WHICH MOUNTAIN
“If my mother could speak,
what would be her last words?”
as she lies in a coma, every night
I ask the indecipherable stars.
Then I wake to a starlit voice:
Which mountain do you want to climb?
Mount Everest is not for me,
nor familiar climbs. I lean to the lush
slopes of Kilimanjaro –
but glacial Mount McKinley gleams,
a field of diamonds
crowned with Northern Lights.
Again I long for Kilimanjaro –
beginning in every color,
ascending with orchids and vines.
But Mount McKinley
calls with tongues of ice –
fissure-blue, ghost-green, pure style.
McKinley or Kilimanjaro? I debate
with myself, climbing the slight hill
on the way to the grocery store.
I have to have the answer soon,
life being counted not by breaths,
but by breathless moments.
~ Oriana
Mount Denali (formerly Mt. McKinley)
’THE MOST DESOLATE PLACE IN THE WORLD': THE SEA OF ICE THAT INSPIRED MARY SHELLEY'S FRANKENSTEIN
The Mer de Glace reached all the way down to the Chamonix valley in 1823
This French glacier has given rise to countless works of art in the past 200 years, including Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Paintings, photographs and modern satellites reveal how the site has dramatically transformed since Shelley was first transfixed by it.
In the 1800s, above the town of the Chamonix in the French Alps, there was a sublime sight known as the "sea of ice" that provoked both awe and a touch of dread. Those who climbed up the mountain trails to see it would encounter an icy, barren expanse of white, dark blue and aquamarine. Visitors described a scene akin to a torrent of waves and whirlpools frozen in time; an unrelenting frost extending boundlessly into the mountains.
Many artists at the time painted this icy sea, but one of the most striking images is an early photograph: a gloomy daguerreotype taken by an assistant of the writer John Ruskin in the 1850s.
This was the "Mer de Glace" glacier – a mass of compacted snowfall, creeping down from the Mont Blanc massif. For centuries, it has remained the largest glacier in France, and was one of the first to be studied scientifically.
Sadly, it has shrunk profoundly since then – more than 2.5km (1.6 miles) since the mid-1800s – and as I discovered following a recent visit, it is barely visible from the same point that the Ruskin photo was taken. The melting is accelerating, and by 2050, scientists anticipate it could retreat by at least 2km (1.2 miles) further, even with stringent emissions reductions.
Unlike many glacier retreats around the world tracked via remote sensing or ground measurements, the Mer de Glace is unusual because its changes have been captured in painting, photography and literature. Over the centuries, many writers and artists have come to feel overwhelmed by its scale.
And among the most notable was a young Mary Shelley. In 1816, the writer had yet to publish Frankenstein – the book she'd later call her "hideous progeny" (most recently adapted into a film directed by Guillermo del Toro). But her hike to the glacier would prove to be a major influence, providing her with the setting for a pivotal scene between Viktor Frankenstein and the creature.
By comparing Mary and her contemporaries' descriptions with paintings and photography across the years, it's possible to see how this once-stunning sea of ice has transformed.
In the 1800s, the Mer de Glace was so big that it almost nosed into settlements in the Chamonix valley below, as the painting from the 1820s shows [see the opening image].
Around this period, taking the "Grand Tour" across Europe was fashionable, which meant many artists and writers passed through the Alps en route to Italy.
After Charles Dickens visited in 1847, he wrote how the glacier and other sights of Chamonix "are above and beyond one's wildest expectation. I cannot imagine anything in nature more stupendous or sublime. If I were to write about it now, I should quite rave – such prodigious impressions are rampant within me."
This is how the artist JMW Turner painted the Mer de Glace when he came in 1802:
And in 1826, a Swiss artist composed this scene from roughly the same point as the Ruskin daguerrotype, looking south-east from the Refuge du Montenvers hotel:
When 18-year-oldMary Shelley – then Wollstonecraft Godwin – visited, the icy sea would make a deep impression. In 1816, the so-called "Year Without Summer", she traveled up to the glacier with her stepsister Claire Clairemont and soon-to-be husband Percy Shelley, the poet.
Setting off on horseback, the trio navigated a vertiginous path with pine trees and snowy hollows. At one point, a mule slipped and they almost fell into the valley. As they ascended, the scenery became ever more barren and dreadful, until they eventually reached Montenvers, where they could walk onto the glacier.
"This is the most desolate place in the world – iced mountains surround it – no sign of vegetation except on the place where we view the scene," Shelley wrote in her diary. "It is traversed with irregular crevices whose sides of ice appear blue while the surface is of a dirty white.”
Her partner Percy was similarly struck. Later, he recalled "a scene in truth of dizzying wonder." And his description of the glacier captured why it had been named a "sea": "The vale itself is filled with a mass of undulating ice," he wrote. "It exhibits an appearance as if frost had suddenly bound up the waves and whirlpools of a mighty torrent…The waves are elevated about 12 or 15ft (4 or 5m) from the surface of the mass, which is intersected by long gaps of unfathomable depth, the ice of whose sides is more beautifully azure than the sky."
The trip would later inspire the couple's literary writing. For Percy, the Alpine landscape would feed into his much-studied 1816 poem Mont Blanc. And in one scene in Frankenstein, Mary would place her characters upon the icy ocean's surface.
In Chapter 10 of the 1818 edition, Victor Frankenstein visits Chamonix in search of solace. Struck by guilt following the creature's murder of his brother – as well as the unjust execution of the girl blamed – the scientist climbs to the Mer de Glace in the hope that "the awful and majestic in nature" might salve his woes. Hiking across it, he describes the glacier as "rising like the waves of a troubled sea, descending low, and interspersed by rifts that sink deep." However, a moment later, his solace is punctured when he sees the creature bounding towards him across the ice for a confrontation.
Frankenstein and his creation confront one another on the glacier in Mary Shelley's story
In the summer of 2023, I visited the Mer de Glace while researching the Shelleys for a writing project, in the hopes of seeing the glacier for myself. I arrived in Chamonix mid-afternoon, too late to catch a ticket for the train that now transports tourists. So, I hiked the steep path instead, up through a forested valley where fountains of glacial meltwater streamed down from the peaks.
Two hours later, I arrived at Montenvers – where the Shelleys had their lunch and Ruskin's assistant took his daguerrotype. I looked out into the valley, hoping for a hint of the unrelenting frost. But there was no sea. Instead, all I saw was an absence. I knew beforehand that the glacier had retreated due to climate change, but it was shocking to discover just how much. The valley that once held a roiling ocean of crevasses is now bare, apart from powdery moraine and the trickle of meltwater. The glacier is there, but it has almost fully recoiled out of view behind the curve of the mountainside in the distance.
Later, I tried to piece together the glacier's retreat using images taken from the same Montenvers viewpoint. As little as 100 years ago, it was still an icy sea. Here is how it looked in 1926:
However, by the start of the 21st Century, it sat far lower in the valley, with fewer crevasses and a coating of powdery moraine. In 2002, the retreat began to accelerate. Here is the glacier in 2014:
And finally, here is how it looked when I visited in summer 2023, following the particularly hot summer in 2022 when there was record ice loss from glaciers across the Alps:
Today, the glacier has retreated so far that you need to take a cable car, installed in 2024, down into the valley if you want to see it up close.
When Frankenstein arrives at Mer de Glace in Mary Shelley's novel, ruing the creature he created, he describes a sublime, uplifting scene that the writer herself would have encountered in 1816:
"The sea, or rather the vast river of ice, wound among its dependent mountains, whose aerial summits hung over its recesses," he narrates. "Their icy and glittering peaks shone in the sunlight over the clouds. My heart, which was before sorrowful, now swelled with something like joy."
Yet if Mary were alive to encounter the glacier today, she would see something quite different: the impact of climate change on France's largest glacier. No sea of ice, but instead a landscape that is monstrously man-made.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20251106-the-sea-of-ice-that-inspired-frankenstein
*
THE LATE BORIS NEMTSOV ON THE WAR IN UKRAINE:
Exactly ten years ago, Boris Nemtsov was killed in the very center of Moscow.
Shortly before his death, he addressed the Russian military, saying:
“You swore an oath to defend the homeland against enemies, not to fight the brotherly and Orthodox Ukrainian people. The war against Ukraine is an unforgivable crime. It is not your war. It is not our war. It is Putin’s war — for his power and his money. It is the war of his accomplices — the billionaires Rotenberg, Timchenko, Yakunin... — for their own enrichment. Do not forget that you are fighting and dying for them, not for Russia.” ~ XL, Quora
*
WAS THE SOVIET UNION BASED ON RUSSIAN VALUES?
Before Stalin’s era (1917 through mid-1920s) — no.
The pre-Stalin Soviet rule was based on full rejection of the Russian heritage. National symbols of the Russian empire were banned, monuments destroyed, churches closed, the old elite annihilated. Ethnic Russians, unless they came from worker or peasant families, were largely refused higher education and employment in the state.
During the 1930s this rejection was softened, and the “anti-imperial” part of Russian culture and history gradually came to the fore. During WWII, Russian nationalism was largely restored, churches re-opened, and incorporation of the imperial legacy of Russian state into the larger narrative of Soviet might slowly started to take place.
Stalin’s political model was largely a revamped Russian monarchy with serfdom in the guise of collective farming, and the educated class of intelligentsia as the new gentry.
The end of 1940s and beginning of 1950s saw a sharp turnaround in the fortunes of Soviet Jews. The Soviet rulers stopped considering them a cornerstone of the new Socialist society, and started to treat them as an ideologically ambiguous, nationalist force that should be contained. That paved the way to the rise of Russian nationalism, which gained strength, along with resurgent anti-Semitism. From mid-1970s until the collapse of the USSR in 1991, Russian nationalism became mainstream across large swathes of the Soviet elite. ~ Dima Vorobiev
Ramesh:
One of my friends is a die-hard stalinist (yes, its possible in India) and according to that person, in terms of power Stalin was the closest a person came to god. And the meaning of god here is something which brings utter destruction in the name of benevolence and is still revered. A manifestation of the plebs who are designed to follow and not think. What is your take on that?
Dima Vorobiev:
sounds very convincing to my Russian ear
Ramesh:
One thing I have seen among stalinists. Their knack for history (factual and beyond the prevalent biases) and human sociology is very strong, and their perspectives are really praiseworthy with regard to situations. And they just loathe left-wing liberals. As a right-wing liberal (tough to explain) I really connect with stalinists. Was Stalin a history and sociology enthusiast?
Dima:
he hardly knew what sociology is, but otherwise yes
Gregory Drazkiewicz:
He knew history well and pretended to know Marxism well but most of his works on that was done by someone else.
*
IS PUTIN THE NEW TZAR OF RUSSIA?
Mercedes as a tombstone
A new trick to prevent towing for parking on the sidewalk has been devised. Using a bike lock, fasten the door handle to a post.
I’d just wrench the door handle off and tow it anyways. The driver of the Mercedes with tinted windows believes that he might be taken for a public official or a mafia boss and left alone.
As if THEY need a bike lock to park in a non-designated area.
Oh no, trouble is paradise. Elvira Nabiullina’s super high interest rates is causing banks to turn down 60% of mortgage requests from young families who can’t afford to pay for it with mutual wages.
Elvira, where are the Eastern Orthodox believers gonna have their traditional babies? In the cow pastures? They can’t live on the streets because as Russian trolls can’t stop telling you there are no hobos in Moscow.
Elvira, the governess of the Central Bank of Russia, recently expressed her displeasure that Russians are paid too much at work.
According to her, they then grab their wallets and go to the shops and Oh heavens! spend money on stuff! What are they gonna do next to destroy Russian economy? Abolish private ownership?
The shopping, Elvira claims, accelerates inflation, which she’s fighting tooth and nail. The shopping as well as construction business should all cease to exist to improve the health of economy.
I guess this is what communist professors had taught Elvira in Moscow State University, then part of the Soviet Union: command economy and state ownership.
We have chief of the Central Bank who’s a Marxist. ~ Misha Firer
Elvira, where are the Eastern Orthodox believers gonna have their traditional babies?
