CIRCE
I wear purple like a mystical sunset.
That’s when the men arrive.
I was a failure in life.
Now with my herd of handsome swine,
everyone thinks me successful.
But it’s too easy, loosening my hair,
letting the late light
play its game of glints —
too practiced, serving the spiced wine,
singing my slow-dying chant —
too familiar, that tremor
when they feel the tug
away from the need to be human.
The sun with its heart of fire
sets the sea on fire;
the waves toss their torn veils.
I knew a boy before I became
queen of this doomed island.
I put my head in his lap
like a tired child — I was
a tired child — and he
held his breath and closed his eyes.
No one has touched me since.
~ Oriana Ivy
FOR PENELOPE
Do not wait for me Penelope
I am not the Navigator
I am the great pink boar
wallowing at Circe’s trough
O Penelope
these are
my last human thoughts
~ Sutton Breiding
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THE ODYSSEY AND THE SECOND HALF OF LIFE
Western literature has given us two great epic poems that deal with the midlife crisis or the transition to the second half of life: Homer’s Odyssey and Dante’s Divine Comedy, which includes the amazing Ulysses Canto, canto 26 of the Inferno, where Dante takes great liberties with Homer’s plot, since he has a different, non-Homeric vision of Odysseus/Ulysses, one shared by most readers, it turns out: the hero as a fearless explorer, a man infinitely curious about the unknown.
True: while other Greek leaders head West to return home, Odysseus says, "Let's go South first and see what lies there." I am tempted to say that rather than be afraid of monsters, Odysseus wants to encounter them, confident that he can outwit them. After all, he has just outwitted the Trojans and burned the "topless towers of Ilium."
Odysseus has also been called the first modern man, or a Faustian Man, in the sense of insatiable quest for knowledge, even at the expense of other values – not at all the ancient vision of what a hero should be. Let's recall that Goethe’s Faust starts with a quest for knowledge, a midlife crisis, and ends with the Eternal Feminine. In Western literature we also have a wonderful story of a woman's journey to maturity and a reunion with her husband. Thata's the tale of Psyche and Eros, by the Roman writer Apuleius, but it’s not an epic poem; it’s a prose account, a part of a romantic novel. The ordeals that the female hero must undergo are very interesting; Psyche is in some ways similar to Odysseus. But Odysseus is a middle-aged man, a towering and unusual character at the dawn of western culture. Psyche's greatest temptation is to lose herself and her goal by taking care of others; Odysseus must struggle against his own ego and desire for fame, and remember and honor the needs of others.
The word ODYSSEY has passed into the language to mean a very long journey, full of detours and trials one must pass; at the end, you return to your palace not in glory, but humbly, in a beggar’s rags. You are older and wiser; you have a different vision of what is most important in life.
Why this continued popularity of the Odyssey, while the appeal of the Iliad seems to have waned? Part of the answer is universality. Homer has revealed some universal truths – in this case, the midlife crisis and the journey of transformation that leads to a happy later life. The Odyssey could be subtitled: WHEN BAD THINGS HAPPEN TO MIDDLE-AGED HEROES. This is unique because the typical literary hero dies long before the second half of life, or we don’t learn anything more about him after the heroic deeds of youth are accomplished. The typical hero either dies young or marries the Princess. We suspend disbelief in favor of "happily ever after."
But, according to Jung, in the second half of life, a crisis forces us to initiate our personal odyssey. In a typical case, the heroic ego project of youth has failed, and we are reconciled at last to the idea that we won’t be rich and famous after all. We won’t write the Great American Novel, we won’t win the Nobel Prize, we won’t become president, we won’t marry Prince or Princess Charming. Our child the genius, instead of winning a scholarship to Harvard, may end up on the mental ward – or, to be more realistic, may become an accountant or an undistinguished corporate lawyer. We do not live up to our own youthful expectations, and our children do not live up to our grandiose expectations either. Reality is simply more modest. It’s not that we don’t try hard enough; we do the best we can. But it also takes the right circumstances; the whole universe has to be just right if a grand achievement is to be realized. As one of my students brilliantly mis-wrote, “The limits are boundless.”
Now, American culture in particular promotes the “think big” mentality, feeding the young lies such as “You can be anything you want.” Even without this kind of cultural pressure, we know it’s normal for the young to start out with “great expectations.” What happens at midlife? Typically, the great expectations of the first half of life collapse. This can lead to severe midlife depression. The image of Odysseus arriving home not as a hero with twelve ships loaded with treasure, but alone, in beggar’s clothes, is a haunting one.
First we have the magical thinking of childhood, then the heroic thinking of adolescence and young adulthood – which may extend until forty or beyond (I lilke the phrase "advanced youth"). Finally, if we are lucky to sail through the midlife crisis without getting stranded in the artificial drug paradise of Lotus Land, or devoured by the flattering Sirens, we start asking, “If I’m never going to be rich and famous, then what is the meaning of my life? What is the most important thing in life? What should I do during the limited amount of time that remains?”
The answers that the Odyssey tries to give are nothing like “win immortal fame through bravery in battle.” The Odyssey is in a way an anti-Iliad. It emphasizes the importance of a harmonious, supportive marriage; of friendship and xenia, the kindness toward strangers; of belonging to a community and one’s duty to that community. Note that these are the so-called "feminine" values of connectedness. The meaning of life seems to lie in the way we touch the lives of others. In a shocking contrast to the hypermasculine Iliad, in the Odyssey life is not about striving for personal glory. It’s not about who is the best warrior. It’s about the long journey home, the stsruggle to return to yourself – to lead the right kind of life, the life where you really belong.
The epic also shows the importance of maintaining focus on one’s highest goal – not losing sight of that ultimate goal. This requires persistence, patience, self-control, and trust. Odysseus is not about being a superman on the battle field. Odysseus certainly shows courage as well as resourcefulness, but the Odyssey is not really an epic about physical courage; it’s more about not giving up hope. It's about the importance of having a goal. "As long as you have the WHY of life, you can survive almost any HOW" – this is perhaps the wisest of Nietzsche's aphorisms.
The revolutionary difference lies in the fact that Odysseus is a middle-aged hero who dares to defy the gods, meaning social conventions. Heroism isn’t dying in battle, but persistence toward a goal, and survival. Heroism isn’t “look what I can do all by myself” but rather being able to ask for help, and accomplishing some important task with help, and acknowledging and honoring that help.
Achilles represents the choice between two destinies. The protagonist of the Iliad chooses a short life filled with glory over a long but undistinguished life. The point of the Odyssey, however, is not that the short life with glory is to be preferred to long life without glory, but rather persistence and survival. The Odyssey affirms the value of life – as well as the value of marriage and/or supportive relationships in general. Both Odysseus and Penelope give us lessons in persistence. A new concept of hero is emerging: the hero is one who persists.
A word of explanation: I found this text as notes from a lecture I attended a long time ago. I confess that I am no longer sure about the main source — is it James Hollis, my favorite Jungian scholar, or is it mostly my own version based mostly on a Jungian essay or two or more essays, undeniably woven through with my own musings? I identify with both Odysseus and Penelope. I deeply apologize for this lack of clarity about sources; I either made or copied these notes several years before I started working on the blog, which goes back to 2010 — before I had any inkling that the blog would become the central part of my own odyssey.
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ENGLISH AS A GERMANIC LANGUAGE
(please pardon this swerving — the blog was created in two phases — more discussion of the Odyssey, and specifically Nolan’s 2026 film version, will follow)
How did a small coastal dialect in the Netherlands become the closest living relative to the English language, bypassing Dutch entirely?
English, Frisian, and Dutch are all West Germanic languages. However, linguists group English and Frisian into a tighter sub-branch known as Anglo-Frisian, which is part of the broader "North Sea Germanic" family. Dutch, on the other hand, descends from a separate branch called Low Franconian.
The divergence comes down to where these tribes lived, traded, and moved during the 4th and 5th centuries:
The North Sea Germanic Sphere: During late antiquity, tribes like the Angles, Saxons, Jutes, and Frisians lived along the coastal stretches of present-day Denmark, northwestern Germany, and the northern Netherlands. Living in close contact, their dialects underwent shared phonetic shifts. A classic example is the palatalization of the hard "k" sound before certain front vowels. This is why the English word cheese and the Frisian word tsiis sound similar, while the Dutch word remains kaas. The same pattern appears in church (English), tsjerke (Frisian), and kerk (Dutch).
The Anglo-Saxon Migration: As the Roman Empire withdrew from Britain in the early 5th century, many Angles, Saxons, and Jutes migrated across the channel to the British Isles. They brought their North Sea Germanic dialects with them, which eventually merged and evolved to become Old English.
The Frisian Remnant: The Frisians largely stayed behind on the continental coast. Because they shared the exact same immediate linguistic ancestors and cultural network as the tribes that settled Britain, Frisian remained the closest living continental relative to English.
The Frankish Origins of Dutch: Dutch evolved from the dialects of the Salian Franks. Unlike the coastal seafarers, the early Franks lived slightly further south and inland, near the Rhine and Meuse rivers. Because they were outside the immediate North Sea coastal network, the Franks did not adopt the Anglo-Frisian sound changes. As the Frankish political sphere expanded and consolidated in the Low Countries over subsequent centuries, their distinct Low Franconian language laid the foundation for modern Dutch.
Ultimately, it was the North Sea itself that served as a highway connecting the ancestors of the English and the Frisians, while leaving the slightly more inland ancestors of the Dutch on a different linguistic path. ~ Sepia Glyphs, Quora
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MORE ON HUNGARIAN ORIGINS
Hungarians used to proudly trace their lineage to the fierce horse lords of Attila the Hun. When linguists linked their language to peaceful Arctic reindeer herders, the nation was horrified.
The controversy started in 1770, when a Jesuit astronomer named János Sajnovics accompanied an expedition to northern Norway and noticed striking similarities between Hungarian and the language of the indigenous Sámi. Decades later, scholar Sámuel Gyarmathi systematically proved that Hungarian belonged to the same language family as Finnish, Estonian, and several languages spoken by indigenous groups in the Ural Mountains. This established the foundation of the Finno-Ugric language family.
For a nobility that prided itself on a martial, equestrian heritage, being told their closest relatives were fish-eating forest dwellers in the frozen north felt like a national insult. This clash of identities sparked a fierce, decades-long academic dispute in the late 19th century known as the "Ugric-Turkic War." Prominent orientalists like Ármin Vámbéry argued passionately that Hungarian was fundamentally a Turkic language, pointing to the obvious nomadic lifestyle, military tactics, and cultural traits the early Magyars shared with Turkic peoples.
Linguists eventually won the debate through rigorous comparative analysis. They demonstrated that while Hungarian has a significant layer of Turkic loanwords related to agriculture, warfare, and statecraft, its core foundational vocabulary—words for basic numbers, body parts, and fundamental actions—is undeniably Finno-Ugric.
This realization forced a permanent shift in how Hungarian origins are understood, separating linguistic lineage from cultural and genetic history. Historians now recognize that the early Magyars likely originated near the Ural Mountains, speaking a Finno-Ugric tongue.
As they migrated westward across the Eurasian steppe over several centuries, they lived alongside and absorbed the lifestyle, military tactics, and genetics of Turkic and Iranian nomadic tribes. The language survived the journey, but the people who carried it into Central Europe arrived as mounted steppe warriors, merging a northern linguistic root with a nomadic steppe culture. ~ Sepia Glyphs, Quora
~ Finno-Ugric is a traditional linguistic grouping that comprises the vast majority of languages within the Uralic language family, excluding only the Samoyedic languages. Spoken by approximately 25 to 27 million people, it is famously distinct from the dominant Indo-European languages of Europe. Its three most prominent and widely spoken languages are Hungarian, Finnish, and Estonian.
The FInno-Ugric branch splits into two distinct geographic and historical groups:
The Finnic (or Finno-Permic) Branch: Includes Baltic-Finnic languages (Finnish, Estonian, Karelian), the Sámi languages of northern Lapland, and several minority languages in Russia like Mari, Mordvin, Komi, and Udmurt.
The Ugric Branch: Includes Hungarian, alongside its closest linguistic relatives, the Ob-Ugric languages (Khanty and Mansi), which are spoken by small indigenous populations in Western Siberia.
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ANTI-SEMITISM IN GEORGIAN ENGLAND
In 1753 the journey of a minor Jewish naturalization Act through Parliament prompted an outsized furor.
jew nat
Study for a satirical print against the Jewish Naturalization Act, by Louis Philippe Boitard, 1753
Georgian London was not immune to eruptions of agitation or mob violence. The Wilkes affair of the mid-1760s, which mobilized the crowd behind ‘Wilkes and Liberty’ against the government, and the anti-Catholic Gordon Riots of 1780 are the episodes that have lodged most strongly in historical memory. Yet in 1753 the question of Jewish naturalization captured the attention of the political nation, with London crowds parading the streets to the refrain of ‘No Jews, no wooden shoes’ (the latter a symbol of the French peasantry and a shorthand for popish tyranny).
The Jews had been expelled from England in 1290 by Edward I and readmitted by Oliver Cromwell in 1656. From the Restoration onwards, the credit and commercial needs of the nation pressed Parliament towards a more elastic code regarding foreigners, and in 1663 the law affecting naturalization – previously the preserve of a private Act of Parliament – was amended to admit certain skilled trades, such as flax-dressing and thread-making.
A wider relaxation came in 1740 when Parliament allowed the naturalization of foreign Protestants settled in the American colonies and exempted Jewish applicants from the requirement to receive the Sacrament and from the Christian phrasing of the Oath of Abjuration, which, renouncing the Stuart Pretender, was sworn ‘upon the true faith of a Christian’, words no Jew could use. Some 200 Jews, most resident in Jamaica, became English subjects, and until 1753 the naturalization question was conducted in such fashion that it scarcely bothered anyone apart from the clerks responsible for carrying it out.
Then came the decision for radical reform. The government that proposed this was that of the Pelham brothers: Henry Pelham as prime minister and Thomas Pelham, duke of Newcastle, dominant in the Lords. They had inherited their style of rule from Walpole, and remained Court Whigs to their fingernails, characterized by aristocratic languor, some complacency, and toleration of dissent.
Motivated partly by a Whig’s easy tolerance, and partly from gratitude to the City’s Jewish financiers who wished the disabilities on Jewish landholding resolved, in the Session of 1753 the Pelhams introduced legislation to permit Jews professing their religion to apply to Parliament for naturalization without receiving the Anglican communion otherwise required of an applicant. Even Newcastle, whose political imagination tended towards apocalyptic horror, did not foresee the coming storm.
The Jew Bill of 1753 passed the Lords almost soundlessly after five weeks of scrutiny. It was in the Commons, on 16 April, that the temper of the debate turned. A general election was imminent, and the opposition had begun to scent an issue that might trouble the old Whig corps entrenched in office since 1714. Sir Edmund Isham, a dissident Whig with an intense dislike of the ministry, argued that the bill would in practice naturalize multitudes of foreign Jews who would refuse to assimilate. Sir John Barnard, in his role as member of the City of London, framed his case in commercial terms: Jewish naturalization would transfer English business into foreign hands and, in time, the landed estates with it. Lord Dupplin defended the bill as a means of attracting capital, while Robert Nugent suggested that residence in England would furnish the Jews with the opportunity to convert to Anglicanism. Pelham himself closed the debate, stressing the urgency of securing the Jews of England in their tenure of property.
Then came the wave of petitions. The first, on 21 May, came from City merchants who argued that naturalization would draw persons of wealth and substance, with their effects, into the kingdom. On the same day the lord mayor, aldermen, and common council of the City countered that the bill would dishonor Christianity and endanger the constitution. A third, the following day, came from those trading with Spain and Portugal, who feared injury to that commerce. A fourth, signed by more than 200 merchants and shipwrights, defended the measure on the principle that to examine men’s private rights on account of their religion was to open a door no one could later close. On 7 July, the bill carried by 96 votes to 55.
With the parliamentary battle won, the argument moved to the streets, where ballad-mongers added ‘The Jews Naturalized; or the English Alienated’ to the popular repertoire: ‘T’incorporate with us that fugitive tribe;/ But, what is it Britons won’t do for a bribe?’ Jews were insulted and assaulted and the clamor ran so high that the archbishop of Canterbury feared the Jews would soon ‘be massacred’.
The arguments deployed against the Act poured out in a deluge, ranging from the vile and contradictory to the outlandish and plainly ridiculous. It was claimed that it would diminish the consumption of ham and bacon; that the Jews would multiply until they excluded Protestants from every office and profession; that wealthy Jews would buy up the great estates, influence elections, sit in Parliament, ascend to higher office still. Simultaneously, poor Jews would flood in until the natives were pauperized and the public finances ruined.
One satirist, writing mock news ‘a hundred years hence’, had St Paul’s converted into a synagogue and a statue of Pontius Pilate raised in the City. A pamphleteer warned that the Act would draw down upon the nation the entire accumulated curse of Israel. The grievances rehearsed in these months – that newcomers would not assimilate, would corrupt commerce, would buy seats in Parliament – would be heard against successive waves of immigration in the centuries that followed. The 1753 controversy is, in this sense, one of the first dress rehearsals of a rhetoric that has not since gone out of fashion.
In the end, the Pelhams lost their nerve. Newcastle, the great electioneer of the age, persuaded his brother that the Act could not be defended through a general election and must therefore be sacrificed. When the repeal was moved in the Lords, Earl Temple delivered one of the finest speeches of the debate, calling upon the peers to stand as a bulwark against the prejudices of the mob and the intrigues of those who manipulated them. He was ignored. On 20 December the repeal received the Royal Assent.
