At Key West, Florida*
THE IDEA OF ORDER AT KEY WEST
She sang beyond the genius of the sea.
The water never formed to mind or voice,
Like a body wholly body, fluttering
Its empty sleeves; and yet its mimic motion
Made constant cry, caused constantly a cry,
That was not ours although we understood,
Inhuman, of the veritable ocean.
The sea was not a mask. No more was she.
The song and water were not medleyed sound
Even if what she sang was what she heard,
Since what she sang was uttered word by word.
It may be that in all her phrases stirred
The grinding water and the gasping wind;
But it was she and not the sea we heard.
For she was the maker of the song she sang.
The ever-hooded, tragic-gestured sea
Was merely a place by which she walked to sing.
Whose spirit is this? we said, because we knew
It was the spirit that we sought and knew
That we should ask this often as she sang.
If it was only the dark voice of the sea
That rose, or even colored by many waves;
If it was only the outer voice of sky
And cloud, of the sunken coral water-walled,
However clear, it would have been deep air,
The heaving speech of air, a summer sound
Repeated in a summer without end
And sound alone. But it was more than that,
More even than her voice, and ours, among
The meaningless plungings of water and the wind,
Theatrical distances, bronze shadows heaped
On high horizons, mountainous atmospheres
Of sky and sea.
It was her voice that made
The sky acutest at its vanishing.
She measured to the hour its solitude.
She was the single artificer of the world
In which she sang. And when she sang, the sea,
Whatever self it had, became the self
That was her song, for she was the maker. Then we,
As we beheld her striding there alone,
Knew that there never was a world for her
Except the one she sang and, singing, made.
Ramon Fernandez, tell me, if you know,
Why, when the singing ended and we turned
Toward the town, tell why the glassy lights,
The lights in the fishing boats at anchor there,
As the night descended, tilting in the air,
Mastered the night and portioned out the sea,
Fixing emblazoned zones and fiery poles,
Arranging, deepening, enchanting night.
Oh! Blessed rage for order, pale Ramon,
The maker’s rage to order words of the sea,
Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred,
And of ourselves and of our origins,
In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds.
~ Wallace Stevens
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ART AND ORDER VERSUS REALITY AND CHAOS
"The Idea of Order at Key West" hints at its main theme in its title: it imagines the way that human beings, and artists in particular, might make some profound, overarching sense of the chaos of everyday life. Its speaker describes a seaside singer so brilliant that her art seems to upstage reality—and then to set that reality in a kind of order.
That is, her song seems not only to express but to give form to the formless natural scene around her. In this way, she becomes a symbol of the artist, or of human creativity in general. The poem implies that the best art "Master[s]" and maps the world we walk through, to the point of transforming it altogether: "Arranging" it in our minds, "deepening" our experience of it, and "enchanting" our imaginations.
The poem casts the singing woman as a "genius" whose art surpasses nature's finest showmanship. The speaker declares that "She sang beyond the genius of the sea," implying that the power of her art exceeded the best nature could come up with. The setting is the gorgeous "summer" seascape of "Key West," Florida—a vast panorama of "Theatrical distances" and "mountainous atmospheres"—yet her singing steals the show. In fact, her song is so compelling and powerful that even the sea, with its grand, "tragic"-seeming movements, becomes "merely a place by which she walked to sing." For the moment, at least, she makes nature itself look like a backdrop, or even a kind of supporting actor.
More impressively, the woman's art seems to grant form and meaning to nature's noisy, swirling chaos. The speaker claims that "when [the woman] sang, the sea, / Whatever self it had, became the self / That was her song, for she was the maker." Her art seems to write the very script that nature acts out or call the tune that nature dances to. Indeed, in the speaker's eyes, this artist or "maker" assumes godlike power: she appears to be "the single artificer of the world / In which she sang." It's as if she's created her surrounding reality—or a separate reality that eclipses her surroundings. Even after she's gone, she seems to have transformed the environment. "When the singing end[s]," the surrounding "night" and "sea" look changed and beautiful, as if they're part of the "world" she "made" through song.
This, the poem seems to say, is what human art and creativity do at their best. They "Arrang[e]," "deepen[]," and "enchant[]" the world around us, making it both more cohesive and more magical. Addressing a companion, the speaker recalls how, after the woman left, "The lights in the fishing boats" seemed to map out the surrounding night, like a set of glowing coordinates. Good art, the speaker implies, maps and "portion[s] out" our reality in just this way. It emerges out of a "Blessed" human "rage for order": an exalted, fervent desire to give form to the mess of reality. Like the harbor lights, or the "dimly-starred" sky, it helps us navigate our world—and adds spellbinding beauty to the world as well.
SOLITUDE AND EMOTIONAL CONNECTION
In "The Idea of Order at Key West," the speaker witnesses a solitary woman singing by the sea. Though they never interact, the woman's song moves the speaker and grants them a kind of epiphany about art's place in the world. The speaker then turns to discuss this experience with a companion, "Ramon Fernandez"; in other words, the song moves the speaker to share feelings and insights with another person. Part of art's power, the poem suggests, lies in forging these kinds of bonds, making people feel less lonely and uncertain in the world. "Maker[s]" like singers and poets translate humanity's shared reality into words, easing our "solitude" and granting us a deeper insight into each other and "ourselves."
The singer by the sea expresses an elusive emotion that touches the speaker. The speaker recalls, "It was her voice that made / The sky acutest at its vanishing." Her song makes the horizon beautiful or painful to look at (perhaps because it evokes distant dreams or the unattainable). In singing, the woman "measured to the hour its solitude." The word "its" here mainly refers to the "sky" but could also refer to the "hour" or even the woman's own "voice"; all have a solitary quality. It seems as though "there never was a world for her / Except the one she sang and, singing, made": she appears alienated from everything but the world she makes in her art. She keenly expresses the loneliness of nature and humanity alike, but in a way that connects with another human being—the speaker.
The speaker then turns to share that experience with a companion, as if emotionally compelled to do so. The speaker hints at a shared dialogue early on, mentioning a philosophical question "we" asked in response to the song. Only later, however, does the reader learn that the speaker is one individual addressing another. The sudden one-to-one human connection is surprising and powerful. The speaker urges their companion, "Ramon Fernandez," to "tell me, if you know," why the world looked different "when the singing ended." Though the nature of their friendship is vague, it's clear that the speaker wants Fernandez to help them understand the effect of the song. The singer's art has directly inspired two people to rethink their world together.
Later, the speaker exclaims "Oh! Blessed rage for order, pale Ramon," then elaborates on the idea that art orders our worlds. This kind of emotional exclamation—and direct human address—is rare in Wallace Stevens's poetry, which is famously solitary and meditative. Again, the woman's song has inspired connection as well as insight.
Since the reader never hears from Fernandez, the poem never quite loses its air of loneliness. It might just be an apostrophe, with Fernandez unable to hear or respond. Still, it shows that art at least sparks the desire to overcome "solitude," reach out to others, and better understand our shared world.
https://www.litcharts.com/poetry/wallace-stevens/the-idea-of-order-at-key-west
Oriana:
The idea of order, of man-made order, as opposed to nature's "slovenly wilderness" (to steal from another poem on this theme, "Anecdote of the Jar") is one of the central themes in the poetry of Wallace Stevens. He was an insurance executive, in many ways the opposite of Nietzsche who claimed, “You must have chaos within to give birth to a dancing star.” They are both right, if we accept the Hegelian notion that the thesis (order) and the antithesis (chaos) must meet (I’m tempted to say “mate”) to give birth to a higher order (synthesis: transformation into art or poetry, into beauty and insight).
The human mind seeks patterns. It creates an order because that’s its function: humans cannot produce true randomness. I learned that from the study of statistics, which sometimes relies on mechanically produced “tables of random numbers” — because it turns out that humans, asked to write numbers at random, will, sooner or later, introduce patterns.
Thus, to be human, is to perceive order and create order — as expressed in the structure of a song or poem. And Stevens, being a poet, is in awe of that phenomenon. Rather than endlessly praising nature, Stevens makes the radical gesture of praising the order-producing human mind.
One might object that nature actually shows all kinds of intricate order. What appears to be chaotic and turbulent, like the the breaking of waves, is, after more careful analysis, a structured dance of almost infinite complexity. Art is forced to be selective and thus tends to simplify that natural complexity to a limited pattern, or “meaning” (for lack of a better word). Or two or more possible meanings, but within a relatively narrow range of human comprehension.
On the surface it’s a paradox, reminding me of the timeless observation that it takes great solitude to produce a work of art that will engage a multitude of minds. A writer may object to this, saying “When I write, it’s between me and the language.” But language is a collective medium, a shared logos, the “hive mind.” We simply have to live with it: it’s impossible to be “truly original.”
At the same time, it’s also impossible to “step into the same river twice.” All those Heraclitean meditations return us to the same well-worn riverbeds. But all rivers end up in the sea — just as all true poems sing “beyond” the repetitions of the waves.
*
THE PUZZLING DEATH OF JANE AUSTEN
Two hundred and fifty years after her birth, Jane Austen is more popular than ever. The English novelist’s incisive social commentary and wit still spark relatability, contemplation and laughter.
“There’s magic about what she did,” said Juliette Wells, professor of literary studies at Goucher College in Baltimore.
Her fans may feel a close connection to the writer, but many questions remain about Austen’s life. Now, new scholarship is shifting our understanding of the celebrated author and even her family.
For years, researchers vilified
However, scholars have come to appreciate Cassandra as the ultimate steward of the author’s enduring legacy. Of the 3,000 letters Austen likely wrote in her lifetime, about 160 survived, thanks to her devoted sister.
“She chose recipients carefully of, in some cases, tiny little scraps of paper that included important information about Austen,” Wells said.
Other questions around Austen’s final days also linger.
“What I would really like to know more about are the conversations she and Cassandra had during the weeks leading up to her death,” Wells said. “What did they discuss about her literary legacy, including plans to publish the novels that hadn't yet been released?”
But one unsolved puzzle about Austen may never be settled.
The Austen sisters headed to Winchester, England, in 1817 in the hopes that a doctor could cure the writer’s persistent but unexplained illness. When she died on July 18 of that year, what claimed her life was unknown — and it might likely remain “one of literature’s great mysteries,” according to Lizzie Dunford, director of Jane Austen’s House.
With no physical evidence to study, researchers turned to another source to solve the riddle of Austen’s death: her letters.
“Thanks to surviving letters, we actually know more about how she felt during the months leading up to her death than we do about many other periods of time in her life,” Wells said.
By constructing a thorough timeline of mentions in Austen’s correspondence, Dr. Elizabeth Graham and the late Dr. Michael D. Sanders reconstructed the last year of the author’s life.
Paying particular attention to Austen’s descriptions of symptoms, like joint pain, that others had overlooked, they arrived at a new hypothesis for her cause of death: lupus.
https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/?pli=1#inbox/FMfcgzQdzmWCDwKdLZgpftFpnRxnmBrW
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WHEN DID THE ALLIES KNOW THEY’D WIN WW2?
In the case of Winston Churchill, the most significant was the Pearl Harbor in 1941. Later on when he wrote about the incident he said that he had slept that night with a serenity which he had never known before not because he was too frightened but because he knew the truth. He was aware that the moment American factories would make planes and tanks, Germany would be behind. The war became a production war and Hitler was unable to succeed. [A friend of mine said the war was won because of America's great industrial potential.]
Then we should consider the Eastern Front. By early 1943, when the Germans were defeated at Stalingrad, the Soviet leaders were aware that the tide had changed. Germany lost a whole army at Stalingrad. It is impossible to substitute 300,000 trained soldiers in one night. It was the time when the unstoppable German army started its extended retreat.
Finally, by mid 1943, Allies had succeeded in the war against the U-boats in the Atlantic. As soon as American supply ships would be able to make it across the ocean, the war was virtually finished. The Allies were so confident that they did not even mention anything about signing a peace treaty and they required unconditional surrender. The war was virtually won by the Allied leaders in 1943. They only awaited the arrival of the front lines to become the reality. ~ Alex Colby, Quora
Robert Kieran:
The Germans also lost a second army in 1943 when the Afrika Korps surrendered shortly after Stalingrad.
Pat Davison:
Stalingrad was the turning point of the war. After Stalingrad the Germans would not win another major battle, and would begin the long retreat back to Berlin and unconditional surrender.
Chai:
Stalingrad surrender was the moment Germany was no longer capable of projecting offense.
Jeffrey Seltzer:
The practical turning point, was Hitler declaring was on the USA, on December 9, 1941. The economic, human, and manufacturing potential of the USA, was nearly unlimited. Thus, the outcome was inevitable.
The USA was so powerful, under the leadership of President Roosevelt and Military Chief of Staff, George C. Marshall, that it fought in Europe with right fist and Japan with its left.
James Volkral:
The ultimate failure of Operation Barbarossa to defeat the Soviet Union in 1941 and Hitler’s foolish declaration of war on the United States days after Pearl Harbor made German defeat inevitable. Stalingrad and the failure of Operation Blue ended any chance Germany had to reach a better outcome than total defeat. Even a victory at Kursk would only have prolonged the war on the Eastern Front.
Bill Noname:
After the Normandy invasion everyone, including the Germans, knew it was only a matter of time. Only the most fanatical Nazis held faith in Hitler’s Germany.
Charles Kemp:
Historians have shown that it was 1942 when the 3rd Reich began to contract, territorially and socially.
Dennis Coslett:
I read a book written by an RAF pilot who flew Hurricanes on reconnaissance missions with the Desert Air Force. He said when they learned that the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor and the Americans had now joined the war, they considered it only a matter of time before the Allies won.
*
ARE HUMANS NATURALLY SELFISH OR ALTRUISTIC?
Research suggests that people are actually more than willing to prioritize others' safety over their own in many situations. A paper published in 2020, for example, investigated CCTV recordings of violent attacks in the UK, the Netherlands and South Africa. It found that one or more people had tried to assist in nine out of 10 of the attacks – with bigger groups making an intervention more, not less likely.
You might argue that even so-called "have-a-go-heroes" are on some level motivated by self-gratification, perhaps to gain group approval. But a 2014 study about recipients of the Carnegie Hero Medal, awarded to people who have risked their lives for others, found that such extreme altruists, largely described their actions as intuitive rather than deliberative, suggesting their altruism was a reflexive, or "automatic" response. It's something we are when we don't have time to think.