Mother of God had her baby in a stable, but you expect luxuries??!? That's what satanic West does to people, they think they're better than Jesus. To wash away the shame, I would recommend you giving a generous donation to the Orthodox Intelligence agency, I mean Church. Maybe they can't guarantee you entry to Heavens, but they surely can change your life into living hell.
Misha Firer:
Car garages. But the mayor wants to gut them en masse. Can’t win with these people.
Janusz Krzyshtofiak:
To be fair, what she says makes sense in the situation she is in. People and the government spending money increase the velocity of money, which pushes up inflation. The default option would be to increase the interest rates even higher to suck the money off the market. She cannot do this; the rates are already high, and raising them further would indirectly affect the rates of IOUs used to finance the “special military operation”. The second option would be to ask the government to slash spending directly. She cannot do this either => normal welfare has already been slashed to make room for expenses related to the “special military operation”. The third option left is to call for bigger austerity for ordinary Russians. I assume Elvira Sakhipzadovna doesn’t want to experience the law of gravity in the novel and irreversible way; that makes her options increasingly limited.
Tim Orum:
That’s interesting. Moscow State University teaches the same economics as Harvard and Columbia universities. Coincidentally, they are also both known for their creation and grooming of most of our highly esteemed Deep Staters.
William Garrison:
When Nabiullina graduated from Moscow State University in 1986, they definitely weren't teaching the same economics as Harvard and Columbia.
Tim Orum:
I guess they may have taken different paths but both seem to have reached the same economic conclusions.
*
RUSSIA’S SELF-PERCEPTION
Without access to Western technology, Russia would still be building wooden log longhouses for its self-aggrandizing tsars and tsarinas.
They are giving him too much credit. Putin and his enablers falsely believe they are still living in the Soviet Union.
They think they are as much movers and shakers of world affairs as their predecessor had been. Recall how Putin would always be late to the meetings with European leaders believing that they are not his equals.
He’s a cut above them all. Up there sharing the exalted pedestal with the president of the United States. All that power has really got to the head of the unremarkable KGB officer.
No amount of sanctions has achieved the desired effect: Putin hasn’t been able to read any cues, about as clear as a bell.
The entire invasion of Ukraine is about Putin proving to the West that Moscow is its equal and got the right to its own sphere of influence and country’s economy could — and should — be thrown under the bus towards achieving that objective. Freeze your nose to spite your granny.
Take today’s news: Kremlin’s spokesperson Dmitry Peskov stated that Kremlin is waiting for US clarification on Trump’s remarks about Russian and Chinese nuclear tests.
They are still issuing orders and ultimatums to the global superpower: remember the ridiculous pre-invasion ultimatum to NATO to withdraw to the 1991 borders?
Delving deeper into pathology, at the same time Putin is highly insecure about his assessment of Russia’a preeminent role in global affairs as he is hanging on every word American president would say and do to validate his grandiosity, and when all fails Putin tries to manipulate him into paying attention to him.
I read the comments of Russian trolls throwing tantrums under my recent photo post about an absolutely average location outside of Moscow.
It looks grim and dystopian but nothing special but the trolls demand that I take more photos of glitzy malls, palaces, and other specifically designated places approved by Kremlin to represent Russia as a developed country in the proper light.
If Russia is really that developed and nice why do they need to control the narrative and constantly deflect away to what-about-homeless-people-in-california?
The narrative of Russia’s superpower status and economic development equal to America and China is so flimsy that it falls apart upon a slight contact with grim and uncomfortable reality of the homeland.
Yes, the Russians don’t have expertise to operate plants abandoned by the European companies in 2022.
Yes, the Russians can’t make Mercedes trucks, Siemens trains, Hyundai cars. They can’t make passenger planes, cellphones, chips, computers.
Rather than facing the music, Kremlin compensates for that glaring deficiency — which as a matter of fact is a number one requirement to be viewed on par with the Western countries — Kremlin advertises the only industry (apart from building nuclear plants) that it has managed to salvage from the Soviet era and to continue developing: arms manufacturing.
Hurray, computer CGI of another wonder weapon has been successfully tested! Last time it was a sea drone that can annihilate London. This time it’s a nuclear powered cruise missile that can destroy everything.
And there we have on the one hand Potemkin palaces and CGI missiles on the other that can turn into dust bedeviled decadent West, while poor peasants are being ground down into compost in the steppes by thousands to uphold the delusion of grandeur.
There’s one word that suits well in characterizing Putin’s 26 year reign. It is: pathetic. It is however nothing particularly new in the way Russian leadership chooses to address its inferiority complex. ~ Misha Firer, Quora
SP:
Today's Russia is basically a large African nation, all raw materials and dictatorship. Very sad what Tsar Putin did to the place. But perhaps he or his Putinist heir can make it to Kyiv sometime this century.
Ted Wilson:
You said, and have often said, that Russians can’t make Mercedes, or Cell phones or chips. Why do you think that is? Clearly Russians are neither stupid nor work-shy, so is this largely down to consistently poor leadership?
Misha:
Roughly for the same reasons much of the rest of the world can’t: cultural and social differences.
*
HOMO PUTINUS: RUSSIA’S PERSON OF THE FUTURE
In April, Kremlin ideologist Alexander Kharichev wrote a “blueprint for Putinism.” In his new essay, he envisions “Russia’s Person of the Future.”
Kremlin official Alexander Kharichev has published a new essay. As the head of the Putin administration’s team for “monitoring social trends,” Kharichev plays a central role in shaping the regime’s ideological doctrine. In his latest manifesto, he outlines his vision for how Russia should cultivate the “person of the future,” emphasizing philosophy classes, large families, and self-sacrifice. He also identifies what he calls the country’s “main threats,” including civil war and demographic decline. Meduza special correspondent Andrey Pertsev unpacks Kharichev’s main arguments.
In his last essay, “Civilization Russia,” Kremlin official Alexander Kharichev asserted that Russians value collectivism over individualism and are prepared to sacrifice themselves for the good of the state.
His latest publication, “Who Are We?,” appears in the November issue of The State, a policy journal published by the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration (RANEPA). The magazine’s editor-in-chief, political strategist Andrey Polosin, is considered a close ally of Sergey Kiriyenko, the deputy chief of staff overseeing the Kremlin’s domestic policy team. Polosin also created the propagandistic college course “Foundations of Russian Statehood,” which became mandatory for all first-year students in 2023.
In his new article, Kharichev proposes supplementing Polosin’s course with a module on “Russian philosophy.” He also calls for expanding the Russian history curriculum, which has been compulsory for all university students since 2023, regardless of their field of study. Currently, the general philosophy course, which focuses on philosophical traditions from around the world, is required only for humanities students. Kharichev explains his reasoning as follows:
“After years of dogmatic teaching of Marxism-Leninism, there remains a certain prejudice against philosophy in Russia. This can fundamentally be changed by creating a textbook on Russian philosophy. The textbook should answer the main question: what is a human being, and what is the true meaning of existence?”
Kharichev argues that Russian higher education needs a stronger “social and humanitarian core.” Alongside “Russian philosophy,” he advocates mandatory courses in Russian law, cultural studies, and economics. These subjects, he insists, should also be taught to engineering students, who currently receive little exposure to the humanities. “You can’t become a manager in production — which is the engineer’s mission — without understanding how the world works,” he writes.
The official also refers to upcoming “patriotic education laws,” which he says will soon be announced. Russian media have reported that the Kremlin began drafting such legislation last fall, intending to submit it to the State Duma in early 2025, though this has yet to occur. According to Kharichev, the law will include specific KPIs for officials responsible for patriotic education, though he offers no details on what those metrics will be.
Kharichev then turns to demographics, urging an aggressive campaign to promote large families. He argues that films and advertisements “should not feature families with [only] one or two children.” This is despite the fact that, according to his official biography on the website of VTsIOM (the Russian Public Opinion Research Center), Kharichev himself has two children.
Many of the themes in Kharichev’s new essay echo his earlier writings. Like in his previous piece, for example, he warns of the threat of “civil war.” However, he appears not to be referring to any immediate risk in modern Russia, but rather to potential internal divisions that could arise within any society.
The warning comes among a broader list of dangers supposedly facing Russia, including “the fragmentation of society,” “the division of the country,” and “the loss of the country’s ability to fight for its own preservation and development.” Kharichev writes:
~ We’ve gone through this at least twice in our history — in the 17th and 20th centuries. And who’s to say it can’t happen again? The causes can be anything, from ethnic or religious tensions to generational or property conflicts. But this risk — or rather, this challenge and threat — is always present in any social system. ~
In “Civilization Russia,” published in April, Kharichev issued a similar warning about “the loss of internal unity” and the “splitting of society.”
Historical examples — from the Time of Troubles to the revolutions of the 20th century — clearly show that when society becomes divided, statehood comes under threat. The contradictions may vary — social, political, moral, or spiritual — but the result is always the same: a divided country becomes easy prey for external forces.
Both essays also focus on other perceived challenges, including “threats to sovereignty” and demographic decline.
In “Who Are We?” Kharichev also reiterates another key point from “Civilization Russia”: the supposedly “self-sacrificing nature” of the Russian people. “For us, life itself seems to mean much less than it does for a Westerner. We believe there are things more important than mere existence. That, in essence, is the foundation of any faith,” he asserts.
In both essays, Kharichev maintains that Russians value faith over rationalism, and trust and justice over formal law.
In the conclusion of “Who Are We,” he declares that the Kremlin’s chief mission is to cultivate “the person of the future” — an individual dedicated to “preserving and developing our civilizational system.” In Kharichev’s vision, this person will “serve the state,” have “three or more children,” and place the interests of the collective above their own.
https://meduza.io/en/feature/2025/11/06/homo-putinus
*
USSR’S EDUCATIONAL SYSTEM
The education system in the USSR was not superior—but it was certainly remarkable.
It was established on the smoldering ruins of the old Imperial system. Under Czars, it delivered administrative and STEM talents to the military-bureaucratic machine of imperial administration, recruiting them from the top layers of social hierarchy.
The problem was not only to repurpose the system. The old educated class was in its entirety considered a hostile force to the triumphant proletariat. Many emigrated. Of those who stayed behind, many were considered untrustworthy due to their family and friend associations. Those who were permitted to research and teach on the sufferance of new rulers found their old laboratories looted and destroyed.
To rebuild and scale up education in an impoverished country run by incompetent rulers under a very ineffectual set of economic principles seemed an impossible task. But anyhow, the Communists made it happen. How?
Three golden principles of Communist management were applied:
brute force
concentration of resources
meritocracy
Brute force
The Soviet rule declared the "right of all to education, health care, food, shelter" etc.
Under Communism, these are the same kind of rights you get when you are recruited in the military: it’s all mandatory. They’ll teach you how to shoot and clean your gun. They’ll serve chow three times a day. They give you a bunk to crash on between duty — and you aren’t permitted to say “no” to any of this.
This applies to all and everyone. If you refused to send kids to a Soviet school, it would be considered a clear sign of anti-Soviet defiance. Kids would be taken from you, and you would be lucky if they just left you alone after that.
Concentration of resources
In the military, this approach most often manifested itself in human wave attacks, or in sending infantry through minefields to clear a passage with their feet. You waste a lot of resources, but ultimately you get to the objective.
In education, this worked amazingly well. “Red professors”— the ones who got through a watered-down high school curriculum in one or two years by the seat of their pants, got a passing grade, and were deemed fit to teach others — this kind of professors proliferated.
Most of the output was not much to boast about. Everyone who graduated from the system was deemed literate. My dad told me how some of his men during WW2 could barely read and asked their comrades to write a couple of lines for them to mail home. The notion “functional illiteracy” did not exist in the USSR and was never researched. For a reason.
But there’s strength in numbers. A lot of peasant kids who would have grown just to be another neighbor “мужик” (“muzhík”) with an insane yield on their grain plot learned high math instead and went about calculating missile trajectories and chemical processes for nuclear fuel. You get a whopping lot of new talent if you teach a whole nation of 150 million people to read and count in a matter of one generation.