All in all, the episode demonstrates how little the actual measure mattered beside what it was imagined to mean. The Jew Bill would have naturalized a few dozen wealthy families already long settled in England; what its opponents saw was the nation’s Christian constitution dissolving. Against a threat of that magnitude no parliamentary majority, however comfortable, could stand for long.
https://www.historytoday.com/archive/history-matters/immoral-panic-antisemitism-georgian-england?utm_source=Newsletter&utm_campaign=b98d665c26-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2017_09_20_COPY_02&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_fceec0de95-b98d665c26-1214148&mc_cid=b98d665c26
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THE CHOSEN PEOPLE
Oliver Cromwell’s desire to bring about the readmission of Jews to England was met with prejudice and opposition. But he succeeded, with help from powerful friends.
cromwell jews
Menasseh ben Israel, by Rembrandt van Rijn, 1636
Members of the Anglo-Jewish Historical Society gathered in London in February 1906 to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the readmission of Jews into England, which took place during the Protectorate of Oliver Cromwell. The historian Lucien Wolf, the society’s founder, remarked that the gathering, which climaxed in a lavish banquet, honored not just Cromwell, the ‘great-hearted Protector’, but also Menasseh ben Israel, the ‘devoted Jew’. These ‘twin champions of a wronged people’ had formed an unlikely partnership, but one of profound historical importance and lasting consequence, though little known today,
https://www.historytoday.com/archive/feature/chosen-peoples
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THE BRITISH BOMBS DOWN UNDER
The legacy of a decade of British weapons testing in its vast central deserts has forced Australia into an uncomfortable reckoning with its nuclear past.
Deep in Australia’s central deserts lies Section 400. Surrounded by bright red sand, tufty spinifex grass, and stumpy mulga trees, this patch of desert – covering some 1,782 square kilometres – was handed back to its traditional owners, the Maralinga Tjarutja, in November 2014. The return, however, was largely ceremonial: Section 400 remains a toxic military exclusion zone, housing irradiated soil, metal, and other debris created during Britain’s decade of nuclear testing in Australia.
It has been more than 70 years since Britain tested its first nuclear weapon in Australia on 3 October 1952 but nuclear issues continue to beset the country. Since 2017 charged debates have raged over the establishment of a national waste repository; while Australians routinely rely on life-saving nuclear medicines, their government has failed on at least three occasions to successfully establish a centralised (and secure) storage facility for the country’s nuclear waste. In 2021 then-prime minister Scott Morrison signed a nuclear submarine deal with Britain and the United States (AUKUS), committing Australians to further investment in military nuclear technologies and high-level waste disposal into the future.
Australia’s abundant uranium supply – the largest in the world – offers a potential solution to the world’s fossil-fueled woes. Regardless of whether Australia embarks on a nuclear-powered future, the nation and its people are haunted by the residues of its past. The soil, machinery, and debris that remain contaminated and fenced off in Section 400 are proof of that.
British bombs
Australia’s nuclear history is colonial history. Anglo-European settlers seeking to make their fortunes at the turn of the 20th century used Indigenous intermediaries to identify and extract radium ore for use by Nobel-prize winning scientists Marie and Pierre Curie. In the decades thereafter, geologists and miners claimed land, sunk bores, and created pits as they searched voraciously for uranium- and radium-bearing ore across the arid continent. In 1947 a large swathe of Indigenous land was set aside for missile testing in the Great Victoria Desert. First used for testing long-range missiles, the region was later repurposed for nuclear weapons testing. The local impact of these tests was suppressed until the 1980s, when nuclear survivors were finally able to tell their stories. Since then, nuclear processes have been resisted and challenged by new generations of Indigenous activists.
Section 400 is at the centre of this. This comparably small patch of contaminated Country – a capacious term used by Indigenous peoples in Australia to encapsulate the complex relationships between the earth, waters, skies, and stars, flora and fauna, ancestral pasts, presents, and futures – is what remains of the 100,000 square kilometers of Australian desert earmarked for nuclear testing in the 1950s. It was, and remains, the land of Maralinga Tjarutja, Pitjantjatjara, Yankunytjatjara, and other Indigenous peoples. Between 1952 and 1963 Britain tested 12 nuclear weapons on Australian soil, as well as undertaking hundreds of ‘minor’ tests.
The first of these were conducted on the Monte Bello Islands off the coast of Western Australia. From there, the tests moved inland. Two desert sites were subjected to nine so-called ‘major’ tests as part of three subsequent trials: Operation Totem at Emu Field (October 1953), and Operations Buffalo (September 1956) and Antler (September-October 1957) at nearby Maralinga. Hundreds of ‘minor’ tests further contaminated the desert as scientists sought to calculate the risks of isolated nuclear accidents by burning, dropping, exploding, and otherwise dispersing plutonium.
These tests were important for postwar Britain. While Britain’s nuclear program – Tube Alloys – had been underway since 1941, the United States’ use of an atomic bomb against Japan in August 1945 catalyzed the nuclear arms race. By 1952 Britain had successfully developed a nuclear weapon, but it needed somewhere to test it. Australia, a dominion of the British Empire and Commonwealth, offered a solution: large, open spaces, geological stability, loyalty to the Crown, and a sparse population made for ideal testing conditions.
The Australian government had its own motivations for facilitating Britain’s program. Australia’s postwar prime minister Robert Menzies (1949-66) believed that Australia’s involvement in British nuclear development would secure Australia’s own atomic ambitions, namely, a ‘new generation of weapons for use in any future war’. Following an approach from Clement Attlee in 1950 asking whether Australia might consider hosting Britain’s weapons tests, Menzies assured his British counterpart that ‘any special facilities which Australia might possess for this or similar purposes would of course be made available’.
Black mist
In October 1953 Lallie Lennon, an Indigenous woman, was in Mintabie, some 200 kilometers east of the testing site at Emu Field, when she heard on the radio that a bomb test was imminent. As she would later tell the McClelland Royal Commission – the inquiry into Britain’s nuclear testing organized by the Australian government in 1984-85 – the earth ‘rumbled, the ground shook’ and she thought ‘the ground was going to cave in’. ‘We reckon it was poison and all that’, she explained: ‘I just didn’t know what to do … thought we was going to die.’
The test that Lennon had experienced was Totem I, which produced a yield of ten kilotons and what survivors later referred to as the ‘black mist’: a dark roiling cloud that swept across the desert, low to the ground, enveloping everything in its path. It clung like tar to the mulga trees. Those exposed developed skin rashes, weeping eyes, and sores.
a bomb test
An atomic test at Emu Field, 15 October 1953.
As far as the authorities were concerned, however, the region in which the testing took place was, and remained, ‘uninhabited’. As the Australian minister for supply, Howard Beale, explained on 18 January 1957: ‘No natives have been found there, therefore, none have been interfered with. Six months after Beale’s reassurances, a family was found camping near the Marcoo bomb crater, produced on 4 October 1956. Edie Milpuddie, her husband, children, and four dingoes, had been traveling across the area on foot. Though the family did not know it, they had been traveling through the Maralinga Prohibited Area. When military personnel discovered the family, they decontaminated them, shot their dogs, and drove them hundreds of kilometers south to Yalata Mission, a reserve established in 1954 and used to house many removed from their Country during and after the nuclear testing.
Awkward questions
While tales of sickness and poison were shared among those sent to the Yalata Mission in the decades following this and other incidents, they were concealed by the British and Australian governments. It is impossible to know how many people travelled through the Maralinga Prohibited Area during the tests. Nevertheless, in the 1980s, in response to calls to have these nuclear-affected lands handed back to their traditional owners, the public began to demand transparency. In 1984 prime minister Bob Hawke called the Royal Commission which began that July.
Its parameters were strategically designed to avoid accusations of colonial wrongdoing. Australian authorities feared that including questions of dispossession would lead to discussions of ‘the dislocation of traditional aboriginal life since the settlement of Australia by white men began’. This approach echoed Hawke’s vision for Australia’s looming bicentenary in 1988. Hawke maintained that Australians could acknowledge the ‘grim and harsh reality of the origins of modern Australia’, but believed that the first 200 years should not be reduced to ‘collective and irredeemable guilt’.
Nevertheless, evidence presented to the commission painted a visceral image of Indigenous dispossession and mistreatment, disease, and misinformation. The findings were stark: among them were that Menzies had approved the tests without seeking advice from Australian scientists, that safeguards had been inadequate, even by 1950s’ standards, and that if, in fact, no Indigenous people were ‘injured or killed as a result of the explosions, this was a matter of luck’.
Nuclear Country
Throughout the commission, Indigenous witnesses stressed the importance of Country and repeated their concerns about the harm that had been done to it. Asked why, they explained it was ‘where they are born and reared and that is their home all the time’. ‘They were not related to that country down south and they wanted to go back’, one man explained, ‘back to the country to which they were related.’
Historian Heather Goodall, who worked on the commission, determined that the authorities had attempted to prevent Indigenous movement through the testing area by claiming that it was plagued by malevolent spirits. Concurrently, a measles epidemic had ripped through several desert missions, leading to hundreds of deaths. As they testified, it became clear that the two events had blurred together in the memories of survivors. By the commission’s conclusion, the Australian public no longer understood the effects of the nuclear tests solely in relation to radiation, but also as the displacement of Indigenous people in pursuit of nuclear development. This is the legacy that lingers in Australia today, a non-nuclear nation with a deep nuclear past.
https://www.historytoday.com/archive/behind-times/british-bombs-down-under?utm_source=Newsletter&utm_campaign=b98d665c26-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2017_09_20_COPY_02&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_fceec0de95-b98d665c26-1214148&mc_cid=b98d665c26
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KAZAKHSTAN’S NUCLEAR NIGHTMARE
During the Cold War, nearly a quarter of all the world’s nuclear testing took place in Kazakhstan, in secret. In 1986, a high-profile disaster in Ukraine changed that.
Kazakh nuclear
Seventy years ago, an explosion in a far-flung corner of Soviet-ruled Kazakhstan set off an arms race that took the world to the brink of nuclear Armageddon. Four years earlier, the US had ended the Second World War by dropping atomic bombs on Japan. Joseph Stalin’s USSR was hellbent on catching up.
The blast at the Kremlin’s secret Semipalatinsk nuclear testing site, which rocked Kazakhstan on 29 August 1949, was the first of 456 atomic explosions conducted there over the next 40 years. Codenamed Pervaya Molniya (First Lightning) by the Soviets and Joe-1 by the Americans (after ‘Uncle Joe’, their nickname for Stalin), the first explosion released 22 kilotons of nuclear energy, or 22,000 tonnes of TNT, into the atmosphere. Over the next four decades, the bombs detonated at Semipalatinsk released energy 2,500 times greater than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945. It was that ruthless display of US military might that launched the Cold War arms race with Washington’s new rivals in Moscow, as the panicked Soviets – helped by spies within the US arms programme – scrambled to split the atom and become a superpower in the newly polarised world.
Mushroom clouds
Today, villagers living around the Polygon, the Russian word for ‘test site’, which became synonymous with Semipalatinsk, have traumatic memories of mushroom clouds exploding on the horizon during their childhood. ‘We’d be sent outside, and we’d crouch in ditches. We saw mushroom clouds: big and terrifying ones’, recalled an old lady called Galina Tornoshenko, born in 1949, the year of the first nuclear test. ‘I was small at the time, but I remember it well.’
In 2016, she shared her memories with me in a village called Znamenka, a dot on a flat, snowy landscape. It was a dazzlingly sunny but bitterly cold winter’s day in March (spring comes late to this part of Kazakhstan, just south of Siberia). Many villagers told similar tales, although since the Soviets concealed the existence of the Polygon and lied about the nature of the blasts, it was only with hindsight that they recognized what they had experienced.
‘On the radio they’d say: go out into the streets, there’s going to be an earthquake,’ a villager called Serikkazy Baribayev told me, explaining how people would be ordered outside ahead of the explosions. The tests moved underground after a ban on atmospheric testing in 1963, into tunnels bored into some nearby mountains. His friend remembered teachers covering children with felt during the blasts, in an attempt to protect them from what locals had begun to suspect was a health hazard – even if they had no idea they were being exposed to life-threatening doses of radiation.
During the Cold War, the existence of the Polygon in Kazakhstan near Semipalatinsk was top-secret. Its HQ was in a town named Semipalatinsk-21, shown on Soviet maps as Konechnaya, meaning ‘Last Stop’. Most people had no idea the nuclear test site was there and anyone harboring suspicions about the explosions on their doorstep was advised to keep quiet. ‘Whether you’re afraid or not, you have no choice – if you speak out, they’ll soon close your mouth!’, said Seysenbey Zhantemirov, a Semipalatinsk resident who recalled being sent flying into the air by what he now knows was a nuclear blast in the 1970s.
Guinea pigs
How did the Soviets select Semipalatinsk as their test site? Casting around for a suitable spot, they settled on the north-east part of what was then the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic, one of 15 Kremlin-ruled entities making up the USSR. Stalin’s henchman Lavrentiy Beria, the secret police chief in charge of the atomic weapons program, breezily declared the area ‘uninhabited’. He was wrong: the 18,500-square-kilometer Polygon lay in Kazakhstan’s industrial heartland, 120 kilometers from the city of Semipalatinsk (now Semey), within striking distance of other towns in Kazakhstan and southern Russia and near many rural communities.
Their inhabitants became human guinea pigs in a disastrous atomic experiment, as the blasts hurled radioactive fallout over northern, eastern and central Kazakhstan and Russian Siberia, exposing hundreds of thousands of people – at a minimum – to toxic radiation. A research centre, innocuously named Anti-Brucellosis Dispensary Number 4, which ostensibly studied an infectious disease found in cattle, actually existed to research how radiation affected the human body.
Almost three decades after the Polygon was closed, the full impact of the blasts on human health and the environment remains unknown. Information lies buried in archives in Moscow, which takes no responsibility for the legacy of nuclear testing on its former colony and its people. Available evidence suggests the tests caused spikes in many types of cancer and other diseases and disorders.
Studies also suggest that victims of nuclear testing in Kazakhstan suffer from hibakusha, the Japanese word for the psychological trauma endured by survivors of the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Nuclear testing at Semipalatinsk destroyed the lives of people not even born when they ceased in 1989, when a moratorium was imposed on testing.
Zhannur Zhumageldina is one. She was born in a village called Olzhabay in 1992, the year after the Polygon closed down completely, suffering from microcephaly, a neurological condition which hampers brain development, and kyphoscoliosis, curvature of the spine so severe that she is paralysed. When Zhannur was diagnosed with these radiation-related conditions, her mother Mayra had never heard of the Polygon. But it had been exploding nuclear bombs nearby for her whole life, which has been irrevocably shaped by the fallout. ‘I didn’t even know the Polygon existed until Zhannurka was 15 months old’, she said, using her daughter’s pet name as she massaged her immobile limbs to prevent them from seizing up. ‘Everyone said I should abandon her – the doctors, my husband, my mother-in-law. I said: no, I’m going to look after her.’ Now a single mother, Mayra has spent every day of the last 27 years caring for her disabled daughter, eking out a living on disability benefits in a small, state-subsidized flat in Semipalatinsk.
Disaster
In the Soviet Union, dissent was forbidden. Debating the pros and cons of the Kremlin’s atomic weapons program or its use of nuclear power was totally taboo – until an accident 4,000 kilometers away from Semipalatinsk, on the other side of the USSR, made the atomic topic explode into the public consciousness.
‘The odds of a meltdown [at a Soviet nuclear power plant] are one in 10,000 years,’ Vitaliy Sklyarov, the minister of power in Soviet-ruled Ukraine, stated confidently in February 1986. Two months later, Ukraine’s Chernobyl atomic power station went into meltdown, causing what has gone down in history as the world’s worst nuclear disaster.
On 26 April 1986, the power plant’s reactor exploded, scattering radiation for thousands of kilometers and killing at least 31 people in the immediate aftermath. The Kremlin tried to cover it up, only admitting what had happened when elevated radiation levels were detected in Sweden, two days after the blast. The authorities had just begun a belated evacuation of local people. We still do not know how many fell ill or died – or will die – as a result of radiation exposure from the Chernobyl catastrophe. Studies have put the figure anywhere from 4,000 to 200,000.
The Chernobyl tragedy put the nuclear debate on the agenda in the USSR, where a policy called glasnost (openness) launched by Mikhail Gorbachev – the reformer who would preside over the USSR’s collapse in 1991 – was under way. Glasnost lifted taboos on debating controversial aspects of life in the Soviet Union – including its nuclear program. The impact of glasnost was felt in Kazakhstan, where a groundswell of opposition to nuclear testing arose, fueled by revelations of a radioactive gas leak from Semipalatinsk in 1989. An anti-nuclear movement emerged, called Nevada-Semipalatinsk (after the Soviet and US test sites) and headed by a poet, Olzhas Suleymenov, who led public rallies against nuclear testing. The movement secured the backing of Kazakhstan’s most powerful politician, Nursultan Nazarbayev, then a rising star in the Soviet political establishment, who became the Kazakh republic’s Kremlin-appointed leader in 1989. After leading Kazakhstan to independence in 1991, he ruled for three decades until his resignation in March 2019.
A terrible legacy
On 19 October 1989, Semipalatinsk exploded its last nuclear device, four decades after testing its first and having staged nearly a quarter of all nuclear tests conducted in the entire world. On 29 August 1991, two years after the moratorium was imposed on testing at Semipalatinsk, and with the Soviet Union collapsing and Kazakhstan’s independence beckoning, Nazarbayev closed the Polygon forever.
