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THE DARK REALITIES REVEALED IN WUTHERING HEIGHTS
When Emily Brontë published Wuthering Heights in 1847, many critics found it disturbing. “It is a compound of vulgar depravity and unnatural horrors,” opined Philadelphia’s Graham’s Magazine.
Set mostly in the 18th century and written during the Victorian era (1837-1901), the book is an intergenerational saga of revenge, abuse and emotional intensity. It tells the story of Heathcliff, an orphan taken into the isolated Yorkshire manor of Wuthering Heights, where he is raised alongside—yet never fully accepted by—the Earnshaw family.
Brutalized and reduced to a servant, Heathcliff forms a fierce, destructive bond with Catherine Earnshaw. When he overhears Catherine declare marrying him would degrade her, he flees, only to return years later hardened and wealthy. He spends the rest of his life torturing the people around him to take revenge.
Here, we break down some key social issues at the heart of the novel, set against the backdrop of late-18th- and 19th-century England. Fair warning—spoilers ahead.
Child Labor
Heathcliff first arrives at Wuthering Heights in 1771, when he’s about 7 years old. Nelly Dean, the servant who narrates most of the novel, explains that Mr. Earnshaw found the boy on the streets of Liverpool and brought him back to his rural home in West Yorkshire. Earnshaw names the child Heathcliff and treats him like a son, but resentment quickly takes root in the Earnshaw family.
The eldest child, Hindley, grows jealous of the newcomer as years pass. When their patriarch dies, Heathcliff is about 13. Hindley strips Heathcliff of his status and makes him a servant in the stables—a humiliation he never forgets.
But Heathcliff’s young age as a servant wasn’t unusual in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, when children as young as 5 worked in factories and mines. Careful readers will note that Nelly Dean also worked for the Earnshaws as a child. She is roughly the same age as Hindley and grew up as both his playmate and servant.
In the late 19th century, the United Kingdom reduced child labor by making school compulsory. An 1880 act mandated school for children ages 5 to 10. Over the next two decades, the country extended compulsory schooling to age 12.
Racial Identity
Heathcliff’s origins remain a mystery. He arrives without a name or family. Nelly says he speaks “some gibberish that nobody could understand.” Mrs. Earnshaw indignantly asks how her husband could bring home a “gipsy brat.”
Throughout the book, characters call Heathcliff this slur against Romani people, who faced discrimination and criminalization in England during this time. In the 18th and 19th centuries, English law and social prejudice framed Romani communities and punished them with statutes like the 1744 Vagrancy Act.
The novel’s characters speculate about what country Heathcliff or his parents may have come from. The neighboring Mr. Linton says Heathcliff may be “a little Lascar,” a term for Indian sailors “or an American or Spanish castaway.” When trying to raise Heathcliff’s spirits, Nelly Dean tells him his father could be the "Emperor of China" and his mother an "Indian queen.”
Modern scholars have pointed out that Liverpool was a major slave-trading port in the 1770s (when Earnshaw found the boy there), suggesting Heathcliff could also have African ancestry.
“He’s definitely racially and ethnically ambiguous,” says Danielle Mariann Dove, a lecturer in English literature at the University of Surrey. His unclear racial identity marks him as different from the white English characters in the novel, as does his unfixed class status.
Class Dynamics
The Earnshaws are a family of landowning farmers who employ servants. During Heathcliff’s first years at Wuthering Heights, he mostly lives as the family does, but his demotion to servant removes his financial stability and influences Cathy’s decision to marry the wealthy Edgar Linton instead.
“If she married Heathcliff, she would have literally had nothing,” says Sue Newby, a learning officer at the Brontë Parsonage Museum in Haworth, England. “For the fact that she marries Linton instead of Heathcliff, I honestly think that she doesn’t really have a lot of choice.”
When 16-year-old Heathcliff overhears Cathy tell Dean she is considering marrying Edgar because it would “degrade” her to marry Heathcliff, he runs away from Wuthering Heights. Three years later, Heathcliff returns as a gentleman who has somehow made a fortune. His class status changes; and with it, his marriage prospects. Since Cathy is already married to Linton, he pursues Linton's sister instead.
Abusive Marriages
Marrying Linton’s sister Isabella is part of Heathcliff’s revenge scheme. As soon as they wed, he becomes cruel and abusive. He traps her at Wuthering Heights, which he has financially acquired due to Hindley’s gambling debts. While pregnant, Isabella runs away to raise their child alone—a decision that would have carried serious legal repercussions at the time.
The real-life case of Caroline Norton illustrates those risks. After leaving her abusive husband, George Norton, in 1835, he retaliated by denying her the ability to see their kids. With no legal right to custody, Caroline returned to the marriage to raise her children. The following year, George kicked Caroline out and again kept their children from her. Norton’s ordeal exposed the legal power husbands held over wives in Victorian England. Her petitions to the government led to the passage of the 1839 Custody of Infants Act and helped her gain shared custody in 1841.
In Wuthering Heights, Heathcliff doesn't exercise legal action to bring his son back until after his wife’s death.
Inheritance Law
Heathcliff doesn’t just acquire Wuthering Heights, he pursues the neighboring estate of Thrushcross Grange by forcing his son Linton and Cathy's daughter, Cathy Jr., to wed. (As if the names aren’t confusing enough, these two are also first cousins.)
Wuthering Heights “is one of the most carefully legally plotted novels I think I’ve ever read,” says Katherine Gilbert, an English professor at Drury University. Because of the legal concept of coverture, in which any property a woman inherited was owned by her husband, “women in the novel often serve as conduits for the property that transfers between the men.”
Heathcliff orchestrates the marriage so that Linton will inherit Thrushcross Grange when Cathy Jr.'s ailing father dies. Linton also dies from an illness shortly after the union. The property transfers to Heathcliff, and he becomes the master of both estates.
What happens to Cathy Jr. after her husband-cousin dies? For that, you’ll have to read the book.
https://www.history.com/articles/wuthering-heights-realities-victorian-era-england?utm_source=firefox-newtab-en-us
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AN ASTONISHINGLY BAD ADAPTATION
Our modern literacy crisis has found a new figurehead in Emerald Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights”. It’s Emily Brontë’s 1847 classic for a culture that’s denigrated literature to the point where it’s no longer intended to expand the mind but to distract it.
With its title stylized in quotation marks, and a director’s statement that it’s intended to capture her experience of reading the book aged 14, it uses the guise of interpretation to gut one of the most impassioned, emotionally violent novels ever written, and then toss its flayed skin over whatever romance tropes seem most marketable. Adaptation or not, it’s an astonishingly hollow work.
Some of this, it can be argued, was already signaled by the film’s casting and the choice to obliterate any mention of race, colonialism, or ostracization in the telling of pseudo-siblings Cathy and Heathcliff’s destructive codependence. Heathcliff, whose ethnically ambiguous appearance is of great concern to every other character in the book, is played by white Australian actor Jacob Elordi.
A blond-and-blue-eyed Margot Robbie plays Cathy, who, while far more accepted than Heathcliff, still exhibits in the source material a desperation to fit a social ideal represented by the wealthier, blond-and-blue-eyed Lintons, Edgar and Isabella (here played by Shazad Latif and Alison Oliver).
Fennell has no interest in such narrative tensions, or really in any of the emotional drive of Brontë’s novel – a naked rage so extreme that a contemporary critic wondered how anyone could write such “vulgar depravity and unnatural horrors” and not kill themselves after a few chapters.
Fennell only adapts the first half of the novel – a tradition since the 1939 film (the earliest extant version) that carried through to Andrea Arnold’s 2011 iteration, the most spiritually faithful take. Accuracy, then, isn’t the primary issue – tone is. And “Wuthering Heights” is whimperingly tame compared even with Fennell’s own work. There’s a hell of a lot more Cathy and Heathcliff in the messy, self-destructive, self-loathing characters of Promising Young Woman (2020) or Saltburn (2023) than there is here.
Heathcliff, for one, has become a wet-eyed, Mills & Boon mirage created entirely to induce swooning, always on standby to shield Cathy from the cold and rain. How infinitely dull he is compared to the complicated, challenging figure we meet in the book: a victim of abuse so dead-set on vengeance that he becomes as monstrous as those who harmed him.
Fennell, in her script, has conflated Heathcliff’s chief abuser, Hindley, with Cathy’s father Mr Earnshaw (Martin Clunes), and made Cathy and Heathcliff equal targets of his violence. This, in turn, flattens the entire story into that of a poor maiden who escapes her dire circumstances by marrying a wealthy man, Edgar, who loves her but is dull, all while she yearns for her soulmate who has not a penny to his name.
When Heathcliff leaves, only to come back rich, it’s presented here as a romcom makeover and not a man’s mission to acquire enough financial power to ruin the lives of everyone he hates.
“Wuthering Heights” is so affronted by the notion that Heathcliff might be anything other than a dreamboat that it builds a world around him that’s more suited to a fairytale than a Gothic masterwork. Jacqueline Durran’s costumes and Suzie Davies’ sets quote cinephile classics like Jacques Demy’s Peau d’âne (1970) and Jean Cocteau’s La Belle et la Bête (1946), while paired with Linus Sandgren’s soft-as-butter cinematography.
But when faced with Brontë’s own vivid, thorny language, all those fantastical red riding hoods and arm-shaped candle holders look as garish as a live-action Disney film. If there’s an exception, it’s Charli xcx’s and Anthony Willis’s musical contributions, which offer a dread that’s missing from everywhere else.
As a sadomasochistic provocation – another of the film’s stated intents – it’s equally limp. A hanged man with an erection drives a village into a Bacchanalian frenzy. A woman wears a dog collar and barks. But these scenes aren’t provocative when they’re so expressly played as a joke, mostly with a fetishistic view of class that categorizes poor people as sexual deviants and rich people as clueless prudes.
And the supposedly “wild” Heathcliff never does anything to Cathy that couldn’t be spotted in the average Bridgerton episode. Mostly, he sticks his fingers in her mouth. Robbie and Elordi don’t entirely lack chemistry, but their characters do feel so thinned out that their performances are pushed almost to the border of pantomime. She’s wilful and spiky. He’s rough but gentle. That’s about it.
Perhaps there’s a more graceful takeaway from all this. If “Wuthering Heights” were true to the spirit of what it feels like to read Wuthering Heights, at any age, it wouldn’t be a film you could market with brand tie-ins and Valentine’s Day screenings. It would disturb people. So, what is Fennell’s loss is only Brontë’s gain. She remains singular.
https://www.the-independent.com/arts-entertainment/films/reviews/wuthering-heights-movie-review-jacob-elordi-margot-robbie-b2920358.html
“Shingaly Moor, Yorkshire,” by Margaret Stoddart, 1865–1934.
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MOTHERLESS GIRL
Rarely does a film exercise the public this much before it’s even been released, but Emerald Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” – quotation marks and all – has done it. This has been rumbling along for months actually, and certainly for longer than usual, in even for most contentious film adaptations. Long before the trailer landed, it was all about who’s in the film.
Fennell’s casting decisions – too old, too blond, too pale – have been picked up on with what you could term accusatorial glee by people ready to get bent out of shape to prove their knowledge of the source text – knowledge which has turned out to be a bit piecemeal in places, if we’re being harsh.
This continued; Catherine’s dresses were anachronistic; even the fabric was ‘wrong’; the accents were not up to scratch; finally, Fennell herself shouldn’t have bothered, being as she is too posh, and therefore somehow out of the running to direct a film where the specter of class and wealth casts an undeniable shadow over the relationship between Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff… or, maybe that could work rather well?
In some cases, hatred for the film feels more like personal hostility towards the director; perhaps consider what she could be doing with her unstinting privilege, and be grateful she’s making bold, original feature films instead.
Forget all of that. Or, rather, if you’re determined to be annoyed by “Wuthering Heights”, then fill your boots: there’s already a raft of affirmative reviews for that out there, many of which have had a blast evaluating a film against criteria it was never suggested it had. This fever dream version of the novel is visually stunning, captures elements of the book’s subliminal energy and passion that haven’t yet been brought to the screen, and though it plays fast and loose with key plot points, to this reviewer it feels affectionate and engaged, not cynical or jaded.
If it’s all a bit much for you, then feel grateful that the novel’s worst excesses have been left on the page: tortured wildlife, hanged pets, imprisonment, domestic abuse, even unearthed corpses. Remember also that Wuthering Heights has been adapted for the screen many times, and not one has been a faithful retelling of Emily Brontë’s novel – a novel which, by the way, her sister Charlotte apologized for in her preface to the book, noting that it contained characters full of “perverted passion and passionate perversity”, which wouldn’t be a bad description of the 2026 film.
In Emerald Fennell’s rendition, arguably her second take on the novel (oh come on: Saltburn essentially follows the same story arc), the second generation of Heathcliffs and Lintons never come into existence; the film sticks closely with the first-generation love story, not lingering on the legal apparatus later used by Heathcliff to disinherit those who wronged him, but staying very, very close to the mutual passion which made Brontë’s Heathcliff want to avenge himself in the first place. It’s a singular reading of the book, sure, but it’s valid, daring and gorgeous.
Starting with a public hanging which instantly conflates and foreshadows the film’s big, bold links between sex and death, we meet Cathy as a little girl. Her father, here a hybrid between the kindly, if odd Mr. Earnshaw who brings home a ‘Gipsy brat’ from a sojourn to the dock city of Liverpool and Cathy’s older brother Hindley (played with zeal by Martin Clunes) divides his time between getting grotesquely drunk and squandering all of his money on gambling, but finds a moment to bring home an abused and rootless little boy from the marketplace, christened Heathcliff by young Cathy.
The child actors in this part of the film are fantastic. Owen Cooper, who plays Heathcliff, made a ferocious impact playing Jamie in the TV series Adolescence in 2025 and he’s great here, too, balancing the slow-burn of an ardent attachment to his foster sister with a masochistic, taciturn streak which turns readily into tangible cruelty in adulthood.
Young Cathy (Charlotte Mellington) comes closest to capturing the ‘wild wicked slip’ epithet bestowed on her by Nelly Dean in the novel; it’s worth remembering that, landowners or not, the Earnshaws live on a working farm; there’s no long stays at school, no lessons in etiquette and no mother to keep her daughter in line. Little Cathy is a headstrong menace, even if her heart is (sometimes) in the right place.
