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THE BELA LUGOSI MOTH
In the hummingbird pavilion,
past an iridescent
veil of morpho butterflies,
wings not trembling nor folded
in prayer, but spread like a cape,
black silk, two yellow eyes —
the Bela Lugosi moth.
Bela, whose tombstone
I found in Los Angeles,
at the Cemetery of the Holy Cross.
Engraved in strict granite,
only name and dates —
slow syllables welling up,
in black flight swooping down,
in a crimson hush:
a shadow, a shudder, a hiss —
I mean kiss —
Do you cross this threshold
of your own free will?
the Count asks, we we must reply.
*
Bela, this moth is your true
memorial — something of you,
with black wings —
Fear too has its rituals, dresses
in capes and fastens fangs.
But when they taunt, You never
loved. You cannot love,
the vampire confesses,
I too can love —
a crucifixion, even as I linger
in the Hummingbird Pavilion,
happier than all the children
whose memory is daylight
and will self-destruct —
while I watch the Bela Lugosi
head-down on the false stone.
Taste is caution. Style is
daring. On black wings
the false eyes warn
art is love and will uncloak
hidden self you didn’t know
waiting in the vivid dark,
the Great Undead
watching from the wall.
~ Oriana
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WHY MANY CULTURES BELIEVE THE DEAD WALK AMONG US; KILLING THE DANGEROUS DEAD
How can whole societies come to believe that the dead walk among them? Understanding that requires moving beyond theoretical approaches and engaging with tangible human communities and their world-views.
We will first visit two very different societies in which the veil between life and death has been thin. The dead have been close: sometimes to be revered, sometimes to be feared, but regularly to be interacted with, if not unambiguously in a bodily form. Both case-studies manifest an endemic layer of anxiety, capable of intensifying under stress into something more concentrated and physical.
The Sora of the Indian East Coast
The Sora are an indigenous, long-stable society. They are slash-and-burn farmers, with linguistic and cultural affinities looking outwards to South-East Asia. Their strong sense of sociability, mutual sharing, and interdependence crosses the life/death boundary. The engagement of the living with the dead is continuous and immensely complex, to the point of influencing large areas of social and ethical practice.
Cremation happens swiftly, but is followed by extended negotiations to help the dead along the road from the short-term ‘Experience’ stage—when they may be resentful, conflicted, or dangerous—to the stable and serene ‘Ancestor’ stage.
That is hardest for those who have died badly: they can seek to pull the living after them, setting up chains of unquiet deaths. In such cases, ‘inquests’ are held: public meetings to settle differences across the divide, in which conversations with the angry dead—mediated by female shamans—can become very direct and informal. Here for instance are snatches from a dialogue between a little girl who had died recently and her aunt (representing the girl’s mother):
dead girl [arriving from the Underworld, faintly]: Mother, where are my nose-rings?
living aunt: They must have burned up in the pyre, darling, we looked but couldn’t find them.
dead girl [petulantly]: Why aren’t you showing me my nose-rings?
living aunt: They were so tiny. . . . Oh, my love, my darling, don’t cause your own illness in others. Can you say that your mother and father didn’t sacrifice for you? . . .
dead girl [addressing herself to her silent mother, and crying]: Mother, you were horrid to me, you scolded me, you called me Scar-Girl, you called me Leper-Girl, you said, ‘You’re a big girl now, why should I feed you when you sit around doing nothing?’
living aunt: So don’t you pass it [her illness] on, don’t you give it to your mother and little sisters!
dead girl: If I grab them, I grab them; if I touch them, I touch them; if I pass it on, I pass it on: that’s how it goes. . . .
In this culture of universal cremation, corpses cannot straightforwardly get up and walk. Even so, the deceased’s ‘ghost’ (kulman) is tangible enough to be coated with ash from the pyre, to have hair that the living can touch, to rummage around the kitchen looking for food, and to need restraining from returning home. In the following story (which reads rather like an origin-myth for the cremation rite), a dead woman who has not been cremated seems physical enough to her family:
A family lived in isolation in the jungle. One day the mother died and since he did not understand what death was, the father just abandoned her corpse. But every day when he left his children and went out to find food, her kulman returned and swept the house and cooked. . . . [The children told him, so he] stayed behind one day to see for himself. His wife did indeed come and start to work. He was overwhelmed with joy and rushed up to her and threw his arms around her. But as soon as he clasped her, she turned to ashes in his embrace. Only then did he understand that he had to cremate her and plant a stone for her.
As elsewhere, the ambiguity in such narratives may reflect ambiguity in perception: do the dead really walk? It may well be that the Sora, if pressed, would say that they do not do so in a literally corporeal sense. But if such a society were to suffer socio-cultural trauma and externally-driven religious change, leading for instance to the abandonment of cremation, might this aspect of their cognitive world assume a more lurid physicality?
Nilsiä, a small town in eastern Finland, belongs to a traditional society of mixed subsistence farming, little touched by modernity before the 1960s. In June 1998 a retired farming couple, Helmi and Uuno Heikkinen, were drinking coffee at home. A friend called Pikilän Helmi had dropped in, and was telling them about the death of her husband Jussi a couple of years earlier. While he was still unburied, Pikilän Helmi and her sister Elsa were preparing for the funeral. That night, Elsa slept beside her sister in what had been Jussi’s place. During the night, Jussi came with his walking-stick, shouted “Get out of my bed,” and drove Elsa away with blows on the leg. In the morning, her leg was red and swollen. Some time afterwards, Jussi visited his widow a second time. “Would you like to come with me?” he asked, in a friendly, inquiring fashion, adding, “but you still have some time left.” Later he came a third time, saying, “Now it’s time to go: you haven’t much time left.”
The meeting with the Heikkinens was soon after that. In fact, Pikilän Helmi had come because she thought it would be her last chance to meet them, and she did indeed die shortly afterwards. Also present on that occasion was Elvi Kuosmanen, who recalled Sanni Hyttinen, a former resident of the same building whose husband had died in the Winter War of 1939–40. Recently, when Sanni had just moved to an old people’s home, her husband had come and told her that it would soon be time for her to go: “It’s good that you now live in such nice quarters, but you won’t have much time to enjoy them.”
Helmi Heikkinen told this story to members of her family in July 2006, but her daughter-in-law and grandchildren agree that on previous occasions, they heard her narrate a simpler version: that Pikilän Helmi’s dead husband would regularly return to sleep with her, and that she essentially took that for granted. They suggest that Helmi Heikkinen unconsciously remolded the story in her mind into a more structured version (perhaps influenced by fairytales with the three-visit motif), and also filtered out the implied sexual aspect.
For us, this story has two lessons. One is about how oral transmission works: genuine memories are reported and handed down, but in the process they can be re-shaped into recognized narrative forms, with elements emphasized or suppressed to suit current sensibilities. The other—counter-intuitively for modern readers—is its normality. It just describes ordinary life, as perceived in pre-industrial societies across the globe through countless millennia: there is nothing sinister about Jussi’s return.
Going back another generation, we meet something darker and more eerie. Helmi’s mother-in-law, Anna Lovisa Heikkinen (1878–1961), was a hard woman in a tough environment. Her keen-sightedness seemed almost outside the human range, and her granddaughter remembers once seeing horns on her head. As she lay dying, she asked mysteriously to be buried with her hair. Soon after her funeral, footsteps were heard in the attic, where a search revealed a bag of hair and nail clippings. This was buried in a bog, and the footsteps ceased. Years later, her great-granddaughter saw her bible lying in a cupboard on the house porch and sensed that nobody liked to touch it.
These stories from a traditional Finnish family preserve traces of a perceptual world that once covered large areas of Europe. The boundary between the living and the dead is thin and permeable, and it becomes perilously frail when daunting individuals, having crossed it, show signs of coming back. Jussi and Anna Lovisa are not returning corpses, but they are physical enough to attack someone with a stick or tramp across a timber floor.
Jussi’s story illustrates the particular dangers of the interval between death and burial. Anna Lovisa represents the strong, potentially dangerous matriarch whom we will meet later. But there is a distinct difference between these two dead people: one behaves in a normal, predictable fashion, whereas the other is sinister and provokes counter-measures. What would another stage along this spectrum look like?
Anthropological Perspectives
By now, we should have some grasp of the kinds of mindset that could—given the right stimuli—generate fears of the walking dead. What then were the stimuli? To pursue this further we need specific and close-grained analyses, but sadly those are few and far between. The heroic pioneers of anthropology, while intensely interested in comparative religious systems and concepts of the soul, gave little thought to the specific problem of corpses with an in-dwelling life. Sir James Frazer’s The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead and The Fear of the Dead in Primitive Religion make six volumes between them, in which beliefs across the globe are rehearsed in mind-numbing abundance. Even so, the dangerous physical dead barely feature there, outside a rather breathless catalogue of corpse-killing practices that is useful as a source for examples, but in no way analytical.
More recently, those anthropologists who have shown interest in the problem have tended to follow the universalizing lead of psychologists. There has been valuable work on the dangerous dead in animistic and multi-spirit cultures, notably Katherine Swancutt’s fine-grained analysis of ‘vampiric imps’ in the complex family structures of Buryat Mongols. By comparison, the few surviving pockets of European corpse-killing have (sadly and surprisingly) seen little attention. A few case studies do nonetheless exist, and two especially deserve our attention here.
Carl-Ulrik Schierup is a sociologist interested in ethnicity, migration, and multiculturalism: his study of vampire beliefs among Wallachians in Denmark and Sweden starts from research on those expatriate communities. Back home, in north-eastern Serbia, the beliefs are endemic, but why do they “not only survive, but are even invoked more often in immigrant communities, than in the pre-migratory rural situation?” Schierup’s answer lies in heightened tensions between expatriates and their home families, whose distinctive structure, dominated by the elderly, continues to exert a hold on them.
He begins with one Milorad, who is working late in his suburban Danish house in 1983. He hears a knock, and lifts his tired eyes: “His deceased mother is hovering outside the window in her white burial attire, muttering in a distant voice: ‘Why have you left me . . . ?’” To his friends, it is only too predictable: “They knew before I did that she might come. . . . I had gone against my mother, and married Zlatka, who was a simple girl and not good enough for me according to Mamma. Then later, when I moved from my mother’s house to bring peace to the family, my mother condemned me. . . . People knew that my mother was strong and that her judgement was a hard burden to bear. They knew that she might return.”
Schierup locates such anxieties in the ‘Timok family type,’ which comprises up to five generations in the same household (now often alternate, as couples temporarily migrate, leaving children with grandparents). It is made practicable by an early age of marriage and a low birthrate. The senior generation, which dominates property-rights and household decision-making, seeks to maintain control by arranging marriages—often doomed ones—for malleable teenagers.
Predictably, many young couples defy the system and make their own choices. Such marriages tend to be more successful, but they can cause bitter and long-lasting conflict between the generations. “Thus the ultimate moral sanction of the older generation, lies in the fact that they might reappear [after death] and revenge themselves.” After about 1970, a new factor was temporary migration to Scandinavia. Migrants regularly returned to their home villages and families, with which they still identified and where life-cycle events happened, but the potential for conflict grew as younger generations became more educated and cosmopolitan. The elders responded by falling back on traditional ideology and magical sanctions: “Thus, the strategic importance of ‘vampires’ tends to increase as integration in Scandinavian society grows.”
There are anthropological insights of a different but complementary kind in Juliet du Boulay’s unique and brilliant paper ‘The Greek Vampire,’ based on her fieldwork in the village of Ambéli (in Euboea on the Aegean coast of Greece) in 1971–3. In contrast to Schierup’s sociological and functional approach, du Boulay explores symbolic meaning. Sadly, her work stands so completely on its own that generalization from it is risky, but it adds such richness in context and significance that it needs close attention here.
The ritual life of Ambéli was dominated by a pervasive cyclic symbolism, represented by the traditional ring-dance, in which all movement was in a spiraling anti-clockwise (‘auspicious’ or ‘right-handed’) direction. In rituals of both marriage and death, blood is a central motif, and that blood must circulate auspiciously, out of the kindred rather than turning back upon it. In the case of marriage, men stay in their own kindreds whereas women move outside them: “The movement of women between the kindreds is equated with the movement of blood and expresses the principle that this movement should be unidirectional and should not be reversed.”
When death comes, the Angel of Judgement “with his drawn sword cuts the victim’s throat, and drenches with blood not only the dead person but also the house and everyone in it”: thus, the individual is transformed from a this-world being of flesh and blood to an insubstantial soul. But that process can go horribly wrong if a procedural accident—usually a cat or some other creature or object passing across the corpse—occurs between death and burial. This breaks the outwards-flowing spiral movement of the blood, turning it back on itself, and may also block a vertical axis passing through the corpse between the upper and nether worlds. The corpse is then reanimated as a predatory and lethal vampire.
There is thus a parallelism—though not a direct causal link—between the good and bad directions of blood circulation in marriage and in death:
Blood going to ‘strange’ blood [by marriage well outside the kindred] pours in a life-giving spiral through the community; while blood going to blood that ‘resembles itself’—that is to say, stays where it is—halts and doubles back. Similarly, the life in which the outpouring of the blood in death has not been frustrated moves on without check into the new and auspicious categories of the other world; while a life by which this outpouring is, by some inauspicious action, checked and turned back on itself, returns to devour the succeeding generations, and imperils the destiny of its own soul.
The parallel elucidates a dramatic moment in du Boulay’s research when she overheard two women deploring a marriage between second cousins: ‘In this context the comment then uttered takes on a startling significance, for, said as an aside and half under the breath, it took the form of a well-known proverb: “The vampire hunts its own kindred” (vrykólakas tó sói kynigáei). The image of the vampire returning from the grave to hunt its own kin sprang intuitively to mind in the context of the blood which in second cousin marriage returns to destroy its originators’.
Du Boulay’s work gives rich texture and meaning to motifs found in many (but not all) dead-killing cultures. One of those, of course, is blood: vampires are rarely caught sucking it, but they sometimes accumulate it in their bodies and graves. Another is social ritual, shockingly transgressed if the dead cannot die. A third is the motif-complex of blocking, frustration, and diversion onto the wrong path, many versions of which appear in this book. Whenever we meet these, we should remember her insights.
Whether she explains why the people of Ambéli came to believe in vampires in the first place is perhaps not so clear. Other Greek regions may be different (as she fully acknowledges), and places further afield may be different again. We will see that beliefs in dangerous corpses were deep-rooted in the Balkans, but may only have developed in Greece during the later Middle Ages. Rather than the Greek vampire being created as a sinister counterpoint to the auspicious spiral, it seems more likely to have been assimilated into that symbolic system from a different source.
What sustained it? The Schierup and du Boulay models have one social institution in common: rigid and heavily-determined marriage patterns based on extended kindreds. But whereas du Boulay dissects attitudes at a moment in time, Schierup emphasizes stresses building up because of social change, migration, and inter-generational strife. Conflicts between norms imposed by family elders and the inclinations of young couples must have occurred in Ambéli, too, where mothers-in-law were proverbially cross-grained and old women could mutter under their breaths about vampires. In the expatriate Wallachian communities, the vampires were the grandmothers themselves.
If this recalls the Freudian idea of ‘relative-as-demon’, it must be stressed that it is just one scenario among several. It introduces some important themes that we will meet again: distinctive kinship structures; dominant and sinister matriarchs; disempowered but rebellious teenagers; heightened stresses within migrant communities. But there will be other cases where few or none of these factors apply.
There is a distinction between societies like those explored in these two studies, where ‘the vampire hunts its own kindred,’ and the many others where it attacks neighbors rather than family and is a general public nuisance. Intra-family tension is one layer, but socio-economic change, trauma, and disease have added others. In a global context, the Ambéli cameo is one point on a fluctuating trajectory.
Epidemics?
Even if fear of the dangerous dead is a human propensity, the cultural factors activating its more intense forms have been absent from large regions of the world. In other regions, the fear has existed at a mild level through long timespans; in others again, it has risen to intense levels during short or occasionally lengthy phases. It seems appropriate to adopt clinical terminology: chronic versus acute, endemic versus epidemic.
Some well-documented outbreaks of vampire-killing erupted quite suddenly: in Saxony and then Silesia from the 1540s, in Moravia from around 1650, and in New England from the 1780s. They then ran for up to a century, with gradually diminishing intensity. That helps to make sense of an older case: eleventh- to twelfth-century England, where the start of the outbreak remains hazy, but its geographical retreat and then near-disappearance after 1200 was quick and obvious.
Elsewhere, and further back in time, the evidence is rarely adequate to calibrate the rise and fall of epidemics: we tend to find specific clutches of stories, or of excavated burials, that suggest intense phases of corpse-killing without giving much idea of their length. With at least some of these, their very isolation might suggest short, acute episodes. On the other hand, there are large areas—northern Europe through the first millennium AD, for instance—where sporadic episodes are most convincingly ascribed to low-level but long-lasting fears, perhaps punctuated by brief local peaks.
The clear epidemic cases arose against backgrounds of acute trauma: foreign invasion combined with socio-economic and religious change in medieval England; bubonic plague, the Reformation and re-Catholicization in central Europe; violence and disease at the interface of Turkish and Habsburg imperial domination in Serbia; and the devastating scourge of tuberculosis in New England. Epidemic disease may be the most powerful driver, but any grossly disorientating and destabilizing change could potentially arouse concerted attacks on the dead—so long as a basic cultural propensity was already there in the background. In other cases we will need to explore different factors, such as the anthropologists’ models of family structure, and religious tensions between Catholic, Orthodox, and Muslim traditions.
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In the end, the dead are most likely to be blamed when external forces bring grievous burdens of sorrow and fear. These can be social, cultural, and religious changes, up-ending the customs and belief-systems that underpin stable life. They can be the grief and outrage of the colonized or the insecurities of colonizers. They can be destructive wars. They can be religious transformations. Above all, they can be epidemic diseases.
Faced with such catastrophes, inaction is intolerable: one must do something. Tragically, vengeful hatred has often been directed irrationally against neighbors, for instance those identified as ethnic, religious, or sexual deviants. But suppose the culprits are recognized among the dead? That may be irrational too, but it will spare the living.