Meritocracy
Offing the old elites is a bloody and wasteful affair. But it has one big advantage. It opens a whole lot of social elevators for a whole lot of people with talent and ambitions. The staler the old system, with the privileged few who hold down the grand majority, the more pronounced is the positive effect of vertical mobility brought about by revolution.
Why did the Soviet system start to lag after Stalin? Meritocracy subsided. Once the bloody mill of recurrent purges stopped, the vertical mobility slowed down and came to almost a full stop by the 1980s. Hence, the apparent degradation of creative talent in the new post-Soviet Russia: we simply didn’t have as good teachers as those who came before us.
Conclusion
As a result of the Soviet rule, our education replicated our State administration. It produced quite a lot of amazing talents who towered over an endless sea of mediocrity. The planned economy corralled them into what was the darling of the system: the military-industrial complex, where they assured a world-class standard. Once the USSR collapsed, their competence was lost, either due to obsolescence or to emigration. For new rulers, Yeltsin and Putin, education has never been the same priority as for the Communist rulers.
Below, the Soviet-era Children’s Encyclopedia, my personal favorite.
In the USSR, we had no comic books. The most entertaining book titles for children were mostly unavailable. The TV was almost all grey, sleep-inducing propaganda. Whenever I felt bored, I used to take one of these 12 volumes and get lost into it for hours. The Soviet system made education an escape hatch for a whole lot of people—and a pretty sensible one for that!
Loyalty to the Tzarist empire was its foundation. Peasants, industrial workers, Jews, and other commoners were barred from entering the system. They needed an extraordinary degree of luck and abilities to go through the needle eye.
This was the opposite of what the Soviet rule needed. The Communist wanted an industrial-style system of universal education that could churn out administrators, scientists, technicians, doctors, and teachers in their millions, year after year. ~ Dima Vorobiev
Kamal Padam:
I see parallels with what happened in India. When the British left, the literacy rate was just 10%. And most of them were clerks trained to write registers and records.
The peasants, artisans, craftspeople had always been denied access to education and healthcare for millenniums, long before the Brits came.
Nehru, the 1st Prime Minister took the brute but democratic approach. He opened tens of thousands of primary and secondary schools with barely trained teachers, but he also set up institutes of higher education in STEM. We are now reaping the rewards.
For a long period, the best talent would migrate to US or UK. The CEOs of Microsoft and Google are Indians. The next in line to Warren Buffet is an Indian. Indians have been CEOs of Citibank, US Airways and many other large and iconic organizations.
Nia:
Many of the best educated Russians did emigrate, but Russia still has one of the highest rates of post secondary education in the world. A long way for sure from the pre-Soviet 15% literacy rate.
*
UKRAINE HITS A MAJOR RUSSIAN REFINERY
Russia and Ukraine have traded almost daily assaults on each other’s energy infrastructure as U.S.-led diplomatic efforts to stop the nearly four-year war make no impact on the battlefield.
Ukrainian drones struck a major oil refinery in Russia’s Volgograd region for the second time in almost three months, Ukraine’s general staff said Thursday. Russian officials did not confirm the attack, although the local governor said drones started a fire at an unspecified industrial facility in the region.
Ukraine’s general staff said in a statement that the attack took place the previous day. The refinery is the largest producer of fuel and lubricants in Russia’s Southern Federal District, processing more than 15 million tons of crude annually — about 5.6% of the country’s total refining capacity, according to Ukrainian officials.
Russia and Ukraine have traded almost daily assaults on each other’s energy infrastructure as U.S.-led diplomatic efforts to stop the nearly four-year war make no impact on the battlefield.
Ukraine’s long-range drone strikes on Russian refineries aim to deprive Moscow of the oil export revenue it needs to pursue its full-scale invasion. Russia wants to cripple the Ukrainian power grid, seeking to deny civilians access to heat, light and running water in what Kyiv officials say is an attempt to “weaponize winter.”
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said foreign countries are helping Kyiv in its efforts to keep the power grid operating amid Russia’s onslaught.
“Practically every day, our power engineers, repair brigades, and the State Emergency Service of Ukraine are carrying out restorations on-site after attacks: hits keep occurring across various points, especially in our communities, and especially near the Russian border and close to the front,” Zelenskyy said late Wednesday.
Also, saboteurs inside Russia burned dozens of locomotives in a bid to hamper the logistics of Russia’s armed forces, Ukraine’s military intelligence said Thursday.
The Freedom of Russia group used Molotov cocktails to set fire to the control and power supply systems of dozens of locomotives that transported military cargo, according to a statement from GUR, as the intelligence agency is known.
It was not possible to independently verify the claim, nor did the statement say whether the GUR was involved in the operation. Russian officials offered no immediate comment.
Ukraine, meanwhile, has attempted to strike targets on Russian soil with domestically developed long-range drones.
Ukrainian forces also struck three fuel lubricants facilities in the Russian-occupied Crimean peninsula and a storage and assembly base for Russia’s Shahed drones in an occupied area of Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region, the general staff statement said.
In the Kostroma region northeast of Moscow, a Ukrainian aerial attack hit unidentified “energy infrastructure facilities,” Gov. Sergei Sitnikov said. There were no casualties and power supplies were not disrupted, he said.
Unconfirmed media reports said the attack targeted a hydroelectric power plant in the Kostroma region, one of the biggest in Russia.
The Russian Defense Ministry said Thursday its air defenses shot down 75 drones overnight over multiple Russian regions and annexed Crimea.
Russia, meantime, attacked the city of Kamianske in Ukraine’s eastern Dnipropetrovsk region with drones overnight, killing one person and injuring eight others, the head of the regional military administration, Vladyslav Haivanenko, said on his official Telegram channel.
Several fires broke out and the roof of a four-story building that was partially destroyed, he said.
The Russian military also continued its assault on Ukraine’s rail infrastructure, causing delays and route changes in Ukraine’s eastern regions of Kharkiv and Dnipropetrovsk and in the southern Zaporizhzhia region, Ukraine’s state-owned railway company Ukrzaliznytsia said.
Russia attacked Ukraine with 135 drones of various types overnight on Thursday, Ukraine’s air force said.
https://www.nbcnews.com/world/ukraine/ukraine-says-hit-major-russian-oil-refinery-long-range-drones-rcna242453?utm_source=firefox-newtab-en-us
*
Returning Soldiers and the Surge of Violent Crime in Russia
Russian convict soldiers
Russia is facing a sharp rise in violent crime – a stark „boomerang effect” of its war in Ukraine. Returning soldiers, unaddressed trauma, and the spread of illegal weapons are fueling a dangerous trend with growing implications for internal security.
In the first half of 2025, Russian authorities recorded 333,251 serious and particularly serious crimes – the highest figure in fifteen years and a 10.4% increase compared to the same period in 2024. Compared to pre-war figures, the rise is even more striking: up 12.7% from the first half of 2021 and a staggering 32.3% higher than in 2019. The most affected regions are the Central Federal District (over 79,000 cases) and the Volga District (nearly 58,000), with Moscow and the surrounding region alone accounting for nearly 43,500 serious crimes.
While total crime numbers are gradually falling – reaching a 16-year low of 940,500 in early 2025 – the category of the most violent offenses continues to climb. In 2024 alone, 617,301 serious or particularly serious crimes were registered – the highest number since 2010. Between 2010 and 2018, these figures had steadily declined, but the trend reversed around the time of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
A growing number of violent incidents have been linked to returning veterans from Ukraine. An independent investigation by the Verstka portal found that since February 2022, Russian soldiers and officers have been connected to at least 750 fatal or near-fatal incidents. These include at least 166 homicides and 112 cases of grievous bodily harm resulting in death. Most of these crimes occur within domestic or local communities and are often fueled by alcohol abuse.
Although the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD) claims overall crime fell by 1.8%, it acknowledged that serious offenses increased by 4.8%. Tellingly, for the first time in many years, the number of murder victims was removed from public statistics.
Analysts at The Jamestown Foundation link the crime surge to the return of convicts recruited into the military in exchange for amnesty. According to Novaya Gazeta Europe, over 1,130 veterans have been charged with crimes since the start of the war, ranging from minor offenses to murder. In around two-thirds of these court cases, the defendants' military service was treated as a mitigating factor – a practice enabled by Article 80.2 of the Russian Criminal Code, introduced in March 2024. This law allows prosecutors to drop charges if a person signs a military contract during mobilization.
Another dimension of the crisis involves the mental health of returning troops. According to Deputy Defense Minister Anna Tsivileva, around 20% suffer from PTSD, but Russia’s healthcare system lacks enough psychologists to cope. Professor Mark Galeotti, writing for the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime (GI-TOC), estimates up to 250,000 veterans may be affected.
This has led to what some experts are calling the ”Wagnerization” of Russia’s underworld. Organized crime groups are recruiting former soldiers as contract killers or bodyguards, prompting rivals to do the same and escalating a criminal arms race. Similar patterns followed the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, when veterans helped swell the ranks of criminal gangs.
So-called „khaki gangs” made up entirely of ex-soldiers are now emerging and clashing with established groups, intensifying violence and illegal arms build-ups.
The flow of illegal weapons is accelerating. Azerbaijani outlet Caliber.Az reported that in just May and June 2025, Russia’s FSB dismantled 157 arms trafficking rings across 51 regions and closed 62 underground weapons factories, seizing grenade launchers and 140 kg of explosives. The GI-TOC report warns that post-war weapons and military skills could feed criminal networks from Europe to Africa. Notably, the main source of illegal arms is not military theft, but ”trophies” smuggled from the battlefield, often sent home via post or personal luggage. A jurisdictional struggle between the FSB and Rosgvardiya over civilian arms control has created what GI-TOC describes as a ”bureaucratic black hole”, ideal for traffickers.
Meanwhile, Russian authorities claim that 57% of 137,000 demobilized soldiers had found employment by 1 May 2025. But according to Radio Svoboda’s Sever.Realii project, most jobs are in security or manual labor, paying just 40,000–60,000 roubles a month – insufficient to address addiction or reintegration issues. The Defenders of the Fatherland Fund absorbs 10–19 billion roubles annually, yet fails to tackle these core problems.
Even senior security officials are sounding the alarm. Former Interior Minister Anatoly Kulikov warned via Lenta.ru that after the military operation ends, Russia could face a serious wave of crime from demobilized soldiers, including convicts-turned-combatants. Drawing on the post-WWII Soviet experience, he highlighted the rise of „banditry” among returning conscripts – a pattern Russian law enforcement must be prepared to counter.
The risks extend beyond Russia’s borders. A Guardian report, citing Europol, notes that the Kremlin is already leveraging criminal networks for sabotage and cyberattacks in the EU, with battle-hardened ex-convicts becoming key assets in hybrid warfare.
If, as GI-TOC warns, Russia fails to implement large-scale rehabilitation and weapons control programs, and continues to soften sentences under Article 80.2, it could face an internal security crisis even greater than after Afghanistan or Chechnya. Without a real plan for disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration, Russia risks descending into a cycle of violence with consequences both at home and abroad — the full scale of which remains unpredictable.
https://defence24.com/geopolitics/returning-soldiers-and-the-surge-of-violent-crime-in-russia
*
MUSLIM REFUGEES
Arun Vaya:
Muslim countries won’t take them. (Poor countries can’t afford/support refugees.) Muslims won’t go there. There is no free lunch or welfare for life.
Arjun Rathore:
Time Europe understood this and get rid of such islamic zombies. Poland must be used as an example for maintaining law and order in the nation. [Poland doesn't accept Islamic refugees.]
Grandcrowdad Forde:
it's an invasion— as always…
Jeffrey Ryan:
Jordan kicked out the Palestinians in September 1970 after the PLO tried to overthrow King Hussain's government. They ended up in Lebanon and helped destabilize the country. As for Syria, I don't think the government of Hafez Assad would have let them in, especially after what happened in Jordan.