The Heights here is a like Fellini’s Satyricon (1969) come to the edge of the Yorkshire moors, by the way: the striking visuals of the house help to position the whole narrative somewhere on the fringes of reality and possibility, making the whole thing feel like a febrile hallucination. If you can get your head around that and accept it on its own terms, then you’ll likely enjoy the rest.
In adulthood, Cathy is at a loss what to do with herself: when she’s not dragging her skirts through pigs’ blood, she’s stuck in a childlike inertia, unmarried, without occupation and reduced to stamping her foot at her father’s ongoing excesses as the house threatens to disappear from under them via a slew of unpaid bills and debts. Her sexual feelings for Heathcliff, still on hold at this point, are quite suddenly lit by a touchpaper when she becomes innocently exposed to the fact that the servants are conducting assignations of their own in the darkest corners of the house; she sees this at the same time as Heathcliff does, but before anything happens, Cathy’s curiosity over the new, wealthy neighbors down at the stately Thrushcross Grange throw her into the path of the kindly Edgar Linton (Shazad Latif) and his ward – not his sister, in this film – Isabella (Alison Oliver).
Catherine sprains her ankle trying to peer into this Secret Garden world and ends up staying for a period of time to recover. She returns to the Heights as a lady, or at least looking like one, and shortly afterwards – here compelled by the specter of imminent poverty – she finds herself engaged to Mr. Linton.
Heathcliff overhears her say that she has accepted Edgar, and that it would degrade her to marry Heathcliff. He disappears, leaving Cathy to the comfortable boredom of the Grange, but once he’s a made man, he returns to stand by the words he spoke as a child – that he would take any punishment for Cathy’s sake. This being finally out in the open, their affair becomes by turns all-consuming, soul-sapping and toxic; it’s worth remembering that these are not nice people – and were never intended to be – but their lust for one another is undeniable, pushing the film onwards to its fatalistic conclusion.
Where the novel hints (but hints strongly) at the romantic and sexual attraction between Cathy and Heathcliff, Fennell’s film thinks, let’s just go for it. Just once. Let’s do a version of the story where Cathy and Heathcliff’s love is about as far away from unconsummated as it’s possible to get.
Admittedly, even all this passion gets a little plodding, but there’s undoubtedly chemistry between Robbie and Elordi; the age difference doesn’t seem like a problem, and some of the set pieces used are absolutely painterly. Heathcliff, once the street urchin, has no problem clambering in and out of Thrushcross Grange when he wants; Edgar seems perfectly clueless at first, though when he eventually begins to take back control of his house and his wife, he essentially imprisons Catherine in her room, finally forcing the impasse between her and her true love.
Thrushcross Grange here is an enchanted space, lush and strange, a doll’s house world within a doll’s house world, but a gilded cage nonetheless. Catherine’s room, bizarrely, is a facsimile of herself, the walls decorated to resemble her skin, walls which are bled just like she is during her illness.
Like The Masque of the Red Death, every room has a color and a theme, and every room bears closer inspection. It’s not real, and doesn’t want to be. Had an obscure arthouse director come up with this, and had audiences had to seek it out, the film would be lauded around the world.
Of course, no film is perfect and “Wuthering Heights” has a few less successful elements, beyond the repetitive nature of Cathy and Heathcliff’s hook-ups. There are misfires; for example, against an array of earthy Yorkshirewomen grudgingly cleaning up Mr. Earnshaw’s vomit after a libation, we get a strange, strained version of Nelly Dean (Hong Chau) who turns out to be some illegitimate offspring of the landed gentry, dumped at the Heights to alternate between a maid-of-all-work and a haughty lady-in-waiting, sometimes joining in with the housework and sometimes sitting aloft like a moral cipher.
There’s no real vigor to the role, and it feels on several occasions that this Nelly is only around to play receptacle to some of the novel’s finest lines. Which, by the way, this film does contain: lots of Cathy and Heathcliff’s most ardent speeches are included and still pack an emotional punch.
Some reviewers have been uncomfortable with the few tension-busting moments of humor in the film, but they work: remember, again, that the film is based on a book which has its own, awkward moments of comedy too. Audience discomfort with the most strident reminders of the film’s sexual undertones show a director utterly confident in the version of the story she’s created, who doesn’t much care, and feels like she can joke. It’s refreshing.
There’s a huge weight of expectation around any literary adaptation like this, but Fennell has gone her own way, and whether you can get fully on side with that or not, she deserves praise for it, not snide hostility. She doesn’t owe you social realism, folks, no film ever does, and if you’re feeling a tad “smooth-brained“, go back and read the book.
https://warped-perspective.com/2026/02/wuthering-heights-2026/
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WHY IS PUTIN SO ANGRY?
Putin is angry because nothing he’s doing works the way he planned. He has to constantly attend to emergency “fires” and amend his plans.
Before Putin launched the full-scale ground invasion against Ukraine in February 2022 (the plan was to “take Kyiv in 3 days,” as you remember), he put forward an ultimatum to NATO: move back to pre-1997 boundaries—or else.
Putin even demanded that each NATO country answers the Russian ultimatum individually.
The FSB-adjacent bloggers, astrologists, and “psychics” were flooding the channels with “secret predictions” about the imminent collapse of the US Dollar and Euro, breakdown of the European Union, civil war in the U.S., and Europe finally escaping “the occupation by American troops.”
This was the FSB plan. This was Putin’s plan.
Which he birthed during the weeks of isolation in his Valdai residence with his closest buddies, brothers Kovalchuk, while the rest of the world was fighting for toilet paper in supermarkets, in the crazy first months of 2020 pandemics.
The FSB immediately began implementing Putin’s plan. Its first step was Navalny’s poisoning on August 20, 2020.
You know it was Putin behind it because of the date: Putin believes in numerology. He believes in the magic of numbers.
Why Navalny?
Putin was convinced that Navalny was an agent of “the West,” that he was recruited by the CIA to remove him, Putin.
Putin’s first job in the Soviet KGB was to chase dissidents (I write about it in my latest book)—it’s his firm belief that anyone speaking against the corrupt state system is hired by foreign enemies. That’s obviously how they taught them in the KGB. He just can’t shake it off. Putin doesn’t believe in grassroots movements. He doesn’t believe that people have agency.
Navalny’s poisoning didn’t go to plan: he was supposed to die on the plane, but the pilot went for emergency landing and paramedics immediately applied an antidote to Novichok, and Navalny didn’t die.
He was in a coma and not getting the correct treatment (the FSB descended on the Siberian hospital, pressuring the chief doctor to say that Navalny had some blood sugar issues—the doctor who made the statement died a suspicious death months later).
After much public outcry, picked internationally, Putin allowed Navalny to be evacuated to Germany. He was assured by his henchmen that Novichok wouldn’t be found in his body. The henchmen were wrong. Not only Novichok was picked up via tests, but also after several weeks in a coma, Navalny recovered.
Putin should have known there and then that his plans for a war against the West were doomed—but he was confident he could fix it.
A traitor (or traitors) at Navalny’s inner circle convinced him to return to Russia. In January 2021, Navalny was arrested immediately after landing in Moscow.
Navalny had been neutralized; Putin’s invasion plans could proceed.
The West ignored Putin’s Dec.2021 ultimatum to NATO; Putin didn’t mind—he yearned to go ahead with the invasion of Ukraine. He was going to show them.
The quick 3-day invasion failed. The Ukrainians fiercely fought back.
Putin was furious; he ordered to bomb Mariupol into rubble—show them what’s going to happen to anyone who resists.
The Ukrainians kicked his ass in Kyiv and made Putin’s troops run away. They refused to surrender because the U.S. and NATO agreed to give them weapons to fight back.
Then the Ukrainians sank ‘Moskva’—flagship of the Russian Black Sea fleet.
Moskva 2012
The sinking of ‘Moskva’ (that’s how Moscow is actually transliterated from Russian) was highly symbolic: The Muscovy empire was doomed. If one needed an omen, you couldn’t dream a clearer signal.
Putin should have gotten the message there and then—7 weeks into the war.
He didn’t.
He decided to keep pushing stronger.
He was trained to double up, in hopes of winning big at the end.
He still keeps doubling up, despite losing round after round. He now knows his henchmen will gleefully blame him for everything and there is already a hidden fight for leadership post-war—post-Putin. Everyone is positioning himself for Putin’s fall.
After Nasrallah’s liquidation and Maduro’s capture, Putin doesn’t trust anyone. He knows his people are lying to him, terrified of his fury—but he no longer has the luxury of being able to replace them.
Putin still hopes that somehow his luck will return and he’d win and make up for all the losses. He’s angry because things aren’t working the way he hoped they would.
Putin is an angry, terrified man, hiding in a bunker. You probably would feel the same if you had to hide in bunkers with no sunlight for months, feeling hunted.
Horrible life this man lived.
The overwhelming feeling of regret and emptiness ruptures his tormented soul; faces of leaders he knew who had departed in horrible ways; faces of his enemies he ordered to execute.
He did all this, trying to resurrect “the Great Russia”—and now, with everything on the line, would all this mighty effort and sacrifice be in vain?
Putin isn’t just angry.
He’s in despair.
~ Elena Gold, Quora
Victoria Shymlosky:
Putin is delusional and obsessed with his desires to expand the Russian empire and his cronies support him. Russia’s economy is in great turmoil due to decades of extreme corruption; graft from top to bottom of the Russian Government Departments, businesses, enterprises are leading to massive bankruptcies. Russian currency is worth nothing.
There is a potential for a complete economic collapse. Workers are not being paid in many industries, infrastructures are deteriorating at an increasing pace. Putin’s government blocks money withdrawals by Russian citizens from banks. The Russian brutal war in Ukraine is a costly on-going failure.
Putin’s inner circle are like jackals, ready to tear his “legacy” into pieces, grab a piece of his massive holdings, chase his money in offshores & crypto wallets. They only support him because he’s at the helm, not because they believe in “the war against the West.”
Putin’s henchmen want to live.
John:
It would be good if Putin was overthrown. However the Russian people seem remarkably servile. Few societies on earth would tolerate a 1000 plus daily casualties, along with economic chaos, due to their leader starting such a pointless war.
I have been to Russia and even before the war, the quality of life in that country seemed to be BY FAR the worst I have seen in Europe. In other European countries there would be a revolution.
If the people had to endure Russia’s peace time living conditions —much less if everybody had relatives coming back in body bags. It is hard to envisage the Russia people rising up and getting rid of Putin.
Dave Owens:
Ironically, the war is the only thing holding Russia together right now. The very thing that will destroy it is holding it together…for now…
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PRICES ARE RISING IN RUSSIA
"Life is becoming more expensive," complains Alexander, a Moscow-based advertising specialist who works for a big corporation.
In the course of one month his monthly food budget soared by more than 22% - from 35,000 roubles (£330; $450) to 43,000 (£406; $555).
With Russia's economy hanging somewhere between stagnation and decline, ordinary Russians have begun to feel the pinch from the Kremlin's war on Ukraine, as it approaches its fourth anniversary.
The cost of almost all essentials has gone up in local supermarkets, from eggs and chicken fillets to seasonal vegetables, Alexander has noticed. (We have changed the names of everyone we have spoken to for this piece.)
Even his daily treat on the way to work — an Americano from a local cafe — has suddenly surged 26% from 230 to 290 roubles.
Russians have noticed a sharp increase in food prices since the start of the year
Prices have risen steadily in Russia since the beginning of the full-scale invasion in Ukraine, driven by a federal budget dominated by the war effort and defense industry.
This in turn has led to rapid economic growth and raised living standards across the country.
Until now, high levels of inflation have gone largely unnoticed by the general population, especially in the big cities such as Moscow and St Petersburg. Big spending masked the mounting economic consequences of the war, as well as Western sanctions and the exodus of foreign investment from Russia.
That rapid economic growth slowed sharply in 2025, and as salaries could no longer keep up with inflation, rising prices started to hit people's pockets.
Then at the start of 2026, supermarket prices jumped by a sharp 2.3% in less than a month, according to data from Russia's statistics service Rosstat.
Everything became more expensive at the start of the year: meat, milk, salt, flour, potatoes, pasta, bananas, soap, toothpaste, socks, laundry detergent, and many medicines too.
Average food basket
Every other January since 2019, the BBC has bought the same selection of 59 basic goods from the same supermarket chain, Pyaterochka, in Moscow. The basket includes vegetables and fruits, dairy and meat products, canned goods and instant noodles, sweets and beverages, including beer.
In 2024, the basket cost 7,358 roubles (£63; $83). Last month, it cost 8,724 (£83; $112) roubles — an increase of 18.6%. Dairy products have seen the biggest price surge in BBC's basket in the last two years. The price of dairy products — which tend to be locally produced — has soared 41%, the biggest rise in our sample basket in the last two years. This is because Russia's dairy industry has been hit by rising farm costs, expensive loans and staff shortages.
That tallies with Rosstat's own 18.1% measure of overall accumulated food inflation from January 2024 to the end of January 2026.
One of the most noticeable price increases in our basket has been a hike of almost 15% in the cost of fruit and vegetables since 2024.
Russia relies on imported fruit and vegetables, so store prices are highly sensitive to fluctuations in the rouble exchange rate and disruptions in the supply chain. Both occurred after the beginning of the war in Ukraine.
Rising taxes and changing habits
The most recent factor influencing price rises is a two-point increase in VAT from 20% to 22% since 1 January.
The sales tax hike is directly related to the war in Ukraine, as Russia's finance ministry said it was needed to finance the country's "defense and security.”
While Alexander from Moscow told the BBC he was not going to change his eating habits, others say rising food prices have hit their diets and family budgets significantly.
Nadezhda, 68, says she can no longer afford to buy beef and has resorted to cheap varieties of fish.
She and her husband, who are both retired, live in Moscow on their state pensions and his additional income. Nadezhda says her entire monthly pension of almost 32,000 roubles (£302; $413) now goes on food.
That means other expenses have been put on hold.
They had been saving to fix their car, but recently had to rely on savings to pay for food.
Similarly, buying a new winter jacket for Nadezhda's husband, which would have cost about 17,000 roubles (£160; $220), will have to wait until next year.
Kristina, a Moscow marketing specialist in her mid-40s, also had dig into her savings to buy food last month. She lives with her husband, who is a personal trainer, and says she has started paying attention to discounts and has noticed others in supermarkets doing so as well.