He also agreed to give up Kazakhstan’s nuclear arsenal – the world’s fourth largest, consisting of 1,410 warheads, as well as tactical weapons. The rest of the world sighed with relief as a proliferation threat was removed in the new post-Cold War world.
Today, Kazakhstan brands itself as a global leader in nuclear non-proliferation, with its flagship project ATOM: ‘Abolish Testing – Our Mission’. ATOM’s ambassador is Karipbek Kuyukov, an artist who paints with his feet and mouth because he was born without arms as a result of exposure to radiation from Semipalatinsk. The nuclear tests stopped 30 years ago, but life stories like his are an expressive reminder that, for Kazakhstan and its people, their legacy will linger for decades, if not centuries.
https://www.historytoday.com/archive/behind-times/kazakhstans-nuclear-nightmare
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MARGARET BONDFIELD, BRITAIN’S FIRST FEMALE CABINET MINISTER
Early in her career as a trade unionist, a young Margaret Bondfield could be found exhorting her fellow workers to ‘cease from your dreaming’ in the pages of The Shop Assistant journal. ‘When you rouse yourself and realize the grand possibilities within you’, she implored readers, ‘you will be filled with that spirit of enthusiasm and unselfishness, without which you cannot become a real trade unionist.’
Bondfield’s own spirit of enthusiasm and unselfishness was a source of strength and inspiration to many of her comrades in the early decades of the 20th century. In 1923 she became the first woman to chair the Trades Union Congress and one of the first women MPs elected for the Labour Party. In 1924 she was appointed the first woman minister, and, in 1929, became the first woman cabinet minister in Britain. But Nan Sloane’s new biography shows that her life was significant beyond this list of pioneering achievements. It is a story of enduring commitment to the labor movement, and especially to the rights and needs of working-class women. Bondfield’s belief in the possibility of a better world never wavered. Nor did her commitment to fighting for it.
Like many of her contemporaries, Bondfield’s faith in trade unions and left-wing politics resulted from early experiences of hardship. Born in Chard, Somerset in 1873, the penultimate child of 11, she hardly knew her older siblings and was sent to stay with relatives by parents struggling to make ends meet. This instability was exacerbated when her father lost his job as a foreman at a lace factory, making the family’s precarious economic situation even more difficult.
Her parents were determined that none of the children should follow their father into the factory, and saw teaching as a route to stable, respectable employment. But Bondfield was determined to strike out on her own. She went to work as a shop assistant in a drapery store, where her desire for autonomy clashed with low pay and inhumane conditions. Staff were locked in dormitories to sleep. Shops were legally required to provide chairs, but the law did not specify that shop workers, on their feet for ten or 12 hours a day, should be allowed to sit in them.
In contrast to this dehumanizing drudgery, Bondfield found great joy in the fellowship offered by social and political clubs and at church. But it was the trade union movement – itself akin to a religion – that transformed her life. Told by her deacon that she needed to choose between politics and church, she did not hesitate. Her early efforts at exposing the harsh treatment experienced by shop workers in The Shop Assistant earned her respect; her public speaking won admiration. Devastated by the loss of her closest sibling, Kate, in 1901, and estranged from her family, Bondfield recalled: ‘I just lived for the Trade Union Movement.’
Bondfield was instrumental in establishing the women-led organizations of the labour movement including the Women’s Trade Union League (1894), the National Federation of Women Workers (1906), the Women’s Labour League (1906), and the National Union of General and Municipal Workers (1924). She campaigned for adult suffrage, rather than women’s suffrage, on the grounds that ‘it is the quickest way to establish real sex-equality’ and that working-class women had the right to make their own decisions, distinct from their middle-class counterparts. Increasingly high-profile on the national stage, she also looked outwards. In 1920 she was part of the Labour delegation that travelled to revolutionary Russia, and various trips to the US allowed her to see the racial politics there first hand.
Bondfield’s private life – though barely separable from her political life – was enriched by her relationships with other women. Most significant was her long partnership with Maud Ward, another prominent socialist. In making the case that Bondfield was likely to have been a lesbian, Sloane argues that without attention to her sexuality we see neither the whole person, nor the full extent of the obstacles she faced.
Though hardly forgotten, Margaret Bondfield does not have the same posthumous status of contemporaries such as Nancy Astor or Sylvia Pankhurst. This is likely due to her role in the second Labour government (1929-31). Faced with a crisis in unemployment, as minister for labour Bondfield’s plans to generate savings in the national insurance system by making massive cuts were perceived as a betrayal by her union comrades, and were exacerbated by her decision to exclude married women from the system altogether. ‘Her time as a Cabinet Member was not her finest hour’, Sloane remarks drily. Her clear-minded assessment is that Bondfield failed – but so did the men around her. Bondfield’s decisions should be understood in context. It was better to try and save the insurance system than to allow it to go bankrupt, but in doing so Bondfield lost all respect from the very people who had propelled her into the political elite. Her reputation never recovered, and was not helped by an autobiography, A Life’s Work (1948), which, as Sloane puts it, ‘studiously gives the impression of a dull, dutiful woman who plodded along and achieved high office more or less by accident’.
But should people be remembered for their worst moments, or for the totality of their efforts? Margaret Bondfield was a courageous campaigner, beloved and admired by men and women across the labour movement. She held fast to her own worth and dignity, and to the worth and dignity of women in her class, in a world which strongly encouraged women like her to believe the opposite. Ellen Wilkinson, appointed as a cabinet minister in 1945, wrote to Bondfield to acknowledge ‘how much you personally had done for the movement to make things possible for the women who should follow you. To carry and hand on the torch you lighted and carried so bravely is my highest ambition’. Nan Sloane’s biography should rekindle a torch that deserves to burn more brightly in labor history.
https://www.historytoday.com/archive/review/margaret-bondfield-nan-sloane-review
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THE FAILED BACKLASH AGAINST NOLAN’S ODYSSEY
Threats against Nolan’s blockbuster adaptation of the ancient Homeric epic have dogged the movie, basically since its announcement. A certain class of terminally online right-wingers—legitimated and amplified by no less than Elon Musk, on his own echo-chamber social media platform—have been pulling their oars against the movie, and the prevailing tide of public enthusiasm for it. For a bunch of mostly stupid reasons—the casting of Black and trans actors, or of Matt Damon as wily Odysseus; the Americanized English dialect; the ahistorical ship designs; the fact that Tom Holland says “dad” in the trailer—many had written The Odyssey off, sight unseen, as nothing short of a “psyop" designed to undermine Western culture. One X user lambasted Nolan as an enemy of “the west.”
Even the nearly unanimous good reviews (The Odyssey currently holds a 96 percent Critic’s Score on Rotten Tomatoes) were seen as part of a “woke conspiracy.” These self-appointed Odyssey haters conspired to downvote the movie’s trailers and generally campaign against seeing the movie.
But there was no sabotage at the King of Prussia Regal Cinema. The local power grid map shows dozens of similar outages across the region, attributable to recent bouts of extreme weather. And I was told this cinema, specifically, had been suffering from outages in recent weeks.
Bracketing a few hundred early-morning soldiers of cinema turned away from a multiplex, and a few thousands dollars in lost revenue for the theater, the boycott against The Odyssey is shaping up to be a tremendous failure. Early ticket sales—including IMAX screenings sold out across the country—are indicating a $200 million worldwide box office return. This would make it the most profitable opening for any of Christopher Nolan’s movies that don’t feature the character Batman. Resale markets have seen tickets fetching $1,000—for a movie!
It wouldn’t be shocking if The Odyssey clears a billion dollars, globally, when all is said and done.
People are booking off work to see the movie. Die-hards are crossing state lines, and national borders, to see the movie on the biggest screens possible. A story circulated earlier this week of a California woman who delayed her pregnancy so as not to spoil the chance of seeing the movie on IMAX 70-mm. I myself traveled about an hour-and-change round-trip only to not see it.
The disjoint between the anti-Odyssey backlash and the film’s actual, organic fandom is revealing. Despite the best efforts by some of the world’s worst people, you just can’t quell the basic human desire to see big-name actors on enormous screens, battling enormous monsters and bedding down with witches. You can downvote a trailer. But you cannot downvote the dreams of the larger moviegoing public.
It speaks to just how cavernous the chasm is between certain elements of The Discourse and reality itself. Maybe they should have picked a more modest target to derail, and not a filmmaker whose movies, whatever one thinks of them, are pretty much synonymous with “making money.”
So much of this culture war jockeying exists purely online, to sustain an infrastructure of monetized outrage that is increasingly preoccupied with Western chauvinism, racism, and just plain antisocial weirdness. It reminds me of a favorite Simpsons joke, where Marge bakes Homer (the other one) a fake cake to ruin so that he won’t destroy Maggie’s real birthday cake. X is the fake cake.
All is not lost for the anti-Nolanites, however. Earlier week, it was announced that AI film studio Fountain 0 is releasing a completely AI-generated Odyssey movie, to cash-in on both the excitement around Nolan’s movie and the backlash.
It feels like a concession to the haters. Real movie fans can have a real, three-hour IMAX action blockbuster. The armchair defenders of Western civilization can hate on Nolan and get their Odyssey fix with some rushed-to-streaming AI slop—a rare chance for them to have their fake cake and eat it too.
https://www.wired.com/story/the-odyssey-backlash-failed-tremendously/?utm_source=firefox-newtab-en-us
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ODYSSEYS USED TO BE WORSHIPED
The Odyssey was far more than entertainment to ancient Greeks. Archaeologists have unearthed evidence of a cult that revered the Homeric hero on his legendary home island of Ithaca.
At the start of the Odyssey, the epic poem's war-weary protagonist finds himself trapped on a remote island by the goddess Calypso. She promises Odysseus immortality and eternal youth if he chooses to stay with her. But after 10 years of waging war against the Trojans alongside other Greek heroes, Odysseus longs to return to his family and home on the Greek island of Ithaca and "see even just the smoke that rises from his own homeland", as Emily Wilson writes in her translation of Homer's epic.
Odysseus' perilous, decade-long journey home sees him trick a cyclops, outsmart a sorceress and survive countless disasters.
But Odysseus' legacy doesn't end there. There is one final, real-life twist in the adventures of this mythical king: Odysseus inspired a spiritual cult that lasted a thousand years. Evidence from archaeological excavations suggests worship of the Homeric hero began around the 9th Century BC, when his turbulent voyage was narrated in oral poems, and appears to have gained momentum after the Odyssey was written down in the late 8th Century BC.
Historical remains of this hero cult include a sanctuary dedicated to Odysseus on Ithaca, as well as recently unearthed coins and tiles bearing his name.
The discoveries shine a light on the fascinating interplay between real people, fictional heroes, and spirituality in the ancient world – and hold wider lessons on hero worship during this era.
From fandom to worship
In the Odyssey, as the Homeric hero is tossed around stormy seas, the thought of Ithaca keeps him going. "No country could be sweeter," he says in book nine of the epic poem.
Meanwhile, Odysseus' family and the Ithacan people desperately await his return. His wife Penelope describes Odysseus as "godlike" and a "noble, lionhearted husband, most talented and brave of all the Greeks”.
Ithaca ruins
Excavations have unearthed evidence of a sanctuary dedicated to Odysseus on Ithaca
In real life, Odysseus also left a mark on Ithaca, a mountainous island that lies to the west of mainland Greece. Discoveries here and elsewhere paint a picture of a mythical character who played a central role in the religious and civic lives of ancient Greeks.
Excavations on the island started in the late 19th Century and have uncovered an array of Odysseus-themed artefacts, including a miniature bronze bust of the Homeric hero. A decree found in modern-day Turkey in the late 19th Century, in the ruins of an ancient Greek city, mentions a sanctuary dedicated to the worship of Odysseus, referred to as "Odysseion", on Ithaca. The decree, which dates back to 207BC and was issued by the city-state of Ithaca, also mentions an "Odysseia", a festival held in the Greek hero's honor.
In 2025, archaeologists from the University of Ioannina in Greece shed a clearer light on the previous finds. They revealed that they had found evidence of this Odysseion on Ithaca, following excavations in the ruins of a monumental complex known as the School of Homer, which dates to the Hellenistic period (4th to 1st Century BC).
The archaeologists unearthed fragments of three roof tiles inscribed with the name of the Greek hero. These finds identify the School of Homer with the Odysseion, says Christina Marabea, an archaeologist who carried out the excavations. Two of these fragments are stamped with the words "of Odysseus" (ΟΔΥCCEOC, in ancient Greek), "clearly pointing to the existence of a shrine of the hero at the site", she says.
The format of the inscription "of Odysseus" is known from other sanctuaries dedicated to well-known gods in the ancient Greek world, Marabea explains. For example, in those other sanctuaries, roof tiles were found bearing inscriptions such as "of Poseidon" and "of Apollo" – meaning, the buildings were dedicated to those gods. The phrasing "of Odysseus" on the roof tiles in Ithaca therefore suggests this particular sanctuary was dedicated to the mythical hero, she says.
The third tile fragment reads like a dedication, "to Odysseus", and was likely left there by a pilgrim, according to Marabea. Leaving a variety of votives (such as clay or bronze objects and figurines inscribed with a simple dedication or prayer) is a "widespread ritual at many ancient sanctuaries", she says.
The sanctuary of Odysseus
Together, the finds reveal "new and decisive evidence" that the School of Homer acted as a public sanctuary and assembly point for local citizens "primarily intended for the worship of the Trojan War hero", Odysseus, during the Hellenistic era and early Roman period, says Yannos Lolos, emeritus professor of prehistoric archaeology at the University of Ioannina, who led the research.
"The civic assembly met at the Odysseion, while the sanctuary of Odysseus, as evidenced primarily by the two roof tiles stamped with his name, might well have been the epicenter of worship, frequented by local and foreign pilgrims alike in veneration of the hero," says Marabea.
These new discoveries build on previous archaeological findings. During the 1930s, 12 bronze tripod cauldrons dating back to the 9th and 8th Centuries BC were discovered inside a "coastal cult cave" in northwestern Ithaca. These were likely "votives in honor of Odysseus," says Marabea. A series of bronze coins were also uncovered at another archaeological site in Aetos, southern Ithaca. These coins are inscribed on one side with Odysseus's bearded head, "so familiar to us from innumerable works of Greek and Roman art", says Lolos.
The decree found in modern-day Turkey reveals different aspects of the cult.
"It contains an invitation to the demos (people of Magnesia) for a privileged presidency at the Odysseia [festival]," says Marabea. "We cannot be exactly sure what took place at this festival but it probably involved athletic games and theatrical performances of epic poems."
At the Odysseia festival, there may have been events inspired by Odysseus' exploits in the Homeric poem, such as discus-throwing and archery, says Joel Christensen, professor of classics at The City University of New York and author of Why Odysseus?: Survivor, Scoundrel, (Anti)hero. Animal sacrifices to the hero and Odysseus' divine patron Athena, the goddess of wisdom, are also likely to have taken place, Christensen says.
Why ancient Greeks worshipped heroes
Sanctuaries dedicated to mythological heroes were common throughout the ancient Greek world, where the lines between myth and reality were somewhat fluid.
"As the Greeks were colonizing and trading throughout the Mediterranean, they took their gods and heroes and stories with them, and mythical figures who travelled a lot became really important," says Christensen.
Mythical heroes such as Hercules, also known as Heracles, who ventured out to complete his 12 labours; and Jason, who set out on a quest to steal the Golden Fleece, "all show up at different cult sites", says Christensen. There was cult worship of Heracles in Rome as early as 600BC and a sanctuary dedicated to the hero on the Greek island of Thasos, he adds.
Hero cult worship is "about the creation of identity and about affiliating your local group and your family with something bigger", says Christensen.
"The cult hero site fulfills this very important human need to have proximity to the divine," he says. The heroes were considered "demigods, who are rooted near us and give us access to the divine. The closest analogue in the modern world is probably Christian saints."
Odysseus is "a figure who transcends the boundaries of life and death," Christensen adds. In book 11 of the Odyssey, the hero descends into the underworld to consult a prophet about his homeward journey. "He talks to the dead and comes back…he is a powerful vehicle for moving from one domain to another.”
Ithaca ruins
A living tradition
Cult hero sites also helped put Greek city-states on the map. As the independent states develop a shared Greek (pan-Hellenic) culture, "they start to write themselves into a common narrative", says Christensen. The Odyssey most likely started out as oral poems which were eventually written down.
facts unearthed in Ithaca date from the 9th Century BC right up until the Roman era (1st to 2nd Century AD). This shows that the Odyssey's legacy on Ithaca lasted "a very long time", says Marabea.
Cult worship lasted "roughly a thousand years after the conjectured return from Troy of the legendary king to his native island (around 1200BC) and about 500 years after the composition of the Odyssey (around 750-700BC)," Marabea says.
Christensen says it is not surprising that the hero and the tale of the Odyssey left such a mark. "We now live in a culture of television and radio. Before all that, myths were the threads that knitted different communities together," he says. "As a traveling figure, Odysseus is one of the best ancient heroes to do that.”
WAS ODYSSEUS A REAL PERSON?
It is widely believed that Odysseus was a mythical character rather than a historical figure.
"We don't have any good evidence for him being real," says Christensen. However, there are geographical and historical elements in Homer's epic poems which suggest some correspondence with the past, such as the mention of palaces which recall those excavated in Mycenae and Pylos in Greece, says Marabea.
