This year’s El Niño will almost certainly become the strongest ever recorded, an analysis by a prominent climate scientist has warned — though other scientists have cautioned that it’s still too early to say what it will unleash.
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EDELWEISS
It was a field mouse that ran in
as I described an edelweiss,
stem, leaf and petal
covered with dense plush.
Before hiding in the night,
the mouse stood up,
lifted his head, and for a hushed
eternity we stared —
I must have seemed a raptor —
an owl-like mask,
predator’s frontal eyes —
yet my nickname used to be
‘Little Mouse’. I overheard
a student once: “Look how she
walks — not across the yard,
but along the wall like a mouse.”
Don’t you see the courage
of the mouse?
Its wisdom in keeping close
to the shadowing wall?
Not with doves and roses
the mouse and I claim our
survival, but with a starlike
flower tucked into rock.
*
Little mouse, little mouse,
I know you no longer exist —
your shoelace tail, pale feet,
your half-moon ears —
And I feel I have lived
several lives by now,
without needing to
die. Or rather, I have
died, meaning changed.
Mouse, in memory
of both of us,
I name you Edelweiss.
~ Oriana
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THE OPOSSUM AND I (AND RAFAEL, AN ANGEL)
It must have gotten in through the garage. I've long fantasized that a beautiful kitten would turn up at my door — but reality showed its rat's tail again.
Still, I loved the little opossum. It’s already a treasured memory — especially the moment I first saw it and how we stared at each other — two mortal creatures, not sure what to do.
John:
Too funny. In the previous house we lived in, we were near about 5 acres of woods. We had chipmunks and snakes in the house! And once there was a bear turning over our trash can. We were happy to move out of the place.
Oriana:
Meanwhile my dream of a kitten persists.
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LATE SENATOR LINDSEY GRAHAM IN RED PANTIES
"I ALWAYS KEEP RECEIPTS!" Former erotic masseuse Brandon Hilton publicly comes out and bravely exposes Lindsey Graham's dirty laundry for the whole nation to see.
After Occupy Democrats shared his story anonymously, Hilton contacted us and said he wanted to be public.
"I went through a lot during this period of my life and I survived it. I’m even writing a book about it, Lindsey Graham wasn’t my only high-profile client during this time and I have all the emails, pictures and information we exchanged over those two years," Hinton wrote to us in an email.
“I’m an LGBTQ+ Pop Artist, Actor and Fashion Designer, but during the years 2015-2017 I was the Carolinas #1 Erotic Masseuse.”
“I first spoke up about giving erotic massages to Lindsey Graham a few years ago on Twitter but no one seemed to care then, or maybe it was SUPPRESSED by the algorithm, who knows.”
“But now that he’s dead and I have no fear of him suing me or having me murdered, I feel I can finally talk about it.”
“For the last decade I’ve had to watch him consistently come for the LGBTQ+ community while secretly being a closeted gay man himself.”
“I was booked by “Brad” aka Lindsey Graham a total of 27 times between 2015-2017 to perform erotic massages on him in a Columbia SC hotel room.”
“He would always have me meet him somewhere else first, usually a Waffle House parking lot, where he would give me cash to go get a hotel room.
Once I’d checked in he would come up to the room in a baseball cap and glasses, strip down to red panties and have me slather him in baby oil and perform erotic massages on him for $150 an hour.”
“I have so many stories from this time in my life, but you never forget the ones like Lindsey, I never would’ve known he was “somebody” if he hadn’t always been so weird and secretive every time we met.”
“After our 3rd session I finally found out who he was, afterwards I googled him and learned more about him.”
“He was a strange man with a strange body and strange sexual fantasies, but he was very generous and was never disrespectful to me in any way, but knowing how he truly felt politically and his stance on the LGBTQ+ community did make things even weirder.”
“And yes, the Ladybug rumors are true. He was covered in skin tags.”
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While we of course would never judge Lindsey for his personal choices, it’s the public ones we have a real issue with. ~ Facebook
ENGLISH IS THREE LANGUAGES IN ONE
The notorious inconsistency of English comes from being three entirely different languages hiding in a single trench coat.
At its foundation, English is a Germanic language, brought to the British Isles in the 5th century by the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes. The foundational grammar and the most common daily words—like "water," "strong," and "house"—come from this Old English.
However, in the 8th and 9th centuries, Viking invaders brought Old Norse. Because the two groups had to trade and live together, their languages collided. To make communication easier, English simplified its own grammar, dropping complex noun genders and word endings. At the same time, it absorbed Norse quirks and pronouns, creating the first deep layer of structural irregularity.
The real chaos began in 1066 with the Norman Conquest. French-speaking nobility took over England, making Old Norman the language of the court, law, and power, while the commoners continued speaking English. Over the next three hundred years, English absorbed around 10,000 French words.
This split is why English has so many confusing spelling rules and dual vocabularies. For instance, people raise "cows" and "swine" (Germanic words used by the farmers) but eat "beef" and "pork" (French words used by the lords being served). This era also introduced French grammatical concepts, like placing adjectives after nouns in certain official titles, resulting in terms like "attorney general" instead of "general attorney."
Centuries later, during the Renaissance, scholars decided that English was not sophisticated enough. They forcefully injected thousands of Latin and Greek words into the language to describe new concepts in science, medicine, and literature. Worse, they tried to impose Latin grammar rules onto a Germanic language framework. The famous rule warning writers to "never end a sentence with a preposition" was pushed heavily by 17th and 18th-century grammarians simply because Latin sentences cannot end with prepositions. Applying that standard to English is like trying to force the rules of chess onto a game of checkers.
The inconsistency of English is simply a historical record of invasions, migrations, and academic meddling. It is not a single language that forgot how to behave, but a colliding mixture of Old English, Old Norse, French, and Latin, all fighting for dominance in the same dictionary. ~ SepiaGlyphs, Quora
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OCEAN TEMPERATURES PREDICT A STRONG EL NIÑO
June global sea surface temperatures have climbed to record highs, prompting concerns over extreme weather, flooding, sea level rise and stress to global ocean ecosystems.
This year’s El Niño will almost certainly become one of the strongest ever recorded, an analysis by a prominent climate scientist has warned — though other scientists have cautioned that it’s still too early to say what it will unleash.
https://www.livescience.com/planet-earth/weather/these-are-striking-forecasts-super-el-nino-keeps-getting-even-more-likely-and-it-could-bring-a-humanitarian-crisis?utm_source=firefox-newtab-en-us
El Niño
During El Niño, trade winds weaken. Warm water is pushed back east, toward the west coast of the Americas.
El Niño means Little Boy in Spanish. South American fishermen first noticed periods of unusually warm water in the Pacific Ocean in the 1600s. The full name they used was El Niño de Navidad, because El Niño typically peaks around December.
El Niño can affect our weather significantly. The warmer waters cause the Pacific jet stream to move south of its neutral position. With this shift, areas in the northern U.S. and Canada are dryer and warmer than usual. But in the U.S. Gulf Coast and Southeast, these periods are wetter than usual and have increased flooding.
During La Niña, waters off the Pacific coast are colder and contain more nutrients than usual. This environment supports more marine life and attracts more cold-water species, like squid and salmon, to places like the California coast.
https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/ninonina.html
https://youtu.be/OTnPLqtKbHs?si=yLIC6yhRW85x7wVg
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FRONTIER GOTHIC: WITH MASKED MEN TO MORPHINE ADDICTION, THE ORIGINAL TV LITTLE HOUSE ON THE PRAIRIE WAS A TRUE AMERICAN HORROR STORY
When it comes to TV credits sequences, few evoke as much nostalgia as that for Little House On The Prairie, the 1970s series about family life on the American frontier in the 19th Century.
"This song reminds of the good old days...carefree and unburdened," says one fan, commenting under a video clip of the NBC series intro on YouTube that has currently been viewed 1.6 million times. Someone else notes: "They simply do not make television like this anymore. It is real, it is wholesome."
But the show's famous introduction gives a false impression of the show – as in fact it was much much darker than it is commonly remembered to be.
Based on the much-loved semi-autobiographical 1930s children's book series of the same name by Laura Ingalls Wilder, Little House on the Prairie ended up becoming a genuine TV phenomenon. Centering on the lives of the Ingalls family – father Charles, mother Caroline and their four daughters Mary, Laura, Carrie and Grace – in the frontier town of Walnut Grove in Minnesota in the 1870s, it ran for seven series, from 1973 to 1984, and pulled in an estimated 15 to 20 million viewers per episode in the US alone. It went on to be syndicated in more than 100 countries; and in 2025, Nielsen Media Research declared it "a top streaming legacy program" based on how many viewers were still watching it.
Robert J Thompson, professor of popular culture at New York's Syracuse University, points out that much of the show's darkness merely reflected the reality of 19th-Century life. "The things the show covered – its chronic dealing with pregnancy troubles, for example – reflected real issues. Pregnancy was dangerous in the 1870s, 1880s, and 1890s, especially in a frontier setting. The show dealt with malaria outbreaks, pregnancy issues, and the deaths of young children. It didn't pull many punches."
Its unexpected evolution
By the show's final seasons, however, its depiction of hard-hitting issues began to veer into actual horror-style storylines. One especially grim two-parter from the seventh series saw a 15-year-old girl being kidnapped by a masked man, and then, it is implied, sexually assaulted, resulting in her becoming pregnant. The episode, called Sylvia, shows her father punish her and she is shamed by other Walnut Grove residents; then her rapist returns and she dies in an accident trying to escape him.
Dr Elizabeth Erwin, co-creator and editor of Horror Homeroom – a website which analyses works of horror through critical theory – recently wrote an article about this particular episode in which she argued that "[its] premise is something straight out of a horror movie" and that it "meshes together elements from a variety of horror sub-genres, most notably Giallo – a highly stylized Italian horror subgenre – and slasher”.
"I'm Gen X and I was talking to someone of my same age group about what scared her most on TV as a kid," Erwin tells the BBC. "And I was expecting her to say Friday the 13th or any of the '80s slasher films, and she said: 'Little House on the Prairie'. I said: 'Was it the Sylvia episode?'
She said: 'Yes – that's exactly it'."
As Erwin points out, though, "Sylvia is not this weird, outlier episode that's a one-off". She describes the show as being part of the subgenre of "Frontier Gothic", which originated in the late 18th and early 19th Centuries and maps Gothic conventions on to stories of US expansion and frontier life.
"The show also does body horror, in season two, where Caroline Ingalls gets her leg infected after a scratch, and takes a knife to it," she adds. "All the tropes are there, all the conventions are there."
The TV show added things that never existed in either the books or Laura Ingalls Wilder's life for melodramatic voltage.
Erwin also notes that the show reflects what cinema studies professor Barbara Creed in 1993 conceptualized as "the Monstrous Feminine", whereby on-screen female monsters or creatures are created to reflect societal fears around female bodies, sexuality and maternal traits. "You see this in My Ellen," Erwin explains, "a season four episode where a woman loses her daughter and then hallucinates that Laura [played by Melissa Gilbert] is her child and puts her in the basement."
The most upsetting episode ever
Another episode that is discussed regularly among fans for being utterly gruesome is season six's two-part May We Make Them Proud, which is set in the Harriet Oleson School for the Blind, where Mary Ingalls, who is herself blind, teaches. The episode sees a fire at the school resulting in the deaths of both Mary's colleague Alice and Mary's baby, Adam Jr.
"This is probably on most people's lists as the darkest episode of Little House," says Thompson. "It's a main character's baby, a blind school burns down, and Mary almost becomes catatonic from grief. But I don't remember it generating much controversy at the time. He continues: "If it aired today, people would probably slam it online as 'torture or emotional pornography'."
Erwin agrees that it was indeed a deeply traumatizing watch: "Alice is literally breaking the glass and then you see the charred bodies. I watched that as a child and that has stuck in my brain. It's never going away."
"Mary just went through trauma after trauma after trauma," she adds, "then she has a psychotic breakdown after [the loss of her baby]. It was a lot to put on the plate of kids just randomly tuning in. What most interests me about Little House in the Prairie is the spectatorship of it all. Because when you go to a horror movie, I purchase a ticket and I know I'm about to have that adrenaline rush, that fear. With this, you just randomly turned on the television and didn't know what to expect."
Netflix's new adaptation sticks closer to the family-friendly tone of the books
Thompson points out that whereas the books sanitized the perils of frontier life for younger readers – for example, not including the real-life tragedy of Laura Ingalls Wilder losing an unnamed baby boy just 27 days after he was born – the opposite was true for the TV show: the danger and threats would have been amplified to create more drama.
"I think some of our assumptions about Little House on the Prairie being sweet and wholesome come from judging it through the books," says Thompson, "which were written that way. So we go from the lived story, which naturally had dark sides, to the books, which cleaned much of it up, and then to the television show, which brought a lot of it back and added things that never existed in either the books or Laura Ingalls Wilder's life – like a morphine addiction storyline [for example] – for melodramatic voltage."
The children's books naturally had very different target markets to a multi-generational TV drama, continues Thompson: "If you're making a network television series, it can't appeal only to girls between five and 15 years old. It has to appeal to everyone. So you're going to add some dramatic juice."
For all the show's darkness, however, that was always offset with a sentimental sweetness. The warmth of the familial relationships, and the lessons of the importance of looking out for one another – as taught to Laura and Mary by their almost beatific Pa, Charles (Michael Landon) – kept a legion of fans committed to the story long after the production wrapped in 1984.