"Now I take a very pragmatic approach: not what I want or don't want to eat, but how much protein is in 100 grams of this product," Kristina says.
She and her husband can no longer afford to eat out, but even when cooking at home, the price of a dinner for two has more than doubled — from around 1,000 roubles (£9.46; $12.92) to more than 2,000 roubles (£18.91; $25.85).
In summer 2025, Russia's Central Bank Governor Elvira Nabiullina said that the economy was close to a "scenario of balanced rates of economic growth.”
However, some economists suggest that after slowing down significantly last year, the Russian economy is now at risk of going into the red.
One of the main risks this year will come from the oil market.
The federal budget is based on a high oil price, but market rates have fallen since the start of this year and there is no expectation of any imminent rise.
Russian oil sales have also been hit by latest US sanctions that have cut off supplies to one of Moscow's main trading partners, India.
As a result, Russian authorities are likely to face a bigger budget deficit than they had planned.
Borrowing is difficult due to high interest rates; few are willing to lend to a country currently waging war and with a reputation for being unreliable.
That could mean further unpopular measures — either further tax rises, which would hurt people and businesses, or cutting budget spending, primarily in the public sector. That would slow down the economy and bring down household incomes further.
"Overall, there is a trend towards stagnation and a possible decline in GDP," Tatiana Mikhailova, an economist and visiting assistant professor at Penn State University, told the BBC.
For the moment nothing indicates the economy is in decline, but she believes there is a high likelihood of it happening.
"Every time oil prices fall, a recession is possible in Russia," she says, even if she believes the economy can carry on without growth for some time.
That may be of little comfort to ordinary Russians, who will still feel the effects in their pockets.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c1mjrgkk1m8o
*
THE FROG POISON USED TO KILL NAVALNY
Epibatidine, which can be secreted by Anthony's poison arrow frog onto its skin, was blamed for Alexei Navalny's death by five European nations
Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny was killed using a deadly toxin found in poison dart frogs in South America, the UK and some of its European allies have said.
Traces of epibatidine were found in samples from Navalny's body and highly likely resulted in his death in a Siberian penal colony two years ago, the UK Foreign Office said.
The allies said only the Russian state had the "means, motive and opportunity" to deploy this lethal toxin.
The Kremlin dismissed the finding as "an information campaign", according to Tass news agency.
Epibatidine is a natural neurotoxin isolated from the skin of the Ecuadorian poison dart frog, according to toxicology expert Jill Johnson.
It was "200 times more potent" than morphine, she told BBC Russian.
Epibatidine can be found naturally in dart frogs in the wild in South America as well as being manufactured in a laboratory.
Dart frogs in captivity do not produce this toxin and it is not found naturally in Russia, the European allies said in their statement.
Species known as Anthony's poison arrow frog and the Phantasmal poison frog are among those that secrete the toxin onto their skin.
Although epibatidine has been investigated as a painkiller and for relief from painful inflammatory lung conditions, it is not used clinically because of its toxicity.
This powerful chemical compound acts on nicotinic receptors in the nervous system, according to Johnson.
Because it overstimulates these nerve receptors, if dosed correctly, it can cause muscle twitching, paralysis, seizures, slow heart rate, respiratory failure and ultimately death, she explained.
Alastair Hay, professor of environmental toxicology at the University of Leeds, told PA that its effects can result in breathing being blocked, and that "any person poisoned dies from suffocation”.
The toxin being found in someone's blood "suggests deliberate administration", he added.
Epibatidine toxicity can even be "increased by co-administration of certain other drugs and these combinations have been researched", Hay said.
Epibatidine is extremely rare and found in only one geographic region and only in trace amounts, Johnson said. (But it can be synthesized in a lab.)
It is understood the dart frog referred to by the UK Foreign Office and others was Anthony's poison arrow frog, a species endemic to Ecuador and Peru.
The frogs produce the chemical through eating the right foods to produce alkaloids, a type of organic compound that makes epibatidine and accumulate it in their skin. If the frog's diet changes, its epibatidine reserves will be depleted.
"Finding a wild frog in the right place, eating exactly the food needed to produce the right alkaloids, is almost impossible... almost," Johnson said.
"This is an incredibly rare method of human poisoning. The only other cases of epibatidine poisoning I know of were laboratory-based and non-fatal.”
What has Russia said?
European laboratories confirmed Navalny died from the obscure poison, the allies said on Saturday.
Moscow has previously claimed Navalny died of natural causes, though Navalny's widow Yulia Navalnaya has consistently argued her husband was "murdered" by poisoning.
The Russian embassy in London denied Moscow was involved in Navalny's death and described the announcement as "feeble-mindedness of Western fabulists" and “necro-propaganda.”
Kremlin spokesperson Maria Zakharova was quoted by Russian state-run news agency Tass as saying: "All the talks and statements are an information campaign aimed at distracting attention from the West's pressing problems.”
Hamish de Bretton-Gordon, a former UK and Nato senior officer, who is also a chemical weapons expert, said people should take anything the Kremlin says, including about Navalny's death, "with a pinch of salt.”
He told BBC Radio 4's Today program that Nato countries "have demonstrated that they have the evidence that Navalny was murdered by the state.”
At the time of his death, Navalny had been in jail for three years and had latterly been transferred to an Arctic penal colony.
According to Russian accounts, the 47-year-old took a short walk, said he felt unwell, then collapsed and never regained consciousness.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cm289we7jzdo
*
EXIT STALIN — WAS TERROR A FEATURE OR A BUG OF THE SOVIET SYSTEM?
A parade in Moscow under a banner of Nikita Khrushchev with a dove of peace, 1961.
‘Are you out of your mind? They don’t shoot people these days’, says a young man at the outset of Mark Smith’s new book, Exit Stalin. But he was wrong. His girlfriend had indeed heard gunfire in the next street, as soldiers fired at demonstrators breaking into the Party headquarters in Novocherkask in protest against food shortages. It was June 1962, a decade after Stalin’s death.
Stalin’s successor Nikita Khrushchev had been trying to curb Stalin’s legacy of terror and improve the lot of ordinary people. Mark Smith believes this ambition never had a chance of success. In the Soviet Union terror was fundamental to the system. Violence, like that at Novocherkask, continued until the end. Lenin had been as determined as his successors to create a totalitarian state. Stalin may have taken things too far, but he was not an aberration. The secret police was an intrinsic part of the system, not an optional add-on. The Soviet system was incapable of making the political and economic reforms that could have saved it. When Gorbachev made the attempt in 1988-89 he doomed the system and did himself out of a job.
In 2018 Smith set out to turn these thoughts into a solid, scholarly book. He was well qualified. He had spent years working and studying in Russia, had a Russian wife, knew many Russians, had a vivid feeling for the quirks of the culture, both high and low, and had a job researching Russian history in Cambridge. Then disaster struck. First there was Covid, which prevented him from returning to Russia to do his research on the spot. Then his wife died. He was paralyzed by grief. And in February 2022, a few weeks later, Putin invaded Ukraine.
Smith found himself thinking differently about the Soviet Union. He no longer saw it as a unified system centered on Moscow. The regions, their people, and their politics were crucial to the story. He had been inclined to share the idea that the Soviet collapse was inevitable, but the idea was false. Putin in Russia and Lukashenko in Belarus had demonstrated that a state prepared to use its coercive power without inhibition can survive indefinitely. He had to revise the whole thrust of his book.
Like the United States, Smith believes, the Soviet Union was born in revolution and claimed a unique mission to show mankind a better future. That differentiated it from Hitler’s Germany, to which it is often compared. But there are questions to be asked: could the Soviet Union have survived? And if so for how long? Was it never more than a brutal dictatorship? Could it ever have become a genuine attempt to better the lives of ordinary people?
Smith places at the core of his book what he calls a ‘new analytical framework’ for looking at the Soviet Union. It was, he maintains, not a system or a regime. It was a whole collection of conflicting realities, the ‘civilization’ of his title. His writing is fluent, unorthodox, emotional, and spirited. His arguments are often confusing and sometimes obscure. His book’s strength lies not in any new approach, but in the empathy with which he portrays a place that no longer exists.
We now see that time as a period of failure and decline; for many of us it has faded into an abstraction. But for those who lived there, it was the only place they had ever known. Every family had suffered directly or indirectly from Stalin’s murderous policies, and from the poverty and famine that accompanied them. But he had led them to beat the Germans. They were justifiably proud of that. They felt proud, too, as their country rose to challenge the US on land, at sea, in space, and in the hearts and minds of those who lived in what was then called the Third World. Once Stalin was gone most Russians were content to get on with their lives in what seemed like a new normality.
Smith sees Nikita Khrushchev as both the hero and anti-hero of this story. A henchman of Stalin, he too had blood on his hands, but he did passionately believe in socialism and its ideals: liberty, fraternity, equality. He did his best to implement them while he had the power.
The 1917 revolution transformed Khrushchev – ebullient, gregarious, barely educated, a shepherd boy from a poor family who became a skilled engineering worker – into a skillful and ruthless politician. His achievements included a housing revolution which gave millions of miserably housed people their own front door for the first time, the cobbling together of a reasonably comprehensive system of health and social services, and a steady improvement in the supply of consumer goods.
These things may not have matched what was available in the West, but Soviet people appreciated them as an improvement on what they had before.
The Soviet Union set out to create a comprehensive education system which by Khrushchev’s time had transformed a largely illiterate people into one of the best educated in the world, even if the work of its brilliant scientists was disproportionately directed to military purposes.
Despite its unrelenting demands for orthodoxy, the Soviet Union produced some of the greatest creative artists of the 20th century: writers such as Pasternak, Grossman, and Akhmatova, composers such as Shostakovich, Prokofiev, and Khachaturyan. In one of his lurches towards openness, Khrushchev sanctioned, in 1962, the publication of Solzhenitsyn’s subversive Gulag novella One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.
In the West many were convinced that the Soviet regime was secure because its people were politically passive, brainwashed into orthodoxy. We make the same mistake about totalitarian regimes today. Soviet people were as capable of thinking for themselves as anyone. They lived in a totalitarian state, so most of them sensibly kept their heads down and got on with their lives. Some discussed in private things which the authorities would have preferred them to leave alone. The bravest challenged the regime in public, but even they were not advocating the adoption of Western liberalism. Andrei Sakharov, the most distinguished of them all, described his views as ‘profoundly socialist’.
The Soviet Union reached the height of its international power under Khrushchev’s apparently boring but politically cunning successor, Leonid Brezhnev. He genuinely believed in the need to improve relations with the Americans in order to get some grip on the menace of nuclear weapons. It was under his aegis that the two superpowers negotiated some of their most significant nuclear arms agreements.
He tried to improve the lot of his people by increasing the production of consumer goods. He also presided over a massive increase in corruption, from which he and many of his cronies benefited, and he was sick and dysfunctional in his later years.
Even so, in the years of chaos which succeeded the Soviet collapse, many people looked back on his time as a golden age. By the time Brezhnev died in 1982 the system was clearly failing to deliver both at home and abroad. The people at the top who succeeded him were not fools, and they could see that for themselves. They engineered Mikhail Gorbachev into the top job hoping he could stop the rot.
At first Gorbachev tried to reverse the trend by reviving what he had persuaded himself was Lenin’s original idea of a socialism without brutality. It didn’t work. His reforms only made the economy worse. He turned to social democracy, believing that if people could make their own choices an economic recovery would follow. But the regime was unable to cope with his reforms, nor with the growing unrest among the Union’s national republics. It fell apart, and Gorbachev lost his job in the ensuing mayhem.
Smith’s insight that the Soviet Union could not survive a whiff of democracy because of its totalitarian essence is still very relevant. The Soviet Union was after all only a brief interlude in Russia’s long history. Yet Russia has never yet managed to put together a lasting democracy. Unprotected by natural frontiers, it has for centuries attempted to secure itself by preying on its neighbors.
Many of us believed that the end of Soviet communism would give Russia a chance to develop its own version of liberal politics and economics. Those hopes were disappointed. Russia is not the Soviet Union. Putin is not Stalin. But his government is brutal, authoritarian, and expansionist in the old tradition. Is that Russia’s unavoidable fate?
https://www.historytoday.com/archive/review/exit-stalin-mark-b-smith-review?utm_source=Newsletter&utm_campaign=07e151130a-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2017_09_20_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_fceec0de95-07e151130a-1214148&mc_cid=07e151130a
*
EPSTEIN AND RASPUTIN
The comparison between Grigori Rasputin and Jeffrey Epstein is a frequently cited analogy used by commentators to describe individuals who gain immense shadow-power influence over elite political, royal, or social circles through manipulation, blackmail, and sexual scandals, often acting as "fixers" or confidants to the powerful.
Key aspects of this comparison include:
Influence Over Power Structures: Both men inserted themselves into the highest levels of power—Rasputin with the Russian Imperial Romanov family and Epstein with international politicians, royalty, and billionaires.
"Mad Monk" vs. "Financier":
Commentators have described the contrast and similarities by noting that Rasputin was a peasant mystic acting as a "therapist/holy man," while Epstein was a financier acting as a "pimp" or "fixer," but both used similar methods of psychological manipulation.
Sexual Scandals and Symbolism: Both men became synonymous with decadence and corruption, serving as symbols of a ruling class that was viewed as morally decayed.
"American Rasputin": Due to his ability to infiltrate elite circles, his mysterious wealth, and his death while in federal custody, Epstein has been dubbed the "American Rasputin".
While separated by over a century, their careers share several striking parallels:
Access to Elite Circles: Just as Rasputin became a trusted advisor to the Russian Romanov family, Epstein cultivated relationships with world leaders, billionaires, and members of royal families, such as the British Windsors.
Intelligence and Influence: Both figures have been the subject of intense speculation regarding their roles as tools for intelligence services. Recently released Department of Justice files show Epstein made repeated attempts to arrange meetings with Vladimir Putin and maintained contacts with Russian intelligence academy graduates.
Moral Scapegoats: Both were viewed as symptoms of a detached and declining elite. Rasputin was often blamed for the monarchy’s loss of authority before the Russian Revolution, while Epstein’s case is seen as a modern example of how global elites operate by different rules.
Untimely Deaths: Both died under circumstances that fueled widespread conspiracy theories—Rasputin was assassinated by members of the Russian nobility, and Epstein’s death in federal custody remains a point of intense public debate.
