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Elsinore (Helsingor)
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THE ELEGY OF FORTINBRAS
Now that we are alone my prince we can talk man to man
though you are lying on the steps and can see as much as a dead ant
a black sun with broken rays
I could never think about your hands without a smile
now they lie on the stone pavement like a toppled star
as helpless as before This is really the end
The hands lie separately The sword separately The head separately
and the feet of a knight in soft slippers
You will have a soldier's funeral though you were not a soldier
it's the only ritual on which I'm something of an expert
There'll be no tall candles or singing there'll be guns and noise
a black shroud dragging on the ground hard-heeled boots
artillery horses the beat of the drum
these will be my maneuvers before taking power
one has to seize the city by the throat and shake it a bit
You had to die anyway Hamlet you were not fit for life
you believed in crystal ideas and not in human clay
you lived in constant spasms as if in a dream
you hunted chimeras
you bit greedily into the air and vomited it at once
you didn't know any human thing you couldn't even breathe
Now you are at peace Hamlet you have done your duty
and are at peace the rest is not silence but belongs to me
you chose the easier part the dramatic play
but what’s a hero's death next to the eternal vigilance
on a tall chair a cold orb in hand
looking out on an anthill and the face of the clock
Farewell prince I must get busy with the projects of canals
and a decree concerning prostitutes and beggars
I must also reform the penal system
since as you correctly noted Denmark is a prison
I must be off to business Tonight a star called Hamlet
will be born We shall never meet
what will remain of me won't become the subject of a tragedy
Neither to greet nor to part we live on archipelagoes
and this water these words what can they do what can they do my
prince
~ Zbigniew Herbert, translated from Polish by Oriana Ivy
Oriana:
It’s important to remember that Hamlet ends not only with the proverbial “stage strewn with corpses” — Hamlet having killed the usurper Claudius at last — but with the rhythmic pounding of soldiers’ boots and the entrance of Fortinbras, the king of Norway, now also the conqueror and new king of Denmark. The tragedy is now complete.
Fortinbras is the opposite of Hamlet — neither a poet nor philosopher, but a man of action. Hamlet’s father killed the father of Fortinbras; the young prince vowed revenge and proceeds to fulfill his plans. Thus, Fortinbras is a kind of “anti-Hamlet” — a simple-minded warrior, likely adored by his soldiers, a “man’s man,” a “don’t mess with me” aggressive leader. When we hear the echoes of his soldiers’ boots taking over the undefended palace, we understand that “the rest is not silence, but belongs to me.” And we also understand that Hamlet is very much a political play, and one that remains relevant to this day, with dictators’ feeling fully justified invading other countries and expecting to be greeted with flowers.
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PUTIN IS RUNNING OUT OF OPTIONS
EU agrees on a massive loan to Ukraine
On Friday night, EU countries agreed to make 90 billion euros available to Ukraine in 2026 and 2027.
However, the loan does not include the frozen Russian assets in Europe, which will remain frozen as long as Russia does not pay compensation to Ukraine for the reconstruction of the country.
If this does not happen, the EU will use the assets to repay the loan.
This is a decisive signal that the war must end, because Putin will only make concessions when he realizes that his war will not pay off, says German Chancellor Friedrich Merz according to TV2.
Now there is only one option left for Putin
António Costa, President of the European Council, states that Russia and Vladimir Putin now have only one option left: sit down and negotiate.
– The fact is that today's decision is about creating a just and lasting peace in Ukraine. The only way to bring Russia to the negotiating table is to strengthen Ukraine, he says at a press conference and adds:
– The message we are sending to Russia today is crystal clear: 1. You have not achieved your goals in Ukraine. 2. Europe stands behind Ukraine, today, tomorrow and as long as it takes. 3. Russia must sit down at the negotiating table, take it seriously and accept that you will not win the war.
The pro-Russian Hungary got what they wanted
Three countries are exempt from the billion-dollar loan. Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic have been allowed to stay out of the loan on the condition that they do not block the decision.
– The good news is that we are staying away from this. This is lost money, says Orbán according to Dagbladet.
The Swedish prime minister want to use frozen assets
Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson regrets that there was no support for using the frozen Russian assets to finance the aid.
But there was no other alternative, says Kristersson at a press conference.
It is clear that there is an extra strong symbolism if we support the attacked country with the resources of the attacking country. Now it is instead the EU that borrows money. ~ Tomas Holst, Quora
Prijevodi B:
“If there is no Third Reich, let there be no German people!” screamed the erratic Herr Hitler in the bunker when he realized that the Soviets were closing in.
This time, Comrade Putler thinks the same, but he hasn’t expressed it so clearly. “If my plan doesn’t work, let another million Russians die and lose body parts—because it’s me, the divine, almighty ME!”
I am almighty but haven’t succeeded in defeating Ukraine.
Which idiot, no matter how large the nation he leads, goes to war with a neighboring country of 44 million people? He got carried away after destroying Chechnya, which has 42 million people less than Ukraine.
The ruins of Grozny, Chechnya, 1996
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PUTIN PROMISES NO MORE WARS IF RUSSIA IS TREATED WITH RESPECT
Russian President Vladimir Putin has said there will be no more wars after Ukraine if Russia is treated with respect — and dismissed claims that Moscow is planning to attack European countries as "nonsense."
In a televised event lasting almost four and a half hours, he was asked by the BBC's Steve Rosenberg whether there would be new "special military operations" — Putin's term for the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
"There won't be any operations if you treat us with respect, if you respect our interests just as we've always tried to respect yours," he asserted.
Earlier this month, Putin said Russia was not planning to go to war with Europe, but was ready "right now" if Europeans wanted to.
Answering a question from the BBC Russia editor on Friday, Putin also added the condition that there would be no further Russian invasions "if you don't cheat us like you cheated us with Nato's eastward expansion."
He has long accused Nato of going back on an alleged 1990 Western promise to then-Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev before the fall of the Soviet Union. Gorbachev later denied the remark had been made.
The "Direct Line" marathon combined questions from the public at large and journalists from across Russia in a Moscow hall, with Putin sitting beneath an enormous map of Russia that encompassed occupied areas of Ukraine, including Crimea, which it annexed in 2014.
Russian state TV claimed more than three million questions had been submitted.
Just hours after the televised marathon, Ukrainian officials said seven people were killed and a further 15 injured in a Russian missile strike on Ukraine's southern Odesa region. Russia's invasion of Ukraine began in February 2022.
Although the "Direct Line" was largely choreographed, some critical comments from the public appeared on a big screen, including one that referred to the event as a "circus", another bemoaning internet outages and one that highlighted poor-quality tap water. Mobile internet outages have been blamed by authorities on Ukrainian drone attacks.
Putin also addressed Russia's faltering economy, with prices rising, growth on the slide and VAT going up from 20 to 22% on 1 January. One message to the president read: "Stop the crazy rise in prices on everything!"
The Kremlin regularly uses the end-of-year event to highlight the resilience of the economy and, as Putin spoke, Russia's central bank announced it was lowering interest rates to 16%.
Foreign policy issues were mixed with musings about the motherland, praise for local businesses, fish prices and the importance of looking after veterans.
But the issue of almost four years of full-scale war in Ukraine was never far away and it was often in the background of many of the questions.
Putin again claimed to be "ready and willing" to end the war in Ukraine "peacefully" but offered little sign of compromise.
He repeated his insistence on principles he had outlined in a June 2024 speech, when he demanded that Ukrainian forces leave four regions Russia partially occupies and that Kyiv gives up its efforts to join Nato.
Chief among Russia's demands is full control of Ukraine's eastern Donbas, including about 23% of Donetsk region which Russia has not been able to occupy.
Putin argued Russian forces were making advances across the front line in Ukraine and he ridiculed Volodymyr Zelensky's visit to the front line at Kupiansk last week, when the Ukrainian leader was able to refute Russia claims that it had captured the town.
Putin has also demanded new elections in Ukraine to be included in the peace proposals that US President Donald Trump has submitted as part of his efforts to bring the conflict to an end. At his news conference, Putin offered to stop bombing Ukraine when voting took place.
Ukraine's SBU security service said on Friday it had for the first time hit an oil tanker operating as part of Russia's "shadow fleet" in the Mediterranean. Putin said it would not lead to the result that Kyiv wanted and would not disrupt Russian exports.
Most of the questions from Russian media or from the public made little attempt to challenge Putin, but two were allowed from Western correspondents, Keir Simmons of US network NBC and the BBC's Steve Rosenberg.
When Simmons asked if Putin would feel responsible for the deaths of Ukrainians and Russians if he rejected the Trump peace plan, Putin praised the US president's "sincere" efforts to end the war, but said it was the West not Russia that was blocking a deal.
"The ball is in the hands of our Western opponents," he said, "primarily the leaders of the Kyiv regime, and in this case, first and foremost, their European sponsors."
Trump has said a peace deal is closer than ever and, despite Putin's apparent refusal to compromise, the US president has said he hopes "Ukraine moves quickly because Russia is there."
A Ukrainian delegation is holding talks in Miami on Friday with Trump envoy Steve Witkoff and Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner. German, French and British officials are also there, days after they met the US officials in Berlin.
Kremlin envoy Kirill Dmitriev is also expected in Miami over the weekend, according to reports.
Putin told the BBC's Russia Editor: "We are ready to work with you — with the UK and with Europe in general and with the United States, but as equals, with mutual respect to each other.
"We are ready to cease these hostilities immediately, provided that Russia's medium- and long-term security is ensured, and we are ready to cooperate with you."
He accused the West of creating an enemy out of Russia. Skating over his decision to mount a full-scale invasion in February 2022, he said: "You are waging a war against us with the hands of Ukrainian neo-Nazis," before repeating his regular diatribe against Ukraine's democratically elected leaders.
European intelligence agencies have warned that Russia is only a few years away from attacking Nato. The Western defensive alliance's chief Mark Rutte said this month that Russia was already escalating a covert campaign and the West had to be prepared for war.
While many of the questions were benign, including several from children, one from a reporter from Yakutia in north-eastern Siberia highlighted a tenfold increase in energy prices in the past four years. Putin told her that his team would look into alternative sources of energy and "keep Yakutia in mind."
Towards the end of the TV marathon, Putin was asked a series of quickfire questions, touching on his views on friendship, religion, the motherland and love at first sight. He said he believed in love at first sight — then added that he himself was in love, without divulging any more details.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cp89p082y2xo
Oriana:
The gist of Hitler’s “last testament” lies in one sentence: “The German people have not proved worthy of me.” The grandiose thinking of a dictator is insanely simple: “it’s all about me.” As Evgeniy Prigozhin managed to point out at the beginning of his brief rebellion, Russia’s attempt to conquer Ukraine has nothing to do with the expansion of NATO. “It’s all about greed and ambition,” Prigozhin said. Western heads of state have stayed curiously oblivious to Prigozhin’s message, instead of running with it whenever Russia trots out its deluded “expansion of NATO” argument for having started the war.
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IF PUTIN VANISHED TOMORROW
As every dictator, Putin makes bad decisions because he lives a lie, suppressing all bad news and opposition.
His downfall may not come as quickly as we would like because, like every dictator, he is now digging into a deeper hole.
But ultimately, the problem is not Putin, but Russia, with its 700-year nasty history of expansionist “empire” that has been wiping out and attempting to wipe out its neighbors.
Putin is following the script of an authoritarian dictator that always leads to a dictator’s fall; another will replace him.
He will follow in the footsteps of his predecessors because Russia is not a democracy — it has always been an authoritarian state.