While the new series of Little House on the Prairie once again centers the heartwarming bond of the family, it steps away from the high melodrama of the previous show, making it far less horror-centric. Showrunner Rebecca Sonnenshine has also incorporated a Native American point of view, bringing in well-crafted Osage characters (developed alongside Osage professor of American literature and culture Robert Warrior) to make the story more historically correct.
Whether it will be received as well as the original 1970s series remains to be seen. Thompson, however, credits the original with taking big swings, even if it did take it to left-field places: "It was willing to be more than just a kid's show. Occasionally it went over the top – and some episodes almost became a horror film. But for all its melodramatic qualities, it was a well-executed series."
https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20260701-the-original-tv-little-house-on-the-prairie-was-a-true-american-horror-story
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HOW LEWIS AND CLARK INVENTED THE WESTERN
In the nineteenth century, empires fought over science and resources and land. But they also fought over poetry. “The Americans,” John Quincy Adams wrote to his father, “have in Europe a sad reputation on the article of literature.” The young diplomat hoped to change this: “I shall purpose to render a service to my country by devoting to [poetry] the remainder of my life.”
Adams would serve in other ways, but he was right to worry. During this period, a nation’s literary achievements could provide patriotic pride and a measure of national success—or national failure. “In the four quarters of the globe,” sneered one British critic, “who reads an American book?”
Meriwether Lewis and William Clark also hoped to change this. Thomas Jefferson had many goals for their expedition, and one of them was literary. When the captains returned in 1806, they did so as international celebrities. Lewis quickly announced that he was writing a book in three volumes—the first a narrative of their epic journey, the second a survey of the Native nations they’d met, the third a volume of science, all of it accompanied by a massive map from Clark that would finally fill in the North American interior.
Given Lewis’s literary talent, and given the expedition’s global fame, this book seemed destined to be the third great work of American nonfiction, joining Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia and Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography. But Lewis never submitted a word. “Everybody is impatient,” Jefferson wrote to him in 1809. It was the last letter he ever sent his friend.
That same year, in the fall, Lewis killed himself. The reasons for this were as complicated as the expedition itself, and those complications bled into one another. One of the documents I uncovered while writing my new book on Lewis and Clark was a letter from Adams, who shared a dinner with Lewis a few days after his return. The great explorer, John Quincy wrote, was “more altered in manners and appearance…than I ever beheld any man.” Adams could not believe how much the expedition had worn Lewis down. “I did not know him again, though I expected to meet him,” Adams wrote. “He looks fifteen years older.”
With Lewis gone, the book fell to a grieving Clark. He ended up working with Nicholas Biddle (the same Biddle who would later battle Andrew Jackson in the Bank War). Biddle studied the journals from the captains and their men, which ran to more than a million words. He asked Clark follow ups, and Clark asked his men, including Toussaint Charbonneau. This meant Sacajawea also contributed her insights, indirectly or not.
Biddle synthesized this material into his own third-person narrative. Another writer, Paul Allen, pitched in.
So did Jefferson. He wrote a long and heartbreaking “Life of Captain Lewis” to open Biddle’s book. Jefferson described the years he’d spent with Lewis at the White House: “While he lived with me in Washington, I observed at times sensible depressions of mind.”
Now Lewis was dead, a tragedy with many costs. One of them, according to Jefferson, was that readers—readers in America, readers around the world—had lost “the benefit of receiving from his own hand the narrative…of his sufferings and successes.” Lewis and Clark had sacrificed so much to cross “that vast and fertile country,” a country Americans were “destined to fill.”
And what would they fill it with? Well, farms and future states—this was Jefferson, after all. But the ex-president saw other possibilities: “with arts, with science, with freedom and happiness.”
Americans would fill it, in other words, with books.
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Biddle’s History of the Expedition Under the Command of Captains Lewis and Clark finally appeared in 1814. Its paraphrases remained the only available version of the journals for most of the nineteenth century, and it was widely and obsessively reviewed. Who reads an American book? Robert Southey, it turns out.
The famous Romantic, whom the king had recently appointed Britain’s poet laureate, wrote an essay about the expedition. It ran for fifty-one pages. While Southey admired the Americans’ courage, he found much to mock. Biddle had simplified his History, omitting most of Lewis’s science. Southey didn’t know this, and he criticized the captains for failing to record enough Enlightenment observations, especially when compared to their British counterparts like Captain Cook.
Of course, Southey would have said that no matter what. This was a rivalry, if not quite a war, and literature remained an important imperial front. The poet paused to smirk at the homey names on Clark’s maps—Rum River, Little Shallow River, Onion Creek. To Southey, they felt as uniquely American as the captains’ swaggering confidence. “When this country shall have its civilized inhabitants,” Southey wrote, “how sweetly will such names sound in American verse!”
Then the poet, in classic big brother style, offered some lines of his own:
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The authors who would defeat critics like Southey—who would at last elevate American literature on the international stage—came a few years later. Their names are still known today: Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, James Fenimore Cooper. What’s less known is that all three drew deeply on Lewis and Clark for inspiration, for subject matter, and for research.
Irving was the most obvious acolyte. He spent most of his life thinking and reading about the American West. Another big review of Biddle’s History ran in Analectic Magazine, which Irving edited.
In 1832, Irving decided to see the region for himself. He had read Biddle’s History carefully. (During his western trip, Irving met with an aging Clark, and they talked about York, the enslaved man who’d emerged as a key member of the expedition.) Once Irving turned to his own books inspired by his travels, he dusted off his copy of Biddle. Astoria and A Tour of the Prairies abounded in anecdotes, landscapes, and descriptions of Native people lifted directly from Lewis and Clark. Southey had scoffed at their place names. Irving recycled them proudly—for their authenticity and their announcement that he was writing a distinctly American literature.
Poe’s debts were stranger. In 1840, he began publishing magazine excerpts from The Journal of Julius Rodman. The journal was a hoax, like his later hoax involving a balloon. Poe had invented both text and author, but each month he presented them as the truth—as a newly discovered and freshly footnoted record of an expedition that predated Lewis and Clark by a decade.
(Oriana: The word “tipis” reminded me of a recent question, a part of the defense of imperialist conquest: Would you rather see the Manhattan skyline or a row of tipis?)
Like Irving, Poe had read Biddle’s paraphrase closely. “Julius Rodman” followed the same route as Lewis and Clark—a route Poe, who would never cross the Appalachian Mountains, had never actually seen. Rodman even traveled during the same seasons as Lewis and Clark. His party included an enslaved man, modeled after York, and a trusty dog, modeled after Lewis’s Newfoundland.
Parts of Rodman’s journal remained pure Poe. Consider his description of the saturated scenery:
On the edges of the creeks there was a wild mass of flowers which looked more like art than nature, so profusely and fantastically were their vivid colors blended together. Their rich odor was almost oppressive. Every now and then we came to a kind of green island of trees, placed amid an ocean of purple, blue, orange, and crimson blossoms.
Rodman himself felt like a classic Poe protagonist, a man with an intricate psychology and a fanatic’s commitment to his cause. To fortify the hoax, Poe wrote an introduction to the “journal,” and in it he described Rodman as someone haunted by “a desire to seek, in the bosom of the wilderness, that peace which his peculiar disposition would not suffer him to enjoy among men.”
And yet those traits were clearly inspired by Lewis. Poe’s introduction claimed that Rodman suffered from “hereditary hypochondria”; Jefferson’s “Life” claimed that Lewis suffered from “hypochondriac affections,” which was “a constitutional disposition in all the nearer branches of the family.”
Today, living in Poe’s America, it can feel like the anxiety of influence has reversed itself—like Lewis, the real Lewis, has been a Poe protagonist all along.
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Irving’s Astoria became an international hit, with editions appearing in Britain and Germany and France. Julius Rodman never finished his voyage, but Poe’s hoax fooled at least one reader, a US senator who cited the incomplete “journal” as evidence for America’s imperial claims to Oregon.
Lewis and Clark’s most important early reader, though, was Cooper. In 1825, he began writing The Last of the Mohicans, his second novel starring a hunter named Natty Bumppo. This project made Cooper nervous for several reasons. (A sequel? Would readers and publishers really want a sequel?) But the most pressing was his lack of authentic details about Native people and Native culture.
Pawnee leaders remembered him traveling to the big eastern cities that Native people visited on diplomatic delegations. (Cooper’s best biographer, Wayne Franklin, has confirmed this.) Cooper interviewed those Native leaders. He observed their gestures, their personalities, their forms of speech.
In The Prairie, Cooper worked in a wink at Lewis and Clark, a minor character who mentioned the famous expedition. “Lewis is making his way up the river, some hundreds of miles from this,” the character says. “I come on a private adventure.”
“A private adventure”: that’s what a good Western often feels like. But Lewis and Clark didn’t invent or even inspire this genre by themselves. They did it with the help of others, starting with the imagination of Cooper and the humanity of his Native sources.
Any honest account of the Western—and any honest account of the West—must reckon with the multiple sides of this messy American story.
https://lithub.com/how-lewis-and-clark-invented-the-western/
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ALBANIANS
Albanians are a distinct ethnic group and nation native to the Balkan Peninsula in Southeastern Europe, sharing a unique language, culture, and history. They are considered Paleo-Balkanic, largely descending from ancient Illyrian and Thracian tribes. They are genetically European/white, often closely related to other Mediterranean populations.
Unique Heritage: Albanian is an Indo-European language that forms its own independent branch, meaning it is not closely related to neighboring Slavic or Greek languages.
Geographic Concentration: They are the majority population in Albania and Kosovo, with significant native populations in North Macedonia, Montenegro, and Greece.
Subgroups: The Albanian population is divided into two main subgroups: the Gegs (Ghegs) in the north and the Tosks in the south.
Origins: Genetic studies indicate descent from Roman-era western Balkan populations, with continuity from Bronze Age Balkan populations.
Diaspora: Large historic communities exist in Italy (Arbëreshë), as well as a significant global diaspora.
They are often associated with other Mediterranean peoples in appearance and are categorized as Southern European.
Albanians speak the Albanian language, which is an Indo-European language. And while this means that Albanian is distantly related to all other Indo-European languages, Albanian constitutes its own independent branch among the Indo-European languages.
There are only two other Indo-European languages making up their own independent branch: Armenian and Greek. All three languages are therefore fully distinct and very old. As while they may have the same origin as all other Indo-European languages, they have developed independently for thousands of years and go back almost directly to Proto-Indo-European. Today, they are the last living descendants of one of the early Indoeuropean linguistic groups preceding them.
This should also answer the main question about Albanian relation to Greek: both are distinct languages, which have in common that they historically were geographically close to each other as neighbors (sort of) and are the sole survivors of their respective branches.
Albanians most likely descend from an ancient people related to the ancient Illyrians (the ancient northern neighbors of the Greeks). Today, Albanians are what is left of them ethnolinguistically, which may serve as helpful information when trying to classify Albanians — old Balkan people.
Genetically — or, rather, when it comes to genetic ancestry — Albanians are very similar to Greeks.
So similar, in fact, that genetic testing companies regularly mistake Albanian for Greek ancestry. To give you an example: A relative of mine made a test, and the result was something above 95% ‘Greek'. We are Kosovo Albanians — which means we historically had probably practically no direct contact to Greeks, excluding any significant intermixing which may be suspected for South Albanians, for example.
The reason for that is rather simple: Both Albanians and Greeks have developed in the Balkans a few thousand years ago, as a result of Indo-European Proto-Illyrians and Proto-Greeks mixing with native, pre-Indo-European populations. The result is that Albanians and Greeks are made up ‘of the same clay', if you want.
Lastly — culture.
Albanians have a distinct culture with regional varieties, as have all other Balkan countries. The Albanian culture was historically influenced through Byzantine and Ottoman culture. Like other Balkan countries, it resembles a mix of ‘east and west'.
Albanians and Greeks especially the ones living close to the border — share much food, music, clothing, dances etc. But not significantly more than Albanians would with other neighboring populations. It's mostly a continuum of culture, and similar in the Balkans in general.
Great Mosque of Tirana
Albanians are multireligious, as opposed to Greeks or their other neighbors. A majority of Albanians are Muslim. This obviously differentiates them from mostly Christian neighbors. Albanians are also historically more tolerant towards other religions among themselves.
Lastly — Albanians had a different recent history than Greeks. Whereas Greece became part of the Western political sphere after WW2, Albanians became either straight-up communist (as in the case of Albania) or part of a socialist Slavic society (Kosovo and North Macedonia). This is a difference as well.
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THE TROY OF THE ILIAD AND THE TROY OF THE ARCHEOLOGISTS
Determined to prove Homer’s Iliad wasn't a myth, amateur archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann dynamited a hill in Turkey. He found the real Troy—and blasted right through the actual Trojan War.
What Schliemann uncovered at the site, known as Hisarlik, was a multilayered archaeological cake of nine different settlements built on top of each other over millennia. Ignoring the upper layers, he tunneled down to what he declared was "Priam's Troy" in a level called Troy II, where he found a cache of gold jewelry.
However, modern archaeology has shown that Troy II dates to around 2500 BCE, over a thousand years before the events of the Trojan War could have taken place.
The real candidates for Homer’s Troy are the later layers known as Troy VI and Troy VIIa, which correspond to the Late Bronze Age. Troy VI was a wealthy, formidable citadel that controlled trade through the Dardanelles—the vital maritime choke point between the Aegean and Black Seas..jpg)
The remains of the thick, sloping stone walls at Hisarlik, which enclose the citadel of Troy VI
The thick, sloping stone masonry excavated from the Troy VI layer precisely matches Homer’s repeated descriptions of a "well-walled" and "steep" city. While Troy VI was a major mercantile power that Mycenaean Greeks would certainly have wanted to plunder, archaeological evidence points to an earthquake, rather than a siege, as the cause of its destruction around 1300 BCE. The walls show severe cracking consistent with seismic damage, and there is no widespread burn layer.