"There is a superficial level at which we can operate selfishly, and we often do," says Taylor whose book, DisConnected, explores how certain human behaviors can cause social problems. "But that's at the level of our ego, or socially constructed identity." Humans also have the capacity to be impulsively altruistic, he adds.
In May 2017, for example, a suicide bomber attacked an Ariana Grande concert in Taylor's home city: Manchester. A total of 22 people were killed and more than a thousand were injured. Despite the ongoing risk to survivors, however, the Kerslake Report, an independent review into the atrocity, highlighted "hundreds if not thousands of acts of individual bravery and selflessness". Similar cases of heroic altruism have been documented during 9/11 and the 2015 Paris terrorist attacks.
There are evolutionary reasons for human altruism, Taylor says. For most of our history, we have lived in tribes as hunter-gatherers – highly cooperative groups.
"There's no reason why early human beings should be competitive or individualistic," says Taylor. "That would not have helped our survival at all. It would have actually endangered our survival."
Some anthropological studies suggest that groups who still live in a similar way to our early ancestors remain egalitarian in how they share resources.
Research in children also suggests that we are "born altruistic", says Ching-Yu Huang, director of the Cambridge Alliance of Legal Psychology, a private company, in the UK and chief executive of National Taiwan University Children & Family Research Center.
Some studies have found that even 14- to 18-month-old infants will go out of their way to help others and cooperate in order to achieve a shared goal – specifically by handing over objects others couldn't reach. And young children will do this even if there's no reward on offer. A 2013 review of similar studies, for example, suggested that young children's prosocial behavior is "intrinsically motivated by concern for others' welfare".
Being kind also makes us feel good. Volunteering, for example, has been linked to improved mental health, self-esteem and self-efficacy, and reduced feelings of loneliness. And there are physical benefits, too. Regular volunteers who were assessed as part of a study published in 2013 were 40% less likely to develop high blood pressure than those who didn't frequently volunteer. Altruism of this kind has even been associated with a reduced risk of mortality, though it's not yet clear why.
"There's such a strong association between wellbeing and altruism that it would be foolish not to live altruistically," argues Taylor.
The very structure of our brains might help dictate our predisposition towards altruism. Abigail Marsh, a neuroscientist at Georgetown University in the US, and her team have used brain scans to look for differences between people who had donated a kidney to a stranger and those who hadn't.
The organ-donating altruists had larger right amygdalae (brain regions associated with emotion), than the non-donor control group. The donors also showed increased activity in this region when viewing pictures of fearful facial expressions, perhaps making them more perceptive of and responsive to others' feelings. Indeed, the results from the donor group were the opposite of what you'd expect to see in psychopathic individuals.
Science suggests that most of us have the hardware to be selfless, often extraordinarily so. But that doesn't mean we can – or should – be selfless all the time. Whether we prioritize ourselves or others depends partly on circumstances, our prior experience and our culture.
Tony Milligan is a research fellow in the philosophy of ethics at King's College London. People should acknowledge that the vast majority of us are "morally mediocre", he says. But this isn't as uninspiring as it sounds.
Milligan argues that people tend to overestimate their own moral goodness. And this may have a particular impact when we are making deliberative, rather than automatic, decisions about our priorities. "Almost everyone we know is morally mediocre," he says, adding that it's unrealistic for most of us to try and copy the lives of extremely altruistic figures such as Nelson Mandela, Gandhi, Jesus or Buddha. "We can act in the light of them, but if you're not one of those statistical anomalies, we need to recognize that we really are in the middle."
According to Milligan, overestimating our moral goodness can leave us feeling guilty and disappointed when we inevitably fail to live up to overinflated standards. "The question you need to ask yourself is not 'What would Buddha do?'," he says, "But, 'What am I capable of? Is this within my reach?'."
This, he adds, requires some humility and self-knowledge. Because if we have a realistic appraisal of what we're capable of, we will be better able to consider others when we make decisions.
"You shouldn't be thinking of this in terms of developing something you can show off to other people, as something that will make you admired," says Milligan. "Think of it more as developing a skill. A skill is something that you slowly, incrementally work on improving.”
People's altruistic tendencies are likely also greatly influenced by their experiences and culture.
Some countries, such as the UK and US, are more individualistic than others, such as many Asian countries, which are generally considered more collectivistic, where people prioritize the good of the wider group over themselves. This impacts not only how selfish or altruistic people tend to be but also the degree to which selfless acts are viewed as being either a choice, or a responsibility.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, for example, researchers found that people living in collectivistic cultures were more likely to wear masks than those in individualistic ones. The former group were more inclined to try and protect others. This difference between East and West is one that Huang has experienced personally.
She spent her childhood in Taiwan, which she describes as collectivistic, before settling for extended periods in the comparatively individualistic US and UK.
"I was brought up to really put everybody else first," says Huang. "If you're a woman, particularly a young woman, who wants to put yourself first and show your ability, this is actually really looked down on in this culture. They would call you a 'female tiger', the implication being that you're aggressive.”
When Huang moved to the US and later the UK, she found it was more acceptable to prioritize herself – but initially held herself back because of her upbringing. Gradually, she found herself able to express her confidence and abilities: "I learned that, actually, I do sometimes need to be a female tiger, especially in the career sense."
Such cultural differences are captured in Huang's own research. She has explored two forms of compliance – "committed compliance" (in which you happily comply with instructions) and "situational compliance" (in which you comply even though you're reluctant to do so) – within three groups: young children from Taiwan; non-immigrant, white English families in the UK; and Chinese immigrant families in the UK.
While all groups showed the same level of committed compliance, the Taiwanese children demonstrated much greater situational compliance because they were more likely to prioritize their parents' instructions over their own desires versus the white English and Chinese immigrant children who had grown up in the more individualistic UK.
In collectivistic cultures "we're more likely to comply even if we don't really want to", says Huang.
That doesn't mean there's one right way to do things. While altruism can benefit both ourselves and others, we do need to be mindful of our own needs and how past experiences, context and culture influence our behavior.
"Things become hard in cultures where the expectation always to be altruistic is supercharged," says Huang, "such as in Taiwan when you're a young woman." Essentially, the responsibility to always prioritize others can become overwhelming.
Most of us are capable of extraordinary selflessness and altruism appears to be something that does us good. It has even helped our species to become uniquely successful. But our decisions and behaviors are also influenced by a wide range of factors, from culture to our own "moral mediocrity". In other words, helping others is great – but recognize that it's okay to look after yourself too.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20250725-should-you-put-yourself-or-others-first
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WHY BEING KIND TO OTHERS IS GOOD FOR YOUR HEALTH
While we might all enjoy the warm glow of helping out others or giving up a little of our time for charity, it could be doing us some physical good too.
Newspapers started writing about Betty Lowe when she was 96 years old. Despite being long past retirement age, she was still volunteering at a cafe at Salford Royal Hospital in Greater Manchester, UK, serving coffee, washing dishes and chatting to patients. Then Lowe turned 100. “Still volunteers at hospital”, the headlines ran. Then she reached 102 and the headlines declared: “Still volunteering”. The same again when she turned 104. Even at 106, Lowe would work at the cafe once a week, despite her failing eyesight.
Lowe told the reporters who interviewed her that the reason she kept working at the cafe long after most people would have chosen to put their feet up was because she believed volunteering kept her healthy. And she was probably right. Science reveals that altruistic behaviors, from formal volunteering and monetary donations to random acts of everyday kindness, promote wellbeing and longevity.
Studies show, for instance, that volunteering correlates with a 24% lower risk of early death – about the same as eating six or more servings of fruits and vegetables each day, according to some studies. What’s more, volunteers have a lower risk of high blood glucose, and a lower risk of the inflammation levels connected to heart disease. They also spend 38% fewer nights in hospitals than people who shy from involvement in charities.
And these health-boosting impacts of volunteering appear to be found in all corners of the world, from Spain and Egypt to Uganda and Jamaica, according to one study based on the data from the Gallup World Poll.
Of course, it could be that people who are in better health to begin with are simply more likely to be in a position to pick up volunteering. If you are suffering from severe arthritis, for example, the chances are you won’t be keen to sign up to work at a soup kitchen.
“There is research suggesting that people who are in better health are more likely to volunteer, but because scientists are very well aware of that, in our studies we statistically control for that,” says Sara Konrath, a psychologist and philanthropy researcher at Indiana University.
Even when scientists remove the effects of pre-existing health, the impacts of volunteering on wellbeing still remain strong. What’s more, several randomized lab experiments shed light on the biological mechanisms through which helping others can boost our health.
In one such experiment, high school students in Canada were either assigned to tutor elementary school children for two months, or put on a waitlist. Four months later, after the tutoring was well over, the differences between the two groups of teenagers were clearly visible in their blood. Compared to those on the waitlist, high-schoolers who were actively tutoring the younger children had lower levels of cholesterol, as well as lower inflammatory markers such as interleukin 6 in their blood – which apart of being a powerful predictor of cardiovascular health, also plays an important role in viral infections.
Of course, in pandemic times, volunteering may be more of a challenge. However, Konrath believes that doing so online could also bring health benefits, if our motivation is to really help other people. She also recommends virtual volunteering with friends, since research shows that the social component of volunteering is important for wellbeing.
But it’s not just the effects of formal volunteering that show up in the blood either – random acts of kindness do as well. In one study in California, participants who were assigned to conduct simple acts of kindness, such as buying coffee for a stranger, had lower activity of leukocyte genes that are related to inflammation. That’s a good thing, since chronic inflammation has been linked to conditions such as rheumatoid arthritis, cancer, heart disease, and diabetes.
And if you put people into a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner, and tell them to act altruistically, you may see changes in how their brains react to pain. In one recent experiment, volunteers had to make various decisions, including whether to donate money, while their hands were subjected to mild electric shocks. The results were clear – the brains of those who made a donation lit up less in response to pain. And the more they considered their actions as helpful, the more pain-resistant they became. Similarly, donating blood appears to hurt less than having your blood drawn for a test, even though in the first scenario the needle may be twice as thick.
There are countless other examples of the positive health effects of both kindness and monetary donations. For instance, grandparents who regularly babysit their grandchildren have a mortality risk that is up to 37% lower than those who don’t provide such childcare. That’s a larger effect than may be achieved from regular exercise, according one meta-analysis of studies. This assumes the grandparents are not stepping into the parents’ shoes completely (although, admittedly, caring for grandkids often does involve a lot of physical activity, especially when we are talking about toddlers).
On the other hand, spending money on others rather than for your own pleasure can lead to better hearing, improved sleep and lower blood pressure, with the effects as large as those of starting new hypertension medication.
Meanwhile, writing a check for a charity can be a good strategy for boosting your muscle power. In one experiment that tested handgrip strength, participants who made a donation to Unicef could squeeze a hand exerciser for 20 seconds longer than those who had not given away their money. So, the next time you want to try yourself at arm wrestling, for example, reach for your checkbook first.
For Tristen Inagaki, neuroscientist at San Diego State University, there is nothing surprising in the fact that kindness and altruism should impact our physical wellbeing. “Humans are extremely social, we have better health when we are interconnected, and part of being interconnected is giving,” she says.
Inagaki studies our caregiving system – a network of brain regions tied to both helping behaviors and health. This system likely evolved to facilitate parenting of our infants, unusually helpless by mammalian standards, and later probably got co-opted to helping other people, too. Part of the system is made up from the reward regions of the brain, such as the septal area and ventral striatum – the very same ones that light up when you get three cherries in a row on a slot machine. By wiring parenting to the reward system, nature has tried to assure we don’t run away from our screaming, needy babies. Neuroimagining studies by Inagaki and her colleagues show that these brain areas also light up when we give support to other loved ones.
Besides making caregiving rewarding, evolution also linked it with reduced stress. When we act kindly, or even simply reflect on our past kindness, the activity of our brain’s fear center, the amygdala, goes down. Again this could be linked to raising children.
It may seem counterintuitive that childcare might be stress-reducing – ask any new parent and they’ll likely tell you that caring for babies isn’t exactly a trip to the spa. But research shows that when animals hear the whimpers of infants of the same species, the activity of their amygdalae tempers down, and the same thing happens to parents when they are shown the photo of their own child. Inagaki explains that the activity of the brain’s fear center has to go down if we are to be truly useful to others. “If you were completely overwhelmed by their stress, you probably couldn’t even approach them to help them in the first place,” she says.
All this has direct consequences for health. The caregiving system – the amygdala and the reward areas – are networked with our sympathetic nervous system, which is involved in regulating our blood pressure and inflammatory responding, Inagaki explains. This is why turning your caregiving on can improve your cardiovascular health, and help you live longer.
Adolescents who volunteer their time have been found to have lower levels of two markers of inflammation – interleukin 6 and C-reactive protein. Both of these have also been implicated in severe outcomes in patients infected with Covid-19. It raises the tantalizing prospect that during the pandemic, helping others in need could be particularly powerful, not simply as a way of lifting our moods through lockdown gloom. Research actually testing whether volunteering could have a protective effect against Covid-19 has yet to be conducted, and anything that increases your contact with others who might carry the virus would potentially increase your risk.
What if, however, giving doesn’t come naturally to you?
Empathy, a quality that is strongly linked to volunteering and giving behaviors, is highly heritable – about a third of how empathetic we are is down to our genes. Yet, Konrath says it does not mean people born with low empathy are doomed.
“We are also born with different athletic potential, it’s easier for some of us to build muscles than for others, but all of us have muscles, and all of us if we do some exercises we will build our muscles," she says. "No matter where we start, and research shows this, all of us can improve in empathy.”
Some interventions take no more than a few seconds at a time. For example, you can try looking at the world from another person’s perspective, really getting under their skin, for a moment or two each day. Or you can practice mindfulness and loving-kindness meditation. Taking care of pets and reading emotionally-charged books, a perfect lockdown past-time, also works well to boost empathy.
During the first six months of 2020, Britons donated £800m ($1.05bn) more to charity than for the same period in 2019, and similar stats pour in from other countries. Almost half of Americans have recently checked on their elderly or sick neighbors. In Germany, the coronavirus crisis has pulled people closer together – while in February 2020 as many as 41% said that people did not care about others, this figure was down to just 19% by early summer. And then, there are the stories of pandemic kindness – Americans and Australians leaving teddy bears in their windows to cheer up children. A French florist, Murielle Marcenac, placed 400 bouquets on cars of hospital staff in Perpignan.