Few reflective comments have come through to us from societies that actually practiced killing the dead. But we can listen to a relative of the last New England ‘vampire’ (exhumed in 1892), recalling the tuberculosis that devastated his family and neighbors, and their way of coping with it: “Do I believe in vampire? No. No, I don’t believe in that. I’m not sure they did, but they had to come for an answer. And it turned out that maybe that was the answer. And some of them old people probably died with that in their mind, that they did the right thing.”
https://lithub.com/why-do-countless-cultures-believe-the-dead-walk-among-us/
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THE DEATH OF MARAT, 1793
Jacques-Louis David's The Death of Marat is a deceptively simple image of a real-life murder. But a closer look at David's iconic painting reveals the political messages contained within.
Great art makes us do a double take. It makes us look, then look again. Take The Death of Marat, 1793, perhaps the most famous crime scene depiction of the past 250 years. At first glance, the portrayal of the murdered body of the French revolutionary Jean-Paul Marat, stabbed to death in his bath on 13 July 1793, could hardly be simpler. The slain journalist, who had agitated for the execution of King Louis XVI, slumps towards us – his body framed by the vast flickering emptiness that stretches above him.
Lean in closer, however, and Jacques-Louis David's iconic painting begins to break down into a complex puzzle of double details that unsettle the bottom half of the canvas – two quills, two dates, two letters, two absent women, two boxes, two signatures, two dead bodies. The cacophony of contrary clues draws us in, transforming us from passive observers of a straightforward snapshot of history to forensic detectives actively engaged in solving a deeper mystery, one in which the artist himself is suspected of having tampered with the evidence.
Everywhere you look in The Death of Marat, there is proof of the artist's dual determination to create both an intimate personal elegy for a murdered friend, whose radical politics the artist shared, as well as a piece of potent public propaganda. In David's hands, Marat is much more than simply a Jacobin journalist into whose chest a French woman, Charlotte Corday, plunged a kitchen knife, believing he was poisoning public discourse. Marat is glorified: a second Christ.
David's portrait exalts Marat, transfiguring him from a sickly real-life person, who required lengthy medicinal baths to soothe a chronic skin disease, into a sacrificed secular Messiah. To amplify that elevation from infirm mortal to mystical martyr, David laces his painting with decodable ciphers and echoes of art history that keep our eyes firmly fixed on the myth he is weaving before them. So implicated is the artist in the choreography of the scene, it is easy to see how Sébastien Allard, curator of the Louvre exhibition, could reach the conclusion in his essay for the catalogue that "the monument David erects to Marat is also a monument that he builds for himself… Marat acts with his pen, the painter with his brushes”.
The two hands
Our gaze is torn in two directions as it tries to trace the curiously contrary activities of the dead man's moribund hands. In Marat's right hand we find the quill with which he was writing when stabbed with the pearl-handled knife that lies only inches away. Knuckles to the floor, that hand dangles lifelessly downward in a manner that recalls Christ's drooping arms in both Michelangelo's monumental marble sculpture, Pietà, and in Caravaggio's affecting painting The Entombment of Christ, 1603-4. Meanwhile, Marat's left hand, rigid with rigor mortis, steadies a blood-smudged letter from the assassin, suggesting an entirely different focus of his attention. One hand clings to life, the other succumbs to death. Between these two diverging gestures, the painting's spirit swivels, flexing forever between the world of the living and the world of the dead – this one and the next.
The two quills
Compounding that friction between the restless flux and sombre stillness of Marat's discrepant hands is David's seemingly redundant decision to insert into the stripped-down scene not one ink-dipped quill, but two. Between the lifeless fingers of his right hand, Marat pinches a writing feather, still wet with ink. Follow its shaft upwards from the floor, past the white plume, to the upturned crate that Marat was using as a desk, and we discover a second quill lying beside the crouching inkpot. This quill's dark nib points menacingly in the direction of the fatal stab wound, and poses a pointed question: was it a knife that killed Marat or words? In times of heated politics, it is never clear which is mightier, the pen or the sword. As we'll see, in David's painting the quill and blade are themselves doppelgängers. They sharpen each other.
The two letters
Once detected, the doubling of evidence in the painting suddenly multiplies. Side-by-side at the center of the canvas we find not one letter but two, each composed by a different hand. Between the lines of these two documents, the entire plot of the painting is written. The note that Marat clutches in his left hand is positioned by the artist in such a way that we can easily read how Corday, unknown to Marat, baited him into inviting her in, and took advantage of his benevolent nature: "It is enough that I am very unhappy", Corday disingenuously pleads in her letter, "to have a right to your kindness." The message is clear: it is Marat's kindness that killed him.
Just below Corday's letter, teetering on the edge of the box, is another missive composed by Marat himself – the document he was apparently writing when she struck. This note is held down by an assignat (or revolutionary money), thought by scholars to be the first-ever depiction of paper currency in Western art. In his letter, Marat selflessly pledges five livres to a suffering friend of the Revolution: "that mother of five children whose husband died in defence of the fatherland". Even in death, we're told, Marat bleeds generosity.
The two women
The two letters do more than draw the axes of luring and lying, kindness and redemption, against which the painting's story twists. The two letters conjure ghosts – two of them. First is Corday's, the conniving assassin who slipped into Marat's home with a long knife beneath her shawl. The second, also unseen, is that of the suffering widow whom Marat was intent on helping, whose husband died fighting for the Republic.
The face-off between female forces, one personifying good and the other evil, has a long tradition in art history. For centuries artists have staged the struggle between saintliness and sinfulness as a bitter contest between strong women. Renaissance artist Paolo Veronese's famous Allegory of Virtue and Vice, c 1565, portrays one woman beckoning Hercules towards honor while another, a long knife hidden behind her back, tempts him towards pleasure. David updates the allegory for the era of Revolution. In The Death of Marat, it is the soul of a nation that is at stake.
The face-off between female forces echoes Veronese's Allegory of Virtue and Vice, c 1565
The two signatures
Every painting ends with a signature – that final flourish with which the artist gives consent to the story that he or she has told. The Death of Marat has two, ensuring the work is never complete, but a confounding cold case that our eyes will forever crack open. One, scrawled askance at the center of the canvas, belongs to Corday and is forged by David in the recreation of the letter she wrote to Marat. Elsewhere, near the bottom of the painting and seemingly chiselled into the wooden box as if it had been carved in stone, is the signature of the artist himself, formally dedicating the work to his assassinated friend, whose name he magnifies beyond the scale of his own: "To Marat, David".
By carving his name into the very furniture of the work, David inserts himself into the scene of the crime. Once again he's echoing art history. In the only painting Caravaggio ever signed, he did the same. At the bottom of his colossal canvas, The Beheading of St John the Baptist, Caravaggio assembles the syllables of his first name "f. Michelang.o" from a pool of blood that spills from the severed neck of the priest. It's a grisly gesture that seems to assume some responsibility for the murder. By recalling Caravaggio's self-incriminating signature, David isn't confessing to Marat's assassination but declaring allegiance to his political agenda. He's asserting "we're all Marat now”.
David's signature echoes Caravaggio, who wrote "f.Michelang.o" at the bottom of The Beheading of St John the Baptist
The two dates
Look closely below David's signature and you will see a silent struggle not just between two different dates but between two contrary conceptions of time. Under his own name, David has chiseled "L'an deux", denoting the second year of the Revolutionary Calendar which began in 1792, when the Republic was founded. That crisp and legible date sits between the pried apart and partially erased digits of the Christian calendar's calibration for the year of the work's creation: "1793". In the bottom two corners of the box, David has inserted and scrubbed away "17" and "93", indicating an utter abolition of Christian time in favor of revolutionary measurements.
Yet again, Marat may be making a rich allusion in his curious conflation of competing systems of time. Like Caravaggio, Botticelli too only signed one painting: his Mystic Nativity, into which he embeds a riddling inscription that brings into close adjacency the Christian calendar and an apocalyptic one that is synchronized to the Book of Revelations: "This picture, at the end of the year 1500, in the troubles of Italy, I, Alessandro, painted in the half-time after the time, according to the eleventh chapter of Saint John in the second woe of the Apocalypse…" In David's Death of Marat, Botticelli is summoned and superseded as the priorities of revelation are usurped by those of revolution.
What, ultimately, does all this doubling add up to in David's famous painting, a work that, by fusing passion with principle, would redefine the texture and intensity of history painting, and influence everything from Delacroix's Raft of the Medusa to Picasso's Guernica? By relentlessly refracting the evidence left at the scene of Marat's murder through the dense prism of his imagination, David projects a double portrait. Before our eyes the artist transforms murder into myth as the physical body of the slain polemicist is alchemized into a mystical second figure we more feel than see. Marat the Messiah's haunting presence disturbed the imagination of the French poet Baudelaire, who famously observed of the painting "in the cold air of this room, on these cold walls, around this cold and mournful bathtub, a soul hovers".
https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20251028-the-death-of-marat-unlocking-the-complex-clues-hidden-inside-art-historys-1793-true-crime-masterpiece
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ARE RUSSIANS BAD AT FIGHTING?
Russia is bad at fighting. Russians don’t mind hurling masses of troops forward, willy nilly, with little sense for tactics. These Russian “meat waves” gains tiny specks of ground at a time, yet seem like successes to Russians; utter failure to Western observers. When Russians gain control of the equivalent of an English garden, yet lose 1,000 troops to get it, they think they’re winning. Russians are satisfied with this mediocrity.
Russia’s Attritional War has backfired on them. Russia knows they have more people than Ukraine, so they are content with a slow, years-long, slog. This has given Ukraine time to develop their weapons industry.
Ukraine now builds more than 5 Million drones a year. They have sea-borne drones that can shoot down Russia’s best fighters (the only system like this in the world). Ukraine launched the first all-robotic drone attack in world history. Now, Ukraine has a cruise missile (Flamingo) with a longer range and larger warhead than the best systems the West has. All of this is possible because of Russia’s slow, stumbling advance.
drone factory, Ukraine
The biggest problem Russia is facing, that hinders Russians the most, isn’t Ukraine…it’s Russians. Rampant graft, cronyism, and corruption, have crippled Russia’s armed forces. Russia started this war with everything they needed to win in three days, three months at the outside. It’s been Russian stumbling and fumbling that’s given the scrappy, inventive, resourceful Ukrainians time to rebound, and even push Russia back at times. Without Russian incompetence, this war would already be over.
Ukraine's Flamingo Cruise Missile
And now, because of the superior inventiveness and, yes, technological intelligence, Ukraine developed its own long-range drones to systematically crash Russia’s fossil fuel industry. Russia has already lost, mark my words; it’s just going to take a long time for the Russian bear body to bleed out and die. ~ Quora
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THE FUTURE OF RUSSIA ONCE THE WAR ENDS
The graffiti says “Perfection and beauty”
Putin’s vision for the future of Russia was the Soviet past: his goal was to recreate the USSR and the Warsaw Bloc, where Moscow was dictating to the whole bunch of nations that after the collapse of the Soviet Union hurried away as fast as they could.
Because of Putin’s war, the image of Russia in the world is now not far from how Hitler’s Germany was perceived.
Under Putin, the Russian Federation secured the position of the raw materials appendage and a backward nation convinced that the fact their neighbors fear them means they are respected.
Under Putin, Russia:
Became an impoverished country with aging population.
Crime is up (and will be much worse when the Russian soldiers return home from Ukraine).
The word “Russian” is associated with murdering kids in their beds and bombing cancer hospitals. [Oriana: let's not forget the attacks on kindergartens.]
The myth about Russian military power shattered.
The stocks of military tech and weapons, left from the Soviet times, exhausted.
Russia was unable to defend its territory without the help from North Korea.
For the first time since WW2, Russia was invaded.
Strikes hit Russian cities as far as 2,300 km from the border (never happened before).
A gas station with nukes has to import gasoline and diesel from abroad.
Putin promised the Russians to bring back the carefree times of the late Soviet Union when people didn’t need to worry about paying for school, healthcare, home, and basic food was affordable.
Instead, he brought the same level of tyranny, propaganda, and government control, and began again sending Russian men to die in wars on foreign soil.
To me, the only way for the people of Russia not to fall under a dictatorship the style of North Korea for the next 100 years is to remove Putin from power on the back of losing the war in Ukraine.
If this doesn’t happen, then Putin’s “Soviet Union 2.0” will be the union with the North Korea. Russia is actually moving pretty fast in that direction.
“Russians are starting to abuse Russians, and there’s no control over it. When there’s no control and oversight — lawlessness sets in. We pretend that this problem doesn’t exist, but it really does.” ~ Russian military blogger Anastasia Kashevarova
Elena Gold:
In Russia proper, there are now kidnappings for ransom.
Ric Pavlovich:
Russia — rapidly moving towards 1930.
KeV L:
Trump and Putin, pair of whack jobs who want to roll the world back to 1955.
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from another source:
THE FUTURE OF RUSSIA AND UKRAINE
Neither of the two countries has a future to speak of.
Russia is committing one of the most spectacular cases of a national suicide in human history, where hundreds of thousands of lives, hundreds of billions of dollars, and decades of Russian and even Soviet diplomacy have been sacrificed on the altar of Putin’s delusions.
For decades, the USSR’s and Russia’s strategy was to maintain leverage over Europe by hooking it up to cheap Russian gas and buying off Russia-friendly politicians in the West.
Russians managed to blow it all in less than a year, bankrupted their own Nord Stream 2, which they lobbied so much for, and are now forced to sell gas to China for a fraction of what the EU paid before 2022.
Gazprom, Russia’s gas giant, is now losing money, for the first time since 1999.
Hundreds of pages have been written trying to rationalize what happened and explain how becoming a pariah state and abandoning any prospect of economic development are somehow in Russia’s best interests. It appears that too many people are afraid to accept the only rational explanation: the largest country on earth is simply run by a drooling idiot who lost his marbles. Putin is no chess player or a Hollywood villain, but a mediocre, not particularly intelligent KGB paper pusher who became president by sheer accident, latched onto power and kept the country hostage to his incompetence ever since.
Russia is not going to collapse into a thousand statelets, as some of the people here claim, and could well continue the war against Ukraine for years to come. But it has certainly kissed goodbye to any prospects of becoming a developed country and catching up with the West. Its fate now is to be a client state of China, and over the next decades it will gradually slide into primitive irrelevance—which is the natural state of Russia when it doesn’t have access to Western technology and Jewish brains. Sanctioned by the West and with its Jewish community rapidly dwindling, Russia already falls short on both.
Now before you upvote this answer and share it to your favorite pro-Ukraine space, I’m afraid I don’t see any good prospects for Ukraine either. Russia and Ukraine have a lot more in common than Ukrainians like to admit, and largely share the same problems—most notably the apocalyptic demography (the fertility rate is 1.42 in Russia, 0.98 in Ukraine) and a propensity towards reality denial. In Russia’s case, it manifests as the delusions of grandeur that affect many Russians who seem to genuinely believe their country is a superpower and a worthy adversary of the US, rather than a Chinese satellite. In Ukraine’s case, it’s the equally harebrained idea that Ukraine is the leader of the free world, rather than an impoverished, war-torn country that only survives thanks to Western life support.
Ukraine is locked in a war of attrition it can’t win, and it seems its only strategy is to hope that a country 4 times Ukraine’s population and 11 times its GDP collapses first. The war could end tomorrow or in a few years, the outcome will be the same: a Korea-style armistice roughly along the existing frontline.
Ukraine won’t get its land back, but won’t recognize it as Russian either; Russia won’t have the sanctions lifted. This means both countries will have no foreign investment to speak of, the brain drain will continue, and Ukraine’s EU and NATO membership will remain a pipe dream.
At a certain point, Russia will have a somewhat sane leader (as unlikely as it seems, this happened several times in Russian history) and will seek a rapprochement with the West—my estimate is it could happen as soon as 2030 and will almost certainly happen before 2050. But even if it happens tomorrow, it will take decades for Russia and Ukraine to catch up with the developed world, if it will be possible at all after 70 years of communism and 25+ years of putinism. And with the demographic collapse looming in, Russia and Ukraine may well become either empty or Muslim in a few decades.
Andy Wiskonsky:
That doesn’t have to be the future. Putin could be overthrown, Russian armies leave all Ukrainian territory, reparations are paid to Ukraine, the Black Sea is demilitarized so both Ukraine and Russia could export grain, steel, oil, titanium, gallium and other goods to the importing nations of the world.
Russia and Ukraine could then probably start recovering in some 15–30 years.
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THE IMPRINT OF COMMUNISM ON RUSSIA (Dima Vorobiev)
Russia that you see today is a product of the Communist rule, deformed by the preceding Russian history. It’s not the other way around (Russia deformed by Communists), because not only the entire imperial elite was wiped out, but also the demographic base and material culture of the old nation was intentionally destroyed.
There are three elements that connect the modern Russia to the pre-revolutionary Russia:
Language
Buildings, art and other artifacts
State
The connection between us, modern Russians, and the old Russian empire is the connection between a Roman imperial villa—with the sets of well-used antique furniture, crockery and a paved courtyard—and a large family of its barbarian occupants, who toil the land with new tools, pray to a new god, and spend nights entertaining each other with stories in vulgar Latin culled from Roman manuscripts.
The huge gap between us and the old Russia explains many oddities you can see at every step in our country. We celebrate the victory over the Nazi Germany under the banners of people who fought the Soviet Union on Hitler’s side. On the celebration day, our marching troops go in front of the mausoleum of Lenin, the man who would have had our president executed on first sight for presiding over the evil rule of Big Capital. Our Communists are celebrating the 100th anniversary of the Communist Revolution in the posh hotel Renaissance Monarch.
Bolsheviks obliterated Russian history and inserted themselves into it instead. We can not just discard their legacy. The whole edifice of the modern Russian nation will go down right away.
