said, noting that scores can fluctuate.

The one test on which his scores have steadily worsened involves visual-spatial function, which could reflect the tau accumulation in the brain area linked to such skills, Dr. Llibre-Guerra said.

His performance far exceeds that of relatives with the mutation, most of them much younger. When they reach the family’s typical age of impairment, Dr. Llibre-Guerra said, “you start seeing decline and usually it’s really consistent.”

Scientists have not yet found Mr. Whitney’s “missing needle in the haystack and said, ‘eureka,’” Dr. Bateman said, but they will keep searching. The puzzle that protects Doug Whitney is too valuable not to be solved.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/07/health/alzheimers-gene-mutation.html?unlocked_article_code=1.rk8.-P8p.RtfwFkJRVvlz&smid=url-share

Oriana:
The finding about dementia I particularly enjoy is that being bilingual delays dementia by 4 to 5 years. Though English has become my primary language when it comes to speaking, I read in Polish with perfect fluency and listen to Polish youtube videos every day. I often have the feeling that for me Polish and English have fused into one language into which I can dip as I please, just as in English you can say “rich” or “wealthy.” 

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ending on beauty: (Frank Bidart)