Key Differences:
Persona: Rasputin was a peasant-monk who used mysticism and religious fervor to gain influence. Epstein was a financier who used wealth and professional networks.
The Nature of the Scandals: While both were accused of sexual debauchery, Epstein’s case centered on a systemic sex-trafficking operation involving minors.
Best way to understand Epstein is to compare and contrast with Rasputin: instrumentalized sex, working for foreign powers, both get killed by clients. A difference: Rasputin was a therapist disguised as monk, Epstein a financier masked as pimp. Both were political animals through and through, ~ AI overview
EPSTEIN SCANDAL RESEMBLES RASPUTIN SCANDAL OF 1916
As
the Epstein scandal continues to grow and involve more people in more
countries, Russian writer Boris Akunin suggests that perhaps the best
way to understand what it is and what it may become is to recall the
Rasputin scandal at the end of tsarist times, given that the two have so
much in common.
He argues that “the Epsteinshchina” –
inventing a word that combines the figure at the center of this and the
Russian suffix for affair — is “pure ‘Rasputinism,” that is, “an old
scandal that in new circumstances has grown to universal proportions”
(t.me/EtoBorisAkunin/706 reposted at https://echofm.online/opinions/epsteinshchina).
Akunin
says that in 1916 “there was an indecent man who attached himself to
the royal family” of the Russian Empire. Now there is “an indecent
high-society manipulator” who attached himself to some of the elites in a
wide variety of countries. In neither case is the individual
“remarkable” but the consequences of their actions clearly are.
Rasputin
did not do everything he was accused of doing, and it may be the case
that neither did Epstein. But in the former case, it was widely believed
that he had and even more widely believed that Rasputin succeeded in
penetrating the Russian imperial elite because it was so corrupt; and in
the latter, something similar is happening; and the elites are
terrified.
“Epstein has been gone for a long time, his dirty
tracks have already been overgrown with grass – and suddenly such a
stir,” Akunin says. While some doing the exposés are focusing on Trump’s
political opponents, many who support Trump “are perfectly aware of
Trumps ‘moral character,’ and they don’t care.”
Akunin
continues: “But the politicians and oligarchs of the opposing camp who
have also been caught up in the crossfire have something to lose. And
they are losing it.” Indeed, many in Western societies are less
interested in Trump that in the moral collapse of “the respectable
pillars of society.”
What such people have concluded
on the basis of the Epstein files is “how disgusting you all are up
there!” Existing elites are being discredited and that “clearly isn’t
accidental” given that these elites really “are tiresome, they have
disappointed and many people really want them to disappear.”
Akunin
says that he believes “’the Epstein affair’ is another harbinger of big
changes in the countries that are commonly called ‘democratic.’ There is the widespread crisis of old parties, the success of
far-right movements, the collapse of international organizations and
alliances, and the destruction of the old rules of political behavior.”
It thus appears, the Russian writer concludes his
post, that “we are in [another] 1916” and that “ahead of us are
upheavals, a redrawing of the world map, a change of elites, different
norms of relations between ‘the top’ and ‘the bottom, the collapse of
old alliances and the emergence of new ones.”
“In ten or even
five years, the world will be completely different from what it is now,”
Akuninn says, a prospect that is both “disturbing and interesting.”
https://windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2026/02/epstein-scandal-resembles-rasputin.html
*
THE STORY VIKTOR FRANKL’S MAN’S SEARCH FOR MEANING
In 1942, Nazi guards stripped a psychiatrist of everything—his coat, his name, his life’s work—but they accidentally gave him the one discovery that would change millions of lives.
At intake, the guards made their calculations. They shaved the 37-year-old man’s head. They tattooed a number on his skin: 119,104. Then they found a manuscript sewn into the lining of his jacket—years of research, his theories, his life’s work.
They tore it apart. They threw it into the fire.
In their eyes, they had erased the man. By taking his dignity, his profession, and his words, they believed they had reduced him to nothing more than a body waiting to expire.
They were catastrophically wrong.
They had stripped Viktor Frankl of everything he owned. But in doing so, they forced him to discover the one thing that could never be taken away—the last of human freedoms.
Viktor Frankl had not planned to be there.
Months earlier in Vienna, he had held a golden ticket: a visa to America. He was a respected psychiatrist with a growing practice and a wife named Tilly whom he deeply loved.
The visa meant safety. It meant a future. It meant life.
But the visa covered only him—not his elderly parents.
He stood paralyzed by the choice. If he left, his parents would almost certainly be taken by the Nazis. If he stayed, he would share their fate.
Then he noticed a small piece of marble on his father’s desk, rescued from the ruins of a synagogue the Nazis had destroyed.
Engraved on it was a single commandment: Honor thy father and mother.
Viktor let the visa expire. He stayed. And soon, the knock on the door came.
He was sent to Theresienstadt, then Auschwitz, then Dachau. The conditions were designed to kill not only the body, but the soul.
Men slept nine to a wooden bunk. They survived on watery soup and stale bread. They worked in freezing mud until they collapsed.
But as a doctor, Frankl began to notice something unsettling: death did not always take the weakest first.
Strong men withered and died within days. Frail men who looked like skeletons somehow kept waking up each morning.
Frankl realized they weren’t dying only from typhus or starvation. They were dying from a loss of meaning.
The camp doctors even had a name for it: “give-up-itis.”
It followed a pattern. A prisoner stopped washing. Then he stopped moving. Then came the final sign—he smoked his own cigarettes.
Cigarettes were the camp’s currency. They could be traded for extra bread—another day of life.
When a man smoked his own cigarette, he was saying he no longer cared about tomorrow.
Usually, within 48 hours, he was dead.
Frankl whispered to himself Nietzsche’s words: “He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.”
So prisoner 119,104 began a quiet, invisible rebellion.
He could not save his manuscript, so he rewrote it in his mind. While marching through snow in torn shoes, beaten by guards, he wasn’t there.
He was back in a warm lecture hall in Vienna, explaining the psychology of the concentration camp to imagined students.
He forced his mind to live in a future that did not yet exist.
He thought of Tilly. He didn’t know whether she was alive. But he held onto her image. He spoke to her in his thoughts. He saw her smile. The love he felt became an anchor the guards could not touch.
He began helping others find their anchors. He crawled to sobbing men and asked a simple question: “What is waiting for you?”
One man had a daughter in another country. Another was a scientist with books left to finish. Frankl reminded them of the unfinished work of their lives.
He gave them a reason to stand for one more roll call.
In April 1945, the camps were liberated.
Viktor Frankl emerged into daylight weighing 85 pounds, his ribs pressing against his skin like a cage.
He was free. And then freedom brought devastating news.
Tilly was dead. His mother was dead. His father was dead. His brother was dead.
Everyone he had stayed for—everyone he had dreamed of through the long nights—was gone.
He was completely alone.
It was the moment he could have finally surrendered. Instead, he sat down and began to write.
He wrote with feverish urgency, pouring grief, pain, and insight onto the page. He reconstructed the manuscript the Nazis had burned, adding something they could never destroy—the proof of lived experience.
It took nine days.
Nine days to write Man's Search for Meaning.
He didn’t write it for fame. He originally hoped to publish it anonymously, using only his prisoner number: 119,104. He believed no one would care about a survivor’s reflections.
Publishers rejected it. They said it was too bleak. They said people wanted to forget the war.
But the book found its way into the world.
And something extraordinary happened.
A grieving widow found the strength to get out of bed. A bankrupt businessman realized his life was not over. A depressed student found a reason to keep living.
The book passed from hand to hand, country to country. It sold millions of copies. It was translated into dozens of languages.
The Library of Congress later named it one of the ten most influential books in American history.
Viktor Frankl lived until 1997. At 67, he earned his pilot’s license. He climbed mountains throughout his life—three challenging trails in Austria now bear his name. He remarried and had a daughter.
He lived a life filled with the meaning he had fought to understand.
But his greatest legacy was not the book alone. It was the lesson he carried back from the abyss:
You can take everything from a human being—their possessions, their health, their family, their freedom.
But there is one thing—the last of human freedoms—that no guard, no government, and no tragedy can ever take away:
The freedom to choose one’s attitude in any circumstance.
The freedom to choose one’s own way.
The Nazis tried to reduce him to a number. They tried to make him a footnote of history.
Instead, Viktor Frankl transformed suffering into insight and gave millions a way to see the light.
He showed us that we are not defined by what the world does to us—but by what we choose to do with what remains.
Ben Allen, Quora
*
LOU HOOVER: AN ACCOMPLISHED FIRST LADY
Lou Henry Hoover was far more than a ceremonial First Lady. Trained as a geologist at Stanford University, she met Herbert Hoover while both were students, and their marriage became an intellectual partnership from the start. Early in their lives together, they lived and worked across China, Australia, and Europe due to Herbert’s mining engineering career.
It was during their time in China (1899–1900) that both Hoovers learned Mandarin, initially out of necessity, later out of curiosity and discipline. By the time Herbert Hoover became president in 1929, the couple occasionally used Mandarin in the White House to speak privately, an unusual but telling reflection of their shared scholarly habits rather than secrecy for its own sake.
Their intellectual collaboration reached its peak with the translation of De Re Metallica, a foundational 1556 Latin text on mining and metallurgy by Georgius Agricola. At a time when no complete English translation existed, the Hoovers spent years painstakingly translating not just the language but also the technical meaning of Renaissance mining terms.
Published in 1912, their edition became and remains the standard English version used by historians, engineers, and archaeologists. Lou Hoover’s contribution was substantial: she handled much of the Latin translation while Herbert focused on technical interpretation.
This scholarly achievement, rare for any political couple, underscores that Lou Hoover was not simply “the president’s wife,” but one of the most academically accomplished First Ladies in U.S. history.
*
JONATHAN KOZOL, EDUCATOR OUTRAGED AT INEQUALITY
Jonathan Kozol was twenty six when he walked into a fourth grade classroom in Boston in 1964, opened a reading book, and realized half the students had been written off by a system that refused to see them. He went home that night and wrote a single sentence in his notebook:
"If I stay silent, I become part of this."
Kozol had been a Rhodes Scholar.
He had studied literature at Harvard.
He could have chosen a comfortable academic path.
Instead he became a substitute teacher in one of the most underfunded schools in the city.
What he saw there changed him permanently.
Students using tattered books from decades earlier.
Classes held in storage closets.
Children tracked into low level groups because of their zip code and skin color.
When Kozol taught a Langston Hughes poem, administrators fired him for deviating from the curriculum. The message was clear.
Do not raise expectations.
Do not challenge the structure.
Do not point out the injustice.
He refused to disappear.
He walked the neighborhoods, listened to families, and documented the conditions schools hid behind bureaucratic language.
In 1967, he published Death at an Early Age, a searing account of racial segregation and educational neglect in Boston public schools.
The book won the National Book Award and forced the country to acknowledge the truth.
Separate could never be equal.
And inequality lived inside classrooms long after the law claimed victory.
Kozol spent the next decades visiting schools across the United States.
He sat with students in South Bronx cafeterias where ceiling tiles sagged above them.
He visited overcrowded classrooms in Chicago, Philadelphia, Camden, and Washington.
Everywhere he went he found the same pattern.
Funding followed wealth, not need.
Children in rich districts learned in bright, modern buildings.
Children in poor districts learned in rooms that looked like afterthoughts.
He turned these observations into books that became moral alarms for each generation.
Savage Inequalities in 1991.
Amazing Grace in 1995.
The Shame of the Nation in 2005.
Each one argued the same idea with new evidence.
America had built an educational system that rewarded privilege and punished poverty, then pretended the outcomes were natural.
Kozol never wrote from distance. He returned to the same students year after year, attending their graduations, visiting their families, and asking what dreams they were still holding onto.
He believed advocacy required relationship, not statistics.
If he quoted a child in his work, it was because he had sat beside them long enough to understand their confidence, their fear, and their hope.
He faced critics who called him idealistic or confrontational.
He answered with data, stories, and a question he repeated in every interview.
Why do we tolerate a system that gives the most to the children who already have the most?
Jonathan Kozol did not set out to become a national conscience.
He set out to teach a poem.
What he uncovered forced him to fight for children the country consistently overlooked.
His work asks a question that has never stopped being urgent.
If equality is a promise, why do our schools still break it every day?
(~ Facebook)
*
THE AFTERMATH OF “SNOWBALL EARTH”
Our planet was once a harsh, alien, icy world. Yet this deep freeze may have shaped you, me and all life on Earth.
As Scotland’s west coast recedes from view, the ocean resembles a mirror, broken only by the swash of the boat and the dolphins chasing us. We’re headed to the craggy, uninhabited islands known as the Garvellachs. Only reachable during Scotland’s short summer, there is nothing between here and North America, and so landing – or rather jumping hopefully onto slippery rocks – is dependent on the kindness of the Atlantic swell. We’ve come to see a globally unique suite of rocks, which preserve a precise moment of global significance: when a warm, tropical environment, teeming with photosynthetic life-forms such as cyanobacteria and algae, transitioned abruptly into perpetual cold.
Imagine a planet suffocated by ice, its glaciers stretching unbroken from the poles to the equator. Such an event, if it transpired on Earth today, would see kilometers-thick ice sheets gouging their way from the Arctic to the Bahamas. Once-diverse ecosystems and climate zones would merge into a single, uniform condition, seemingly destined to be barren. Scientists once argued that such a ‘snowball’ state could never have existed on Earth since global glaciation could not be reversed. Moreover, on such a world, all life, including our own ancestors, would surely have been extinguished. However, hard evidence can change even the most fixed mind, and what was once inconceivable is now the prevailing wisdom. Today’s scientists agree that ice did indeed reach the equator on at least two occasions between 717 and 635 million years ago, where it stayed for tens of millions of years.
What’s more, I and many of my colleagues now think that life not only survived this frozen age, but that such extreme conditions may even have helped life become more complex, a process that would eventually lead to the evolution of all animal forms. Quite simply, without Snowball Earth, you and I wouldn’t be here. And embedded in the rocks of these remote Scottish islands, you can see how it happened.
Sedimentary Garvellachs
Sedimentary layers transitioning into ice age on the Garvellachs in Scotland
For more than a century, geologists have been vexed by the apparent absence of a ‘long fuse’ to the Cambrian explosion of animal forms about half a billion years ago. Compared with the previous period, the Cambrian featured an astonishingly diverse array of creatures. How could biological complexity appear seemingly from nowhere? Often framed as ‘Darwin’s dilemma’, this enigma was a chief objection against the theory of evolution by natural selection, raised by skeptical geologists such as John Phillips in his book Life on Earth (1860), which he rushed to publication after Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859). Although many pre-Cambrian fossils have been found subsequently, the abruptness of the Cambrian explosion is still somewhat of a mystery.