Putin understands and acts on that. This is why his support is so strong. Everyone from left to right instinctively realizes: the mighty Russian state is the only thing that keeps it all glued together. The universal disdain for evangelists of civil society and the human rights activism stems not only from laziness (it’s much safer to sit put and keep mum than go out in the streets and claim our rights). It’s also everyone’s observation: the civil society is barely surviving in tiny pockets in Moscow and a few other places—and Putin is doing a thorough job stomping them out. What happens if the state fails? We’ve seen it in the 1990s. Nothing to put in place. Void. Chaos.
Therefore, the simple answer to the question would be: “in pretty much everything and as far as we can see ahead”. We all are not only survivors of Communism. We are its children.
The statue “Worker and Farmer Woman, multiplied” is a spoof of the iconic Soviet statue in Moscow
Leopoldo Perdomo:
This reminds me of all religions that pushed their members to breed like rabbits. This was not different with the Nazis and the Catholic church and the Islam. I recall as a child to hear, women should make a lot of babies for god loves to hear them singing its praises.
I remember as well a conversation I had with a communist when I was 20. Now I am 80. I was telling him about my obsession with overpopulation of the planet. He rejected my argument on the basis that our enemies (it is supposed they were the religious people) were breeding like rabbits. We must surpass them breeding more rabbits. He was totally serious.
Dale Coder:
You are describing an amazing level of self-contradiction in Russian society. Wow!
Jay Song:
“survivors of Communism”
I mean picking potatoes isn't that bad.
Dima Vorobiev
Being alive beats being dead any day.
Ovidiu Ovidius
East German Communists vote AfD enthusiastically.
Vaibhav Jain
As a Russian would you have preferred the Bolshevik revolution never happened, that is,
the powers of the Romanovs was gradually decreased as Russia moved to a democratic setup, but they still remained influential…..like in the United Kingdom ?
Dima Vorobiev:
With all respect, Sir: since any other fork would mean my (and yours) non-existence in the other reality, I strongly prefer this particular fork.
Paul Serdiuk:
I would add that pre-Communist Russian history is also built on shaky grounds. Russian tzars went to great lengths to deliberately associate themselves with the shared cultural heritage of the ruined Rus’ chiefly by using the Russian Orthodox Church as a political entity. The close association between church and state is still evident in Russia today, and it was not completely destroyed by Communism.
(Though Russians are not the only people who are currently actively engaged in mythologizing their history.)
Patrick Sachs:
I always wondered why modern Russia did not just take Lenin from his grand tomb and fling his body into a common grave like the common criminal that he was. I had come to the conclusion that Russia had not been completely de-Leninized and so still served as an important symbol, but I wasn´t sure why. This answer explains that clearly.
Konstantin Riumin:
Why would we? Soviet symbols still stand tall and proud, Red Stars over Kremlin, hammer and sickle on many government buildings, Red Square’s Communist Cemetery (Stalin’s grave with his monument is still there, under the Kremlin wall, and when I was there there were fresh flowers on it).
Why would we deny the legacy of the country which defeated Hitler and launched man into space? We live among the bones of a fallen Titan, glorious and horrifying. Our elders remember USSR with nostalgia, our youth, not knowing its horrors, tend to look at it as a “mighty state where rich were in check and justice was just (and ruthless), where everyone had a job, where scientists, doctors and engineers were elite, not oligarchs and their spoiled friends and family”. Most of the books I read were written/published/translated in USSR, and through them its propaganda seeps into my heart.
I know that westerners think that Communism is evil, simple as it is — it was hammered into their heads by decades of propaganda, average Westerner lived all his life under its influence. Yet here in Russia, one can truly see that truth is more complex. Communism combined highest aspirations, idealism and heroism, with the most dreaded examples of cold-hearted cynicism. Why would we burn it all? Are we as blind as Westerners to just erase it and damn for all eternity? Why are we, capitalists, rotting and failing when China, still trying to reach this mythical paradise where all humans are brothers and everyone can follow his dream, is rising? We see China, Mao portraits, communist summits, five-year-plans, and we refuse to believe that Communism was one big mistake.
Werner Hoermann
Just because an alien ideology had been forced upon the population by Lenin, the personality of the people didn’t change. To wit, even the communist leadership under Stalin had to resort to resurrecting Russian national identity, to save their rule in 1941. Russians never identified with the idea of “solidarity of the international worker”, but they identified with the tribal idea of “Mother Russia” and, as in Czarist times, they were willing to fight and die for that.
That is what keeps Putin in power and that is why people in Eastern Ukraine want to join Russia, rather than living with the Ukrainians.
A culture is influenced mainly by the ethnic makeup, the environment and religious currents.
The environment hasn’t changed since 1918, global warming notwithstanding.
The ethnic makeup hasn’t changed much either, maybe fewer Jews, some more Chechens, but overall it is still overwhelmingly Russian.
And religiously, despite 70 years of brutal repression, the old Russian orthodox church is going through a renaissance.
So by all accounts, communist rule has just been an interlude, pretty soon a footnote in history.
Dima Vorobiev:
In a country with predominantly illiterate peasants, all it takes is deep-sixing the old elite, and then run the universal education, universal conscription and monopolized media to shape people in the image you want to achieve. That’s exactly what the Bolsheviks did.
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THE BATTLE OF BERLIN, 1945
Listen, this is simple. So logic said no to the Battle of Berlin in 1945 in Germany. It was a catastrophe, solely due to Germany herself, and it was dreadful.
The war was already lost at the end of 1944. Germany had a huge Soviet army on the east and the strong western allies on the west. They lacked gasoline, new troops, and realistically no hope. Sophisticated military strategists recommended halting the battle in order to save lives.
But no. It was his ego that led Adolf Hitler to make the decision of continuing fighting to the end, which was five more months, leading to Berlin. He did not give in, he desired an epic annihilation that will pervert history. Such a decision put the German nation in a dead-end.
What did that decision cause? It just had the effect of inflating the number of people killed.
Over a million German soldiers were killed in the eastern front during the last few months. The city of Berlin was in ruins; the combat within the city killed approximately 125,000 civil people within a few weeks. A great many of the boy soldiers and old men were compelled to fight and perish.
Had the leaders paused at the beginning of 1945, it is still true that Germany would have lost the war, but millions of people and cities would not have been destroyed in the meaningless way. This was not a courageous position; it was a country murdering itself in a tragic ending. Sad history. ~ Quora
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IF HITLER WOKE UP TODAY
Adolf Hitler would be completely indignant and appalled were he to rise to-day and behold Germany. The contemporary nation has little to do with his perverse ideology that is contrary to the present-day meaning of Germany.
The people would be his biggest shock. Hitler was convinced in the purity of the German race, whereas nowadays Germany is open to all the cultures of the world and enjoys diversity. This sharp contrast would show the ineffectiveness of his mission in life. He would be appalled to see successful and safe Jewish people and to observe that the nation also takes care of communities such as the LGBTQ+ one that he hated.
He also loathed democracy. Germany is not under dictatorship or a dictator, but today it is a powerful and stable democracy. The order which he was trying to ruin has become strong and efficient and which he would loathe. In addition, he would not like that fact that Germany is friendly with her neighbors, is a part of the European Union and takes part in the world trade.
He had seen Germany as a greedy, bullying conqueror, rather than a collaborating country.
Lastly, he would come to know that history considers him as one of the worst monsters, but not a hero. That would be a terrible ego hit to him. Instead of the world-conquering power which he had envisaged, he would see a small, aggressive army on the defensive. In brief, he has lost all that he fought. The modern Germany is built on the principle that denies his hate and every desire. ~ Bil John, Quora
MM Manlicher:
What would likely bother AH is that he was flat wrong in his outward assessment (if it wasn’t purely war propaganda). He’d be able to see his blind spots much easier now in hindsight — the conspiracy theory about Bankers, Jewry, and Bolsheviks was a ploy that he and everyone else fell for. Simple but effective race baiting. He might be most angry that people still believe it.
Of course, Churchill might still be the source of frustration.
Nobel Prizes for literature aside, Six Volumes of grandiose obfuscation to repaint his drunk overreach. The masquerade of benevolent anti‑colonial internationalism.
It’s highly likely Hitler would still be irritated by Churchill — especially tales of heroism disguising a reckless pathological duplicity at every turn.
The unabashed post war land grab would be another bee in Hitler’s bonnet. Churchill’s hapless diplomacy, the shoplifting of Malta, Cyprus, the Suez Canal Zone, Palestine, Iraq, Transjordan, Crete, the Aegean, Libya, Somaliland/Somalia, Sudan, Madagascar, Aden, Malaya, Singapore, Borneo, Hong Kong, the Cocos and Christmas Islands, Newfoundland—and he angled for or protected rights at Jamaica, Bermuda, the Bahamas, Trinidad, Madeira, the Azores, the Canaries, the Faroes, Iceland, the Red Sea islets (Perim, Kamaran), Socotra, Ascension, St. Helena, Mauritius, Seychelles, Diego Garcia/Chagos, Ceylon, Penang, Labuan, and West African and Caribbean waypoints. If you know what I mean? Don’t forget about pushing the internationalizing the Ruhr, neutralizing Heligoland and the Kiel Canal, grabbing the Dodecanese, fusing Somali territories under British administration, and carving a British‑leaning Senussi Cyrenaica Even floating British control of Prussia! Churchill’s same, never-ending reprehensible conceit.
Also modern Art.
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MAX WEBER’S “PROTESTANT WORK ETHIC”
Not long ago, a relative of mine told me he had been working so hard in the yard that he’d “literally thrown up”. He didn’t offer this as a health update, or to warn me about overexertion. It was, oddly enough, a boast.
We are familiar with this type of thing. Elon Musk once claimed “nobody ever changed the world on 40 hours a week”, apparently unaware that people from Archimedes to Nobel laureate Sir Alexander Fleming managed just fine on a normal schedule.
If Musk turned overwork into public theater (he even said he slept on Tesla’s factory floor), the biographies of Microsoft founder Bill Gates had already given us a prototype. Gates would stretch out under his terminal like a secular Buddha, waiting not for enlightenment, but for executable code.
Whether you find these stories inspiring or slightly deranged, the point is the same: today, overwork is one of the few politically neutral ways to show virtue. We don’t just work to live; we work to prove we deserve to.
These values aren’t written in the stars, or in our DNA, or in the logic of history. So why do they carry such moral weight? Why is work treated, strangely enough, as if it were next to godliness?
One of the sharper answers came from German sociologist Max Weber. His book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905) has become a classic – though we need to be careful about what “classic” means here. Like the Bible or Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, The Protestant Ethic is widely bought, regularly invoked, and rarely read.
Weber’s book is not quite a history of economics, nor is it what we would label “religious history”. It borrows from both, but is stranger than either. The Protestant Ethic is a study of how religious ideas, especially Calvinism, helped shape the mindset upon which modern capitalism thrives.
Weber argued that a certain kind of Protestantism didn’t just shift what people believed; it changed who they became. Anxious about their prospects for salvation, Protestants looked for signs of divine favor in worldly success. That anxious looking, Weber thought, helped to create – and then helped to reinforce – the disciplined, work-and-future-oriented modern subject that capitalism depends on.
The book is neither a lament nor a celebration, even if, by the end of the book, a tone of despondency creeps into the text. It was one of Weber’s key ideas, and not just in this book, that modernity had lost previous ages’ sense of spiritual meaning, which left behind a mere husk – the grim compulsion to work.
The spirit was gone, Weber thought, even if the ethic lived on, and even if the modern world risked becoming what he called an “iron cage”.
What did Weber actually argue?
Weber kept circling around the same deceptively simple question: why did modern capitalism take root in the West rather than somewhere else?
There are different ways of answering such questions. These days, thinkers like historian Jared Diamond might try to explain such things in terms of geography or the location of resources. Marxists might explain the same thing in terms of class struggle and shifts in the “modes of production”.
Weber would not have denied that such factors played a role, but he was interested in the role of culture, especially those moral and psychological habits that grew out of the Reformation. He argued that they didn’t just fit capitalism in some abstract sense; they helped form exactly the kind of person capitalism came to rely on.
First, it helps to understand what Weber meant by das Geist des Kapitalismus – “the spirit of capitalism”. But it is also useful to know what he didn’t mean. He wasn’t referring to the emergence of markets or profit-seeking, as such; those had been around for centuries.
What was new, Weber thought, was the moral stance: that working hard, living frugally and accumulating wealth weren’t just practical skills for succeeding, but inherently virtuous forms of behavior. Profit, for some, was more than a merely desirable personal outcome; it was a duty.
Weber traced this “Geist” to a particular strain of Protestantism, originating in the work of theologian John Calvin (1509-1564).
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Calvinists believed in predestination. This is the idea that God has already decided who is saved and who isn’t, long before any merely human act could modify this outcome.
Some historians – and Calvin himself – thought that the purpose of the doctrine was to underline human helplessness. In practice, it bred deep anxiety. For if salvation could not be earned here on earth, how could anyone be sure of their fate?
The result was a kind of compensatory behavior. Believers began looking for signs of God’s favor. Success in one’s calling – or “Beruf”, a word that means both “job” and “vocation” – became such a sign. Working hard, avoiding luxury, reinvesting profits: these weren’t just sound habits. They might be clues that one was among the elect.
Weber called this “inner-worldly asceticism”: religious energy channelled not into monasteries or seclusion, but into ordinary life. You did not retreat from the world to find God. You showed your worth through worldly discipline.
Over time, these behaviors detached from their religious roots. You didn’t need to believe in predestination to feel the drive to work endlessly, or to prove your value through success. The idea of a “calling” lingered on, but hollowed out. Eventually, it looked less like a vocation than an obligation.
So Weber’s point was not that Protestants invented capitalism. It was that Protestant ideas helped shape a certain kind of personality – disciplined, anxious, goal-oriented –- that meshed perfectly with the new economic system.
He also thought the world had been stripped of transcendence. But, as theologian William Cavanaugh has argued, modern life is not disenchanted, so much as re-enchanted under new forms.
Capitalism didn’t erase worship; it redirected it. Our liturgies now involve tap-and-go offerings, algorithmic fate, and daily rituals of market devotion. The moral weight Weber saw in the Protestant calling has not vanished. It has been reborn: now it answers to dopamine hits and brand loyalty. We no longer justify our work in relation to God’s glory, but we still work as if something eternal depends on it.
The surprising bit
At first, The Protestant Ethic reads like an origin story for capitalism. Keep going, and it starts to feel more like a ghost story. Weber certainly wasn’t celebrating what he described. He was, instead, trying to document the moment when a spiritual or theological project hardened into something far more mechanical, compulsive and inescapable.
In this purview, a vocational calling contracts into a mere job and sacred duty. It becomes, over time, indistinguishable from base economic necessity.
One of the most quoted lines in the book comes near the end, where Weber declares that modern capitalism leaves us “with a casing as hard as steel” (“ein stahlhartes Gehäuse”). This was translated dramatically (and decisively) into English by Talcott Parson as the “iron cage”.
Weber’s point was that the moral energy that once drove the Protestant ethic has drained away. What remains are mere behavioral patterns, which have become reflexes. People still work obsessively; they still chase success as if it had ultimate meaning. The difference is that now they’re unsure why.
Australian philosopher Michael Symonds has argued that this tragic logic, where the terror of predestination drives believers into a compulsive ethic of work, produces a world where meaning itself becomes hard to grasp. The result is not just what sociologists – also following Weber – call “disenchantment”, but a deeper void. It is a world where suffering no longer automatically invites compassion and where love begins to look like inefficiency.
Labor becomes the only reliable reassurance available to us. “Waste of time,” Weber wrote, “is the first and in principle the deadliest of sins.” In this world, leisure is guilty until proven innocent.
This is one of Weber’s most unsettling points: a system designed to prove spiritual worth ends up building a world whose very operating logic seems to deny that any such worth exists. In chasing this particular kind of meaning, we have built structures that erode our ability to believe that anything means much at all. Modern capitalism is both a consequence of Protestantism and its betrayal.
Why it still matters
Clearly, one doesn’t need to know about Calvinism to inhabit the world Weber described. And yet, if anything, the patterns he traced have only deepened. It’s true of much of the way culture works more generally – the religious fingerprints are still there, though we rarely notice them.
It only takes a moment to realize that the word “secular” is itself derived from Christian theology and tradition. In the end, Weber suggested, capitalism didn’t kill religion; it merely embalmed it. It kept the ethic’s shell, while draining its transcendence.
Take the fixation with self-optimization. The language of “vocation” is everywhere, but it has been flattened into a lifestyle brand. Work isn’t just work anymore; it is supposed to be passion, purpose, identity. You’re not just employed, you’re “doing what you love”. This idea is tempting, but it quickly turns into a trap, because if work is meaning, then failure or exhaustion start to look like moral flaws.
That logic — moralizing productivity, pathologizing rest — feels deeply Protestant, even if no one would put it that way. You hear it in career coaching, education reform, wellness talk. Everyone is encouraged to act like a miniature firm: building your brand, investing in “human capital”, squeezing returns from every hour.
But the anxiety has shifted. For early Protestants, work was a way of reassuring yourself that you might be saved. For many today, work is a way of proving you’re not disposable. The panic hasn’t gone, but the stakes have changed. It isn’t quite heaven or hell anymore. It is something smaller, if no less pressing: relevance.
And the ethic keeps working on us. We feel the pull to be useful, to produce, to stay busy – even when the rewards are uncertain, or vanish altogether. You can see it in people working long hours in precarious jobs, or feeling guilty when they take a break, or struggling to explain what they’re “doing” if it isn’t obviously productive.
That, roughly speaking, was Weber’s warning. He wasn’t just telling a story about religion and economics. He was tracing how ideas shape habits, and how habits, once institutionalized, keep working long after the ideas themselves fade.
Deposit on a cage
So even though The Protestant Ethic looks like an old book about theology and early capitalism, it still slices into modern life with surprising force. It explains why Elon Musk’s factory-floor sleepovers are admired instead of pitied, why “burnout” is treated like a rite of passage.
And it reminds us that systems don’t need belief to keep running. At base, they only need compliance.