Grizmoto:
That's how the so-called Palestinians came into possession of the West Bank, Jordan gave it to them to keep them out of the rest of Jordan. And Egypt damn sure don't want them.
*
WHY DON’T YOU BELIEVE THE PALESTINIANS? A JEWISH COMEDIAN ON THE CONFLICT IN ISRAEL
In documentary Coexistence, My Ass!, Noam Shuster Eliassi uses humor and honesty to turn a one-woman show into something politically radical
In the late 2010s, Noam Shuster Eliassi was working at the United Nations, the latest step in a lifelong effort to build peace between Israelis and Palestinians, when she had an epiphany. In Ukraine, a Jewish comedian named Volodymyr Zelenskyy had made the improbable leap from sitcom about accidentally becoming president to actually becoming president. Perhaps, if she were to take her political career seriously, she should start writing jokes.
It worked. As an Israeli Jew fluent in Hebrew, Arabic and English, Shuster Eliassi could nimbly weave between different audiences, and what started as short comedic videos on social media soon became an invitation from Harvard to develop a full-on stand-up routine skewering the idea of coexistence as it’s often used in the Israeli-Palestinian context. The show would riff on her upbringing in one of the only joint Israeli-Palestinian communities in the country, threading a fine needle with self-deprecating humor and an activist’s edge. The aim, she told the Guardian, was to “unpack” the idea of coexistence, “and say, like, ‘this is how I grew up, there are so many funny kumbayah moments, and I propose something else.’”
That was in 2019. By the time Shuster Eliassi took the stage in Montreal in September of last year, to perform the full routine before a documentary crew, the idea of coexistence between Israelis and Palestinians seemed even more vastly and horrifically remote. After an affable routine ranging from her asking Palestinian neighbors for kebabs on Israeli independence day (“no agenda, just tahini!”) to her Jewish mother meddling in her dating life, Shuster Eliassi addressed the elephant in the room. It used to be the occupation, she says. “Now, the elephant in the room is genocide.”
That moral clarity – the insistence on calling out that elephant in the room, through disarming humor and radical frankness – forms the backbone of Coexistence, My Ass!, a magnetic new documentary, directed by Amber Fares, that takes its name from Shuster Eliassi’s trilingual one-woman show. The film, shot over five seismic years in the US and Israel, chronicles both the development of Shuster Eliassi’s singular comedy, rooted in a too-rare portrait of Arab-Israeli friendship, and the stunning collapse of any near-term hope for real coexistence in the wake of the 7 October 2023 Hamas-led attacks and Israel’s retaliatory destruction of Gaza, killing over 71,000 Palestinians. “I thought the film was going to be about [Noam] trying to be a comedian in the US, and probably going to university campuses in the year of an election,” said Fares. “And the film just took an entirely different turn.”
First it was Covid, which forced Shuster Eliassi to leave Harvard for Israel, where she was quarantined with a mixed group of Arabs and Israelis that recalled her unusual upbringing in Neve Shalom / Wahat as-Salam (“Oasis of Peace”). The daughter of an Iranian-Jewish mother and a Romanian Ashkenazi Jewish father – “woke, progressive leftists” who “believed Israelis and Palestinians deserve the same equal human rights”, she says with faux disbelief in her routine – Shuster Eliassi grew up as a literal “poster child for the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.” She socialized with Palestinian neighbors, learned Arabic from Palestinian educators and represented the idea of peace to numerous celebrities who visited the village; the film includes a clip of Shuster Eliassi and her Palestinian best friend Ranin getting a shout out from Jane Fonda.
“My parents saw moving here as a way to say ‘we’re not just joining a seminar or a dialogue group, we want to live in this alternative way.’ As a political statement, not just a kumbayah thing,” Shuster Eliassi said. “There was always a sense of doing – not just talking about the alternative, but with your individual choices, doing it.”
The show’s mocking premise – Coexistence, My Ass! (“let’s start with my ass,” she jokes, lest you have your guard up) – drew from frustration with the sloganeering of peace: the celebrity visits, the lip service, the lack of real reckoning with how true coexistence cannot coexist with occupation.
“It has been so frustrating to always see this notion of coexistence used repeatedly as a nice decoration,” she said. “It’s like how Trump can come here and say that he is making peace – these are words. Nobody is ‘against’ coexistence.”
“But to me, it was so clear that we will only be able to taste [coexistence] after we talk about the root of the problem and we act on it, especially as Israeli Jews that have privilege and the responsibility to do this.”
The film follows Shuster Eliassi as she attempts to keep her increasing media presence – post-Covid, she secures a regular gig on a TV show; a music video mocking Arab countries selling out Palestine, called “Dubai Dubai”, goes viral – in line with her principles, particularly as the Israeli comedy scene turns away from discussion of the occupation. Some attempts to thread the needle fall flat; others soar (“Don’t worry, I’m only going to be here for seven minutes, not 70 years,” she tells a Palestinian audience to uproarious laughs). “Some comedians in Israel are like, ‘oh here’s Noam, she’s the one who talks about the occupation – why can’t you do, like, Tinder jokes and stuff?’” she said. At a pro-democracy protest against corruption in Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, Shuster Eliassi repeatedly asks liberal Israelis whether they see the protests as at all connected to Palestine. Most say no.
“Because Israelis were never confronted with decades of illegal occupation and actually controlling Palestinian people – Israelis were never confronted with what it’s actually doing to the moral fabric of our society, and what it means that our society is so hyper-militarized,” said Shuster Eliassi of that common response. “Everyone takes a role in the escalation of the dehumanization of Palestinians.”
As she tells it, on 6 October 2023, Shuster Eliassi finally achieved her mother’s dream of bringing home a new boyfriend. The next day, nothing was ever the same. The documentary shies away from showing footage of the slaughter on 7 October, or the mass killings in Gaza – a “very conscious decision”, said Fares. “We felt that by the time this film came out, that footage would been seen and seen and overseen.” Instead, it cuts to Shuster Eliassi at the funeral of longtime peace activist Vivian Silver, who was killed in the attacks, then her despair at the carnage in Gaza, the escalation of her protests and the feverish pitch of social media commentary across languages.
In the intervening two years, Shuster Eliassi has performed less in her home country, owing in part to lack of audience, in part to dwindling venues willing to book her, and in part because she’s now expecting her first child. “A lot of comedians who’ve continued doing comedy during this time – I don’t want to demonize all of them, but I’ve had a huge heartbreak,” she said. “It’s like American comedians who contributed to the re-election of Trump. You’re like, ‘Oh my god, this is how you’re using this tool that was designed to fight against fascism?’ It’s the same thing, when I see comedians making fun of starving Gazans on stage or using comedy to do Israeli propaganda.”
She has fared better outside the country, where Coexistence, My Ass! has mirrored her routine’s ability to invite in and challenge diverse audiences without alienating them. An independent release without major backers, the film premiered at Sundance and opened the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, in a co-presentation with the Arab Film & Media Institute, offering a different but still sharp angle on the conflict. Still, Shuster Eliassi notes, “a lot of what we’re saying in this film, Palestinians have been saying for a really long time. And I say to the audiences, that if they feel relieved or reassured because they hear it from an Israeli Jew – why don’t you believe Palestinians? Why do you need an Israeli Jewish character to [believe]?”
Shuster Eliassi and I spoke days after a ceasefire was announced, which still has not stopped the killing in Gaza. The film, like her routine, like so many invested in true coexistence, are left bereft – imagine, she says on stage, if we had addressed the elephant in the room in time?
“I often think about how I just got lucky, to have this opportunity to exist with Palestinians and have Palestinian neighbors and friends and educators, to have Palestinian life and existence become part of my DNA,” she told me. “It’s extraordinary to me how ordinary it could be. And it really makes me sad, to think how easily things could have been much, much different.”
Hope, she noted, is a strange thing to consider in the midst of atrocities, but it persists. “I don’t know what it is about the human spirit, like how Palestinians are surviving this, how my grandmother moved on after a Nazi camp. How people are constantly rebuilding homes, how I’m now carrying a child into this impossible reality,” she said. “There is something irrational about hope. And it’s very similar to coexistence – these are what our human tendencies can lead to, if we are dedicated to humanity.”
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2025/nov/07/israeli-comedian-putting-genocide-on-stage
*
NO OTHER LAND
New York film festival: a Palestinian-Israeli collective have documented violence and displacement in a damning new film that offers a stark insider’s look at the conflict.
It’s difficult to review No Other Land, a documentary by a group of Palestinian and Israeli activist film-makers on the destruction of villages in the West Bank, on a formal level. The usual rubric for evaluating non-fiction cinema does not really extend to films whose existence was actively challenged throughout filming, whose makers’ equipment and livelihood were constantly at risk. A good portion of the film, which was selected for this year’s New York film festival and won best documentary at the Berlin film festival (to politicized charges of antisemitism and death threats against its makers), is composed of amateur video footage by Basel Adra, who began filming the Israeli occupation of his village in Masafer Yatta at the age of 15, in the name of evidence.
That evidence put forth by the directors – Adra, Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham, Palestinian film-maker and farmer Hamdan Ballal and Israeli cinematographer and editor Rachel Szor – is straightforward, un-sensationalized and completely infuriating. There is nothing to say that has not already been said on the case for Palestinian sovereignty, the war crimes of the Israeli government and the moral clarity of those who call for an end to violence and occupation. No Other Land, should it make it to theaters – the film is, perhaps unsurprisingly, still seeking distribution in the US – ensures that people cannot deny it; that there exists a model of coexistence and mutual safety between Palestinians and Israelis; and that there is no justification for the campaign of wanton destruction and despair in the West Bank, just as in Gaza and now Lebanon.
“I started filming when we started to end,” says Adra in Arabic voiceover at the film’s outset. Through his testimony as well as his father’s, No Other Land summarily details both bucolic daily life for the mostly agrarian communities in Masafer Yatta, a collection of 20 Palestinian villages in the mountainous southern edge of the West Bank, and the generational fight to maintain it against increasingly violent Israeli occupation. The film is forthright if almost too succinct on the facts: in 1980, the Israeli government declared Masafer Yatta a “closed area” for military training, though government documents reveal that the real purpose was to displace Palestinian villagers for illegal Israeli settlements.
Adra was born into a family of activists, in a village declared off-limits to Palestinians, whose residents allied with an Israeli legal group to protest against their forced expulsion. The film picks up in 2022 when, after a 22-year legal battle, the Israeli high court dubiously rules in favor of eviction, beginning an official campaign of destruction that Adra and his cohort capture in damning, persistent, mundane detail. Much of the 95-minute film takes place in Arabic or Hebrew, with occasional interludes of western news coverage, to which Adra and Abraham have sometimes contributed. (For transparency: Abraham has reported for the Guardian on Israeli intelligence agencies’ decade-long campaign to surveil, hack, pressure, smear and allegedly threaten senior international criminal court staff in an effort to derail the court’s inquiries.)
No Other Land proceeds in increasingly dire chapters, as Adra continues his work of recording Israeli incursions on Masafer Yatta villagers, posting undeniable scenes of occupation to social media: bulldozers pulverizing family homes as children cry, a backhoe pointedly destroying a family’s toilet, officials stealing another family’s generator, police filling wells with cements. IDF soldiers – Black, Arab, white, male and female – who do not flash a hint of vulnerability, who carry out the home demolitions with the coolness of its legal order. Families forced to huddle in caves while they attempt to rebuild rudimentary structures at night. “We have no other land, that’s why we suffer for it,” says one older woman after her home is destroyed. The woman’s son is later shot and paralyzed by Israeli forces, one of several acts of physical violence captured by the film-makers.
None of this is new, for anyone paying attention (and so often the failure is attention). But what Adra, Abraham, Ballal and Szor have created is a clear case and a model in its specificity. The protest scenes are bookended by taut, remarkably natural-seeming conversations between Adra and Abraham on the mutual suspicion, complications and necessity of Palestinian-Israeli connections that evince a winsome, hard-won trust; the film subtly explores the power imbalance between Adra, whose movement is restricted, and Abraham, who can drive away at night.