And it will look the same as it did under the tsars, the Bolsheviks, Stalin and other communist rulers of Russia, and now Putin.
~ Anna Magdalena, Quora
Frances Neil:
If Putin vanished tomorrow, nothing would change. Russia’s problem isn't one man — it's a fascist, imperial mindset. From Putin to Navalny, even 'liberals' cheered the theft of Crimea. This only stops when it's broke, when its war machine can't be paid for.
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UKRAINE’S SOLDIERS WHO “DIED THE WRONG WAY”
Kateryna cannot talk about her son, Orest, without tears. Her voice trembles with anger as she explains how she found out the news that he had died on the front line in the eastern Donetsk region of Ukraine in 2023.
According to the official investigation by the army, he died by a "self-inflicted wound", something Katernya finds hard to believe.
Kateryna has asked for her and her late son to remain anonymous due to the stigma that surrounds suicide and mental health in Ukraine.
Orest was a quiet 25-year-old who loved books and dreamed of an academic career. His poor eyesight had made him initially unfit for service at the start of the war, his mother says.
But in 2023, a recruitment patrol stopped him in the street. His eyesight was re-evaluated and he was deemed fit to fight. Not long after, he was sent to the front as a communications specialist.
wire fence Ukraine
The Ukrainian army along the frontline near Chasiv Yar in Donetsk
While Ukraine collectively mourns the loss of soldiers who have died since Russia's full-scale invasion in 2022, a quieter tragedy unfolds in the shadows.
There are no official statistics surrounding suicide among soldiers. Officials describe them as isolated incidents. Yet human rights advocates and bereaved families believe they may be in the hundreds.
"Orest was caught, not summoned," Kateryna says bitterly.
The local recruitment centre denied wrongdoing to the BBC, saying impaired vision made Orest "partially fit" during wartime.
Once deployed near Chasiv Yar in Donetsk, Orest became increasingly withdrawn and depressed, Kateryna recalls.
She still writes letters to her son every day - 650 and counting - her grief made worse by how Ukraine classifies suicide as a non-combat loss. Families of those who take their own lives receive no compensation, no military honours and no public recognition.
"In Ukraine, it's as if we've been divided," says Kateryna. "Some died the right way, and others died the wrong way."
"The state took my son, sent him to war, and brought me back a body in a bag. That's it. No help, no truth, nothing."
funeral Ukraine
A funeral with military honors held in Lviv for a soldier killed in combat
For Mariyana from Kyiv, the story is heartbreakingly similar. She too wishes to keep her identity and her late husband's hidden.
Her husband Anatoliy volunteered to fight in 2022. He was initially refused because of his lack of military experience but he "kept coming back until they took him", she says with a faint smile.
Anatoliy was deployed as a machine-gunner near Bakhmut, one of the bloodiest battles of the war.
"He said that, after one mission, about 50 guys were killed," Maryana recalls. "He came back different; quiet; distant."
After losing part of his arm, Anatoliy was sent to hospital. One evening, after a phone call with his wife, he took his own life in the hospital yard.
"The war broke him," she says through tears. "He couldn't live with what he'd seen."
Because Anatoliy died by suicide, officials denied him a military burial.
"When he stood on the front line, he was useful. But now he's not a hero?"
Mariyana feels betrayed: "The state threw me to the roadside. I gave them my husband, and they left me alone with nothing."
She has also felt stigma from other widows.
Her only source of support is an online community of women like her - widows of soldiers who took their own lives.
They want the government to change the law, so that their bereaved families have the same rights and recognition.
Viktoria, whom we met in Lviv, still cannot talk about her husband's death publicly for fear of condemnation.
Her husband Andriy had a congenital heart condition, but insisted on joining the army. He became a driver in a reconnaissance unit and witnessed some of the most intense battles, including the liberation of Kherson.
In June 2023, Viktoria received a phone call telling her Andriy had taken his own life.
"It was like the world had collapsed," she says.
His body arrived 10 days later, but she was told she could not see it.
An attorney she later hired found inconsistencies in the investigation into his death. The photos from the scene made her doubt the official version of her husband's death. The Ukrainian military has since agreed to reopen the investigation, recognizing failures.
Now she is fighting to re-open the case: "I'm fighting for his name. He can't defend himself anymore. My war isn't over."
Oksana Borkun runs a support community for military widows.
Her organization now includes about 200 families bereaved by suicide.
"If it's suicide, then he's not a hero — that's what people think," she says. "Some churches refuse to hold funerals. Some towns won't put up their photos on memorial walls."
Many of these families doubt the official explanations of death. "Some cases are simply written off too quickly," she adds. "And some mothers open the coffin and find bodies covered in bruises."
Military chaplain Father Borys Kutovyi says he has seen at least three suicides in his command since the full-scale invasion began. But to him even one is too many.
"Every suicide means we failed somewhere."
He believes that many recruited soldiers, unlike career servicemen, are especially psychologically vulnerable.
Both Osksana and Father Borys say those who died by suicide should be considered heroes.
Olha Reshetylova, Ukraine's Commissioner for Veterans' Rights, says she receives reports of up to four military suicides each month and admits not enough is being done: "They've seen hell. Even the strongest minds can break."
She says her office is pushing for systemic reform but it can take years to set up a good military psychology unit.
"Families have a right to the truth," she says. "They don't trust investigators. In some cases, suicides may cover up murders."
When it comes to honoring theses soldiers as military heroes, she prefers to look to the future.
"These people were your neighbors, your colleagues," says Ms Reshetylova. "They've walked through hell. The warmer we welcome them, there will be fewer tragedies.”
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cwypp1jwjz1o
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HITLER AND HIS GENERALS: THE PROBLEM OF SOCIAL CLASS
~ Rayyan Chima, Quora
Oriana:
This reminds me of a line from “Judgment in Nuremberg.” Marlene Dietrich says, “The officers despised Hitler. They thought he was a vulgarian.” Still, they chose to obey orders, ultimately following the vulgarian to their own doom.
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Freiheit ist immer Freiheit der Andersdenkenden. ~ Rosa Luxemburg
Freedom is always freedom for the one who thinks differently.
*
BUBONIC PLAGUE DURING SHAKESPEARE’S LIFETIME
Shakespeare lived his life in plague-time. He was born in April 1564, a few months before an outbreak of bubonic plague swept across England and killed a quarter of the people in his hometown.
Death by plague was excruciating to suffer and ghastly to see. Ignorance about how disease spread could make plague seem like a punishment from an angry God or like the shattering of the whole world.
Plague laid waste to England and especially to the capital repeatedly during Shakespeare’s professional life — in 1592, again in 1603, and in 1606 and 1609.
Whenever deaths from the disease exceeded thirty per week, the London authorities closed the playhouses. Through the first decade of the new century, the playhouses must have been closed as often as they were open.
Epidemic disease was a feature of Shakespeare’s life. The plays he created often grew from an awareness about how precarious life can be in the face of contagion and social breakdown.
Except for Romeo and Juliet, plague is not in the action of Shakespeare’s plays, but it is everywhere in the language and in the ways the plays think about life. Olivia in Twelfth Night feels the burgeoning of love as if it were the onset of disease. “Even so quickly may one catch the plague,” she says.
In Romeo and Juliet, the letter about Juliet’s plan to pretend to have died does not reach Romeo because the messenger is forced into quarantine before he can complete his mission.
It is a fatal plot twist: Romeo kills himself in the tomb where his beloved lies seemingly dead. When Juliet wakes and finds Romeo dead, she kills herself too.
The darkest of the tragedies, King Lear, represents a sick world at the end of its days. “Thou art a boil,” Lear says to his daughter, Goneril, “A plague sore … In my corrupted blood.”
Those few characters left alive at the end, standing bereft in the midst of a shattered world, seem not unlike how many of us feel now in the face of the coronavirus pandemic.
It’s good to know that we — I mean all of us across time — might find ourselves sometimes in “deep mire, where there is no standing,” in “deep waters, where the floods overflow me,” in the words of the biblical psalmist.
Poisonous looks
But Shakespeare can also show us a better way. Following the 1609 plague, Shakespeare gave his audience a strange, beautiful restorative tragicomedy called Cymbeline. The international Cymbeline Anthropocene Project, led by Randall Martin at the University of New Brunswick, and including theatre companies from Australia to Kazakhstan, envisions the play as a way to consider how to restore a livable world today.
Cymbeline took Shakespeare’s playgoers into a world without plague, but one filled with the dangers of infection nonetheless. The play’s evil queen experiments with poisons on cats and dogs. She even sets out to poison her stepdaughter, the princess Imogen.
In ‘Cymbeline,’ Shakespeare suggests that even being seen by someone with antagonistic thoughts can be toxic.
Infection also takes the form of slander, which passes virus-like from mouth to mouth. The principal target again is Imogen, framed by wicked lies against her virtue by a man named Giacomo that her banished husband, Posthumus, hears. From Italy, Posthumus sends orders to his man in Britain to assassinate his wife.
The world of the play is also defiled by evil-eye magic, where seeing something abominable can sicken people. The good doctor Cornelius counsels the queen that experimenting with poisons will “make hard your heart.”
“… Seeing these effects will be
Both noisome and infectious.”
Even being seen by antagonistic people can be toxic. When Imogen is saying farewell to her husband, she is mindful of the threat of other people’s evil looking, saying:
“You must be gone,
And I shall here abide the hourly shot
Of angry eyes.”
Pilgrims and good doctors
Shakespeare leads us from this courtly wasteland toward the renewal of a healthy world. It is an arduous pilgrimage. Imogen flees the court and finds her way into the mountains of ancient Wales. King Arthur, the mythical founder of Britain, was believed to be Welsh, so Imogen is going back to nature and also to where her family bloodline and the nation itself began.
Indeed her brothers, stolen from court in early childhood, have been raised in the wilds of Wales. She reunites with them, though neither she nor they know yet that they are the lost British princes.
The play seems to be gathering toward a resolution at this juncture, but there is still a long journey. Imogen must first survive, so to speak, her own death and the death of her husband.
She swallows what she thinks is medicine, not knowing it’s poison from the queen. Her brothers find her lifeless body and lay her beside the headless corpse of the villain Cloten.
Thanks to the good doctor, who substituted a sleeping potion for the queen’s poison, Imogen doesn’t die. She wakes from a death-like sleep to find herself beside what she thinks is the body of her husband.
Embracing bare life
Yet, with nothing to live for, Imogen still goes on living. Her embrace of bare life itself is the ground of wisdom and the step she must take to reach toward her own and others’ happiness.
She comes at last to a gathering of all the characters. Giacomo confesses how he lied about her. A parade of truth-telling cleanses the world of slander. Posthumus, who believes that Imogen has been killed on his order, confesses and begs for death. She, in disguise, runs to embrace him, but in his despair he strikes her down. It is as if she must die again. When she recovers consciousness, and it’s clear she will survive, and they are reunited, Imogen says:
“Why did you throw your wedded lady from you?
Think that you are upon a rock, and now
Throw me again.”
Posthumus replies:
“Hang there like fruit, my soul,
Till the tree die.”
A world cured
Imogen and Posthumus have learned that we come together in love only when the roots of our being grow deep into the natural world and only when we gain a full awareness that, in the course of time, we will die.
With that knowledge and in a world cured of poison, slander and the evil eye, the characters are free to look at each other eye to eye. The king himself directs out attention to how Imogen sees and is seen, saying:
“See,
Posthumus anchors upon Imogen,
And she, like harmless lightning, throws her eye
On him, her brothers, me, her master, hitting
Each object with a joy.”