In Darwin’s day, few suspected that our planet may once have been covered by ice, and suspected even less that such conditions were pivotal in determining our own existence. To better understand any possible connection, we need to delve into what happened during Snowball Earth, or as we geologists like to say: the Cryogenian period. Part of the Proterozoic aeon, this was one of the last periods before the Cambrian began.
I have spent much of my career examining the physical evidence for how our planet looked during Cryogenian times, evidence that is etched into the rocks beneath our feet. Over three decades, I have asked questions such as: how long did the ice age last, was it truly global in extent, and what were the consequences for life? Most recently, my attention has turned to the Garvellach islands in Scotland, an archipelago I studied as an undergraduate, but somewhere I hadn’t revisited until the COVID-19 pandemic prevented any globetrotting.
Studying the Garvellach outcrops has confirmed what had long been suspected: that a remarkable set of rocks spanning Ireland and Scotland – the Port Askaig formation – is likely to preserve the world’s most complete record of Snowball Earth, and most critically the moment it all began. The first of the Cryogenian ice ages, the Sturtian, began around 717 million years ago, and lasted everywhere on Earth for another 57 million frigid years. A second glaciation, called the Marinoan ice age, lasted from about 645 to 635 million years ago, and marks the end of the Cryogenian. Both episodes saw glaciers reach the equator.
Unlike other sites where the erosive power of ancient glaciers scraped away crucial evidence, in Scotland the rocks bear witness to the exact moment when the tropics first succumbed to the encroaching deep freeze. This is because, back then, Scotland was at far lower latitudes than today due to continental drift. Also, the sedimentary layers are exceptionally well preserved. Only here can we walk step-by-step through almost 80 meters of rock layers that represent the slow passage of time and changing climate from balmy shores to glacial wasteland.
Early signs of cooling can be seen in the increasing numbers of isolated ‘dropstones’ and gravel clusters, which must have fallen from passing icebergs that drifted ahead of the expanding ice caps. The appearance of frost-shattered ground reveals an increasingly frigid and arid environment that eventually gave way, first to glaciers, and then to towering ice sheets. Some were so massive, up to several kilometers in thickness, that they carried with them rock debris as large as football fields, gouged out from the underlying carbonate platform.
The best example, the ‘Bubble’, is a huge chunk of white carbonate rock, which now sits in a porridge of smaller fragments. The layers that once marked out the horizontal seafloor have been so contorted during glacial transport that they now look skyward, having been folded in on themselves as if solid rock were putty. A modern analogy would be if Australia’s Great Barrier Reef were to be lifted out from the sea, only to be kneaded deep inside marauding Antarctic ice sheets.
The ‘Bubble’ on the Garvellach islands
The harshness of the wild seas here never kept people away from the now-uninhabited Garvellachs. On returning from travels that had taken him right across the Atlantic Ocean, Saint Brendan, one of the most famous navigators of all, even founded a monastery on the islands in the 6th century. Beehive huts, or clochán – meditative igloo-shaped structures of stone flags, made by generations of monks since the time of Columba – can still be seen on Eileach an Naoimh, which some call Holy Isle. The craggy walls of these huts are all made up of lithified glacial moraine, ancient remnants of Snowball Earth. The extraordinary ‘Bubble’ must have been contemplated by myriad travelers over many centuries without any inkling about its significance.
The completeness of the sedimentary record on the Garvellach islands has another significance, in that it makes them an excellent candidate for defining the beginning of a new geological period. Such decisions are made only rarely, and only after years of discussion among geologists. Once ratified by the International Union of Geological Sciences, a global boundary stratotype section and point (GSSP) can be established. Informally, these GSSPs are called ‘golden spikes’, as decorative metal plates are ceremoniously hammered into rock outcrops whenever a particular locality is declared the global standard. Not all make the cut though: a proposed GSSP for the Anthropocene, in Canada, was recently rejected.
The end of the Cryogenian already has a GSSP, to mark the start of the Ediacaran, a time renowned for many discoveries of early animal fossils. However, the beginning does not yet have its own golden spike. The Cryogenian GSSP is set to be voted on during the course of 2026, and would represent the transition into about 70 million years of icy cold, punctuated by just one, relatively short interval of warmth.
How did this deep freeze happen? This was undoubtedly an extraordinary moment in geological time, and extraordinary phenomena require extraordinary explanations. One of these involves the unusual arrangement of continents around this time, and goes as follows:
Across our planet’s history, tectonic plates have collided to form supercontinents. Before the Cryogenian, a single supercontinent called Rodinia assembled piece by piece. Eventually, however, Rodinia had become a vast, arid land mass, resembling a supersized Australia, having been denuded by aeons of weathering and erosion. Mountain belts would have been low and scarce during this relatively quiet time for the planet, so quiet in fact that some dub this interval the ‘boring billion’.
But all this was about to change. Rodinia was poised to break apart, its bulging interior marking the sites where volcanoes would burst through, giving birth to embryonic oceans and the beginning of a new supercontinent cycle.
Shortly before ice sheets enveloped the planet, Scotland sat at the margins of a landmass called Laurentia, near Rodinia’s edge. This meant it was greatly affected by the subduction of tectonic plates beneath the supercontinent’s margin. We can recognize this destructive tectonic setting by the types of rocks and minerals that form the sedimentary layers beneath the glacial horizon in Scotland and Ireland. Following glaciation, sediments began pouring in as Rodinia first bulged upward, and then ruptured to form a new ocean basin.
Before oceans are born, magma rises from below to fill underground chambers and eventually volcanoes.
Volcanic rocks across North America – also once part of Laurentia – witness this turbulent history. And, crucially, they can be dated to show that this ‘rifting’ began only a million years or so before glaciation. This is a critical, although circumstantial, piece of evidence to show that rifting may have triggered cooling, because while volcanoes belch out greenhouse gases, such effects are short-lived compared with the cooling that occurs when extruded lavas are weathered.
The chemical weathering of fresh lava is known to soak up atmospheric carbon dioxide, which is why sprinkling powdered basalt across farmland could help reduce global warming.
The notion that basalt weathering caused Snowball Earth is often referred to as the ‘fire and ice’ hypothesis.
Although plausible, there is a significant problem with the fire-and-ice model. Other supercontinents, such as the more recent Pangaea, also broke up, but that did not lead to glaciation. If supercontinent breakup triggered Snowball Earth, then why did it happen only once? There must be something more to the story.
Snowball Earth is so unusual an event that it challenges the uniformitarian mantra that has been hardwired into geologists’ minds ever since the days of Darwin and Charles Lyell. Students are still taught that ‘the present is the key to the past’, only to later discover that it doesn’t always apply, and that it might sometimes be better to adopt a livelier imagination. If we could journey back to our ancestors’ most formative years, and witness the first animals coming into being, we would find a planet as alien to us as Mars is today. The Cryogenian, and the Ediacaran that immediately follows, simply do not conform to our current understanding of how the Earth system works.
Consider the atmosphere. The Cryogenian and Ediacaran witnessed considerable climatic instability, likely driven by very high atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations followed by equally extreme low points, leading often to glaciation. Such oscillatory behavior suggests uniquely strong, positive feedbacks unlike anything Earth experienced before or since.
Perhaps this instability reveals the secret behind the cold climatic malaise of Snowball Earth. Back then, a gentle push in one direction could lead to runaway cooling or warming. Any negative feedbacks, such as those that stabilize climate today, must have been so weak that glaciation sometimes set in too hard before they were able to kick in.
Scotland’s carbon isotope record falls perfectly into this emerging paradigm. As carbon dioxide is removed from the atmosphere and buried as isotopically light organic matter, the ratio of carbon-13 to carbon-12 increases in the oceans, and this isotopically heavy signature can be recorded in sedimentary rocks as a sign of global cooling.
Conversely, if organic matter escapes burial, carbon dioxide can rise to higher levels, leading to global warming. Over the previous decade, it has become increasingly clear that ancient glaciations were preceded by extremely warm climates: so warm even that almost no organic matter could be buried anywhere on Earth.
This is because organic decay scales exponentially with temperature. If no organic matter can be buried, then the greenhouse effect raises temperatures ever higher. This is a classic positive feedback: higher temperatures mean less burial, which in turn leads to higher temperatures. Isotopic oscillations indicate strongly that glaciations arose when conditions shifted towards greater organic burial, evidenced by increasingly ‘heavy’ sedimentary carbon.
By analyzing the carbon isotopes of the Garvellachs rocks, we can see this transition playing out, as the return to isotopically heavy carbon coincides exactly with the first sedimentary evidence of cooling. Unsurprisingly, it is this precise sedimentary layer that is being proposed as the golden spike to mark the official start of the Cryogenian globally. The breakup of Rodinia may well have been the catalyst to cooling, but it was the bizarrely unstable nature of the Earth system that caused the event to have such dramatic consequences.
So what did such oscillations mean for life? Life, which had thrived on the ocean’s margins up to this point, had to survive not only through a deep freeze, but also the extreme hothouse conditions before and after each icy plunge. Like ancient Romans stepping between the frigidarium and the caldarium, lifeforms needed to negotiate repeated shocks to the system, producing a succession of bottlenecks that not only sped up the rate of evolutionary change but critically determined who would survive to become our early ancestors.
It is only in the past few years that we’ve realized that climatic extremes characterize the entire interval from the Cryogenian right the way through to the Cambrian explosion, and that the Snowball Earth interval represents just the two most extreme and prolonged examples of global cooling.
Crucially, changes in organic burial would not only have perturbed climate, but also affected oxygen availability, because organic burial allows the oxygen released by photosynthesis to remain in the atmosphere. It seems likely therefore that oxygen levels also fluctuated wildly throughout those eventful times, causing booms and busts for life on Earth. Oxygen is important for all metabolically energetic animals that build energy-sapping skeletons, muscles and organs. Without oxygen, no creature can move, grow large or even think. It is highly significant therefore that the Cryogenian separates a world with only single-celled protists before, from the more complex multicellularity exhibited by true animals after global glaciation.
Although the extremes of climate, oxygen and environment that typify this interval can potentially explain biological diversification via repeated radiations and extinctions, they don’t really explain why the road to greater complexity became the chosen path, especially considering the billion years of remarkably little progress beforehand. So let’s now return to the question posed earlier: how did Snowball Earth favor the emergence of complex life?
Profound glaciation, although presumably a shock for life accustomed to tropical climes, would, once established, quickly have become the norm. Whatever lived on Earth through those times would have ended up well-adapted to extreme cold and dryness. Although fossil assemblages are fairly nondescript during most of the Cryogenian, we know that many types of organisms still alive today survived somewhere, even if we do not know where. One thing we have learned in recent years, though, is that an entirely glaciated planet need not be lifeless.
Cryoconite hole
Although we often think of ice caps as barren wastelands, this is untrue. Many organisms that specialize in slow reproduction live in isolated oases on top of the ice. Cryoconite holes are a good example. They form when windblown debris, such as volcanic ash, absorbs heat from the Sun to melt a small patch of ice, which then acts as a tiny, isolated refuge for a surprising diversity of lifeforms.
Today, cryoconite holes provide homes for all the major groups of life: bacteria, algae and eukaryotes, including protists that ingest organic matter, and several invertebrate animal phyla, dominated by the hardy water bears (tardigrades) and rotifers. Fossilized amoebae-like protists that would become the cousins of all animals appeared just before the onset of the Sturtian ice age, and so must have lived through all of the Cryogenian. Yet fossil evidence may never be found as it has melted away.
Organisms with surprising complexity likely existed before the ice. Although we animals possess the most intricately interconnected organs, we are not the only creatures to demonstrate multicellularity. Even single-celled life forms, such as bacteria, can form colonies of millions of identical cells. Moreover, cell differentiation is also not unique to us and likely arose more than once in Earth’s history: in land plants (embryophytes), green algae (chlorophytes), red algae (rhodophytes), brown algae (heterokontophytes) and at least twice in fungi.
Amazingly, several of these groups existed well before the Cryogenian. Indeed, some groups of fungi, green and red algae, as well as amoebae all made it through Snowball Earth unscathed, as pre-glacial fossils are commonly identical to their living relatives. Not only that, but molecular evidence shows that algae, as well as our animal ancestors, diversified both during and shortly after the Cryogenian. This was truly a period of extraordinarily radical and rapid evolutionary change, characterized by complexification.
Rather than being an evolutionary dead end, the Cryogenian, and specifically the Snowball Earth event, seems to have been the catalyst that paved the way to modern ecosystems. The emergence of complex multicellularity in the aftermath of Snowball Earth laid the foundations for the diverse and interconnected web of life that shapes our planet’s ecosystems today.
Some mysteries do still remain, though. In multicellular animals, individual cells have to make sacrifices for the good of the whole, and in many cases cells are even prohibited from growing at the expense of the organism. In order to achieve such apparent altruism, labor must be divided, sufficient resources allocated and suitable environments maintained, just like in any well-managed city.
Did Snowball Earth make cell cooperation a more viable option than, say, a return to an independent single-celled existence or to a simpler, colonial form of multicellularity? In this, the jury is still very much out, but perhaps slime molds can lend some insight.
The spontaneous development of multicellularity in normally single-celled protists is thought to be a response to sudden, unfavorable conditions. In the life cycle of cellular slime molds, for example, which can today be found in both Arctic and Antarctic realms, initially identical cells huddle together as a colony to form a multicellular slug that then proceeds to crawl to the light.
The slug soon turns into a fruiting body before expelling its spores to start new colonies elsewhere. Some cells even appear to sacrifice themselves to become a woody stalk, all for the good of the whole. This seemingly animal-like behavior would be a great strategy to ensure survival in harsh, isolated ecosystems, starved of nutrients. In such slugs, may we be glimpsing those very first steps towards our own animal ancestors? Could it be a similar kind of creature that clung to the ice during its Snowball period?