In an early scene, filmed in 2019, Adra and his community express hope that the US will exert enough pressure on Israel to stop the expulsion, a reasonable enough notion that now feels heartbreakingly quaint. It’s a condemnation of western complicity as damning as anything said in far blunter terms in the many protests abroad. By the film’s end, just a few years later, Adra and Abraham discuss the utility of reaching people beyond the region – so you touch someone, and then what?
Conditions have only deteriorated since filming was completed in October 2023; emboldened by Israel’s war in Gaza, extremist settlers have evicted 16 Palestinian villages in the West Bank in the past year. The film’s last recorded image is of a group of rogue settlers approaching Masafer Yatta with guns. But No Other Land, for its many images of despair, still offers a stirring vision for what could be – Israelis and Palestinians working together in the name of justice, collaborating toward a world where both are free.
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2024/sep/30/no-other-land-review-palestinian-israeli-documentary
*
EICHMANN’S LAST WORDS
His final words were “Long live Germany, long live Argentina, long live Austria. These are the three countries with which I have been most connected and which I will not forget. I greet my wife, my family and my friends. I am ready. We'll meet again soon, as is the fate of all men. I die believing in God.”
Albert Speer was the only high-ranking Nazi who apologized for his crimes.
https://www.yadvashem.org/articles/general/eichmann-trial-classroom
Hitler’s last public words were “It is finished, good-bye.” His “Last Will and Testament,” however, begins, “The German people have not proved worthy of me.”
*
MAN RAY’S “WOMAN-VIOLIN”
Man Ray's 1924 image Le Violon d'Ingres, of a woman's body transformed into a violin, has continued to fascinate, confuse and upset viewers, more than 100 years on.
Some works of art endure in spite of themselves. They transcend their own deficiencies. The Mona Lisa, The Scream and The Girl with a Pearl Earring are all meme machines, but still manage to move us. Something in them shields their essence from the acid of caricature, and ceaselessly restores their mystery. So it is with Man Ray's iconic photograph of his lover's naked torso, which the France-based American Surrealist famously transformed into a violin.
The image's objectionable perspective, which transforms a person into a thing, has not slowed its propulsion in popular imagination. In 2022, Le Violon d'Ingres (1924), among the key works on display in the exhibition Man Ray: When Objects Dream at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, sold for more than $12m (£9.6m), the highest price ever paid for a photograph at auction – proof of its accelerating appeal. What is it about the photo that, despite its ostensible flaws, keeps it resonating over a century after it was created?
Le Violon d'Ingres captures from behind the celebrated French model, memoirist, painter and Jazz singer, Alice Prin, who adopted the nickname "Kiki de Montparnasse" after the bohemian neighborhood of south Paris in which she rose to prominence in the 1920s. Man Ray shows Kiki seated with a straight back, arms invisible in front of her, and head turned slightly to the left. She wears nothing more than a turban fashioned from a patterned shawl and drop earrings.
Le Violon d'Ingres captures from behind the celebrated French model, memoirist, painter and Jazz singer, Alice Prin.
The image takes its title from a French idiom for "hobby", alluding, as it does, to the 19th-Century Neoclassical artist Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres and his fondness for playing the violin as a diversion from painting. By fitting Kiki's back with a pair of f-holes, Man Ray more than merely lyricizes her feminine curves or melts them into melody. The holes re-engineer her physique altogether, conceptually dislocating it from that of a human being into something built, not born: a tunable, playable and ultimately silenceable object. They hollow her out.
In musical terms, the f-holes control an instrument's projection, and dictate where its bridge and the soundpost sit. Expertly crafted, they are essential to the object's objectness – its function as a thing that is played, plucked and ultimately put away. They are no less fundamental to the strategy of Man Ray's photo. At first glance, the sinuous sound holes may seem like adoring augmentations of the singer's vocal gifts, affectionate enhancements of her sonic expressiveness. But Man Ray has positioned the sound holes on Kiki's back, not on her front, rendering them useless at best: a disfigurement.
Was that deformation deliberate? There are reasons to think it was. Not only does Man Ray allude explicitly to Ingres in the title of his work, Le Violin d'Ingres audaciously echoes the perspective and contours of his forebear's well-known portrait, The Valpinçon Bather (1808). That work, like many of Ingres's paintings, relies for its effect on a disturbing distortion of the female form. In idealizing his subject, Ingres has pulled his subject's physique out of all proportion, skewing the relative dimensions of torso and limb. In The Valpinçon Bather these deformities are subtle enough; elsewhere, his spines are famously stretched to breaking point.
Le Violin d'Ingres echoes the perspective and contours of his forebear's well-known portrait, The Valpinçon Bather, 1808
In Ingres's La Grande Odalisque, 1814, a lounging woman's absurdly elongated lumbar was lampooned by critics for its anatomical illogic. So severely has the artist taffy tugged his subject's backbone, medical scholars have since estimated that she has been given at least five additional vertebrae – a malformation that would, in reality, result in profound physical paralysis. Rather than enhancing sexuality, these interventions mistune their subjects' bodies. In Man Ray's photograph, the positioning of the f-holes conceptually impair Kiki's capacity for sound. They silence her.
'Teasing emblem of love and control'
Nor does it stop there. These blemishes are also marks of enslavement. At the time Man Ray created his work in 1924, f-holes were very much in the air. Once associated chiefly with elite orchestral instruments, their meaning had begun to widen. Modern mandolins had already been equipped with sound holes and the year before Man Ray made Le Violon d'Ingres, Gibson released its L-5 archtop guitar, the first mass-market instrument of its kind to utilize the f-hole, giving the instrument the volume and resonance necessary for performance in dance halls and jazz clubs. Suddenly, f-holes were not simply shorthand for projection and power, they were emblems of commodified culture and mass-produced sound. Tattooed onto Kiki's back, they brand her and turn her into a thing that is bought and sold.
Paradoxically, however, they also deepen the meaning of the photo, enriching its range of cultural resonance. The violin has long carried occult overtones in art, music and literature – from Pieter Bruegel the Elder's Triumph of Death, 1562, in which death plays a fiddle, to Niccolò Paganini's unreal violin virtuosity, which sparked rumors of a Faustian pact. The connection between the violin and the world we cannot see was well known to Man Ray's contemporaries. A decade before Le Violon d'Ingres, Marcel Proust famously likened the experience of hearing a violin "to listening to a captive genie, struggling in the darkness… like a pure and supernatural being that unfolds its invisible message as it goes by." By merging Kiki's shape with that of a violin, Man Ray taps into an intriguing tradition of grasping after the ungraspable.
In Man Ray's imagination, images such as Le Violin d'Ingres were constructed as talismans that could conjure unseen spirits. The so-called "rayograph" technique to which the Met's exhibition is devoted – conceived by the artist as an immaterial spin on material X-rays – was profoundly ritualistic. To create them, the artist sought to sidestep the soulless machinery of the camera by placing objects directly onto light-sensitive paper, a process he believed could access hidden energies and dimensions beyond human perception.
The Met's exhibition is devoted to the 'rayograph' technique conceived by Man Ray
The result, of which Le Violin d'Ingres is a hybrid (a conventional photograph inscribed with rayographed f-holes), is absorbingly spectral – an image whose aura shudders with ghostly allure. In describing the achievement of his rayographs, Man Ray himself could hardly have been more inscrutably hermetic: "Like the undisturbed ashes of an object consumed by flames these images are oxidized residues fixed by light and chemical elements of an experience, an adventure, not an experiment.”
In the case of Kiki, this adventure takes observers back to an occult tradition that conceives of the violin as an instrument of metamorphosis – a hollow body that mediates matter and spirit. That notion, of a cosmic instrument harmonizing body and soul has its origins in antiquity, in the lyre of Orpheus, and can be traced forward through to Robert Fludd's 17th-Century symbolic concept of the "Monochord of the Universe", which mapped celestial vibrations – the music of the spheres – onto human anatomy.
By transforming Kiki's back into a violin, Man Ray envisions her body resonating eternally with invisible harmonies that quiver exquisitely through the elegant apertures of the ambiguous f-holes. The result is something irresolvably strange and complex, as art, desire and mystical vibration are tightly intertwined into an intensely teasing emblem of love and control, creative emancipation and physical confinement – a riddling rune that perennially plucks at both our patience and imagination.
https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20251021-the-key-to-man-rays-le-violon-dingres-disturbing-erotic-power
*
YOUNG EINSTEIN AND HIS PARENTS
As a world-renowned scientist, Einstein was often asked questions like, "Did you get your scientific abilities from your father? Or did you inherit them from your mother?" Einstein then answered:
“I don't have any special skills. I just have a strong curiosity.”
What most people miss is that Einstein had an extraordinary support system from childhood: his parents. Einstein's curiosity was encouraged by them. They respected freedom of expression , despised dishonesty, and loved nature and art. Thanks to such a supportive upbringing, Einstein wasn't limited to just one area but also excelled in various fields.
Einstein had a character that would never be satisfied until he achieved results in something he was researching. For example, at the age of five, Einstein contracted an illness that confined him to bed. To pass the time, his father gave him a compass. There, Einstein first became fascinated by the fact that the compass needle, no matter how it was moved, always pointed north.
Then he asked his father, "What is a magnet? Why can it pass through walls or boxes?" However, his father's scientific knowledge was inadequate to answer Einstein's question, so Einstein was left with his curious soul that always asked questions about everything. And his mother, unlike other mothers, was not at all worried about Einstein's tendency to think alone and rarely socialize with his friends.
Even upon entering school, Einstein often faced challenges. From elementary school through high school, he consistently struggled to adapt, and his teachers even accused him of low intelligence. Despite this, Einstein's mother consistently encouraged her son, "Don't worry, you'll become a much greater person than anyone else."
His high intellectual ability was the result of his love of reading. One of the books he read repeatedly was the 6th edition of the Popular National Science Outline, which sparked Einstein's interest in pursuing a medical degree. However, he was discouraged due to financial constraints. His mother, however, remained supportive by inviting a medical student to dinner every Friday night to discuss her studies with him. From there, Einstein's scientific knowledge broadened.
By the way, Einstein's family was a lover of literature and music. His mother was a pianist at the time. Influenced by her mother, Einstein learned to play the violin at the age of six. While exiled in Germany, Einstein also held violin concerts and raised funds to help children. "You have to be smart, but you also have to have a high level of empathy." This character trait was more or less influenced by the teachings of his mother, Pauline Einstein.
Unfortunately, when Einstein received the Nobel Prize, his mother had already passed away and was unable to witness it. ~ State Politics, Quora
Canisfamiliaris:
Nice to have a supportive high IQ family, who obviously value knowledge and education, because they’ve got the brains to exploit the knowledge. Einstein ran with it, because he was born genetically as a mathematical genius. That’s what made him, the rest is filler.
Alex Urquides:
Genius or not, I noticed most, if not all of his well known scientific theories were discovered at a very young age (teenage years or early twenties). Would this be a sign of being a child prodigy? Why was he not as productive in his mature years?
Canisfamiliaris:
Because most geniuses, or incredibly bright people are at their peak in their early twenties, in terms of arrogance, surety, cognitive functioning and sheer stamina. This applies to physical as well as mental attributes.
Krishnamoorthy Lyer:
Einstein’s interest in Math and Physics started at a very young age, and Max Talmey (aka Max Talmud), the young Jewish medical student who was a friend of the Einstein family remarks how Einstein very quickly surpassed him in understanding basic Mathematics.
Also Einstein’s father was a successful businessman, and financial constraints do not seem to have been much of an issue in his childhood and late teenage years.
*
CERTAIN CLASSIC MOVIES COULD NOT BE MADE TODAY
There’s a fascinating experiment that was conducted with the script of Casablanca. The results are depressing.
In the 1980s, journalist Chuck Ross submitted the script of Casablanca, under the title "Everybody Comes to Rick's," to 217 studios to test their ability to identify a great script. The results were depressing because out of 85 studios that responded, only 3 deemed the script commercially viable, 33 recognized it as Casablanca, and 1 accepted it as a TV movie. This experiment highlighted how industry professionals could overlook a classic film masterpiece when its iconic status was removed.