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But let’s not ignore negative reviews, though these are in the minority:
'THE ODYSSEY' IS A MOSTLY DULL SLOG THROUGH CHRISTOPHER NOLAN’S LIMITED IMAGINATION
Well. This one’s for the boys. At everyone else’s expense, in a way only Nolan could bring.
The time is more than right for an adaptation of the classic Greek tale, and Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey aims to bring the ancient to the present, hailing from its obvious inspirations in the Hollywood heyday of epic dramas (with a spectacular cast to prove it) while firmly grounding it in our present moment. If that includes a kind of confusion as to what that moment means, it also speaks to the simultaneous complexity and simplicity of our times, and how the boys (the film bros) often respond.
The time is more than right for an adaptation of the classic Greek tale, and Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey aims to bring the ancient to the present, hailing from its obvious inspirations in the Hollywood heyday of epic dramas (with a spectacular cast to prove it) while firmly grounding it in our present moment. If that includes a kind of confusion as to what that moment means, it also speaks to the simultaneous complexity and simplicity of our times, and how the boys (the film bros) often respond.
Odysseus (Matt Damon, giving all the tortured soul vibes) has been away from his beloved kingdom Ithaca and his queen Penelope (a steely yet vulnerable Anne Hathaway) for a total of 20 years - ten spent fighting the Trojan War, and the other ten in a no less perilous battle to make his way home. As all hope for the return of the king has gradually faded, suitors have gathered (led by Robert Pattinson absolutely oozing lecherous sleaze), vying for widow and throne. It’s not the safest of situations for Odysseus’s son Telemachus (a blandly appealing Tom Holland) either, whose status as heir represents a serious obstacle for the ambitions of those lusting for his birthright.
It should be something of an extravaganza, but Nolan is known for keeping his cool even in his more emotional storylines. Still, the brooding despair in Damon’s eyes as he contemplates the horrors of the war he helped win, the brutality he witnesses in his present time, and a civilization crumbling from foes they’re barely able to name, let alone fight, is exactly the type of male angst which by now almost seems to exist for Nolan’s particular set of skills.
√It also practically screams relevant, but the problem with attempting to be subversive is it requires a clear-eyed view of what you’re trying to subvert. Nolan wants his film to be about trauma and the evil that men do while still making Odysseus a badass hero, with a final showdown to prove it. He wants to disdain colonialism while mostly portraying the locals he and his men hope to trade peacefully with as inhuman monstrosities, with little motivation besides tearing our heroes apart.
Where Nolan misses the point entirely is his most notorious weakness: gender. He attempts to criticize male entitlement, but makes Samantha Morton’s Circe the aggressor when the soldiers encounter her and even take care to reassure that they mean her no harm before she transforms them into the pigs she claims is their real form (I’d love to see her work on Elon Musk). He casts an actress like Mia Goth as an enslaved woman and makes her nothing more than a complicit conniver. He tries to show Penelope as a ruler, but makes her another victim, not a wily foil to her husband.
And as it turns out, the bros had no reason to worry about Lupita Nyong’o’s casting, since she is a mere avatar for female pain in not one but two roles, as the much hyped Helen of Troy, now very repentant, with a famous face scarred from battle, but also as Clytemnestra, who is killed by her own son for daring to take her revenge on the husband who sacrificed their daughter. But the real awkwardness is saved for the movie’s first on-screen casualty, Elliot Page, who is killed off within minutes and has the honor of becoming another face of trauma for Odysseus. Hardly the effective stunt casting it’s clearly meant to be when trans actors are disposed of so readily.
Even goddesses are rather boring in Nolan’s world. While there’s little doubt that magic exists in this adaptation, and creatures like the Cyclops firmly fall on the side of reality, the gods remain mostly out of sight or weirdly down to earth. To witness Zendaya’s Athena, you’d barely guess that she is one of the only movie stars of our time, the kind of charismatic force that proclaims she was practically born to grace us with her presence on the big screen. Or maybe she’s still too young to preside over such a stately role. Even with the age gap, she still might’ve been better swapped out with Charlize Theron’s Calypso, who in this version is more of a hot caregiver, providing the grief-stricken Odysseus an isolated home and companionship to convalesce while he slowly recovers in mind and memory from the loss of his men.
After such men discover that the world isn’t made for them anymore, what are they to do? According to The Odyssey, it’s to “Give up the fight, give up control, and live.” I suppose it’s a more benevolent way for straight white men to react by viewing passivity as a form of salvation; basically to screw up the world and then run away. But how strange, and how crushingly disappointing, to see it in Nolan, a filmmaker who genuinely seems committed to not only filmmaking itself, but the communal experience of it. Fortunately others have better solutions, both in cinema and real life. Here’s hoping some of them end up getting half the hype and distribution Nolan does.
https://areelofonesown.substack.com/p/the-odyssey-is-a-mostly-dull-slog?r=3hc6p
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ELIOT PAGE’S NON-CANON CHARACTER SAVES NOLAN’S MUTED EPIC
The debate over the accuracy of Christopher Nolan’s latest offering to the IMAX gods, The Odyssey, has started long before the film hit cinemas this weekend. Yet, despite all the backlash, it’s a character who isn’t even mentioned in the Homeric tale who holds the writer-director’s anti-war manifesto together, saving it from being a sauceless, grey adaptation of the most vivid homecoming in classical literature.
The fidelity discourse has accompanied The Odyssey’s every marketing step since 2025. First came Matt Damon rocking a historically inaccurate boar’s-tusk helmet as Odysseus after the first-look images were released last year. Then the movie’s supposed modern language was slammed when the extended trailer landed in May.
The clip came under fire for Robert Pattinson’s freaky take on Antinous as Penelope’s (Anne Hathaway) suitor taunts Odysseus’s son, Telemachus (Tom Holland), about pining for a “daddy” he never knew. The Tenet star’s Antinous is possibly the most hilariously pathetic, so-bad-he’s-good villain in Nolan’s ‘Hollywood does Ancient Greece’, with his performance standing out as deliciously amusing.
Still, it’s Elliot Page’s Sinon, a soldier grown up during the Trojan War and fully committed to the cause, who delivers the fatal blow, exposing the cracks in Damon’s heroic Odysseus. And no, there’s no trace of him in Homer (although he did appear in Virgil’s The Aeneid).
Penelope and Telemachus on terrace
Damon comfortably wears his all-American hero screen persona like a cape, with Nolan’s Odyssey seeing its protagonist shed any layers of cunning he possesses in Homer’s original — whatever that means for a story that was performed orally for centuries as its only way to be passed down to the next generations.
Nolan’s King of Ithaca is a sound man, brave veteran, and loyal husband to Penelope. Most importantly, he’s a reluctant warrior who’s weighed down by his own crimes throughout his journey. And that’s the most significant departure from the Homeric epic.
Years after the Trojan War ended in unspeakable destruction, Odysseus opts to take the scenic route home, an ill-fated decision condemning his crew to certain death. Meanwhile, his wife Penelope is fending off suitors who’ve installed themselves in her palace, delaying the moment she’ll have to remarry to secure Ithaca’s stability.
As her son Telemachus sets off for Sparta on a mission to find his father, Nolan’s film relays the hero’s years-long ordeal in a non-linear narrative that drags along till a spectacular third act.
His smug confidence shattering at every hurdle the gods put on his path, Nolan’s Odysseus steers from Homer’s as he grapples with survivor’s guilt and PTSD stemming from a conflict he didn’t even want to fight in the first place.
A third chapter in Nolan’s unofficial no-war trilogy, The Odyssey follows in the footsteps of Dunkirk and Oppenheimer by spinning Odysseus’s journey with a decidedly moral approach to the end of a civilization and the not particularly innovative reveal that the real enemy is the one smiling back at you in the mirror. Here, Zendaya’s firm Athena accompanies Damon’s protagonist with her stern gaze, a visual reminder of the consequences of his actions.
Nolan tweaks some elements to fit the message — we won’t spoil the ending here — while maintaining Homer’s most exhilarating events virtually untouched, with the grand finale of this nearly three-hour-long voyage being the most conventional, and the most rewarding.
This is a movie about manhood filtered through a present-day sensibility, but also features an array of women who are as strong-willed and flawed as Odysseus — and that’s more than can be said for any other film Nolan has written before.
Lupita Nyong’o steals every scene she’s in as Helen and Clytemnestra, each bearing the literal and figurative scars of men playing gods. The filmmaker doesn’t romanticize Odysseus being coerced into a relationship with Calypso (Charlize Theron), though he cuts his dalliance with Circe, here played by Samantha Morton. The witch remains a powerful, all-knowing ally for the protagonist, with the pig transformation scene emerging as one of the most horrifying sequences in the movie and a rightful callout of toxic masculinity.
In this study on what it means to be a man, Nolan entrusts Page’s Sinon with a crucial arc of disillusionment with performative violence. Tricked into delivering the horse that would win Agamemnon (Benny Safdie) the war, Sinon, unlike his Aeneid equivalent, has no clue that Menelaus (Jon Bernthal), Odysseus and his men are hidden inside, waiting for nightfall to strike, burning Troy to the ground and killing its people.
Betrayed by the man he’s looked up to his whole life, Sinon haunts Odysseus in this world and the one under — and will likely haunt audiences too as the film’s tether to our present.
As Nolan concludes that mistakes are bound to be forgotten and history to repeat itself, Sinon’s plea to remember becomes the most impactful, rageful prayer in an otherwise lukewarm adaptation that is content to swim in shallow waters.
https://www.soundspheremag.com/reviews/the-odyssey-christopher-nolan-review/
ONE”S WRITER’S VERDICT: PRETENTIOUS
I'm a movie fan and I've been looking forward to "The Odyssey" 2026 for months. I'd have to be living under a rock not to know that Christopher Nolan's film has received some of the most rhapsodic reviews ever written. Some are calling Nolan's "The Odyssey" the best film ever made.
I'm glad so many are getting so much from this movie. I was bored from the first scene to the last. Many in the cast are terrific and there is obviously a lot of money on the screen. Nolan's "The Odyssey," though, is an episodic, pretentious, superhero movie.
Superhero – Odysseus – confronts a scary monster. There is fighting, fighting. Odysseus overcomes the scary monster. Odysseus gets back on his boat, sails to the next island, and meets another scary monster. There is more fighting, fighting. Monster is overcome. Odysseus gets back on his boat, and confronts another monster. If you like this bare bones superhero movie plot, you will like this movie.
Nolan's pretentiousness left me cold. Nolan opens the movie with Travis Scott, a black rapper in dreadlocks. He raps a Greek ballad. Oh, come on.
The bulk of the movie is fight scenes. You could just stay home and watch pro wrestling. You see screaming men in Bronze Age armor running, invading, stabbing, burning, punching, spearing, decapitating, and shooting arrows. Other than Odysseus, none of these warriors, and none of their victims, have any depth, and you don't care about them.
The bulk of the movie is fight scenes. You could just stay home and watch pro wrestling. You see screaming men in Bronze Age armor running, invading, stabbing, burning, punching, spearing, decapitating, and shooting arrows. Other than Odysseus, none of these warriors, and none of their victims, have any depth, and you don't care about them.
After all the fight scenes – and this would be laughable if it weren't so pretentious and tone deaf – a key character gives a speech. "War is bad because it hurts people and breaks things." Nolan serves up platters of big, sweaty biceps, camaraderie, glorious battle, and anonymous victims. Hypocrisy, thy name is box office receipts.
In between the fight scenes, there is a metric ton of exposition. Characters immediately recount their back story. "My name is Menelaus. This is my wife Helen. Hers is the face that launched a thousand ships … " I can't believe so much money was spent on a movie that breaks the cardinal rule: show don't tell. Especially given that, as usual, Nolan purposely mixes his sound so that you can't make out most of what is said, except that almost everyone in the movie has a name that ends in some version of "us." Odysseus, Menelaus, Antinous, Telemachus, Polybus, Eumaeus, Euripides pants, Eumenides pants.
People are calling the film beautiful. The only scene that struck me as beautiful was when some backlit Greek soldiers enter a dark cave.
I was never afraid. I was never moved. I cry at movies all the time. Nothing here mattered to me. Exposition doesn't move me and unless a fight scene is really well orchestrated and motivated, I'm no big fan of fight scenes.
Many of the actors here are really good. Samantha Morton, a powerful actress, is a stand out as Circe. She belongs in a better movie. Matt Damon does a fine job as Nolan's Odysseus. This Odysseus is less Homer's hero, full of guile, and more a stolid older guy trying to get home but who lost his GPS and is too proud to ask for directions. Robert Pattinson and Tom Holland are excellent as a young man coming into his own and a bad guy who is just asking to get his comeuppance. John Leguizamo is surprisingly convincing as a blind Greek Mr. Miyagi. Anne Hathaway came the closest, for me, of conveying Homeric qualities. She is strong, elegant, loving, long-suffering, regal.
This is clearly an awards-bait movie, and to receive Academy Awards, a film must meet "Representation and Inclusion Standards" – that is it must be DEI. The Odyssey is not a universal story. It is a specifically Greek treasure. Nolan's insistence on disrespecting that doesn't do his narrative any favors. When Helen of Troy or Sinon comes onscreen, you are not experiencing "Willing suspension of disbelief" and losing yourself in the story. You are congratulating yourself on how open minded you are that you can accept the actors Nolan chose for those roles.
My sister Antoinette was older than I and she read Homer before me. She would tell me the story, orally, and I would listen, rapt. Antoinette describing Odysseus to me as a man distinguished by his "guile" – and how that was a high virtue – was probably my first experience of cultural relativism. To us Catholic schoolgirls, goodness was the highest virtue. To the Ancient Greeks, guile was. Hmm. Food for thought.
After Homer, I went on to read the great poetry inspired by him: Yeats' "Leda and the Swan," Tennyson's "Ulysses," W. H. Auden's "Shield of Achilles." With my older brothers, I watched "Jason and the Argonauts" with the terrifying skeletons scene.
My sister, Homer himself, recent poems and sword and sandals films all moved me more than Nolan's bloated borefest.
Whatever Nolan is doing that other viewers love so much is completely lost on me. I did not care. I was not moved. I did not experience willing suspension of disbelief. I went out for a meal with a friend after the movie. We talked about current events, and it was only later that I realized that I had already forgotten seeing the film. ~ Danusha Goska, Facebook
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And just one more (this movie is definitely not for everyone):
ANOTHER CRITIC FINDS NOLAN’S ADAPTATION “POINTLESS”
Nolan has called the lack of mainstream adaptations of the work a “curious gap in Hollywood history.” But I’d argue the lack of “Odyssey” films partially stems from the fact that the text speaks for itself. Pursuing an adaptation of this caliber feels like a losing battle, something a filmmaker does just to prove that they can. Without any noteworthy changes that give the source material unexpected new meaning — significance you could only get in a movie theater, and not from the story or any of its scholarly interpretations — that air of self-importance quickly turns to a sour funk. In an ironic twist, Nolan’s own ambition in adapting “The Odyssey” looks something like Odysseus’. Fresh from his latest victory, Nolan reaches for the stars and grazes the gods. His determination may be admirable, but the sheer, futile arrogance of such a display backfires in equally spectacular fashion.
None of this is to say that there isn’t merit in a filmmaker, particularly one of Nolan’s stature, wanting to explore their artistic desires. But that’s also why “The Odyssey” is such a keen disappointment. Someone like Nolan — who has passed just about every bar there is to pass, raised that bar, and then passed it again — probing his ambition within the context of a work as substantial as “The Odyssey” should prove to be compelling in its own right. To use a recent example operating on a similar blockbuster scale, Steven Spielberg’s “Disclosure Day” did this particularly well, assessing humanity and movies together against the backdrop of Spielberg’s favorite themes. One could enjoy “Disclosure Day” as a solitary experience, or measure it against Spielberg’s body of work to explore an even deeper meaning.
Sure, one might argue that in “The Odyssey,” Nolan is studying his own hubris, accepting the innate faults that come with bringing Homer to the big screen. But I don’t think Nolan understands that’s what’s happening here, and that’s because his “Odyssey” doesn’t have anything new to say about the original text or his beliefs as a filmmaker. If anything, “The Odyssey” only waters down every artistic statement Nolan has already posed.
Like Homer’s poem, Nolan’s “The Odyssey” is told nonlinearly, scattered between the perspectives of Odysseus (Matt Damon), his wife Penelope (Anne Hathaway) and their son, Telemachus (Tom Holland). Ten years after the fall of Troy, Odysseus still hasn’t returned home to Ithaca, and his kingdom has been overtaken by suitors crudely courting his wife’s hand.
As their impatience grows, the window for Odysseus to reclaim his kingdom and restore a crumbling world to Zeus’ law — essentially open-hearted hospitality and treating others as you’d be treated — is closing. As Telemachus travels to seek news of his father’s whereabouts, or if he’s even alive, Odysseus recounts his story to the island nymph, Calypso (Charlize Theron): The bloody Trojan War, a cyclops, a sea witch, dalliances with the dead, sirens, and a crew of impatient men.
Nolan makes only a handful of changes to the translations of the original text. Instead of gods like Poseidon and Zeus playing an integral role in the story, they are left as unseen forces that motivate the characters’ actions. Every 40 minutes or so, Zendaya appears to Odysseus as the goddess Athena to spout some ethereal wisdom before disappearing, but Athena plays more like a postwar trauma manifestation than an actual character. Characters speak with a more casual, modern dialect.