Weber’s point wasn’t just that, once upon a time, religion fatefully shaped economics. It was that a certain kind of theology, and the specifically religious anxiety to which it gave rise, engendered a system that outlived its theology and hardened into something else entirely.
The religious energy that once drove productive labor aimed at glorifying God was stripped of transcendence. Where people once worked to glimpse signs of salvation, we now work to prove we still matter at all. The world has been disenchanted, but the demands that preceded the disenchantment remain.
There are evident paradoxes here. The ethic meant to reveal God’s grace ends up, in Weber’s account, eroding the very idea that the world has meaning at all. Even if it no longer speaks, the world still functions.
Weber’s tone at the end is not prescriptive or revolutionary, but mildly tragic. He offers no remedy and no call to arms. He asks only that we come to see how we got to where we are – how a certain religious tradition helped us build a machine that now runs on our labor without our belief.
In describing how capitalism arose, Weber was also probing how we became the kind of people ready and willing to live inside it. Although his tone is tragic, one thing remains clear: the world he describes is not determined by the stars or “human nature”. And although he is often set against reformers like Marx, Marxists can use him too, for Weber was willing to ask how it is that we came to see a cage not only as tolerable, but as something we’d put a deposit on.
https://theconversation.com/why-do-we-think-hard-work-is-virtuous-max-webers-protestant-ethic-gives-a-sharp-answer-257826?utm_source=firefox-newtab-en-us
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THE MARRIAGE OF MARX AND FREUD
It is impossible to overlook the extent to which civilization is built up upon a renunciation of instinct. ~ Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents
I will not give up on Paradise. ~ Paul Goodman, Five Years
Lust strives to become intellectualized, the concrete operations of the flesh are blended with decorous abstractions, human loves tend toward the impossibilities of angelic embraces. Magic and pseudo-mysticism . . . become so many spices which are used to give a new taste to the well-known feast of the senses. ~ Mario Praz, The Romantic Agony
One of the most conspicuous features of the cultural revolution that swept through America and Western Europe in the 1960s was the demand for sexual liberation. In some respects, of course, this demand was not new. The revolt against traditional sexual mores had been an important ingredient of advanced thinking at least since the 1920s. In essentials, it can be traced back to the early nineteenth century and the Romantic cult of feeling and spontaneity. Even the union of sexual liberation and radical politics—a hallmark of the 1960s—had important antecedents going back to such disparate apostles of liberation as Rousseau, Fourier, Blake, and Shelley.
Nevertheless, the Sixties were different. First of all, there was the matter of numbers. In the past, movements for sexual liberation had been sporadic and confined largely to a bohemian elite. In the 1960s—partly because of the perfection of the birth control pill and other reliable forms of contraception, partly because of greater affluence and mobility—sexual liberation suddenly became an everyday fact of middle-class life. What had been a fringe phenomenon became the established norm.
There was also the matter of political rhetoric and quasi-philosophical baggage. If demands for sexual liberation were a regular, if not invariable, concomitant of revolutionary politics in the past, seldom had sexual emancipation been invested with such a forbidding panoply of political mystification and high-flown verbiage. Plenty of revolutionary movements have made sexual emancipation one of their causes; rarely has sexual gratification so thoroughly defined the content of revolutionary politics.
A large part of the credit—if “credit” is the mot juste—for this development must go to Wilhelm Reich, the Austrian-born psychiatrist, demobbed Communist, renegade Freudian, militant atheist, and all-around champion of the beneficent effects of sexual orgasm. At the center of Reich’s teachings were two convictions: that “the sexual question must be politicized,” as he put it in The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933), and that establishing “a satisfactory genital sex life” was the key not only to individual but also to societal liberation and happiness, as he put it in The Function of the Orgasm (1942) and practically everything else he wrote. As one critic acknowledged, “Reich, in truth, did feel that sex was everything.”
It has been said that when someone abandons belief in God, what he will then believe is not nothing but anything. Reich was one of many modern figures who would seem to confirm this observation. Reich was always obsessed with sex. By the 1940s he was potty about it. It was then that he published his theories about “cosmic orgone energy” and “orgiastic potency.” He built “Orgone Energy Accumulators”—empty boxes to the rest of us—which he sold to patients so that they might mobilize their “plasmatic currents” and thereby overcome sexual repression and, incidentally, cure everything from cancer to schizophrenia. It was all nonsense, of course, and fraudulent nonsense at that: Reich spent the last years of his life in a Federal penitentiary, courtesy of the Food and Drug Administration, dying in 1957 in his sixtieth year.
Although by the end he was almost certainly mad, Reich was also immensely influential. A self-declared “Freudo-Marxist,” he helped to pioneer that strange amalgam of radical politics and emancipatory sex that fueled the sexual revolution of the 1960s. Today, the familiarity of this union tends to obscure its oddness. As the political philosopher Harvey Mansfield pointed out in his essay “The Legacy of the Late Sixties” (1997), the sexual revolution depended on “an illicit, forced union between Freud and Marx in which Mr. Marx was compelled to yield his principle that economics, not sex, is the focus of liberation, and Mr. Freud was required to forsake his insistence that liberation from human nature is impossible.”
As is so often the case, contradiction has proved no bar to credulity. For Reich and his disciples and spiritual heirs, sex was the primary focus of political activism, and human nature was a harsh but dispensable fiction. Reich came too soon and was too much of a quack to see his ideas triumph in their original form. But by the early 1960s, variations on his core theories about sex and politics were everywhere. Norman Mailer’s infamous essay on “The White Negro” (1957), for example, with its adolescent radicalism and hymns to the “apocalyptic orgasm” is Reichean boilerplate gussied up with Mailerean bombast.
Mailer had a part to play in popularizing Reich. But the three men who really accomplished the Reichean gospel were the anarchist poet-psychologist Paul Goodman, the classicist turned neo-Freudian guru Norman O. Brown, and the Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcuse. None would have described himself as a follower of Reich, but all read and commented on his work. More to the point, whatever their disagreements with Reich or with each other, all absorbed the essential Reichean tenets about politicizing sex and investing it with a kind of redemptive significance. As Richard King noted in The Party of Eros: Radical Social Thought and the Realm of Freedom (1972), all three “sought to combine a concern for instinctual and erotic liberation with political and social radicalism, cultural with political concerns.”
It would be difficult to overestimate their influence. The critic Morris Dickstein—himself a slightly tarnished Sixties radical—was quite right to insist, in Gates of Eden: American Culture in the Sixties (1977), that Goodman, Brown, and Marcuse were prime catalysts in “the rise of a new sensibility,” the thinkers “whose work had the greatest impact on the new culture of the sixties.”
At the same time, it is worth stressing that the importance of Goodman, Brown, and Marcuse was not so much intellectual as emotional and affective. Despite the elaborate scholarly machinery they employed in their books, their chief appeal was not to people’s minds but to their hearts—and to other, lower, organs. They came bearing arguments, but, as the Sixties wore on, they were increasingly acclaimed as prophets. Their ideas were embraced less as reasoned proposals than as talismans of personal and political transformation. As Dickstein put it, the trio of Goodman, Brown, and Marcuse spoke with such urgency to his generation because “we knew that at bottom their gospel was a sexual one, that sex was their wedge for reorienting all human relations.”
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Of the three, Paul Goodman (1911–72) is the one whose reputation has faded most completely. Having graduated from City College in 1931 with a degree in philosophy, Goodman early on determined to be a writer. Today, most people familiar with Goodman’s work would probably describe him as a kind of social psychologist. But in fact his literary interests—like his sexual interests, as it turned out—were extremely promiscuous. He contributed to all manner of left-wing publications, including Partisan Review, Politics, Commentary, Dissent, and The New York Review of Books. He wrote literary criticism (and even took a Ph.D. in literature from the University of Chicago) as well as poems, short stories, and novels; in 1951, he collaborated on a book about Gestalt psychology. He wrote essays on everything from city planning and decentralization to education, youth work camps, pornography (he was for it), Wilhelm Reich, and making antiwar films.
During World War II, Goodman’s draft-dodging and anarchist views made him persona non grata at some of his usual outlets, and he receded somewhat from the scene. But in 1960 his big break came. Norman Podhoretz had just taken over the editorship of Commentary. As a declaration of editorial intention, he decided to publish three large segments of Goodman’s Growing Up Absurd, the manuscript of which had just been turned down by over a dozen publishers. In his memoir Making It (1967), Podhoretz recalled that Growing Up Absurd represented “the very incarnation of the new spirit” that he wanted both for Commentary and for the world at large.
Looking back from the mid-1970s, Morris Dickstein described the book as a “masterwork in social criticism . . . that did much to inform the whole frame of mind of thinking people in the sixties.” Be that as it may, by the mid-1960s, Goodman had achieved enormous celebrity. He was an invariable participant at rallies, sit-ins, protest marches, and other events sure to attract large numbers of young men. “Like Allen Ginsberg,” Dickstein noted, “Goodman was more than a writer in the sixties: he was a pervasive and inescapable presence. . . . the most tireless and incandescent Socratic figure of the age.
Today, it is hard to recapture the excitement. For one thing, Goodman’s prose is atrocious. “Encountering Goodman’s style,” Norman Mailer once observed, “was not unrelated to the journeys one undertook in the company of a laundry bag.” The critic Kingsley Widmer in Paul Goodman (1980), a monograph designed to outline Goodman’s achievement, regularly comments on his subject’s deficiencies as a writer. Of his literary works generally Widmer observes that, “pathetically, they are often quite literally incompetent—marked by trite and mangled language, bumblingly inconsistent manners and tones, garbled syntax and forms, embarrassing pretentiousness and self-lugubriousness, and pervasive awkward writing.”
In a curious way, however, some of Goodman’s failings as a stylist actually contributed to his effectiveness. Goodman had a knack for reformulating current anxieties and clichés in the astringent language of the social sciences. This had the double advantage of imbuing his sociological writings with an aura of authority while reinforcing his readers’ settled prejudices—a tactic sure to inspire gratitude. He managed the neat trick of balancing pathos and jargon in such a way that—for those susceptible to his spell—the underlying banality of his thinking momentarily disappeared.
By the time that Growing Up Absurd was published, Goodman’s main point was wearisomely familiar: postwar America was a conformist wasteland that stifled anything beginning with the letter s—spirit, spontaneity, self-expression, and of course sexuality. Goodman said virtually nothing new in Growing Up Absurd. But somehow, his method of recycling received opinions about the problems of youth culture in what he liked to call the “Organized System” struck a chord.
His success was due partly to the way he combined the radical clichés of the moment with a traditional language of virtue. “My purpose is a simple one,” Goodman wrote in his first chapter: “to show how it is desperately hard these days for an average child to grow up to be a man, for our present organized system of society does not want men.” (Girls and women do not figure much in Goodman’s scheme of things.)
In other words, Goodman cannily blended rhetoric appropriate to a Marine recruitment poster with portentous fantasies about America being an “unnatural system” that warps young souls. Given current conditions in America, Goodman wonders, “Is it possible, being a human being, to exist? Is it possible, having a human nature, to grow up?” But the pertinent question is whether it really was “desperately hard” for an average child to grow up in the United States in the 1950s—an era of tremendous prosperity, excellent public education, potent national self-confidence. Was it true, as Goodman insisted, that “the young men who conform to the dominant society become for the most part apathetic, disappointed, cynical, and wasted”?
Part of Goodman’s purpose was to sympathize with and exonerate those elements of youth culture that had chosen not to conform to “the dominant society”—the Beats and other fringe groups who believed that “a man is a fool to work to pay installments on a useless refrigerator for his wife.” (Not so useless if one wishes to keep food from spoiling, of course, but Goodman never acknowledges that side of things.) He praises the Beats for being “pacific, artistic, and rather easy-going sexually.” Indeed, as one reads through Growing Up Absurd, it becomes increasingly clear that being “easy going” when it comes to sex is one of his chief criteria of psychological health. “My impression is,” he writes in one gnomic passage, “that—leaving out their artists, who have the kind of sex that artists have—Beat sexuality in general is pretty good, unlike delinquent sexuality, which seems, on the evidence, to be wretched.” (What “kind of sex” does Goodman think artists have? He never says.)
As Richard King observed in The Party of Eros, Goodman’s works “reveal a man obsessed with two things—sex and general ideas.” Although he had two common-law wives and fathered three children, Goodman was aggressively bi-sexual, which meant—as his diary, Five Years (1966), makes clear—predominantly homosexual. His sexual behavior was so flagrant that he managed to get himself dismissed from teaching positions at a progressive boarding school and even from that bohemian outpost of the South, Black Mountain College.
He seems to have been obtuse as well as importunate. “I distrust women clothed,” he wrote in his diary. “Naked, they are attractive to me like any other animal. Male dress passes—but I have to reach for their penises, to make sure. This has damaged my reputation.” Imagine that! Five Years records a steady stream of one-night stands, rough-trade, and hasty pick-ups in bars. “There have been few days going back to my 11th year,” Goodman noted, “when I have not had an orgasm one way or another.”
C. Wright Mills and P. J. Salter described one of Goodman’s articles from the 1940s as putting forward “the gonad theory of revolution.” In truth, Goodman propounded the gonad theory of life. As the critic Joseph Epstein put it in 1978, “the good society, for Goodman, started at the groin.” Responding to Epstein’s criticism, a Goodman enthusiast quoted from a letter that Goodman had written some years before: “My own view . . . is that no sexual practices whatever, unless they are malicious or extremely guilt-ridden, do any harm to anybody, including children”—a statement that not only epitomizes Goodman’s philosophy, but also helps to explain why he became such an idolized figure for the counterculture of the 1960s.
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The philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer once observed that no one should read Hegel before the age of forty: the dangers of intellectual corruption were just too great. Herbert Marcuse is a case in point. He was so intoxicated by Hegel’s dialectic that he could no longer register the most commonplace realities. His Marxist view of the world mandated that capitalism led to oppression, ergo capitalist societies were monuments of misery and unfreedom: Q.E.D. Never mind that the United States has developed into the most tolerant and prosperous society in history: the theory says that it can’t happen, therefore what looks like freedom and prosperity must be an illusion. Marcuse’s boldness in this direction is quite breathtaking. The fundamental point of One-Dimensional Man is that the better things appear to get, the worse they really are. “Under the rule of a repressive whole,” he writes, “liberty can be made into a powerful instrument of domination.” And again, “a rising standard of living is the almost unavoidable by-product of the politically manipulated society.”
Marcuse came up with several names for the idea that freedom is a form of tyranny. The most famous was “repressive tolerance,” which was also the title of an essay he wrote on the subject in 1965. He even offers a simple formula for distinguishing between the “repressive tolerance” that expresses itself in such phenomena as freedom of assembly and free speech and the “liberating tolerance” he recommends. “Liberating tolerance,” he writes, “would mean intolerance against movements from the Right, and toleration of movements from the Left.” What Marcuse wants is “not ‘equal’ but more representation of the Left,” and he blithely sanctions “extralegal means if the legal ones have proved to be inadequate.” Marcuse admits that “extreme suspension of the right of free speech and free assembly is indeed justified only if the whole of society is in extreme danger,” but he goes on to note that “I maintain that our society is in such an emergency situation.”
No wonder Leszek Kolakowski concluded that Marcuse’s philosophy advocated “Marxism as a Totalitarian Utopia.” In the end, Kolakowski points out, Marcuse’s entire system “depends on replacing the tyranny of logic by a police tyranny. . . . The Marcusian union of Eros and Logos can only be realized in the form of a totalitarian state, established and governed by force; the freedom he advocates is non-freedom.”
The ideas put forward by people like Paul Goodman, Norman O. Brown, and Herbert Marcuse are so extravagant that one is tempted to dismiss them as ridiculous figments of a diseased understanding. The problem is that these figments, deceptive though they undoubtedly are, have been extolled as liberating wisdom by an entire generation. If they are no longer declared with the same proselytizing fervor that they were in the 1960s, that is because they have become part of the established intellectual and moral climate we live with. The unlikely marriage of Marx and Freud shows that it is a great mistake to believe that ideas, because untrue or even preposterous, cannot therefore do great harm.
As the political commentator Irving Kristol points out in “Utopianism, Ancient and Modern,” “the truth is that ideas are all-important. The massive and seemingly solid institutions of any society . . . are always at the mercy of the ideas in the heads of the people who populate these institutions.” Goodman, Brown, and Marcuse promised boundless liberation. What they delivered was mystification and immorality. Edmund Burke was right: “liberty must be limited in order to be possessed.”
https://newcriterion.com/article/the-marriage-of-marx-and-freud/
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NUCLEAR ARMS TESTING
In 1992, the U.S. stopped explosive testing of nuclear arms.
The most recent nuclear test done by the U.S. occurred in September of that year and was named Divider. It occurred at a compound more than 60 miles away from Las Vegas named the Nevada National Security Sites, according to The Associated Press.
The U.S. stopped nuclear testing due to reasons including the fall of the Soviet Union, according to the AP, with the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty receiving the U.S.’s signature in 1996.
Russian testing
The Soviet Union stopped testing nuclear weapons in 1990, and its Russian successor has not officially tested nuclear weapons, according to The Washington Post.
There have been allegations that tests have happened since and during Trump’s first term, and one senior U.S. official said Russia most likely had gone through with secret low-yield nuclear weapons testing.
https://thehill.com/policy/defense/5581750-us-russia-nuclear-competition-trump/
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*
THE MOST HATED QUEEN IN HISTORY
Marie Antoinette has been much maligned over the centuries –portrait by Élisabeth-Louise Vigée Le Brun
Once the most despised woman in Europe, Marie Antoinette was vilified as an empty-headed libertine, a conspirator and a reckless spendthrift – and then publicly executed. Now a major exhibition interrogates some of the myths that surround her.
"All eyes will be on you," cautioned Maria Theresa, Empress of Austria, in April 1770, as her daughter, the 14-year-old Archduchess Maria Antonia prepared to marry the future King Louis XVI of France at the Palace of Versailles. Yet the scrutiny endured by Marie Antoinette, as the Archduchess was later known, was far crueler than anticipated. She was vilified as a libertine, a conspirator and a reckless spendthrift, whose exorbitant lifestyle was bankrupting the country – accusations that would precipitate the French Revolution and lead to a rare and shocking spectacle: the public execution of a queen.