The Experiment: Ross wanted to see if studios could recognize a classic when the title and character names were changed.
The Script: He used the original title of the play, "Everybody Comes to Rick's," and only changed the sidekick's name from Sam to Dooley.
The Results:
217 studios received the script
85 studios provided feedback
33 studios correctly identified the movie
3 studios said they would produce it as a future film
1 studio accepted it as a TV movie
Everybody Comes to Rick's was the title of the play Casablanca was based on, which had never actually been produced at the time. Nobody involved in the film expected it to be as successful as it was. They got lucky when the actual place Casablanca was captured by Allied troops, allowing them to push up the release date of the film to take advantage of the fact that the name was in the news.
cobaltcollapse:
Just because it was a viable film when it was released doesn't mean it would be viable if it were created today.
_big_baby_Jesus:
Citizen Kane is considered a triumph of American cinema. It would bomb today. I found it super boring and the ending doesn't really make sense.
PiLamdOd
It bombed when it came out.
kvetcheswithwolves:
Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine.
We'll always have Paris.
Here's looking at you, kid.
Go ahead and shoot, you'll be doing me a favor.
I mean so many lines in the film... which have penetrated popular speech... And so many quick witty quips... "What nationality?" "A drunkard." "That makes him a citizen of the world."
King_Of_Regret
Maltese falcon is the stereotypical "great" noir film. I can vouch it's amazing.
Tom_Stall:
Citizen Kane was the year before it, Gone with the Wind (which has the top line) and The Wizard of Oz have the joint-second most amount of lines are both 3 years Casablanca. In fact the decade it comes from (1940s) has the joint-top number of entries (with the 1980s) at 17. The years 1939-1945 contain 21 entries, more than any whole decade. It comes from the era of what is considered the top era for memorable quotes in Hollywood movies and it dominates.
mgzukowski:
Different time. Casablanca was based on a play that attempted to get America to enter the war on the Allies' side.
The film itself fame out about a year after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. It may be a great film, with acclaimed actors. But it was a propaganda piece, so that's why now a days it's a harder sell.
Jay Carr:
Movies, so central to American life, shaped theAmerican mind, and “Casablanca” is as much about movies as about romantic adventure. It taps our love of movies, our involvement with them, our dreamy bond-age by them. Some movies innovate. “Casablanca” culminates. It brings to a peak the between-the-wars imperative that one was obliged to live life with a sense of style. The style at work in “Casablanca” is marked by witty poise, but the sophistication of café society between the wars, with its white linen suits and baccarat in private rooms – and also its helplessness before corruption, its impotent sleekness.
One of the many extraordinarily potent resonances comes when we notice that the croupier at Rick’s is played by Marcel Dalio, the same Dalio who played the nervous aristocrat dancing on the edge of a crumbling world in Jean Renoir’s “Rules of the Game” in 1939. There are more than a few homages to French films of the period. But it’s the insistence of “Casablanca” on the importance of style, exemplifying it in the character of Rick, that has caused “Casablanca” to tilt toward Bogart over the years. That and his way of standing outside institutions and calling his own shots to his own moral code.
https://www.loc.gov/static/programs/national-film-preservation-board/documents/casablanca1.pdf
Oriana:
I loved Casablanca, each scene an exercise in style – which doesn't detract from the human drama. I kept hearing about Citizen Kane being the greatest movie ever made, and to my shock I found it painfully boring and "without redeeming value." It utterly failed to engage me.
*
CAN WE REALLY FUEL PLANES WITH FAT AND SUGAR?
For sustainable air fuel to work, it's going to need a staggering amount of land.
As the politician next to him took out his phone for a selfie, Virgin Atlantic chairman Richard Branson peered into the camera, grinned, and did a double thumbs-up. The world's first commercial airliner to cross the Atlantic using 100% biofuel had just landed in New York.
Virgin Atlantic's Boeing 787 was powered not by fossil fuels, but plant sugars and waste fats – a form of so-called Sustainable Aviation Fuel, or SAF. A British Conservative MP posted his smiling selfie with Branson to the social media site X, formerly known as Twitter, and declared the flight "a significant UK aviation achievement". (The flight was partly funded by the UK government.)
But not everyone is so sure that this represents the future of flying. The biomass required to make biofuel can come from a broad range of sources – plant material, food waste or even algae. While biofuels release CO2 when burned, some consider them a sustainable option because they are renewable and biomass removes some CO2 from the atmosphere as it grows.
The problem is the sheer volume of biomass needed to power an industry as fuel-hungry as aviation. One academic paper published in August estimated that, if you were to grow sugar cane and use that to make biofuels for commercial jets, you'd need 125 million hectares (482,000 sq miles) of land – roughly equivalent to the surface area of the states of California, Oregon, Washington, Nevada and Louisiana combined.
That's a lot of land. And if you tried using waste sources of biomass alone, you wouldn't have nearly enough to keep all the world's planes in the air, say some experts. The airline industry is currently responsible for about 3.5% of greenhouse gas emissions, roughly the same as the entire country of Japan, which is one of the world's highest emitters.
Proponents of SAF argue that the fuel could make flying much greener than it is currently. It's just that scaling SAF production up is a gigantic challenge.
"What they're doing is quite important, they're just demonstrating that the flight is perfectly safe, there are no problems with the fuel," says David Lee, a professor of atmospheric science at Manchester Metropolitan University, who studies the impact of aviation on the climate, and who was a co-author of the paper that investigated the feasibility of transitioning to SAF. By switching to SAF over fossil fuels, you can achieve carbon savings of around 70%, says Lee, though this depends on the specific source of biomass you choose.
Lee notes that international regulations don't actually allow for flights using more than 50% SAF as fuel at the moment, so Virgin Atlantic's hop across the pond required a special permit from the UK's Civil Aviation Authority.
It all adds up to a successful proof-of-concept. But it would be difficult to power more than one glitzy flight with 100% SAF today. "You just can't get hold of the damn stuff," says Lee. "If we want to do engine tests, we have difficulty purchasing the fuel."
It's an issue that Virgin Atlantic itself acknowledges. SAF accounts for just 0.1% of all aviation fuels consumed. The International Air Transport Association predicts that the airline industry will require 450 billion liters of SAF by 2050 – only 300 million liters were produced in 2022. However, to date, SAF has helped to fuel hundreds of thousands of flights – at least as part of a blend with fossil fuels. In the US, SAF production is estimated to reach 2.1 billion gallons (7.9 billion liters) annually by 2030 – well below President Biden's target of producing 3 billion gallons (11.3 billion liters) of the fuel annually by that year.
Some SAF comes from waste fats, for example, from food production processes. Relying on such sources could, in theory, lessen the need for expanding crop cultivation just to make biofuels. But there's far too little waste available, says Hannah Daly at University College Cork, in Ireland. Even if you gathered up all the biomass waste available in the Republic of Ireland, she says, it would only allow you to replace about 4% of fossil fuels consumed by the country. The calculation would be similar in other countries, she suggests.
Plus, what if you think you're buying up waste fats when you're not?
"There's substantial risk that that 'waste cooking oil' could be fraudulently relabeled virgin palm oil," says Daly. "That could be contributing to deforestation."
Some alternatives to SAF, including hydrogen fuel and electrification, are not currently viable options for large commercial flights.
Chelsea Baldino, senior researcher at the International Council on Clean Transportation and her colleagues have calculated that SAF made from waste sources in the UK would only be able to meet a maximum of 15% of UK jet fuel demand in 2030. The ICCT also estimates that just 3.3-4.2 billion gallons of SAF could feasibly be produced domestically in the US by 2030, while in 2019, US airlines used 23 billion gallons of jet fuel.
"Biofuels providing the significant greenhouse gas savings needed to decarbonize jet fuel will not be available at scale," she says. E-fuels – synthetic versions of fossil fuels made using renewable energy – will be "essential", according to Baldino. E-fuels require a lot of energy to produce but they have the advantage of not introducing additional carbon into the atmosphere, as would be the case with newly extracted fossil fuels.
Josh Moos, an economist at Leeds Beckett University in the UK, lambasts Virgin Atlantic's 100% SAF flight as "greenwashing".
"The science would suggest that there really is no such thing as sustainable aviation," he says. It would be better to reduce demand for flights globally, perhaps by placing a levy on frequent flyers or by increasing taxes on the airline industry, he argues. Moos acknowledges that such measures are "politically and socially unpalatable", though both he and Daly suggest they might be necessary if we are to meet net zero goals.
A spokeswoman for Virgin Atlantic says, "We are committed to achieving Net Zero 2050 and have set interim targets on our pathway to get there, including 10% Sustainable Aviation Fuel by 2030."
She notes that the 100% SAF flight from London to New York relied entirely on waste biomass and that the demonstration was "an important step, but not the end goal" in the firm's efforts to scale up its use of SAF in the coming years.
Some skeptics remain unconvinced. Daly, for one, points out that even if SAF does replace an increasing proportion of fossil fuels for aviation purposes, the overall benefit could be wiped out by the rapidly growing airline industry. Eurocontrol, a European air safety organization, predicts that the annual total number of flights worldwide will reach 16 million by 2050 – an increase of 44% on 2019's figure.
"I would love guilt-free flying myself – but it's just not possible," says Daly.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20231201-can-we-really-fuel-planes-with-fat-and-sugar
*
VIRGIN MARY NOT TO BE CALLED CO-REDEEMER
Pope Leo has instructed Catholics not to refer to Mary as having helped her son Jesus save the world from damnation, amid the spread of an exaggerated worship of the Madonna, often on social media, that has emboldened claims of apparitions, weeping statues and self-styled prophets.
A decree from the Vatican’s doctrinal office approved by the pontiff says Jesus alone saved humanity from hellfire and therefore Catholics must not call Mary the “co-redeemer” or “co-redemptrix”, ending a long-running debate among church scholars that has even divided popes.
It says Jesus saved the world through his sacrificial death on the cross and that while Mary paved the way for the redemption by giving birth to him, she was not a “co-redeemer.”
The late Pope Francis was vehemently against calling Mary a “co-redeemer”, saying in 2019 that it was “foolishness” because “she never wanted to take anything for herself from her son.” His predecessor, Benedict XVI, also opposed the title.
John Paul II, the pope from 1978 to his death in 2005, was a proponent but stopped using the title publicly in the mid-1990s amid growing skepticism.
According to the decree, the title “creates confusion and an imbalance in the harmony of the truths of the Christian faith” and “carries the risk of eclipsing the exclusive role of Jesus Christ.”
Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández, the prefect of the Vatican’s doctrinal office, wrote in a preface to the decree that it was a response to questions in recent years about devotion to Mary and to clarify what is acceptable.
“There are some Marian reflection groups, publications, new devotions, and even requests for Marian dogmas that do not share the same characteristics as popular devotion,” he wrote, adding that some devotional practices expressed “intensely through social media” could sow confusion among Catholics.
Iacopo Scaramuzzi, the Vatican correspondent for La Repubblica newspaper, said the decree was a way of putting the brakes on “the cult of the Madonna.” “The Vatican is cracking down on a devotion which is spreading on social media, and which is a specific devotion embraced especially by conservative Catholics,” he said.
Last year the Vatican tightened rules surrounding supernatural phenomena such as apparitions of the Virgin Mary amid a crackdown on scams and hoaxes, which have proliferated in the age of social media.
Pope Francis warned in 2023 that apparitions of Mary “are not always real”, in what was believed to have been an indirect reference to a woman who drew thousands of pilgrims to a town near Rome to pray before a statue that she claimed had shed tears of blood. “When Marian devotion is too self-centered, it’s not good,” Francis said.