And, perhaps most memorably significant, the Trojan Horse is discovered half-submerged on the beach, and not outside Troy’s gates on wheels. Nolan uses this adjustment to build out the film’s emotional throughline: an extended rumination on the evils of war and the repugnance of men. And while it’s a smart and novel twist on a colloquial metaphor that has almost come to precede Homer’s poem, Nolan’s Trojan Horse doesn’t inspire any reflections on war that weren’t addressed more directly and cleverly in “Oppenheimer.”
Every question “The Odyssey” poses has been asked dozens of times before by Nolan himself, and in far more interesting ways. Here, Nolan once again returns to his pet themes of playing God, human mistreatment, the passage of time, and bearing witness to the world’s slow, painful destruction. All of these things are surveyed with more thought and care in many of his other works, especially “Oppenheimer,” but also in “Interstellar,” “Tenet,” and even translated into the hyper-accessible superhero fare of his “Batman” films.
Many great filmmakers are immersed in the same ideas, returning to them in one way or another with each film. But to do that with something like “The Odyssey” is unnecessary, even haughty. Nolan attempts to assert the text’s relevancy in our contemporary age, but that’s not something any scholar or even the average reader would contest. This is Homer, after all, famously the foundation of all great work. What’s perplexing is that Nolan’s said as much himself. So why try to tackle “The Odyssey” at all, if not only to — as Nolan also acknowledged — be one of the only loyal feature-length film adaptations in history, and have his name forever cemented in the same conversation as Homer’s?
In the second act (that is, the second hour of the film’s three), Nolan gets close to revealing why. Tied to the mast of his ship as he and his crew pass the singing sirens, adorned on the jagged rocks at sea, Odysseus screams out with pain and desire. After the ship has made safe passage and the sirens’ voices have drifted into the air, Odysseus’ second-in-command, Eurylochus (Himesh Patel), asks him what he heard. Odysseus tells Eurylochus that their song contains everything he’s ever known and everything he never wanted to admit to himself. And, in a line of dialogue that will stick with me — one that shot straight to my heart faster than any of Nolan’s oft-repeated contemplations on war or morality — Odysseus says, “Their song told me that what you want the most is what you already had.”
There’s no better summary of Nolan’s “The Odyssey.” Here, a filmmaker who managed to reach the peak of Olympus makes the prideful, ill-fated decision to hoist a ladder toward the stars, trying to get even higher, past where even the Gods can see. He knows there is no foundation to hold him, nothing to prop his steps against, but he tries anyway. And truthfully, there’s dignity in that curiosity, in wanting to know if greatness is all there is, or if there is something more that exists beyond what we can perceive. But both history and myth have proven that there’s no measuring up to the gods.
circe and pigs
https://www.salon.com/2026/07/18/christopher-nolans-the-odyssey-is-pointless/
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THE MEANING OF THE ODYSSEY, PART II
The Odyssey can be read as an anti-Iliad. The values of the middle-aged Odysseus are the opposite of those of the young, fame-hungry Achilles. At first Achilles seems to favor the long and peaceful life; it’s his rage at the death of Patroclos thrusts him into battle, though he knows it will be not just his glory, but his doom. (The first word of the Iliad is “rage” [menin]; the first word of the Odyssey is “man” —, or, to be grammatically correct, “of the man” [andra].
In the Odyssey, we meet Odysseus also at a point of choice between two destinies. He’s being offered immortality – without human suffering, the innevitable failure defeats, and whatever glory may or may not come. Perhaps the most astonishing and crucial part of the Odyssey is the fact that Odysseus chooses human life over immortality at the price of living on a lovely but boring island with Calypso (the name means the Concealer [cf “apocalypse,” or unveiling, revelation].
(A side note: Calypso was the daughter of Atlas, implying a connection with the earth; she lives in a cave, suggesting the womb of mother earth.)
Even as she agrees to let him go, she once more repeats her offer. They are having a meal, Odysseus eating human food, Calypso her diet of nectar and ambrosia, when Calypso addresses Odysseus. She speaks to him with an “immortal radiance upon her.”
Wily Odysseus, if only you knew all the pain
you are destined to suffer before getting home,
you’d stay here with me and be immortal –
though you wanted her forever,
that bride for whom you pine each day.
Can I be less desirable than she is?
Less fascinating? Less beautiful? Can mortals
compare with goddesses in grace and form?
To this Odysseus, a supreme strategist a flatterer, replies:
My Lady Goddess, here’s no cause for anger.
My quiet Penelope – how well I know –
would seem a shade before your majesty,
death and old age being unknown to you,
while she must die. Yet, it is true, each day
I long for home, long for the sight of home.
If some god has marked me out again
for shipwreck, my tough heart can endure it.
What hardship have I not suffered
at sea, and in battle! Let the trial come.”
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Odysseus chooses to accept mortality, persists in his goal, and accepts suffering – “let the trial come.” This is SURRENDER to reality rather than a youthful denial of it. He scorns the easy, peaceful, boring paradise and chooses the storm of human life.
HIS WILLINGNESS TO SUFFER; people who are not willing to suffer don’t accomplish anything (example – working to build one’s own business, trying to publish one’s book)
There is a shift from youthful fantasy of attaining a personal paradise (“rich and famous”) to the idea of having a task to perform, a duty, a service; from the heroic ego-project to the ideal of service, of duty that one owes to others.
What does Odysseus’s choice teach us about the second half of life? We know that a goddess is not going to fall in love with us and offer us immortality. It’s a question of ACCEPTING ONE’S MORTALITY AND DECIDING HOW BEST TO USE WHAT LIFE REMAINS.
The second half of life ideally means a shift from ambition to meaningful work; from the ego project to service,
from “look how great I am” to “what is my task in life”
from “what can life do for me?” to “what does life demand of me?”
from living for the ego to living for the soul; the second half of life should belong to the soul.
But if I am not going to be someone spectacular, brave as Achilles or beautiful as Helen, then what am I here for? Perhaps the best answer is “to be of service.” To help spread the light, to be part of the chorus. It is a humbling answer, certainly not what the ego wants, but a mature person knows that, rather than the often futile struggle of being a lone hero, it is ultimately more satisfying to feel that one is a part of something greater.
The ultimate prize is A MEANINGFUL LIFE.
An endless easy life with Calypso would be meaningless. They were not real partners; they had nothing in common. (Still, the elemental pleasure of existing can’t be entirely dismissed; Calypso’s bribe — immortality — is a powerful temptation.)
Homecoming is more important than living forever without challenges; Odysseus chooses to leave the isolation of an island paradise to become part of family and community again.
What is really important to us? Is it making as much money as possible, or having the leisure to do what we love doing? Maybe the greatest wealth is time to do what you love – and/or human affection. Dropping the ego, the profit motive, and “following your bliss” is often possible only later in life.
The Odyssey tells us that glory is less important than having a home; a beautiful goddess less important than a spouse who is a true partner.
Living for the Soul rather than the Ego
Considering the collapse of the "great expectations," the second half of life may seem uninspired and diminished. But it can be the more spiritually oriented half of life, coming home to where you really belong.
(I am not sure about the exact origin of this text. My best guess is that these are my notes from a Jungian lecture on the meaning of the Odyssey. I specifically remember that the lecturer stated that he didn’t know how to interpret Circe’s changing men into swine; I replied that women have no trouble understanding this particular metaphor.)
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ORIANA: THE TRUE HERO OF THE ODYSSEY IS PENELOPE
Ir’s worth seeing just for the sake of Anne Hathaway’s rendition of Penelope. She too has to be heroic — to hold fast to her her hope and faith and love. One might even argue that her extraordinary ability to wait in spite of the pressure of 108 suitors — some of them attractive, but in Penelope’s eyes not half as smart as smart and strong as Odysseus — shows a greater heroism than facing giants and monsters. Equally with Odysseus, Penelope shows in a pure form the new and more interesting face of heroism — persistence.
A movie needs to be selective in choosing which details to highlight and which to omit. The killing of the suitors goes on perhaps too long. One suitor’s poignant cry, “Odysseus, don’t kill your own people!” should perhaps have been included, to add one more one more choice to the series of weighty choices that he must make.
Two other omissions happen at the mouth of Hades, when Odysseus speaks with the dead. The movie does not show his heartbreaking meeting with his mother, who tells him that she died of the heartbreak of waiting and waiting, weeping because of worrying that he was dead. Odysseus tries three times to embrace his mother’s shade, but the laws of Hades forbid such communion between the living and the dead, and she slides through his arms, insubstantial.
But the other omission is more significant in terms of the overall message of the Odyssey. When Odysseus speaks with the shade of Achilles, he remarks that the glorious warrior must feel like a king among the dead, who know of his glorious deeds and have the honor of meeting the greatest warrior who fought at Troy.
But Achilles says something as unexpected as it is wise and expressive of the spirit of the Odyssey, which can be read as an anti-Iliad. Achilles says that he’d rather be a poor serf among the living than a king among the dead. His fame means nothing to him. It is far more glorious to live even a modest, obscure life, than to be famous and dead. From the point of view of conventional values, still prevalent today, military glory is a false ideal. The greatest joy is simply to be alive.
Also crucial to the central message of the Odyssey is the hero’s refusal of immortality on Calypso’s island in favor of “real life.” The movie rushes over this episode, mentioning this monumental choice so briefly that it’s easy to miss its full meaning.
The meeting with Nausicaa and Odysseus’s beautiful speech in praise of a harmonious marriage are also omitted — but this choice can be easily justified by the constraints of time. However, since speaking with the shade of Achilles is included, I don’t understand why the most important part, crucial to the meaning of the epic, is left out — the greatest warrior’s rejection of the warrior ideal and his praise of life itself, be it obscure and without glory, yet still delightful in every breath, every sensation, every heart beat that a says I live, I exist.
The Iliad is a poem of death, but the Odyssey is the great poem of life. And, as I’ve pointed out earlier, it gives us a new definition of heroism: not great military deeds, and certainly not how many enemies one has slain in battle, but the heroism of patience, of persistence. And since it is Penelope who best exemplifies persistence, to me she is the the most heroic character of the Odyssey.
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THE STRANGE JOURNEYS OF EVA PERON’S CORPSE
Argentina's iconic first lady died in July 1952. Sixty years on, the BBC looked back at her cadaver's bizarre disappearance – and its 16-year journey around the globe.
A few hours after the death of Eva Perón, on 26 July 1952, Dr Pedro Ara got to work. The renowned Spanish anatomist was tasked with embalming the Argentinian first lady's body in the same way the Russians had preserved the remains of Lenin and Stalin. The corpse of Evita was kept in the Ministry of Labour building, where a monument to workers was due to be built, with a glass coffin at its base that would be her final resting spot.
Yet three years later, in September 1955, her husband, President Juan Perón, was deposed in a military coup and went into exile. The new regime decided to steal Eva Perón's body – setting off a macabre 16-year odyssey. Her cadaver would be held at the Centre for Military Intelligence, stored in a van, buried in Milan, and transported to Madrid before it was eventually returned to Buenos Aires to be laid to rest in a heavily fortified crypt.
After Eva Perón died of cervical cancer at the age of 33, her husband had political reasons for having her embalmed. Her poor rural background and her charitable works as first lady had won her fervent working-class support. "So he wanted to preserve that, [by] preserving the body," Flavia Fiorucci, a historian of Peronism, told the BBC in 2012. "It also had to do with the importance that Perón and Peronism gave to symbols, and Evita was a symbol."
That was clear in the weeks after her death. Dr Ara was able to embalm Evita's body in a lifelike state using a paraffin and glycerine injection technique. Two million people visited her coffin as she lay in state in Congress for 14 days, the devotion she'd inspired while alive continuing after her death.
And the symbolism of Evita's body was the reason for the long meandering journey it took over the next 16 years. When Perón was deposed in 1955, the dictatorship led by Gen Pedro Aramburu aimed to quash all aspects of Peronism – and feared that her corpse could become an emblem of resistance.
Lt Col Carlos Moori Koenig, head of the Army Intelligence Service, moved it around Buenos Aires, paranoid that Peronists might attempt to retrieve it. Evita's cadaver was said to be hidden in a van parked on the streets of the capital, behind a cinema screen, and inside the city's waterworks – and wherever it went, flowers and candles appeared.
Koenig then moved the body to his office, where he allegedly stood the coffin upright, and showed it off to visitors. He was said to have become obsessed with her corpse. "I knew him from military school. He was completely normal, but after getting his hands on the body, he went mad," said Col Héctor Cabanillas in the 1997 documentary Evita, la tumba sin paz (Evita, the grave with no peace).
Argentine academic Cecilia Macón told the BBC in 2012 that, while it's hard to uncover the truth because "myth and history mingle constantly in stories regarding Evita", one story is that Koenig became infatuated with his charge, before being relieved of his duties in 1957.
Cabanillas was then tasked with making the body of Eva Perón disappear, arranging for it to be shipped to Italy in 1957. Evita was buried under the name María Maggi de Magistris in a cemetery in Milan. She was not forgotten by her supporters, however, with graffiti appearing in Buenos Aires asking, "Where is the body of Eva Perón?" The return of the corpse became a rallying cry for Peronists in Argentina.
The return of the body Fiorucci believes that the fact it was the military who had made Evita's corpse disappear added to its potency. "The pain inflicted [on] the dead body of Evita was also a symbol of that against the working class."
In 1971, a new regime aimed to return Argentina to democratic rule, easing restrictions against Peronists, and agreed to return Evita's body to Juan Perón. It was delivered in a silver coffin to the villa in suburban Madrid where the former dictator was living in exile, with his third wife Isabel.
Carlos Spadoni, then a confidant of Juan Perón, was one of the first to see the body. "Gen Perón, the gardener and I took the body out of the coffin," he told the BBC in 2012. "We laid it on a marble-top table and our hands got all dirty with earth. So the body had to be cleaned. Isabel took care of that… with a cotton cloth and water. Nothing more. Very carefully. Isabel combed the blonde hair. It was long and she cleaned it bit by bit with a comb and then blow-dried it."
Again, myths circulated about what happened next, with stories focused on the occult beliefs of the former government minister José López Rega. According to one tale, the Peronist politician told Isabel to lie beside the body of Eva Perón so that the Evita political magic would rub off on to her. Beliefs like this tapped into the almost religious reverence that Evita's followers felt towards her. The former dance‐hall girl who rose to power with her husband became a spiritual leader to her devotees, her body taking on a sacred importance for them – although she was also reviled by anti-Peronists.
Juan Perón returned to power in Argentina in 1973, with Isabel as his vice president. Evita's body remained in Spain, but after Juan died suddenly in 1974, her corpse was returned to Buenos Aires. Domingo Tellechea was sitting in a bar in the capital when he was first approached to repair damage to Evita's body. "Two guys all dressed in black came in," he told the BBC in 2012. "They flung the doors open and looked over at us. This was dangerous, because in those days people were being carried off and 'disappeared' and never seen again."
Tellechea was a restorer of art, antiquities – and human remains. Fearful of government death squads, he was relieved when he found out the two men were drivers. They took him to see Oscar Ivanissevich, Eva Perón's former personal physician. "He said to me, 'We've got a job for you. You've got to restore the body of Eva Perón.'"
Tellechea accepted, despite being aware of the risks. "To do the work was to put myself in opposition to the people who made the body disappear and a lot of people really wished Evita had never turned up again at all. I knew it could bring me problems," he said. "There were threats, phone threats, torching my car." The restorer later went into exile, as state brutality and torture became systematic in Argentina under successive regimes.
Yet Evita was finally laid to rest in October 1976, with only a small group to witness her burial. The crypt was fortified to ensure her remains would never be disturbed again. The marble tomb had a trapdoor in the floor leading down to a hidden room. And that room had a second trapdoor leading to another room which housed her coffin. Even 24 years after her death, the strength of Evita's symbolism meant that her body had to be buried 5m below the ground.
https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20260717-the-macabre-kidnapping-of-eva-perns-corpse
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THE PROPHECIES OF FATIMA
In May 1917, three Portuguese children declared that they had seen an apparition of the Virgin Mary in a meadow. The prophecies they received fuelled anti-communist sentiment in the Cold War. In 1992, a witness told the BBC about the "miracles".
On 13 May 1917, 10-year-old Lucia dos Santos and her younger cousins Francisco and Jacinta Marto were tending sheep in a field in Fátima, Portugal when, they claimed, they saw a shining figure in an oak tree. They said that the apparition was the Virgin Mary, who told them they should return at the same time on the 13th day of the month for the next five months.
The children also said that they received three revelations. Two of them were made public, but one of them, the so-called "third secret of Fátima", was written down and kept hidden in the Vatican until the turn of the millennium. Speculation about the secret helped to fuel the phenomenon of Fátima – a phenomenon that turned a rural shrine into an unlikely Cold War landmark.
Thousands of pilgrims were said to be present at the apparition's final appearance, on 13 October. What they reported to have witnessed became known as the Miracle of the Sun. "All I saw was the planets in the sky in many colors. It was a miracle," one of the witnesses, Francisco Ferreira Rosa, told the BBC's Newsnight in 1992. "Then there seemed to be a shower of flowers falling from the sky. It was like a snowfall. And then the Sun started spinning faster and faster like a wheel of fire. It lasted for about half a minute. By the end, it was going very fast."
Those who were there that day said that serious illnesses were cured and the blind were restored to sight. According to the 1980 book Fatima: the Great Sign by Francis Johnston, the Portuguese anti-religious newspaper O Século (The Century) published a report at the time with the headline "Terrifying event! How the Sun danced at midday in the sky at Fatima". The writer said that at least 50,000 people had gathered there.