Returning from the Garvellach islands, tired from a day’s rock hammering, and salty from the sea spray, my colleagues and I find time to reflect upon how this incredible transition into glaciation, 717 million years ago, was so much more than simply an unusual climatic event. Wild swings between hot and cold, oxygen-replete and oxygen-starved conditions over many millions of years, heralded a biological revolution that redrew the tree of life. Greater cooperation between cells eventually led to more energetic, oxygen-sapping metabolisms, and the arms race that became the Cambrian explosion.
Walking along the rocky shoreline allows us to step, rock bed by rock bed, through 70 million years of time when life was forced to adapt to extreme cold. Although icy conditions fostered the gradual emergence of biological complexity, it was the thaw that likely proved the most pivotal. Walk along the coast hereabouts and, abruptly, the rocks change: no evidence of ice can be detected here, or indeed anywhere on Earth 635 million years ago. We have reached the start of the Ediacaran. The catastrophic retreat of the ice sheets and unprecedented sea-level rise, happening swiftly over mere thousands of years, launched a fight for survival in a rapidly warming, oxygenated world. The ancestors of you, me and all our animal cousins must have won that race.
THOMAS KINKADE, LOVED BY SOME, DESPISED BY OTHERS
Beloved by many, despised by others, Thomas Kinkade's quaint rustic scenes and his wholesome image belied a dark and tortured story that contrasts with his 'sugary' artworks.
Thomas Kinkade was one of the best-selling artists in history, as well as one of the most divisive. When he died in 2012, the American painter had been rocked by business problems, but at his commercial peak a decade earlier, his company was bringing in more than $100m a year. And yet his work was despised by many critics – not because it was blasphemous or obscene, but because, well, he specialized in quaint pictures of thatched-roof rural cottages nestling in leafy groves.
"Thomas Kinkade's style is illustrative saccharine fantasy rather than art with which you can connect at any meaningful level," Charlotte Mullins, the author of A Little History of Art, tells the BBC. "It is schmaltzy pastiches of Disney-style woodland scenes, complete with cutesy animals and fairy tale cottages. They are… like the images you find on cheap greetings cards – sugary and forgettable."
And compared to some critics, Mullins is being polite.
These critics don't just consider Kinkade's paintings to be nauseatingly sickly, they detect something disturbing and ominous about them. In her 2003 book on California, Where I Was From, Joan Didion summed up his art by saying. "It typically featured a cottage or a house of such insistent coziness as to seem actually sinister, suggestive of a trap designed to attract Hansel and Gretel. Every window was lit, to lurid effect, as if the interior of the structure might be on fire."
As harsh as that sounds, Didion may have been more perceptive than she realized. Art for Everybody, a new documentary directed by Miranda Yousef, shows that the man who called himself the "Painter of Light" did indeed have a dark side. "His branding was so effective that you didn't know there was this really complicated and I would say tortured artist behind it all," Yousef tells the BBC. "He lived a Greek tragedy of a life.”
Kinkade: Pavillion
The documentary features audio tapes recorded by Kinkade when he was a long-haired, bohemian-looking art student in California in the 1970s – and even then, he was already fretting over the question of whether he could make an impact as an artist while making a decent living. After a stint in Hollywood, painting backgrounds for Ralph Bakshi's 1983 animated feature film, Fire and Ice, he concentrated on idealized, nostalgic American landscapes, and he and his wife Nanette sold reproductions of them outside a local grocer's shop. In the 1990s, he took the idealism and the nostalgia to new heights, and swapped his rugged vistas for soft-focus pastoral scenes that a Hobbit might deem a bit on the twee side.
Old-fashioned lampposts and cottage windows glowed. Streams twinkled beneath slender stone footbridges. Bushes burst with pastel flowers. And cash registers rang. Kinkade didn't sell the paintings themselves, but the hazy idylls they depicted were soon being printed on collectible plates advertised in newspapers and magazines. For many Americans, they were comforting refuges from the modern world.
In Art for Everybody, Christopher Knight, the art critic of the Los Angeles Times, is contemptuous of Kinkade's imagery. "It's a cliché piled upon a fantasy piled upon a bad idea," he says. "The color is juiced and the light coming from inside those cottages is intense and blaring." Just as importantly, as far as his critics were concerned, Kinkade's pictures had nothing to them beyond their superficial decorative qualities.
"They are banal and hollow, with no intent to say anything meaningful," says Mullins. "Today we would think they had been produced by AI – designed as if by algorithm to a certain formula." But Yousef insists that Kinkade's skill can't be discounted. "There were actually other people who were painting cottages and Christmas scenes and putting them on plates and all that stuff," she notes, "and the thing is that Kinkade's were so much better. His works just blew everybody else's out of the water.”
Kinkade focused on idealized, nostalgic American landscapes, before swapping his rugged vistas for soft-focus pastoral scenes .
Kinkade's deprived upbringing, says Yousef, didn't just inspire his choice of subject matter, but drove him to make as much money as he could. He and his business partners printed pictures on an industrial scale, as well as putting his immediately recognizable imagery on furniture and ornaments, and selling them on the QVC shopping network. They also set up hundreds of faux olde worlde Thomas Kinkade Signature Galleries in shopping malls around the US, and trademarked the "Painter of Light" brand.
Again, Yousef doesn't see Kinkade as entirely calculating. Having grown up in a house with no pictures on the walls, "He sincerely believed that art should be accessible to everyone.”
Behind the fantasy
Whatever you thought of the paintings, the mass-marketing of the work of a single artist was certainly groundbreaking. In interviews at the time, Kinkade asserted that he was no different from an author selling stacks of novels or a musician selling CDs.
He even declared that by industrializing his output, he was doing what Andy Warhol had always dreamt of. But Mullins argues that Kinkade was being "obfuscatory and disingenuous" by churning out reproductions by the thousand, paying his assistants to add a few dabs of paint here and there, and then selling these prints for thousands of dollars, as if they were rare and precious works of art. "Prints offer an affordable way of buying art by great artists," she says. "They retain their value through the limited nature of the edition. This was never Kinkade's strategy.”
Kinkade: sailship. Kinkade printed pictures and merchandise on an industrial scale and trademarked the "Painter of Light" brand
Still, this sort of disagreement between Kinkade and his critics was one of his selling points. Art for Everybody features news reports and promotional videos, in which he tells adoring audiences that his art could be understood and appreciated by everyone, whereas only the snooty elite could see anything artistic about Chris Ofili putting elephant dung on his canvases, or Tracey Emin presenting her unmade bed to gallery-goers.
"This is not legitimate art," he proclaimed. As much a televangelist as a painter, Kinkade was a born-again Christian who assured his devotees that buying his work put them on the right side of a political and spiritual line separating them from decadent metropolitan tastemakers. He trademarked the sobriquet "Painter of Light" not just because of all the sunlit clouds and fiery cottages in his pictures, but to signify that he was a force for virtue and Christianity.
"The art world is a world of darkness today," he thundered. He, in contrast, was "someone who stands up for family and God and country and beauty". A doughy, plaid shirt-wearing fellow with a thick mustache, he often appeared on television with his blond wife and his four blond daughters: the embodiment of wholesome, traditional, all-American values. His fans weren't just paying for his pictures; they were paying to associate themselves with this proudly conservative persona. But that persona, like the pictures themselves, was more a fantasy that Kinkade wished for than an accurate representation of reality. He was prone to swearing after the directors of his mawkish videos called "cut".
He relied on alcohol to cope with work pressures. And, in the documentary, his daughters say that they were encouraged to smile in videos and personal appearances, but often felt as if their father cared more about his career than about them. "Thomas Kinkade and his persona and his brand really cast an extraordinarily long, dark shadow over his entire family," says Yousef, "and there was a lot wrapped up in perpetuating the brand and preserving it.
In order to maintain this brand and the vast business empire that went with it, Kinkade had to present himself as a Christian paragon, and he had to complete a stylistically identical painting every month. That meant that he had to suppress other, more conflicted parts of his psyche. The strain became too much. In the mid-2000s, Kinkade fell out with his business partners, and had legal battles with gallery franchisees.
He reinvented himself as a womanizing, hard-drinking hellraiser. After some interventions by his friends and family, some time in rehab, and the collapse of his marriage, he died of an accidental overdose of alcohol and diazepam at the age of 54.
It was only after his death that his family sorted through the vault containing his artwork, and uncovered a stash of bleak, violent drawings and paintings that seemed to express his inner rage and fear in a way that his cottage paintings never could: a shack in the middle of nowhere on a murky night; a nun pointing a gun at herself; giant monsters and distorted faces. Art for Everybody raises the questions of whether these pictures are more authentic than the ones the public knew about. Do they express how Kinkade really felt about his difficult upbringing and his frightening father?
Would it have been healthier for him to explore the shadowy netherworlds in these pictures instead of shutting himself inside his stifling sylvan cottages, year after year? And were his critics right to say that his famous paintings were disturbing all along?
"One of the things that was obvious early on," says Yousef, "was that his fans had a two-dimensional view of him and his critics had another completely different two-dimensional view of him. I knew there was a three-dimensional person in there somewhere, and that's what I wanted to try to find.”
In some ways, Kinkade was ahead of his time. First, he was a culture warrior before culture wars were being fought as fiercely as they are now. As someone who claimed that he was taking a stand for Christianity and patriotism and against the intellectual elite, he was staking out territory occupied by more and more in the US today. Second, he was also ahead of his time as an artist with such a brazen commercial side. "Today we're seeing all these artist collabs," says Yousef. "There's Yayoi Kusama who's working with Louis Vuitton, and Tom Sachs is working with Nike, and Kehinde Wiley is doing a collab with American Express, whereas you see in the movie an MBNA bank card with a Thomas Kinkade painting on it. He was already doing it 20 or 30 years ago."
Finally, by calling himself the Painter of Light, and by trading on his pious family-man persona, Kinkade turned himself into a kind of product. "Look at where we are today with social media, and everybody being a brand," says Yousef. "He was really ahead of his time with that. But I think that one of the big questions of the film is, what are the costs of turning yourself into a brand?" In Kinkade's case, the costs were unbearably high.
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There are extraterrestrial dust particles on your rooftop.
They are called micrometeorites and are about 400 microns in size. More than 100 billion micrometeorites are believed to fall to Earth each year.
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THE COSMIC FATE OF THE EARTH
The cosmic fate of the Earth is to be destroyed, most likely consumed by the Sun in approximately 5 billion years when the Sun expands into a red giant. Long before this, in about 1–2 billion years, the increasing luminosity of the Sun will evaporate the oceans and render the planet uninhabitable.
Here is the detailed outlook:
Solar Evolution: As the Sun exhausts its hydrogen fuel and becomes a red giant, it will expand, likely swallowing Mercury, Venus, and Earth. If not directly consumed, the extreme heat will vaporize all life, oceans, and atmosphere.
Final State: The Earth will be reduced to a barren, molten rock, potentially leaving a remnant core that cools to near-absolute zero after the Sun sheds its outer layers and becomes a white dwarf.
Alternative Scenarios: Long before the Sun's death, other possibilities include catastrophic asteroid impacts, gamma-ray bursts, or, in the very far future, perturbations caused by the collision of the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies.
The Timeline
~1 Billion Years: The End of Life. The Sun's luminosity increases by about 10% every billion years. This will eventually trigger a runaway greenhouse effect, boiling Earth's oceans and stripping away its atmosphere, rendering it uninhabitable for even the hardiest microbes.
~4 Billion Years: Galactic Collision. The Milky Way is predicted to collide with the Andromeda Galaxy. While direct collisions between stars are rare, the gravitational shift could potentially eject the Solar System into intergalactic space.
~5–7.5 Billion Years: Solar Expansion. As the Sun exhausts its hydrogen, it will swell into a Red Giant. It will certainly engulf Mercury and Venus, and most models suggest it will likely swallow and vaporize the Earth as well.
Technological Intervention: Some users speculate that an advanced future civilization might move the Earth to a wider orbit or replenish the Sun’s fuel to extend the planet's life.
Survival Scenarios: If Earth somehow avoids being swallowed by the Red Giant, it would become a frozen, barren rock orbiting the remaining White Dwarf for trillions of years.
Cosmic Threats: Earlier ends could be triggered by random events like a massive asteroid impact (similar to the one that killed the dinosaurs), a nearby gamma-ray burst, or a wandering "rogue" star disrupting the Solar System's stability.
The Ultimate End of Everything
Beyond the Earth, scientists often discuss the "Big Freeze" or "Heat Death," where the universe continues to expand until all stars burn out and matter itself decays over quadrillions of years, leaving nothing but a thin haze of subatomic particles.
~ Google, AI overview
Johann Hillel:
Based on everything we know today, it’s going to be heat death. And, in particular, the kind of heat death you get from a universe whose expansion keeps accelerating forever, but not accelerating fast enough to rip it apart. Everything will be so far away from everything else that it doesn’t even have anything to interact with, much less any way to get useful work out of such interactions.
But we can’t yet be sure. The reason you’re seeing people suggesting that it might be cyclical, or driven by more complicated stuff in a multiverse, or heading for a Big Rip, and so on is that these are still open conjectures that we can’t rule out yet, and probably won’t be able to rule out until we know more about quantum gravity, inflation, and dark energy.
And we could always make new discoveries that require us to revise our models into something not quite as simple as the current ones, which could conceivably then give us a different answer—it doesn’t seem too likely, but it’s certainly not impossible. The more we understand, the more confident we can be, but we’re never going to get to 100% confidence, because science doesn’t do that.
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THE NUMBER 666 IN THE HEBREW BIBLE
“The number of the beast is 666” (William Blake, 1805)
The number “666” has become infamous in the Western world. It is often regarded as the numerical symbol of Satan himself. Various satanic and neo-pagan displays portray the number. It is also the sum of all the numbers of the roulette wheel (often called the “Devil’s Game”); the 19th-century mathematician and Monte Carlo casino owner François Blanc devised a version of this game of chance that gave the house greater odds of winning than the players, thus causing rumors to swirl that he had made a “deal with the devil” to unlock its secrets.
The notoriety of 666 traces back to a single passage in the New Testament book of Revelation. This verse does not attribute it directly to the devil himself, but to the “beast” empowered by him (Revelation 13:17-18).
Various theories abound as to the interpretation of this number. That is not the purpose of this article. Instead, let’s answer the question: Is there any negative association with this number in the Hebrew Bible?
I recently discussed this topic with a friend at Hebrew University. The general conclusion seems to be that there are no negative connotations with the number. The number is found a few times in the Hebrew Bible—unsurprising, given the many thousands of figures given in the text—but in general, it is summarized as having “no meaning at all.”