Robert Mickens, a Rome-based Vatican expert, said the latest move would please progressive Catholics. “Mary’s considered the most exalted of all human creatures but she’s not semi-divine,” he said.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/nov/05/mary-not-co-redeemer-vatican-pope-leo-catholic-church
Oriana:
In Poland the cult of Mary did seem to be more popular than anything else the church had to offer. People obviously needed a mother figure, a figure of mercy who never punishes any sinner. Hence the holidays dedicated to Mary (Our Lady of the Meadows, for instance). There were usually more candles in any chapel of Mary of the Seven Sorrows than in the chapels of popular saints such as St. Francis, St. Antony, or St. Thérèse the Little Flower — or even in the Chapel of Jesus of the Sacred Heart.
Why this great popularity of Mary? She is a much needed Mother of Mercy as opposed to the God of Punishment. She suggests pure acceptance and "perpetual help" rather than judgment. I remember one nun who suggested to us children that if our sins were particularly bad, we shouldn't pray to Jesus. "Pray to Mary instead, and she'll then ask Jesus to forgive you."
I'm not suggesting that this was the official doctrine. It was rather the feeling that Mary was all-accepting and all-forgiving, a true helper and comforter, the one who prayed for us "now and in the hour of our death." A Polish woman I knew said that at bedtime she prayed to Mary to come and tuck her in — the way a little girl waits for Mommy to tuck her in.
But then the Catholic church always wanted "the faithful" to be like sheep, or at least like little children. But not like Little Einsteins, always asking questions. No, like Mommy's little angels with their endless trust. They don't particularly care for Jesus the blood-smeared Savior. They want the Holy Mother to kiss them and take the hurt away.
*
THE GREAT FLOOD AND NOAH’S ARK
It is a chillingly accurate description on what happens when an asteroid hits the Indian Ocean.
The same myth of the Deluge is known all around the Indian Ocean basin, and it differs only in details, But the theme — a watery wall of doom of death — is the same in each. The thing that some people can read the signs, build a large vessel, save themselves — appears again and again. It is a clear index that something has happened as it is so deeply etched in the collective memory of the humankind.
Asteroids do exist. Megatsunamis do happen. Of course the flood did not cover the whole Earth and it didn’t obliterate the whole biosphere, but the destruction must have been immense.
And there is actually evidence that it happened — the Burckle Crater.
Now when an asteroid hits the Earth, it can be observed already days before. It looks like a flaming star full of gods’ hate. And when it strikes, it vaporizes thousands of cubic kilometers of seawater. And even more so if it is an ice asteroid.
The atmosphere cannot contain it. It all rains down — exactly as described in the Flood story.
But even worse is to be expected. What follows is iminami — a tsunami whose wave can be kilometers’ high when it hits the shore. If the Thailand tsunami 2004 was bad enough (it is still remembered 20 years after it happened!), multiply it by 10,000.
When such cataclysm happens, the memory of it is imprinted deep in the collective memory of the humankind. It isn’t just a local flood and it isn’t just a myth of the amniotic sac bursting in childbirth. It isn’t necessarily a global or worldwide catastrophe, but it is a catastrophe which involves the Known World Back Then.
Yes, it is a myth. But myths tend to contain a truth. 200 years ago everyone considered the Trojan War as merely a myth and a story Homer had invented to amuse people. Then Heinrich Schliemann really discovered the ruins of Troy and demonstrated it really had happened.
~ Susanna Viljanen
*
WHY IT TOOK SO LONG FOR MULTI-CELL ORGANISMS TO DEVELOP
It took a very long time — nearly two billion years — for eukaryote cells to evolve, because of the incredible level of internal complexity involved. Here’s a bacterium:
and here’s a very simplified view of a eukaryote cell: cell of a multicellular organism
Here’s a close-up of part of a eukaryote cell:
It takes time to build up that level of complexity, but if the Francevillian biota are what they look like, i.e. simple multicellular organisms rather than bacterial colonies, then once eukaryote cells had evolved multicellular life followed almost immediately.“Francevillian” refers to the Francevillian Event, a period of significant geochemical changes around 2.3 billion years ago. This event is linked to the Great Oxidation Event, a time when the Earth's atmosphere saw a dramatic increase in oxygen levels followed by a subsequent drop to lower levels. The term is also sometimes used in relation to the Francevillian Sequence, a set of rock formations studied in this context.
The Great Oxidation of Earth’s atmosphere about 2.3 billion years ago began a series of geochemical events leading to elevated oxygen levels for the next 200 million years, with a collapse to much lower levels as these events played their course.
*
THE LONGEST LIVED MAMMAL
Native
to the arctic waters of the northern hemisphere, the Bowhead whale can
live for centuries, and now scientists think they know why.
The
longest-lived mammals on Earth, bowhead whales, contain longevity
secrets that scientists hope could be applied to our own biology.
A
new study analyzes gene repairing proteins and found that bowhead
whales contain 100 times the concentration of CIRBP, a protein that
repairs genetic damage known as double-strand breaks.
They also
found that the specimens subjected to colder temperatures tended to
produce more of these proteins, a nifty trick for a species that lives
in arctic waters.
The elusive bowhead whale (Balaena mysticetus)
is clearly winning the longevity game. Native to the subarctic and
arctic waters of the northern hemisphere, these mysterious whales live
incredibly long lives. They’re so old, in fact, that native Alaskan
Inupiat hunters have found Victorian-era spear tips embedded in their
blubber and have been known to pass information down several generations
in regards to specific whales, according to Smithsonian Magazine.
Not
only are they the longest-living mammal on Earth, they’re close to
being the oldest animal of them all (taking the bronze longevity medal
behind the Greenland shark and the ocean quahog). To date, the oldest
recorded specimen is 211 years old. That means some Bowhead whales alive
today could’ve been born during the War of 1812.
Greenland shark, 393 years old
Considering
this astonishing level of longevity, it’s no wonder that scientists are
immensely curious as to how these massive, 100-ton beings pull it off.
In a new study published in the journal Nature, a team of scientists led
by researchers at the University of Rochester think they might’ve found
at least part of the answer. Compared to other mammals, Bowhead whales
contain an unusually high concentration of a protein called CIRBP. This
protein is known to repair double-strand breaks where both strands of
the double helix DNA structure are severed, which typically causes
disease and shortens lifespans.
At first, the scientists expected
that whales required a higher number of “oncogenic hits”—genetic
mutations that lead to the creation of cancerous cells—for their cells
to turn malignant. However, they found that they actually required fewer
hits, and that the real secret was they just didn’t accumulate these oncogenic genetic hits in the first place.
To find answers, the team
examined Bowhead whale tissue, and while several type of repair proteins
were present, CIRBP were in concentrations at “100-fold higher levels,”
according to Gorbunova. When the team added this protein to human and
fruit fly cell cultures, DNA repair improved and lifetimes were expanded
as expected. Weirdly, when these cells were subjected to lower
temperatures, they produced more CIRBP in response.
While scientists have understood the underlying mechanism behind the Bowhead whale’s long lifespan, translating that to a Great Ape species separated by more than 94 million years of evolution will be an arduous task.
“There are different ways to improve genome maintenance and here we learn there is one unique way that evolved in bowhead whales where they dramatically increase the levels of this protein,” Gorbunova said in a press statement. “Now we have to see if we can develop strategies to upregulate the same pathway in humans.”
https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/animals/a69220091/bowhead-whale-protein/?utm_source=firefox-newtab-en-us
*
TEAS WITH MORE ANTIOXIDANT POWER THAN GREEN TEA
Green tea isn’t the only antioxidant powerhouse. While green tea is well-known for its catechins and flavonoids, several other teas—including black and matcha—offer equal or even higher antioxidant levels.
Matcha leads the pack for antioxidant content. Because it uses the whole powdered tea leaf, matcha can contain up to 945 mg of antioxidants per cup—far surpassing traditionally brewed teas and offering strong anti-inflammatory and heart-protective benefits.
Each tea offers unique health perks. From black tea’s heart and gut support to white tea’s skin-protective effects and rooibos’s caffeine-free calm, these teas deliver diverse antioxidants that benefit everything from cardiovascular and cognitive health to inflammation and digestion.
Antioxidants are one of the most talked-about nutrients these days, as they can positively impact several aspects of overall health. This is primarily thanks to their ability to target unwanted compounds in the body—namely free radicals.
“Free radicals can damage cells and cause oxidative stress, while antioxidants neutralize them,” explains Jamie Baham, MS, RDN, LD, registered dietitian and owner of Ladybug Nutrition. Free radicals1 and oxidative stress are often at the root of many of the most common acute and chronic illnesses.
When looking to boost antioxidant consumption, green tea is a popular option as an accessible, tasty, and rich source of these nutrients. “Outside of it being delicious, green tea is full of antioxidant powerhouses called catechins2 (especially epigallocatechin gallate, or EGCG)—a type of flavonoid. These mighty inflammation fighters may protect your cells from damage and reduce the risk of chronic illnesses like heart disease and cancer,” Baham adds. You’ll also find other flavonoids like quercetin, kaempferol, myricetin, and rutin in green tea.
“These compounds are shown to support cognitive function in older adults as well as promote heart health by lowering LDL cholesterol,” shares Amy Woodman, RD, dietitian and owner of Farmington Valley Nutrition and Wellness in Simsbury, CT. Better blood sugar management, skin health, and even longevity9 are also tied to the antioxidants in green tea.
Depending on how it’s grown, picked, processed, and brewed, green tea can contain anywhere from 50 and 100 milligrams (mg) of antioxidants per cup. However, it’s not the only tea that offers these beneficial nutrients. Read on to discover five teas that contain as much—or more—antioxidants per cup compared to green tea.
Teas With More Antioxidants Than Green Tea
Though most of these teas come from the same plant (Camellia sinensis), the way their leaves are processed primarily dictates their flavor, color, and health properties—including antioxidant content.
Black Tea
Antioxidant content: 62-100 mg per cup
As one of the most popular teas stateside, black tea is not only delicious, versatile, and nostalgic, but also full of antioxidants. In turn, this tea is associated with plenty of health benefits. “Regular consumption of black tea may offer cardioprotective benefits and help lower blood pressure,” shares Woodman. Its high antioxidant content also helps keep our immune health in tip-top shape and may support a healthy gut microbiome. Some of the most popular and flavorful black tea blends to look for include Earl Grey, English breakfast, and orange pekoe.
White Tea
Antioxidant Content: 52-77 mg per cup
If you’re not familiar, “white tea is made from immature tea leaves and has a delicate flavor, containing slightly less caffeine than green or black teas,” explains Woodman, “it provides many of the same antioxidants found in green and black teas, such as catechins.” Baham shines a light on a couple of the unique health benefits of this tea, sharing, “white tea may promote skin health and reduce DNA damage.” This highly drinkable tea can also be a smart choice for those with sensitive stomachs as “white tea is gentle on the gut,” adds Jessica Villalvir MS, RDN, registered dietitian.
Oolong Tea
Antioxidant Content: 86-150 mg per cup
Oolong tea may not be as well-known as the other teas on this list—but it deserves just as much attention for its wonderfully light, nutty flavor. “Oolong tea is a less common variety compared to green and black teas, and has been associated with improved cardiovascular health, lower blood pressure, enhanced cognitive function, and reduced inflammation,” offers Woodman. But that’s not all, “oolong may help balance blood sugar18 and protect bones, too,” Villalvir adds.
Matcha
Antioxidant Content: Up to 945 mg per cup
Few caffeinated beverages have become as trendy as matcha. In fact, you’re likely to find it at most coffee shops nowadays. Not only is it incredibly tasty, but this powdered green tea also surpasses regularly brewed green tea in antioxidant content. “Matcha contains a higher concentration of antioxidants because, unlike traditional teas that are steeped and then discarded, matcha is made by whisking the powdered tea leaf directly into water, allowing for the entire leaf to be consumed,” explains Woodman. This results in some very notable health benefits. “Matcha is a powerhouse of antioxidants and can help lower inflammation, support healthy cholesterol, and even give you a little focus boost,” shares Villavir. Aside from making for social media-worthy lattes and lemonades, matcha can also be added to smoothies and baked goods for an antioxidant boost.