Whether it was a miracle or a mass hallucination – or a meteorological event – is debated. But it seemed to have had a profound effect on some of the people who were present. "Everyone knows I already had faith. But after that, I began to believe even more strongly," Rosa told the BBC in 1992. "I wasn't afraid, but many people, when they saw the Sun spinning like that, they were afraid. When something like that happens, you have to believe and have faith.”
The first two prophecies
Of the three children who'd had the apparitions, two died in the Spanish Flu outbreak a few years later – leaving Lucia as the only bearer of the messages and prophecies. While the first "secret" offered a vision of Hell said to prophesy World War Two, the second – given to the children just before the October Revolution – claimed that if prayers were devoted to the Virgin, Russia would eventually be saved from communism.
Uneasy at first with the rapidly growing popularity of Fátima, the Vatican only officially sanctioned the Fátima prophecies in 1930.
Under the ultra-conservative António de Oliveira Salazar dictatorship in Portugal, the rural village became one of the most popular Virgin Mary shrines in 20th-Century Catholicism. Pilgrims still visit in their thousands. Worshipers often crawl on their knees along a marble pathway – the Via Penitencial – to the Chapel of Apparitions, where five of the Virgin Mary's six apparitions were said to have occurred.
But in the years that followed the children's visions, Fátima picked up a different kind of following. By including a prediction of the spread, then the collapse, of communism in Russia, the prophecies developed a political dimension. During the Cold War, Fátima became an ideological shrine for anti-communists.
Speaking to the BBC in 1992, the year after the Soviet Union collapsed, theologian Michael Walsh said: "The real problem with Fátima is the message about Our Lady, which has developed in the 20s, about the anti-communism of Fátima… it has become a divisive force, almost, in the Church."
Pope John II became a fervent supporter of Fátima after an assassination attempt in 1981.
Fátima's anti-communist associations increased when the Polish-born Pope John Paul II became a fervent supporter in 1981, after an event that took place on 13 May – on an anniversary of the first apparition. While in his "popemobile" in St Peter's Square, Vatican City, he was shot twice at close range. Despite the arrest of the lone gunman, there were theories that others were behind the assassination attempt. The Pope alleged in his 2005 memoir that "someone else masterminded it". Could it have been someone in the USSR?
The Soviet leadership viewed the Pope as a threat, with a Communist Party directive warning in 1979 that the Pope was their "enemy", due to his support for Poland's Solidarity movement. Documents recovered from former East German intelligence services in 2005 indicated that Soviet military intelligence initiated the plot to kill him – something that the Russians denied.
The secret in the sealed envelope
Because of the date he was shot, the Pope credited his recovery to Our Lady of Fátima – bringing even more anti-communist fervor to believers in the prophecies. He visited the shrine twice, and one of the bullets extracted from his body was placed alongside diamonds in the gold crown worn by the statue of the Madonna there.
As well as drawing worshippers because of its anti-communist interpretations and support from the Pope, Fátima was the subject of fevered speculation fueled by the existence of the "third secret". Lucia wrote it down in 1944, asking that it not be revealed until 1960, and successive popes refused to make it public.
Kept in a sealed envelope at the Vatican, and known only to each pope and his inner circle of advisors, it led to Fátima attracting conspiracy theories and doomsday cults. Attempting to force the Vatican to reveal the secret, Fátima fanatics held hunger strikes, and one even hijacked a plane.
When the prophecy was revealed by the Vatican in 2000, an estimated 500,000 worshipers gathered at the Fátima shrine for the announcement. Yet for some, it was a letdown. The New York Times reported at the time that "the belated disclosure of the third secret of Fátima last week was a little like the FBI announcing that Elvis is, in fact, dead", and that witnesses scoffed at the announcement as a "made-to-measure revelation".
Conspiracy theorists had suggested that the prophecy warned of a third world war, or another apocalyptic event threatening mankind.
Yet the Vatican described the secret as a vision of the 1981 assassination attempt on Pope John Paul II, warning that a man "clothed in white… falls to the ground apparently dead”.
Despite the disclosure of the "third secret", speculation has continued about the supposed links between what happened at Fátima and events in the Cold War. Some argue that it was no coincidence that, when John Paul II did as the Virgin had asked – consecrating Eastern Europe "to her immaculate heart" in 1984 – Mikhail Gorbachev became Soviet leader and Perestroika began.
However, there are critics who question both the sensationalist interpretations of the prophecies and how they were embraced by those in power. When releasing the "third secret" as a Cardinal, Joseph Ratzinger – who became Pope Benedict XVI in 2005 – said that "no great mystery is revealed, nor is the future unveiled", shifting the focus away from apocalyptic predictions.
"Original reports simply had the Virgin asking people to pray for the 'conversion of the world'," says Michael Carroll, author of the book The Cult of the Virgin Mary: Psychological Origins. "It was only later, in the late 1920s, that Lucia (then in a convent) revised the story and suggested that the Virgin had asked people to pray for the 'conversion of Russia'."
He argues: "There is no doubt that the Church, especially in the immediate post-World War Two period, used the Fatima apparitions in its fight against communism. Did that contribute to the collapse of the Soviet Union? Fatima per se aside, the Church's opposition generally to communism likely did likely play a role in that collapse, but so likely did a host of other factors."
But there is no doubting the impact the visions had. When Lucia died in 2005, at the age of 97, Portugal declared a day of mourning, and canvassing in the general election was suspended. And on 13 May 2025, around 270,000 worshipers gathered at the shrine to mark the day the children said they saw their first vision.
https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20260508-the-divine-visions-prophesying-the-fall-of-the-ussr
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WHAT YOUR SPOILER PREFERENCE SAYS ABOUT YOU
There are two kinds of people in the world: people who hear the words “spoiler alert” and immediately cover their ears, and people who say, “No, tell me. Does the dog die?” The first group regards spoilers as narrative vandalism. The second sees them as a public service.
Research on spoiler preferences suggests the issue goes beyond whether someone likes surprises. Spoilers actually change the emotional experience we are about to have. The question is whether they change it for the better or for the worse.
One early study found that people sometimes enjoyed short stories more when they had been spoiled beforehand. Knowing the ending may have reduced the mental effort of figuring out what was happening and what would happen next, allowing readers to relax and enjoy the story more. That finding got a lot of attention with headlines like: Spoilers do not spoil stories!
Except, of course, they often do. People may enjoy stories more when they are not spoiled.
Unspoiled stories can feel more fun, suspenseful, moving, and satisfying. Spoilers can also reduce enjoyment, especially when we are watching television episodes or films in which we are emotionally invested. Sometimes we read or watch something for the craft, structure, or meaning, while other times, we want an emotional ride—suspense, surprise, catharsis, a reason to sob, or a socially acceptable way to feel anxious for two hours while lying on the couch under a blanket. Spoilers change the ride.
Why Some People Want Spoilers
Some people seek spoilers because they want the emotional ride to feel more manageable. If suspense thrills you, uncertainty is part of the pleasure. But if suspense feels stressful, uncertainty can become the obstacle to pleasure. Knowing what happens can function like an emotional seatbelt. It lowers the emotional volume enough for the person to stay engaged.
That is why someone might want to know whether a dog dies, whether a couple breaks up, whether a character survives, or whether the ending is devastating before deciding to watch. They are trying to regulate their emotional experience. For people who are sensitive to distressing content, a spoiler can make it possible to enjoy a show, book, or movie they might otherwise avoid. It gives them a sense of control over the emotional impact.
Why Some People Avoid Spoilers
Spoiler-avoiders are trying to protect something, too. They want the experience to hit them exactly as designed. They want the suspense, the surprise, the dread, the shock, the reveal. To them, a spoiler is emotional interference; it robs them of the experience they seek.
That's why people can be so protective of shows, books, or films they care about. The more emotionally invested they are, the more they want to guard the experience and feel what happens in the intended order. For spoiler-avoiders, uncertainty is the point.
One reason spoiler debates get so heated is that not all spoilers are the same. Knowing the outcome (they don’t end up together) is not the same as knowing how we get there (they don’t end up together because she finds the letter he hid in the piano bench, confronts him at Whole Foods, and he admits he was in love with his anonymous kidney donor all along). How we get there is where much of the emotional experience lives.
Spoilers Are Really About Uncertainty
The deeper question behind spoiler preferences is how we manage uncertainty. Some people calm themselves by knowing while others feel energized by not knowing. Some want just enough information to feel safe but not so much that the experience goes flat. And some people insist they hate spoilers, then spend 45 minutes reading spoiler-filled reviews “just to check one thing,” which may not be a moral failing but is probably a felony in certain fandoms.
Spoilers are one small version of a much larger question: How much uncertainty can we tolerate, and when does knowing help us cope rather than rob us of the experience? Your spoiler preference does not mean you are emotionally fragile because you want to know the ending. It also does not mean you are emotionally superior because you refuse to.
Your spoiler preferences can shift and change based on many factors. What they reflect in the moment is a choice about the kind of emotional experience you're trying to create for yourself.
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SHOULD YOU BE POLITE TO AI?
According to a 2019 Pew Research Center survey, more than half of Americans say "please" when they're talking to their smart speakers. It seems that trend continued. A 2025 survey by the publisher Future found 70% of people are polite to AI when they use it. Most said they're nice because it's just the right thing to do, though 12% said they do it to protect themselves in case of robot uprisings.
Politeness may not protect you from angry robots or make LLMs more accurate, but there are other reasons to keep doing it.
"The bigger thing for me is saying 'please' and 'thank you' might make you more comfortable interacting with the AI," says Schulhoff. "It's not helping the performance of the model, but if it's helping you use the model more because you're more comfortable, then it's useful."
There's also the tenderness of your own human nature to consider. The philosopher Immanuel Kant argued that one reason you shouldn't be cruel to animals is that it's also damaging to yourself. Essentially, being unfriendly to anything makes you a harsher person. You can't hurt AIs feelings because it doesn't have any, but maybe you should be nice anyway. It’s a habit that could benefit other parts of your life.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20260224-the-best-way-to-talk-to-a-chatbot
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VIOLENCE REPEATEDLY ERUPTS IN ELDER-CARE HOMES
Sam Ato Timaloa, a paroled sex offender who also served time for attempted murder, had dementia and an acute intolerance of noise — especially from roommates at Sunrise Post Acute, a nursing home in Banning, California. Over four months in 2025, a state investigative report found, Sunrise switched Timaloa's room eight times, the last into one occupied by Attilio Cecchetto, 92, a retired tile installer whose dementia led him to frequently moan, mumble, and yell.
Overnight, a nurse aide walked into their room and saw blood splattered on the floor, walls, and ceiling, according to a grand jury transcript. Cecchetto's face "looked twisted and smashed," the aide testified. A Banning city police officer testified that Timaloa, 77, told him that he had punched Cecchetto twice.
"He just kept saying that Attilio was being too loud: 'He talks too much,'" the officer said.
Cecchetto died two days later from blunt force facial trauma.
"You get placed in a facility like this to be taken care of, not to be murdered," one of his sons, Gino Cecchetto, said in an interview. "This was completely preventable at many different points."
Timaloa pleaded not guilty to assault. The charges were later upgraded to murder, and a judge ordered a mental health evaluation. The judge will rule as early as August on whether Timaloa is competent to stand trial.
PACS Group, the nursing home chain that owns Sunrise, denied negligence. "We strive to provide quality care to everyone we serve, and our hearts continue to go out to the Cecchetto family for their loss" PACS spokesman Brooks Stevenson said in an email.
In nursing homes primarily occupied by impoverished people as well as posh assisted living facilities that cost upward of $10,000 a month, agitated residents have shoved, punched, bit, and kicked others. They have wielded canes, walkers, pens, a plate, a mop stick, a shoe, a belt buckle, and even the footrests of wheelchairs as weapons, federal inspection reports show.
How often these altercations take place nationwide is unknown, but an in-depth study of 14 assisted living facilities in New York state led by Cornell University researchers estimated 1 in 7 residents experienced aggression within a month, including verbal, physical, or sexual acts. Their separate study of 10 New York state nursing homes estimated 1 in 5 residents experienced an altercation in a month. Researchers have found that these assailants are disproportionately likely to have dementia.
The diseases that cause dementia can impair brain circuits involved in impulse control and threat perception, raising the risk of aggressive behavior. Residents with Alzheimer's disease and other dementias constitute more than 900,000 of the 2.2 million people living in these settings, many of which include specialized memory care units.
Often, altercations involving a resident with dementia erupt after danger signals are missed or ineffectively addressed, according to a KFF Health News examination of court records, police reports, and state and federal inspection reports.
Since the start of 2024, the federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services has faulted nursing homes at least 700 times for failing to protect residents from physical, sexual, or verbal abuse by other residents, CMS inspection reports show. The federal records do not include assisted living facilities, which are regulated by states.
In the first three months of this year, CMS cited nursing homes more often for resident-to-resident abuse than for any other type of abuse, neglect, or exploitation, including abuse by employees, the reports show.
The long-term care industry says not every clash can be averted. Presbyterian Homes & Services, a nonprofit Christian chain of senior living facilities, said in a statement: "Caring for individuals living with advanced dementia is complex, and behaviors can change in ways that are difficult to fully predict or prevent, even with clinical interventions in place.”
Eilon Caspi, a dementia consultant and researcher who studies resident-on-resident altercations, said that usually there is a specific unmet need that precedes an altercation. "In the vast majority of incidents," he said, "there are warning signs in the months, weeks, days, hours, and sometimes minutes and seconds prior.”
Breeding grounds
One psychological theory about Alzheimer's, the most common dementia disease, holds that as the brain's networks deteriorate, the balance shifts between the prefrontal cortex, which helps govern judgment and self-control, and limbic regions including the amygdala, which helps process fear and threat responses.
As cognition clouds, people lose the ability to understand what is happening around them and to put distress into words, researchers say. Pain, infection, medication side effects, and other physical and emotional distresses may be expressed through shouting, intimidating gestures, kicking, pushing, or punching. Long-term care facilities can be triggering environments, with intimate care often delivered by a changing stream of aides whom residents can't recognize. Amid noise, close quarters, and rigid routines, interactions become flash points.
"You don't feel safe, because you don't know these strangers who are coming in and taking off your clothes," said Al Power, a geriatrician and an advocate for alternative models of care for people with cognitive issues. "These things will be distressing to anybody."
The Cornell researchers found verbal altercations were the most common type of aggressive interaction but estimated 4% of assisted living residents and 5% of nursing home residents in their studies experienced physical assaults in a month.
Another Cornell study found that Connecticut police were called to nursing homes for resident-to-resident clashes more often than allegations of staff abuse, theft, and residents wandering away without supervision combined. A national analysis of survey data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention calculated nearly 8% of residents in assisted living facilities engaged in physical aggression or abuse toward other residents or staff members.
Many of the physical aggressions KFF Health News identified in CMS inspection reports were perpetrated by residents with diagnoses of dementia, schizophrenia, or other cognitive disorders. In some physical altercations, both residents were aggressors, while other fights were one-sided. Sometimes the residents were roommates.
Laura Mosqueda, a geriatrician at the University of Southern California's Keck Medicine in Los Angeles and a senior adviser to the National Center on Elder Abuse, said: "What worries me is that we just end up blaming two people who have either cognitive impairment or severe, uncontrolled mental health issues, when they're supposed to be in an environment where people are safe."
Gladys Lynch, a retired department store accountant, transferred into the memory care unit at Harbor Crossing in White Bear Lake, Minnesota, in September 2025. Her monthly cost was more than $10,000, according to an invoice provided by the family.
One of Lynch's daughters, Rebecca Norton, installed web cameras in her room and often saw another resident inside. "Every day I looked at it, this woman would be walking into my mom's room, harassing her, digging through her things, using her bathroom, yelling at her," Norton said in an interview. She informed Harbor Crossing's administration, and the facility said it would start locking her mother's door.
Norton emailed a Harbor Crossing administrator a list of issues with her mother's care. "My biggest concern," she wrote, was that her mother's door was not consistently locked and the webcam showed the woman had again entered, rummaged through the bathroom, and taken a couple of adult diapers.
Unknown to Norton, Harbor aides had raised concerns about the other resident, who like Lynch was new to Harbor Crossing's memory unit, according to a Minnesota Department of Health report. Diagnosed with Alzheimer's, severe dementia with agitation, depression, and anxiety, the woman was confused, had difficulty communicating her needs, and hit aides.
Aides repeatedly reported that the woman had "ongoing aggression, entered other residents' apartments, invaded others' personal space, and was difficult to redirect," the health report said. They said medications had been ineffective and pressed for new ones. The report said one nurse told the woman's doctor it was "only a matter of time before" she "hurts another resident."
Captured on camera
On the last day of September, she entered Lynch's room and resisted leaving, the state report said. The next morning, she reappeared. Video of the incident was described in the police and state reports and reviewed by KFF Health News. It shows Lynch guided the woman out and appeared to attempt to lock the door, but the woman opened it and returned once more.
The woman declared it was her house, went into Lynch's bathroom, used the toilet, and then returned to the room Lynch was in. Lynch can be seen repeatedly pressing the alert pendant around her neck to signal nurses for help.
The video shows the woman was almost out of her apartment door when she attempted to touch an object near the door. Lynch put her hands up to block her. The woman slapped at her hands and said, "I'm going to kill you if you don't quit it." She pushed Lynch, who fell, her head hitting the floor and blood seeping out.