The research suggests such kindness not only warms our hearts, it can help them stay healthy for longer, too. “There is really something about just focusing on others sometimes that’s really good for you,” Inagaki says.
With that in mind, surely we could all spare a little time for a moment's kindness in the months ahead.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20201215-why-being-kind-to-others-is-good-for-your-health
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LONG TERM IMPACTS OF LA FIRES
Last January, fires were raging across Los Angeles, smothering some 20 million people across the region in toxic smoke and ash.
LA residents worried that the air was toxic, the soil contaminated, and the water poisoned. Questions swirled about the health risks created by the burns — and there were few answers at hand from city, state or federal leaders.
Scientists from Los Angeles and around the country quickly scrambled into action as fires burned through the Pacific Palisades and Altadena. The priority, says UCLA physician and disaster researcher David Eisenman, was keeping people safe in the short term. But the fires also presented a moment to learn crucial missing information about the health effects of wildfires to help those affected and to better protect people's health from the inevitable next ones.
"This won't be the last wildfire that Los Angeles sees," says Eisenman. "Part of the community recovery process is to learn from what we experienced."
Researchers fanned out across the city to collect what data and samples they could. Doctors started thinking of ways to collect patient data to better understand the immediate and long-term health impact. They soon joined together to form a consortium that tied together 10 research institutions, developing a phalanx of research studies to explore some of the most pressing questions brought up by affected community members.
Some questions were simple but frustratingly hard to find answers to, like: What was in the smoke? Other questions, like those exploring the long-term health impacts, will take years to untangle. But answers are beginning to emerge.
Extra-dangerous smoke
Wildfire smoke is dangerous under any conditions. Exposure to high smoke levels is linked to respiratory problems such as asthma and COPD, cardiovascular issues and even dementia.
But from the first moment the Palisades and Eaton fires took hold last January, UCLA air pollution expert Yifang Zhu knew they were different. Because it wasn't just trees and plants burning: There was plastic from people's houses, and car batteries and asbestos tiles — a "toxic soup" of air pollutants, she says.
What was in that soup, and how dangerous it might be to human health — that wasn't clear.
Official air quality monitors in downtown Los Angeles, miles away from the heart of the fires in Altadena and Pacific Palisades, recorded high levels of lead and arsenic in the air during the burns. Researchers from Caltech and the Georgia Institute of Technology later measured lead concentrations in air samples both near and far from the fires. Lead levels, they found, were elevated, even miles away, signaling that smoke and ash from the burns spread the dangerous heavy metal widely.
But many scientists suspected the smoke and ash spread other toxic particles and gases widely, too — chemicals that standard EPA and state monitors didn't test.
"We need to test more than just what the EPA calls for. And the EPA has limited resources," says Kari Nadeau, an environmental health scientist at Harvard University and one of the leads for the new research consortium. "But as academics, we can test for hundreds of things all at once, which helps the community. Because what you don't know, you don't know, but it can still hurt you."
Before the fires, Zhu and her team had been getting ready to sample the air at Aliso Canyon, where a natural gas leak in 2015 had caused major health problems for nearby residents. When the fires broke out, the team pivoted, taking their sampling equipment as close to the fires as they could.
That opportunity was special. Researchers are rarely ready to deploy at a moment's notice to capture samples during disasters such as the LA fires. The special circumstances let Zhu's team "set the stage about what's going on during this active fire burning all week," Zhu says.
Dust and ash
Dust and ash from the Palisades and Eaton fires spread across the Los Angeles region. Scientists are still learning about the contaminants and toxic components in the debris left behind after the fires and the health consequences of being exposed to it.
Lingering risks
The high benzene levels dissipated after the burning stopped, Zhu found. But other dangerous gases actually increased later on, especially indoors. A few health-harming gases, including toluene and carbon tetrachloride, became more concentrated inside people's homes a few weeks after the fire.
The message was clear. "The fire impact doesn't really disappear with the active flame," Zhu says. Homes themselves can absorb dangerous gases in the drywall, furniture and other soft materials, releasing them for days and weeks after the smoke has dissipated. People need to know that their homes might be contaminated long after the fire is out, she says.
That wasn't the only lingering risk. Another research team started to look for a contaminant called hexavalent chromium, which can cause cancer, sometimes known as the "Erin Brockovich" contaminant, made famous by the movie of the same name. It can be produced when fires burn through certain types of soil or rock, as well as during industrial processes like welding. It's not often searched for after wildfires, but the researchers found it lingering in the air around cleanup sites long after the fires were out.
"It's actually one of those things that … makes you pay attention differently," says Joe Allen, an exposure scientist at Harvard University, who has been conducting ongoing research on building safety after the fires. And the contaminant was found in tiny particles so small that they can penetrate deep into people's lungs, bodies, and even directly to their brains.
"We've seen hexavalent chromium in soils after fires. I don't think anybody expected to see it in air. I don't think anybody expected to see it exclusively in the nanoparticle size range," Allen says.
Ash also contaminated people's homes, as well as soil and water across the region. The water impacts seemed to clear quickly, though longer-term effects are still being tracked. But levels of lead and other heavy metals inside people's homes and in the soil around them often remained high, even after cleanup was supposedly done.
"That is an ongoing question," says Allen. "Do we have enough funds to remediate all these properties, or are we just putting some people back into properties that are not properly cleared?"
Zhu was impressed by how much she and others learned about the dangerous smoke and ash. But she also worries they probably only scratched the surface. "We are only detecting things that our method allows us to detect. So even though we learn a lot from that, you know, I wonder what we missed," she says.
What does this all mean for people's health?
Scientists have known that in the short term, wildfire smoke exposure leads to more respiratory issues, such as asthma and COPD; increases the risk of developing dementia; and affects people's immune responses. But the full array of impacts, and the long-term costs of exposure, are still muddy.
"We know a lot about the health effects of wildfire smoke," says Allen. But "we don't know all that much about urban wildfire smoke. We certainly don't know what happens when you expose a population of 20 million people in the greater Los Angeles area to smoke like this, enriched in these toxic metals and other pollutants. "
The research is beginning to uncover some of the health impacts.
Cheng and colleagues collected data from the emergency room at Cedars-Sinai, one of the busiest in the region, and particularly close to the Palisades fire. In the 90 days following the fires, they saw a 24% increase in respiratory issues — and a 47% jump in heart attacks.
It was "very striking," she says. "This actually surpassed heart attack rates during January of all prior years, even during the worst years of COVID.”
Homes and businesses in parts of Los Angeles were reduced to rubble and ash. The fires caused a spike in visits to some emergency rooms for issues such as respiratory problems and heart attacks. And many people's blood showed signs of health disruptions. Scientists are tracking many local residents to understand the long-term health impacts of the fires.
Abnormal blood tests also spiked, increasing by more than 100% over previous levels. That included unexpected blood sugar readings, signs of a disrupted immune system, and changes to people's metabolic profiles — signals, Cheng says, of bodywide stresses that could be precursors to many different health problems down the line.
"For a very large number of people who lived through these January wildfires, the wildfire exposures led to some kind of a biochemical or metabolic stress in the body that likely affected not just one, but many organ systems," she says.
The team is now tracking some of those patients, trying to understand what health issues their unusual bloodwork might have signaled coming.
The ER data is likely just skimming the surface, says Eisenman. Longer-term health problems, from heart issues to mental health stresses, are likely to linger or develop in the coming years.
Ongoing research will explore the different health outcomes for people who experienced different levels of smoke and toxin exposure.
A UCLA-led study has enrolled over 4,000 people from across the city to follow their health changes long-term. Another study will focus on the specific health outcomes for those who stayed behind at their homes to fight the fires, giving them extraordinarily high smoke doses. The LA Fire Health study consortium is also tracking the long-term health impacts on firefighters and first responders.
Much of the emerging research is being supported by private philanthropy, says Eisenman. The wildfires happened just before the Trump administration began its campaign to tighten budgets for many of the science agencies that have historically funded post-disaster research, like the National Science Foundation.
"That gap was really filled in by the research community, who did ongoing and extensive and really thoughtful testing of air, of water, of soil, of debris for toxins, and really rapidly communicated those results back to the community," he says.
But how to financially support the long-term future of some key studies, he says, is still uncertain, because many major federal research funding resources — like NSF and the National Institute of Health — have shifted priorities under the Trump administration.
How to protect yourself and your family
The biggest questions for the ongoing research, many of the researchers say, are about how best to protect yourself from similar fires in the future.
Allen says there are some clear lessons. Overall, the less smoke one inhales, the better. So while outside, he says it's crucial to wear an N95 mask, or even a respirator that can protect you from the fire's gases.
Indoors, keeping clean air is crucial, says Zhu. Using air filters, ideally HEPA-rated, can lower indoor pollution significantly. Carbon filters are particularly effective at removing the gases, Allen says. People can also install HEPA filters in a car's air-handling system to keep the air clean while they drive.
"You want to control what you can control," says Allen. So inside your space, clean up dust and ash thoroughly. Filter the air. And consider a low-cost air monitor to keep track of the air quality inside.
For people most impacted by the fires, Allen stresses that adequate cleanup of soil and buildings is critical. "It was a bit of the Wild West out there" after the fires, he says. A lack of standardized testing protocols and a hodgepodge of policies from different insurers "really harmed the survivor community."
That lack of guidance left many unsure whether their homes were safe to live in again, and many others were forced to go back to homes that were demonstrably still unsafe.
"We need more coordinated recommendations and rules to help people know whether their homes are safe," Allen says.
It will take years to get a full picture of the health impacts of the LA fires, many of the researchers say. But it's critical to learn from the tragedy, says Nadeau, the Harvard environmental health scientist — to "be able to say, OK, in the future, here's what to do to protect your children or protect your elderly community against stroke," or lung cancer, or the myriad other risks from the wildfires that will, inevitably, come again.
https://www.npr.org/2026/01/14/nx-s1-5630989/la-fires-health-impact-smoke
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WHY LA WILDFIRES GREW SO FAST
As Los Angeles starts to recover from the catastrophic losses from their deadly wildfires—which killed 31 people as a result of direct contact with the fires, and many others as a result of heart and lung conditions aggravated by the smoke and stress, or breakdowns in the health care and mental health care systems. The fires displaced 100,000, and caused tens of billions of dollars in damages—many wonder what first sparked the fires.
While officials investigate possible causes, including arson, sparking power lines, and errant fireworks, an expert told NBC News that natural causes are more plausible than arson, due to heavy wind conditions. No matter the cause, scientists say that the weather and climate conditions when the fires started January 7 created a recipe for disaster for the swift spread of the flames. Continued strong winds have kept the country’s second-largest city by population at risk for further calamity.
Boston University Today spoke with David Demeritt, a College of Arts & Sciences professor of Earth and environment. Demeritt is a geographer whose research focuses on environmental policy, especially the management of flooding, wildfire, and other environmental risks. Before joining BU in 2023, he taught at King’s College London for over 20 years and is a member of the Peer Review Colleges for both the Natural Environment Research Council and the Economic and Social Research Council. Demeritt is also an elected fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences.
BU Today: Why have these Los Angeles fires spread so fast and ferociously?
Demeritt: The answer to this question depends partly on whether you look at the immediate proximate cause (high “Santa Ana winds” and drought) or longer-term trends in ecology, fire suppression, and land use.
In the first instance, LA is experiencing a climatological phenomenon called “Santa Ana winds” that leads to strong and very dry winds that create dangerous fire weather conditions. This happens regularly in Southern California in the late autumn and winter, driven by high pressure over the interior and temperature gradients (between Southern California’s comparatively warm coast and much cooler areas of high desert at higher elevations in Nevada and Utah), which create strong and very dry winds that blow out of the mountains and towards the warmer coast. These winds are further accelerated by the topography of the narrow mountain valleys leading down to LA and the coast. High Santa Ana winds fuel any ignitions, making them burn hotter, spread faster and farther, and greatly complicate fire suppression efforts, since it’s hard to deploy air assets like tanker planes and helicopters to spread water and fire retardant.
In these conditions, the Eaton fire burning the San Gabriel Mountains east of Pasadena reportedly grew twentyfold in size within hours, according to the New York Times.
This is possible because the vegetation is exceedingly dry. The last even moderate (less than a quarter inch) rainfall recorded at LAX airport was in April 2024. Since then, precipitation was recorded at LAX on just five other dates, totaling a meager 0.15”. The landscape is tinder dry, and so any ignition source, whether from errant cigarette butts or sparks from power lines blown over in the strong winds, is much more likely to take hold and spread.
How do the dry conditions make the problem worse?
There is a lot of fuel on the landscape to burn. This time last year, Los Angeles was plagued with flooding (and landslides) that broke an extended long-term drought across the region. That burst of moisture led to plant growth, which has been steadily drying over the past year of very dry conditions.
What’s more, much of the vegetation in Southern California is fire-dependent shrubland called “chaparral,” which has not evolved to tolerate periodic burning. Fire is a regular part of the life cycle required by many species for their reproduction. But a long-standing US government policy of fire suppression has led to dangerous accumulations of fuel so that when the landscape catches fire, there is so much fuel that fires burn with greater intensity than they would have if we hadn’t had decades of active fire suppression.
While there is now expert consensus on the need to reintroduce fire to such fire-dependent landscapes, that is difficult because there is now extensive development in the so-called “wildland-urban interface”: building homes up against the mountains. Residents understandably fear prescribed burnings might harm their homes, but without burning—or other, more labor-intensive forms of fuel load management—the risk just increases year on year, so that when you do get a fire, it’s an inferno. Climate change means that the window for safe prescribed burning is narrower than ever before.
How are these fires different from the previous fires?
It’s important to recognize several things about the current fires in LA that make them different from past fire disasters in California. First, this is happening in the winter (because of Santa Ana winds), rather than in the more typical fire season in the West, which is during the late summer, when high temperatures and dry conditions raise the risk of ignition from dry lightning and increase the probability that any ignition will catch hold and be difficult to put out.
Second, while some of the fires in Los Angeles County, like the Kenneth fire in the wildland, have their primary fuel source coming from the vegetation that sends out embers affecting isolated homes—something on which my BU colleague Ian Sue Wing [a CAS professor of Earth and environment] has done some cool econometric modeling—the Palisades fire, in particular, has become an urban conflagration in which much of the fuel is provided by buildings. So it is not clear that trimming the vegetation to manage fuel loads on the landscape is going to mitigate the risk all that much.