Our fascination with Marie Antoinette has never waned, but increasingly her story is being questioned. Did she deserve to be despised, or was she a martyr caught between conflicting interests and destroyed by lies? For Dr Sarah Grant, the curator of Marie Antoinette Style, opening at the V&A on 20 September, she is the "most fashionable, scrutinized and controversial queen in history". Marking the 270th anniversary of the birth of this mold-breaking but maligned figure, the show celebrates her sense of style, and interrogates some of the myths associated with her.
One such myth is her apocryphal "let them eat cake" comment, a brattish response to devastating bread shortages. Attributed to "a great princess" in Rousseau's Confessions, written in 1765 when Marie Antoinette was aged 10 and still in Austria, it cannot have come from her. More fake news appears in the form of the "diamond necklace affair" (1785-6), in which a necklace of more than 600 diamonds was falsely ordered in the queen's name, solidifying her reputation for excess despite her vindication at trial.
The young queen's lavish lifestyle was certainly salt in the wounds of the starving poor. Bound to a weak-minded and rather dull husband, who was more interested in hunting than in her, and was for seven years medically unable to consummate their marriage, she found diversion in extravagant parties, gambling and fashion. Her fancifully decorated dresses with vast structural panniers, crowned with towering ornamental hairstyles, were widely copied at the time, and later inspired pop stars such as Madonna and Rihanna, and fashion designers such as Vivienne Westwood, Dior and Moschino.
'Madame Déficit'
The moniker of "Madame Déficit", however, was unjustified. Though she spent less than the king's brothers, and was just one of a series of profligate French monarchs, the foreign queen became a convenient scapegoat for the French government's handling of funds.
"It's the spending on wars that is actually what bankrupts France, certainly not the money that Marie Antoinette is spending," Grant tells the BBC. "Her wardrobe budget is the equivalent today of around $1 million, but France spent $11.25 billion on just the American War of Independence.”
Even scaling back her spending made her new enemies. "When she stops wearing silks, the silk industry is in uproar because their livelihood is threatened," says Grant. And when, in 1783, she tried to project a different image with a portrait of her in the more casual "country" attire that she would popularize, it was swiftly replaced by something more elaborate and formal. "She is expected to create a regal spectacle," Grant continues. "That is how the monarchy maintains its authority.”
An illustration portraying the queen as a mythical harpy tearing up human rights and the constitution
The folklore surrounding this early modern celebrity also overlooks her philanthropy. She recycled her wardrobe each year, sharing it between her staff; and she adopted several children, including Jean Amilcar, originally from Senegal, whom. she released from slavery. She also "turned down offers of expensive gifts from her husband" and "gave generously to charities", author Melanie Burrows (née Clegg), who has written widely on the period, tells the BBC. Far from being the "empty-headed idiot she is often portrayed as," argues Burrows, she was "well-intentioned, generous and kind-hearted.”
Presented to the French court as a peace offering after years of hostility with Austria, Marie Antoinette had split allegiances that mired her in suspicions − not all unfounded − that she shared military secrets with Austria. She was deemed indifferent to the French people, and derogatory references to her as "L'Autri-chienne" (a wordplay on the French for both Austrian and bitch) exemplify the distrust that fueled public feeling.
Unlike a king, a queen had no official power and was meant to remain in the background. Marie Antoinette was considered too prominent, too vivacious and too willing to use her charm to meddle in political affairs, secretly lobbying ministers and opposing the constitutional reforms the country cried out for. As far as her enemies were concerned, she needed to be brought down. Libelous pamphlets circulated, some pornographic, accusing her of promiscuity (Count Axel von Fersen is, in fact, her only known lover), orgies, lesbian relations and even incest.
The gossip was "all driven by misogyny", argues Grant, adding that "a lot of the myths that persisted... arose in the 19th Century when her biographies [were] written by men". According to Burrows, the queen was actually quite prudish. She rarely drank, she says, engaged in only "very mild flirtation" and "hated to be seen naked even by her own maids.”
Yet these tropes persist. In Marie Antoinette's World – Intrigue, Infidelity, and Adultery in Versailles (2020), Will Bashor speculates that her chronic uterine bleeding was caused by venereal disease. But he also argues that she was "emotionally abused", "bored" and "neglected", and though he finds her guilty of seeking pleasure outside her marriage, concludes that, for him at least, she was "forgiven."
In reality, "she was a devoted mother," Dr Laura O'Brien, Associate Professor of Modern European History at Northumbria University in the UK, tells the BBC, referencing the "gentler and more emotional connection" the queen had with her children, in contrast to her own upbringing. She was the first French queen to breastfeed, and to dress – as seen in the rejected portrait – in a manner suited to parenthood and life at her rural retreat.
Marie Antoinette’s beaded silk slippers
The continuing fascination with Europe's most loathed queen is also linked to the tragedy of her story: a child bride from a royal dynasty forced into an impossible situation, and ultimately reduced to a tragic figure in a white chemise, her hair shorn short, carried by cart to her death. For revolutionaries, she became a symbol of everything France needed to change, and her execution in 1793 attempted to cleanse the country of the worst of the Ancien Régime.
Marie Antoinette being taken to her execution;William Hamilton
Whether or not Marie Antoinette's death was justified, it failed to stifle her influence. A trend emerged for short "porcupine" haircuts and blood-red chokers suggestive of the guillotine's cut. She was detested by those who believed the stories surrounding her, but she was also widely – and enduringly – admired. "For me, this exhibition is another dream fulfilled," Blahnik commented in a recent interview. "The re-vindication of Marie Antoinette.”
https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20250917-why-the-most-controversial-queen-in-history-was-so-hated
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HITLER’S REASONS FOR DECLARING WAR ON THE US
German soldier after the defeat at Stalingrad
First, Hitler had great contempt for Americans. He considered the U.S. a frail nation composed of immigrants, not tough, and controlled by the Jews and wealthy individuals. He believed that they were too soft to have any serious war over the sea. He severely underestimated the speed and quantity of the construction that American army and war production could produce.
Second, the Pearl Harbor attack encouraged him. He thought, “Good! Japan will have the American army busy in the Pacific years to come. He was sure that this distraction would afford him time so that he could swiftly overpower Russia and bring the war in Europe to an end before the U.S could even have an adequate commencement.
Third, the war was already being practiced. The U. S. Navy had been assisting Britain a lot and battling German submarines (U-boats). Through the formal declaration of war, Hitler was able to direct his U-boats to sink any American ship with official orders. He aimed at ending the supply channel to Britain.
Ultimately, this is what killed him through this arrogance. Rather than purchasing him time as envisaged, it instantaneously brought America together and turned its entire giant industry straight against Germany — a very, very bad reckoning. ~ Alex Colby, Quora
Tony Olivary:
Hitler’s army had stalled in front of Moscow and Siberian troops were being offloaded in Moscow and going straight to the front. Hitler needed to stop that happening and wanted the Japanese to attack the Soviets to halt the flow of reinforcements from Siberia but Stalin knew from his agent in Japan, Richard Storge, that the Japanese hadn’t forgotten the mauling they received from the Soviets in 1939 which had resulted in the signing of the Soviet Japanese Neutrality Pact. So while Hitler was hoping that by declaring war on America and showing solidarity with the Japanese they would attack Siberia and pull his bacon out of the fire, the Japanese had no intention of doing that.
Andrew Carrie:
The Soviets and Nazis would eventually go to war against each other. Hitler thought better sooner than later as the Soviet military was in a bad way after Stalin's officer purges.
Krish Prabnakar:
Hitler was never a strategist of any persuasion, least of all in military affairs or war planning. He was a total bozo when it came to assessing enemy’s strengths and capabilities; the catastrophic and insane Operation Barborrosa was the epitome of stupidity riding on hubris.
Soviet battalion strength and industrial capacities had been grossly underestimated at the start of the campaign and the prosecution of the operation was an exercise in incompetence by the Führer. The might of the United States was evident as daylight and once it was dragged into the war, it signaled the beginning of the end for Germany in a hopeless two front war. It was just a travesty that such an individual was given plenipotentiary status by a proud nation.
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UKRAINE IS NOW A LEADER IN DRONE PRODUCTION
Russia could possibly, eventually, maybe theoretically win this war by the end of this century, maybe, if Europe completely abandoned Ukraine. But that’s unlikely.
Ukraine now has its own thriving military-industrial complex, built thanks to Russia and its endless wars. It produces everything from ammunition and tanks to missiles, but its greatest achievement is in drone development.
Ukraine is now a global leader in this field, operating drones in the air, on land, on and under water, redefining what drones are and how they’re used. This is literally drone warfare.
In 2024, Ukraine had produced more than five million drones, becoming the leader in motors, flight controllers, optics, antennas, and AI integration software. It has turned drones into a doctrine. They are used for reconnaissance, targeting, and strike missions that have imposed disproportionate costs on Russia and reshaped how Western military strategists think about warfare.
As recently as October 2025, Ukraine is pioneering next-generation systems: AI-guided swarms, autonomous navigation, adaptive jamming resistance, and multi-domain coordination between air, land, and sea drones and even coordination with human Air Force pilots and artillery.
Even without outside help, Ukraine is now an even tougher nut to crack than it ever was. And if Russia somehow managed to occupy it, partisan warfare would never stop.
When I was growing up in Ukraine in the ’60s and ’70s, people joked that we (Ukrainians) water our flower beds with machine oil to keep the buried guns from rusting. The struggle did not start in 2014 or 2022. It is an old war with MILLIONS of Ukrainians killed by Russia way prior to this mess. But if history teaches anything, it’s that Russians never win in Ukraine even when they occupy it. They must either go home or get destroyed once and for all. ~ Mike Bojeczko, Quora
AI overview of Ukraine’s drone production:
Ukraine has become the world's largest producer of tactical and long-range drones, with production expanding rapidly since 2024 due to government funding and a thriving domestic defense industry. The country expects to produce over 4.5 million drones in 2025, a significant increase driven by both domestic investment and international partnerships. Ukrainian companies are also focusing on domestic component manufacturing, developing AI-driven capabilities like drone swarms, and producing other defense systems.
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LIFESTYLES OF THE RUSSIAN OLIGARCHS
In Israel, I heard fantastic tales about a Russian oligarch who tried to buy an entire neighborhood of apartment blocks in Tel Aviv, only because his girlfriend liked it.
Another oligarch bought a villa in the poshest neighborhood and then tried to buy all the neighboring villas to have more privacy.
Great Russian Oligarchs have been known to pull many stunts. When you read the following, keep in mind that the majority of their fellow citizens are poor and earn about as much as Cambodians do. The lives of the great majority of the Russians are nothing but Great Misery, or cradle to grave survival.
Oligarch Vladimir Evtushenkov was staying in a five-star hotel in Forte Dei Marmi where he had rowdy parties. After the guests complained to the administration, Evtushenkov purchased the hotel outright, kicked out all the guests, and continued to party.
When Oligarch Deripaska’s son told him he wants to learn to play tennis, Deripaska hired the best Russian tennis player, and briefly the best in the world, Evgeni Kafelnikov. When they were staying in Forte Dei Marmi, Deripaska rented Kafelnikov for three months, had him stay in the villa opposite to his to maximize family time with him.
For his wedding with a Serbian supermodel on the French Riviera, Oligarch Melnichenko ordered to transport an Orthodox church to Cannes from the Moscow region. They dismantled the church in Moscow and reassembled in France, and had Christina Aguilera sing for them.
In a bid to outdo Abramovich the Greatest Oligarch, Oligarch Melnichenko bought a more expensive super-yacht built to look like a submarine, which set him back $450 million. On his maiden journey, Melnichenko went to pick up a couple of impressionist paintings for his private collection.
Abramovich outdid Melnichneko by buying Munch’s “Scream” for $120 million, which so well conveys how 100 million Russians feel about their lives. He also bought the football club Chelsea, and other toys to entertain himself.
Not to be outdone, Oligarch Tinkoff ordered a 77-meter icebreaker yacht.
A certain Russian oligarch bought a Boeing-787, but he didn’t find it comfortable and he ordered to refit it so he could park his beloved Land Rover inside and have a swimming pool.
Oligarch Prokhorov, the Russian answer to Epstein, likes to entertain ministers and government officials with supermodels on his superyacht. He got arrested at the alpine resort Courchevel with a small harem of supermodels he’d brought from Russia and was slapped with pimping charges. Prokhorov complained to the prime minister of France, Sarkozi, and was released.
Prokhorov had his revenge. He bought the best nightclub in Curchavel and closed it down for good right before the New Year party. ~ Misha Firer, Quora
Leonid R:
In old days it was called unbridled capitalism. Today it is called Russian oligarchs.
Salvatore Barrera:
Is another 1917 revolution due soon?
Misha Firer:
I spend my evenings reading comments on Yandex Zen, Russian Quora of sorts. There’s a lot of discontent, but no “revolutionary” sentiments. They are just waiting for something to happen to them. They can wait for eternity for all I know.
My take from hours of reading Russians’ comments is that they view the whole situation passive aggressively. They hate Putin, oligarchs and officials because they took all the money and brought the country to economic devastation. They want Russia to be a great country like the Soviet Union was.
But they have not a faintest idea how to get from dreaming to implementing it into reality. They hate the opposition politicians and parties because the believe those people are just a bunch of Western spies. There are no leaders whom they trust.
Russians feel they are all alone in this world like orphans or something. I don’t know whether to laugh or to cry, but it’s definitely highly educational and entertaining read.
I’m no prophet. I don’t know what’s going to happen in Russia politically, but there are going to be big changes and the country will take a new direction. I’m 100% sure of that.
As for Putin’s being worth $ 40 billion, Putin is worth everything and nothing. As long as he is the president he can have a hundred billion dollars if he wishes. However, once he is not a president he will have absolutely nothing. And nobody will come out to support him. That’s how it has always been in Russia.
Dmitrii Medvedev:
One can’t predict a revolution…
However one thing that I noted in Russia (in January I was visiting my relatives) is the amount of random HATE that average people have toward the government. Like during regular casual talk with stranger that stranger suddenly talks something very angry about the government.
This is new.
Also this was before Covid shenanigans. So I would suspect that people has become even more angry because government “response” to Covid made a lot of people unemployed and with no savings…
Mr. White:
Wasn't the legendary founder of three great religions called Abramovich, or something equivalent in ancient language?
Industry that made the ICBMs is gone and existing missiles are slowly rotting away. I wouldn’t be surprised if modern Russian industry can’t produce weapon grade uranium and plutonium either. In ~10-20 years give or take Russia won’t be possessing working ICBMs.
Audie Chason:
When Trump suggested Kim Jong-un would give up his nukes, Putin remarked, “North Koreans would rather 'eat grass' than give up nukes.” Putin knows very well his survival and Russia’s strength comes from military and nukes, and Putin will eat grass before he allows Russia’s military and nukes to decay to irrelevancy.
Misha Firer:
This is what his survival rests on: the submissiveness of the masses, and if any of them speaks out, he/she will bear the brunt of the system: security services, rubber-stamping judges on the payroll, controlled media, jails. Not much has changed since the Soviet days.
Dmitrii Medvedev:
The plant where the Soviet ICBMs were made and Russian ICBMs were serviced is located in Ukraine. After certain events hell would freeze over before they will service these ICBMs there.
Delivery of nukes to the US is something Putin is concerned about. You may heard about mysterious radiation spikes in Arctic? This comes from failed nuclear-powered cruise missile tests. They are trying to make such weapon (similar to if I’m not mistaken US Colibri project from the 50-ies) and they are failing.
They’ve been also trying for decades to make a new submarine-launched ballistic missile and even officially it have very low success rate.
One can’t make an advanced weapon without qualified people and skilled labor and with one’s cronies stealing overwhelming majority of budget.
Putin couldn’t care less about Russia or Russians, he cares only about his wealth and how to keep it. He is basically a street thug who by chain of unlikely events and extreme luck ascended to his current position. He isn’t some puppeteer mastermind western press writes he is.
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PENTECOST
All four authors and their redactors were lying, and when a bunch of different people start lying, who are too far apart to keep their lies in synch, there are going to be discrepancies.
Take, for instance, how the disciples were filled with the “holy ghost.”
The book of Acts claims this happened at Pentecost, a mere 50 days after the alleged “resurrection” of Jesus.
Since the gospels weren’t written until decades after the alleged “resurrection” of Jesus, of course all the authors would have known about the “miracle” of Pentecost.
But none of them did.
One gospel says the resurrected Jesus gave the disciples the “holy ghost” directly, by breathing on them.
Another gospel says Jesus gave the disciples the “holy ghost” while he was still alive, allowing them to perform “miracles” and cast out “demons.”
Different authors, or probably their redactors, came up with “irreconcilable differences” to explain how the disciples came to be “filled” with the magical “holy ghost.”
But we know the “holy ghost” itself was a lie.
How do we know?
Because the “holy ghost” was supposed to lead christians into “all truth.”
But instead the early christians were divided and at each other’s throats.
James and Peter insisted that circumcision was still required.
Paul said he wished the Judaizers would “go all the way” and emasculate themselves!
Paul also said that being circumcised would make salvation of no effect, so why are modern christians still circumcising their male babies?
The lunatic author of Revelation put words in Jesus’s mouth and said Jesus would personally murder the children of a Pauline christian woman, in the letters to the churches.
So even in the early days of christianity, apostles were threatening each other with emasculation and murder, over “nutty” points of dogma, pardon the pun.
Catholics and Protestants would go on to torture and burn each other at the stake. Where was the holy ghost?
During the American Civil War, around 600,000 christians murdered each other, over different interpretations of the bible’s verses about slavery. Where was the holy ghost?
Jesus said a house divided is doomed to fall.
Today there are 45,000 different christian denominations.
Apparently the “holy ghost” didn’t get the message that divided houses are doomed to fall.