Aides arrived 13 minutes after she had initially pressed her pendant, the state report said. Lynch suffered a brain hemorrhage and fractures to her eye socket and ribs, according to the state report. She died in the hospital five days later at age 96; the medical examiner's office declared it a homicide.
Norton said her mother was kind and pleasant and never combative. "My mom deserved better than what they gave her," she said.
Prosecutors declined to bring charges, according to the police report. The state investigation concluded Harbor Crossing was responsible for neglect because it was aware the woman "exhibited violent and aggressive behaviors" and yet had failed to put in place effective interventions. Harbor Crossing has requested the state reconsider its findings.
Preventive tactics
Geriatricians, researchers, and resident advocates say long-term care homes should employ strategies to reduce the risk of altercations, including closer supervision of residents at high risk, relocating them closer to nursing stations, separating residents with repeated conflicts, and adjusting roommate assignments or seating in shared spaces.
Each resident should have a care plan, and homes should train staff to be alert to a resident's triggers and intervene quickly, dementia specialists say. Organized activities are essential to keep residents occupied and engaged. Antipsychotics and other psychotropic medications are often prescribed, but they can increase the risk of falls, strokes, and even death.
An aide can be assigned to watch a particularly challenging resident one-on-one, but many places lack enough staff for protracted, dedicated supervision. Some assisted living facilities will tell a resident's family they must hire a personal aide, who can cost thousands of dollars extra each month. In extreme situations, facilities might send a resident to an emergency room for evaluation or to a psychiatric hospital, or evict or discharge them.
Camille Russell, who served as Kansas' long-term care ombudsman until 2024, said she observed nurses and aides were often "woefully undertrained" in basic elements of dementia care.
"We've gotten too far away from making decisions that are caring decisions," Russell said. "There has to be a balance, and the balance has gotten too far to the profit side.”
A debilitating kick
Many physical altercations between residents result in a scratch or a bruise, but nonfatal scraps can leave permanent damage on deeply frail residents.
Linda Twiddy's first weeks in a Chesapeake, Virginia, memory care unit in August 2024 were happy, her daughter, Barbara Howerin, said in a May interview. Twiddy, a former church secretary with vascular dementia, sang along with a visiting church choir, decorated pumpkins, and visited a cat cafe. The facility, The Vero at Chesapeake, charged Twiddy a one-time $6,825 move-in fee and monthly charges of $7,475, according to the lease.
Seven weeks after Twiddy started living there, a nurse called Howerin. She told her that her mother had been kicked in an altercation with another resident and was being sent to the hospital.
When Howerin arrived at the hospital, she was shocked by the extent of the injury. "It was like 10 inches long by 6 inches wide, the whole front of her shin," she said. "The calf was just like dangling down."
According to an internal facility incident report the family obtained, an aide heard Twiddy scream for help and raced over to see a male resident with dementia trying to hit Twiddy as she sat on the floor in "a pool of blood." The report said, "Linda was screaming get him away from me, he pushed and kicked me."
The man had prior episodes of aggression, according to documents Twiddy's family obtained in a lawsuit they brought against The Vero in Chesapeake Circuit Court. At his previous facility, a progress note from 2023 stated, he was "becoming very aggressive in tone and actions to residents and staff." He "grabbed another resident by the wrists and pushed her," according to the note. He was sent to an emergency room for evaluation of agitation, according to a hospital report. It did not make clear whether he was discharged back to the facility or elsewhere.
Agitation tied to pain
The male resident's medical records at The Vero said he was diagnosed with late-onset Alzheimer's disease, agitation, and anxiety, according to his doctor's deposition. He had chronic pain in his back and trouble sleeping. He could answer simple yes-or-no questions but had trouble providing more extensive answers and couldn't communicate that he was in pain, she testified. His behavioral changes usually occurred when he had a urinary tract infection, the doctor said.
When he was agitated, aides could sometimes calm him by turning on the television so he could watch his beloved New England Patriots, one aide testified in a deposition. A former aide said she tried to avoid dealing with him altogether. "If you go up to him and he was agitated, he'd reach out to try to grab you," she testified. "If he had that cane, he would swing that cane or he would punch at you."
In a court filing, The Vero denied allegations by Twiddy's family that it should have protected residents from him. The filing said The Vero complied with all standards of care and that any injuries Twiddy sustained "were caused by her own negligence" or acts of others.
In their investigation of the incident, Virginia regulators alleged The Vero had failed to assume responsibility for the health, safety, and well-being of its residents. The inspection report said The Vero pledged to appropriately staff the memory care unit based on the number of residents and to ensure someone completed rounds at least every two hours during sleeping hours.
Twiddy underwent three surgeries at the hospital for her leg, including a skin graft, then spent a month in rehabilitation. "She was never able to walk again," her son, Doug Twiddy, said in a May interview.
The family moved Linda Twiddy to a different memory care facility where the nursing station had a clear view of all the rooms. She lived there until her death earlier this year.
The lawsuit was settled on confidential terms in early June. Carlton Bennett, the family's attorney, declined to comment. In an email, Lauren Rogers, a spokesperson for Sinceri Senior Living, which operates The Vero, said the company was pleased the legal case had been resolved but could not comment further, citing confidentiality and patient privacy.
"The Vero at Chesapeake is committed to providing a caring, supportive environment where resident health, safety, and well-being remain our highest priorities," she said.
A history of violence
After Attilio Cecchetto was fatally bludgeoned at Sunrise Post Acute, his adult children and their attorney, Jody Moore, discovered disturbing details about Sam Ato Timaloa. He had been imprisoned in 1999 after being convicted of raping an underage girl and sentenced in 2008 to 24 years in prison for attempted murder involving domestic violence, according to Riverside County court records. His public defender declined to comment.
Cecchetto's sons, Moore, and her colleagues at Moore Hutchins Moore also learned more about the home's owner, PACS Group, a publicly-traded company with more than 300 long-term care facilities. Last year, PACS earned $191 million on revenue of $5.3 billion, according to its annual securities filing.
In the lawsuit the Cecchettos and their father's widow filed against PACS, they accused the company's founders, Jason Murray and Mark Hancock, of draining resources from their nursing homes to pay for the chain's expansion and swell their personal wealth.
The two had earned more than $650 million through stock sales since taking the company public and bought two private luxury jets, according to the lawsuit and securities filings. PACS has also purchased corporate sponsorships for Utah sports teams even though it owns no nursing homes in the state, the lawsuit said.
California regulators fined Sunrise $120,000 for failing to protect Cecchetto and for not taking Timaloa's articulated dislike of noise into account when assigning rooms. Medicare issued its own $62,810 fine.
In legal papers responding to the Cecchettos' lawsuit, PACS denied negligence for his death and alleged he "failed to exercise ordinary care on his own behalf for his own safety." It has sued to overturn the $120,000 state fine, saying it was issued too late and that Sunrise "did what might reasonably be expected of a long-term health care facility licensee acting under similar circumstances" to comply with state rules.
The Cecchettos' lawsuit asks for a judge to impose robust procedures PACS homes must follow for admissions, staff training, room changes, and the reporting of altercations between residents. The suit asks for a court-appointed monitor to oversee compliance. In its written statement to KFF Health News, PACS said "important context" would come out during the process and declined further comment.
In an interview, Cecchetto's three sons, Dino, Gino, and Marco, described their father's life. He spent his childhood on a farm in Italy, growing up under Benito Mussolini. After World War II he moved to Canada, where he learned to tile and lay marble and terrazzo, a decorative flooring material made of chips of stone, glass, or other materials embedded in cement or resin. He relocated to California in the early 1960s, became naturalized, and worked as a tile journeyman and a contractor for decades.
"We don't want this to happen to somebody again," Gino Cecchetto said. "With the life he led, he deserved a quiet, dignified death. Instead, he ended his life in pain and fear.”
https://www.npr.org/2026/07/19/nx-s1-5894692/dementia-violence-warning-supervision-nursing-homes-assisted-living-facility
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THE LONG-LIVED GREENLAND SHARK
Some Greenland sharks alive today may have been contemporaries of Shakespeare. With a scarred heart that beats for centuries and eyesight that doesn't fade, this deep-sea shark defies age-related decline.
The ocean's dead often wash up on the storm-battered west coast of Ireland. But in April 2026, a group of researchers and volunteers stood on the cloudy shoreline of County Sligo, Ireland, and marveled at the sight of a species that had never been stranded here before – a dead Greenland shark.
Judging by its size – around 3m (10ft) long – the grey-beige animal lying on the tidal flats was over 150 years old. It would have been born in the age of Queen Victoria and US president Abraham Lincoln, when three-mast sailing ships crossed the seas, and the car hadn't yet been invented.
By Greenland shark standards, that's pretty young.
"It's such a pity. This guy – it took him 150 years to get to the point where he could have reproduced, could have contributed to get the population on track, and may not have had the chance," says Emilie De Loose, a marine biologist at the Irish Whale and Dolphin Group.
The Greenland shark, the longest living vertebrate on the planet, can live for around 400 years. As baby sharks, some of the ones swimming around today may have been contemporaries of Shakespeare – though the exact length of lifespan is still subject to debate, with estimates ranging from roughly 300 to 500 years.
"We were all just in awe," says De Loose. "It's so mind-boggling to think how long that animal lived, and what it might have seen."
While sad for the species – and the shark – the stranding, and the necropsy that followed, were an opportunity to shine some light on a species shrouded in mystery.
A visitor from the deep
"There is something very intimate about working with dead animals, because you really get to know the species," says Jasmine Stavenow Jerremalm, a PhD researcher in marine ecology at University College Cork in Ireland, who took part on the necropsy of the shark. "Dead animals can tell us a lot about the living ones."
The first challenge was getting the shark to a lab. Greenland sharks are among the world's biggest sharks, measuring up to 5m (16ft). This one weighed over 200kg (440lb). The group on the shore covered the body with seaweed, to prevent seagulls and other animals from pecking at it. The next day, in a recovery operation overseen by the National Museum of Ireland, a crane hoisted it onto the back of a lorry and took it to a regional veterinary lab.
A day later, protected by masks, gloves and overalls, a group of researchers from a range of organizations and institutions, including the museum, started examining the shark in a well-ventilated space.
"When it's an animal that could be a few hundred years old, there could be anything in that animal, so for health and safety, you want to be sure you follow good routines," says Stavenow Jerremalm. "If it's an animal that's lived for that long, bacteria or viruses from very long ago could be within that body", and then suddenly get exposed through the necropsy, she explains. "It's important to be mindful that we don’t know why this animal died, and which potential diseases it could have within it.”
When it comes to Greenland sharks, researchers are still trying to answer a vast range of questions – from how these animals manage to live for such an extraordinarily long time, to basic facts around their existence.
Greenland sharks are slow-swimming, solitary scavengers and predators. They feed on carcasses but are also known to catch prey such as seals, and have even been observed "hoovering" up their prey. Powerful suction allows them to suck prey into their mouths, swallowing it whole.
"Greenland sharks are very slow swimmers so they are mostly thought of as scavengers that feed off carcasses. But sometimes they seem to opportunistically manage to catch live, fast-swimming prey like seals,” says Lily Fogg, a postdoctoral researcher in evolutionary biology at the University of Basel in Switzerland. "Since Arctic waters can be quite dim, it is possible that they can ambush sleeping or resting seals, or maybe pick off seals that are already injured or trapped by ice."
Greenland sharks live in the North Atlantic and Arctic waters around Greenland, Canada and Iceland, and have evolved certain features that help them cope with the cold. High concentrations of chemicals in their bodies act as an anti-freeze, which has the side effect of making their flesh poisonous.
But much about this elusive animal remains unknown.
"For such a large shark with a broad distribution, that is not really a rare species throughout most of its range, it's amazing how little we know about these sharks," says Brynn Devine, a marine biologist and Arctic Fisheries Scientist at Oceans North, a conservation NGO, who was not involved in the necropsy.
"Even basic aspects of their biology and ecology are unknown," she says. "For example, we still do not know where their mating and pupping grounds are, and only one pregnant female has ever been observed so we don't even know for certain how many pups they have per pregnancy or how often they reproduce."
As a result of this uncertainty, scientists aren't able to accurately estimate how many Greenland sharks there are in the world, she says. This makes it harder to assess population health, and their risk from threats like fishing bycatch.
"It's difficult to protect a species effectively if you aren't sure what areas or habitats are most important for them for key behaviors like mating and pupping, as well as not knowing how often they reproduce or how many pups they have," Devine says. "[There are] lots of big mysteries that still need to be solved beyond how they live so long."
It was the first stranding of a Greenland shark in Ireland, which does however get many other strandings, De Loose says – due to the way its west coast juts out into the Atlantic, and is battered by storms that can sweep animals ashore.
"It would have been old by our time scale – but it was maybe 150, maybe 200 years old if we're stretching it, so, for a Greenland shark it's just reached maturity," says De Loose.
De Loose and the other researchers examined the shark for potential wounds or cuts that could explain its death – from fishing nets, for example – but found no signs of damage. They then carefully skinned the shark. The skin, covered in sharp little hooks called denticles, is currently stored in a freezer, ready for taxidermy.
The National Museum of Ireland hopes to eventually display the specimen: "This would allow future visitors to learn about one of the world's most mysterious shark species and the scientific work needed to study such creatures," says Amy Geraghty, curator of zoology at the National Museum of Ireland, Natural History. "In short, we hope to learn and share as much as possible from this unusual stranding.”
The researchers then pried open the shark, revealing its massive liver – weighing 50kg (110lb) – which they carefully guided out into a large steel basin to examine it. "Everything was examined, measured and weighed with samples taken as we went," says De Loose.
Another crucial step was to remove the eyes: the lenses will be used for radiocarbon dating, which will help find out the shark's age.
Greenland sharks' eyes are another source of mystery.
"For a long time, Greenland sharks have been described as having very poor vision, or even being blind," says Fogg. "This is because of their extremely long lifespan [...] and little tassel-like parasites that hook onto the front of their eyes.
However, a 2026 research paper by Fogg and others has found the opposite: "Their eyes and retinas are actually intact and highly specialized for life in very dim light," explains Fogg, who was not involved in the Irish stranding case. "Even in individuals over a century old, the cells and molecular machinery needed for vision are still there and still look healthy. Their visual system is essentially like a 'low-light camera', which makes perfect sense if you spend your life in the dark, cold depths of the Arctic Ocean," she explains. "What's really remarkable is that this complex tissue appears to keep working for so long. It's a visual system that seems built to last for centuries."
The dangling parasites don't actually have much of an effect on the shark's vision, she says, according to the research.
This resilience is in contrast to humans' visual system, she says. Human eyesight tends to decline with age, "while in the Greenland shark, we show that vision can remain intact for over a century. This is quite astonishing as it suggests they may have evolved mechanisms to resist or delay this kind of age-related degeneration," says Fogg.
One reason for the resilience may lie in the Greenland shark's ability to repair damaged DNA, she suggests: her team found genes involved in DNA repair that were especially active, or "turned on", in the Greenland shark compared to other sharks that don't live for as long.
"This is especially interesting because DNA damage and repair capacity are widely linked to aging processes across animals," she says.
A sample of muscle tissue will be sent to a lab for a different, experimental method to establish a Greenland shark's age, based on the length of its telomeres, the protective caps on the ends of DNA sequences, says Stavenow Jerremalm. Telomeres tend to shorten with age, along with exposure to environmental stresses.
"We opened the 'chest' to reach the heart of the animal so we could remove that as well," says De Loose. The heart seemed healthy, she says – and was huge, weighing 34kg (75lb): "It was gigantic, because it's a gigantic shark." For comparison, a human heart weighs around 300g (10oz).
How can a heart beat on for centuries? A recent study examining Greenland sharks' hearts found they showed common signs of aging, such as scarring. However, despite these markers, the hearts seemed well-functioning. The findings suggest that the Greenland shark has evolved to be resilient to markers of aging that are associated with poor heart health in other animals, including humans.
This highly unusual finding – the heart continuing to function, despite being marked by aging – "underscores resilience as a key mechanism enabling extreme longevity," the papers' authors say.
For Stavenow Jerremalm, the post-mortem offered a chance to take a close look at some of the Greenland shark's unique features, which have evolved to perfectly suit its needs, such as feeding on carcasses on the seabed. "It eats it, even when it's rotten, no matter its stage – it takes that opportunity to eat," she says.
The dead shark in the lab had the perfect tools for that job. "Its teeth were so adapted for ripping off chunks of carcasses, because of its straight, very sharp upper teeth, and the bottom teeth had two different directions, almost like a saw. That's a perfect adaptation for biting off chunks of carcasses it finds on the seabed."
The stomach and entire digestive tract were removed intact, for later analysis. Feeling the closed stomach, the researchers noticed that it seemed empty, but the spiral valve – a part of the intestine – seemed full, suggesting it had recently digested food. The empty stomach may not have been a problem for the shark, which has low energetic needs (their slow metabolism may have evolved to cope with resource-scarce environments, like the Arctic, with highly seasonal prey).
One of its testicles was twisted, and the spleen's color looked unusual, De Loose says – but overall, the shark seemed healthy. It's possible that the shark was sick in a way that wasn't obvious, she suggests – and the analyses of the organs and samples may eventually reveal more about the cause of its death.
"It makes you wonder, what happened?" De Loose says. "It's sad because it's old by our standards, but it really had much of its life ahead."
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20260717-the-shark-that-lives-for-centuries
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HOW HAPPINESS LOWERS CORTISOL AND LEADS TO HEART HEALTH
Recent field research is authenticating the age-old association people make between the psychological state (feelings) and the biological (the heart). Studies now confirm that happy moods create measurable physiological changes.