To what extent is climate change responsible for these fires?
It doesn’t help, but attribution is tricky. All of the [preceding] climate events—heavy rainfall stimulating vegetation growth, drought, Santa Ana winds—occur “naturally.” And, as I said before, a history of fire suppression and the ignition risk posed by aboveground electrical wires also play an important role both in triggering this event and magnifying its severity.
Focusing on climate change leads to a certain kind of paralysis insofar as it suggests that unless we get the entire planet on board to reduce emissions to minimize climate change, there is nothing we can do. There are lots of things that we can do to make disasters like this less likely and less severe, like managing fuel loads to lower the risk, preventing housing development in places that are prone to wildfire, improving building standards and materials to reduce structural ignitability, and getting homeowners and communities to do more to create defensible space around homes and housing developments.
Also, addressing evacuation routes and improving preparedness, so that when fires do occur, people can get out safely and in a way that doesn’t impede fire suppression efforts by clogging the roads and putting people at risk of burning in their gridlocked cars.
What lessons are we to take away from these fires?
It’s early days yet, and I’m not optimistic about the prospects for much rational deliberation in a society so badly polarized and in awe of social media algorithms that promote bat-[expletive] crazy conspiracy theories and outrage—particularly, but not exclusively, on the right.
The financial hit for the insurance industry is going to be huge. Nationwide the insurance industry has been struggling with losses from climate-related extreme events. Many were withdrawing from California. This will only accelerate that trend. The state runs an insurance scheme of last resort, but it’s expensive and will likely become even more so. That will have implications for housing markets both regionally and nationally.
By contrast, I expect the policy response will be slower and much less effective. I’d imagine that some of the emergency evacuation planning for Los Angeles will get updated, after a good bit of blame-gaming. Some of the evacuations were handled badly. There may also be some renewed emphasis on fuel load management. But California is already relatively proactive in that area (at least compared to other parts of the country), and the circumstances in Los Angeles and Ventura Counties—with lots of shrub-land and mountains surrounding the second-biggest [network of urban communities] in the US—are relatively distinctive. It’s not clear that what you’d need to do in LA is all that transferable to other parts of the West.
https://www.bu.edu/articles/2025/how-and-why-the-la-wildfires-grew-so-fast/
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CAN LA FIRE-PROOF ITSELF?
Months after the wildfires tore through Los Angeles, residents are tussling with the urban destruction left behind – and a debate over the future of the city's buildings.
Countless Los Angeles streets still contain the charred remains of homes that succumbed to wildfire six months ago. Many of their inhabitants are still living with friends and relatives or in hotels, hostels and shelters.
With more than 16,000 homes and buildings destroyed in the January 2025 wildfires, the LA neighborhoods and nearby communities affected have been left contemplating how best to balance the need to get their homes back as soon as possible with future resilience to wildfire.
Today, even as the city faces the new turmoil of immigration raids ordered by President Donald Trump and the extensive protests that have followed, LA is clearing debris and preparing to rebuild.
Progress so far has been slow, however, with few permits issued to rebuild (in Palisades, for example, just 125 rebuild permits have been issued out of 558 applications, the LA Department of Building and Safety told the BBC). Many residents have moved to communities far from the homes they lost, according to an investigation by the New York Times.
Faced with a daunting rebuild, many contractors and homeowners want to build quickly, with some working to loosen environmental protection code and permit requirements. Meanwhile, wildfire experts tell the BBC they want to ensure new construction is compliant with fire and energy codes, while sustainability advocates say they hope greener methods and materials will enter the market.
"There are going to be hard decisions on how we want to rebuild versus what is technically required," says Ian Giammanco, managing director for standards and data analytics at the Insurance Institute for Business and Home Safety (IBHS), a South-Carolina-based research group funded by the insurance industry.
California's building code was updated in 2008 to establish standards for wildfire-resistant construction. It requires the use of non-combustible materials and for homeowners to maintain defensible space around the home, such as by creating a safety buffer cleared of vegetation or debris. California is one of only five US states to apply a specific building code to areas designated as having very high wildfire risk.
In March, the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, a state agency often referred to as Cal Fire, expanded its maps of areas required to use the code, with existing homes at a minimum creating defensible space by clearing brush. The expansion means about 500 additional homes affected by the Eaton Fire will be covered by the code by late July 2025, according to analysis by US broadcaster NPR, but still leaves about 7,800 structures outside the high-risk zone.
Some of the proposed methods are already being used in the wider US. In Colorado, for example, where a 2021 wildfire destroyed nearly 1,000 homes in the Denver suburb of Superior, some homeowners have opted to rebuild using compressed earth blocks that have a high resilience to fire.
And CalEarth, a California-based nonprofit that pioneered a type of earthbag construction called super adobe, has drawn renewed attention from residents, says Khalili, and is urging state and local officials to work with them on making their designs code-compliant. "Let's do the full tests… and build back prepared for these climate events," Dastan Khalili, president of CalEarth, tells the BBC. "It's insane to build the same thing and expect different results."
But bringing alternative building methods to market is costly, especially in California, where materials must prove to be fire-resistant while also passing stringent seismic testing.
Any alternative material, such as rammed earth – a building technique using compacted soil mixed with water and stabilizers which has been used for over 1,000 years, including, in recent decades, in California – must be submitted for testing, typically by manufacturers, says Crystal Sujeski, chief of code development and analysis for CalFire. This testing needs to prove they are equivalent to or exceed the standard set by conventional, widely used materials. "A lot of [testing] options are out there," she says.
New building materials that pass multiple tests can also be added to a register of approved materials, she says. The devastating Palisades Fire covered 23,707 acres (9,594 hectares), killed 12 people and destroyed 6,833 structures . Khalili says CalEarth has always designed structures to comply with international building codes and has planned tests to meet the fire and seismic requirements of California's code. "All of that is ready to be executed," he says. "The only thing that's stopping us is the funding to go after it and make it happen." Burn tests in a fire lab for a single new material, he says, run at around $40-50k (£30-37k), and the required seismic testing can triple or quadruple this bill.
As a result, rammed earth homes and other alternative structures can be costlier than using more conventional methods – and even then, the process of approving construction at the state and municipal levels is arduous.
Ann Edminster, a green building consultant and author based in northern California, says that the ease and cost of the permitting process is highly dependent on the jurisdiction and who you work with. "The building official will either be your best friend or your worst enemy," she says.
It creates a wall of inertia boxing out those with interest in experimenting with alternative materials, she says. And in any case, if you have just lost your home to fire and don't have a place to live, "you're probably not going to be super enthusiastic about testing some brand new material", she says.
Still, there are relatively straightforward options for fire-proofing new builds – especially considering the risks of not doing so. A 2022 report by IBHS and Headwaters Economics, a Montana-based research institute, found that wildfire-resistant construction adds from 2% to 13% to the cost of a new home in California, with the upper cost here going well above current required codes.
"Increasing home loss and growing risks require reevaluating the wildfire crisis as a home-ignition problem and not a wildland fire problem," the report said, noting that a home's building materials, design and nearby landscaping all influence its survival.
Stephen Quarles, an advisor emeritus at the University of California who has spent decades researching how building materials perform during wildfires, says it's more straightforward to obtain approval for smaller alternative projects.
Quarles emphasizes that wildfire building codes are flexible and allow for traditional construction to be adapted and use more sustainable materials. For instance, a homeowner constructing a straw bale home can coat the exterior with a fireproof material to get approval from a code official. "You could say, 'My cladding is stucco, which is non-combustible,' and you would be good to go," he says.
But he also acknowledges that most homeowners just want to rebuild as quickly as possible.
When the June 2007 Angora fire destroyed 280 homes in neighborhoods around Northern California's Lake Tahoe, some residents raced to rebuild before the stricter code regulations took effect the following January, Quarles recalls. Later that same year, after the Tubbs fire ripped through the Coffey Park neighborhood of Santa Rosa, the community "built back as if there [hadn't been] a wildfire there", he says.
But he believes the latest Los Angeles wildfires – along with the 2023 Lahaina fire on Hawaii's Maui island, which were called the "largest natural disaster in Hawaii state history" – have alerted people to the importance of hardening their homes in the future.
A January 2025 study found that the hot, dry weather that gave rise to the LA fires was made about 35% more likely by climate change. The LA wildfire season is getting longer, the study noted, while the rains that normally put out the blazes have reduced.
A home in California certified by the IBHS as defended from embers, flames and radiant heat. It has dual tempered windows, enclosed eaves and covered gutters
"There's an acknowledgement that these fires can happen in places where you don't expect fires to happen," Quarles says. "I think that's taking hold and there is a desire to genuinely build back better.”
Giammanco, who contributed to a March 2025 report by IBHS documenting which types of homes survived the fire, agrees. "If you look back at our history of construction, there are inflection points," he says.
The report showed that homes compliant with California building codes had a higher survival rate than those which were not.
But some homes that took preparatory steps, such as clearing brush and creating defensive space, still succumbed when enough of their neighbors had not taken these steps.
"Even the most hardened materials when subject to extreme fire exposure will reach their limit," Giammanco says. "Defending a community is sort of a system that builds on itself.”
When wildfires spread in urban areas, the homes they ignite become "fuel bombs" and intensify the blaze, says Kimiko Barrett, lead wildfire research and policy analyst at non-profit research group Headwaters Economics.
"The home itself is the fuel," she says. "Once your neighbor's house starts to burn, the radiant heat means that your home is threatened as well." This is a particular problem in LA, which despite its sprawling footprint is actually still a densely populated area, especially relative to more rural communities.
Slow progress in retrofitting existing homes remains a major problem, says Giammanco – and homes that predate California's 2008 wildfire code are not mandated to do it. But there is precedent for incentive and rebate programs in the US to help make homes more resilient to extreme weather, from initiatives in arid south-western cities for residents to collect rainwater to an Alabama program providing grants up to $10,000 (£7,400) to install roofing resilient to wind and rain.
Giammanco says similar programs for wildfire protection could incentivize residents to make their homes more resilient to fire. "I think that's the missing link," he says.
Adding fire-resistant materials in retrofits such as fiber cement siding and enclosing roof eaves to make it code compliant costs just a few thousand dollars, Barrett says. Other steps are even easier, such as clearing bark mulch from a home's defensive space.
"A lot of these mitigation measures can be done over the weekend by the homeowner," she says.
It's still early days in LA for the thousands of homeowners preparing to rebuild, but there are signs that the construction industry is starting to adapt. The LA-based homebuilder KB Home, for example, has designed a fire-resilient community with 64 homes that comply to IBHS standards.
embers test – Generators throw embers – the leading cause of home ignitions – onto a full-scale structure in a 2011 test at the IBHS research centre in Richburg, South Carolina
When it comes to building new homes, Edminster emphasizes that simple structures with minimal openings and overhang can be best, comparing an ideal fire-resistant home to an aerodynamic car. "The same principle could and should apply to homes," she says. "Obviously we don't want to live in little round spaceships or something, but… get your outer shell so that it works really well."
Sustainable building advocates are also pushing for greener materials and methods to become commonplace, arguing that they can be used in fire-hardened homes while also reducing emissions and bringing costs down in the longer term. For existing houses, simple retrofitting steps can improve the sustainability as well as the resilience of a home – even when they don't use the greenest materials possible. Some of Edminster's clients have retrofitted homes to be fire-resistant without stripping everything out. "That's a terrible waste of material and the embodied carbon in them," she says. "So there's a trade-off.”
Edminster is adamant that building codes should stay in place after a disaster. "The whole idea of relaxing code to make it easier for people to rebuild, I think, is nonsense," she says. "[They] have been put in place to protect people and to protect us as a society.”
And while many of the structures lost in the Eaton fire remain outside the boundaries of California's wildfire code, Barrett believes there is precedent for drastic change. US cities began mandating fire hydrants and sprinkler systems around the turn of the 20th Century after major urban fires in Chicago and San Francisco. Earthquake codes became stiffer in the 1970s, requiring buildings to retrofit for seismic risk reduction. "We can do this. We have done it before," Barrett says. "We just need to now think of it through a wildfire lens."https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20250626-can-la-fire-proof-itself
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HOW A NOBEL-WNNING SCIENTIST TRANSFORMED CANCER TREATMENT
For decades, cancer care remained relatively unchanged, as doctors largely relied on three main strategies for confronting tumors: surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy. Yes, more sophisticated versions of these therapies have evolved as scientists began to learn more about cancer and how it works, but these main routes to disabling cancer remained pretty standard for a long time.
Then came targeted therapies, which were designed to address specific mutations in tumors and manipulate them so tumors couldn’t grow. But even though these dramatically improved survival rates for many cancers, they didn’t have the overwhelming effect that doctors thought they would.
Dr. James Allison, who received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2018, unlocked one of the more powerful reasons why.
As an undergraduate and later graduate student at University of Texas, Austin in the 1960s and early 1970s, a professor introduced him to T cells, then a relatively new and still mysterious component of the immune system. “He said they percolate through your body and look for viruses and infected cells, or cells that have picked up bacteria, and can eliminate them. And maybe even eliminate cancer cells,” says Allison. “I thought, ‘wow, that’s cool.’” When he asked the professor how the cells recognized different things, “He said, ‘I have no idea, I don’t even think they’re real,’” says Allison.
Allison remained curious, however, and decided to become an immunologist to better understand phenomena like T cells. He didn’t immediately think about what role they might play in cancer, although finding better ways to treat cancer loomed in his mind after losing his mother to lymphoma when he was 11. Seeing her suffer from the then-crude radiation treatments she received convinced him there had to be a better way to help patients.
Allison became curious about what made the unique T cells tick. How did they know which cells they needed to stick to? And how could they tell the difference between foreign microbes like bacteria and viruses and the body’s own cells?