Or was it always a lie?
You can probably guess which way I’m leaning. ~ Michael Burch, Quora
THE INVENTION OF MIRACLES
The authors of the gospels had a problem.
A very big problem.
An immense problem.
The apostle Paul, who created what we now call the christian religion, wanted people to believe in an impersonal Cosmic Christ.
Paul’s savior lacked character and color.
Why?
Paul knew nothing about Jesus living on earth, having an earthly ministry, having earthly teachings, performing earthy miracles, etc.
Who could love or admire such a faceless being?
The immense problem of the early christian cult was that it was competing with cults whose “saviors” had far more compelling (and entertaining) resumes.
Dionysus turned water into wine.
Poseidon and his sons could walk on water.
Asclepius healed the sick and raised the dead.
Romulus, after his death and resurrection, appeared to friends on a road where he explained his divinity to them.
Etc.
These other “saviors” had been brought to vivid “life” by storytellers. For instance, Dionysus in the Bacchae by Euripides.
Clearly, the colorless Jesus needed his Euripides.
Unfortunately, Paul was no Euripides.
This is where the fan fiction authors of the gospels stepped in. None of them were Euripides, granted, but they would follow in his footsteps, as best they could, with more than a few stumbles along the way.
The authors of the gospels had a simple solution to their immense problem:
“Anything your god can do, our god can do better!”
So they copycatted the “miracles” of other gods and demigods.
They plagiarized the stories of Euripides, Homer and other ancient mythmakers.
As the ancient Greek philosopher Celsus accused, “The christians have used the myths of Danae and the Melanippe, of the Auge and Antiope, in fabricating this story of virgin birth!”
~ Michael R. Burch, Quota
John Secker:
I recall hearing a Church of England vicar in a discussion program on Radio 4 saying “Well of course in those days every self-respecting god had a virgin birth.”
Kevin Lawson:
It is a story of a social justice warrior, definitely a progressive whose caring was inclusive.
John Secker:
If Jesus appeared in the US today he would be denounced as a woke commie and hauled off by ICE as an illegal middle-eastern immigrant. At least he will only be put into a concentration camp in El Salvador, not executed — that will come in Trump’s third term.
Jean-Pierre Erasmus:
It’s what people wanted, it's what many people still want to make the world feel like a better place for them. Why people down in the dumps many times turn to religion, one, its the selling point of many religions, two, they do not know where else to go, three, the people already brain washed will help them, because that is what the religion dictates them to do.
Religions are cults. Some
just go too far, and create serious life threatening cults or cults
wiping themselves out, but at the heart they are all brain washing
cults. By modern standards, the Christian hoax seems like something that wouldn’t have worked; people should have been too smart to fall for these silly stories. However, given the lack of sophistication at the time, many people did get taken in by the hoax and people were impressed by a story of a miracle-maker.
Walking on water, etc. was an essential part of getting Christianity going and it became so embedded in Western civilization that children still take it in as their naive world view and most never recover as adults.
John Hunter:
The Crusades, killing more people than every human sacrificing religion in history, combined, the Inquisition, complete with endless torture of the inadequately devout, witch burnings, forced conversions as the religion was shoved down the throats of defeated populations worldwide at the threat of “convert or die,” during the colonization eras, and modern joys like Christianity being used to support slavery, being the undisputed religion of the KKK and the Nazi party, and generally taking as much political power as it can get, by force if necessary, serve as pretty strong counter examples about the “for the better” part.
This religion was spread by the sword, not by little circles of loving disciples.
*
WHY BREAKING UP WITH A PARENT CAN SOMETIMES BE THE RIGHT CHOICE
Why we need to destigmatize estrangement in a society that deifies family
“It was awful but also a fantastic thing to happen to me.” Cara, a 25-year-old journalist from Bradford, is talking about an experience that, for many, would be unthinkable. Three and a half years ago, at the age of 22, she fell out with her dad – and they haven’t spoken since.
While the idea of reaching a point where you cut all contact with a parent might sound extreme, it is far more common than polite society would have us believe. Previous research by charity Stand Alone suggested around one in five families in the UK may be affected by estrangement; the Institute for Family Studies claims that 6 per cent of adult children in the US are estranged from their mothers. It’s long been such a taboo subject, though, that the hard data often simply doesn’t exist.
However, in the past few years, high-profile voices have tugged the issue blinking into the light. Actor Matthew McConaughey recently revealed that he had previously stopped speaking to his mother for eight years after she sold stories about him to the press (the pair have since reconciled). Davina McCall has spoken starkly and openly about the troubled relationship she had with her alcoholic mother following a nomadic childhood, while former child actor Jennette McCurdy made waves with her 2022 best-selling memoir, I’m Glad my Mom Died, soon to be an Apple TV series starring Jennifer Aniston.
Earlier this year, editor-turned-author Eamon Dolan published The Power of Parting: Finding Peace and Freedom Through Family Estrangement, combining research, reportage and his own experience to explore the knotty issue of parental estrangement. “I think it’s becoming more common as time goes on,” posits Cara. “As a generation we don’t put up with as much stuff anymore. We’re not eager to take on more trauma and hurt; it’s easier to prioritize yourself, especially as a young woman.”
Yet it’s unclear whether the number of adult children choosing to sever ties with a parent is actually increasing – there’s no firm research to back up this theory – or whether, more likely, people are simply able to speak about it more openly. There is more access to therapy, more language to define and process our relationships, and more scope to share lived experience via social media and other online platforms.
Estrangement can happen for all kinds of reasons. In Cara’s case, the relationship with her father had always been rocky. “He had sexist views… It had been building up and there had been more and more arguments,” she says. Things finally came to a head after he got into a physical fight with someone while on a night out to celebrate his daughter’s birthday. “He rang me later and tried to act like everything was normal. But something in my brain had switched; I thought, I am upset, I can’t just let it blow over.” After arguing on the phone, he ceased all contact. And Cara decided that she, in turn, would stop trying to have a relationship.
“It’s strange – it’s kind of like I’d always been looking for an out,” she recalls. “I’ve never had an instinct to ring him or to reach out. I had a gut feeling that I’d done the right thing.”
It has been an undeniably “good thing”. “I didn’t quite realize what a negative influence he’d had on me until he’d gone,” Cara says. And people who are appalled by her decision “don’t have the context of the relationship beforehand – he wasn’t really a great dad. Where does that line between my happiness and family loyalty end?”
For Angel Cassin, CEO of Together Estranged, a non-profit dedicated to estranged adult children, the breakdown between herself and her mother was more dramatic. The daughter of a single mum, Cassin describes her upbringing as “chaotic, challenging. There were a lot of mental health issues, and that unfortunately resulted in some pretty extensive emotionally abusive behavior.”
As an adult, Cassin did her best to renegotiate the relationship and shift the dynamic – to no avail. “There were a lot of very exacerbating, challenging behaviors like stalking.” In the end, she was forced to involve the police. “It’s something nobody, especially a child, wants to do. But these things that you could never have imagined previously become necessary; you end up having to set really firm, clear boundaries that we now call estrangement.” Cassin has been no contact with her mum since 2018.
According to Dr Becca Bland PhD, a coach and researcher who is a leading expert on family estrangement, while each estrangement is unique, there are certain themes that repeatedly come up. Abuse, whether it be emotional, physical or sexual; a parent’s divorce and remarriage, which can lead to family ruptures; and polarized morals, values and beliefs.
“We see this in the US right now; it’s a very divided nation in terms of values,” she says to this last point. “That impacts families, because we’re bringing our values, beliefs, and authenticity into those family networks. If it’s rigid, then we don’t really have the space to be ourselves and be validated for being ourselves.”
*
Sam Morris, an artist, writer and content creator from London, has openly shared his journey of estrangement with a nearly 350,000-strong TikTok following. He made the painful decision to cut ties with his mother after she became radicalized during the Covid pandemic, spouting ever more extreme conspiracy theories. “It’s been almost two years now since I’ve had any contact with my mum whatsoever, and I’m in an acceptance stage of grief – because I really had to go through it. It was horrendous,” he says in one emotive post from earlier this year. “I had to accept that the woman I knew was gone – I had to grieve her while she was still alive.”
Acceptance is a big factor for many of the members of the Together Estranged community who are also part of the LGBTQIA community; coming out has, in some cases, directly led to parental estrangement. It’s also not uncommon for people who decide to step away from religious groups or specific cultural norms to find themselves unable to continue a relationship with family members who no longer respect or recognize their decisions or lifestyle.
In Bland’s own case, she was raised by her grandmother as both her parents were addicts. “It was incredibly difficult to have a consistent experience of love with them; they were not emotionally available at all in our relationship,” she says. It led to abusive behavior, neglect and “all sorts of toxicity.” At the age of 24, she tried to have a dialogue with them about it; the relationship swiftly broke down.
Despite the fact that estrangement is fairly commonplace – after all, rare is the family that doesn’t have some sort of “aunty Karen isn’t talking to aunty Sharon” situation – there is still a huge stigma attached, particularly when it comes to children who have voluntarily extricated themselves from a relationship with their parents, Jennette McCurdy wrote the best-selling memoir ‘I’m Glad my Mom Died.’
“There’s that typical societal deification of a certain value, right?” says Bland. “Like, Family Togetherness is really important. But if you’re an exception, you don’t really get a voice, and you don’t get a space, and you certainly don’t get a place for support or grief.” A frequent knee-jerk response that adult children encounter is, ‘Oh but it’s your mum/dad/sibling. You only get one family! Pick up the phone!’
“A lot of the stigma comes from this misguided or misinformed sense that every family is safe and that every parent knows how to love their child,” says Cassin. “But we know that parents abuse their children. People need to understand what a nuanced, challenging, complex issue it is.”
There is particular judgement when it comes to mothers. If a father-child relationship deteriorates, particularly after divorce, it’s more socially accepted; the very fact that the term “deadbeat dad” exists where there is no female equivalent is, perhaps, telling. “That stigma is really strong,” says Dr Lucy Blake, an academic specializing in family estrangement.
Psychology research reflects an inherent belief that mothers are the primary caregiver and parent, such as British psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott’s concept of the “good enough mother” or John Bowlby’s attachment theory. “There are lots of archetypes about the maternal bond,” explains Bland. “It’s something that is so conditioned by society – that mothers will always be loving. There’s a very high expectation for women to be the ‘perfect’ mother; but some women just haven’t got that capacity.”
As well as being an incredibly difficult decision to come to emotionally, estrangement from a parent or parents provides a unique set of barriers for adult children. And our society, with its continuing emphasis on the nuclear family, is not set up to offer support.
Blake points to different issues that arise at different life stages: students often struggle to meet basic needs for food and housing when they head off to university, for example. “Sofa surfing is common in that population,” she says. “They also suffer from not having anyone to call for practical advice around money and all the challenging, difficult aspects of becoming an adult.” Lots of policies aren’t set up for this cohort either, from accessing a student loan to having a guarantor for housing.
Cassin has dubbed the unspoken, practical difficulties the “admin of estrangement”. She gives the example of, when she got married, having to negotiate a way of accessing a version of her birth certificate that would be accepted. “I think some of that comes from how custody arrangements happen, with shared parenting often still being less common than mothers having custody. Then there’s paternity and maternity leave – family policies right from the start of life often favor mother-child relationships over father-child ones.”
When adult children become parents themselves, they face additional obstacles by not having emotional support or help with childcare. “There is a societal expectation about the role of grandparents,” adds Blake. “The experience of raising children while you’re estranged from parents is a silent one that’s often overlooked.”
And that’s all on top of the in-built disadvantage of feeling guilty and judged in a society still predicated on moral tenets that originated from the Bible, such as “Honor thy father and thy mother.” “There’s a very English value about respectability,” as Bland puts it. “And having a good relationship with your family equals respectability. That’s what the research says. That becomes a massive value challenge in terms of, can I be a respectable, shame-free human being and not have a relationship with my addict parents?”
Ultimately, despite the many hurdles and negative side-effects, estrangement can have a net positive impact for individuals who feel forced to go down this route. Sam Morris has said on TikTok of the decision: “I’m genuinely so at peace. I’m the happiest I’ve ever been in my life.” Cara speaks of the benefits after a childhood in which she had “so much happiness and so much confidence robbed from me.”
Many people have described finally feeling “safe” after ending parental relationships, according to Blake’s research, while a lot of people in the Together Estranged community have spoken about the “lightness” they experience after stopping contact – despite the devastating grief and hardship. A common reaction is, “This is the hardest thing I’ve ever done, but I’m so glad I did it.”
For those going through estrangement, sharing their experience and finding connection via a support group can be helpful; both Bland and Together Estranged run regular groups. “It gives you a social space to process the grief of losing someone who’s living,” says Bland. Therapy can also help individuals work through the myriad issues raised by a family breakdown.
And for those of us lucky enough that parental estrangement remains the unthinkable? Save the judgement and consider responding with empathy instead. “We need to be a kinder society and understand that people don’t make these decisions because they’ve fallen out over something minor,” as Cassin puts it. “And we really need to support people and look after them, because they’ve probably made a really healthy decision in a really unhealthy situation.”
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SEA LAMPREY HELPS US UNDERSTAND THE HUMAN NERVOUS SYSTEM SE
With a suction-cup mouth and over 100 teeth, the sea lamprey has earned the nickname "vampire fish" and comparisons to sea monsters. Sea lampreys are one of the world’s most ancient fish species, killing prey by latching their suction-cup mouth onto a fish's skin and rasping away the fish's flesh with a rough tongue to feed on blood and bodily fluids.
Sea lampreys sound like something from a horror movie, but the creatures have been crucial to almost two centuries of neuroscience research. Neuroscientists study sea lamprey spinal cells, which the animals can regenerate if their spinal cord is damaged, as a model to understand the human nervous system, spinal cord injuries and neurological disease. The evolution of human brains and nervous systems is also closely tied to these alien-like creatures.
Neurologists and zoologists began studying lampreys in the 1830s, examining their nerve cells to understand how the spinal cord works. Lamprey research took off after 1959, when biologists first described lampreys’ ability to regenerate spinal cord neurons and eventually swim after spinal damage.
Sea lampreys are ideal for neuroscientists to work with because the animals have large nerve cells and synapses, making observation easier than in other species. “The synapses are so big that you can see them, and you can record from them and access them very easily,” says Jennifer Morgan, neuroscientist at the University of Chicago’s Marine Biological Laboratory. The creatures also have a similar molecular and genetic toolkit to humans, she says, which can make it simpler to translate research from lampreys to humans and find tools that work in both species.
Lampreys thrive in different types of water, all over the globe. “[Lampreys] have been found on every continent except for Antarctica,” says Morgan, whose lab uses sea lampreys for research. “So, they’re very hardy animals and super easy to maintain.”
The sea lamprey (Petromyzon marinus) filter feeds as a larva but becomes parasitic once it reaches adulthood, latching onto fish and feeding on their blood. They can feed on trout, salmon and other large, commercially important fish, and one sea lamprey can destroy up to 40 pounds of fish per year.
Much of the supply of sea lampreys for research comes from the Great Lakes, where lampreys wreak havoc on the fishing industry. Although the species is native to the Atlantic Ocean, improvements in the late 1800s and early 1900s to canals connecting Lake Ontario and Lake Erie to the ocean enabled lampreys to bypass Niagara Falls, which had previously been a natural barrier. From there, lampreys invaded the lakes, where they have no natural predators.
By the 1960s, lampreys had devastated trout fisheries in the region and a control program began to weed them out using pesticides.
Sea lampreys’ invasion of the Great Lakes has actually boosted their use in research. Over the last century, the Great Lakes Fishery Commission has directed considerable amounts of research funding toward lampreys, to study their life cycle and how to eradicate them. This put more lampreys in labs, resulting in studies on other aspects of their anatomy and evolution. Collectors catch wild lampreys in the Great Lakes, says Morgan, and send them to the lab in coolers.
“Great Lakes fisheries harvested these lampreys, and they wanted scientists to understand them more,” says Robb Krumlauf, developmental biologist and scientific director emeritus at the Stowers Institute for Medical Research, who also researches lampreys sent from the Great Lakes. “They had a natural supply that they could give to those who are interested in the research.”
Although lampreys look like they’re from another planet, they have more in common with us than it might seem. Lampreys branched off from other vertebrates about 500 million years ago, so they have some of the oldest traits in the lineage: they’re at the base of the vertebrate branch of the evolutionary tree. Because of this, studying lampreys’ genomes can clarify important evolutionary steps in the lineage — like when vertebrates developed jaws, or arms and legs.
Sea lampreys survived multiple mass extinction events, including the asteroid 66 million years ago that wiped out roughly 80 percent of life on Earth. “It’s a chance to have a glimpse of the past. It’s sort of like a living fossil,” says Krumlauf.
Krumlauf studies how sea lamprey evolution and human evolution are related through how our faces and heads develop. The brain region that shapes facial and cranial features is similar across vertebrates, from lampreys to chickens to mice to zebrafish, even though all these animals’ heads look quite different.
“There’s a common toolkit,” says Krumlauf. “If you have building materials, and they’re all the same, you can build a garden shed or you can build a mansion – what’s different is the way the blueprint is put together.” Studying lampreys shows how these blueprints evolved in the earliest vertebrates, says Krumlauf. His research links facial and head development in the animals to the development of craniofacial abnormalities in humans.
The evolutionary history of lampreys and other vertebrates also helps scientists like Yi-Rong Peng, ophthalmologist and neurobiologist at UCLA, illuminate the evolution of vision.
Peng’s research has found lamprey retinal cells are similar to those of other vertebrates, such as mice, chickens and zebrafish. Such a finding suggests retinal vision, like humans have, evolved early in the vertebrate lineage. Studying the overlaps between animal retinas gives a window into how vertebrates saw the world 500 million years ago. And understanding how the retina first formed in humans can help Peng’s research team study retinal cell degeneration that leads to blindness.