The smoking gun for a historical Trojan War lies in the subsequent layer, Troy VIIa, which was destroyed around 1180 BCE. The archaeology here paints a grim picture of a city under siege. Houses were crammed together tightly inside the citadel walls, suggesting people from the surrounding countryside had fled inward for protection. Excavators have found stockpiles of sling bullets, unburied human skeletons lying in the streets, and a massive destruction layer of ash and charred wood.
The physical evidence confirms that a wealthy, walled city at this location was violently destroyed by invaders during the Late Bronze Age collapse. Hittite diplomatic texts from the same period reference a city called "Wilusa" (the Hittite name for Ilios, or Troy) and conflicts involving the "Ahhiyawa" (Achaeans, or Greeks).
The real Trojan War was not a single, ten-year siege over a stolen queen, but a series of pragmatic, brutal raids by Mycenaean Greeks against a wealthy trading rival. Over centuries of oral tradition, bards merged these historical conflicts into the singular, romanticized epic of gods and heroes that Homer eventually recorded.
~ SepiaGlyphs, Quora
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TORTURE IN RUSSIAN PRISONS
Early one October morning in 2019, a group of men jumped out of a car and grabbed Liudmyla Huseinova as she left her home.
The 64-year-old says they seized her bag and threw her into the back seat, beginning what she describes as a "nightmare" in Russia's secretive detention system in parts of Ukraine it had occupied since 2014: "For three years and 13 days of my life, my soul and body were crippled."
She says that among the men was Yurii Temerbek, a Ukrainian who had been a local traffic policeman and had joined the Russian-backed separatists.
Temerbek – a husband, father and grandfather, now aged 56 – was there again, two weeks later, she says, watching as a man with a Russian accent sexually assaulted her in a notorious detention center.
A BBC World Service investigation has identified Temerbek, and uncovered details about two other men accused of abusing detainees, shedding light on a system that operates almost completely out of reach of Ukrainian and international justice.
The men appear to now be living ordinary lives with their families in Russia and occupied Ukraine. Survivors see revealing their identities as a step towards holding them accountable.
Liudmyla says that if the men she accuses of abuse aren't found and imprisoned, "then, justice for me will be their names as criminals, and torturers, will be known to their children”.
The prisons these men helped run are part of a detention system in which the UN's human rights office (OHCHR) says the torture and ill-treatment of civilians is "systematic and widespread".
It says former detainees describe beatings, electric shocks, mock executions and sexual violence, with civilians often detained arbitrarily and families given little information.
The Kremlin has accused the OHCHR of bias. In May this year, the UN added Russia to its blacklist of countries suspected of committing sexual violence in conflict zones -—allegations Russia dismissed as "groundless lies".
Ukrainian authorities say more than 16,000 civilians have been taken captive or disappeared. Some of these cases followed Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 — others date back as far as 2014, when Russia annexed the southern Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea and occupied parts of eastern Ukraine, triggering widespread international condemnation.
At that time, Liudmyla was working as a safety engineer on a poultry farm in Novoazovsk, a city in the Donetsk region close to the border with Russia.
Russian-backed armed groups seized the city, beginning several years of paramilitary control.
Liudmyla says that, under occupation, she helped care for orphans and took food to Ukrainian forces, who gave her a Ukrainian flag with notes of thanks written on it. She believes a photo of the flag she shared with trusted friends reached the Russian-backed forces: "This was probably why they arrested me."
She was accused of spying, she says, and taken to Izolyatsia — a factory-turned-modern art gallery that had been taken over by Russian-backed forces. It later became widely known and feared, as numerous accounts of torture emerged from former detainees.
When she arrived, she says a group of men — she does not know who — surrounded her, pinching her body. "It's not a peach," she recalls one of them saying. "Not a dried apricot either. A raisin."
Detainees were forced to stand constantly from 06:00 to 22:00, and bright lights shone at night, she recalls. Her first days, she says, were punctuated with sounds of distress from other rooms: "I have never heard such terrible screams before."
Two weeks later, she says, she was taken to the second floor, where a man who was referred to as "Koval" in the prison told her she was "too old for boys who come for 'relaxation'".
Temerbek was there, "being sarcastic… laughing", she says.
Then, she says, Koval sexually assaulted her.
She knows Temerbek's name, she explains, because she saw his name on a document and remembered he had been known locally for his role in the Ukrainian police.
Ukrainian authorities accuse him of working for the Ministry of State Security (MGB) established by the Donetsk People's Republic (DPR), which was created by Russian-backed paramilitaries.
Ukrainian prosecutors have started criminal proceedings against him for being part of a "terrorist group" — a term they often use when alleging collaboration with Russian-backed forces.
The BBC worked with two Ukrainian open source investigators, Bohdan Kosokhatko and Vladyslav Chyryk, to find out more about Temerbek and others accused of abuses, building on work they have done with the Ukrainian investigative organisation Truth Hounds.
Information including detainees' testimony, social media posts, media reports and documents from Ukrainian prosecutors allowed our team to build up a picture.
The investigators working with the BBC discovered that Temerbek studied Ukrainian language at university and has a wife, daughter and son in their 20s, and grandchild. They appear to live in the Rostov region, in south-western Russia near the border with Ukraine.
A photo on social media from before 2014 shows him in Ukrainian police uniform, with a badge identifying him as a traffic policeman. We were not able to establish whether he currently has a job.
Liudmyla says the man in the image was among those who arrested her. She says she last saw Temerbek around late 2021 when he called her "bitch" and threatened that she would be sent to Siberia.
We have not been able to identify "Koval".
She says another guard at Izolyatsia, referred to within the prison as "Yermak", once ordered her to eat uncooked food mixed with soil and rubbish.
"I spat it out, but there was some left. The taste of this food will stay with me the rest of my life," she says. She now finds the smell of food cooking unbearable, and struggles to eat a normal diet.
She never saw Yermak because guards often put a bag over her head, she says, but she heard his voice.
On another occasion, she says, he entered her cell: "He shouted: 'Are you for Ukraine?' I said: 'I'm for justice'. After that, he began to beat me."
Liudmyla saw Yermak's face for the first time when the investigators working with the BBC located photos of him on social media, showing him with his wife and daughter, on family holidays and drinking with friends some as recent as 2024.
He was first identified, as a man named Ruslan Yeriomichev, by the investigative reporting group Bellingcat and Ukrainian journalist Stanlislav Aseyev, who was also held in Izolyatsia. Yeriomichev is now 46.
According to his social media accounts, he studied law at the Donetsk National University.
Ukrainian prosecutors accuse him of multiple crimes, including cruel treatment of prisoners of war and civilians.
It is not clear whether he still works at Izolyatsia, but social media posts suggest he still lives in the area. Photos on social media show him with his wife, daughter and friends, and on holiday in occupied Crimea. Both Temerbek and Yeriomichev were Ukrainian nationals who later acquired Russian passports.
"They are free people, and they can go anywhere," Liudmyla reflects as she looks at the photos. "They took years off the lives of so many people.”
Liudmyla was released in a prisoner exchange in 2022. She was welcomed home by friends. "They stood crying. I realized I couldn't cry, I had no tears," she says.
Even now, she says: "These feelings, emotions, they are still frozen in me… sometimes I really want to cry and scream, but I can't.
"I realized I couldn't cry, I had no tears," says Liudmyla (center) of the moment she was released in October 2022
She has been reunited with her husband and they now live in Ukraine's capital, Kyiv. She runs an organization supporting other women who have been detained, and, using a secret network, helps send parcels from families to those still in captivity.
The BBC also mapped the scale of the network of detention centers, cross-matching reports from media sources, investigators and human rights groups.We identified 93 sites where civilians and prisoners of war were held in occupied Ukraine between 2023 and 2025. About a third of them appear to be unofficial, in buildings ranging from a tax office to hotels and garages. We identified another 102 in Russia. International organizations have not been allowed free access to them.
Ukrainian prosecutors say 2,000 people have passed through such centers since Russia's full-scale invasion in 2022.
One of them, 42-year-old sailor Oleksii Sivak, told the BBC he was among hundreds of civilians arrested in the wake of Russia's capture of the southern Ukrainian city of Kherson in 2022, in what pro-Kremlin reports called a crackdown on terrorists.
Oleksii says torture with electric current on the genitals took place in the detention facility where he was held in Kherson
Oleksii, who worked on cargo ships, says that in the early months under occupation he helped cook for elderly people, as well as making banners and leaflets opposing the Russian presence: "I did what I could, resisted how I could."
He says he was arrested and taken to a former police facility in Kherson. "There was torture with objects," he says. "On the genitals, electric current."
In November 2022, the Ukrainian army retook Kherson. He says Russian forces took some detainees as they fled, but he escaped because they did not have enough space in their vehicles.
Ukrainian prosecutors say the Kherson detention facility was run by Andrey Spivak, previously a policeman working in the prison system in the Russian city of Omsk.
They have charged him with cruel treatment of the civilian population and violations of the laws of war.
The investigators working with the BBC found that he is 40 and was born in the Omsk region. Images on social media suggest he enjoys fishing, hunting and traveling.
Photos in recent years show him back in Omsk, at Russian interior ministry events. The investigators working with the BBC also found he has registered his car to work as a taxi driver.
The BBC tried to contact Temerbek, Yeriomichev and Spivak about the allegations in this report but they did not respond. Asked about the allegations, the Russian Embassy in the UK said Russia had "consistently advocated respect for international law and the rule of law" and allegations of crimes during the Ukraine conflict "are documented and investigated".
Ukrainian prosecutors have opened legal proceedings against dozens of people accused of mistreating Ukrainians in Russian-run prisons. A small number have been sentenced in absentia. The BBC is aware of only one who has been imprisoned — a former head of Izolyatsia who was arrested in Kyiv in 2021 and has been sentenced to 15 years in prison.
The site is still operating, according to Ukraine's prosecutor general's office.
Since Russia's full-scale invasion in 2022, the office has documented more than 400 cases of conflict-related sexual violence against civilians. So far 85 people have been charged — of which 30 have been given prison sentences, most of them in absentia.
Oleksii and Liudmyla are both keen to help hold perpetrators of abuse of detainees to account.
"For me, justice is not revenge," says Liudmyla. "For me, justice is the decree that these people intentionally, deliberately did what they did. I want them to be punished by law."
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx2kkrx8jeno
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HIGHLY INTELLIGENT PEOPLE MAY FEEL MORE LONELY
Consider a software engineer who spends hours deeply focused on solving a complex problem. After an intense day of cognitive work, they might decline a large social gathering, not because they dislike people, but because their mental energy is already depleted.
Highly intelligent individuals may actually experience social environments differently. Their motivations, preferences, and cognitive processing styles can diverge from the social norms that most people rely on for connection.
One influential piece of research illustrates this dynamic. A study published in the British Journal of Psychology examined data from more than 15,000 young adults and found a surprising pattern. While most people report greater life satisfaction when they socialize frequently with friends, individuals with higher intelligence showed the opposite pattern.
In other words, increased social interaction predicted higher happiness for most participants, but for highly intelligent individuals, more social contact was associated with lower life satisfaction. This doesn’t mean intelligent people dislike others. Rather, it suggests that the psychological mechanisms that shape happiness and social connection may operate differently for them. Here are two research-backed reasons why.
The "Savanna Theory" May Not Apply to Highly Intelligent People
Humans evolved as highly social creatures. Psychological theories such as the belongingness hypothesis propose that forming and maintaining close relationships is one of our most fundamental human motivations.
For most people, spending time with friends and community members is strongly linked to happiness. However, the above mentioned study suggests that high intelligence may partially change this equation.
The researchers framed their findings within the savanna theory of happiness. The theory proposes that many psychological mechanisms evolved to function optimally in ancestral environments, such as the small, tightly connected communities on the African savanna. In those environments, frequent interaction with close social groups was essential for survival. As a result, humans developed strong psychological rewards for socializing.
However, individuals with higher intelligence may be better equipped to adapt to evolutionarily novel environments, such as modern cities, digital communication, and independent lifestyles. Because of this adaptability, their happiness may be less dependent on the constant social interaction that benefited humans in ancestral environments.
The data from the study reflects this shift. While most participants reported higher life satisfaction with more frequent interactions with friends, the most intelligent participants actually experienced greater life satisfaction with less frequent social contact.
This preference doesn’t necessarily reflect social avoidance. Instead, highly intelligent individuals may simply find that their psychological needs are fulfilled through other activities, such as intellectual work, creative pursuits, or long-term personal goals.
In practical terms, this means they may prioritize depth of engagement over breadth of social contact. Spending hours thinking through a complex problem, writing, coding, or building a project may feel more meaningful than attending frequent social gatherings.
When your brain is wired to solve complex, abstract problems, the “low-stakes” social rituals that satisfy others (e.g., small talk, gossip, or repetitive group activities) can feel like a distraction from more meaningful pursuits. For the highly intelligent, loneliness is often not a result of being “rejected” by the tribe but, rather, a functional byproduct of finding the tribe’s daily activities less rewarding than the pursuit of long-term, solitary goals.