We will continue to need good doctors now to protect us from harm. But we can also follow Imogen through how the experience of total loss can purge our fears, and learn with her how to start the journey back toward a healthy world.
https://theconversation.com/after-the-plague-shakespeare-imagined-a-world-saved-from-poison-slander-and-the-evil-eye-134608
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HAMNET: DID THE LOSS OF A CHILD INSPIRE SHAKESPEARE’S GREATEST PLAY?
What makes Chloé Zhao’s films so special is the way they convey nature's transcendent quality.
That aesthetic instinct is the best part of “Hamnet,” Zhao’s wildly hyped fifth film. The fictionalized story of how William Shakespeare and his wife worked through the loss of their son has been overwhelming festival audiences with emotion, leaving viewers and critics alike in puddles of sobs. Jessie Buckley’s performance in particular has inspired effusive praise for its raw intensity. As the mother of a son, I was bracing myself for “Hamnet,” fully expecting that I would be an absolute wreck.
But I wasn’t.
“Hamnet” actually works best as a sensory experience, before its major plot points fall into place. Working with cinematographer Lukasz Zal (“Cold War,” “Ida”), composer Max Richter, and sound designer Johnnie Burn, an Oscar winner for his haunting work on “The Zone of Interest,” Zhao establishes a heightened forest setting where anything seems possible. It’s lush and richly textured, unsettling and enveloping at once.
We’re told early on that Buckley’s character, Agnes, is the daughter of a forest witch, and her connection to the earth, the trees, and the sky feels tangible and powerful. We first see her in an overhead shot, curled in a ball in a red dress beneath a giant tree, and it’s as if the woods are undulating and groaning around her.
When she meets cute with a guy we know only as Will (Paul Mescal)—who will eventually turn out to be The Bard—their connection feels just as alive and free. They frolic and flirt joyfully, and the qualities that make her a weirdo to everyone else make her wonderful to him. In no time, they’re married, then have a daughter named Susanna (Bodhi Rae Breathnach), and then twins: a boy and a girl, Hamnet (Jacobi Jupe) and Judith (Olivia Lynes).
And then things change.
But again, watching them as young parents—playing with their kids, teaching them about the land, squabbling over all the usual couples’ concerns—is more compelling than the Big Event that’s on the horizon. Zhao lulls us into their everyday activities, and supporting players like Emily Watson as Will’s mother and Joe Alwyn as Agnes’ brother provide further context.
Working with screenwriter Maggie O’Farrell, whose novel “Hamnet” serves as the basis for this film, Zhao indicates a supernatural bond between the twins that’s delicate and fascinating.
Hamnet’s shocking death at age 11 shatters this bliss. There’s nothing subtle about Buckley and Mescal’s performances in the way they portray this bottomless ache: It’s big and shrieky and shrill, and Zhao lingers in their pain in a way that feels uncomfortably voyeuristic. The loss of a child is devastating. It’s impossible to know what that’s like unless you’ve experienced it yourself. “Hamnet” depicts this tragedy with histrionics that are so overly demonstrative, they actually take you out of the moment.
But the whole point of “Hamnet” is its connection to “Hamlet”: Both the book and the film suggest that Shakespeare wrote his greatest play as a means of processing his grief over his son’s death. Sometimes we see this in ways that are obvious and groan-worthy, as when Will does the famous “To be, or not to be” speech while standing on the river’s edge.
The play’s the thing, though, to borrow a line from the play itself. And the staging of “Hamlet” at the film’s climax provides a powerful argument for art as an opportunity for healing. We see this theme in much more understated, legitimately moving ways in another major awards contender this season, Joachim Trier’s “Sentimental Value.” But there are individual moments within the performance of “Hamlet” that are gripping in their tension, as a perplexed and bereft Agnes begins to understand what she’s witnessing.
The casting of Noah Jupe (Jacobi Jupe’s older brother) as the actor playing Hamlet is a clever touch that ties back to the film’s spiritual connection. The choice seems to say: This is who our son might have become if he’d lived long enough to take the stage himself, something he’d dreamed of doing as a mischievous little boy. (Both Jupe brothers make a strong impression within their limited screen time.)
And there’s an overhead shot at a crucial moment during the play that took my breath away. It suggests the power of theater as a living, breathing thing to change hearts and minds, and visually, it serves as a mirror image of Agnes in the forest at the film’s start. The craft on display alone is enough to bring a tear to your eye.
https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/hamnet-paul-mescal-jessie-buckley-william-shakespeare-film-review-2025
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As always, not all critics were enchanted.
~ Chloe Zhao's Hamnet is a kind of flip side to Shakespeare in Love. Whereas that film was a more comedic take on the romantic inspiration behind Romeo and Juliet, Hamnet explores how grief over the death of his son may have fueled the creation of his most famous masterpiece — Hamlet.
Unfortunately, for all its heavy portent, the film never really clicked for me. Like much of Zhao's work, it's beautifully constructed, awash in long, contemplative silences and a sense of natural wonder. Yet unlike The Rider or Nomadland, Hamnet feels strangely empty, its dramatic inertia creeping it toward an overwrought, weepy conclusion that feels unearned.
Jessie Buckley has rightfully received much praise for her performance as Agnes, Shakespeare's tempestuous wife and the grieving mother of Hamnet (Jacobi Jupe), who died of plague at the age of 11. The immeasurable loss sends her into a tailspin of grief, a reaction not shared by her more stoic husband, William (Paul Mescal), who instead pours his grief into his work in the theater in London. The two grieving parents seem on two very different planets until Agnes travels to London for the premiere of Hamlet, where she finally comes to understand her husband's work and give her son the farewell she never had the chance to in life.
On paper this movie should be squarely in my wheelhouse; a hushed, haunted tale of grief centered around the writing of one of the greatest pieces of English literature is absolutely catnip for me. Yet Hamnet never really clicked into place. It's constantly feinting toward interesting ideas about art as outlet for grief, but Zhao never really connects Hamlet the play to Hamnet the boy in a way that makes the catharsis at the end feel earned.
Things Agnes has said to William reappear in the play — "undiscovered country," "the rest is silence." Hamlet himself is played by Noah Jupe, older brother of Jacobi Jupe, who plays young Hamnet, and both Agnes and William see their son in him.
But Hamlet feels so removed from this world that its performance doesn't have the seismic emotional impact that it's clearly going for. Despite having a score by Max Richter, Zhao hits us over the head with Richer's overused "On the Nature of Daylight," an admittedly gorgeous piece that has now been used in so many films and television shows that it feels like a cliche.
If this is a moment for our protagonists to process their grief, Zhao does not afford the same to her audience. Here, Shakespeare grants his son immortality, but the process feels disjointed, unconnected, and frustratingly opaque. We are left with some indelible performances and lovely cinematography, but Hamnet fails to reaches the emotional heights for which it is so desperately strives.
https://www.fromthefrontrow.net/home/hamnet-2025
and just one more:
The literal-minded Hamnet abandons cultural outreach
The best joke in the 1995 military service comedy Major Payne introduced a classroom of young, poorly educated recruits, one of whom identified Shakespeare’s Hamlet as “the play about a little pig.” The new quasi-British historical film Hamnet is hardly better. It deduces that Shakespeare’s most famous play resulted from the death of his only son, named Hamnet, who was in fact his mother’s most cherished child. The mother, Agnes (pronounced An-yehs), came from a rural Celtic tribe, supposedly born of a forest witch. But as portrayed by Jessie Buckley, she is Inspiration itself — the ultimate earth mother, and a headstrong wife, to whom the West’s greatest poet owes a debt. This revisionism is a major pain.
Hamnet is an Oscar-bait prestige picture aimed at Hollywood’s known prejudices, its period setting meant to convince viewers that all is good with a feminist bourgeois approach to the world — same as the ersatz Shakespeare in Love (1998).
By elaborating on Millennial feminist theory, Hamnet heroizes Agnes through Buckley’s firebrand temper, plain features, and ruddy complexion. She sleeps in the woods as if anticipating A Midsummer Night’s Dream and flies a hawk, which is how she meets young Latin tutor William Shakespeare (Paul Mescal, mopey again), who is struck by her independence and craftiness. He’s literate, but she represents oral tradition, chanting her family creed against superstition: “You defy venom. You defy air illness. You defy the horror that stalks the land.”
They begin courtship reciting the legend of Orpheus and Eurydice in the Underworld, but Agnes’s touch reveals Shakespeare’s destiny: “I saw undiscovered countries. . . . He’s got more inside of him than any man I’ve ever met.” Stalwart Agnes self-delivers their firstborn in the woods while he baptizes himself in a nearby pond — an attempt at visual folk poetry consistent with the film’s contemporary gender bias.
Director Chloé Zhao is a fully assimilated Western feminist. Buckley’s broad, likable smile mitigates the penchant to use her as feminist weapon (I’m Thinking of Ending Things and Men). But to then present Mother Agnes as the embodiment of the Great Audience, the first to fully appreciate Shakespeare’s greatness, is the flip side of feminist condescension. Zhao indulges English mysticism merely to tout Agnes as a prophetess. It is an accident of casting plus timing that Emily Watson gets only a small role as a midwife; though not Agnes, Watson is luminous. Her “We must never take for granted that our children live” scene conveys profound womanliness.
Nothing else Zhao does has comparable effect. Eerie scenes such as the one in which cherubic Hamnet (Jacobi Jupe) trades his life for his twin sister’s and then wanders in the Underworld, or the bereaved parents tussle in a wide shot because Zhao can’t figure out where to best put the camera, fail to maximize the film’s conceit. Mescal’s improvising the “To be or not to be” speech during a suicide attempt against sounds of lapping waves and sad piano music is embarrassing, yet Shakespeare eventually conquers idiocy.
An earlier recitation of a sonnet by Shakespeare’s young daughters precedes Agnes’s witnessing the first performance of Hamlet at the Globe Theater. Zhao doesn’t replicate the appreciation of English tradition that Olivier brought to the Globe scenes in Henry V (1945), so the switch from rural vernacular to London verse is puzzling (as in the diversity quota of black folks in the peanut gallery). Still, Hamlet’s exactitude is thrilling. When Mescal’s Bard performs as the Ghost of Hamlet’s Father (Mescal wears an earring, his face caked with make-up like Bob Dylan’s in the Rolling Thunder Tour), the line “All that lives must die / Passing through nature to eternity” is simply too profound to destroy.
Playing the first Hamlet, a blond ingenue (Noah Jupe) provokes Agnes to exclaim, “He has swapped places with our son!” This pathetic idea that Shakespeare married an illiterate woman is inexcusable. Zhao’s cut to a mother who can’t grasp the line “It shows a will most incorrect to heaven” diminishes the movie but not the poetry.
Hamnet’s dumb conceit gives the lie to prestige-movie pretense (from impresario-producers Steven Spielberg and Sam Mendes). Once Agnes gets it (Buckley laughs in hearty recognition) and reaches out to return the stage actor’s reach, the idea contradicts metaphorical interpretation, succumbing to the worst aspect of contemporary culture and poor education.
This era can’t appreciate the famous Dietz Schwartz lyric about Hamlet: “Where a ghost and a prince meet / And everyone ends in mincemeat.”