Morgan’s lab studies how sea lampreys regenerate spinal cords, and its work could lead to advances that help humans recover from spinal damage. When researchers cut a sea lamprey’s spinal cord, it becomes paralyzed but can regenerate nerve connections. The process does not have to be perfect to work, adds Purdue University science historian Kathryn Maxson Jones. Lampreys’ original neuron connections don’t reform in the same way, but cells grow in flexible ways to compensate for damage–biology can take different routes to achieve the goal of a spinal cord that works again. And the large size of lampreys’ cells and synapses enable the research team to closely examine the whole process.
Sea lampreys are also crucial to Morgan’s research on Parkinson’s disease. A specific protein’s accumulation in the brain is linked to the progression of the disease, so injecting that protein into lamprey synapses allows the researchers to observe how it affects the nervous system. This gives insight into how the disease progresses in the human nervous system and how exactly neurons can recover. Scientists observe how damaged lamprey neurons regenerate and how many synaptic connections are restored, guiding how to target treatment in human brains.
Morgan’s research team hopes to move from understanding nervous system damage in lampreys and humans to how to fix it.
When you cut your finger and the area becomes numb, that’s because of damage to the nerve endings in the finger, which is part of your peripheral nervous system, explains Morgan. But you do eventually get feeling back, because humans can regenerate cells in the peripheral nervous system–just not in our central nervous system.
But lampreys can. “When lampreys regenerate the spinal cord and recover function, they are using a lot of the same changes in gene expression that occur during regeneration of the peripheral nervous system in mammals,” says Morgan.
“Why we can’t do that in our spinal cord is a big question. But I think learning from the adaptations of these animals, that can do these really neat feats of nature like regeneration, will tell you something about the recipe that needs to happen, the conditions that need to be met,” adds Morgan.
And the parallels between lampreys’ brain features and ours make crucial research possible when studying human brains isn’t an option. “It often points us in the direction of things we would’ve never looked at in humans,” says Krumlauf.
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METAPHORICALLY SPEAKING, YOUR NERVOUS SYSTEM IS A DICTATORSHIP
— except when it’s an oligarchy. Or a democracy. Or all three.
How does the architecture of our brain and neurons allow each of us to make individual behavioral choices? Scientists have long used the metaphor of government to explain how they think nervous systems are organized for decision-making. Are we at root a democracy, like the U.K. citizenry voting for Brexit? A dictatorship, like the North Korean leader ordering a missile launch? A set of factions competing for control, like those within the Turkish military? Or something else?
In 1890, psychologist William James argued that in each of us “[t]here is… one central or pontifical [nerve cell] to which our consciousness is attached.” But in 1941, physiologist and Nobel laureate Sir Charles Sherrington argued against the idea of a single pontifical cell in charge, suggesting rather that the nervous system is “a million-fold democracy whose each unit is a cell.” So who was right?
For ethical reasons, we’re rarely justified in monitoring single cells in healthy people’s brains. But it is feasible to reveal the brain’s cellular mechanisms in many nonhuman animals. As I recount in my book “Governing Behavior,” experiments have revealed a range of decision-making architectures in nervous systems—from dictatorship, to oligarchy, to democracy.
For some behaviors, a single nerve cell does act as a dictator, triggering an entire set of movements via the electrical signals it uses to send messages. (We neurobiologists call those signals action potentials, or spikes.) Take the example of touching a crayfish on its tail; a single spike in the lateral giant neuron elicits a fast tail-flip that vaults the animal upward, out of potential danger. These movements begin within about one hundredth of a second of the touch.
Similarly, a single spike in the giant Mauthner neuron in the brain of a fish elicits an escape movement that quickly turns the fish away from a threat so it can swim to safety. (This is the only confirmed “command neuron” in a vertebrate.)
Each of these "dictator neurons" is unusually large—especially its axon, the long, narrow part of the cell that transmits spikes over long distances. Each dictator neuron sits at the top of a hierarchy, integrating signals from many sensory neurons, and conveying its orders to a large set of subservient neurons that themselves cause muscle contractions.
Such cellular dictatorships are common for escape movements, especially in invertebrates. They also control other kinds of movements that are basically identical each time they occur, including cricket chirping.
But these dictator cells aren’t the whole story. Crayfish can trigger a tail-flip another way too—via another small set of neurons that effectively act as an oligarchy.
These “non-giant” escapes are very similar to those triggered by giant neurons, but begin slightly later and allow more flexibility in the details. Thus, when a crayfish is aware it is in danger and has more time to respond, it typically uses an oligarchy instead of its dictator.
Similarly, even if a fish’s Mauthner neuron is killed, the animal can still escape from dangerous situations. It can quickly make similar escape movements using a small set of other neurons, though these actions begin slightly later.
This redundancy makes sense: it would be very risky to trust escape from a predator to a single neuron, with no backup–injury or malfunction of that neuron would then be life-threatening. So evolution has provided multiple ways to initiate escape.
Leeches hold a neuron election before recoiling from your touch.
Neuronal oligarchies may also mediate our own high-level perceptions, such as when we recognize a human face. For many other behaviors, however, nervous systems make decisions through something like Sherrington’s “million-fold democracy.”
For example, when a monkey reaches out its arm, many neurons in its brain’s motor cortex generate spikes. Every neuron spikes for movements in many directions, but each has one particular direction that makes it spike the most.
Researchers hypothesized that each neuron contributes to all reaches to some degree, but spikes the most for reaches it’s contributing to most. To figure it out, they monitored many neurons and did some math.
Researchers measured the rate of spikes in several neurons when a monkey reached toward several targets. Then, for a single target, they represented each neuron by a vector—its angle indicates the neuron’s preferred reaching direction (when it spikes most) and the length indicates its relative rate of spiking for this particular target. They mathematically summed their effects (a weighted vector average) and could reliably predict the movement outcome of all the messages the neurons were sending.
This is like a neuronal election in which some neurons vote more often than others. For some animals and behaviors, it is possible to test the nervous system’s version of democracy by perturbing the election. For example, monkeys (and people) make movements called “saccades” to quickly shift the eyes from one fixation point to another. Saccades are triggered by neurons in a part of the brain called the superior colliculus. Like in the monkey reach example above, these neurons each spike for a wide variety of saccades but spike most for one direction and distance. If one part of the superior colliculus is anesthetized—disenfranchising a particular set of voters–all saccades are shifted away from the direction and distance that the now silent voters had preferred. The election has now been rigged.
A single-cell manipulation demonstrated that leeches also hold elections. Leeches bend their bodies away from a touch to their skin. The movement is due to the collective effects of a small number of neurons, some of which voted for the resulting outcome and some of which voted otherwise (but were outvoted).
If the leech is touched on the top, it tends to bend away from this touch. If a neuron that normally responds to touches on the bottom is electrically stimulated instead, the leech tends to bend in approximately the opposite direction. If this touch and this electrical stimulus occur simultaneously, the leech actually bends in an intermediate direction.
This outcome is not optimal for either individual stimulus but is nonetheless the election result, a kind of compromise between two extremes. It’s like when a political party comes together at a convention to put together a platform. Taking into account what various wings of the party want can lead to a compromise somewhere in the middle.
Numerous other examples of neuronal democracies have been demonstrated. Democracies determine what we see, hear, feel and smell, from crickets and fruit flies to humans. For example, we perceive colors through the proportional voting of three kinds of photoreceptors that each respond best to a different wavelength of light, as physicist and physician Thomas Young proposed in 1802.
One of the advantages of neuronal democracies is that variability in a single neuron’s spiking is averaged out in the voting, so perceptions and movements are actually more precise than if they depended on one or a few neurons. Also, if some neurons are damaged, many others remain to take up the slack.
Unlike countries, however, nervous systems can implement multiple forms of government simultaneously. A neuronal dictatorship can coexist with an oligarchy or democracy. The dictator, acting fastest, may trigger the onset of a behavior while other neurons fine-tune the ensuing movements. There does not need to be a single form of government as long as the behavioral consequences increase the probability of survival and reproduction.
ANTIBIOTICS, ANTIVIRALS AND VACCINES COULD HELP TACKLE DEMENTIA
Using drugs approved for other conditions could dramatically speed up hunt for cure, experts say
Antibiotics, antivirals and vaccines could be used to tackle dementia, according to experts, who say repurposing drugs approved for other conditions could dramatically speed up the hunt for a cure.
The number of people living with the disease globally is forecast to almost triple to 153 million by 2050, presenting a major threat to health and social care systems.
New drugs are coming down the pipeline, but slowly, and experts say more must be done to see whether existing medicines could help prevent or treat dementia.
Dr Ben Underwood, from the University of Cambridge, said: “We urgently need new treatments to slow the progress of dementia, if not to prevent it. If we can find drugs that are already licensed for other conditions, then we can get them into trials and – crucially – may be able to make them available to patients much, much faster than we could do for an entirely new drug.”
In new research led by Cambridge and the University of Exeter, researchers examined studies which linked commonly used drugs to dementia risk. They analyzed data from 14 studies that tracked the health of more than 130 million people and involved 1m cases of dementia. They also analyzed prescription data and identified several drugs that appeared to be linked to dementia risk.
Overall, they found a “lack of consistency” between studies in identifying drugs that might modify a person’s risk of dementia. But they found some “candidates” that could warrant further studies.
One unexpected finding was an association between antibiotics, antivirals and vaccines and a reduced risk of dementia. The finding supports the hypothesis that some cases of the disease may be triggered by viral or bacterial infections.
Anti-inflammatory drugs such as ibuprofen were also found to be associated with reduced risk. Inflammation is increasingly being seen to be a significant contributor to a wide range of diseases.
There was conflicting evidence for several classes of drugs, with some blood pressure medications and antidepressants and, to a lesser extent, diabetes medication associated with a decreased risk of dementia and others associated with increased risk, the researchers said.
But the study published in journal Alzheimer’s and Dementia: Translational Research and Clinical Interventions suggests there is “biological plausibility” for some medicines to be tested further.
“The association between antibiotics, antivirals and vaccines and decreased risk of dementia is intriguing,” the researchers wrote. “Viral and bacterial infectious causes of common dementias have been proposed, supported by epidemiological data linking infection to dementia risk, antiviral drugs have been identified as some of the most promising repurposed drugs for dementia and there is increasing interest in vaccination as being generally protective.
“Our findings support these hypotheses and lend further weight to these agents as being potentially disease-modifying or preventive for dementia.” Dr Julia Dudley, the head of research strategy at Alzheimer’s Research UK, said it was too early to say if the existing drugs could be used to reduce the risk of dementia. Researchers will need to confirm the findings in clinical trials, she added.
Dr Richard Oakley, associate director of research and innovation at the Alzheimer’s Society, said: “If we can repurpose drugs that have already been shown to be safe and approved for use for other conditions, this could save millions of pounds and decades it takes to develop a new dementia drug from scratch, and get us closer to beating dementia.
“This research provides some initial groundwork and indicates which drugs have potential for being repurposed for dementia and should be prioritized for further investigation.”
Oriana:
The
finding about dementia I particularly enjoy is that being bilingual
delays dementia by 4 to 5 years. Though English has become my primary
language when it comes to speaking, I read in Polish with perfect
fluency and listen to Polish youtube videos every day. I often have the
feeling that for me Polish and English have fused into one language,
just as in English you can say “rich” or “wealthy.”
*
NEW FINDINGS ON AUTISM
Autism diagnosed early in childhood had a different genetic and developmental pattern than autism diagnosed later
Early diagnosed autism was linked to lower social and communication abilities, while later-diagnosed autism showed more behavioral problems in adolescence
Each group had its early polygenic profile, challenging the idea of a single underlying cause of autism.
Autism diagnosed during early childhood had a distinct genetic and developmental profile compared with autism diagnosed later, a large analysis of multiple cohorts showed.
The trajectory associated with earlier autism diagnosis had lower social and communication abilities in early childhood, reported Varun Warrier, PhD, of the University of Cambridge in England, and colleagues in Nature.
The trajectory linked with later autism diagnosis (typically, after ages 9-11) had more socioemotional and behavioral difficulties in adolescence.
Common genetic variants accounted for approximately 11% of the variance in age at autism diagnosis -- similar to individual demographic and clinical factors, which typically explain less than 15% of the variance, the researchers said.
The earlier diagnosis group had a low genetic correlation with attention deficit-hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and mental health conditions. The later diagnosis group had stronger genetic correlation with ADHD and mental health conditions, including post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and depression.
The results challenge a long-held assumption that autism has a unified underlying cause. In the unitary model, genetic variants are expected to be the same, regardless of age at diagnosis. This study, however, found that each group had its own polygenic profile and the genetic correlation between the two groups was small (rg=0.38).
The term "autism" likely describes multiple conditions, Warrier noted. "For the first time, we have found that earlier- and later-diagnosed autism have different underlying biological and developmental profiles," he said in a statement.
Some genetic influences predispose people to show autism traits from a very young age and may be more easily identified, leading to an earlier diagnosis, Warrier pointed out. "For others, genetic influences may alter which autism features emerge and when. Some of these children may have features that are not picked up by parents or caregivers until they cause significant distress in late childhood or adolescence," he explained. "An important next step will be to understand the complex interaction between genetics and social factors that lead to poorer mental health outcomes among later-diagnosed autistic individuals," Warrier said.
The findings shed light on the role of genes in autism, in contrast to HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s dismissal of genetic factors. A recent CDC study identified one in 31 children who were 8 years old in 2022 as having autism spectrum disorder, due in part to greater awareness, stronger surveillance, and broader diagnostic criteria.
Core features of autism spectrum disorder include persistent difficulties in social communication and interactions, along with restricted and repetitive behaviors, interests, or activities, noted Elliot Tucker-Drob, PhD, of University of Texas at Austin.
"Clinical diagnostic criteria generally require that these symptoms be observed in early childhood," Tucker-Drob wrote in a accompanying editorial.
"However, the age at which a person is first diagnosed with autism varies considerably, ranging from the first years of life to adolescence and adulthood, even in individuals who were screened in early childhood."
This study presents evidence that the developmental timing of autism diagnosis is "not simply an artifact of the challenges of identifying milder cases at early ages, but rather a primary feature that distinguishes distinct forms of autism," Tucker-Drob wrote.
Developmental timing is "just one possible axis along which autism subtypes can be differentiated, and it is possible -- if not probable -- that other mechanistically separable subtypes of autism exist that have yet to be identified," he added.
In their analysis, Warrier and colleagues incorporated behavioral data from childhood and adolescence in the U.K. and Australia, and genetic data from over 45,000 people in cohorts from Europe and the U.S.
The study has important implications about how autism is conceptualized and provides a model to explain some of the diversity found in autism, the researchers noted. "It makes me hopeful that even more subgroups will come to light, and each will find an appropriate diagnostic label," wrote Uta Frith, PhD, of the University College London, on the U.K. Science Media Center website.
"It is time to realize that 'autism' has become a ragbag of different conditions," Frith continued. "If there is talk about an 'autism epidemic,' a 'cause of autism,' or a 'treatment for autism,' the immediate question must be, which kind of autism?"
https://www.medpagetoday.com/neurology/autism/117789?xid=nl_mpt_morningbreak2025-10-06&mh=342eee1afb71606be9b8799b062f5355&zdee=gAAAAABo29FxQg2TSBv4EtJM5W1VjKng5HcRKCzHDCDPKk74XDU9a7ZRsFMpCanN5DChqnIpt7XMKPXDcHGvJwqpQbR2u3mi3BwNHQZRX4ekpN-hZeDzmFo%3D&utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=MorningBreak_100625&utm_term=NL_Gen_Int_Daily_News_Update_active
Michael M, PhD:
Anyone who has ever worked with people with autism, especially children and adolescents, knows that there are at least two general variants: "autism" and what used to be called "Aspergers". This distinction was erased with the DSM 5. I thought it was a mistake at the time. Now I'm sure of it.
BuzziesMom: Removal of Asperger's Syndrome from the DSM was a very bad decision. What it neglected to realize was that Hans Asperger was specifically talking about children who had no cognitive disabilities, unlike those with autism, who usually did. If you know a true Aspie, they are very different.
I have a 30 year old who was diagnosed in 1998 with PDD-NOS (Pervasive Developmental Disorder-Not Otherwise Specified), which was also dropped from the DSM. But many toddlers were given the diagnosis, and then the formal autism diagnosis became more clear as he approached 3-4. He still has autism, but he is quite independent and works full time. His friend is clearly an Aspie, and always has been. A spectrum is fine. I am of the belief that most things are! ADHD is definitely on a spectrum, as are mental health issues like depression and anxiety.
We’re all on the spectrum! Some just need a lot more support. Meanwhile, the individuals at the higher end of the spectrum can require 24/day care and some have to be placed in group homes at young ages if they have aggressive behavior (especially towards younger siblings). They are very much disabled, as RFK so callously described. But they are not the majority.
Ivan: Agree completely that the expanded definition is at fault here. Whenever I hear "advocates" for ASD interviewed — articulate, self-reflective young adults — I know that the "autism" with which they are diagnosed is a very very different thing to traditional "Kanner"—type ASD diagnosed a generation ago.
IMO, we're witnessing the same sort of diagnostic bloat that we saw happen with Bipolar disorder 30 y ago: Provides an acceptable label (and sense of identity) for folks who might otherwise have been seen as Axis 2, say, or other less fashionable dx.
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Kanner autism, aka “classic autism”
Classic autism—also known as childhood autism, autistic disorder, or Kanner's syndrome—is a formerly diagnosed neurodevelopmental disorder first described by Leo Kanner in 1943. It is characterized by atypical and impaired development in social interaction and communication as well as restricted and repetitive behaviors, activities, and interests. These symptoms first appear in early childhood and persist throughout life.
Autistic infants show less attention to social stimuli, smile and look at others less often, and respond less to their own name. Autistic toddlers differ more strikingly from social norms; for example, they have less eye contact and turn-taking, and do not have the ability to use simple movements to express themselves, such as pointing at things. Three- to five-year-old autistic children are less likely to exhibit social understanding, approach others spontaneously, imitate and respond to emotions, communicate nonverbally, and take turns with others. However, they do form attachments to their primary caregivers.