Being Highly Intelligent Can Make Social Alignment Harder
Another reason highly intelligent individuals may experience loneliness lies in how they process the world. Loneliness is rarely about the number of people in a room; it is about the feeling of being understood. For those with high intelligence, finding “mental peers” is a statistical challenge that often leads to a sense of profound isolation.
Research suggests that loneliness is often linked to differences in how people interpret social experiences and perspectives. For example, neuroscience research has found that lonely individuals sometimes process social information in ways that diverge from those around them.
A 2021 neuroimaging study found that people experiencing loneliness showed more idiosyncratic neural responses when interpreting the same stimuli as others, suggesting their perceptions and interpretations differed from those of their peers. In everyday terms, this means lonely individuals may feel as though they see the world differently from those around them.
Highly intelligent individuals may encounter a similar challenge. Intelligence is associated with enhanced abstract reasoning, pattern recognition, and complex problem-solving. While these traits are advantageous in many domains, they can sometimes create cognitive asymmetry in social environments.
For instance, conversations that rely heavily on shared assumptions, casual small talk, or common cultural interests may feel less stimulating for highly analytical thinkers. When the majority of social interaction occurs at this level, intellectually curious individuals may struggle to find peers who match their preferred depth of discussion.
The preference for nuance, abstract theory, and multifaceted problem-solving may be met with blank stares or labeled as “overthinking” in a general social setting when attempting to share insight.
Over time, this creates a masking effect. To fit in, the intelligent person may simplify their thoughts or suppress their natural curiosity. This social camouflaging might be exhausting for them. It may even lead to a specific type of loneliness called existential isolation, which is the feeling that one’s true internal world is inaccessible to others. This pattern can inadvertently increase loneliness, even when the individual technically has access to social networks
The Paradox of Intelligent Solitude
Solitude and loneliness are not the same thing. Solitude can be intentional and restorative. Many highly intelligent individuals actively seek time alone to think, create, or work deeply. This type of solitude is often linked to productivity, creativity, and emotional regulation. Loneliness, on the other hand, is the painful perception that one’s social relationships are insufficient or lacking.
For highly intelligent individuals, the boundary between these two states can sometimes blur. Their preference for independence and cognitive engagement may reduce the frequency of social interactions, increasing the chances that loneliness will eventually emerge.
But it’s important to emphasize that intelligence itself does not doom someone to loneliness. Social fulfillment depends on many factors, including personality traits, emotional intelligence, life circumstances, and access to like-minded communities.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/social-instincts/202604/2-reasons-intelligent-people-face-higher-loneliness
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THE KING JAMES BIBLE EXISTS BECAUSE OF A GAY LOVESICK MONK
The King James Bible exists in part because of a lovesick monk who could not take a hint.
Desiderius Erasmus was the greatest biblical scholar of the Renaissance, a Dutch priest and humanist who spent decades doing something the Catholic Church considered faintly dangerous: going back to the original Greek manuscripts of the New Testament and actually reading them. The Latin Vulgate had been the Church's standard Bible for over a thousand years. Erasmus thought it was riddled with translation errors, and he was right.
In 1516, he published the first printed Greek New Testament in history, a side-by-side Greek and Latin edition that blew the doors off a millennium of Biblical assumptions. He published five editions total, each more refined than the last. That third edition, printed in 1522, became the direct source text for William Tyndale's English New Testament and, eventually, the King James Bible of 1611.
Every English-speaking Christian quoting scripture today is working from a text that traces back to Erasmus.
The Catholic Church was not thrilled about any of this. Neither, apparently, was his fellow canon at the monastery of Steyn, a man named Servatius Roger.
Erasmus was obsessed with Roger. The letters he wrote him in the late 1480s are some of the most nakedly lovelorn documents to survive from the Renaissance. He called Roger "half my soul." He wrote that he had "wooed you both unhappily and relentlessly." He complained that Roger hid from him like a snail retreating into its shell. He compared himself to a girl pining for an indifferent lover.
Roger's surviving responses suggest a man deeply committed to not engaging with any of this. It basically amounts to “wtf?"
Was Erasmus gay? Historians argue about it. Some read the letters as evidence of genuine romantic longing. Others point out that flowery, emotional language between male scholars was common in humanist correspondence and doesn't necessarily mean what it looks like to modern eyes.
What nobody disputes is that the letters read like a one-sided love affair, that Erasmus was clearly the pursuer, and that Servatius Roger spent years being magnificently unmoved by one of the most brilliant men in Europe.
Erasmus eventually left the monastery, got a papal dispensation releasing him from his monastic vows, and spent the rest of his life traveling, writing, and being controversial. Roger rose to become prior of Steyn and spent years trying to get Erasmus to come back. By then, Erasmus was done.
He rewrote the New Testament and got his heart broken. Not a bad legacy. ~ Bill Browning, Facebook
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HOW TO RESPOND WHEN AN ADULT CHILD SAYS "YOU RUINED MY LIFE”
You tell yourself this time with your adult child is going to be a time of connection and positivity—and then, wham!—those painful words arrive without much warning. The parents I see for coaching recount Sunday dinner meltdowns, heated phone calls, or incendiary texts.
For sure, I have heard stories of drama and pain during holiday gatherings and even weddings.
The words "You ruined my life," or similarly hurtful phrases, can rip your heart out as a parent.
Based on my sessions with many struggling adult children, they are feeling a lot of pain and overwhelming emotions when they say those words. In the moment, parents tend to freeze up and default to one of two failing responses: They either collapse into an apology (I often hear from parents accused of "weaponizing" their tears) or they harden their defense. But neither of these responses meaningfully lowers the overall tension or lessens the fighting.
What to Say That Actually Works and Why
After a few decades of coaching families laden with emotional reactivity, I have found that what parents say in the first 60 seconds often matters more than anything they say afterward. Here are three responses that actually open the door to calmer, constructive conversations rather than impulsively slamming one shut.
"You Sound Really Hurt and in a Lot of Pain. Tell Me More."
Contrary to what many parents may believe (and I can see how it can feel counterintuitive), when you first acknowledge your adult child's pain—and that does mean you agree with their total perception—it can help both of you regulate your emotions. This type of response conveys that you can feel their hurt without needing to fix or refute it immediately. Many adult children aren't testing your guilt; they are testing whether you can stay present.
"I Hear That You Are Really Angry With Me"
The more you realize that anger is a surface emotion—with deeper ones such as frustration, shame, anxiety, and sadness lurking beneath—the easier it is not to be as rattled by it. Along these lines, anger at this often reflects a fear of disconnection. The more you can calmly acknowledge and hold a space for their anger, without apologizing, the more opportunity it creates to show that your relationship can hold hard feelings without breaking. Then you can calmly model constructive dialogue by saying something like, "Would you agree that if we can get to a place to talk about this calmly and constructively, it'll help us both get to a better place?"
"I Love You, and I'm Not Going to Accept Blame for Your Whole Life"
As I describe in my new book, You Ruined My Life—Now You Owe Me, the topic of over-the-top, misplaced blame frequently comes up when I work with parents and adult children. When adult children cast blame for their struggles on their parents, it converts (within the parents' mind) into incessant guilt.
This blame-guilt cycle does not bode well for constructive dialogue and problem-solving. The statement, "I love you, and I'm not going to accept blame for your whole life," is the heart of what I call moving from fixer to coach. The fixer says, "Let me make this right for you." Yet when you say something like, "I believe you can work through this, and I am still here," you shift into a more effective coach/mentor mindset.
The Takeaway
The above soundbites are not meant to serve as a rigid script but as tools for adopting a mindset that is calmer and firmer, yet non-controlling. These phrases are meant to help you stay calm, connected, and constructive rather than reactive, defensive, or shutting down.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/liking-the-child-you-love/202607/how-to-respond-when-an-adult-child-says-you-ruined-my-life
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SELF-HELP IN THE MIDDLE AGES: HOW TO PREVENT BURNOUT
Stress and mental exhaustion aren't new – in medieval times, they were prevalent. And the wisdom of the Middle Ages about how to deal with burnout still rings surprisingly true today.
The symptoms, John Cassian noted, were always the same. Weariness and hopelessness, a longing to be anywhere but work, and brain fog – "a kind of unreasonable confusion of mind" that left his colleagues feeling idle and useless and longing for the "solace of sleep".
If you've ever suffered burnout, exhaustion or depression, you might be familiar with at least some of these feelings, and you may assume that these afflictions are unique to the pressures of the 21st Century. But Cassian was writing in the 5th Century AD, and his intended audience were not modern-day executives, but early Christians who had become exhausted by their spiritual labors.
Could such accounts shine a light on our modern malaise, and even suggest a cure? That's the argument of historian Peter Jones's new book, Self-Help from the Middle Ages: A Journey into the Medieval Mind, which offers a fascinating glimpse into the ways that "therapist priests" – Jones's term – would guide their flocks out of spiritual anguish.
In the 5th Century, John Cassian was among the early Christian thinkers who were “therapist priests”
His research reveals just how common feelings of exhaustion have been throughout history – a recognition that may itself provide comfort for any of us facing a dark night of the soul.
"There's so much wisdom in the Middle Ages," Jones says. We've already seen a proliferation of "lifestyle philosophy" books mining the works of the ancient Stoics, after all – maybe it's high time to take a leaf out of some medieval manuscripts.
Lost in Siberia
Jones was inspired to write the book after his own crisis – the "coldest winter of my life". For reasons that he still finds hard to fathom, he had accepted a role as Chair of History at the University of Tyumen in Siberia. The temperatures were so low that he lost all feeling in his legs after spending just 20 minutes outside. He was struggling with the language and desperately missing his family in Dublin. "I was supposed to be researching and planning my lessons, to be getting on with my life," he writes. "But I couldn't bring myself to do anything at all."
As he started formulating a new course on the Seven Deadly Sins, however, he started reading echoes of his own unhappiness in the medieval accounts that he was studying."You see that they went through exactly the same things that we do," he says. "The feelings have always been the same, and people have had the same crises.”
"Acedia", or sloth, was one of the Seven Deadly Sins – the medieval framework for understanding what it was to be human
The Deadly Sins, Jones explains, do not appear in the Bible but were formulated by early Christian thinkers such as Cassian. They were then refined by Pope Gregory the Great, who – as Jones writes in his book – "thought they would be the perfect tool for mapping out the troubles of the mind". This framework "ordering and processing all thoughts" comprised: Pride, envy, anger, sloth, avarice, gluttony and lust.
By the 13th Century, a series of popular manuals had emerged to guide the priest therapists in the best ways to help their parishioners overcome those issues during confession. "When you look at the materials, the picture looks a lot like therapy," Jones says. Rather than admonishing the congregation, "they encourage a conversation that's quite probing and nuanced – it gets under the skin."
Acedia – an absence of love, a vacuum of the spirit
Sloth offered the best match for Jones’s feelings in Siberia. Today, we might associate the word with willful indolence or laziness, but medieval writers recognized the emotional void at the heart of the affliction. Known at the time as acedia, it encompassed "an absence of love, a paralysis of care, a vacuum of the spirit" Jones writes. "It's when all the things that used to light up your day now leave you cold and indifferent.”
A 1612 engraving depicting the vice of acedia – it was a curable affliction according to medieval thinkers
Jones reports finding great resonance in one 13th-Century text, known as MS 306 in Trinity College, Dublin. The author describes acedia as "standing in the middle of a rushing river, facing a current that froths and beats at my legs, but without the energy to move forward" – feelings of inertia that were all too familiar during his winter in Siberia.
Meanwhile the writings of the "Archpoet" – an anonymous author from 12th-Century Germany – detail the enormous frustrations of his job as a bureaucrat, with complaints that could resonate with any modern executive. "His poems were about working non-stop in a futile job that he feels is petty and pointless – giving everything while burning the candle at both ends.”
Jones is by no means the only historian to find these parallels between medieval and modern ailments. In her book Exhausted, cultural historian (and executive coach) Anna Katharina Schaffner draws a direct connection between the acedia described by medieval Christians, and modern-day burnout – the symptoms of which included the tendency to comfort eat and pursue mindless distractions in place of meaningful work.
"It's a classic vicious circle: the acedic become ever less able to meditate and to contemplate things of a spiritual nature, while their ill-chosen strategies for restoring their energy aggravate their condition further," she writes. "In that sense, they are just like us – weary 21st-Century burnouts who engage in a host of similarly unproductive displacement activities." '
Thorny fields and strong mountains
So what were the solutions? The author of MS 306 offers an elliptical biblical allusion. "Whether you like it or not, the Jebusites live within your borders," he wrote. "You can subjugate them, but you cannot exterminate them." The Jebusites, Jones explains, were an ancient tribe that had once invaded Jerusalem and were impossible to expel. In this way, the author is advising someone with acedia to learn to live with their feelings, without fighting them.
William Peraldus's Treatise on the Virtues and Vices advises sufferers of mental exhaustion to find a higher purpose
William Peraldus's Treatise on the Virtues and Vices take a similar tack. "He told us to remember that the field that grows over with thorns will one day bear fruit." To reorient our thinking, Peraldus suggests finding a "strong mountain" – some kind of higher purpose that will see you through the tough times. "You need the support and strength of somebody that you love or something that you love to get you through," explains Jones. "If you have faith in the things you love, eventually they'll come back to you. “
Jones worries that, in conversation, without the gravitas of the original sources, "these things can sound trite", but his summaries are eerily reminiscent of today's treatments for burnout and other emotional issues. Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, for instance, encourages us to acknowledge our emotions without trying to change them. Besides learning to sit with those emotions, we are advised to identify our personal values and take meaningful steps to living by them. Add in a few medieval metaphors of thorny fields and strong mountains, and you have something very close to Peraldus's prescription from 800 years ago.