I’m not so sure.
The number 666 is found three times in the Hebrew Bible. One passage is the otherwise-innocuous Ezra 2—a census of “the children of the province, that went up out of the captivity of those that had been carried away … who came with Zerubbabel” to rebuild the temple and resettle in the Holy Land (verses 1-2). One of the familial groups was “[t]he sons of Adonikam, 666” (verse 13; English Standard Version). In the context of an entire chapter of different numbers, this figure isn’t too shocking. Still, it is interesting to note that in the parallel census in Nehemiah 7, the figure for the children of Adonikam is ever so slightly different: 667 (verse 18).
The other two passages are more interesting. They are parallel passages relating to King Solomon: 1 Kings 10:14 and 2 Chronicles 9:13 (both virtually identical in content, differing in only two Hebrew letters). 1 Kings 10:14 reads: “Now the weight of gold that came to Solomon in one year was 666 talents of gold.”
Now this is a very oddly-specific number. The Hebrew word for “talents” is used numerous times in the Bible in referring to quantities of silver or gold. For vast sums in the hundreds or thousands, the number of talents is often rounded to the nearest 100; occasionally, to the nearest 10. For example, 100 talents are mentioned in Exodus 38:25; 120 talents in 1 Kings 9:14; 420 talents in verse 28; 1,000 talents in 2 Kings 15:19; 300 talents in 2 Kings 18:14 ; 100 talents in 2 Kings 23:33; 450 talents in 2 Chronicles 8:18; etc.
The 666 talents in 1 Kings 10:14 and 2 Chronicles 9:13 constitute the only case in which we have such a vast quantity of talents given right down to the nearest single digit. Is this mere coincidence? I don’t believe so. It appears to be a point of special emphasis.
Solomon is famous for his numerous wives (700, plus 300 concubines), which “turned away his heart after other gods” (1 Kings 11:4). He acquired these wives in direct contravention of the command for kings in Deuteronomy 17: “Neither shall he multiply wives to himself, that his heart turn not away” (verse 17).
But there is a second, more often overlooked part of the very same verse: “neither shall he greatly multiply to himself silver and gold.” In the same context of Solomon’s sin in multiplying wives, we read also of his “greatly multiplying to himself” the very specific sum of 666 talents of gold—not ascribed to any specific purpose (as in the building of the temple)—but rather as an annual figure of accumulation. (Solomon also accumulated so much silver that it became worthless; see 2 Chronicles 9:20, 27.)
The Cambridge Bible Commentary notes of 1 Kings 10:14: “There can be no doubt that Solomon was one of the wealthiest monarchs in the East at that date. But the taxation must have been crushing, and with all this Oriental splendor and luxury there was rottenness within. Solomon was the Jewish Louis XIV.” 1 Kings 12:4-16 describe the harsh “yoke” of taxation that those in Israel were facing (a “yoke” that played a role in the eventual breakup of the kingdom).
As Solomon lamented at the end of his life: “I searched in my heart how to pamper my flesh … I gathered me also silver and gold, and treasure such as kings and the provinces have as their own; I got me men-singers and women-singers, and the delights of the sons of men, women very many … whatsoever mine eyes desired I kept not from them; I withheld not my heart from any joy …. Then I looked on all the works that my hands had wrought, and on the labor that I had labored to do; and, behold, all was vanity and a striving after wind, and there was no profit under the sun. … This also is vanity and a great evil”(Ecclesiastes 2:3, 8, 10-11, 21).
This brings to mind that famous scriptural assertion that “the love of money is the root of all evil.” It seems that for Solomon that “root of all evil” may have had a definite numerical figure—666.
And on this subject of “evil” in relation to this numerical figure, there is even more than meets the eye in the Hebrew scriptures.
A Very Ra Number
The word for “bad” in modern Hebrew is ra, רע. More appropriately, it is the biblical word translated as “evil” or “wicked” (i.e., the “tree of the knowledge of good and evil”). Can you guess how many times it is used in the Hebrew Bible? This word—Strong’s number H7451—“occurs 666 times.” Again, just coincidence? A number with “no meaning at all”?
There is another layer of intrigue. Ra just so happens to be the name of the chief Egyptian god, and is spelled the same way in Hebrew (רע). And in comparing the account of the Exodus plagues and this chief deity of Egypt (a sun-god), it is clear that this deity was the key target in God’s demonstrations “against all the gods of Egypt” (Exodus 12:12). This is expounded upon in Prof. Gary Rendsburg’s article for theTorah.com, “YHWH’s War Against the Egyptian Sun-God Ra.”
Stele 666
Perhaps it’s also fitting that the Stele of Ankh-ef-en-Khonsu, displaying a syncretized figure of the gods Ra and Horus, ended up with the inventory number 666 in Egypt’s Boulaq Museum. (This led to a great deal of interest in the item among the occultist community, particularly spurred on by the infamous Aleister Crowley.)
Much of the language contained within the Torah shows clear linguistic evidence of Israel’s sojourn in Egypt, with the presence of various Egyptian words adopted and utilized. As such, could it be more than coincidence that such a Hebrew word for “evil” is one and the same word as the name of the great, opposing sun god of the Egyptians? And by the same token, is it just coincidence that we find 666 cases of this word in the Hebrew Bible?
Is it also coincidence that King Solomon accrued to himself precisely “666 talents of gold per year” (1 Kings 10:14, New English Translation), alongside his manifold wives, which turned away his heart—both of which are warned about in the very same context of Deuteronomy 17:17?
Again, is there an underlying negative connotation to the number 666 in the Hebrew Bible? You decide. ~ Quora
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JESUS VS SAINT PAUL
Did Paul change the original message of Jesus?
Undoubtedly.
That is, if the gospels tell us the original message of Jesus.
I have my doubts, because the gospels are so contradictory.
But let’s suppose, for the sake of argument, that there is a kernel of truth in the gospels.
What was the original message of Jesus?
I believe the original message of Jesus was: “The world is about to end very soon, during your lifetimes, so repent and be sure you’re ready to be accepted into the kingdom of god.”
According to the gospel of Matthew, this repentance meant following the entire 613 laws of Moses, since Jesus said that not one jot or tittle would pass from the law until all was fulfilled.
Paul tossed that idea out like yesterday’s fetid garbage.
Paul said salvation was not by the law or works, but via grace through faith.
Jesus said he would judge christians by their works, if the bible can be believed.
The bible admits that the early christian church was deeply divided over the issue of faith vs. works.
Why did the Holy Ghost lead Paul to believe salvation is by faith through grace, while leading James and the Judaizers to believe the law and works were paramount?
Jesus said a house divided is doomed to fall.
The christian religion is divided into 45,000 different denominations.
Did the Holy Ghost not get the message? ~ Michael R. Burch, Quora
Mike Pitamber:
Paul was a false apostle due to his differing doctrines from what Jesus taught, especially since he's never even met Jesus.
Coach:
If you actually study the messages side by side, there are differences, and the problem with that is a perfect religion or divine “plan" should have been and always will be consistent. So when shit changes, it’s a red flag that something was wrong. If you buy into the book as the actual word of god, you need to follow it all, cover to cover. None of the "that doesn't apply “ nonsense and there’s loads that doesn’t make sense.
Jorge Rodriguez:
Christianity started as a mystery cult that copy pasted bits and pieces of other cults and gave it a Jewish flavor.
That’s why Paul sends letters to other congregations saying what’s right or what’s wrong. Nobody agreed then and nobody agrees now, because there is no “original.”
I mean, in one gospel when Jesus died there was a zombie apocalypse in Jerusalem when all the Jewish prophets rose from their graves and talked to people, but nobody noticed it, much less the authorities, while in the other gospels there’s nothing happening; in one gospel Lazarus is raised from the dead, in the others nothing happens or I guess it wasn’t important to mention; in one apocryphal gospel (Gospel of Peter) it’s implied that Jesus never died and instead what walks out of the tomb is the literal freaking cross, that then proceeds to talk to people, completely normal stuff.
In another gospel that was later rejected by the powers that be (Gospel of Thomas), we have Jesus’ childhood where he was like Dennis the Menace, killing kids with his powers, making clay birds come to life… the list goes on and on. It’s all made up, people.
P.S. ~ The Gospel of Peter was later rejected not because of the “crazy” in it — there’s plenty crazy elsewhere — but because it defended the idea that Christ wasn’t fully human, but a divine illusion. That gives you an idea of how completely arbitrary a fact it is that we have reached today’s understanding of Jesus. But of course, this is to be expected, when you’re talking about humans writing fiction.
“Paul said salvation was not by the law or works, but via grace through faith.”
Why did the Holy Ghost lead Paul to believe salvation is by faith through grace, while leading James and the Judaizers to believe the law and works were paramount?”
He did not. Paul was right and James did not contradict him.
All that James said that if you do not see the fruit of the spirit (Gal 5:22,23) in someone who claims to be a Christian (e.g.Trump), it is very likely that that person is not a real, saved Christian.
A believer starts to change and show the fruit of the spirit as an outworking of his faith.
But faith comes first and saves, and good works follow in its wake. (Oriana: Even as a child, I rejected the idea that faith and grace come first and we are able to do good only thanks to grace. I knew too many kind atheists, including my parents, to believe that we do good only because of divine grace.)
They are not a prerequisite for being saved/ becoming a child of God.
The bible admits that the early christian church was deeply divided over the issue of faith vs. works. Jesus said he would judge christians by their works, if the bible can be believed. ~ Quora
Robert de Neef:
Jesus told us that nobody but the Father would know the time of His second coming, not even the Son.
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THE BRAIN’S ROLE IN HEART ATTACK
Scientists at the University of California San Diego have discovered a path between the brain and the immune system that could potentially lead to new ways to ease heart attacks. They showed that disabling specific parts of that circuit could profoundly improve outcomes in mice with experimentally induced heart attacks.
"The injury almost disappears," says UCSD neuroscientist Vineet Augustine, who led the new study appearing Tuesday in the journal Cell.
While it may not seem obvious how neuroimmune crosstalk relates to heart disease, links between the nervous and immune systems have captivated researchers for decades. Some researchers have focused on the vagus nerve, a huge bundle of fibers that carries signals between the brain and other organs to control breathing, blood pressure, digestion and other involuntary functions.
A key discovery came in 2000 when researchers at the Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research on Long Island, New York, showed that electrically stimulating the vagus nerve in rats curbed production of an immune protein that drives inflammation.
Last July, an implantable vagus nerve stimulator developed by SetPoint Medical — a company co-founded by Dr. Kevin Tracey, president of the Feinstein Institutes — earned FDA approval as a treatment for people with rheumatoid arthritis, an autoimmune disease.
Earlier research had also found striking links between the cardiovascular system and the nervous and immune systems. On the day of the devastating 1994 Northridge earthquake, the number of sudden cardiac deaths in Los Angeles County rose more than fivefold. Similar spikes occur with high-stakes sporting events. During stressful moments, the heart rate shoots up to protect us.
"The brain says, hey, get up and run, you're going to die," says Dr. Kalyanam Shivkumar, a UCLA cardiac electrophysiologist.
While such fight-or-flight signals help during emergencies, in the long term, they trigger harmful inflammation. "And then the heart swells up. You get arrhythmias and heart failure," says Shivkumar, who's leading an effort to create a new anatomical atlas of the heart.
The current research from UCSD uses state-of-the-art tools from genetics and neuroscience to gain a more precise understanding of how the brain communicates with the heart and its role in heart attacks.
It shows how the vagus nerve carries signals between the brain and the heart. Augustine says he found that during a heart attack in mice, certain vagal neurons (TRPV1 expressing neurons) "literally wrap around the injury site." His team wondered if blocking communication through those nerve cells could help slow or even prevent heart attacks in the lab animals.
It was a bold idea — one that some scientists told Augustine was "unreal" when he spoke about the project in its early stages four or five years ago.
The experiments were technically demanding and required multiple researchers to work long hours together — one performing heart surgery on the mice, another targeting specific cells in the brain, and others taking physiological measurements and conducting echocardiography to image the heart in real-time.
"Minor errors at any step could have compromised the entire experiment," Saurabh Yadav, a postdoc in Augustine's lab and one of the paper's first authors, said via email. "There were moments when I wondered whether I had taken on too much or if this was simply too big a leap.”
Then came an "incredibly encouraging" moment, Yadav told NPR. The team turned off this small group of TRPV1 nerve cells and saw striking improvements in pumping efficiency and electrical signals associated with heart contraction. And that was just the first victory.
The TRPV1 neurons carry signals from the heart to the hypothalamus — a deep-brain structure that regulates body temperature, thirst, hunger and sleep. Other cells in the hypothalamus receive those signals and relay them to a different cluster of nerve cells that project back to the heart and unleash an immune protein that drives inflammation. Blocking any of the three junctures of the heart-brain-immune loop relieved heart attack complications in the mice, the UCSD team reports in Cell.
"The findings in this paper are quite impressive," says Cameron McAlpine, a neuroimmunologist at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai who was not involved in the new research.
While he and others have long known that heart attacks trigger major changes in the immune and nervous systems, McAlpine says, it's only in the last five or six years that researchers have developed "tools and technologies that allow us to study this at a really deep level" — such as some of the genetic approaches for precisely manipulating the activity in specific groups of nerve cells.
For years, research in this area stalled because of a conceptual divide — the idea that the brain is the command center, sending signals to the rest of the body, Augustine says. Clinicians "focused on the organ itself, whereas the nervous system was kind of ignored," he adds.
Now interest in the nervous and immune systems is surging. These systems "affect practically everything in your body," he says. "The field is really exploding.”
While the mouse findings are still years from entering human trials, it's possible that the approved vagus nerve stimulator could prove useful for heart attacks after further study, says Asya Rolls, a neuroimmunologist at Tel Aviv University in Israel. Her team has shown that the brain's reward networks can regulate inflammation in mice in various settings including bacterial infections and cancer as well as heart attacks.
In future experiments, Augustine says his team will flesh out the heart-brain-immune circuit by investigating, for example, what exactly the nerve cells are sensing and how they communicate with the heart cells.
In a 2024 paper, McAlpine and colleagues report that heart attacks send immune cells into the brain to promote deep sleep.