He credits a period of time in the late 1970s to mid 1980s after graduating when he was part of MD Anderson Cancer Center but working at a satellite research facility a couple of hours from Houston. There, he had the freedom to indulge in his curiosity and wasn’t constrained by typical academic obligations or administrative duties. “I had the time to just sit there and just keep working and thinking and thinking and thinking all the time about it and being able to just get up and do the experiments.”He began experimenting with mice to learn more about how the T cells, the immune system, and cancer faced off. His research led him to think that trying to rev up the immune system to tackle cancer wasn’t enough. It’s a challenging process since cancer cells are created from normal cells that have picked up mutations that make them malignant, and therefore destroy healthy cells along with the cancerous ones. In addition to activating the immune system, Allison realized, the body also needs to release the brakes on whatever system the T cells have to protect the body’s cells, which cancer cells exploit to shield themselves from being recognized as tumors. “This brake would shut off the army [of immune cells] that your body generated before it had a chance to really take the tumor out,” he says. “That was the idea I had.”
It was an insight that would lead to the development of so-called checkpoint inhibitors, a new group of drugs that would herald the era of immunotherapy to treat cancer. But it took a while for drug makers to accept the idea, and they were initially reluctant to launch trials to test the approach in people. The key to convincing them, says Allison, was forcing them to recognize that immunotherapy isn’t an overnight success but that it takes time to educate and train the immune system to combat cancer.
Ultimately a small company took a chance on testing the first checkpoint inhibitor, and larger pharmaceutical companies eventually joined in. In 2006, when Allison was at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, he met the first patient treated with a drug derived from his research, who was part of the early studies on the therapy. Sharon Belvin was diagnosed with late stage melanoma at age 22 and was told she shouldn’t plan to start a family or expect to have many more years to live.
After receiving the drug, Belvin’s doctors were surprised to see her tumors disappear. Allison was brought to tears after hearing her story, and nearly 20 years later, Belvin now has her own family and stays in touch with him. “I talked to her a couple of weeks ago,” he says. “She’s fine and her kid’s about to go to college.”
Immunotherapy is now an important part of cancer care, and plays a role in treating an increasing number of cancers. Doctors are also studying ways to optimize the power of checkpoint inhibitors, by combining them with other treatments as well as introducing them earlier in the disease, such as before surgery, to reduce the chances of recurrence and minimize the invasiveness of the surgery patients might need.
It's a bright future for the field, but Allison is concerned that recent restrictions to funding of basic biomedical research by the Trump Administration will strangle the pipeline of the next breakthroughs in cancer treatments.
“Over 27 years, I had a continuous grant [from the National Institutes of Health],” says Allison. “I had to renew it every three to five years, and it’s competitive. All of my work from the T cell receptor all of the way through the mouse work was supported by grants to some extent. But now it means somewhere between one in 25 or one in 30 people will get funded. It’s really frightening. The people in their prime who are working now and the smart people coming up need to know that there’s something there that will support them. Everybody is passionate—you don’t do this kind of work to make money. You do it because you love doing it, but you have to be able to do it.”
https://time.com/collections/time-for-change/7341643/james-allison-cancer-research-treatment/?utm_source=firefox-newtab-en-us
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ONE WOMAN’S ADVENTURE: GIVING UP SEX
When writer Melissa Febos was 35, she decided to temporarily give up sex.
After a few brief entanglements, Febos opted to take a break from dating and sex. She'd been in consecutive relationships since she was 15 and hoped a period of celibacy would help her develop a more "honest and authentic relationship to sex with other people," she says.
Febos chronicles her year of abstinence in a new book published in June, The Dry Season: A Memoir of Pleasure in a Year Without Sex.
That period helped her realize that "I had given a tremendous amount of energy to sex and love," she says. "When I withdrew that energy, I had it for myself.”
Melissa Febos is the author of the memoir The Dry Season: A Memoir of Pleasure in a Year Without Sex.
Febos, a professor at the University of Iowa and author of Body Work, Girlhood and Whip Smart, talked to Life Kit about the surprising gifts of celibacy. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
How did you define celibacy for yourself during this period?
At first, I defined my celibacy as no sex. But swiftly I realized I needed to divest from all activities surrounding sex and love: dating, flirting and maintaining sexually charged friendships.
If I wanted to really go on a hiatus and be alone with myself, I needed to stop the compelling distractions that had occupied me so powerfully.
I considered giving up masturbation. But upon reflection, I understood it was actually one of the most unselfconscious ways I experienced intimacy.
When you decided to give up sex, you planned to do it for just three months. Why?
That was as long as I could imagine not having sex, and I was trying to work with myself.
I also chose it because I'm sober, and 90 days is a familiar unit of time in some recovery circles. It's generally thought of as the period of time necessary to get some breathing room from a compulsive or addictive behavior.
I don't identify as a sex or love addict, but I knew there was a compulsive element to my behavior in those areas.
Then you kept extending your celibacy.
At three months, I knew it had not been long enough to fundamentally change my behavior, so I extended it. I ended up continuing for about a year in total.
Did you miss sex?
Honestly, I didn't really. At 35, I was starved for alone time. I had never known how to ask for it or even recognize that need. I had been so focused on others that keeping my attention for myself was glorious.
I also became aware that I often had sex when I didn't really want to, even if my partners didn't pressure me. There was an internal pressure to have sex a certain amount, because that's what a healthy relationship was made of.
Also, it seemed easier to have sex I felt ambivalent about than to disappoint my partner. This now sounds unhinged to me, though I have talked to many people who feel the same way.
You put together an inventory of romantic and sex partners as part of your effort. What did you get out of that?
It showed me what I had to be accountable for and how I'd been complicit in every romantic disaster of my life.
I devised a list of questions that I would answer about each partner: Where was I dishonest? How was I self-centered? What happened here? It was basically a study of my past to see what I had been doing and how I could do it differently.
What did you gain from your abstinence?
I started to learn things about myself. Like, I had no idea how much alone time I needed to be happy and that sometimes I like to eat dinner at 11 p.m.
Maybe the most outstanding thing was that I developed this spiritual sense of being in the world that I had relegated to my love life. I realized that I could experience it in nature, or with myself, or through art, or friendship, or all the other kinds of intimacy that are available to us.
At the end of your year of celibacy, you met the person who is now your wife.
I did. I've now been with my partner for eight years, married for four, and I would never have been able to sustain this relationship had I not spent that year celibate.
I have been much more honest in this relationship about who I am and what I need. It's a connection beyond anything I've ever experienced.
What advice do you have for people who are thinking about taking a break from sex?
You know, I'm not big into prescription. I'm not trying to start a celibacy movement. But what I will say is that we don't know what will happen if we make a decision to try something different.
I could never have foreseen how [doing that] would change the entire course of my life.
https://www.npr.org/2025/07/15/nx-s1-5372768/sex-love-celibacy-intimacy-book
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HOW EMOTIONALLY IMMATURE PARENTING AFFECTS OUR ADULT LIVES
Many of us grow up with emotionally immature parents and may not know it. This is a key pattern seen in intergenerational trauma that is conditioned and maintained from one generation to the next.
For example, a child may observe that their parent cannot maintain emotional closeness with them. They may pull toward their child for connection one minute, then push away the next. They may struggle in providing for their child’s emotional or physical needs such that the child becomes parentified in a role reversal. Or a parent may try to be their child’s friend and may come off as irresponsible or concerned about getting their own needs met.
When a parent is emotionally immature, they are often parenting from a place of their own attachment trauma, early abuse, or rejecting parents. Many emotionally immature parents don’t “evolve” past their own childlike needs and self-centeredness, often because they themselves were abused or neglected in their childhood.
First, to understand how emotionally immature parenting can affect a person later in their adult life, it helps to recognize that unresolved trauma is what perpetuates from one generation (i.e., parents) to the next generation, such as their children. When trauma has not been resolved and healed, the potential for it to repeat is significantly increased.
For example, emotional neglect is one of the strongest predictors of developing emotional dysregulation, which can cause emotionally immature parenting down the road. Thus, if a parent was abused or neglected in their own childhood, this places them at an increased risk of repeating the same trauma to their children, if unhealed.
Red Flags of an Emotionally Immature Parent
Has inconsistent or nonexistent boundaries
May try to be the “party” parent or blur the lines between friend and parent
Has parenting style often based on their own unmet needs for love or attention
May ignore or neglect their child’s needs for their own needs
Often “lives in the moment,” which can include living beyond their financial means
Often has mental health issues and/or diagnoses
May be dismissive or avoidant of their child’s feelings
May have drug or alcohol addictions or compulsive behaviors
May overly dramatize their needs or turn to friends or family to “save” them
May overreact to stressors or become excessively “needy”
Can be rigid or inflexible with rules or boundaries, which prevents the child’s autonomy
4 Types of Emotionally Immature Parents and Their Effects on Our Adult Lives
1. Driven and controlling: Driven and controlling parents are often referred to as “helicopter” parents who demand excellence and perfection, and set high (often unrealistic) demands on themselves and their children. These parents may parent with excessive anger or from a punitive approach. They are highly intrusive and critical, and often violate a child’s personal space.
In adulthood: Kids raised with this type of parenting often become perfectionists, overachievers, and highly critical of themselves, and may struggle with compulsive behaviors such as workaholism or shopaholism as ways of self-numbing and to feel worthy. In their romantic relationships, they may demand perfection in their partner or may minimize relational problems by staying overly busy and intellectualizing instead of allowing themselves to feel their emotions.
2. Emotional (or non-emotional): Emotionally dysregulated parents may vacillate from one extreme to the other such that they can appear overly dramatic, may overreact to situations, or may appear helpless and “needy.” On the other end of the spectrum, emotionally dysregulated parents can appear distant, cynical, dismissive, or cold toward their children. Many times, parents with dysregulated emotions may be experiencing their own unhealed attachment trauma, which can include parenting from a disorganized attachment style.
In adulthood: Children raised in chaos and an unpredictable environment may become highly anxious, depressed, or emotionally dysregulated adults. They may battle anger problems or may feel disconnected from their emotions—especially vulnerable emotions. This can negatively impact the emotional maturity of their relationships and increases the risk of developing traumatic bonds with [abusive] romantic partners.
3. Rejecting: Parents who are rejecting are typically dismissive and avoidant. They may push away, may prefer to spend their time alone, or may not want to be bothered with parenting or emotions. Rejecting parents were often children who were rejected themselves and grew up “fending for themselves.” If they do have to interact with their children, they may become demanding or verbally abusive.
In adulthood: If a child was raised with this type of emotionally immature parent, they may become adults who have limited empathy for other people’s needs, may vacillate between wanting connection and pushing it away, may appear selfish or self-centered, or may become an emotionally rejecting parent themselves. This type of parenting dynamic may also resonate with a more dismissive or avoidantly attached person, which can make it challenging to sustain emotional intimacy and connection with romantic partners.
4. Negligent or passive: Parents who are emotionally or physically negligent or passive avoid confrontation and may appear easy to get along with. Many negligent or passive parents lack healthy and consistent boundaries and may come off as the “cool” parent or the child’s friend. Parenting is reduced to what the parent wants, with less consideration of what their child needs. Emotionally or physically negligent parents often come across to other adults as childlike, or unable to care for themselves in an adult manner. They may minimize, invalidate, or dismiss their child’s emotional needs as too overwhelming for them to deal with.
In adulthood: Being raised by a parent who is emotionally or physically negligent can include higher risks of anxiety, depression, or other mental health diagnoses, as well as intense feelings of anger and shame toward themselves and feelings of contempt for their parent. Adults who grew up with emotionally negligent parents may have difficulty expressing vulnerable emotions and may become detached, cold, distant, or “distracted” around their romantic partners to avoid feeling vulnerable.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/understanding-ptsd/202211/how-emotionally-immature-parenting-affects-our-adult-lives
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MARTY SUPREME: TOO MANY POINTLESS PLOTLINES IN THE MIDDLE
From the very beginning of “Marty Supreme,” Josh Safdie wants to confuse you a little. It’s a film set in the ‘50s, filmed with a movie language that’s incredibly reminiscent of the jittery character studies of the ‘70s, all set to a backdrop of ‘80s needle drops by Public Image Ltd., Peter Gabriel, and Tears for Fears. The displacement is intentional, a way to subconsciously disorient the viewer, putting them in the shoes of a character who’s never quite where he thinks he belongs, someone flung out of time.
Safdie employed similar techniques with his brother on “Uncut Gems,” another propulsive drama about a man who looks uncomfortable in his own skin, a shark who’s convinced he will drown if he stops swimming. Safdie’s daring choices merge with the best performance of Timothee Chalamet’s career for a story of a man who thinks he’s the best in the world at something, and that thinking is as important as actually being it.
Chalamet plays Marty Mauser, a ping pong champion who barely makes ends meet working at a NYC shoe store. That’s where he sleeps with an old friend and neighbor named Rachel (Odessa A’zion), who’s married to a Stanley-esque brute named Ira (Emory Cohen) but is clearly in love with the captivating Marty. After what is basically a prologue, Marty takes off for a ping pong championship, where he tries his best to live as large as possible, including upgrading his room to the Ritz and trying to pin the blame on the organizers of the event.
That’s where he spots former box office queen Kay Stone (Gwyneth Paltrow) walking through the lobby, and he’s instantly drawn to her star power, even if it’s somewhat faded. Marty talks his way into Kay’s life (and bed) through sheer bravado, even trying to coordinate business deals with Kay’s husband, Milton (Kevin O’Leary of “Shark Tank” fame), while he sleeps with his wife. When he loses the championship and becomes a joke in Japan as the “Defeated American,” he returns to New York in debt, having to rebuild his ego and reputation, at whatever cost. And then he discovers Rachel is pregnant.
Safdie circles Marty with unexpected, familiar faces designed to provoke a response. It’s not entirely stunt casting, but Safdie knows what O’Leary is famous for, making his business-driven decisions another aspect of the film that’s just left of center. Famous New Yorkers dot the scenery from stars like Sandra Bernhard & Fran Drescher to filmmaker Abel Ferrara and local legend John Catsimatidis. Tyler Okonma (aka Tyler, The Creator) is excellent in a few scenes as Marty’s partner-in-hustling; Penn Jillette is almost unrecognizable, late in the film. It’s a consistently inspired piece of work from the casting director that leans into the unpredictability of the narrative in that you have no idea who’s coming around the next corner.
Of course, the film belongs to Chalamet, who fully captures the kind of guy who thinks confidence is currency. He doesn’t just refuse to take no for an answer; he never stops to think before he speaks, often shutting doors that others are trying to open for him through his big mouth. He gives a performance reminiscent of ’70s Al Pacino, playing the guy who’s the most fascinating and annoying person in the room at the same time. Leaning into the temporal displacement mentioned above, it’s almost as if Marty is an ‘80s shark stuck in the ‘50s. What if Jordan Belfort were born a generation too early? It was ping pong for Marty 70 years ago; it would probably be Bitcoin today.