Perhaps most importantly, these medieval thinkers remind us of the power of self-forgiveness.
Jones points to the 12th-Century writing of Bernard of Clairvaux – one of the co-founders of the Knights Templar. "He compared living a good life to running over a rough terrain, and says that anyone who runs for a long enough distance is going to fall down or stumble," explains Jones. "We will all have our moments of complete directionlessness."
There is great consolation, he says, in simply recognizing that you are not alone in your suffering; whatever your affliction, people will have been feeling this way for thousands of years. "It's comforting to feel the company of people in history," he says.
https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20260713-what-the-middle-ages-can-teach-us-about-burnout
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EV BATTERY RECYCLING: IT’S COMPLICATED
Chris McQuiggen and Archie Brewton of Everett Auto Parts strap two Chevy Volt batteries to a pallet in preparation for shipping. The batteries are separated by a layer of wood so they don't make contact with each other. Everett Auto Parts found a battery recycler who will accept these hybrid vehicle batteries, but the salvage yard won't make any money off of them.
On a sweltering morning in early July, Thomas Andrade, the co-owner of Everett Auto Parts in Massachusetts, supervises as a team of workers carefully straps two Chevy Volt hybrid batteries to a pallet, ready to ship out for recycling.
Selling off valuable bits and pieces of a vehicle is, fundamentally, how a salvage yard makes money. And these batteries are, in fact, full of valuable minerals: nickel and cobalt and manganese and lithium. They're headed to a battery recycler who will shred them into a fine, dark powder called black mass, from which those minerals can be recovered and reused in new batteries.
So how much will Andrade make off this particular deal?
Zilch.
And he's pretty happy with that.
"The good thing with these is, they'll at least take them at no expense," he says of the battery recycler.
The fact that Andrade is quite pleased to make no money at all points to a problem for the vehicle recycling industry — and for society at large.
It's extremely important that EV batteries get recycled. If they're treated like trash, they become hazardous waste due to the risk of toxic leaching or dangerous fires. Treating them like waste is also, well, a waste: It squanders minerals that could be reused.
Recycling battery minerals, the better option, reduces the climate footprint of new vehicle production and eases U.S. reliance on China for those critical minerals. In the best-case scenario, it also makes money for everyone involved.
But in many cases, the math for EV battery recycling is not penciling out. That's leaving salvage yards stuck with old batteries nobody wants, not even recyclers.
As Andrade is packing up those T-shaped Chevy Volt batteries, across the state at Westover Salvage Yard, CEO Brian Bachand is staring at another EV battery. This one is a mattress-sized Tesla battery, sitting on a shelf.
It, too, is hypothetically valuable. It still works just fine. If a Tesla driver wants to buy it as a replacement battery, it could be worth up to $2,000, Bachand estimates. But he's priced it at $1,200.
"We try to price our parts to sell," he says. "We don't run a museum here."
So far, this might as well be a museum display. No one's biting. And if Bachand can't sell it, his other option is to ship it off to a recycler — and he hasn't been as lucky as Andrade. The only quote he's gotten from a recycler who will accept this particular battery is negative $1,800.
As in, he would have to pay $1,800 to cover the cost of shipping a hazardous material and to make it worth the recycler's effort to process the battery. If he can bundle together five batteries like this, he might be able to get a recycler to take them for free, but so far, he's only got the one. Which is why it's still here, on a shelf.
"This is a liability," Bachand says. "No one's paying me for it. I have to pay to get rid of it."
Battery recycling can be profitable — for some
At a recent General Motors event in San Francisco, the automaker announced new battery chemistries and a commitment to using old EV batteries to help feed energy back into the grid. It was a celebration of "circularity," the idea of a closed-loop system where old batteries never go to waste. In conversations on the sidelines, executives sounded optimistic about the economics of battery recycling.
J.B. Straubel, the founder and CEO of Redwood Materials, a major U.S. battery recycler, was bullish. "Every year that goes by, every month that goes by, it's getting more economical, it's getting more competitive," he said. "We've got a fundamental economic tailwind because these materials are valuable to recycle."
General Motors itself has a lot of batteries to recycle, including scrap that comes off its own cell manufacturing lines. Andy Oury, a battery engineer at GM, said that while recycling used to be an expense, it's now "a source of revenue" for the company, with battery recyclers paying for that scrap.
"Capitalism is doing its thing, where there's a positive incentive structure to go get those materials," he said.
He acknowledged that the cost of shipping batteries can cut into revenue. But a huge company like GM, which has large volumes of scrap to recycle, can optimize the logistics of shipping them.
The view looks different from salvage yards, which don't have those economies of scale. Think of Bachand, who could strike a better deal if he had five batteries instead of just one.
But there's more at play, too.
It's already challenging for scrapyards to make a profit off of disassembling EVs, simply because they have fewer parts than gas-powered cars do, says Emil Nusbaum, the vice president of strategy and government affairs for the Automotive Recyclers Association.
In a traditional gas-powered car, he says, "the two most valuable components are engines and transmissions for reuse and vehicle repairs. We don't have those components in electric vehicles." Instead of a complex engine, there's an electric motor with a single moving part that rarely, if ever, needs to be replaced.
And of course, there's the battery. For a salvage yard, that battery is a wild card. It could be worth a chunk of change, if it's in good shape and can find a second life, either in another car or as energy storage for a building or the electric grid. Or it could be worthless, if it's only useful for recycling and the cost of shipping will cancel out its recycling value.
Or it could be a costly liability, if the minerals inside aren't valuable enough to cover the price of shipping and processing it.
When an old EV is up on the auction block, auto salvagers often have no way of knowing whether its battery will be a boon or a burden.
"Is it going to be something that we can actually have as a valuable asset, for recycling or repurposing or repair?" Nusbaum asks. "Or alternatively, is this something that is going to be a substantial cost — in some cases thousands of dollars — in order to find a responsible home?"
More batteries may get stranded
This is the economic conundrum that can lead to unwanted EV batteries piling up at salvage yards. And the problem is expected to get worse.
Partly, that's just because there will be a lot more old batteries. Right now there aren't many genuinely old EVs on the road.
And EV batteries have been lasting longer than anticipated, meaning that there just haven't been many that need recycling. In fact, most of the EV batteries that get recycled in the U.S. right now are scrap from factories, like defective batteries rejected by quality control, rather than dead batteries from old cars, according to data from Benchmark Mineral Intelligence.
But that will change. EV adoption is expected to rise over time, and the cars on the road today will eventually reach the end of their lifespans.
Meanwhile, EV batteries themselves are also changing. Increasingly, manufacturers are shifting away from packing them with expensive minerals, like nickel and cobalt, toward cheaper ones, like iron phosphate.
Lithium-ion batteries made with iron phosphate, known as LFP batteries, last longer and are more affordable — those are perks if you're buying one. But the cheaper ingredients are a real challenge if you're trying to recycle one.
"There's really no value in recycling iron phosphate, unfortunately," says David Klanecky, the CEO of Cirba Solutions, a major battery recycler in the U.S.
The lithium in them is still worth something — but for Cirba to make a profit extracting it, they have to charge both the person providing the battery and the buyer of the minerals on the other end.
"If I have to pay anybody to get an LFP battery, we don't make any money," Klanecky says.
Frederick Bloomfield, an analyst at Benchmark Mineral Intelligence who tracks prices along the battery recycling supply chain, uses the term "gate fee" to refer to any time a recycler charges to accept scrap. It's akin to the payment you might have to make at your local dump to drop off trash.
"Crunching the numbers, it is pretty clear to say that there's around $1.50 to $2 per-kilogram gate fee at the moment in North America for LFP," he says. EV batteries can easily weigh a ton or more. Do the math, and that's hundreds of dollars salvage yards have to pay to get an LFP battery accepted for recycling, even before they front the often-substantial cost of transporting a hazardous material.
That's compared to the scrap value of some more expensive EV batteries, packed with pricier minerals, where instead of charging a gate fee, recyclers are willing to pay $2 a kilogram or more for scrap.
A few years ago, when companies were investing in building battery-recycling capacity in the U.S., they didn't anticipate that the cheaper LFP batteries would perform as well as they do, or take off as quickly as they did. So they built facilities that "are now kind of looking a little bit ill-prepared," Bloomfield says, for the kinds of batteries that will actually need recycling in the future.
A problem that stretches beyond scrapyards
Joe Hearn co-founded the SHiFT vehicle retirement initiative, which promotes responsible recycling for all kinds of aging vehicles. He says the risk of holding a battery that will be expensive to dispose of is making some players in the supply chain very cautious.
"The scrappers and shredders are very conservative about what they're willing to receive at this point," he says. "Our auto recycling partners have had loads refused and returned to them because there is an EV or hybrid in that load."
What happens if responsible recyclers are reluctant to take these old batteries? Bloomfield says they might get shipped overseas to places where recycling is done in unsafe and dirty conditions.
Or someone stuck with old batteries might just let them pile up. "There's really a risk of those batteries catching fire, becoming damaged," says Jessica Dunn, a scientist with the Union of Concerned Scientists who focuses on battery recycling. "That's a huge cost and also just a huge safety risk."
She says EV and hybrid batteries are already showing up in landfills. "It is illegal to put a battery in a landfill, but they end up there anyway. And then that cost falls on a public entity to try to deal with it," she says.
Colorado tackles the problem with a new law
One state is trying to get ahead of the problem. This summer, Colorado passed a new law that puts the onus of recycling unwanted EV batteries on the companies that sold them in the first place — an extension of the state's embrace of a philosophy known as "producer responsibility."
"Producer responsibility just means that the people making the trash — or whatever we're considering the trash, the thing we're disposing of — have to take responsibility for recycling it and for taking care of end-of-life," says state Sen. Lisa Cutter, who co-sponsored the bill and previously pushed similar laws for smaller batteries and plastics.
"There's not a magic trash fairy," she says. "We have to plan for these things."
The law serves as a sort of backstop. If an EV battery is dumped at a landfill or stranded at a salvage yard, then the manufacturer who originally sold the EV — Tesla or GM, for instance — will be on the hook to pick it up and make sure it's recycled, at the carmaker's expense.
Dunn, with the Union of Concerned Scientists, notes that the law also requires that a certain percentage of the battery's minerals be recovered, which is a way of requiring that it be recycled well.
The bill was shaped not just by environmental groups — namely Dunn's group and Western Resource Advocates — but by a remarkably broad swath of industry players. Emil Nusbaum's association representing salvage yard operators enthusiastically supported it. So did battery recyclers; both Redwood and Cirba praised the law in interviews with NPR.
Even automakers who will be footing the bill were on board with the new law, which is less onerous for them than a similar law in the European Union. The Alliance for Automotive Innovation, the trade group representing most of the major automakers in the U.S., praised the law as "balanced," and noted in a letter to Colorado Gov. Jared Polis that keeping battery minerals within domestic supply chains is "foundational to America's automotive industrial base."
That is to say: Everyone in this supply chain has a vested interest in making sure these old batteries become resources, rather than hazards.
Dunn, who worked on the legislation, is optimistic that this broad coalition of support will increase the chances that other states will follow Colorado's lead.
"We see Colorado as the starting place," she says.
https://www.npr.org/2026/07/13/nx-s1-5847025/ev-battery-recycling-economics
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THE NOSTALGIA FOR “HAND-MADE”
In 1795, John Thelwall, the son of a silk mercer, wrote about his memories of the weavers’ gardens:
~ I remember the time, myself, when a man who was a tolerable workman in the fields, had generally, beside the apartment in which he carried on his vocation, a small summer house and a narrow slip of a garden, at the outskirts of the town, where he spent his Monday, either in flying his pidgeons, or raising his tulips. But those gardens are now fallen into decay. The little summer-house and the Monday’s recreation are no more; and you will find the poor weavers and their families crowded together in vile, filthy and unwholesome chambers, destitute of the most common comforts, and even of the common necessaries of life. ~
Like many others, Thelwall was nostalgic for a lost way of life. The historian E P Thompson notes that almost all writing about cloth workers in the 19th century is ‘haunted by the legend of better days’. And, like many others, Thelwall used the flowers that artisans had grown (and then woven into their patterns) as a symbol of that loss. ‘Weavers,’ the historian Robin Veder writes, ‘mourned the flowers as stand-ins for lost artisanal work culture.’ We might say that Thelwall was in the grip of skill nostalgia.
Today, we seem to be caught by the same emotion. Streaming sites are full of reality television shows in which people compete to learn new skills: baking, pottery, sewing, glassblowing, blacksmithing. Etsy, an online marketplace built around handmade and vintage goods, now has more than 5 million sellers. A version of the 19th-century whaling song ‘The Wellerman’ has been viewed by hundreds of millions of people on TikTok and YouTube – a work song for people with neither ship nor crew.
The French worker’s jacket, bleu de travail, is now sold by luxury fashion houses to people who will never set foot on a factory floor. We dream of running away to work on a farm or living the life of a Mediterranean peasant (ie, ‘Nonnamaxxing’). The American philosopher Matthew Crawford – who left his job at a think tank to open a motorcycle repair shop – wrote a bestselling book about this kind of transition, called Shop Class as Soulcraft (2009), in which he argues that skilled manual work gives access to a form of thinking that office work denies us.
These desires are growing ever more acute as AI promises, or threatens, to automate yet another layer of what humans can do. We crave the handmade, the from-scratch, the traditional, the folk. We dream of old forms of skilled work.