Everything about Hamnet is condescending, just as everything is literalized in today’s movies because Hollywood has thoroughly abandoned outreach.
https://www.nationalreview.com/2025/12/mrs-shakespeare-credit-hog/
*
~ It's
undeniably effective. It also feels a little reductive, in the way that
it regards an endlessly complex Shakespeare masterwork in purely
therapeutic terms, a means of achieving closure. Zhao knows that, in the
end, the play's the thing — but as staged here, it feels like a
smaller, less meaningful thing than it should. ~
https://www.npr.org/2025/11/21/nx-s1-5615302/hamnet-review-shakespeare
Oriana:
My big problem with the movie was the assumption that the play Hamlet was inspired by the death of a child. It’s difficult to state in one sentence what Hamlet is about — revenge, court politics, the meaning of life? — but it’s definitely not about the loss of a child.
Now, immersion in art — any art — can be therapeutic, and we can indeed speak of the way art can help heal the brain after trauma. But that’s a matter of directing attention away from the self, rather than dealing with trauma transformed into art.
Art can indeed transform suffering by providing a new cognitive framework for it, for instance, (religion can do it too) — and Hamlet (based on a friend’s experience) can speak in a special way to those who lost a parent in childhood, and then experienced the surviving parent’s “treason” of remarriage.
Indeed, Hamlet has a different impact on different viewers, and it does address suffering in general — but not the specific and particularly shattering grief due to the loss of a young child. Yet practically all reviews assume that Hamnet (the movie) tries to us to make us accept a [false] message — that the child Hamnet is metaphorically reborn in the play as the crown prince of Denmark. Norway's conquering Fortinbras never makes his heavy-booted entry in the movie's version of Hamlet — removing the political aspect of the play.
But here we tread on the swampy ground of the whole mystery of Shakespeare, with the bizarre-sounding question: Who wrote Shakespeare’s plays? The man presented in the movie doesn't seem to have any interest in poetry, or anything literary — say, enjoyment of the play on words. We see him as a loving father, and can — with some effort — imagine him as an actor performing at the Globe. But no amount of effort of imagination manages to make me see him as a writer of genius.
But there would be hardly any literature if we didn’t practice a “suspension of disbelief.” If I drop rational analysis, then the movie stands on its own. Its central character is not William Shakespeare, but his wife, Anne Hathaway — I have no idea why “Anne” was changed to “Agnes.” With Anne or Agnes as a portrait of a strong woman who is basically a single mother, the movie works in a poetic way.
Aside from the sweet little boy, Hamnet, who is pure endearment, Agnes, with her emotional strength, is the character who remains “in my mind’s eye.” She completely eclipses her wishy-washy husband, none other than William Shakespeare, the greatest poet and playwright in human history (you’d never guess that based only on the movie). She is a fortress of female strength, but with something coarse and ruthless showing at the edges. Perhaps she needed that just to survive in those ruthless times.
But do we fall in love with her? I certainly didn’t. In fact I rather disliked her — for some reason it was very easy for me to imagine her hitting and yelling at the children (which would not have been considered abuse at the time). This could be just me — vaguely seeing a female bully not intended by the movie. The movie wants us to admire this woman, and, perhaps due to personal history, I resented being pushed to admire her.
The only lovable character here is the little boy Hamnet, with his extraordinary caring for his twin sister. I don’t understand the critics of this movie who spoke of sobbing — unless they mean grieving the death of this little angel, who is all heart and kindness, and who, for all the clumsy machinations toward the end of the movie, bears no similarity to Prince Hamlet. Yes, the child is wonderful and touches the heart — yet could not have inspired the immortal “melancholy Dane.” If anything, I can imagine him growing up to be pretty much the opposite of Hamlet, not caring one bit about things beyond his village.
*
THE TWENTIES AS THE DECADE OF LONELINESS
It’s a chilly October evening in 2021 that Adam Becket remembers most sharply. He was 26, and had moved to Bristol a year earlier for work but had struggled to make friends.
"I wasn't alone all the time, but […] I was a bit of an outsider," he remembers.
As he headed home that night, the streets were full of Halloween partygoers in monster and cat costumes. "I walked past people turning up to friends' houses, people running into shops to buy beer.
"All the pubs were full. It just [felt] like a different world that you're not part of. And you feel like you can never be part of it."
That night, he felt like the only person experiencing serious loneliness. In fact, it is becoming a defining feature of his generation.
Conversations around social isolation tend to focus on the elderly, especially around Christmas. But by some measures, people in their 20s are the loneliest group in Britain.
According to Office for National Statistics (ONS) research published last month, 33% of Britons aged 16 to 29 reported feeling lonely "often, always or some of the time" — the highest of all age groups (17% of over-70s said the same thing).
This year, the World Health Organization reviewed various studies published across the world and found that young adults and adolescents report the highest levels of loneliness too.
The data is complex, and there are indications that, in some countries, among the very oldest group (over-85s), loneliness shoots up and could match that of 18-to-30s. But analysts say that in most research, young adults shine through as a particularly isolated group.
"Adults between 18 and 24 are the most lonely — followed by older people," says Prof Andrea Wigfield, director of the Centre for Loneliness Studies at Sheffield Hallam University. "It's a growing problem."
But why has this happened — and is there a solution?
The problem of 'scattering'
Increasingly, experts say the modern world is to blame. Many twenty-somethings live in house-shares where they do not know or like their housemates. Work increasingly is done from home and friends are often spoken to on social media.
It is not all bleak. Thanks to the internet, young adults enjoy access to friendships from all over the world. But broadly speaking, experts say, the image of gregarious twenty-something life presented in sitcoms like Friends needs urgent correction.
"We tend to romanticize young adulthood as a carefree time — when it's usually the most miserable time in people's lives," says Prof Richard Weissbourd, a lecturer in education at Harvard University.
In some ways, early adulthood has always been a time of instability. Young adults tend to leave their childhood home and move around. Friends depart, and family ties weaken. These transitory life events can, for some, lead to intense loneliness.
"A big problem is the scattering — everybody you ever knew now lives in a million different places," says Dr Meg Jay, a clinical psychologist and author of The Twenty-Something Treatment.
This "scattering" proved difficult for Adam Becket. He had a rich social life when he lived in London in his early 20s — but after moving to Bristol, he had to make friends from scratch.
"Not only did I not know anyone, I didn't know where to start meeting people either. You can't just go up to someone and be like, 'Can I join in this fun?' It's easy to spiral into self-doubt and self-flagellation — 'I'm clearly not interesting or cool, or the right kind of person.’"
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Stas Miroshnikov: The Lonely House
Things improved when he joined running and cycling clubs and met people that he "clicked with" — though he says his loneliness still comes and goes.
The Bowling Alone thesis
In many parts of the world, people are getting married and having children later (or not at all).
The average age of first marriage in the UK is now 31, according to the ONS, up from 1970 when it was 23 for men and 21 for women. Young adults tend to be more reliant on friends for emotional connection — and if those friends don't deliver, loneliness can follow.
Prof Weissbourd points to a broader fragmenting of communities too. In rich countries, membership of civic institutions — like churches, community groups, or trade unions — has dropped since the 1970s.
This is sometimes known as the Bowling Alone thesis, named after an influential 1995 essay by political scientist Robert Putnam, who observed that more young Americans were bowling on their own rather than in teams, a symbol of a wider collapse of social relations.
Twenty-somethings — who might have left their childhood home but not yet started their own family — can feel that decline of community most sharply, says Prof Weissbourd.
"We live in an increasingly individualistic society. I think loneliness is a symptom of our failure to care for each other.”
This resonates with Zeyneb, 23, who lives alone in Cheltenham. Her own feelings of loneliness peaked last year during her master's degree. With only a few hours of teaching each week, she struggled to find meaningful connections with her classmates. And with her family far away in Romania, she now spends much of her time alone while she looks for a job.
"It does feel cripplingly lonely when everyone has their own thing to do."
She craves what psychologists call a "third place": a social setting like a park or library that is different from your "first place" (home) or your "second place" (work or university). "We don't really have that space to meet people," she says.
The closest thing she can think of is her gym — but virtually everyone there wears headphones, she tells me, and few make eye contact.
The urban houseshare paradox
Then there is the post-pandemic rise in working from home. Though young adults in the UK don't work from home as often as older generations — 28% of 16-to-29-year-olds worked from home at least some of the time in the first quarter of 2025, compared with 54% of 30-to-49-year-olds, one study suggests — remote work can hit people in their 20s particularly hard.
"Work from home has been, in my opinion, a nightmare for twenty-somethings," says Dr Jay. "It's really hard to make friends when you don't leave the house."
Nor do shared living situations always help. There is something of a paradox here, as young adults are the most likely to live with other people. (In England and Wales only 5% of people in their early 20s live alone, versus 49% of over-85s, suggests the ONS.) But living under the same roof as others doesn't always seem to make young adults any less lonely.
"Some of my most pitiful memories of my 20s were being stuck living with people that I didn't like," recalls Dr Jay. "If I was having a hard time, they didn't care, they were too wrapped up in themselves."
Of course this isn't the case for all house-shares — but she thinks having an emotionally distant flatmate can make people "even more lonely" than if they lived alone.
'Compare and despair' on smartphones
All of this is complicated by smartphones and social media. This year, the average British 18-to-24-year-old spent six hours and 20 minutes online every day, according to the media regulator Ofcom, higher than other adult age groups.
Some might assume that apps like Instagram and Snapchat contribute to feelings of loneliness because they encourage people to speak online rather than in person — but the data doesn't cleanly support this.
What is certainly true, say some experts, is that social media amplifies pre-existing feelings of loneliness because of what Dr Jay calls the "compare and despair" factor.
"You feel like, 'Everybody seems to have best friends and they're all skydiving in Dubai — what's wrong with me, I didn't see anyone all weekend.’”
The average young adult in the UK spends 6 hours and 20 minutes online every day, according to media regulator Ofcom
Yet it is also possible that reporting biases are playing a role.
Studies about loneliness are mostly based on self-report surveys (meaning people are simply asked whether they feel lonely). And Prof Weissbourd says it is plausible that young adults, who tend to be more fluent in the language of mental health and therapy, are more likely than older people to describe themselves as lonely in surveys.
Prof Wigfield also thinks the high level of young-adult loneliness is a real phenomenon, not a statistical mirage.
The 'lottery' of social prescribing
At first, David Gradon's story was fairly typical. In his late 20s, his friends moved away from London. "My social circle really shrunk," he remembers and he developed symptoms of depression. It was an NHS counselor who suggested this could be loneliness.
He tried meeting people over dating apps (a "terrible" idea) and joined a tag rugby club, but injured his leg in the first session. Increasingly despondent, he organized a park walk on social media.
One autumn day in 2021, Mr Gradon and 11 strangers met at Hampstead Heath in north London. He organized more walks and other events and in time this became his full-time job.
He now runs The Great Friendship Project, a non-profit organization to combat young adult loneliness, which runs social events for people in their 20s and 30s across London.
"Everyone's in that same boat. And actually, that brings down barriers. Because you know you're not going to be judged," he explains.
His group also carries out research and awareness campaigns about loneliness.
Council-funded youth clubs operate around the country. Most are currently aimed at teenagers and children, but Laura Cunliffe-Hall, head of policy at charity UK Youth, wants to see more clubs for people in their early 20s. She argues that youth work should serve everyone up to the age of 25.
Funding, she says, is the barrier. Local authority spending on youth services in England fell by 73% between 2010/11 and 2023/24, according to the charity YMCA.
Some argue that spending money on friendship services can save money over the long term, because the health consequences of long-term loneliness can be severe. Prof Wigfield says that chronic loneliness is linked to inflammation, and can increase the risk of cardiovascular disease and dementia in later life.