It’s an idea that flourishes in the storytelling, too, in that Safdie and co-writer Ronald Bronstein are almost telling an origin story not just of American business but of the way toxic bravado became part of the American reputation around the world. At first, Marty refuses to do the travel circuit of ping-pong sideshows and acts that perform at halftime of shows like the Harlem Globetrotters, but he eventually relents. Sometimes you have to play ping pong with a seal to get ahead. He may just be a ping pong prodigy, but he’s also a vision of the aggressive American businessman, a fast-talker who’s not content to just dominate his corner of the world—he needs the whole planet. And will do whatever it takes to vanquish his international enemies.
Two excellent supporting performances balance Chalamet: A’zion could have disappeared into a loyal girlfriend role, but she imbues Rachel with her own kind of confidence, the kind that comes from knowing someone like Marty for so long that she doesn’t just see through his act, she knows how to enable him to the best version of himself. Paltrow avoids the cliché of the fading star, subtly finding the truth of a woman who needs to be loved, whether it’s by a crowd on opening night or the ping-pong player who love bombs her. She has a beautiful moment that washes over her face when she hears theater goers respond to her entrance, just one of several smart choices throughout “Marty Supreme,” a movie that feels big but succeeds through hundreds of small decisions.
Finally, “Marty Supreme” doesn’t work without two key collaborators: Darius Khondji and Daniel Lopatin. The legendary cinematographer behind films like “Seven,” “The Immigrant” and so much more gives “Marty” a jittery, sweaty visual language as if the camera itself is struggling to keep up with the protagonist (an aesthetic enhanced by Safdie & Bronstein’s ace editing work too) while Lopatin’s pulsing score, along with the crazy needle drops, becomes a character itself. I nearly levitated when the Peter Gabriel track kicked in.
A reductive shorthand for “Marty Supreme” will be “Uncut Gems with ping pong,” and the two films do share a filmmaking language intended to shake viewers. Still, this movie is no mere echo of Safdie’s former collaboration with his brother. It is unlike anything released this year, a riveting study of a man who fully believes it when he says, “I have a purpose. You don’t. And if you think that’s some kind of blessing, it’s not.”
“Marty Supreme” is a story of a guy burdened by how great he thinks he’s supposed to be. How very American.
https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/marty-supreme-movie-review-2025
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PING-PONG NIGHTMARE (THE GUARDIAN)
This new film from Josh Safdie has the fanatical energy of a 149-minute ping pong rally carried out by a single player running round and round the table. It’s a marathon sprint of gonzo calamities and uproar, a sociopath-screwball nightmare like something by Mel Brooks – only in place of gags, there are detonations of bad taste, cinephile allusions, alpha cameos, frantic deal-making, racism and antisemitism, sentimental yearning and erotic adventures. It’s a farcical race against time where no one needs to eat or sleep.
Timothée Chalamet plays Marty Mauser, a spindly motormouth with the glasses of an intellectual, the moustache of a movie star and the physique of a tiny cartoon character (though that could just be the initials). He’s loosely inspired by Marty “The Needle” Reisman, a real-life US table tennis champ from the 1950s who was given to Bobby Riggs-type shenanigans: betting, hustling and showmanship stunts. The movie probably earns the price of admission simply with one gasp-inducing setpiece involving whippet-thin Chalamet, a dog, a bathtub, cult director Abel Ferrara in a walk-on role and a scuzzy New York hotel room. Talk about not being on firm ground. Similarly disorienting is the climactic revelation of Chalamet’s naked buttocks prior to one of the most upsetting displays of corporal punishment since Lindsay Anderson’s If.
Marty is a young Jewish guy working in a New York shoe shop in 1952, dreaming of world-conquering success in the up-and-coming sport of table tennis and patenting his own brand of ball called the Marty Supreme. He’s having an affair with married childhood sweetheart Rachel (Odessa A’zion) and saving up his earnings to travel to Britain for the table tennis championships at Wembley. (There is a stirring shot of the old stadium’s twin towers, which American audiences may think is a reference to Tolkien.)
Getting his promised cash is the first of many bizarre uproars, but once in Blighty, brash Marty deliberately shocks British sports journalists with crass jokes about his pal and fellow player, a Hungarian-Jewish camp survivor called Béla, played by Géza Röhrig (from László Nemes’s Holocaust movie Son of Saul.)
Having hustled and blustered his way into a free room at the Ritz, Marty conceives an erotic obsession with a fellow guest, retired movie star Kay Stone – for which role Gwyneth Paltrow has very stylishly come out of retirement – and Kay’s later Broadway debut is wonderfully realized with a stunned Marty in the audience. Marty’s table tennis face-off with Japan’s ping pong superstar Koto Endo (Koto Kawaguchi) ends in disaster, and Kay’s husband and Marty’s possible sponsor Milton (Kevin O’Leary) shows himself to be bigoted to both Marty and Béla. Back in the US, pure chaos reigns, a nonstop hellzapoppin’ meltdown as Marty frantically tries to claw together the cash for a rematch with his Japanese nemesis, and with the charismatic Kay.
The film’s comic and absurdist effect resides in the slowly dawning realization that it’s not actually about table tennis. Marty Supreme doesn’t behave like a sports movie: there are no training montage sequences, no scenes in which Marty explains his technique in voiceover, no scenes in which he either listens humbly to some ping pong mentor or Oedipally rejects him. And unlike Forrest Gump, who becomes a patriotic celebrity through his table tennis gift, Marty is always a reprehensible character whom no one really trusts – although it is arguably his pioneering 1950s work popularizing the sport which made possible Forrest’s ping pong pre-eminence in the 1960s.
It is rather that the film is itself ping pong; the rhythm and spirit of table tennis is in every scene and the mesmeric effect of the spectacular, clattering, dizzying back-and-forth. Marty Supreme is on its own spectrum of determination and emotional woundedness, and Chalamet hilariously enacts an unstoppable live-wire twitch, powered by indignation and self-pity. And Paltrow gives us a clever and wittily conceived counterweight to Marty’s thrumming narcissism; she is amusing and sensual, she sees what Marty is up to and understands him better than he does himself.
By the end of this movie my head was oscillating from side to side as if it had been hit with cymbals. The catastrophes, the stunts, the shocks, the jabbering desperation and Marty’s supercharged neediness, with everything important in his life poised to be thrown away, like the box of Marty’s patented table tennis balls that goes out of the window. And yet somehow our pint-sized hero always comes back and even achieves a poignant kind of maturity in the final shot. The pure craziness is a marvel.
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2025/dec/01/marty-supreme-review-timothee-chalamet-ping-pong-table-tennis
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I’m happy to report that Chalamet’s outsized performance on the promotional trail does not undersell his performance in the actual film. In Marty Supreme, the first outing from Josh since he stopped working with his brother Ben, we follow Marty Rauser, a smooth-talking shoe salesman in 1950s New York, who dreams of becoming a world-champion ping-pong player. His sporting hopes take him all over the globe: to the Ritz in London and the backstreets of Tokyo, as well as some escapades closer to home. The plot is driven by the dude’s (at-times ruthless) ambition, an exhilarating prospect in a landscape littered with likeable characters.
And you certainly can’t fault Chalamet in all this. As a young Jewish man in the post-war years, Marty has something to prove to himself and the world and Chalamet is excellent at portraying the egotism and short-sightedness of youth. He goes all in on the unlikeable parts and also manages to imbue Marty (loosely based on a real-life New Yorker) with a winning boyishness.
Chalamet is quite obviously one of our finest new actors, and it is almost always a joy to watch him in this film. He holds his own against the bombastic soundtrack (“Everybody Wants to Rule the World”, “Forever Young”) and does not look out of place among the gorgeous production design (New York is pleasingly grubby and claustrophobic, the old-world version of London appears suitably grey).
It is a shame that the film, co-written by Safdie and his long-time collaborate Ronald Bronstein, does not fulfill the promise of that explosive first half. What starts as a sports movie – a satisfying genre – about victory and legacy quickly descends into a sometimes intriguing, sometimes tiring mix of Promethean ambition and muddled romance. Anyone familiar with previous Safdie ventures (Uncut Gems, Good Time) will know what to expect here: propulsive, anxiety-inducing sequences and flashy, chaotic action. But in the second half, caught between its director’s predilections and awards-seeking ambition, the movie loses focus.
We learn, over and over, that Marty’s complacency can be cruel. In a couple of stand-out scenes, we see how that cruelty infects those around him, particularly in relation to love interest – and that label really sums up this strangely unemotional role – Odessa Azion. But elsewhere, that dynamic wears thin, and unfortunately a diverting turn from Gwyneth Paltrow as a world-weary actor (genius casting) is mostly wasted, while an overlong side quest with Tyler the Creator has little pay-off. The globe-trotting nature of the film should be exciting, but by the time we return to New York in the second half, it has the unfortunate effect of reminding us how much more fun the start was in comparison.
And then we reach the end. Marty fulfills long-held sporting dreams overseas, but finds true transcendence in personal developments back home. It is a puzzling direction for a film so unrelenting about professional ambition and twenty-something recklessness, a conclusion that will leave many viewers with a feeling of confusion, rather than all-out victory. Perhaps it is a masterstroke of Safdie to hide such a small story amid all the theatrics, but you may wish that he had dreamed not so much bigger but a little weirder.
Oriana:
The movie is worth watching for several reasons, including the riveting ping-pong matches. I never thought that ping-pong would have this kind of appeal to me. And no, it actually doesn’t — I got involved in watching those sequences because of the excellent editing that doesn’t allow for a nanosecond of boredom.
Chalamet as Marty is almost shockingly convincing. His youthful overconfidence and shameless self-aggrandizement by some miracle of acting don’t make us dislike him (and there are reasons to dislike him — he certainly has a cruel streak). But we can’t help but root for him whenever he competes. My dislike was focused strictly on the rich movers and shakers in this movie — the “masters of the universe” with their private jets.
Some critics said that everyone in the movie is unlikeable, most of all the central character. I think I understand what they mean —Marty’s ruthless ambition, arrogance, and feeling entitled certainly draw attention. But Marty remains likable despite his “me first” attitude. It may be his boyish charm, but it may also be his authenticity: he is profoundly human, meaning flawed. One doesn’t become a champion by acting altruistic. Actually it felt refreshing reading reviews damning the male protagonist for being selfish — my life experience showed me that it was socially OK for a man to follow his ambition, and it was women who were slammed with the “selfish” label if they dared do the same. "You have assumed the male privilege of trying to live your own life,” I was once told.
Marty is not merely ambitious: he is desperate. Unfortunately this desperation is the main theme in the middle of the movie, which loses the focus on ping-pong and devolves into pointless, boring schemes of how to get money to enable the pursuit of the dream. These subplots only distract from the main story: a poor kid from New York ultimately becoming a champion, after setbacks and humiliations. It would be a spoiler to give away the main humiliation he’s willing to undergo, but I think I'm allowed to say that it’s a shocker.
The ending, which aims to show us that Marty is capable of tender feelings, is so-so at best. OK, so he’s capable of tender feelings. Will this be the end of his ambition? Of course not. As Marty says to Rachel, at the beginning of the movie, “I have a goal. You don’t. That’s the difference between us.”
The movie is set in the early fifties, but it’s interesting to see that the same theme — ambition vs altruism — was alive back then, when “family values” were deified and professional ambition vilified, especially for women — and is still haunting us today. There is really no satisfying solution. Everyone has to figure out how to live without being torn to pieces by the conflict between prioritizing self or others. I can’t help repeating myself: it was refreshing seeing this at play when the protagonist is male, presumably enjoying his “male privilege": never giving up his ambition for the sake of serving others, basking in admiration and applause, with emotional support always available. Life simply isn’t that way. Many people do NOT want you to succeed. And if you want to become the best in any particular field, you're sure to encounter envy and hostility. I applaud the movie for its honesty in showing that.
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REVOLUTIONARY NEW PROCESS LITERALLY TURNS E-WASTE INTO GOLD
Urban mining, or gold recycling, offers a sustainable approach to address the finite nature of gold deposits. Approximately 25% of the world’s gold now comes from recycled sources. This shift reflects a growing commitment to minimizing environmental damage.
Recycled gold is extracted from discarded electronics, including mobile phones and computers. These devices contain valuable gold that can be separated through advanced chemical processes, resulting in high-purity recycled gold.
This method is not only environmentally friendly but also strategic. Manufacturers are increasingly turning to recycled sources as gold mining production plateaus. This approach reduces dependence on finite natural resources and lessens the ecological footprint of mining. “Recycling gold helps conserve resources and maintain environmental balance,” experts note, underlining its dual benefits.
Recent advancements in materials science have revolutionized gold recovery. Among these, tetrathiafulvalene (TTF)-based systems stand out. Gold's natural affinity for nitrogen- and sulfur-containing ligands makes TTF’s sulfur atoms critical in chelating gold. This selective adsorption opens new possibilities for recovering gold from mixed metal solutions.
TTF is a p-type semiconductor celebrated for its electron donation capacity and photostability. Researchers are now integrating TTF into polymers and covalent organic frameworks (COFs) to enhance gold adsorption. These frameworks leverage TTF’s redox properties, enabling the selective extraction of gold from e-waste while leaving other metals, like nickel and copper, largely untouched.
In one breakthrough, a Cornell University-led team developed vinyl-linked covalent organic frameworks (VCOFs) using TTF. Published in the journal, Nature Communications, these COFs exhibited remarkable performance, capturing 99.9% of gold from electronic waste while minimizing the adsorption of less valuable metals. This selective recovery not only preserves resources but also eliminates the need for hazardous chemicals traditionally used in gold extraction, such as cyanide.
E-waste—from discarded phones to obsolete computers—is an untapped gold mine. A single ton of e-waste contains at least ten times more gold than a ton of mined ore. Yet, less than 20% of the approximately 50 million tons of e-waste generated annually is recycled. By 2030, this figure is projected to soar to 80 million metric tons, underscoring the urgency for innovative recycling solutions.
https://www.thebrighterside.news/post/revolutionary-new-process-literally-turns-e-waste-into-gold/
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THE RUSSIAN EQUIVALENT OF THE AMERICAN DREAM
The American Dream is to own a single-family house.