A young autistic boy who has arranged his toys in a row
HISTORY OF AUTISM DIAGNOSIS
Leo Kanner and Hans Asperger are widely credited with discovering autism in the 1940s, with Kanner identifying "early infantile autism" in 1943 and Asperger describing a similar syndrome around the same time. Their independent work built on the earlier use of the term "autism" by Eugen Bleuler in 1908 to describe symptoms in patients with schizophrenia. One characteristic of autism is high MALE PREVALENCE.
The Autism and Developmental Disabilities Monitoring Network in the USA looked at eight-year-old children in 14 states in 2008, and found a prevalence rate of autism within those states overall of 1 in 88, with around five times as many boys as girls diagnosed (Autism and Developmental Disabilities Monitoring Network Surveillance Year 2008 Principal Investigators, 2012).
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ULTRASOUND INSTEAD OF SURGERY IN CANCER TREATMENT
Ultrasound has long been used for helping doctors see inside the body, but focused high frequency sound waves are offering new ways of targeting cancer.
For many people, the word "ultrasound" is associated with creating medical images of the body. But there is another type of ultrasound that isn't used to diagnose diseases, but to treat them.
In cancer care, for example, high-intensity sound waves can be concentrated on a tumor, creating microbubbles that break apart the cancer without leaving any wounds or scars.
Research suggests that ultrasound could also supercharge the effects of chemotherapy and radiation, allowing doctors to use smaller amounts of these toxic treatments.
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If Zhen Xu hadn't annoyed her lab mates, she might never have discovered a groundbreaking treatment for liver cancer.
As a PhD student in biomedical engineering at the University of Michigan in the US during the early 2000s, Xu was trying to find a way for doctors to destroy and remove diseased tissue without the need for invasive surgery. She'd landed on the idea of using high-frequency sound waves – ultrasound – to mechanically break up tissue and was testing her theory on pig hearts.
Ultrasound isn't supposed to be audible to human ears, but Xu was using such a powerful amplifier in her experiments that other researchers she shared the laboratory with began to complain about noise. "Nothing had worked anyway," she says. So she decided to humor her colleagues by increasing the rate of ultrasound pulses, which would bring the sound level outside the range of human hearing.
To her shock, increasing the number of pulses per second was not only less disruptive to those around her, but also more effective on living tissue than the approach she'd tried previously. As she watched, a hole appeared in the pig heart tissue within a minute of ultrasound application. "I thought I was dreaming," says Xu, who is today a professor of biomedical engineering at the University of Michigan.
Decades later, Xu's serendipitous discovery, known as histotripsy, is one of several approaches using ultrasound that are ushering in a new era of advanced cancer treatment, offering doctors non-invasive methods to rid patients of cancerous tumors using sound rather than surgery.
Increasing the number of ultrasound pulses produced every second made the device better at destroying living tissue .
Histotripsy was approved by the US Food and Drug Administration for the treatment of liver tumors in October 2023. The following year, a small study funded by HistoSonics, the company formed to commercialize Xu's technology, found that the approach achieved technical success against 95% of liver tumors. While side effects ranging from abdominal pain to internal bleeding are possible, research suggests complications are rare and the method is generally safe.
In June, the UK became the first European country to approve histotripsy. The treatment was made available on the NHS under the pilot phase of its Innovative Devices Access Pathway for unmet clinical needs.
"People think of ultrasound as imaging," says Julie Earl, a principal investigator in the biomarkers and personalized approach to cancer group at Spain's Ramón y Cajal Institute for Health Research who has studied the technology. But a growing body of research, she says, suggests it can also destroy tumors, subdue metastatic disease (cancers that have spread to other parts of the body) and boost the efficacy of other cancer treatments – all without putting a patient under the knife.
How ultrasound works
For many people, the word "ultrasound" triggers instant associations with sonograms during pregnancy. To create a medical image like a sonogram, a handheld transducer sends high-frequency sound waves into the body, where they ricochet off tissues inside. A sensor in the device picks up the waves that bounce back, converting their activity into electrical signals, which are then used to create an image of what's going on beneath the skin.
In cancer treatment, ultrasound waves are concentrated onto a small area of a tumor to destroy it.
For treatment of liver cancer, histotripsy devices channel ultrasound waves into a focal zone of about two by four millimeters – "basically, the tip of your coloring pen", Xu says. Then, a robotic arm guides the transducer over the tumor to target the correct area.
The ultrasound is delivered in quick bursts. These pulses create tiny "microbubbles" that expand and then collapse in microseconds, breaking apart the tumor tissue as they do. The patient's immune system is then able to clean up the remains.
For treatment of liver cancer, histotripsy devices channel ultrasound waves into a focal zone of about two by four millimeters – "basically, the tip of your coloring pen", Xu says. Then, a robotic arm guides the transducer over the tumor to target the correct area.
The whole thing is fast, non-toxic and non-invasive, usually allowing patients to go home the same day, Xu says. While exact treatment time varies, most procedures are over in one to three hours, according to HistoSonics. Tumors are often destroyed in a single session, although patients with multiple or larger lesions may need multiple rounds. While its benefits are promising, there are unanswered questions about histotripsy. There's not yet robust long-term data about cancer recurrence after treatment. Some researchers have raised concerns about histotripsy potentially seeding new cancer growths as tumors are broken up inside the body, meaning they can be transported to other areas. That fear, however, hasn't borne out in animal studies so far.
Histotripsy may also not work against all cancers, research suggests. Bone can block ultrasound from reaching its intended source, ruling out tumors in certain locations. And using histotripsy in gaseous organs, like the lungs, could be dangerous, potentially causing damage to nearby healthy tissues. But HistoSonics is currently studying histotripsy as a potential treatment for tumors of the kidney and pancreas.
Cooking cancers with ultrasound
Histotripsy is not the first use of ultrasound in cancer care. High-intensity Focused Ultrasound (HIFU), an older and more established technology, can also be used to attack tumors. A focused blast of ultrasound is applied to a tumor to generate heat that essentially "cooks" the tissue, says Richard Price, who co-directs the Focused Ultrasound Cancer Immunotherapy Center at the University of Virginia in the US. "If you take a magnifying glass and you hold it outside on a sunny day over a dry leaf, you could actually start the leaf on fire," Price says. HIFU essentially does the same thing to cancer tissue, only using sound energy.
In oncology, HIFU is perhaps best known as a non-invasive way to treat prostate cancer, an application for which it seems to be roughly as effective as surgery, according to a 2025 study. Patients may experience some pain and urinary side effects when they wake up, but recovery is generally faster than after intensive therapies like surgery. Both histotripsy and HIFU therapy are typically performed under general anesthesia so patients don't move during treatment, minimizing the possibility of accidental damage to nearby organs or tissues. But histotripsy does not generate the heat produced by HIFU, which can damage nearby healthy tissue.
Not all cancers can be treated with HIFU, however – again, bone or gas can block ultrasound from reaching tumors. It's not generally an option for patients whose prostate cancer has spread throughout the body. Still, researchers in numerous countries are studying it in the hope of targeting other cancers, including some forms of breast cancer.
Ultrasound plus other drugs
The power of ultrasound could also be supercharged by combining it with other existing forms of cancer treatment, researchers say.
Recent research suggests, for example, that injecting microbubbles into the bloodstream and stimulating them with ultrasound can temporarily open the blood-brain barrier. This barrier usually prevents toxins in the bloodstream from entering and damaging the brain. But purposely opening it during cancer treatment could allow drugs to reach the tumors they're meant to attack.
"The non-invasive part is awesome, but the [drug-delivery component] is really unmatched anywhere," Price says.
Deepa Sharma, a research scientist at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre in Ontario, Canada, says those benefits don't stop at brain cancer. She has studied the combination of ultrasound and microbubbles across cancer types, finding that it can broadly improve drug delivery.
Sharma's research also suggests that ultrasound-enhanced microbubbles can boost the effects of radiation by damaging the vasculature of tumors, leading to greater cell death. Those findings suggest that doctors can use smaller amounts of toxic cancer treatments, like chemotherapy and radiation, if they're paired with ultrasound and microbubbles, she says.
"Radiation therapy does cure cancer, but it does also cause a lot of long-term side effects," Sharma says. If its effects can be enhanced thanks to ultrasound-stimulated microbubbles, she says, doctors could theoretically use lower doses to achieve the same treatment effects with fewer devastating side effects.
Ultrasound also seems to be a good match for immunotherapy, a treatment approach focused on spurring the immune system to fight off cancerous cells that may be dodging or hiding from the body's natural defenses.
As focused ultrasound heats and damages tumors, it seems to make these tissues more visible to the immune system – and thus more vulnerable to its defenses, says Price, whose research center is focused on using ultrasound along with immunotherapy.
A direction for future research, Price says, is determining whether that pairing can work against advanced-stage cancer. Metastatic cancer is much harder to treat than localized disease – when cancer spreads throughout the body, it's no longer enough to remove a single tumor.
The holy grail would be that clinicians could someday use ultrasound to coax one tumor out of hiding by breaking it apart, allowing the immune system to pick up on its characteristics and launch a system-wide attack against cancerous cells elsewhere in the body, Price says. This remains to be tested in any kind of trials, but theoretically, doctors could "treat 10, 15, 20 tumors just by treating one tumor", Price says.
That said, trials on ultrasound and immunotherapy are still in relatively early stages, Price cautions. That means far more research is required to know if, when or how this combined approach could change patient care.
But ultrasound approaches already in use are ushering in a new era in oncology – one that aims to replace, or at least improve, effective-yet-devastating therapies like surgery, chemotherapy and radiation. "Cancer is awful," Xu says. "What's making it even worse is cancer treatment."
Ultrasound isn't a "magic cure" for cancer, Xu says. Like any medical treatment, it has downsides and shortcomings. But just as she was able to spare her lab mates from annoying noise decades ago, Xu hopes her discovery – and those of other scientists – will help patients avoid unnecessary suffering for years to come.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20251007-how-ultrasound-is-ushering-a-new-era-of-surgery-free-cancer-treatment
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GENETICS AND AUTISM
Autism diagnosed during early childhood had a distinct genetic and developmental profile compared with autism diagnosed later, a large analysis of multiple cohorts showed.
The trajectory associated with earlier autism diagnosis had lower social and communication abilities in early childhood, reported Varun Warrier, PhD, of the University of Cambridge in England, and colleagues in Nature.
The trajectory linked with later autism diagnosis (typically, after ages 9-11) had more socioemotional and behavioral difficulties in adolescence.
Common genetic variants accounted for approximately 11% of the variance in age at autism diagnosis -- similar to individual demographic and clinical factors, which typically explain less than 15% of the variance, the researchers said.
The earlier diagnosis group had a low genetic correlation with attention deficit-hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and mental health conditions. The later diagnosis group had stronger genetic correlation with ADHD and mental health conditions, including post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and depression.
The results challenge a long-held assumption that autism has a unified underlying cause. In the unitary model, genetic variants are expected to be the same, regardless of age at diagnosis. This study, however, found that each group had its own polygenic profile and the genetic correlation between the two groups was small (rg=0.38).
The term "autism" likely describes multiple conditions, Warrier noted. "For the first time, we have found that earlier- and later-diagnosed autism have different underlying biological and developmental profiles," he said in a statement.
Some genetic influences predispose people to show autism traits from a very young age and may be more easily identified, leading to an earlier diagnosis, Warrier pointed out.
"For others, genetic influences may alter which autism features emerge and when. Some of these children may have features that are not picked up by parents or caregivers until they cause significant distress in late childhood or adolescence," he explained.
"An important next step will be to understand the complex interaction between genetics and social factors that lead to poorer mental health outcomes among later-diagnosed autistic individuals," Warrier said.
The findings support the role of genes in autism, contrary to HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s claims that autism is a "preventable disease."
A recent CDC study identified one in 31 children as having autism spectrum disorder, due in part to greater awareness, stronger surveillance, and broader diagnostic criteria.
Core features of autism spectrum disorder include persistent difficulties in social communication and interactions, along with restricted and repetitive behaviors, interests, or activities, noted Elliot Tucker-Drob, PhD, of University of Texas at Austin.
"Clinical diagnostic criteria generally require that these symptoms be observed in early childhood," Tucker-Drob wrote in a accompanying editorial. "However, the age at which a person is first diagnosed with autism varies considerably, ranging from the first years of life to adolescence and adulthood, even in individuals who were screened in early childhood."
This study presents evidence that the developmental timing of autism diagnosis is "not simply an artifact of the challenges of identifying milder cases at early ages, but rather a primary feature that distinguishes distinct forms of autism," Tucker-Drob wrote.
Developmental timing is "just one possible axis along which autism subtypes can be differentiated, and it is possible — if not probable — that other mechanistically separable subtypes of autism exist that have yet to be identified," he added.
In their analysis, Warrier and colleagues incorporated behavioral data from childhood and adolescence in the U.K. and Australia, and genetic data from over 45,000 people in cohorts from Europe and the U.S.
The study has important implications about how autism is conceptualized and provides a model to explain some of the diversity found in autism, the researchers noted. "It makes me hopeful that even more subgroups will come to light, and each will find an appropriate diagnostic label," wrote Uta Frith, PhD, of the University College London, on the U.K. Science Media Center website.
"It is time to realize that 'autism' has become a ragbag of different conditions," Frith continued. "If there is talk about an 'autism epidemic,' a 'cause of autism,' or a 'treatment for autism,' the immediate question must be, which kind of autism?"
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GLOBAL LIFE EXPECTANCY
Humans are living 20 years longer than they were in 1950, according to new research with all 204 countries and territories studied reporting declines in their mortality rates since then. But vast inequities remain, and there is an “emerging crisis” of rising death rates among adolescents and young adults.
In 2023, life expectancy was 76.3 years for women and 71.5 years for men, according to analyses published Sunday in the journal The Lancet by the University of Washington School of Medicine’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) – returning to pre-pandemic levels after falling during the height of Covid.
Covid-19 fell from the leading cause of death in 2021 to 20th place in 2023, with heart disease and stroke rising to again become the leading causes of death globally.
Deaths worldwide have generally been shifting away from infectious disease, with sharp declines in deaths from measles, diarrheal diseases and tuberculosis, according to IHME.
Noncommunicable diseases now account for about two-thirds of global mortality and morbidity, including both deaths and broader burden from disease. Although mortality rates for heart disease and stroke have declined since 1990, rates have increased for diabetes, chronic kidney disease and Alzheimer’s disease.
“The rapid growth in the world’s aging population and evolving risk factors have ushered in a new era of global health challenges,” IHME Director Dr. Christopher Murray said. “The evidence presented in the Global Burden of Disease study is a wake-up call, urging government and health care leaders to respond swiftly and strategically to the disturbing trends that are reshaping public health needs.”
About half of the world’s disease burden is preventable, according to the new research, attributable to dozens of modifiable risk factors.
High blood pressure, smoking, high cholesterol, diabetes and obesity are among the 10 risk factors with the greatest effect, IHME found. Between 2010 and 2023, there was an 11% greater burden of disease due to high body mass index – measured by years of life lost due to disability or premature death – and a 6% increase due to high blood sugar.
Environmental factors such as particulate matter pollution and lead exposure were also among the most significant risk factors, along with those related to newborn health including low birthweight and short gestation.
Additionally, mental health plays a significant role in global mortality, according to the new research, with burden from anxiety and depression surging.
While the global population is growing and aging, death rates among children and young adults have increased in some parts of the world.
Among adolescents and young adults, the largest increase in deaths over the past decade or so was among those ages 20 to 39 in high-income North America, mainly due to suicide, drug overdose and high quantities of alcohol, according to the IHME research.
Deaths among those ages 5 to 19 also increased in Eastern Europe, high-income North America and the Caribbean, and among adolescents and young adults in sub-Saharan Africa, due to infectious diseases and unintentional injuries.
Globally, for children 5 to 14, iron deficiency was the leading risk, followed by others related to unsafe water, sanitation, and hygiene and malnutrition. For the 15 to 49 age group, the top two risks were unsafe sex and occupational injuries, followed by high BMI, high systolic blood pressure and smoking.
Overall, life expectancy ranged from as high as 83 years in high-income regions to as low as 62 years in sub-Saharan Africa, IHME found.
Covid-19 fell from the leading cause of death in 2021 to 20th place in 2023, with heart disease and stroke rising to again become the leading causes of death globally.
Deaths worldwide have generally been shifting away from infectious disease, with sharp declines in deaths from measles, diarrheal diseases and tuberculosis, according to IHME.
Noncommunicable diseases now account for about two-thirds of global mortality and morbidity, including both deaths and broader burden from disease. Although mortality rates for heart disease and stroke have declined since 1990, rates have increased for diabetes, chronic kidney disease and Alzheimer’s disease.
“The rapid growth in the world’s aging population and evolving risk factors have ushered in a new era of global health challenges,” IHME Director Dr. Christopher Murray said. “The evidence presented in the Global Burden of Disease study is a wake-up call, urging government and health care leaders to respond swiftly and strategically to the disturbing trends that are reshaping public health needs.”
While the global population is growing and aging, death rates among children and young adults have increased in some parts of the world.
This new research highlights an “urgent need for policymakers to expand health priorities,” IHME researchers said – especially among adolescents and young adults – rather than limiting resources.
“Decades of work to close the gap in low-income regions with persistent health inequities are in danger of unraveling due to the recent cuts to international aid,” said Emmanuela Gakidou, senior author of the new studies and professor at IHME. “These countries rely on global health funding for life-saving primary care, medicine, and vaccines. Without it, the gap is sure to widen.”
https://www.cnn.com/2025/10/12/health/global-mortality-risk-factors-adolescents-young-adults
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A Greenland shark estimated to be 393 years old. It is the oldest known vertebrate species on Earth. Scientists also concluded that this species doesn’t reach sexual maturity until around 150 years of age.
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ending on beauty:
. . . paradise was when
Dante
regathered from height and depth
came out onto the soft, green level earth
into the natural light
~ A. R. Ammons
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