In recent years the NHS has invested in "social prescribing", where GPs connect patients with certain mental health problems to charity-run services in their area — like art classes or gardening.
More than one million people (of all ages) were referred to NHS social prescribing services in 2023, a recent study found.
But Prof Wigfield says infrastructure remains patchy. "It really is a lottery in terms of where you live [and] whether the GP has knowledge of local services."
Virtually all attendees come alone, meaning everyone's "in the same boat", says David Gradon of The Great Friendship Project
Looking ahead to the next decade, Dr Jay sees signs of hope. For one, she thinks working from home has "lost some of its luster" among twenty-somethings. (Several large employers — including Barclays and WPP — asked staff to spend longer in the office this year.)
Dr Jay also notes that some high-profile people are turning against social media — though she says there is not yet much evidence of a significant fall in usage among young adults.
"I'd love to see more of a backlash against [social media], but it's just so in our pockets," she adds.
Then there are those who find their solution to loneliness in unexpected places. For Zeyneb, the best antidote to social isolation was adopting a black cat, Olive.
"She's quite cuddly," says Zeyneb. "She knows when I need time with her.
"Without her, I would have been much lonelier.”
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cn0kz1wpnq5o
Oriana:
I’m glad people are opening up more now, and not insisting that youth is wonderful, and the twenties are the happiest years of one’s life. This may be true for the lucky few, but for millions (I’ve done some reading on this) it feels like being an orphan lost in the woods. (Speaking of which, the idea of a "happy childhood" is also not what it used to be. We are finally admitting that childhood can be a nightmare.)
When I was in my mid- and late twenties, my peers told me that I was experiencing “Saturn’s return” — astrology was hot back then in California. It was supposed to be a time of great suffering, which was seen — I never found out why — as necessary for the transition to true adulthood. I also summarized those years as “hospitals and heartbreaks” — more descriptive, I know, but “Saturn’s return” had some cosmic poetry to it.
One of the lessons I learned was that having a label for those years of perdition, never mind how nonsensical the label, did help. I realized that it wasn’t just me; one way or another everyone learns what suffering is. No one is spared. And I was finally beginning to see the power of circumstances, rather than blaming myself for everything that went wrong. I saw that everything was much more complex than I initially perceived, and didn’t judge others quite as harshly. Every day I thought of suicide, and every day my love of beauty kept me alive.
*
HOW MANY PAST PARTNERS IS TOO MANY FOR LONG-TERM LOVE?
Recent sexual activity matters more than you think when it comes to commitment.
Around the world, people tend to prefer long-term partners who have had fewer past sexual partners.
Recent sexual activity lowers a partner’s appeal for committed relationships.
New research found no sexual double standard—men and women face similar judgments on sexual history.
In what way does someone’s past sexual history shape how they are perceived as a potential romantic partner? New research reveals the specific number of past sexual partners people consider acceptable and highlights the surprising role of recent sexual activity.
First, a little background:
Historically, sex has carried significant risks, ranging from life-threatening diseases to social consequences like abandonment or paternity uncertainty. While modern contraception and family planning have reduced many of these risks, these risks haven’t disappeared entirely, especially when people are considering a long-term partner.
One factor people often consider is the number of sexual partners a potential mate has had. This detail can shape perceptions about the potential mate’s values, sexual health, and potential reliability in a long-term relationship.
A Global Study on Sexual History and Long-Term Relationship Preferences
A recent study published in Scientific Reports explored how a person’s past sexual behavior affects their dating appeal. Led by Andrew Thomas and colleagues across 11 countries, the study asked whether people prefer partners with fewer sexual encounters.
The researchers found that people generally preferred those with fewer partners, but timing also mattered. Those whose sexual activity had slowed in recent years were seen as more appealing for long-term commitment.
The biggest drop in desirability occurred between four and 12 past partners. Increasing from 12 to 36 also lowered appeal, but the effect was smaller. This pattern appeared in both men and women, suggesting there was no strong sexual double standard. Cultural differences were present but minor.
Study Details: How Researchers Measured Sexual History Preferences
The research comprised three studies involving more than 5,300 participants. In the final study, 10 international labs collaborated to assess how cultural background shaped people’s responses.
Participants first completed a test of their views on sociosexuality (openness to casual sex), called the Sociosexual Orientation Inventory-Revised (SOI-R). This included statements like “Sex without love is okay.”
Next, participants viewed diagrams that depicted fictional sexual histories. These visuals illustrated how often someone had new sexual partners over time.
Participants were asked if they would consider a long-term relationship with someone based on each of these patterns.
The results were clear: People were less likely to commit to someone with a history of many past partners, especially if these relationships had occurred more recently.
Why Timing Matters
People were more open to long-term relationships with partners whose sexual activity had slowed down over time. In contrast, frequent recent encounters made people less willing to commit. This effect was strongest when the total number of partners was already high.
Even those who were open to casual sex still preferred suitors whose sexual history was slowing down. This suggests that stability over time is attractive to most people seeking a long-term relationship, regardless of personal values around sex.
Small Cultural Differences
Results were mostly consistent across cultures, with a few exceptions. For instance, participants in the U.S. and Norway were more accepting of a partner with four past partners than those in China or Poland. These differences may reflect social attitudes, dating norms, gender roles, or even sex ratios.
What This Means for Dating Today
What is the “right” number of sexual partners when it comes to long-term relationships?
The studies showed that having more past partners reduced people’s willingness to pursue a committed romantic relationship.
The biggest drop happened between four and 12 partners.
Going from 12 to 36 partners also lowered appeal, but not as sharply. At a certain point, the differences seem to become less meaningful. For example, the difference between 31 and 35 partners matters much less than between five and nine.
In short, fewer tends to be better.
Timing also matters. People care not just about how many partners someone has had, but when those encounters took place: A history of slowing down is seen as more appealing than one that’s becoming more active.
Final thoughts
Even though we’ve come a long way from cave-dwelling and hunting for survival, not all concerns have changed. One of them is still the risk involved in forming a long-term romantic bond (long-term cohabitation, getting married).
As dating becomes more public (through apps and social media), these patterns may shape how people present themselves, and what others infer from their relationship and sexual history.
And we will continue to judge others and make assumptions, sometimes harshly and sometimes unconsciously, but almost always with serious consequences.
So when you next find yourself (or someone else) reacting to a person’s number of past partners, pause to consider the assumptions that reaction rests on. Are they justified or ingrained? As our dating norms continue to evolve, questioning these gut impressions may be one of the most important steps toward healthier, more authentic, and meaningful relationships.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/finding-a-new-home/202508/how-many-past-partners-is-too-many-for-long-term-love
*
YOUR PAST RELATIONSHIPS MAY CONTROL YOUR PRESENT REALITY
Attachment theory is relevant to both adult close relationships and self-concept.
Individuals possess multiple, relationship-specific selves activated by context.
Secure attachment fosters a coherent self-concept, while insecure attachment does not.
Transference causes individuals to apply past relationship representations to new people.
Have you ever met someone new—a potential romantic partner, a new boss, a neighbor—and felt an instant, inexplicable wave of familiarity?
Maybe you felt immediately safe and understood. Or perhaps you felt a sudden spike of anxiety, a feeling that you needed to impress them or defend yourself.
You didn’t have concrete information to base these feelings on yet. So, where did they come from?
They came from your past.
According to a new synthesis of psychological research by myself and colleagues, in the absence of new information, similarities to past partners trigger existing mental blueprints. We unwittingly recreate familiar interpersonal patterns.
This is called transference. And it’s just one part of a complex system that dictates who you are.
Today, we’re breaking down the fascinating intersection of attachment theory and what psychologists call the "relational self" to understand the invisible strings pulling your behavior.
The Myth of the Singular "You"
We like to think we have a solid, unchanging "real me."
But psychologist Susan Andersen's research suggests the self is inherently relational—it is dynamically constructed and reconstructed in the context of your relationships. Her social-cognitive model of the relational self posits that we form distinct cognitive, emotional, and behavioral tendencies in close relationships that transfer across contexts.
Put simply: We roughly have as many selves as we have close relationships.
You maintain multiple "selves" activated by close others. The version of "you" that emerges with a sibling is fundamentally different than the "you" with a romantic partner. The context you are in activates the relevant aspect of your personality.
The Attachment Blueprint
At the foundation of these relational selves is Attachment Theory.
Developed by Bowlby and Ainsworth, this theory explains how the emotional bonds we form with early caregivers shape our developing self-concept and influence how we relate to others across our entire lifespan.
These early experiences are internalized into "working models"—mental representations of ourselves and others.
Secure Attachment: Comes from safe, responsive caregiving. These individuals tend to develop a positive, coherent, well-organized self-structure. They perceive themselves as worthy of love and hold a positive view of both self and others.
Anxious Attachment: Results from inconsistent caregiving. They tend to display a negative, less integrated self-structure marked by self-doubt and a heightened need for validation.
These styles don't just affect how you date; they affect how you view yourself. They act like invisible blueprints that guide your emotional responses, expectations, and behaviors.
Secure individuals typically develop a more cohesive and positive self-concept compared to those with insecure styles. Secure attachment promotes autonomy and validation essential to forming a stable identity.
Avoidant Attachment: Results from cold or rejecting caregiving. They often adopt a self-concept marked by compulsive self-reliance, persistent self-doubt, and discomfort with intimacy and emotional closeness.
When the Past Hijacks the Present
Here is where it gets tricky.
These old representations of significant others can be unconsciously activated and applied to new people when we perceive a resemblance.
As a result, we experience recurring thoughts, feelings, and behaviors toward new partners that echo past relationships—sometimes leading to totally false assumptions about the new person.
Crucially, research shows we tend to show greater social interest in targets who resemble our previous relationship partners.
The Good News: You Are Malleable
If this sounds deterministic, don't worry. The research offers massive hope.
While attachment styles are trait-like and stable, they are not fixed in stone. They have a "state component" that can be activated through priming.
Security as a Resource: Priming a sense of attachment security acts as an internal resource. It can enhance self-regulation performance, especially when you are cognitively depleted.
Repeated exposure matters: Repeated priming of attachment security can lead to sustained improvements in mood and self-perceptions.
Self-Expansion: Relationships aren't just for comfort; they are engines of self-change. We seek to "expand" our self-concept by incorporating traits and perspectives of our partners into our own identity. Secure relationships make us feel safe enough to explore new aspects of ourselves.
Practical Implications
Recognizing how past relationship patterns influence current interactions can help break cycles of dysfunction. When you understand that your reaction to your boss might be influenced by your relationship with a critical parent, you can begin to respond as your adult self rather than your triggered relational self.
In Relationships: Awareness of transference can help you see your partner more clearly, rather than through the lens of past relationships. It can also help you understand why certain conflicts feel disproportionately intense.
In Personal Development: Recognizing that you have multiple selves can be liberating. Instead of trying to maintain one consistent identity, you can appreciate the richness of your various relational selves while working to integrate them into a coherent whole.
The Takeaway:
Your identity isn't a fixed monument but a living, breathing creation that grows and changes through every meaningful connection you make. You are a constellation of the relationships you’ve had.
By becoming aware of your attachment style and recognizing when you are "transferring" an old map onto a new territory, you can break maladaptive cycles.