The Russian Dream is to own one-bedroom apartment.
Condo project Shushari in Saint Petersburg
Most middle-class families in Russia live in condo projects. These days they normally build 22- or 24-story buildings, although Russia is the largest country in the world and there is no shortage of land. But we enjoy living like that because we are communal people and like to do stuff together.
For family needs, you want to have a good reliable car. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome the pride of Russian automobile industry:
With average salaries across the country below $500 this is your best option if you don’t want to break the bank (or your back, paying off 14% auto credit). Average fertility rate per woman stands at 1.4 so the chances are you guys all gonna fit in.
And after a year of hard work you’d better take your family to Crimea. Did you know that we built a bridge that connects it to the continental Russia so now you can drive there in your Lada Granta? Yes, we did and yes, you can. Just don’t get killed on your way there: our roads and male drivers’ driving are not for faint-hearted.
Vladimir Menkov:
And, of course, also a dacha (small summer home on a lot in the countryside, preferably near a lake or a river). It can be either a summer house in a purpose-built dacha community (lots of them exist just outside most cities), or an actual village house purchased in a village that has inexpensive vacant houses for sale.
In most cases, people live in their dachas only in the summer (May through September), during their vacations and weekends, since heating such a place and cleaning the road to in winter would be too much trouble.
Robert Shuler:
Americans who have not taken a road trip in Russia cannot possibly comprehend the extent of this dacha thing. While my wife did not have a dacha per se, she had access to several relatives who lived outside the city or in a village. I had a guide in Ukraine (similar culture) who asserted no one would go hungry. Everyone knew someone who lived in the country with a garden and could go live with them. Not sure the extent to which that is true, but at least it represents how they think of themselves. Misha Firer is just sour about something. There are always those who look at the negative. Vodka drinking is reportedly down. Last time I visited two years ago I was not offered any (unusual).
Nils Eliassen:
Ukraine isn't Russia. And yes I've been to both. The outskirts of Moscow are hell.
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HOMOSEXUALITY AND EVOLUTION
Same-sex sexual behavior may help monkeys and apes rise up the social ranks and ultimately have more offspring – and it seems to be especially beneficial in harsh environments where there are lots of predators, say, or a shortage of food.
That’s the implication of a study looking at why the level of same-sex behavior varies in different primate species. It supports the idea that, contrary to what is commonly assumed, same-sex sexual behaviors in apes and monkeys are an adaptive trait that boosts survival.
It has often been claimed that same-sex behavior is somehow “unnatural”. But in addition to people, it has now been reported in at least 1500 animals, from insects and dolphins to bison and bonobos.
There are many reasons to think this is the tip of the iceberg. Most species haven’t been closely studied; same-sex behaviors often aren’t recognized when seen because the sexes of the individuals involved may not be clear; and even when such behaviors are recognized they may not be reported.
Of the 20 or so mammal species that have been closely studied over long periods, same-sex behavior has been seen in 80 per cent. In a colony of rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta) on the Puerto Rican island of Cayo Santiago that has been studied for many decades, for instance, three-quarters of males engage in same-sex behavior, Vincent Savolainen at Imperial College London and his colleagues reported in 2023.
In other words, there can now be no doubt that same-sex behavior is entirely natural. The question is why?
This has sometimes been referred to as “the Darwinian paradox”, because of the common assumption that homosexual behavior is non-adaptive – that is, that it doesn’t help individuals have more offspring, or boost the survival chances of those they do have.
Various explanations have been proposed for why same-sex behavior is so common if it is non-adaptive. One is that same-sex behavior occurs because of a lack of discrimination, that is, because individuals can’t tell the difference between males and females. This is probably true of simple animals such as insects, but it’s certainly not the case for highly intelligent animals such as apes and dolphins.
Another is that it’s a side effect of selection for other traits. For instance, it has been suggested that some traits that boost reproductive success in women may be linked to a greater likelihood of homosexuality in men.
It’s also possible that same-sex behavior is adaptive, after all. One idea is that it helps males build coalitions that ultimately give them more access to more females. “Same-sex behavior is, if you want, a currency that you can use to navigate your way in these societies,” says Savolainen.
His team has now analyzed data on the prevalence of same-sex behavior in 59 primate species and looked for associations with environmental and social factors. Among other things, they found that it was more likely to occur in drier environments where food was scarce or where there was more predation pressure, as well as in more complex societies.
For a behavior to become more common in stressful environments does suggest it is adaptive. If, say, same-sex behavior was done for pleasure only, you’d expect it to be less common in stressful environments.
“Same-sex behavior may facilitate better cooperation and cohesion by strengthening social bonds, which is particularly important in these stressful environments,” says team member Chloë Coxshall, also at Imperial.
“But to demonstrate adaptive value, the behavior needs to be linked to increased fitness, that is, a higher number of offspring,” says Savolainen. “This is precisely what I intend to test in macaques.”
So we are not yet at the point where we can conclusively say same-sex behavior in at least some primates is adaptive, but it could be that science is about to turn yet another of our preconceptions about this behavior on its head.
What does this tell us about homosexual behaviors in people? Well, if these findings are confirmed, it might help explain why it is as common as it is. What it does not tell us, the researchers stress, is anything about the rights or wrongs of such behavior – this is the so-called naturalistic fallacy. That is, human behaviors should not be judged based on what animals do.
That said, there is a certain delicious irony in the idea that when it comes to the survival of the fittest, we may need to redefine who the fittest really are.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2511053-is-there-an-evolutionary-reason-for-same-sex-sexual-behaviour/
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ON TURNING 80 AND PLANNING TO LIVE TO 100
Lifestyle changes after 80 can help you live to 100.
Meg Selig: I haven’t actually turned 80 yet. I’ll pass that mile marker in a few months. But I am already thinking of myself as 80 just to get used to the idea. The thought fills me with 1. dread because I am that much closer to the final exit, 2. gratitude because I’ve had so much joy and love in my life, and 3. astonishment because I’m basically healthy and feel great most of the time.
I attribute my good health and long life partly to good luck and good genes. But I also made several good decisions when I was younger.
In my 20s, I vowed to lose the weight I had gained in college and maintain that healthy weight for the rest of my life. To do it, I developed my own healthy eating program, avoided restrictive diets, and figured out how to get the most pleasure—yes, pleasure—from eating. (My secrets to healthy eating are described here and in my book, Silver Sparks.)
The result: I’ve been at the same healthy weight for 55 years. I feel obliged to say that my original decision was motivated as much by vanity as health. Since then, decades of research have confirmed the benefits of a healthy weight.
I made my second big decision when I hit my 40th birthday. I wanted to avoid medical problems and remain healthy as I aged. As I looked around at the healthiest older people I knew, I saw that they all had one thing in common: they were active and exercised regularly.
Nowadays, you can’t turn on your computer without seeing a plethora of articles about the benefits of exercise. But 40 years ago, there was much less published research—at least not that I was aware of as a busy divorced single parent working full-time.
Nonetheless, I had the intuition that the secret to longevity and health was exercise. I decided to exercise three times a week, using a combination of walking, exercise DVDs (thanks, Jane Fonda and Ellen Barrett), and aerobics classes. (I now follow the standards of the World Health Organization and exercise 5-7 times a week for about 20-30 minutes each time.) My intuition about exercise and longevity proved correct, though I never could have guessed the bouquet of benefits of almost any amount of exercise.
I made other healthy decisions, too. I quit smoking in my 20s and eventually stopped drinking because I realized alcohol predictably gave me headaches. (Not surprisingly, I was later diagnosed with migraine.)
So, here I am at 80 years old. Now what? I would like to live to a healthy 100, feeling as fit, happy, and energetic as I do today, but will my current health program do that for me?
Just as I was asking myself this question, an article entitled How to Live to 100 appeared in Medical News Today. Here is a summary of the research and recommendations.
How to Live to 100
The research was unique because it studied the influence of lifestyle factors, such as exercise and healthy eating, on people 80 and older. Most such studies have concentrated on people in midlife or younger.
In the study, researchers in China followed 1,454 centenarians and 3,768 people who died before reaching 100. Each person was rated from 1-6 on such lifestyle habits as smoking, exercise, and diet. As health reporter Tony Hicks states:
"(The researchers) reported that the participants with the highest healthy lifestyle scores – based on smoking history, exercise routines, and dietary diversity – had a significantly higher likelihood of living to 100 compared to those with the least healthy lifestyle behaviors. Researchers said their findings suggest that healthy habits, even at an advanced age, can have life-prolonging benefits."
Hicks interviewed a geriatrician, Scott Kaiser, who confirmed that setting a goal to live to 100 could itself motivate healthier choices, thereby lengthening both lifespan and health span. “Much like a car you’re hoping to keep on the road if you take care of your body as if you’re going to need to for 100 years, you’re far more likely to achieve your healthy longevity goals,” Kaiser said.
In addition to exercise and healthy eating, longevity experts generally recommend the following:
Sleeping 7-8 hours per night.
Keeping your brain active. Yes, crosswords. Or whatever brain games you enjoy.
Spending time with people you love and value.
Managing stress with tai chi, meditation, mindfulness exercises, or cultivating a flexible mindset.
Finding a purpose or a way to contribute to others.
Savoring the small and large pleasures of life.
Quitting smoking and other unhealthy drugs.
The Power of a Decision
It’s good to know that I am already doing most of what I must do to reach my goal of being healthy and happy at 100. My ability to manage stress could be kicked up a notch or three, but nobody's perfect. I've decided to become an "imperfectionist," and that's remarkably helpful in reducing stress.
What about you? Can you make a decision that will help you live longer and better? If you can create a specific goal to change something that will benefit you, you are more likely to achieve your goal than if you set no goal at all, according to this research. Beyond acquiring a worthwhile health behavior, you may find that the change process strengthens your self-esteem and builds your confidence. Moreover, being healthier will make you happier. That alone is a huge bonus.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/changepower/202406/on-turning-80-years-old-and-planning-to-reach-100
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SNOWBALL EARTH
Earth looked like this 700 million years ago:
That’s right, the entire planet was covered in ice sheets that reached to the equator, the globe was on an ice age on massive steroids. This event is known as Snowball Earth, the most recent of which happened in the Cryogenian period (720–635 million years ago) during the Neoproterozoic era. Earlier global freezing did happen in the Paleoproterozoic (Huronian glaciation), but I’ll be focusing on the Sturtian and Marinoan glaciations.
There are 2 main things that determine Earth’s temperature:
The sun’s luminosity
Atmospheric gases
Back in the Cryogenian, the sun was 6–7% dimmer than it is today (the sun gets brighter over time), meaning baseline temperatures were a lot lower on average, which made Earth much more vulnerable to an albedo runaway, which I’ll get to in a bit.
In the preceding Tonian period, continents were lined in the equator; this is huge as chemical weathering is strongest at the equator due to intense rainfalls. Chemical weathering locks CO2 gases into carbonate rocks. This happens when CO2 rains down upon silicate rocks, which are common in volcanic regions and continental merging. Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, which means it traps the sun’s heat in the atmosphere, unlike oxygen. So when CO2 gets locked away in carbonate rocks, the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere decreases.
This process happened over in the millions of years leading up to the Cryogenian. CO2 would keep plummeting as more and more carbonate rocks were formed due to chemical weathering, which continuously cooled the planet. Eventually, ice around the poles started to form. Ice is one of the best deflectors of sunlight on Earth, otherwise known as albedo. As the amount of greenhouse gases lowered, more and more ice started to form, which reflected more sunlight, which made the Earth even colder, which meant more ice.
Once the ice reached around 40° degrees latitude, the albedo runaway affect became unstoppable, causing ice to eventually reach the equator, thus beginning Snowball Earth.
It’s estimated that at least 80–90% of the planet during this time would’ve been frozen rock solid, with possible small patches of equatorial ocean remaining intact, if any. Otherwise, the continents were covered in ice sheets kilometers thick, with oceans being covered in ice at least a couple hundred meters thick.
Temperatures around this time are estimated to have averaged around -50°C globally, with the equator being around -30°C on average, and the poles being a whopping -80°C on average! To put that into perspective, Antarctica's record low of -89°C is barely colder than the average.
The absolute coldest days of Cryogenian period would’ve likely happened in the South Pole in winter. It’s been estimated that the record low could've reached a monumental -110°C to -130°C; that’s as freezing as the average day on Mars’s poles at night. These were very likely the coldest days in Earth’s history.
However, below the ice sheets covering the sea, life was still enduring, the earliest and most primitive of animals still hanged on in these hellish conditions, such as Otavia antiqua, possibly by being near hydrothermal vents and small patches of water where sunlight hit.
And as for how Snowball Earth ended? Volcanos.
Even during this global freezing, volcanos remained active and contributors of CO2 gases, and now that Earth was frozen, chemical weathering became pretty much nonexistent, so nothing was able to prevent CO2 gases from accumulating over millions of years.
Eventually, enough CO2 accumulated that ice began to melt at the equator before eventually, Earth was ice free.
Since then, Snowball Earth has never happened again. The last time this phenomenon could’ve been possible under the perfect conditions was around 540–520 million years ago in the early Cambrian. Afterwards, the sun became too bright to allow ice to reach the equator before melting. Even today, we are nearing the threshold for ice ages in the geological time scale. Snowball Earth will forever be exclusive to the Proterozoic eon.
~ Cesar Alcaraz, Quora
Michael Monea:
So, what was the cause of these climate change events?
Cesar Alcaraz:
CO2 withdrawal. For most of the Proterozoic, CO2 levels were relatively stable, which prevented the Earth from globally freezing. But in the years leading up to the Cryogenian period, chemical weathering increased dramatically, which caused carbon dioxide to diminish in the atmosphere at a continuous rate.
David Reid:
Contrary to he old “tranquil shallow beach” idea of where life formed, life actually started after a similar period of intense glaciation.
Maybe huge glaciers scoured rocks, maybe depositing minerals into coastal volcanically active areas, that also had enough iron to attract lightning strikes.
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T. rex took 40 years to become fully grown.
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CLIMATE CHANGE AND THE DECLINE IN HUMAN BODY CORE TEMPERATURE
Human body temperature has declined over the past two centuries.
Climate change may further influence human thermoregulation and core temperature.
We propose a link between rising ambient heat and long-term physiologic adaptation.