The growing body of research illustrates how brain-immune connections can manifest differently across conditions — and "it's likely much more complex" than the specific pathways identified by each research team, Rolls told NPR via email. Each manipulation likely affects many other pathways such as blood flow, vascularization and metabolism. A National Institutes of Health program called Stimulating Peripheral Activity to Relieve Conditions (SPARC) is funding research on stimulating neural circuits to relieve disease.
Shivkumar sees an emerging theme. "The message people should get is, oh my God, these scientists are doing something very exciting. But literally we are building on ancient knowledge," he says. Research on stimulating the vagus nerve supports "what the Buddha said: meditate. I call it Zen cardiology.”
https://www.npr.org/2026/01/27/nx-s1-5690108/heart-attack-brain-nervous-immune-system
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CAN A PULSE OF ELECTRICITY TO THE BRAIN MAKE US LESS SELFISH?
Scientists have discovered how to make people less selfish — at least temporarily — by stimulating two areas of their brain.
In a new study carried out at the University of Zurich, 44 volunteers were asked to decide how to split an amount of money between themselves and an anonymous partner.
During the experiment, an electrical current was applied to the frontal and parietal areas of the brain – situated at the front and towards the back. When these areas were stimulated at the same time, the participants gave away more money.
"The effects were not huge, but they're consistent," said Prof Christian Ruff, one of the lead authors who carried out the experiments.
Changing behavior
"Statistically, we really see an increase in their willingness to pay."
As well as revealing something about the mechanisms behind fundamental human behavior, the findings, researchers say, could be useful in treating some brain disorders.
"There are people who have profound problems with social behavior, because they can't take other people's perspective into account and are constantly behaving selfishly," Prof Ruff told BBC Radio 4's Inside Science. "That's when we could use this.”
In the case of this experiment, the effects were short-lived.
"To really change behavior in the longer term, you would have to do it repeatedly," said Prof Ruff. He compared the potential effects to going to the gym. One workout will not improve your fitness, "but if you go to the gym twice weekly for a period of two months, your body changes. This is the same.”
This new discovery, published in the journal PLoS Biology, builds on their previous study, which monitored brain activity while participants played the same money-sharing game.
In that study, the researchers pinpointed the two brain areas that appeared to be "talking to each other" — with brain cells firing at the same frequency — when players gave away more money.
Those two brain areas are known to play a role in decision-making and in empathy, or distinguishing the feelings of others from our own.
When a more selfless decision was made, the empathy region and the decision region appeared to communicate.
So for this study, the researchers wanted to find out if they could use electrical stimulation to "nudge" people towards more selfless decisions.
One anonymous volunteer, who tried out the brain stimulation test, said the experience felt "like a warm shower or small drops of rain" on the scalp.
"Immediately after starting the stimulation, I was making the decisions displayed on a screen. At no time did I have the sensation that the stimulation was impacting my decisions.”
Identifying this selfless decision brain activity, in multiple people, strongly suggests that altruism is hardwired in our brains; that it evolved to make us take care of others.
Being able to influence and change that mechanism, Prof Ruff explained, "is what makes this discovery clinically relevant.”
Prof Ruff's co-author, Dr Jie Hu from East China Normal University, said: "What's new here is evidence of cause and effect.
"When we altered communication in a specific brain network using targeted, non-invasive stimulation, people's sharing decisions changed — shifting how they balanced their own interests against others.”
But should we be concerned — or unsettled — by an experiment that influences behavior in this way? Prof Ruff says “absolutely not.”
"This is medically regulated specifically for these experiments," he explained. "It goes through an ethics committee and people give informed consent, which they can withdraw at any time.
The neuroscientist compared that to the influences on our behavior from social media and advertising. "There you have no control over what you're exposed to [and how your brain responds to it]," he said.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c20znqe2yqlo
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THE POOR AGE FASTER THAN THE RICH
People with lower socio-economic status appear to age faster than their better-off counterparts, British researchers found.
They showed that the poor have shorter telomeres, the caps on chromosomes that prevent them from fraying, which makes them biologically older than people of the same age in higher social groups.
"Not only does social class affect health and age-related diseases, it seems to have an impact on the aging process itself," said Dr Tim Spector of St. Thomas's Hospital in London.
Each time a cell divides, telomeres shorten. The loss is associated with aging, which is why telomeres are thought to hold the secrets of youth and the aging process.
The researchers compared telomere length of 1,552 women twins in Britain between the ages of 18 and 75 who were assigned to one of five groups based on National Statistics' Socio-Economic Classification.
Even after adjusting for factors such as obesity, smoking and exercise, which can also influence aging, the scientists found that telomeres in women of lower economic status were significantly shorter.
The average difference was equivalent to about seven years of telomere loss, which also could not be explained by education or income, according to the study published in the journal Aging Cell.
"This is equivalent to what could be considered an extra seven years of biological aging," Spector told a news conference.
"We are talking about a seven-year difference in telomere loss between people of the same age, same body mass index, same smoking status, same exercise status who happen to be in a manual job or non-manual job, which roughly divides the social classes," he added.
When the scientists compared telomere lengths of 17 pairs of twins who had been raised together but as adults were in different socio-economic groups, mainly through marriage, the average difference was equivalent to about nine years' loss.
Spector suspects that lower socio-economic status has an impact on telomere dynamics.
"The idea is that psychological stress itself or the loss of control might have a biological impact," he said. "It might raise levels of oxidative stress in the body and make cells turn over more quickly.”
Oxidative stress is damage to cells and DNA caused by free radicals — charged particles found in the environment and produced by processes in the body.
https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna13943205
AI OVERVIEW:
Individuals with lower socioeconomic status experience the onset of chronic diseases and death 5–10 years earlier than wealthier counterparts, often driven by higher biological risk factors, including increased physiological dysregulation. This earlier "aging" is linked to higher rates of diabetes, heart disease, hypertension, and cancer. These populations also suffer from increased functional limitations and lower access to preventive care.
Key details regarding this disparity include:
Biological Aging: Poor individuals exhibit a higher average number of biological risk factors, indicating faster physiological decline.
Disease Prevalence: Lower-income adults are more than three times as likely to report activity limitations due to chronic conditions, such as diabetes and heart disease.
Early Life Factors: Childhood poverty is linked to a higher prevalence of adult chronic illnesses like hypertension and arthritis.
Risk Factors: Increased exposure to stress, poor nutrition, and environmental hazards contributes to this earlier, more severe onset of disease.
Mortality Gap: Poor individuals often die younger, with lower-income populations experiencing higher morbidity and mortality rates.
Drivers of Early Disease Onset
Limited Access to Care: Low-income populations often lack access to healthcare, leading to delayed diagnoses and poor management of conditions.
Environmental and Lifestyle Factors: Limited financial resources can force reliance on cheaper, less nutritious food and create, or increase, exposure to pollution, which contributes to chronic diseases.
Chronic Stress: Economic hardship creates chronic stress, which is a major driver of physiological decline and disease.
Lifestyle Behaviors: Lower income is associated with higher rates of smoking and lower levels of leisure-time physical activity, accelerating the onset of chronic disease.
Contributing Factors
The disparity is rarely due to a single cause but rather a "vicious cycle" of environmental and systemic issues:
Environmental Barriers: Poor neighborhoods often lack access to fresh, healthy foods ("food deserts") and safe spaces for physical activity, increasing the prevalence of obesity and metabolic diseases.
Healthcare Gaps: Lower-income individuals face higher "no-show" rates for medical appointments due to lack of transportation, child care, or paid sick leave, leading to poorly managed conditions that worsen quickly.
Chronic Stress: The persistent psychological and physical stress of financial instability triggers "allostatic load," which accelerates the aging process and disease progression.
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WHY SO MANY PEOPLE WITH SCHIZOPHRENIA SMOKE
Nearly 70% of people with schizophrenia spectrum disorders (SSDs) smoke cigarettes.
People with SSDs have neurochemical vulnerabilities to smoking, research suggests.
A recent review concluded that smoking increases neural connectivity but can reduce gray matter volume.
Learning more about these effects could help individuals with SSDs find healthier alternatives to smoking.
Almost 70 percent of people with schizophrenia smoke cigarettes, which is two to three times higher than the general population. Why? Is it that people with schizophrenia feel a pull towards nicotine, or does tobacco calm them in ways that other substances can’t?
There might be some truth to both ideas. Past research has suggested that people with schizophrenia may benefit more from certain aspects of nicotine and are more strongly drawn to it than the average person, but the findings were far from comprehensive. Substances can be complicated, often because they have both adverse and positive effects.
A 2025 systematic review was able to narrow down the specific effects that smoking has on people with schizophrenia, and the results reveal a true distinction in the way smoking affects the brains of people with a schizophrenia spectrum disorder (SSD) specifically. Here is what they found.
Smoking and Schizophrenia Spectrum Disorders
For their review, researchers analyzed 22 studies that used various methods to observe the biological traits of those with SSDs. Some of those methods included brain imaging techniques like fMRI, which allows researchers to view brain activity during a task; resting state fMRI, which observes the brain when the participant is lying still and doing nothing; and structural MRI, which allows researchers to view brain region volume—in particular, the loss of gray matter that is common in people with SSDs. Gray matter is responsible for cognitive tasks, and a reduction in volume can worsen symptoms and cognitive skills.
The review found that people with SSDs who smoke tend to have a significant reduction in gray matter. There were noticeable and significant reductions in the prefrontal cortex (which is responsible for higher-order thinking that allows people to conduct cognitive tasks), the amygdala (which is related to emotional regulation), and the hippocampus (responsible for memory), to name a few.
Smoking and SSDs are both known to be individually associated with gray matter reduction; both combined may worsen the effect.
Surprisingly, however, smoking appears to help the brain and nervous system integrate. One study found that the default mode network (DMN) and the limbic system had more interaction in the participants who smoked, suggesting that smoking might actually improve poor connectivity between neural pathways and brain regions. This was apparent both in people who had SSDs and those who did not.
Some studies revealed unique neural patterns in patients with SSDs who smoke, which suggest that those with SSDs have a susceptibility to smoking and nicotine. There appears to be increased reward sensitivity in those with SSDs, as well as a decrease in pathways that are normally responsible for processing the negative effects of smoking. People with SSDs find short-term rewards fulfilling, while being less sensitive to long-term or cognitive awareness of the negative effects of smoking.
Recovering From Smoking
People with SSDs are generally vulnerable to things the average person isn’t. It seems that nicotine may be particularly neurochemically attractive to those with the disorder, with both positive and negative results. For people with SSDs, smoking can bring comfort and regulation in ways that are difficult to find in other substances—but it does negatively affect the brain, potentially leading to worse outcomes long-term.
Given the negative effects of smoking, which include the higher change of lung cancer, researchers point out that it might be worthwhile to further look into the effects of smoking on people with SSDs to isolate these effects. The results could produce therapies to help engage and satisfy these unique neural pathways, such as heightened reward sensitivity, while minimizing the negative effects by replacing the substance.
Recovery includes regulating cravings that come with both the disorder and medications (which are known to increase appetite that leads to weight gain), but it can be done, and researchers are currently working on ways to increase the hope and livelihood of people with SSDs. Many people are able to live a full life without smoking, using other things like travel, creativity, and hobbies as rewards. What gives you that feeling of reward that isn’t smoking? Maybe look into it.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/living-as-an-outlier/202602/why-so-many-people-with-schizophrenia-smoke
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Research indicates that nicotine patches can improve attention, focus, and working memory in both smoking and non-smoking individuals with schizophrenia
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HEALTH BENEFITS OF COLD WATER
While cold-water therapy was being studied for its ability to treat depression and anxiety, an amazing discovery was made. The strategy stopped pain. In fact, Mark Harper, MD, PhD, author of Chill: The Cold Water Swim Cure, says he’s seen participants get relief that’s so effective, they are able to stop pain meds.
The reason? Immersing yourself in water below 50 F and 68F lowers your body’s stress level putting the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system in balance, asserts Dr. Harper. The result? Levels of stress hormones are lower, reducing whole-body inflammation and its effects, including pain, brain fog, blue moods, and even risks of chronic illnesses like diabetes. You can get these benefits by getting a cold shower, or even better, a cold bath.
Dr Harper’s how-to: Step into the water and stay there until your breath returns of normal (1 to 2 minutes). Then put your face into the water for 10 seconds, doing this 3 times times so so you are in the water for a total of 3 minutes. It’s a key step, say Dr. Harper, because it strengthens the body’s ability and to calm and control the stress response. “We need stress and inflammation for our body to function correctly,” he says. But cold water exposure helps us keep the stress and inflammation in the zone that’s good for us.” ~ Woman’s World, June 26, 2023.
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WHAT HAPPENS AFTER 30 DAYS OF DAILY COLD SHOWERS?
After 30 days of daily cold showers, individuals commonly experience increased energy, heightened mental alertness, and improved mood due to a surge in dopamine and endorphins. It boosts metabolic rate, improves circulation, and enhances skin/hair health. Additionally, it builds significant mental resilience, reduces muscle soreness, and improves tolerance to stress.
Physical and Mental Benefits After 30 Days
Increased Alertness & Energy: Cold water acts as a potent stimulant, waking you up more effectively than caffeine.
Mental Toughness & Reduced Stress: The daily practice builds discipline and resilience, making it easier to handle stressful situations and reducing hesitation.
Improved Mood: Cold showers act as a neurochemical reset, increasing dopamine and endorphins.
Healthier Skin and Hair: Unlike hot showers that strip natural oils, cold water keeps skin and hair hydrated and can reduce irritation.
Improved Recovery & Circulation: Regular cold exposure reduces muscle inflammation, soreness, and improves circulation.
Metabolic Boost: Cold water triggers brown fat activation, which may help with burning calories to keep the body war
(~ AI overview, Internet)
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ending on beauty:
FIRE
After school we saw a strange glow.
A three-story building was on fire,
the only building on street
that had survived the war.
We rushed to it and stood as close
as firemen would allow.
It was December, the dark sky
like a black dress for a jewel.
The flame now crouched low,
licking the charred walls,
now shot up and danced high,
soaring, merging and dividing —
gold like a lion’s leap,
then a roaring red.
And the huge droning hum,
like a crowd chanting a prayer.
I imagine no one was hurt
in this passage to the light,
though frankly we didn’t ask,
too thrilled by the dance,
by the wind of sparks —
not of history, but childhood —
our faces happy at last,
smiling, wrapped in the blaze.
~ Oriana
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