You can choose which "self" you want to bring to the table.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/all-we-need-is-love/202512/your-past-relationships-may-control-your-present-reality
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HOW A 'FERTILITY GAP' IS FUELING THE RISE OF ONE-CHILD FAMILIES
Natalie Johnston was scrolling on Facebook a couple of years ago, when she came across a group called, "One And Done On The Fence". Seeing it, she felt a sense of relief.
"It was nice to hear someone giving it a name," she says.
She and her husband have a five-year-old daughter called Joanie but they knew they probably wouldn't have a second child — not because they couldn't, but not out of choice, either: Natalie finds it hard to imagine having the time and money for one.
"You know you'd love that baby, everyone tells you, but there's a little teeny niggle where you think, 'what if I put my first in that position where she can't do the activity she wants to do because I've got to spread money out between two'?"
She adds: "Is it okay to say you're only having one because they don't fit into modern ways of parenting?”
People aren't 'turning their backs on parenthood', says the UN — some people simply can't afford it. One expert explains that there is a fertility gap — ‘'for every three kids wanted… only two are born’
Modern parenting, for Natalie, 35, looks like family holidays with Joanie. It looks like weekday evenings hearing about her day at school and helping her with homework. But, with demanding jobs and no family living nearby to help with childcare, it also looks like an expensive childcare jigsaw.
But ultimately, deciding whether or not to have a second is a tough decision. "I think you worry you'd regret it," she says.
The fertility rate was 1.41 children per woman in England and Wales last year, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS) — the lowest on record for a third year running.
Separately, the proportion of families with one dependent child has grown since the turn of the century — that includes families with one child, as well as those who also have children over 18 or may have left home.
They made up 44% of all families in England and Wales with dependent children living with them, up from 42% in 2000. (Though the peak was 47% in the early 2010s, which then dipped before picking up again after Covid.)
The UK's falling birth rate is part of what the United Nations calls a "global fertility slump", which it puts down, in part, to money worries.
People aren't "turning their backs on parenthood,” says the UN in a summary of its Population Fund's State of World Population report, which surveyed people across 14 countries.
Instead it says they “are being denied the freedom to start families due to skyrocketing living costs, persistent gender inequality and deepening uncertainty about the future.”
Bridging the 'fertility gap'
Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson said earlier this year that she wants "more young people to have children, if they so choose".
She pointed to the expansion of funded childcare hours in England as a way the government was trying to recover "dashed dreams".
Annual nursery costs for a child under two in England did fall this year for the first time in 15 years, according to the children's charity Coram. They are now an average of £12,425, down 22% on the previous year. However they are slightly up in Scotland and Wales, at £12,468 and £15,038 respectively.
A study from University College London (UCL) last year suggested two-fifths of 32-year-olds in England want children – or more children, if they are already parents – but only one in four of them are actively trying to conceive.
Dr Paula Sheppard, an anthropologist at the University of Oxford, believes parents in the West still think of having two children as "the norm".
However, she says there is a "fertility gap" and that "for every three kids wanted… only two are born".
"A lot of this gap is driven by… people starting families later and later in life," she explains – often a result of education and career opportunities for women and changing gender roles.
"It becomes a whole lot more difficult to get pregnant [and] it becomes a whole lot more difficult to keep the pregnancy."
Fewer pupils, less cash for schools
The falling birthrate is giving education policymakers a headache.
The number of pupils in England has dropped by 150,000 since 2019, and will fall by a further 400,000 by the end of the decade, according to the Education Policy Institute.
Schools are given money per pupil, so fewer pupils means less cash. Less cash, in turn, is an issue for those head teachers struggling to fund staffing and resources.
About a year ago, a post on a UK Reddit thread for teachers raised what one contributor saw as another potential impact of more only children on the education system.
The contributor wrote that they had seen a rise in "spoilt" children with "demanding behavior due to overindulgent parenting". These children tended to have siblings who were much older or no siblings at all, they claimed.
The idea that children without siblings may be selfish or spoiled dates back to research conducted in the late 19th century by psychologists G Stanley Hall and E W Bohannon.
"Selfishness is one of the most striking traits of the only children in families," they wrote in their Study of Peculiar and Exceptional Children. "'The only child' is deficient on the social side.”
But more recent studies have debunked that idea.
"Numerous studies have disproven these myths that only children are maladjusted, spoiled, and lonely," explains Dr Adriean Mancillas, a psychologist and professor in California State University's education department.
Only children and academic performance
Dr Mancillas has spent her career exploring family dynamics, the development of only children, and mental health intervention in schools — and says most research "consistently demonstrates advantages of being an only child, particularly in educational and academic outcomes".
This is down, mainly, to a theory called "resource dilution." In simple terms, she says this means parents with one child "are able to be more involved in their child's education."
"Children with siblings share in parents' time, emotional support, attention, and financial resources whereas the only child does not," says Dr Mancillas. "This singular focus of resources tends to provide academic advantages for the only child."
She points to some research that suggests many only children did better academically when schools closed to most pupils in lockdowns during the Covid-19 pandemic, “because of the relative availability of parental resources.”
"Resource dilution" is one of three social science theories about the consequences of being an only child, according to University College London (UCL) academics.
The second is "confluence theory", which also suggests that only children perform better than children with siblings academically because a family's "intellectual environment" declines as the number of children grows.
Then there is "socialization theory" which, in contrast, argues that siblings help children learn how to share, negotiate and resolve conflict.
Existing research, according to the UCL academics, support the first two theories. But, like Dr Mancillas, they say it "generally does not support the socialization theory as it finds that only children are comparable to children with siblings (especially those with few siblings) in terms of personality, parent-child relationships, achievement, motivation and personal adjustment."
Dr Mancillas suggests there could be something else feeding into only children's better academic performance, too.
"Studies show that parents with one child tend to have attained higher educational outcomes themselves than parents of multiple children," she says.
"Much of the time, parents have delayed having children in order to complete career or higher educational goals. This would suggest that parents who have one child likely place a high value on education overall."
'Little emperors' and 'one-child dynasties'
Earlier this year, Susan Newman, an American psychologist explored so-called only-child dynasties — where parents who are only-children, have one child themselves — in an article to accompany her new book, Just One: The New Science, Secrets & Joy of Parenting an Only Child.
One of the most surprising findings from the new research for her book was, she wrote: “Adult only-children are increasingly choosing to have “just one” child themselves.
“The resulting only-child dynasties underscore the trend. Count on seeing more of them, most noticeably without the spoiled, entitled 'little emperors' we heard so much about for so long —despite a lack of evidence to support such misinformed stereotypes.”
The phrase has been used as shorthand to describe the only children born under China's one-child policy, the idea held by some being that it led to a generation of "solitary children pampered and paraded with a retinue of parents and elders.”
However, while the policy did leave a lasting legacy after its end in 2015 — an aging population, for example, and a gender imbalance because of a traditional preference for male children — research has suggested that the "little emperor effect" has not been a part of it.
There were "very few only-child effects" on children's personality, according to a study of Chinese schoolchildren carried out by American researchers at two Texas Universities.
'People feel very alone in this'
The phrase "one and done" was only just beginning to emerge when New York-based journalist Lauren Sandler began writing her 2013 book, One and Only: The Freedom of Having an Only Child, and the Joy of Being One.
"I would be on the subway with my adorable child and someone would say, 'so cute, when are you having another one?'
"There is so little discussion about what it means to have single children, which is incredible to me considering how many there are."
She adds: "I think that people feel very alone in this."
She began to question why some people assumed she would want more children, something she also explored for her work. It used to be that having larger families was how we survived, she points out.
"A family was a workforce, and that was very much a necessity until the industrial revolution."
Only after the industrial revolution, and the introduction of child labor and welfare laws did that change. "The opportunity costs and the economic costs of children shifted dramatically," she explains.
She also questioned the negative connotations that can sometimes be associated with having one child.
"There's also a lot of research that shows that only children do not take relationships for granted at a very, very young age. So, [it's not the same as when you] fight with your older brother and then just, through exposure, need to make up again.
"These people aren't going to be at the dinner table with you every night. Because of that, there's a lot of care that seems to come into relationships. And so that is sort of the opposite of the selfish stereotype of only children."
Trump and the $5,000 'baby bonus'
So teachers may not really have a generation of "little emperors" on their hands. But the impact of the falling birth rate is still very much being felt by some schools, and more widely too.
Policymakers, for example, are grappling with the impact of the UK's aging population on public services, taxes, and the growing cost of state pensions.
"Falling birth rates and an aging population can create pressures on public services and public finances because the balance between the number of people working and the number of people drawing on age-related services changes over time," says Dr Alina Pelikh of University College London, who specializes in demography.
"Governments may need to consider adjustments — whether through pension age, contributions, or other measures — to ensure long-term sustainability.”
The concerns are global, and governments around the world are trying to encourage people to have more children.
US President Donald Trump has mentioned the idea of a $5,000 "baby bonus". Poland has just introduced a policy of zero personal income tax for families with two or more children. And in Hungary, Prime Minister Viktor Orban has introduced tax exemptions for mothers.
But for all the the statistics and policymaking this is, ultimately, a very personal decision.
Natalie couldn't be prouder of her daughter, who has recently been made "values ambassador" in her class, encouraging other children to show empathy and respect.
"She has been chosen, not because she's an only child, because they don't know whether she's got siblings or not. She's been chosen based on her personality," says Natalie.
"I don't think I was ever worried about not giving her [a sibling], because you can never have a child for somebody else.
"You've got to have a child for yourself, haven't you?”
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cwyv7211jljo
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SCIENTISTS THOUGHT PARKINSON’S WAS IN OUR GENES. IT MIGHT BE IN THE WATER
Amy Lindberg spent 26 years in the Navy and she still walked like it—with intention, like her chin had someplace to be. But around 2017, her right foot stopped following orders. Lindberg and her husband Brad were five years into their retirement. After moving 10 times for Uncle Sam, they’d bought their dream house near the North Carolina coast. They had a backyard that spilled out onto wetlands. From the kitchen, you could see cranes hunting. They kept bees and played pickleball and watched their children grow.
But now Lindberg’s right foot was out of rhythm. She worked hard to ignore it, but she couldn’t disregard the tremors. And she’d started to misplace words and thoughts, especially when she got excited. Was this normal? She was 57, fit and clean-living. Could the culprit be menopause?
The diagnosis took all of five minutes. Lindberg had Parkinson’s disease, the neurologist said, with all the classic symptoms. PD—as the scientists she would meet call it—is a neurological disorder, and a life sentence. Sufferers gradually lose control of their muscles, their bowels, their esophagus. Doctors told Lindberg that there was no way to know what had caused it.
The daughter of a sailor, Lindberg had built her life around the military. She was commissioned in the Navy out of college and became an officer at 23. Her first posting was to Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune in North Carolina, a city-sized training hub that supports more than 60,000 sailors and marines. There were murmurs even then—whispers of weird cancers and stillbirths—but Lejeune was one of the prettier pieces of land in the Navy’s property portfolio. The bachelor officers’ quarters were on a grassy thumb of shoreline called Paradise Point, where the New River meets the Atlantic.
“Lejeune was just picturesque,” Lindberg says. “We had a river right there, and the beach wasn’t far away, and you worked half a mile from where you lived.” She loved her job at the hospital and made lifelong friends. She met her husband—a photo on her desk shows a blond Lindberg beaming beneath her Navy cap while Brad smiles broadly in his dress blues. “It was really nice,” she says. “You’d never suspect the water.”