But nostalgia can be a complicated and problematic emotion. For one thing, it is characteristically detached from reality. Fond memories of London’s weavers and their flowers make it easier to overlook the problems with artisanal silk production, and the fact that there were still gardens in Spitalfields until the mid-19th century. An equally serious concern is that nostalgia channels discontent about the present into the project of recreating an imagined past. As the cultural theorist Svetlana Boym argues in The Future of Nostalgia (2001), unreflective nostalgia ‘breeds monsters’: nationalism, racial supremacy, fascism.
Will our desire for a lost age of skilled work curdle into technophobia, a distrust of social change, and a desire to return to the ‘way things were’? When we fetishise the skills and objects of the past, are we falling into a reactionary form of Luddism that resists all change? What are the politics hidden within our desire for artisanal sourdough bread and hand-thrown pottery?
We are not the first to confront these questions. More than a century ago, sickened by the factories and slums that mechanical looms had built, John Ruskin and William Morris looked back, reaching past the Spitalfields weaver to something older: the medieval artisan. There, they found a dream of skilled labor, which they used as a tool to indict the present and imagine a fairer future.
Their skill nostalgia became radical. Could ours do the same?
Anxieties about the way we work are much older than the factories that worried Morris and Ruskin. For more than two millennia, philosophers have argued that skills are worth defending, and that we lose something of ourselves when we let them go.
In Plato’s Phaedrus dialogue, written around 370 BCE, Socrates relates an Egyptian story about the invention of writing by the God Thoth. In the tale, Thoth makes his case for this new technology to the Egyptian king Thamus. After the divine sales pitch, Thamus responds:
“This discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves.”
In Plato’s telling, Socrates sides with Thamus on the basis that writing produces only a simulation of intelligence. Written texts are fixed, whereas conversation requires speakers to exercise flexibility, responding to questions and adapting to listeners. Plato views this responsiveness as characteristic of wisdom. There is a suggestion here that genuine understanding is produced through flexible give-and-take, and that reliance on writing threatens this by fostering forgetfulness and the mere appearance of knowledge. In some ways, this story suggests that flexible conversation could be understood as a skill – one that might be threatened if the technology of writing were to become widespread.
Roughly 21 centuries later, in Émile (1762), Jean-Jacques Rousseau argues that apprenticeship in a métier – a job or skill – ought to be a central part of a child’s education. His rhetoric explicitly connects crafts with heritage: ‘Cultivate the heritage of your fathers! But if you have lost that heritage, or if you never had it, what should you do? Learn a skill [métier]!’ For Rousseau, the point of this apprenticeship is to gain insight into social relations, and crucially to learn the distinction between jobs that are held in high esteem and those that are actually useful.
A century later, Karl Marx spends three chapters of his Capital (1867) detailing the shift from hand-crafted objects to industrially manufactured products. These chapters are presented as economic analysis but they have a nostalgic bent. For example:
Manufacture begets, in every handicraft that it seizes upon, a class of so-called unskilled laborers, a class which handicraft industry strictly excluded. If it develops a one-sided specialty into a perfection, at the expense of the whole of a man’s working capacity, it also begins to make a specialty of the absence of all development.
In these chapters, Marx presents something like a political economy of skill. His basic thought – following Adam Smith – is that the division of labor in production leads to substantial benefits of efficiency and profitability for the owner of capital, at the cost of a vicious specialization among workers that narrows their practical and mental lives.
The shift to industrial manufacturing destroys (or ‘uninvents’, to borrow a phrase from Donald MacKenzie and Graham Spinardi) the practical, tacit knowledge that was tied up in the creation of handmade goods. Eventually, people simply forget the exact way to make things because not all forms of practical knowledge can be written down.
These examples of skill nostalgia have some common themes. Each argues that there is a moral imperative to cultivate skills, and that we can’t be free or truly understand the world without learning them. Each takes a declinist view of history, in which practical skills are always diminishing due to technological change.
But each argument also highlights some of the problems with skill nostalgia. Rousseau ranks trades by how independent they are, anticipating the aspiration to heroic practical independence that we later find in Henry David Thoreau’s writing (and in every man who starts a DIY project). Socrates plays the technophobic trick of dismissing a technology by listing only its costs. Marx romanticizes the artisan, treating the workshop as a site of integrated human development while underplaying the social inequalities that often structured the production of crafts.
There’s a pattern here. When earlier periods of skilled practice are treated as more fully human, the social order that produced them can easily appear better than what replaced it. The past, then, seems superior to the present. This is why such arguments risk becoming reactionary. When we mourn the uninvention of skills, we may also – unless we are very careful – end up mourning the loss of the social structures that surround them. That slippage is the core mechanism by which skill nostalgia feeds into a longing for a bygone world.
The wellspring of modern reactionary skill nostalgia is Martin Heidegger’s essay The Question Concerning Technology, first presented as a lecture in 1953. Heidegger argues that modern technology enframes the natural world, transforming it and us into the ‘standing reserve’ for industrial production. In so doing, modern technology alienates us from the revelatory potential of skill, and from our human essence. Heidegger’s alternative is dichterisch wohnen (‘poetic dwelling’), which amounts to romanticizing one’s life: inhabiting the world in a way that remains open to the meaning of things rather than treating them as resources to be ordered and used.
Heidegger’s examples of poetical living are steeped in Volkish symbolism and nostalgia: the woodsman, the windmill, the peasant farmer, the rushing river Rhine (now emasculated by a hydroelectric power station). We can find elements of Heidegger’s perspective running through popular writing on skill nostalgia in recent decades. In Shop Class as Soulcraft, Crawford focuses on male-coded skills like motorcycle repair. In Craftland (2025), the historian James Fox ties craft to British national identity; the book is structured around the regional trades that once defined local communities.
And in Against the Machine (2025), Paul Kingsnorth describes skill and tradition as defenses against modernity, which he equates with spiritual collapse – a position that places him within a longer tradition of reactionary European thought.
An example to tie these ideas together: in September 2025, the United States Labor Department posted a picture of a white man in a denim shirt with a cleft chin against a blue sky marked by towering cranes. The slogan: Make America Skilled Again! At best, the image promotes the Fordist compromise of hard work for a family wage. At worst, it echoes National Socialist posters that promote a white supremacist politics, using the white worker as a synecdoche for the power of the state.
What exactly do I mean by skill nostalgia? For me, the term describes both the desire for skilled activity that can be fulfilled by acquiring a skill, and more indirect forms of nostalgia for things – objects, practices, fashions – merely associated with skills. The skill-oriented hobbyist and the impractical hipster dressed in workwear are both expressing forms of skill nostalgia. But are they both expressing a Heideggerian desire to return to some imagined golden period? Is the hobbyist a technophobe? Is the hipster guilty of stolen valor?
A more sympathetic view is that skill nostalgia – and nostalgia in general – is often motivated by a sense of pained loss rather than a desire to return to the past. We can find this sense of loss in the very origins of the word. ‘Nostalgia’ was introduced in the late 17th century as a medical diagnosis for the homesickness of Swiss mercenaries, which was so severe that superior officers banned the singing of the Alpine herding song ‘Ranz des Vaches’, supposedly on pain of death. The word has obviously undergone semantic drift since then, but the association between it and loss appears to be important. What kind of loss might give rise to skill nostalgia?
The loss that animates skill nostalgia relates to the hollowing out of skilled labor and our frustrated desire for skilled work. In The Doctrine of Virtue (1797), Immanuel Kant describes the failure to develop our capacities (such as physical skills) as a failure of self-directed duty that leaves us idle and ‘rusting away [our] natural dispositions and powers’.
Many contemporary jobs are simply not complicated enough to keep the rust off. For example, consider two of my own: there is no such thing as a master supermarket cashier or an expert warehouse worker. You can be good at these jobs but, because of the way they are organized, you can’t devote your life to mastering the art of scanning or unpacking cages in the same way as a craftsman devotes themselves to blade-making or weaving. We face a dearth of complex and meaningful jobs.
Some of us have found complexity and meaning in hobbies that reproduce obsolete forms of skilled labor: woodworking, knitting, fishing, fixing radios, home brewing, hand-weaving, fixing typewriters, calligraphy. The ever-pessimistic Theodor Adorno argues in the essay ‘Free Time’ (1977) that hobbies are a trick played by the management class to keep people busy and to habituate us into the work ethic. This view can claim some historical support: many hobbies were designed to keep the working class busy.
However, there’s a more optimistic diagnosis available. Hobbies that reproduce obsolete jobs have, or can be imagined to have, features that many contemporary jobs lack: clear and sustained attention to a single task; the kind of complexity that enables lifelong self-development; stability; a specialized community organized around the possession of knowledge; and social recognition based on expertise and performance. Our hobbies seem to have become one way that we imagine our jobs should be. As automation, AI and lay-offs threaten to deskill labor further, it’s likely that our desire for skilled hobbies will only increase.
As I see it, nostalgia is a peculiar combination of a desire for something associated with the past and a belief that it is impossible for that desire to be satisfied. Nostalgia is heterogeneous because there are many past things that we can desire. Perhaps we look to the community solidarity of the German Democratic Republic or the chivalric code of the medieval knight. Nostalgia can be associated both with individual and collective loss. You can be nostalgic for your lost childhood. You can also be nostalgic for losses that were never yours: the murmurations of starlings that once filled the evening sky and have since thinned away.
There are two obvious routes out of the pain – and irrationality – of desiring something from the past that you believe you cannot have. You can either give up the desire for the past thing, or you can give up the belief that the past is lost. If you lose the desire, you end up lighter, but you accept the world the way it is. This is supposed to be the grown-up way to process nostalgia: stop dreaming about being a child and be an adult. On the other hand, if you give up the belief that the past thing is lost, your desire can create a belief that the present can be made more like the past. This is the reactionary form of skill nostalgia that we find in Heidegger and the current US government.
Are these the only two options for skill nostalgia? Must it always resolve into accepting the present or into the project of recreating an imagined past?
In the 1800s, following the start of the industrial revolution in Britain, there was a wave of nostalgia in art, literature, architecture and design that looked back to the medieval period. The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood produced art inspired by Arthurian folk stories. Authors of Gothic literature used medieval symbols as emotional engines to generate fear and awe.
Architects drafted a slew of pseudomedieval Gothic buildings (most notably the Houses of Parliament). And interior designers and decorative artists popularized a style that evoked the medieval workshop and its handmade aesthetic.
This wave of medieval nostalgia was in large part a Romantic reaction to industrialization. One of its central ideas was that one ought to value the products made by hand over factory-produced goods – a kind of skill nostalgia.
Consider the furnishing and interior design firm Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co (later known as Morris & Co). When it was founded in 1861, the firm started with a renovation project. One of the founders, William Morris, wanted to build a family home that rejected what he saw as dominant Victorian social values. With his friend Philip Webb, Morris designed a modern Gothic house made from red brick, in southeast London. It would be furnished with stained glass, tableware, furniture and tapestries designed by Morris and his friends. One evening – apparently as a joke – they started Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co as an attempt to reform the decorative arts against the overwhelming tide of shoddy factory-made objects. In a later talk, Morris sets out a dual function for the decorative arts:
~ To give people pleasure in the things they must perforce use, that is one great office of decoration; to give people pleasure in the things they must perforce make, that is the other use of it. ~
The making of cloth, books and tapestries by hand were rapidly declining skills by the mid-1800s, and Morris personally dove into reinventing several crafts, with the assistance of period manuals. But he wanted to do more than just reproduce art from bygone eras. Morris wanted people to have the opportunity to perform skilled labor in the manner of medieval craftspeople by working slowly, with their hands, gradually improving their skills through experiments and mistakes.
Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co was an early part of the wider Arts and Crafts movement that emerged from medievalism and the rejection of industrial production. Eventually, it led to a resurgence of craft practices across the world, from the Mingei movement in Japan to the Prairie School in Chicago.
The Victorians were clearly nostalgic for medieval craft production, but was their form of skill nostalgia reactionary or radical?
There certainly were reactionary takes on this wave of nostalgia. Consider the work of the Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle and the English architect Augustus Pugin (co-designer of the Houses of Parliament). In Past and Present (1843), Carlyle compares the troubles of the English working class with the harmony of the medieval monastery, and makes the case for reestablishing a feudal monarchy.
Pugin anticipates this message in his illustrated tract Contrasts: Or, A Parallel between the Noble Edifices of the Middle Ages and Corresponding Buildings of the Present Day (1836). Pugin contrasts the beauty of medieval buildings with the ugliness of Victorian buildings, and thinks that beautiful architecture reveals a flourishing society, and ugly buildings are a sign of breakdown. He writes:
“It is only by communing with the spirit of past ages, as it is developed in the lives of the holy men of old, and in their wonderful monuments and works, that we can arrive at a just appreciation of the glories we have lost, or adopt the necessary means for their recovery.”
Faced with the industrial revolution, both Pugin and Carlyle seek a counter-revolution that re-establishes the medieval social order: king, church and country.
In contrast with this reactionary version of skill nostalgia, consider the form articulated by the art critic Ruskin. From 1851 to 1853, he published a three-volume history of Venetian architecture titled The Stones of Venice. Like Pugin, Ruskin views architectural styles as indicative of the social and political health of society. His central argument is that the Venetian Republic reached its peak during the Gothic period and declined thereafter.