Future studies should track generational trends in body temperature and heat response.
~ Average human core body temperature has decreased over the past two centuries. While reduced infections and modern lifestyles have likely contributed to this observation, we hypothesize that increasing global temperatures as a result of human activity are driving a physiological adaptation by resetting thermoregulatory set points.
This shift may reflect short-term plasticity rather than genetic evolution. Understanding these changes requires considering metabolic, immune, and demographic factors, as well as acknowledging limitations in historical temperature measurements. Recognizing this trend could reshape our understanding of human health in the context of climate change.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0306987725003056
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SEED OILS: SHOULD WE AVOID THEM?
What do ready-to-bake cinnamon rolls, most french fries and many premade salad dressings have in common? They’re all made with seed oils.
Everyone from so-called wellness influencers on social media to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the secretary of health and human services, wants us to believe that seed oils are uniquely bad for us. The health secretary has gone so far as to say, without evidence, that seed oils are toxic. And some restaurants, including the salad chain Sweetgreen, are increasingly boasting of seed-oil-free options.
So today we dig into seed oils: What are they, and are they secretly killing us? To answer these questions we reached out to Eric Decker. He’s a professor at the Center for Agriculture, Food and the Environment at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
Scientific American (SA): One of the reasons we wanted to speak with you is you’re something of an expert on seed oils, which have in recent years become the villain of, you know, quote, unquote, “wellness” social media. For me that raises a pretty natural question, which is: What is a seed oil?
Decker: Basically, the fats we eat could come from animals, so that would be things like lard and tallow and butter; or they can come from fruit, and that would be things like olive and avocado; or they can come from seeds, and those seeds could be soybean, corn, canola, sunflower.
SA: So something like corn or soybean oil would be a seed oil …
Decker: Correct.
SA: But something like olive oil or—my personal nemesis because I’m allergic to it—avocado oil, that is not a seed oil.
Decker: Correct.
SA: But when I’m looking in my kitchen cabinet I’m seeing, for the most part, liquid oils that all look exactly the same. Are seed oils different, like, on a chemical level from non-seed oils?
Decker: Yeah, they’re gonna have a couple differences. So what makes olive oil unique is it’s not a refined oil—extra-virgin olive oil. Avocado oil, sometimes it’s refined; sometimes it’s not refined. Most of the seed oils that we would buy at the supermarket would be refined. There are some cold-pressed seed oils, but they’re pretty uncommon.
So because they’re refined or not refined could be one of the reasons that their composition will change. But the other thing is, is that the genetics of the plant dictates the type of fatty acids that are in the oil.
And so olive and avocado oil, very high in oleic acid, which is a monounsaturated fatty acid.
The seed oils, you can find a very broad range of fatty acid composition. So canola oil would be very high in monounsaturated fatty acids, like olive oil and avocado oil. But then the others, like corn and soybean and the safflower or sunflower, these are high in polyunsaturated fatty acids, and the most common one of those is linoleic acid. Which has two double bonds, versus the monounsaturates with one double bond.
SA: Okay, so for a regular person who’s just trying to figure out what they should eat in the grocery store aisle, these fatty acids, do they matter?
So people who—especially people who have high LDL —could benefit greatly by using a seed oil that has a high linoleic-acid concentration.
Wait, what? Because I have it on good authority from our human health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., that Americans are being “unknowingly poisoned” by seed oils. Here’s what he said in an interview on Fox & Friends in 2024.
[CLIP: RFK Jr. speaks in an August 24, 2024, interview on Fox & Friends Weekend: “Seed oils are one of the, the most unhealthy ingredients that we have in foods.... Seed oils, they are associated with all kinds of very, very serious illnesses, including body-wide inflammation.”]
Decker: Yeah, there’s a lot of theories about this. There’s one theory called the omega-3/omega-6 ratio. And this theory—the omega-6, which is the polyunsaturated linoleic acid, is thought to increase inflammation. Whereas the omega-3s, most of which we would get from fish oil, would decrease inflammation. So even though this, this is a theory and it’s been shown in animals, but not in humans when you actually look at human clinical trials.
The linoleic acid, the omega-6, has not been shown to increase inflammation. So right now the research shows that the benefit of the linoleic acid in decreasing your LDL cholesterol is much greater than the potential risk of that fatty acid increasing inflammation.
The other controversy involving the seed oils is they’re extracted with hexane which is a chemical solvent. But there’s pretty good data that shows that for the consumer that’s not really a high risk. Almost all the hexane’s removed from the oil when they process it.
And really, the only time you ever see hexane being a problem is with workers in factories that are exposed to very high levels of hexane.
SA: From the outside it often seems, when I go to the grocery store and I look at, you know, these seed oils, they’re often lower-cost than some of the other oils that we’re being pushed to consume instead. And I’m wondering—it feels like there’s a little bit of classism at play here and this idea that just because it’s expensive, it must be better for us.
Decker: So the best example is extra-virgin olive oil. They just press out the fat, and when they press out the fat they don’t get all the fat out of the olive. So the yield is somewhat low. Plus, olives can only be grown in warm climates, so there’s limitation of how much that’s out—there’s actually some shortages that are occurring right now because of climate change. So they typically will be more expensive. And when you think about olive oil it’s really—has a lot of flavor to it, and that flavor is very desirable in the olive oil. And so that’s why you don’t wanna refine it, because it takes all the flavor out of it.
The seed oils, on the other hand, are extracted with hexane, and when they’re extracted with hexane this gets all the oil out, so it’s very, very efficient. But it takes out some other fats—it takes out things like phospholipids and free fatty acids and fats that aren’t desirable in the oil. So the refining process removes these other lipid components from the oil, and this makes the oil very bland in flavor; it gives it really good cooking properties, like very high smoke point; and so it makes these oils very, very versatile. But because they are so efficient at extracting it, it also makes the costs much lower.
SA: And isn’t that also why people love deep-frying in peanut oil, because it has a high smoke point?
Decker: Yeah, they’re all pretty similar; all the refined oils are pretty similar. When you get into high saturated fats they would be a little bit higher. But, you know, peanut oil is a good one—’cause in a lot of those applications when you’re cooking, you want bland, right? You don’t wanna make your sugar cookies with olive oil.
[Laughs.] So, so you want, you know, you want a bland—or maybe in the case of a cookie you want butter, right? But in some applications, you don’t want the oil to have flavor.
One thing about olive oil, it’s actually not good to high-temperature-cook olive oil ’cause it’s got a low smoke point and you’ll lose a lot of the flavor that you’re paying for. So it’s, like, you should use it in cold applications or in—you know, you can use it in a frying pan, which doesn’t get too hot.
I think a risk in all oils is if you heat ’em too high and they start to smoke, you’re now decomposing the oil into other compounds, which have health risks. So really managing your oil when you’re cooking with it and not letting it get too high of temperature and start to smoke is also very important.
SA: Right, and that’s where it comes into handy to know how to cook a little and to look for the smoke point. But I guess it feels like there’s a health halo around kind of the more expensive oils and we’re vilifying sort of the cheaper, more accessible oils.
Decker: Yeah, I mean, extra-virgin olive oil does have this halo, and there’s a lot of good research that shows that it has health benefits beyond just normal oils. A really good contrast is your favorite, avocado oil.
So avocado oil doesn’t really have any data that shows that it has major health benefits, and actually, its fatty acid composition, in terms of the amount of monounsaturated fatty acids, is very similar to canola oil. So—and when you go to the store and you look at olive oil—or avocado oil, you find that a lot of times it’s refined; it’s not cold-pressed. And so if it’s refined, then you’re taking out other potential beneficial compounds in the oil, and it becomes even more like canola oil, except it’s probably four times more expensive.
So it’s more that people are making these cold-pressed oils into being these superfoods when there’s really no evidence to show, especially with avocado oil, that that’s true.
SA: That’s, A, awesome to know, and, B, I hope the word gets out because people are putting avocado oil in everything for no reason [Laughs], as someone who’s allergic.
But something I’ve noticed is that the people who really hate seed oils aren’t just pushing other plant-based oils, like olive or palm oils. They’re really pushing for us to use animal fats, like butter or rendered beef, a.k.a. tallow.
You’ve probably heard that the fast-food chain Steak ’n Shake, for example, has said it’s gonna eliminate seed oils in favor of beef tallow. And actually, if you go on the website, they’re selling jars of beef tallow. And this kind of makes me think—Steak ’n Shake is just fundamentally processed fast foods. And I can’t imagine that even if you were to switch whatever oil they were using before for a, quote, unquote, “healthier” oil, it’s gonna make that much difference in the health of ordinary people.
Decker: Yeah, there’s two parts of this controversy. One is that some people don’t feel that saturated fats are that bad for you, but again, there’s pretty good clinical evidence to show that saturated fats increase your LDL cholesterol. They do the opposite of the polyunsaturated fats. So especially if you were to replace polyunsaturated fats with saturated fats, you would decrease the benefit of the healthy polyunsaturated fats in your diet.
However, on the other side, there’s an oxidation that occurs in oils, and when those oils oxidize they start to decompose into a whole variety of compounds, some of which, in animal studies, have shown to have some toxicity. So if you do something, like, in, uh, food-service operations and you deep-fry foods with these highly polyunsaturated fatty acids, they can oxidize and produce these products, where if you use something like tallow, which is saturated, it’s much more stable against the oxidation and doesn’t present, again, that risk.
Now, as long as you take care of the oil that you’re using in the fryer, there’s no real risk there. The risk becomes—is when the oil is not used properly.
SA: And what does “used properly” mean?
Decker: It just means you have to make sure that you maintain the oil in the freshest state possible. Good food-service operations will actually filter and clean their oil on a regular basis. And then you have to monitor the oil, and when it gets to be older you need to discard and start with fresh oil.
SA: In a way you’re saying that using beef tallow gives fast-food restaurants an easier margin, so they’re able to, essentially, use older oil than they would if they were using a seed oil.
In a way you’re saying that using beef tallow gives fast-food restaurants an easier margin, so they’re able to, essentially, use older oil than they would if they were using a seed oil.
So for many years McDonald’s used beef tallow. And then what happened is people were concerned about the cholesterol in the beef tallow, so McDonald’s stopped using the beef tallow. But many times if you go to fancy restaurants, you can get fries that are cooked in beef tallow—or even duck fat. Sometimes you see duck-fat fries. And that’s part of the advantage of that, is you’re getting a flavor in addition to the stability of the fat.
SA: And it also just sort of seems like for your everyday, you’re not looking for a flavor, maybe you’re making a stir-fry, a seed oil is fine. If you really want, like, a strong—like, maybe you’re making a pasta dish or a salad, that’s a really good place to use your extra-virgin olive oil because it adds a really good flavor profile.
And to be clear, I love a good duck-fat french fry; they are very tasty. But I’m also not under the belief system that a potato deep-fried in duck fat is heart-healthy. [Laughs.] I’m not making a health claim. And I think the thing that, with seed oils in particular, is many of the people who are vilifying them is they’re making an explicit health claim and telling people to eat diets that are really heavy in these saturated fats and to really pivot away from eating, you know, canola oil or oils that are, for many people, lower-cost, more accessible and—it seems to be, based on the available evidence—better for our health.
Decker: Yeah, I mean, I would say that the influencers who have had so many negative comments about seed oil, those aren’t really based on strong scientific evidence.
And you know, like you said, the recommendation should really be, “Eat less fried food,” right, because fried food’s gonna be, generally, very high in calories. If it’s potatoes or chicken nuggets, it’s not gonna be very high in positive nutrients.
So the messaging is—seems to be all messed up. We shouldn’t worry about, “Is seed oil better than tallow?” We should be worried about people that eat so much fried food in their diet.
Oriana:
I use only two kinds of oil: extra virgin olive oil, and MCT oil (derived from coconut oil). Come to think of it, I also use Irish grass-fed butter, wonderfully soft and flavorful. Butter is a source of short-chain fatty acids — and of course it adds flavor to practically any dish. There is zero-need for seed oils. None.
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HOW CELERY HELPS YOUR ARTERIES
Lowers Blood Pressure: Contains 3-n-butylphthalide (NBP) and apigenin, which relax artery walls and act as diuretics, improving blood flow.
Reduces Inflammation: Its antioxidants and polyphenols fight inflammation in blood vessels, a key factor in atherosclerosis (plaque buildup).
May Prevent Plaque: Some studies suggest celery compounds can lower bad cholesterol (LDL) and prevent plaque formation, protecting against heart disease.
Provides Key Nutrients: High in water for hydration, fiber for digestion, and potassium for blood pressure regulation.
Steaming for 10 minutes retains most antioxidants.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=benefits+of+celery
Oriana:
Celery is wonderful — so refreshing and hydrating! But if you are serious about lowering your blood pressure, bear in mind that the best vegetable for increasing the blood-vessel widening nitric oxide is beets. And the best blood-pressure lowering supplement? In my opinion, the amino-acid citrulline. Combine it with CoQ10, and prepare to be amazed.
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EFFECTIVE ANTI-INFLAMMATORY SUPPLEMENTS
Effective anti-inflammatory supplements with good evidence include Omega-3s (fish oil), Curcumin (the active ingredient in turmeric), and Ginger, which help reduce inflammatory markers; other supportive options are Green Tea Extracts, Vitamin D, Vitamin C, and Quercetin, but always consult a doctor before starting, especially if taking other medications, as quality and dosage vary.
Berberine is one of the most impressive supplements in existence. Studies have shown that berberine has both antioxidant and anti-inflammatory effects.
Spirulina, a type of blue-green algae, is rich in powerful antioxidants, omega-3 fatty acids, and anti-inflammatory compounds. It can help reduce inflammation caused by allergies, asthma, and anemia by improving inflammatory markers.
Spirulina helps improve joint health as it is rich in glucosamine, a compound that helps rebuild cartilage. It also contains phycocyanin, an anti-inflammatory compound that helps protect joints from wear and tear.
THE RHEIMS CATHEDRAL
He who walks through the meadows of Champagne
At noon in Fall, when leaves like gold appear,
Sees it draw near
Like some great mountain set upon the plain,
From radiant dawn until the close of day,
Nearer it grows
To him who goes
Across the country. When tall towers lay
Their shadowy pall
Upon his way,
He enters, where
The solid stone is hollowed deep by all
Its centuries of beauty and of prayer.
~ Emile Verhaeren
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