Rooibos
Antioxidant Content: Up to 68 mg per cup
Unlike the other teas on this list, rooibos is actually not made from the Camellia sinensis plant, but rather from the Aspalathus linearis plant, and is therefore completely caffeine-free! This makes it the perfect beverage to boost your antioxidant intake before bed. “Though slightly below the highest green tea antioxidant concentrations, it’s still substantial per cup. Rooibos is anti-inflammatory and supports cardiovascular health,” shares Baham. This variety makes for a super delicious chai latte that won’t have you buzzing after you drink it.
https://www.realsimple.com/teas-with-more-antioxidants-than-green-tea-11843706?utm_source=firefox-newtab-en-us
*
SIX FRUITS THAT HAVE MORE ANTIOXIDANTS THAN GREEN TEA
All eyes are on antioxidants these days as many of us equate the term with healthfulness—and rightfully so! But what are they, exactly?
“Antioxidants are natural compounds that help protect your body from oxidative stress caused by free radicals,” says Lauren Manaker MS, RDN, LD, a Charleston-based registered dietitian. Free radicals are molecules often at the root of many acute and chronic illnesses Americans face1. “Antioxidants may help protect us from cardiovascular disease, diabetes, cancer, and brain decline,” adds Lori Barrett RDN, LD, registered dietitian. These compounds support immune health from other angles, too. “Antioxidants have fantastic anti-inflammatory properties,” shares Barrett.
But antioxidants are unique from other food-based nutrients and compounds in that there are dozens of different types, from micronutrients like vitamins C and E, to plant compounds like polyphenols. This can make the antioxidant landscape kind of confusing, as each antioxidant benefits our health in specific ways. “For example, polyphenols can help feed some of our gut bacteria that produce beneficial short chain fatty acids to support brain health, immunity, anti-inflammatory, energy, gut health, disease states, and even weight loss,” says Barrett.
The sheer amount of antioxidants can also make deciphering rich food sources more convoluted. One easy way to clear this up is by comparing options to a high antioxidant source, like green tea. “Green tea is a fantastic source of antioxidants, specifically a group known as catechins, with epigallocatechin gallate (EGCG) being the most noteworthy. These catechins have been studied for their ability to reduce inflammation, support brain health, and even play a role in cancer risk reduction,” explains Manaker.
One cup of green tea can contain anywhere between 50 and 100 milligrams (mg) of catechins depending on how it's grown, harvested, processed, and brewed. But green tea isn’t the only place to find high levels of antioxidants. “They can be found in vegetables, fruits, seeds, nuts, oils, and drinks, too,” shares Barrett.
In fact, there are plenty of fruit options that are actually higher in antioxidants than green tea. Though amounts can vary depending on growing, harvesting, and processing conditions (just like green tea), here are six tasty fruits that are not only all-around nutrition VIPs, but boast an equal or higher amount of antioxidants than a single cup of green tea:
Apples
Antioxidant Content: 57-82 mg per small apple (150 grams)
50-75 mg from polyphenols
The proverb an apple a day keeps the doctor away certainly rings true when you consider the impressive antioxidant quality of this popular fruit. Some of the polyphenol antioxidants you’ll find in apples include quercetin and phenolic acids, but this fall favorite is also packed with vitamin C—another popular antioxidant—all equating to incredible immune support. The high fiber and water content of this fall harvest favorite also boosts gut, metabolic, and cell health. Apples are delicious dipped into yogurt or peanut butter, as well as added to smoothies, baked goods, and oatmeal.
Blackberries 
Antioxidant Content: 151-426 mg per ¾ cup (100 grams)
130-405 mg from polyphenols,5
21 mg from vitamin C
Oftentimes, the darker the fruit, the more antioxidant-rich it is. “Purple and blue-colored fruits typically have higher concentrations,” Barrett agrees. And blackberries are no exception. These brilliant purple fruits are loaded with antioxidants like anthocyanins, flavanols, phenolic acids, and vitamin C to help ward off chronic diseases as well as your everyday common cold. But the tiny seeds and skins of these berries also mean that they’re super high in fiber—in addition to the impressive amounts of potassium and vitamin A they boast. These nutrients combine to support gut, heart, and eye health. Whether muddled into cocktails and mocktails, or added to yogurt bowls, chia pudding, or intriguing marinades, there’s no shortage of tasty ways to enjoy blackberries.
Grapefruit
Antioxidant Content: 46-146 mg per 1/3 cup (100 grams)
15-115 mg from polyphenols5
31 mg from vitamin C
Citrus fruits, like grapefruit, are well-known sources of the antioxidant vitamin C but many may not realize all the other antioxidants this bitter citrus offers. High in flavonoid and phenolic acids, alongside fiber, vitamin A, folate, and potassium, grapefruit champions immune, gut, heart, eye, and metabolic health. If not enjoyed by the spoonful (ideally not doused in too much sugar!), grapefruit makes for an interesting smoothie, baked good, and salad addition.
Blueberries
Antioxidant Content: 168-488 mg per 1 cup (100 grams)
160-480 mg from polyphenols5
8 mg from vitamin C
Similar to blackberries, blueberries are one of the most antioxidant-dense foods you can find—they’re dark blue color is a dead give away. Anthocyanins and quercetin are some of the most notable polyphenol antioxidants found in blueberries, though they’re also chock-full of manganese and vitamin K, boosting bone and heart health. Blueberries are fantastic in whole grain pancakes or waffles, smoothie bowls, homemade jam, and even glazes for proteins like chicken and turkey.
130-240 mg from polyphenols
2 mg from vitamin C
Though often forgotten about, plums are not only super tasty, but incredibly nutritious as an impressive source of antioxidants like phenolic acids and anthocyanins—as well as vitamin C. Plus, they offer plenty of vitamin A, vitamin K, and fiber for better eye, bone, heart, and gut health. These fruits can usually only be found fresh in season (mid-summer). However, their dried counterparts, prunes, can be found in whole or juiced form all year-round to support digestion and immunity. But regardless of whether you opt for fresh plums, dried prunes, or prune juice, these ingredients can be added to salads, dressings, a range of beverage recipes, and baked goods.
Pomegranates
Antioxidant Content: 240 mg per ½ cup juice 240 mg from polyphenols, 5 0 mg from vitamin CPomegranates are almost synonymous with antioxidants nowadays thanks to Big Pom’s savvy marketing campaigns. But this isn’t false advertising by any means. Pomegranate juice and arils are chock-full of antioxidants like ellagitannin. Meaningful amounts of folate and potassium are also found in this popular fruit to boost energy metabolism, hydration, and heart health—and the arils are full of fiber for more regular digestion.
Pomegranate juice is *chef’s kiss* when enjoyed as is or added to mocktails and cocktails, and pomegranate arils are the perfect standalone snack or addition to yogurt, oatmeal, and salads. “A spinach salad tossed with berries and pomegranate is a home run for your body, too,” adds Barrett.
https://www.realsimple.com/fruits-with-more-antioxidants-than-green-tea-11739371
*
MERE 3,000 STEPS A DAY HELP LOWER ALZHEIMER'S DISEASE RISK
Past studies have shown that certain healthy lifestyle choices, such as being physically active, may help individuals lower their risk of Alzheimer’s disease.
A new study found that older adults may be able to lower their risk of Alzheimer’s disease by taking as few as 3,000 steps a day.
Scientists reported this benefit was also seen in older adults with high levels of amyloid-beta in their brains.
Past studies have shown that certain lifestyle choices, such as eating a balanced diet, managing stress, getting sufficient sleep, and engaging in regular physical activity, may help reduce a person’s risk of developing Alzheimer’s dementia.
However, it can sometimes be difficult for older adults to be as active as they were when they were younger, and even hitting 10,000 steps a day can be challenging, despite its numerous health benefits.
But a new study, recently published in the journal Nature Medicine, has found that older adults may be able to lower their risk of Alzheimer’s disease by taking as few as 3,000 steps a day.
This modest amount of physical activity, scientists say, also helps to slow cognitive decline risk in older adults with high levels in their brains of a protein called amyloid beta, which is considered to play a large role in the development of Alzheimer’s disease.
Study participants were followed up for a median of about nine years with cognitive assessments and additional PET brain scans to look for signs of another protein associated with Alzheimer’s disease called tau.
For this study, researchers analyzed medical data from almost 300 participants of the Harvard Aging Brain Study. Participants ranged in age from 50 to 90 years and did not have any cognitive deficits before the start of the study. They also had PET scans to measure the amount of amyloid-beta plaques in their brains.
“Our participants actually included a wide range of amyloid levels in the brain, from none to substantial amounts,” Wai-Ying Wendy Yau, MD, a neurologist in the Department of Neurology Memory Division at Mass General Brigham, instructor at Harvard Medical School, and both first-author and co-corresponding author of this study, told Medical News Today.
“This design allowed us to study how early amyloid buildup relates to brain changes and cognitive performance. From neuropathological studies, we know that some people remain cognitively normal despite having Alzheimer’s disease changes in their brains,” she said.
“With the development of amyloid PET imaging in the early 2000s, researchers could visualize and track these changes in living people for the first time, revealing that amyloid accumulation begins many years before symptoms appear and progresses slowly,” Yau continued.
“The Harvard Aging Brain Study, launched in 2010, was designed to understand how this early amyloid buildup contributes to brain dysfunction and cognitive decline, and why people with similar amyloid levels can differ in their cognitive trajectories,” she explained.
Daily walking delays cognitive decline by 3-7 years
At the study’s conclusion, researchers found that older study participants who walked fewer than 3,000 steps a day and had higher levels of amyloid-beta in their brains exhibited faster cognitive decline and tau brain buildup than participants who walked 3,000 to 5,000 steps a day.
Overall, scientists discovered that participants who walked 3,000 to 5,000 steps per day delayed cognitive decline by an average of three years, and those who walked 5,000 to 7,500 steps per day slowed cognitive decline by an average of seven years.
“The significance of these findings is that even modest levels of physical activity were linked to differences in Alzheimer’s-related brain changes,” Yau explained.
Among older adults with elevated amyloid, those who were very sedentary, taking 3,000 steps or fewer per day, showed the fastest buildup of tau proteins and the greatest cognitive decline. Even a modest amount of physical activity, between 3,001 and 5,000 steps per day, was associated with slower changes in both tau and cognition,” Yau said.
“This suggests that the potential benefits of physical activity may begin at relatively achievable levels rather than requiring very high step counts,” she said.
“While clinical trials are needed to confirm causation, these results are encouraging and suggest that small, consistent increases in daily activity may be meaningful for brain health, particularly for those at higher risk of Alzheimer’s-related changes,” she added.
Physical activity and cognitive health strongly connected
MNT spoke with Manisha Parulekar, MD, FACP, AGSF, CMD, director of the Division of Geriatrics at Hackensack University Medical Center and co-director of the Center for Memory Loss and Brain Health at Hackensack University Medical Center in New Jersey, about this study.
“The link between physical activity and cognitive health is something we consistently emphasize to our patients and their families,” Parulekar commented.” This study provides ongoing evidence that further solidifies this connection, particularly for individuals already on the path of Alzheimer’s pathology with elevated brain amyloid-beta.”
Parulekar said that this study opens up several exciting avenues for future research that she would be keen to see explored.
“First, I would like to see longitudinal studies that follow individuals over a longer period to better understand the sustained impact of different levels of physical activity on cognitive function and the accumulation of both amyloid and tau proteins,” she detailed.
Does 10,000 steps lower Alzheimer’s risk further?
“It would be valuable to determine if there is a dose-response relationship — does increasing daily steps from 5,000 to 8,000 or 10,000 confer even greater protection, as some research has suggested for lowering dementia risk in the general population?”
“Second, it would be beneficial to investigate the underlying biological mechanisms at play,” Parulekar said.
“How exactly does walking and physical activity slow the buildup of tau proteins and protect against cognitive decline in brains already burdened with amyloid? Understanding these pathways, whether they involve reduced inflammation, improved blood flow, or the release of neuroprotective factors, could lead to the development of new, targeted therapies,” she added.
ending on beauty:
THIS IS JUST TO SAY
No comments:
Post a Comment