Parkinson’s is the second most common neurological disease in the United States, after Alzheimer’s; each year 90,000 Americans are diagnosed. For decades, Parkinson’s research has focused on genetics, on finding the rogue letters in our genome that cause this incurable misery. Today, published research on the genetics behind Parkinson’s outnumbers all other potential causes six to one. This is partially because one of the disease’s most generous benefactors, Google cofounder Sergey Brin, can tie Parkinson’s to his genetics.
Some Parkinson’s patients diagnosed before age 50—as Michael J. Fox was—can trace the disease to their genes; Brin, whose mother has the disease, carries a mutation of the LRRK2 gene, which significantly increases the likelihood of him developing PD. Over the years, Fox’s foundation has raised billions for Parkinson’s research, and Brin has personally committed $1.8 billion to fighting the disorder. All told, more than half of Parkinson’s research dollars in the past two decades have flowed toward genetics.
But Parkinson’s rates in the US have doubled in the past 30 years. And studies suggest they will climb another 15 to 35 percent in each coming decade. This is not how an inherited genetic disease is supposed to behave.
Despite the avalanche of funding, the latest research suggests that only 10 to 15 percent of Parkinson’s cases can be fully explained by genetics. The other three-quarters are, functionally, a mystery. “More than two-thirds of people with PD don’t have any clear genetic link,” says Briana De Miranda, a researcher at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. “So, we’re moving to a new question: What else could it be?”
“The health you enjoy or don’t enjoy today is a function of your environment in the past,” says Ray Dorsey, a physician and professor of neurology at the University of Rochester. Your “environment” could be the refinery a town over, the lead in the paint of your mother’s home, the plastic sheath of the Hot Pocket you microwaved in 1996. It is air pollution and PFAS and pesticides and so much more.
And this environment of yours—the sum of all your exposures, from conception to the grave—could be making you sicker than you realize. In a study of half a million Britons, Oxford researchers determined that lifestyle and the environment is 10 times more likely to explain early death than genetics. But that also offers a tantalizing prospect. If Parkinson’s is an environmental disease, as Dorsey and a small band of researchers emphatically believe, then maybe we can end it.
In 1982, two years before Lindberg was stationed at Camp Lejeune, a 42-year-old heroin addict named George Carillo was wheeled into the Santa Clara Valley Medical Center in San Jose, California. A few days earlier, Carillo had been perfectly able-bodied. Now he was mute and unable to move. Baffled, the neurologists on call came to an impossible diagnosis: The patient, over a long weekend, had developed Parkinson’s disease.
Carillo would probably have spent the rest of his short life in a psych ward had a pioneering young neurologist named Bill Langston not intervened. The way Parkinson’s takes over the body is distinct, Langston told me. The disease attacks the neurons in a region of the brain called the substantia nigra, a small dark structure that stands out amid the squirms of beige. The neurons here release dopamine, which sends signals to other neurons that help the body to move smoothly and effectively. In Parkinson’s these neurons die off; by the time a patient is diagnosed, they have often lost 60 to 80 percent of them.
The process usually takes years, Langston says. But in the case of Carillo, all the neurons had disappeared almost overnight.
Over the summer of 1982, Langston found five more “frozen addicts” across the Bay Area. Through gumshoe detective work, he discovered they had all injected a batch of what they believed to be a designer drug called MPPP, cooked in a Morgan Hill basement. But the chemistry had gone awry. Instead of 1-methyl-4-phenyl-4-propionoxypiperidine, a potent opioid with morphine-like effects, the dime-bag chemist had accidentally made 1-methyl-4-phenyl-1,2,3,6-tetrahydropyridine, or MPTP, a pharmacological slipup that would rewrite neurology textbooks.
When Langston and colleagues secured a batch of MPTP and tested it on primates, they knew they had uncorked a revolution. “Any neurologist could see these monkeys and immediately know that’s Parkinson’s,” Langston says—which was especially compelling, since monkeys do not get Parkinson’s in the wild. In a first, Langston showed that MPTP killed the dopamine-producing neurons in monkeys’ substantia nigra. The discovery made him the most famous Parkinson’s researcher in the country and, Langston wrote at the time, promised to “turn the entire field of Parkinson’s disease upside down.” Parkinson’s, it appeared, could be caused by a chemical.
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Amy Lindberg settled quickly into life at Lejeune. She played tennis and ran on her lunch breaks, flitting through sprinklers in the turgid Carolina summers. But something dark was lurking beneath her feet.
Sometime before 1953, a massive plume of trichlorethylene, or TCE, had entered the groundwater beneath Camp Lejeune. TCE is a highly effective solvent—one of those midcentury wonder chemicals—that vaporizes quickly and dissolves whatever grease it touches. The spill’s source is debated, but grunts on base used TCE to maintain machinery, and the dry cleaner sprayed it on dress blues. It was ubiquitous at Lejeune and all over America.
And TCE appeared benign, too—you could rub it on your hands or huff its fumes and feel no immediate effects. It plays a longer game. For approximately 35 years, Marines and sailors who lived at Lejeune unknowingly breathed in vaporized TCE whenever they turned on their tap. The Navy, which oversees the Marine Corps, first denied the toxic plume’s existence, then refused to admit it could affect Marines’ health. But as Lejeune’s vets aged, cancers and unexplained illness began stalking them at staggering rates. Marines stationed on base had a 35 percent higher risk of developing kidney cancer, a 47 percent higher risk of Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a 68 percent higher risk of multiple myeloma. At the local cemetery, the section reserved for infants had to be expanded.
Meanwhile, Langston had spent the remainder of the 1980s setting up the California Parkinson’s Foundation (later renamed the Parkinson’s Institute), a lab and treatment facility equipped with everything needed to finally reveal the cause of the disease. “We thought we were going to solve it,” Langston told me. Researchers affiliated with the institute created the first animal model for Parkinson’s, identified a pesticide called Paraquat as a near chemical match to MPTP, and proved that farm workers who sprayed Paraquat developed Parkinson’s at exceedingly high rates.
Then they showed that identical twins developed Parkinson’s at the same rate as fraternal twins—something that wouldn’t make sense if the disease were purely genetic, since identical twins share DNA and fraternal twins do not. They even noted TCE as a potential cause of the disease, Langston says. Each revelation, the team thought, represented another nail in the coffin of the genetic theory of Parkinson’s.
But there was a problem. The Human Genome Project had launched in 1990, promising to usher in a new era of personalized medicine. The project’s goal, to identify all of the genes in man, was radical, and by the time it was completed in 2000, frothy comparisons to the moon landing were frequent. Unraveling our genome would “revolutionize the diagnosis, prevention, and treatment of most, if not all, human diseases,” then president Bill Clinton said.
But for Langston and his colleagues, the Human Genome Project sucked the air out of the environmental health space. Genetics became the “800-pound gorilla,” as one scientist put it. “All the research dollars went toward genetics,” says Sam Goldman, who worked with Langston on the twin study. “It’s just a lot sexier than epidemiology. It’s the latest gadget, the bigger rocket.”
A generation of young scientists were being trained to think of genetics and genomics as the default place to look for answers. “I characterize science as a bunch of 5-year-olds playing soccer,” says another researcher. “They all go where the ball is, running around the field in a herd.” And the ball was decidedly not environmental health. “Donors want a cure,” Langston says. “And they want it now.”
In 1997, researchers found a family in Italy that had passed along Parkinson’s disease for generations. Although the gene in question would later be shown to cause just a fraction of Parkinson’s cases, the damage was done. The Parkinson’s Institute faced stronger economic headwinds and difficulties with administration, and Langston eventually chose to shut it down. The environmental theory of Parkinson’s went back on the shelf.
No one knows exactly how much of the world’s drinking water is laced with TCE. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reckons that the water supply of between 4 and 18 percent of Americans is contaminated, although not always at dangerous concentrations; the Environmental Working Group figures 17 million Americans drink the stuff.
In Silicon Valley, where TCE was integral to the manufacturing of early transistors, a necklace of underground plumes have been identified along Highway 101 from Palo Alto to San Jose. Santa Clara County has more toxic Superfund sites, at 23, than any other county in the country. (Several tech giants have offices near or on top of these sites; in 2013, workers at a Google office were subjected to unhealthy levels of TCE for months after a ventilation system failed.)
And while TCE’s connection to cancer is well studied, what it does to our brain is more mysterious. That’s because good data on exposure is devilishly hard to come by. The US, with its fractious health care system, has few national databases, and chemical exposures are rarely tracked.
In 2017, Sam Goldman realized that Camp Lejeune offered the perfect opportunity to change this. Goldman—an epidemiologist and a doctor—has made a career out of teasing apart data: finding unusual case reports, looking for patterns, interviewing patients in the clinic about what chemicals they handled at old jobs and what exposures they faced in their childhood. In the case of Lejeune, Goldman could examine VA medical records to find Parkinson’s diagnoses and compare them to service records. But Goldman’s genius wasn’t finding this Lejeune cohort—it was realizing he had a control group, too.
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Camp Pendleton, in Southern California, is the Marine Corps’ West Coast equivalent to Lejeune. Thousands of young, healthy Marines shuffle through its barbed-wired gates each year. But Pendleton has one thing Lejeune does not: uncontaminated drinking water.
When Goldman compared both populations, the results were shocking: Marines exposed to TCE at Lejeune were 70 percent more likely to have Parkinson’s than those stationed at Pendleton. And in a follow-up study last year, he showed that disease progression in Lejeune vets with the highest exposure to TCE was faster than those with low or no exposure, too. In the world of Parkinson’s research, Goldman’s study was a blockbuster.
But to really prove a link, you need more than just correlation. So, on the third floor of a drab university building in Birmingham, Alabama, Briana De Miranda has re-created Camp Lejeune in her lab, but for mice.
De Miranda is a toxicologist, not a neurologist, which is an unusual CV for a cutting-edge Parkinson’s researcher. When I visit her in October 2024, she shows me the plexiglass chamber where a few dozen mice doze in a pile. They’ve been spending their days in this chamber for months, inhaling a small amount of TCE almost every day. This experiment is the first to re-create the exposure someone like Lindberg experienced over years at Camp Lejeune.
De Miranda walks into a dark annex of her lab and asks a tech to pull up some imagery. “These are dopamine neurons in the brain,” De Miranda says, pointing to a scan of the control mice. In unexposed mice the substantia nigra looks like a nighttime satellite image of Manhattan—thousands of neurons sending dopamine across the mice’s brains to orchestrate fluid scurrying and sniffing and munching. Then the tech pulls up the brain scans of mice who have been exposed to TCE. Suddenly we’re in West Virginia. It’s not pitch black, but most of the lights are off and the ones that remain have been dimmed. The dopamine neurons have died, De Miranda explains.
And she’s seeing the physical effects in the mice too. “We see minor motion defects; we see it in their gait, and we are seeing cognitive effects,” De Miranda says.
De Miranda’s studies, the first ever on inhaled TCE toxicity and Parkinson’s, are compelling, her colleagues agree, and well designed. And although there is more work to be done, the results wrap a bow on Goldman’s epidemiological work and the Parkinson’s Institute’s years of research. TCE is a neurotoxin, and generations of Americans have been exposed. In December 2024, the Environmental Protection Agency finally moved to ban TCE in the United States.
“I think TCE is the most important cause of Parkinson’s in the US,” says Ray Dorsey, the Parkinson’s expert at the University of Rochester. In 2021, Dorsey, who frequently collaborates with De Miranda, Goldman, and a core group of like-minded scientists, published Ending Parkinson’s Disease. The book’s central thesis: Parkinson’s is a growing pandemic, and up to 90 percent of cases are caused by chemicals in our environment. Cut exposures like TCE and pesticides, and we can “end Parkinson’s” as we know it. “The full effect of the Parkinson’s pandemic,” Dorsey writes, “is not inevitable but, to a large extent, preventable.”