Ruskin gives a detailed conceptual analysis of the Gothic style of architecture. He proposes that Gothic buildings have six characteristics: savageness, changefulness, naturalism, grotesqueness, rigidity and redundancy. This all sounds pretty dry, until we get into the details. Each architectural feature really describes a virtue of the medieval stonemasons who built it, rather than a physical property of the building. Savageness is a sign of improving skill; changefulness, of independence; naturalism, of love of nature; grotesqueness, of imaginative freedom; rigidity, of dedication to hard work; and redundancy, of generosity of spirit. Ruskin is doing virtue theory via aesthetics.
Ruskin goes on to use the Gothic stonemason to critique the factory labor system. He contrasts the independent and always-improving stonemason with the factory laborer who works under the division of labor:
“We want one man to be always thinking, and another to be always working, and we call one a gentleman, and the other an operative; whereas the workman ought often to be thinking, and the thinker often to be working, and both should be gentlemen, in the best sense. As it is, we make both ungentle, the one envying, the other despising, his brother; and the mass of society is made up of morbid thinkers, and miserable workers. Now it is only by labor that thought can be made healthy, and only by thought that labor can be made happy, and the two cannot be separated with impunity.”
Ruskin doesn’t want to return to the way of life of the medieval stonemason and he doesn’t see the medieval period as a golden era. Instead, he wants to build our hopes for the future around the ideals and virtues that animated the stonemason’s life and work. Ruskin treats the past not as an ideal, but as a way to calibrate our hopes and dreams. He points towards a way to develop nostalgia that is an alternative to accepting the present or trying to recreate the past. Instead, his nostalgia orientates us towards the future.
On 4 December 1877, Morris expressed something similar to a gathered crowd at the Trades Guild of Learning in London. During the talk, he conjured the days when the ‘the mystery and wonder of handicrafts were well acknowledged by the world.’ Those were days when ‘all handicraftsmen were artists’. But then that art changed: it grew into something heavy and complex, and crafts like weaving or blacksmithing were broken down into parts and turned into serious, industrial activities, rending the lives of artists into ‘one long tragedy of hope and fear, joy and trouble.’ This process, Morris says, defines ‘the growth of art: like all growth, it was good and fruitful for awhile; like all fruitful growth, it grew into decay; like all decay of what was once fruitful, it will grow into something new.’
William Morris by Frederick Hollyer, platinum print, 1874.
The problems of skilled, meaningful work are just as urgent today as they were in the time of Morris and Ruskin. In the Papal Encyclical Magnifica Humanitas (2026), Pope Leo XIV worries that artificial intelligence will ‘paradoxically de-skill workers, subject them to automated surveillance and relegate them to rigid and repetitive tasks.’ But we must push back against this, he insists, because ‘work is not simply an instrument; it expresses and enhances the dignity of our lives. It is a requirement of the human condition, a normal path toward maturity, development and personal fulfillment.’
Defending that dignity often involves looking back. Some of the richest thinking about what good work looks like has come from people mourning its disappearance. Skill nostalgia is worth cultivating, provided we redirect it. The longing to live as some imagined stonemason, peasant farmer or carpenter can be turned into a demand for work that is complex and worthwhile.
In his essay Useful Work versus Useless Toil (1885), Morris offers a framework for doing this. He dismisses a swathe of contemporary work as useless and harmful to the mental life of the worker – something that many of us can likely relate to – but he maintains that there is a category of hopeful work. For him, such work is animated by four goals: the hope of rest, the hope of producing useful things, the hope of intrinsic pleasure in skilled activity, and the hope of abundance for all.
Morris, Acanthus wallpaper
Yes, the gardens have fallen into decay and the flowers are gone. We can mourn that loss. Or we can ask: what kind of work will let us grow them again?
https://aeon.co/essays/the-radical-reasons-why-you-dream-of-making-things-by-hand?utm_source=Aeon+Newsletter&utm_campaign=b192bf9041-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2026_07_10&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_-49ad69cbc2-838110632
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WHAT IF JOBS AREN’T WORKING ANYMORE?
Work means everything to us Americans. For centuries – since, say, 1650 – we’ve believed that it builds character (punctuality, initiative, honesty, self-discipline, and so forth). We’ve also believed that the market in labor, where we go to find work, has been relatively efficient in allocating opportunities and incomes. And we’ve believed that, even if it sucks, a job gives meaning, purpose and structure to our everyday lives – at any rate, we’re pretty sure that it gets us out of bed, pays the bills, makes us feel responsible, and keeps us away from daytime TV.
These beliefs are no longer plausible. In fact, they’ve become ridiculous, because there’s not enough work to go around, and what there is of it won’t pay the bills – unless of course you’ve landed a job as a drug dealer or a Wall Street banker, becoming a gangster either way.
These days, everybody from Left to Right – from the economist Dean Baker to the social scientist Arthur C Brooks, from Bernie Sanders to Donald Trump – addresses this breakdown of the labor market by advocating ‘full employment’, as if having a job is self-evidently a good thing, no matter how dangerous, demanding or demeaning it is.
But ‘full employment’ is not the way to restore our faith in hard work, or in playing by the rules, or in whatever else sounds good. The official unemployment rate in the United States is already below 6 per cent, which is pretty close to what economists used to call ‘full employment’, but income inequality hasn’t changed a bit. Shitty jobs for everyone won’t solve any social problems we now face.
Don’t take my word for it, look at the numbers. Already a fourth of the adults actually employed in the US are paid wages lower than would lift them above the official poverty line – and so a fifth of American children live in poverty. Almost half of employed adults in this country are eligible for food stamps (most of those who are eligible don’t apply). The market in labor has broken down, along with most others.
Those jobs that disappeared in the Great Recession just aren’t coming back, regardless of what the unemployment rate tells you – the net gain in jobs since 2000 still stands at zero – and if they do return from the dead, they’ll be zombies, those contingent, part-time or minimum-wage jobs where the bosses shuffle your shift from week to week: welcome to Wal-Mart, where food stamps are a benefit.
And don’t tell me that raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour solves the problem. No one can doubt the moral significance of the movement. But at this rate of pay, you pass the official poverty line only after working 29 hours a week. The current federal minimum wage is $7.25. Working a 40-hour week, you would have to make $10 an hour to reach the official poverty line. What, exactly, is the point of earning a paycheck that isn’t a living wage, except to prove that you have a work ethic?
But, wait, isn’t our present dilemma just a passing phase of the business cycle? What about the job market of the future? Haven’t the doomsayers, those damn Malthusians, always been proved wrong by rising productivity, new fields of enterprise, new economic opportunities?
Well, yeah – until now, these times. The measurable trends of the past half-century, and the plausible projections for the next half-century, are just too empirically grounded to dismiss as dismal science or ideological hokum. They look like the data on climate change – you can deny them if you like, but you’ll sound like a moron when you do.
For example, the Oxford economists who study employment trends tell us that almost half of existing jobs, including those involving ‘non-routine cognitive tasks’ – you know, like thinking – are at risk of death by computerization within 20 years. They’re elaborating on conclusions reached by two MIT economists in the book Race Against the Machine (2011). Meanwhile, the Silicon Valley types who give TED talks have started speaking of ‘surplus humans’ as a result of the same process – cybernated production. Rise of the Robots, a new book that cites these very sources, is social science, not science fiction.
So this Great Recession of ours – don’t kid yourself, it ain’t over – is a moral crisis as well as an economic catastrophe. You might even say it’s a spiritual impasse, because it makes us ask what social scaffolding other than work will permit the construction of character – or whether character itself is something we must aspire to. But that is why it’s also an intellectual opportunity: it forces us to imagine a world in which the job no longer builds our character, determines our incomes or dominates our daily lives.
In short, it lets us say: enough already. Fuck work.
Certainly this crisis makes us ask: what comes after work? What would you do without your job as the external discipline that organizes your waking life – as the social imperative that gets you up and on your way to the factory, the office, the store, the warehouse, the restaurant, wherever you work and, no matter how much you hate it, keeps you coming back? What would you do if you didn’t have to work to receive an income?
And what would society and civilization be like if we didn’t have to ‘earn’ a living – if leisure was not our choice but our lot? Would we hang out at the local Starbucks, laptops open? Or volunteer to teach children in less-developed places, such as Mississippi? Or smoke weed and watch reality TV all day?
I’m not proposing a fancy thought experiment here. By now these are practical questions because there aren’t enough jobs. So it’s time we asked even more practical questions. How do you make a living without a job – can you receive income without working for it? Is it possible, to begin with and then, the hard part, is it ethical? If you were raised to believe that work is the index of your value to society – as most of us were – would it feel like cheating to get something for nothing?
We already have some provisional answers because we’re all on the dole, more or less. The fastest growing component of household income since 1959 has been ‘transfer payments’ from government. By the turn of the 21st century, 20 per cent of all household income came from this source – from what is otherwise known as welfare or ‘entitlements’. Without this income supplement, half of the adults with full-time jobs would live below the poverty line, and most working Americans would be eligible for food stamps.
But are these transfer payments and ‘entitlements’ affordable, in either economic or moral terms? By continuing and enlarging them, do we subsidize sloth, or do we enrich a debate on the rudiments of the good life?
Transfer payments or ‘entitlements’, not to mention Wall Street bonuses (talk about getting something for nothing) have taught us how to detach the receipt of income from the production of goods, but now, in plain view of the end of work, the lesson needs rethinking. No matter how you calculate the federal budget, we can afford to be our brother’s keeper. The real question is not whether but how we choose to be.
I know what you’re thinking – we can’t afford this! But yeah, we can, very easily. We raise the arbitrary lid on the Social Security contribution, which now stands at $127,200, and we raise taxes on corporate income, reversing the Reagan Revolution. These two steps solve a fake fiscal problem and create an economic surplus where we now can measure a moral deficit.
Of course, you will say – along with every economist from Dean Baker to Greg Mankiw, Left to Right – that raising taxes on corporate income is a disincentive to investment and thus job creation. Or that it will drive corporations overseas, where taxes are lower.
But in fact raising taxes on corporate income can’t have these effects.
Let’s work backward. Corporations have been ‘multinational’ for quite some time. In the 1970s and ’80s, before Ronald Reagan’s signature tax cuts took effect, approximately 60 per cent of manufactured imported goods were produced offshore, overseas, by US companies. That percentage has risen since then, but not by much.
Chinese workers aren’t the problem – the homeless, aimless idiocy of corporate accounting is.
That is why the Citizens United decision of 2010 applying freedom of speech regulations to campaign spending is hilarious. Money isn’t speech, any more than noise is. The Supreme Court has conjured a living being, a new person, from the remains of the common law, creating a real world more frightening than its cinematic equivalent: say, Frankenstein, Blade Runner or, more recently, Transformers.
But the bottom line is this. Most jobs aren’t created by private, corporate investment, so raising taxes on corporate income won’t affect employment. You heard me right. Since the 1920s, economic growth has happened even though net private investment has atrophied. What does that mean? It means that profits are pointless except as a way of announcing to your stockholders (and hostile takeover specialists) that your company is a going concern, a thriving business. You don’t need profits to ‘reinvest’, to finance the expansion of your company’s workforce or output, as the recent history of Apple and most other corporations has amply demonstrated.
So investment decisions by CEOs have only a marginal effect on employment. Taxing the profits of corporations to finance a welfare state that permits us to love our neighbors and to be our brothers’ keeper is not an economic problem. It’s something else – it’s an intellectual issue, a moral conundrum.
When we place our faith in hard work, we’re wishing for the creation of character; but we’re also hoping, or expecting, that the labor market will allocate incomes fairly and rationally. And there’s the rub, they do go together. Character can be created on the job only when we can see that there’s an intelligible, justifiable relation between past effort, learned skills and present reward. When I see that your income is completely out of proportion to your production of real value, of durable goods the rest of us can use and appreciate (and by ‘durable’ I don’t mean just material things), I begin to doubt that character is a consequence of hard work.
When I see, for example, that you’re making millions by laundering drug-cartel money (HSBC), or pushing bad paper on mutual fund managers (AIG, Bear Stearns, Morgan Stanley, Citibank), or preying on low-income borrowers (Bank of America), or buying votes in Congress (all of the above) – just business as usual on Wall Street – while I’m barely making ends meet from the earnings of my full-time job, I realize that my participation in the labor market is irrational. I know that building my character through work is stupid because crime pays. I might as well become a gangster like you.
That’s why an economic crisis such as the Great Recession is also a moral problem, a spiritual impasse – and an intellectual opportunity. We’ve placed so many bets on the social, cultural and ethical import of work that when the labour market fails, as it so spectacularly has, we’re at a loss to explain what happened, or to orient ourselves to a different set of meanings for work and for markets.
And by ‘we’ I mean pretty much all of us, Left to Right, because everybody wants to put Americans back to work, one way or another – ‘full employment’ is the goal of Right-wing politicians no less than Left-wing economists. The differences between them are over means, not ends, and those ends include intangibles such as the acquisition of character.
Which is to say that everybody has doubled down on the benefits of work just as it reaches a vanishing point. Securing ‘full employment’ has become a bipartisan goal at the very moment it has become both impossible and unnecessary. Sort of like securing slavery in the 1850s or segregation in the 1950s.
Why?
Because work means everything to us inhabitants of modern market societies – regardless of whether it still produces solid character and allocates incomes rationally, and quite apart from the need to make a living. It’s been the medium of most of our thinking about the good life since Plato correlated craftsmanship and the possibility of ideas as such. It’s been our way of defying death, by making and repairing the durable things, the significant things we know will last beyond our allotted time on earth because they teach us, as we make or repair them, that the world beyond us – the world before and after us – has its own reality principles.