Since the 1990s, the number of Americans with chronic disease has ballooned to more than 75 percent of adults, per the CDC. Autism, insulin resistance, and autoimmune diagnoses have reached epidemic proportions. The incidence of cancer in people under the age of 50 has hit an all-time high. If Parkinson’s disease is—as Ray Dorsey believes—a pandemic that’s being caused by our environment, it’s probably not the only one.
After a century of putting genetics on a pedestal, the geneticists have some surprising news for us: The vast majority of chronic disease isn’t caused by our genes. “The Human Genome Project was a $3 billion investment, and what did we find out?” says Thomas Hartung, a toxicologist at Johns Hopkins. “Five percent of all disease is purely genetic. Less than 40 percent of diseases even have a genetic component.”
Most of the conditions we worry about, instead, stem from a complex interaction between our genes and our environment. Genetics loads the gun, as former National Institutes of Health head Francis Collins put it, but the environment pulls the trigger. Rather than revealing the genetic origins of disease, genomics has done the opposite. Only 10 percent of breast cancer cases are purely genetic. Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease? Rheumatoid arthritis? Coronary heart disease? All hover around 20 percent. The primary driver of disease is considerably more terrestrial: It’s the environment, stupid.
Yet only 1 percent of the roughly 350,000 chemicals in use in the United States have ever been tested for safety. In its 55-year history, the EPA has banned or restricted about a dozen (by contrast, the EU has banned more than 2,000).
Paraquat, the pesticide that appears to cause Parkinson’s in farm workers, has been banned in Europe and China but remains available in the US. And in January, a month after the EPA’s ban on TCE was finalized, the Trump administration moved to undo it, even as new evidence emerged of Parkinson’s clusters in the rust belt, where exposure to trichloroethylene is high.
It’s easy to mock the MAHAs and the TikTok trad moms making their own food coloring, but the chemical regulatory system in America does not inspire confidence. No one really knows what the chemicals we’re interacting with every day are doing to our bodies.
That’s why, earlier this year, slices of brain from Briana De Miranda’s TCE-addled mice ended up with Gary Miller, a professor at Columbia University. Miller is the country’s leading proponent of a brand-new field called exposomics. Your “exposome” is the sum of your own personal environmental exposures, from the womb to the casket. Many exposures, like TCE, disappear from the bloodstream quickly; people who came into contact with a chemical in the past will never be able to prove it. The exposome is a way to potentially answer the question, “Just what the hell have I been exposed to?”
Miller began his career in the ’90s as a Parkinson’s researcher studying environmental exposures. But he grew tired of the “whack-a-mole approach” of modern toxicology: identifying one of the 350,000 chemicals on the market as a potential toxicant, looking for the exposure in the environment, looking for correlations, looking for toxicity in mice’s brains, rinse, repeat.
He wanted a shotgun approach, an answer to the way genome sequencing identifies all the genes in the body. What Miller wants is a Human Exposome Project. “We realized that this wasn’t just about Parkinson’s,” he says. “There were so many disease states we could look at.” Quantify our exposomes, Miller hopes, and we can know what ails us.
“We have the tools to put the big puzzle together,” says Rima Habre, an environmental health and exposomics expert at the University of Southern California. Through blood draws and metabolomic studies, the exposomics advocates want to measure the vast mixture of chemicals and pollutants in the body and figure out how they impact health. Take air pollution, Habre’s specialty. An ever-changing mélange of small molecules, from tailpipe emissions to tire bits to dust, it has been linked to obesity, endocrine disruption, heart attacks, and more. But if we can figure out what specifically in this toxic cloud is doing the damage, Habre says, we can work to quickly reduce it in our environment, the way we removed lead from gasoline.
Or autism. Autism diagnoses have exploded from 1 in 10,000 in the ’70s to 1 in 36 today, a rate that genetics and screening can’t explain, says Johns Hopkins’ Thomas Hartung. Hartung, another Human Exposome Project proponent, is growing clusters of neurons in the lab and subjecting them to flame-retardant chemicals—which are applied to couches and car seats across America—to see what happens. Already, the associations trouble him. The goal of all this, Hartung says, is a world where toxicologists like Briana De Miranda don’t have to spend money creating a mouse gas chamber, expose mice for three months, then wait several more months for results.
Miller’s goal with mouse brains is to figure out what exactly about TCE is killing dopamine-producing neurons and leading to Parkinson’s—to unravel and define the interaction between our environment and our genetics in a way never before possible.
The parallels to the Human Genome Project—in both promise and froth—are clear. But there is a sense of empowerment in knowing that our health is not predetermined. Nearly every scientist interviewed for this story does a few simple things. They filter their water, they run an air purifier, they don’t microwave plastic. They don’t freak out about their daily exposures, but they do things like opt for fragrance-free products, avoid eating out of plastic when they can, and buy organic produce. Our exposures, while not always in our control, can be limited.
About two hours south of Lejeune in Wilmington, North Carolina, Amy Lindberg is having lunch with her husband, Brad, on a pier overlooking the Atlantic. Although Goldman, De Miranda, and Dorsey have unveiled the likely origins of her Parkinson’s, the random nature of it gnaws at her. “When I was diagnosed, it was just like, where’s everyone else?” Lindberg says. “I felt like, if I have it, what about my coworkers?” She nods to Brad, who also spent years drinking Lejeune’s water. “He suffered no ill consequences,” she says. She worries about her kids, one of whom was born on base.
She still exercises constantly, playing pickleball, boxing, and hopping on the elliptical. She’s found that movement, especially high-intensity exercise, reduces her symptoms. A recent Yale study confirmed as much, showing that interval training increases dopaminergic signals in the brains of Parkinson’s patients, suggesting that exercise slows disease progression and even improves neuron function. The environment may have caused Lindberg’s disease, but she can use it to fight back too.
https://www.wired.com/story/scientists-thought-parkinsons-was-in-our-genes-it-might-be-in-the-water/?utm_source=firefox-newtab-en-us
Strange_Weather:
US is deliberately behind Europe in banning harmful chemicals because countries with universal healthcare systems have “skin in the game” to protect citizens’ lives, productivity, and health. Consequently, they also have the large medical databases required to conduct the necessary epidemiological studies. The huge difference in banned chemicals is a damning indictment of how disposable US considers its citizens and how little it cares for their heath and well-being while alive.
Cynicalobserver:
Camp Lejeune is just an example of the massive drinking water contamination by TCE which exists in the United States. Two huge examples: In Simi Valley, California, a northwestern suburb of Los Angeless, a defense contractor called North American Rockwell owned a 2850 acre site called Rocketdyne, where all sorts of wildly dangerous experiments and tests occurred. The site was called Rocketdyne by the locals. North American Rockwell made a mess of its site, contaminating the underground water aka groundwater with a host of carcinogenic chemicals including TCE as well as radionuclides. North American Rockwell sold part of that land to NASA which tested space shuttle size rocket engines on the property, wildly contaminating the groundwater with more than a million gallons of TCE.
For years that contaminated groundwater traveled east into rural residents home drinking water wells, as well as into public water agency groundwater wells, also to the east and to the north of the Rocketdyne property in Simi Valley. The unsuspecting locals were drinking tap water contaminated with TCE for at least 2 decades. And yes the surrounding communities have massive incidence of Parkinsons, cncers and dead children as well as adults. NASA admits that the equivalent of at least 500,000 gallons of TCE still remain in the groundwater under the 2850 acres alone.
And then there was defense contractors Whittaker, which owned a 990+ acre hilly and mountainous property in Santa Clarita, California, one of LA's Northern suburbs. Whittaker manufactured bombs and other ordnance there, and tested it by blowing it up onsite, through the late 1980s. For decades, the surrounding local folks drank tap water which was at least 50% well water pumped out of the groundwater. They, too, were drinking water contaminated with TCE from that Whittaker Bermite property, contaminated with TCE, PCE and a rocket fuel called ammonium perchlorate.
When the State figured out why so many local people were sickened by the toxic chemicals, the local water agency was arm-twisted into buying and operating fancy equipment to take the TCE, PCE, other VOCs and ammonium perchlorate out of the drinking water pulled from public water wells near the Whittaker Bermite site. The local water agency first sued Whittaker in 1999, under the Federal laws. Whittaker's parent company, the British defense contractors Meggitt, aggressively fought against paying the damage-demand of the local water agency: The cost of permanently running the fancy equipment forever, because there was so much TCE, PCE and ammonium perchlorate the well water would never be cleaned-up. First Whittaker's insurance company paid $50 Million "policy limits" and walked away. Whittaker and Meggitt kept up the fight but lost at the 9th Circuit Court and had to pay $65.9 Million, to run the fancy equipment for only 15 years.
Ex_Radio:
Fifty years ago, my father asked a top scientist co-worker "what can I do to help my family avoid all these diseases and cancers that keep appearing these days?" He said to start under your kitchen and bathroom sinks. Toss out all caustic products and especially avoid anything that sprays or has aerosols. Wear a mask if you spray anything on your lawn or trees.
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COQ10 HELPS PREVENT MIGRAINES
Coenzyme Q10 (CoQ10) is a popular supplement that shows promise for preventing migraines by boosting brain cell energy, reducing oxidative stress, and improving mitochondrial function, with studies suggesting it can lower attack frequency, duration, and associated nausea, typically at doses of 100-300 mg/day, though it may take 3 months to see benefits.
How it helps
Energy Production: CoQ10 is crucial for mitochondrial energy production in brain cells, and low energy levels may trigger migraines, so CoQ10 boosts this process.
Antioxidant: It acts as a potent antioxidant, reducing oxidative stress and inflammation, which are linked to migraines.
Reduces Symptoms: Studies show it can decrease the number of migraine days, attack frequency, and headache severity, with some patients experiencing a 50% reduction in attacks.
Oriana:
I would suggest the form of CoQ10 called UBIQUINOL, which is better absorbed. Otherwise, take CoQ10 with some fat.
You need to experiment with the dosage, but given the wide range of benefits, and aging-related deficiency, I see 200 mg as a minimum daily dose. Still, I can’t deny that I have seen astonishing benefits with only 100 mg. Ubiquinol is one of those rare supplements that truly work. It’s there with berberine and mega-doses of glucosamine sulfate, OMAX curcumin (in gels with MCT oil), and — I’m still tentative about this — citrulline malate, my newest discovery related to lowering blood pressure.
. . . and, not surprisingly, vitamin D
Vitamin D deficiency is common in migraine sufferers, and studies suggest supplementation can reduce migraine frequency, intensity, and duration by influencing inflammation, serotonin, and nitric oxide, though results vary.
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Ending on beauty:
AUTUMN CASSIOPEIA
The light of the hills. Every day
I go out to see that light.
That ripeness when the peaks
glow like planets.
At night the full moon
paints the ground ghost-white,
as if gauzed with first snow.
I watch Cassiopeia
and a thousand other constellations
seeding fields of dark.
Along the fire road,
a curtain of bleached grass
shivers, a slender wind.
The oak leaves speak
an older language now.
Sage touches the tips of dusk.
Climbing Point Thorn,
I press my palm
into a seashell print
in rock that was once a sea.
I lie down on the grass,
add my breath
to the rustles and shiftings.
I do not move.
I fall through the net of roots,
sink into the rock and wait
for another sea.
~ Oriana
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