Think about the scope of this idea. Work has been a way of demonstrating differences between males and females, for example by merging the meanings of fatherhood and ‘breadwinner’, and then, more recently, prying them apart. Since the 17th century, masculinity and femininity have been defined – not necessarily achieved – by their places in a moral economy, as working men who got paid wages for their production of value on the job, or as working women who got paid nothing for their production and maintenance of families.
Of course, these definitions are now changing, as the meaning of ‘family’ changes, along with profound and parallel changes in the labor market – the entry of women is just one of those – and in attitudes toward sexuality.
When work disappears, the genders produced by the labor market are blurred. When socially necessary labor declines, what we once called women’s work – education, healthcare, service – becomes our basic industry, not a ‘tertiary’ dimension of the measurable economy. The labor of love, caring for one another and learning how to be our brother’s keeper – socially beneficial labor – becomes not merely possible but eminently necessary, and not just within families, where affection is routinely available. No, I mean out there, in the wide, wide world.
Work has also been the American way of producing ‘racial capitalism’, as the historians now call it, by means of slave labor, convict labor, sharecropping, then segregated labor markets – in other words, a ‘free enterprise system’ built on the ruins of black bodies, an economic edifice animated, saturated and determined by racism.
There never was a free market in labor in these United States. Like every other market, it was always hedged by lawful, systematic discrimination against black folk. You might even say that this hedged market produced the still-deployed stereotypes of African-American laziness, by excluding black workers from remunerative employment, confining them to the ghettos of the eight-hour day.
And yet, and yet. Though work has often entailed subjugation, obedience and hierarchy (see above), it’s also where many of us, probably most of us, have consistently expressed our deepest human desire, to be free of externally imposed authority or obligation, to be self-sufficient. We have defined ourselves for centuries by what we do, by what we produce.
But by now we must know that this definition of ourselves entails the principle of productivity – from each according to his abilities, to each according to his creation of real value through work – and commits us to the inane idea that we’re worth only as much as the labor market can register, as a price. By now we must also know that this principle plots a certain course to endless growth and its faithful attendant, environmental degradation.
Until now, the principle of productivity has functioned as the reality principle that made the American Dream seem plausible. ‘Work hard, play by the rules, get ahead’, or, ‘You get what you pay for, you make your own way, you rightly receive what you’ve honestly earned’ – such homilies and exhortations used to make sense of the world. At any rate they didn’t sound delusional. By now they do.
Adherence to the principle of productivity therefore threatens public health as well as the planet (actually, these are the same thing). By committing us to what is impossible, it makes for madness. The Nobel Prize-winning economist Angus Deaton said something like this when he explained anomalous mortality rates among white people in the Bible Belt by claiming that they’ve ‘lost the narrative of their lives’ – by suggesting that they’ve lost faith in the American Dream. For them, the work ethic is a death sentence because they can’t live by it.
So the impending end of work raises the most fundamental questions about what it means to be human. To begin with, what purposes could we choose if the job – economic necessity – didn’t consume most of our waking hours and creative energies? What evident yet unknown possibilities would then appear? How would human nature itself change as the ancient, aristocratic privilege of leisure becomes the birthright of human beings as such?
Sigmund Freud insisted that love and work were the essential ingredients of healthy human being. Of course he was right. But can love survive the end of work as the willing partner of the good life? Can we let people get something for nothing and still treat them as our brothers and sisters – as members of a beloved community? Can you imagine the moment when you’ve just met an attractive stranger at a party, or you’re online looking for someone, anyone, but you don’t ask: ‘So, what do you do?’
We won’t have any answers until we acknowledge that work now means everything to us – and that hereafter it can’t.
https://aeon.co/essays/what-if-jobs-are-not-the-solution-but-the-problem
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In the ocean's twilight zone, where the reach of the Sun fades to nothing, the world's largest migration begins every time night falls. It could also have an outsized effect on our climate.
During World War Two sonar technicians made an extraordinary discovery. The pings from their echo sounders reflected off what they thought must be the ocean floor. But the sea was much shallower than they had expected and – even more puzzlingly – the seabed seemed to move up and down throughout the day.
This wasn't the undulating ocean floor, however, but the many inhabitants of the twilight zone making their nightly migration to the surface to feed. This concentrated "deep scattering layer" of marine organisms, suspended in the water column, was so extraordinarily high that it scattered the sound, reflecting the sonar pings as if it was a solid object.
Beneath the waves, the twilight zone – or mesopelagic zone – starts at a depth of 200m (656ft), where the ocean is bathed in perpetual twilight. Sink deeper and the reach of the Sun's rays fades rapidly. The last remnants of sunlight vanish completely around 1,000m (3,280ft). There, the only light is the eerie glint of bioluminescence, produced by creatures that glow in the dark.
This vast layer of water spans the globe and is teeming with an astonishing diversity of life. It is home to an estimated 95% of all fish biomass, and around 10,000 million tons of fish.
Every night trillions of zooplankton that inhabit this zone rise from the deep to feed under the cover of darkness. This phenomenon, known as diel vertical migration (DVM), is the largest natural migration of animals on the planet, with an estimated biomass of 10 billion tons. As the Earth spins on its axis, diel vertical migration takes place throughout the world's oceans.
"I like to think of it as a Mexican wave," says Laura Hobbs, lecturer in Arctic Marine Science at the Scottish Association for Marine Science, describing the swell of animals rising and falling, following the night around the globe.
"Zooplankton go to the surface to feed because that's where the phytoplankton is," says Hobbs.
"Zooplankton", she explains, is an umbrella term for many different species of tiny animals that live in the ocean. "These critters are just millimeters long, they're tiny. And they're swimming hundreds of meters every single day, up and down again. It would be like running multiple marathons." (Read about Jailing Cai's incredible experience of photographing animals of the twilight zone.)
Phytoplankton, meanwhile, are the plant-plankton. "Phytoplankton need the sunlight [to grow]. That's why they're restricted to the surface layers."
"As the Sun rises," says Hobbs, "the zooplankton become threatened by visual predators, bigger zooplankton or fish [that can see them now in the light]. So, they migrate back down into darker waters and stay there to digest. Then they excrete their waste, get hungry again and, as the Sun sets, they come back up for more."
(apologies for having lost the link)
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WHOSE LIFESPAN BEST PREDICTS YOUR OWN LIFE EXPECTANCY?
A massive study of 400 million family trees revealed a bizarre paradox: your siblings-in-law predict your lifespan better than your own blood cousins do.
This is because genetics plays a much smaller role in your longevity than most people assume.
If you are looking strictly at biological relatives, your identical twin is the single best predictor of your lifespan.
For the rest of the population, your mother is the second best biological predictor. Large-scale demographic studies show that maternal lifespan correlates more strongly with offspring longevity than paternal lifespan does. This maternal advantage is partly due to mitochondrial DNA, which you inherit exclusively from your mother. Mitochondria act as cellular powerhouses, and their efficiency and decay rates are central to how your body ages. Additionally, maternal-fetal health in the womb sets early physiological baselines that influence long-term health.
The explanation for the sibling-in-law paradox lies in that landmark 2018 study published in Genetics. By analyzing those hundreds of millions of public pedigree records, researchers discovered that the actual heritability of human lifespan is incredibly low—only about 7% to 10%, down from previous estimates of 20% to 30%.
The study revealed that the most powerful non-twin predictor of your lifespan is actually your spouse. Although you share zero genes with your partner, you share a physical environment, dietary habits, sleep patterns, socioeconomic status, and healthcare access. This phenomenon, known as assortative mating, means that people tend to select partners with similar lifestyles and backgrounds.
Because of these shared environments and lifestyle alignment, your spouse's siblings end up sharing a more similar lifespan to yours than your genetic cousins. Ultimately, the partner you choose to live with predicts your longevity far better than the bloodlines you inherited. ~ Vital Signs, Quora
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BRAIN CELL CHANGES MAY EXPLAIN WHY PARKINSON'S AFFECTS MORE MEN THAN WOMEN
A new study, presented recently at the Federation of European Neuroscience Societies (FENS) Forum 2026 in Barcelona, Spain, uncovers genetic changes in brain cells that might help us understand why Parkinson’s is much more prevalent in males.
Parkinson’s is the second-most prevalent neurodegenerative condition, affecting around 1% of people aged over 60. Due to many factors, including our increasing average age, the number of Parkinson’s cases is projected to reach approximately 9 million by 2030, doubling cases since 2005.
These figures are concerning, and given that current treatments are far from perfect, understanding the disease as much as possible is vital.
The sex question remains unanswered
Males are around 1.5 times more likely to develop Parkinson’s disease than females.
Additionally, females tend to develop the condition later than males and survive for longer.
These differences could be due to a range of factors, including an increased likelihood of men experiencing head injuries or exposure to pesticides, solvents, and metals.
However, it is still an open question, and the latest study helps us begin to answer it.
The new study approaches the condition from a new angle. “The most interesting aspect is that the researchers are examining Parkinson’s disease through the lens of biological sex and glial cells, rather than focusing only on neurons,” Laura Bojarskaite, PhD, told Medical News Today. Bojarskaite, who was not involved in the study, is a neuroscientist and postdoctoral fellow at the University of Oslo.
In particular, the researchers investigated epigenetics and their potential role in the sex differences seen in Parkinson’s. Epigenetic changes are not changes to the DNA code; rather, they are modifications that switch genes “on” or “off.”
The most well-studied form of epigenetic modification is methylation, in which a methyl group is added to DNA, effectively switching it“off” or “silencing” it.
Lead author Prof. Julia Schulze-Hentrich’s previous research showed that females with Parkinson’s had changes to DNA methylation in 69 regions of their genome. In males, however, only two regions were affected.
As she explains, this suggests “that a person’s genetic make-up influences these DNA methylation changes.” This spurred her to investigate what specifically might influence differences in DNA methylation patterns between males and females.
Digging into five brain regions
Schulze-Hentrich and her colleagues collected brain samples from deceased people. In total, there were 73 people with Parkinson’s (28 females and 45 males). They compared these samples with 24 individuals without Parkinson’s (9 females and 15 males).
The scientists measured differences in gene expression across all brain cell types in five regions. This includes neurons, which transmit messages, and glial cells, which are multi-functional support cells for neurons. Glial cells include astrocytes, oligodendrocytes, and microglia.
“We studied five brain regions and found that Parkinson’s causes common changes in the brain, regardless of sex,” explains Schulze-Hentrich.
“All these cells in the five regions,” she continued, “showed signs of being under stress. They switched on proteins that help damaged proteins fold correctly, called ‘chaperones.’”
Interestingly, they also found differences in gene activity between males and females, in some cells and some brain regions.
Schulze-Hentrich and her team identified differences in gene activity between the sexes, including:
In astrocytes, differences in the activity of genes associated with mitochondria (cell organelles that produce energy).
In oligodendrocytes, there were differences in the activity of genes responsible for creating the brain cells’ myelin sheath, which is a protective coating necessary for signal transduction.
“This shows that Parkinson’s triggers some shared ‘stress responses’ in everyone’s brain cells,” explains Schulze-Hentrich, “but also, there are differences between men and women at the cellular level, especially in how the brain ‘support’ cells manage energy and protect nerve connections.”
She explains how their findings “help to explain why symptoms and disease progression in Parkinson’s differ between men and women.”
She hopes that this could, eventually, lead to personalized Parkinson’s treatments, “rather than treating all patients with Parkinson’s as biologically identical.”
https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/brain-cell-changes-may-explain-why-parkinsons-affects-more-men-than-women#Unpicking-the-differences-between-male-vs-female-brains
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WHAT EVERYONE SHOULD KNOW ABOUT STROKE
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, over 795,000 people in the United States have a stroke every year, and around 610,000 are first strokes.
In 2019, stroke was the second leading cause of mortality globally, accounting for 11% of deaths.
There are three main types of stroke. The first and most common, accounting for 87% of cases, is an ischemic stroke. It occurs when blood flow through the artery that supplies oxygen to the brain becomes blocked.
The second is a hemorrhagic stroke, caused by a rupture in an artery in the brain, which in turn damages surrounding tissues.
The third type of stroke is a transient ischemic attack (TIA), which is sometimes called a “ministroke.” It happens when blood flow is temporarily blocked to the brain, usually for no more than 5 minutes.
STROKE IS PREVENTABLE
The most common risk factors for stroke include hypertension, smoking, high cholesterol, obesity, diabetes, trauma to the head or neck, and cardiac arrhythmias.
Other risk factors include alcohol consumption and stress. Working to reduce or remove these lifestyle factors may also reduce a person’s risk of stroke.
A MINISTROKE NEEDS TO BE TAKEN SERIOUSLY
“The term ministroke has been used incorrectly as some think that it is related to small strokes that carry low risk,” said Dr. Ortiz. “That statement is incorrect, as a ministroke is a transient ischemic attack (TIA).”
“It is not a small stroke, but a premonition that a large stroke can occur. Any symptom of acute stroke, transient or persistent, needs emergency workup and management to prevent a devastating large stroke,” he added.
https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/medical-myths-all-about-stroke
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CAVE OF BLUE
Over the ocean a cave of blue
holds out against the night —
an entrance to the world beyond
where it is still day.
I trace the glow of lucent green,
and you say look, that violet rim,
that lip of ripe plum purple.
The soul, we know, is tender blue,
like memory of being loved
back in the mother cave, and now,
this moment made of blades of blue,
a window of remaining light.
It’s Aphrodite’s blue-green glow,
the life that yet remains —
that kiss at mirror-edge where sky
marries the shining water.
I take your hand and we hope
that dark leap is a dolphin.
~ Oriana
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