The 2026 World Happiness Report (WHR) notes that its quarter-century of research continues to support a finding in psychology that longevity and immunity are boosted not by the absence of negative emotions but by the presence of positive emotions. This is true across wide demographics and in all relationships, but is particularly pronounced among older adults. The health benefits of happy moods are boosted when positive feelings are shared with others and enhanced even more when the mood is shared between people who feel good about the relationship.
Field and Lab Studies Align
Tomiko Yoneda, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of California, Davis, was the lead author of a 2024 study investigating co-experienced positive emotions in couples’ daily lives. From 2012 to 2018, Yoneda and her team measured saliva cortisol levels concurrent with the self-reported emotional states of 321 older adult couples aged 56–89 years multiple times a day for a week in three studies in Canada and Germany. She notes that the study’s field findings concur with previous laboratory studies that show a relationship between happiness, longevity, resilience, and a stronger immune response due to reduced long-term cortisol exposure, which supports better overall health.
Yoshida notes that with aging, the links between emotions and cortisol may be more pronounced. Older adults tend to have stronger physiological responses to stress, and their bodies are less able to slow down their cortisol production. Sharing a happy moment can buffer cortisol production, contributing to healthier aging.
Yoneda said, “These research results are consistent with a psychological theory that suggests positive emotions increase our ability to act more fluidly in the moment. These experiences can create a positive feedback loop that enhances this ability over time.”
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NEW LAB-GROWN TEETH MAY REPLACE TODAY’S PROCEDURES
While teeth play a greater role in health than many realize, current dental solutions for tooth loss are temporary and subpar. What if we could regrow our teeth instead?
Some surveys suggest upwards of 70% of adults fear going to the dentist. Their anxieties and distrust of fillings and drillings lead them to skip routine cleaning and care.
Yet, nearly every day, biochemist Hannele Ruohola-Baker gets an email from someone begging to undergo bizarre dentistry experiments that go beyond the routine pains of most dentist visits – they want her to help them regrow their teeth.
That's because Ruohola-Baker is part of a growing number of scientists worldwide harnessing the power of regenerative medicine to replace traditional dental procedures for the millions of people who are missing teeth and managing tooth pain.
If their vision becomes reality, a visit to the dentist could one day involve regrowing damaged teeth tissue or even an entire tooth, rather than repairing it with synthetic materials or yanking it out – an appealing prospect not only because of its novelty, but also because teeth play a greater role in health and well-being than many may realize.
"When we first began, one thing became very clear to me," says Ruohola-Baker, who is the associate director of the University of Washington Institute for Stem Cell and Regenerative Medicine in the US. "People are ready for something new in dentistry."
Open wide
Teeth are "your window to the world," says Pamela Yelick, a professor at the Tufts School of Dental Medicine in the US. "If you're afraid to open your mouth or can't eat properly, it's a very downward spiral."
Historically, it was underappreciated that "oral health is key to good systemic health," says Yelick. Now, it's increasingly understood that dental issues, like bacteria from gum disease, can increase the risk of heart disease and respiratory infections. They have even been linked to Alzheimer's disease. Tooth loss, meanwhile, is associated with more illness and earlier death. It affects the ability to eat, chew, and smile, and can harm social and emotional well-being – an insidious cycle that can begin in childhood.
Dentists have many tools to help counteract this. They can repair cavities by removing what's damaged and filling the space with a man-made material, such as a resin composite. And they can use fillings to fix minor chips and cracks.
But these are imperfect solutions. For instance, there's a lot of variability in the durability of fillings, which can last anywhere from about five to 20 years. It’s also not uncommon for people to have to go through "repeated interventions" with procedures like these, says Anne George, a professor of oral biology at the University of Illinois, Chicago, in the US.
That’s because these fixes primarily focus on "repairing damage, rather than restoring biological function," says George. Instead, "regenerative dentistry can be a paradigm shift," says George. "It emphasizes healing.”
Self-filling cavities
Cavities, for one, are "the most common thing that destroys the tooth," says George.
Teeth have four main layers: enamel, dentine, cementum, and tooth pulp. Cavities develop when dental plaque bacteria feed on sugars and produce acids that gradually dissolve that first layer of tooth enamel. Dentine is beneath enamel and is softer and less resistant to decay, and when enamel is lost and dentine becomes exposed, cavity risk further increases.
George researches the proteins that help dentine grow, mineralize, and repair itself. She was also part of a team that cloned one of the genes that helps build dentine, understanding more about the inner workings of how teeth create and maintain this tissue in the first place. This knowledge could lead to new treatments that stimulate damaged teeth to repair cavity damage with new dentine on their own, says George, ending the need for traditional fillings to plug the holes instead.
Ruhola-Baker and her team are also working on "living fillings" – but ones rooted more in enamel, rather than in dentine. After researching donated wisdom teeth, the scientist found that the special cells that make enamel, called ameloblasts, die after a human tooth erupts so they cannot be stimulated once the tooth breaks through.
Instead, the team used chemical signals to coax some stem cells into ameloblasts, and induced other stem cells to become odontoblasts, which are cells that make dentine. Combined in a dish, these ingredients produced a tooth organoid that secretes enamel proteins on its own.
Ruohla-Baker can see a future in which these enamel proteins are used to make fillings or painted onto cracked teeth. But her long-term goal is a whole lab-grown tooth: eventually, she wants to embed the engineered cells necessary to build a tooth in a patient's mouth and let "nature take care of the rest," she says.
How to farm a tooth
If a tooth has many cavities and decay, the best and easiest treatment may be to pull it out and place an implant – a combination of a screw-like post, an artificial crown, and a connector of the two.
But implants don't contain nerves that help you feel while you chew, so it's possible to unintentionally bite down too hard and crack the implant. Bacteria can attach to the implant, leading to a condition that can affect the remaining healthy teeth. Artificial crowns need replacement after about 15 years and can cost thousands of dollars, depending on your insurance.
Entirely lab-grown teeth, instead, could be a more durable solution than implants, says Ana Angelova Volponi, director of regenerative dentistry at King's College London, in the UK.
"Rather than just trying to patch what has been damaged, we could use a biological replacement," says Volponi, who is also creating an organoid capable of developing into a replacement tooth.
Volponi's team found that cells taken from adult human gum tissue, combined with tooth-forming cells from mice, could produce a hybrid human-mouse "tooth structure" with viable, developing roots. She’s now working on ways to recreate the instructions that guide such tooth formation, along with engineered biomaterials that might help those cells assemble into a structured, functional tooth.
Unfortunately, this does not happen naturally.
Unlike some other animals, humans can't continuously grow new teeth once something happens to their adult set. Sharks, instead, have an endless supply of teeth, regenerating them in a continuous conveyor-belt-like manner. Kangaroos get multiple sets of molars, as do elephants.
Pigs also have a biological quirk: their jaws contain multiple sets of unerupted adult tooth buds. It's because of this eccentricity that Yelick was able to grow human-like teeth in adult Yucatan minipigs using a combination of human and pig tooth cells.
The team collected cells capable of forming dentine from human teeth and cells that form enamel from unerupted teeth in discarded pig jaws from a butcher. "Even if a pig is harvested for food, there are tooth buds that are in the jaw getting ready to form another tooth," says Yelick.
After growing the cells in a laboratory, the researchers combined them on a bioengineered scaffold designed to mimic the environment of a developing tooth. After three months, tooth-like structures developed at a rate close to that of natural pig teeth.
"It was a proof of principle that this could really work… many, many people reached out who were desperate to fix their own tooth problems," says Yelick, who is now looking to do the experiment over a longer period of time, and directly inside a pig jaw. Eventually, Yelick and her team want to prompt cells to grow teeth in a person’s mouth without any pig cells involved
From the lab to the dentist's chair
Despite the demand, we're still years away from the first person to get self-filling cavities or a lab-grown tooth replacement. Before "we can begin to talk about" studying humans, experiments with non-human primates have to happen first, says Ruohola-Baker. That will take more research, time, and money. Plus, to get lab-grown teeth into human mouths, researchers need to create improved environments for tooth development.
In the meantime, the lessons learned in regenerative dentistry could help broader efforts to reproduce various parts of the body, such as organs and bones. Because teeth are "highly sophisticated living organs," says Yelick, efforts to replicate them in labs are teaching scientists how hard and soft tissues work together on a very basic level.
While it may not happen soon, Volponi is confident that safe, sustainable regenerative dental solutions will eventually be available to the public. "That's where I see the future," she says. "It's not very clear, but it’s hopeful.”
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20260717-goodbye-implants-scientists-are-regrowing-teeth
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RESEARCHERS CONFIRM CAUSE OF EARTH’S BIGGEST MASS EXTINCTION
A new Stanford-led study offers the clearest picture yet of how some ocean life survived our planet’s biggest mass extinction while most animals did not.
About 252 million years ago, 96% of marine species and 70% of land animals died off during the Permian–Triassic extinction event, known as the “Great Dying.” Not all branches of the evolutionary tree were affected evenly, however.
In the ancient oceans, the extinction wiped out nearly all brachiopods, which resemble clams, and certain types of seafloor-dwellers like sea lilies (crinoids). These were the animals that dominated seafloors for roughly the first 280 million years of animal life on Earth. However, only about half of the mollusks, like clams and snails, died out. Ever since, Earth’s oceans have been dominated by mollusks, fish, and echinoderms such as starfish and sea urchins that survived.
The new study, published July 6 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, for the first time incorporates biological responses of the animal groups that were decimated in the extinction and those that fared better. The groups hit hardest were those whose metabolisms could least tolerate warm, poorly oxygenated water. Such conditions prevailed throughout much of the world’s oceans as the Great Dying unfolded, caused by a surge of volcanic activity that released gargantuan amounts of planet-warming gases like carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere.
“With this study, we essentially wanted to solve the mystery of why, when you go to the beach, you collect the shells of clams and snails rather than those of brachiopods,” said lead study author Jose Andres Marquez, a former PhD student in the lab of Erik Anders Sperling at Stanford. “Our findings show that, across different organism groups, extinctions happened at much higher rates for those more vulnerable to increases in water temperature and decreases in oxygen availability.”
The findings serve as a warning of sorts. Conditions preceding the extinction event are very similar to the climate of the past tens of millions of years, which is being altered by emissions from burning fossil fuels and other human activities.
“This study is really the final nail in the coffin for what caused the Permian–Triassic mass extinction,” said Sperling, the study’s senior author and an associate professor of Earth and planetary sciences in the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability. “The biggest mass extinction of all time started from a world that is very similar to today in having a relatively cool, relatively well-oxygenated ocean, and then there was a giant injection of carbon dioxide into the Earth system. Understanding how Earth and Earth’s biota responded back then could inform us of what’s to come.”
Ancient vs. modern metabolisms
Metabolism refers to all the chemical processes happening inside an organism’s body to obtain energy and sustain life. During the Paleozoic period, which ended with the Great Dying, much of the oceanic life consisted of slow-metabolizing, bottom-dwelling, mostly immobile, filter-feeding animals such as brachiopods, crinoids (sea lilies, related to starfish), and certain corals and sea anemones.
In contrast, animal groups that persisted after the Paleozoic display greater mobility and predatory behavior, requiring faster metabolisms. These more modern ocean creatures include fish – obvious frequent, fast movers – as well as slow but mobile snails, sea urchins, and bivalves, such as clams, oysters, and mussels.
Compared to brachiopods, bivalves possess much faster metabolisms and greater energy needs because they often have bulkier bodies and muscular “foot” extensions to dig and crawl. “This is why we eat clam chowder and we don’t eat brachiopod chowder,” Sperling said.
“Brachiopods have almost no meat.”
Prior to the Great Dying, brachiopods outnumbered bivalves. Nowadays, only around 400 brachiopod species still exist, compared to about 10,000-15,000 bivalve species. Sperling said this dramatic turnover compares to the extinction of the non-avian dinosaurs 65 million years ago during what is probably the most famous mass extinction, “where mammals essentially took over and never gave up that niche to reptiles again.”
Worldwide patterns of extinction
The new research builds on a 2018 study led by researchers at Princeton and Stanford – including Sperling and Jon Payne, also a co-author of the new study – that found evidence indicating oxygen loss and warming in Earth’s oceans were the primary cause for the Great Dying. However, the physiological data in that study came only from modern ocean species measured by other scientists, skewing the results toward economically important fish and crustaceans versus the kinds of animals that went extinct at higher rates during the mass die-off.
“In our new study, we filled in this gap about the physiology of the Paleozoic fauna to see if we could explain not only the biogeography of the extinction but the taxonomic selectivity of the extinction,” said Sperling.
Fieldwork to gather information on impacted organismal groups took place over the years since the earlier study, including in the San Juan Islands of Washington state, where brachiopods are still common. The researchers collected a diverse set of ocean animal groups representative of those that dominated oceans before and after the Great Dying. They performed experiments at field stations and in Sperling’s lab at Stanford to monitor organisms’ oxygen use in a chamber and how that usage changed with water temperature. As temperature rises, animals’ metabolic rates increase as the extra energy makes reactions occur faster, and they require more oxygen.
The lab work showed that the Paleozoic fauna can live in water with less oxygen, under conditions that would asphyxiate ocean animals from the modern groups. But when the temperature increases, the Paleozoic fauna’s slow metabolisms cannot keep pace and their oxygen needs increase much faster than modern fauna’s. This outcome is ultimately related to their different body plans – the more active and athletic modern fauna require more oxygen at a minimum, but when oxygen requirements rise (as during warming), they have the muscles and gills to match.
“Warming and oxygen loss are the key drivers,” said Sperling. Other research has strongly implicated ocean acidification as well, whereby reactions with atmospheric carbon dioxide render ocean water more acidic, making it tougher for organisms to grow their shells. However, while the new findings suggest acidification may have contributed to the extinction, it was nowhere near the most devastating factor, Sperling added.
Warming today
The Stanford researchers plan to examine more marine animal groups to further understand the intertwined impacts of the three stressors of warming, lack of oxygen, and acidification, which are growing in severity today.
The researchers emphasize that history could well repeat itself, as changing ocean conditions threaten modern species that are vulnerable to warmer, oxygen-depleted waters.
“The bad news is, we are on track for Permian-Triassic levels of warming in worst-case scenario projections,” said Sperling. Temperatures increased 8-12° Celsius over thousands of years to cause the Great Dying, and today, over just 100-200 years, temperatures are projected to be 1.5-4° Celsius warmer than pre-industrial times by 2100. “But the good news is, we’re still at the point where we can change things and do something about it.”
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1135567
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HOW COFFEE MAY SLOW DOWM AGING
A new study says that polyphenols and other compounds in coffee help activate a specific protein in the body known to help alleviate inflammation and protect against stress and chronic diseases, leading to healthier aging.
Although aging is inevitable, research shows there are healthy choices people can make — such as not smoking, being physically active, and following a healthy dietTrusted Source — that may allow them to age slower and in a healthier way.
When it comes to diet, previous studies show that certain foods may help slow down the aging process due to the nutrients they contain.
One example is polyphenols — naturally-occurring micronutrients known to help lower damage to the body’s cells and lower inflammation.
Polyphenols are found in a variety of foods, including berries, pomegranates, artichokes, spinach, dark chocolate, extra virgin olive oil, walnuts, green and black teas, and coffee.
“Aging and associated age-dependent development of chronic diseases are facts of life; however, there are dietary and lifestyle choices that can slow this process,” Stephen Safe, PhD, a distinguished professor and Sid Kyle Endowed Chair in Veterinary Toxicology in the Department of Veterinary Physiology and Pharmacology in the College of Veterinary Medicine and Biomedical Sciences at Texas A&M University, explained to Medical News Today.
“For example, individuals that live in Blue Zones or drink coffee live longer and have decreased age-related health problems,” Safe told us.
Safe is the lead author of a new study published in Nutrients that helps to shed more light on how coffee may help provide aging benefits.
Researchers found that polyphenols and other compounds in coffee help activate a specific protein in the body known to help alleviate inflammation and protect against stress and chronic diseases, leading to healthier aging.
Coffee’s polyphenols activate a protective protein in the body
Using multiple cellular models, scientists examined how certain polyphenols and other compounds in coffee might interact with a specific protein in the body called NR4A1.
“NR4A1 was initially discovered as a gene that responds to various types of stress including oxidative and inflammatory stress,” Safe explained.
At the study’s conclusion, researchers found that various compounds in coffee — including polyphenols like caffeic acid — bind to and activate NR4A1, potentially reducing cellular damage and offering disease protection.
“The significance of this finding is that now we know at least one pathway (coffee-NR4A1) that explains some of the age-protective effects of coffee that have been observed in humans, and these results further support a protective role of NR4A1 in aging,” Safe explained.
“It also suggests that NR4A1 may be a target for developing pharmaceuticals and nutriceuticals that are health protective,” he told us.
Not yet proof that coffee is an anti-aging treatment
MNT had the opportunity to speak with Dung Trinh, MD, an internist for Memorial Care Medical Group and chief medical officer of the Healthy Brain Clinic in Irvine, CA, about this study.
Trinh — who was not involved in this research — commented his first reaction to these findings was one of cautious optimism.
“The study offers an intriguing biological explanation for some of the health benefits that have long been associated with coffee,” he explained.
“At the same time, it is important to put the findings in context,“ he told us. “This was primarily a laboratory study using cell models — not a clinical trial showing that drinking coffee slows aging or prevents diseases such as Alzheimer’s. I view it as an important mechanistic clue and a strong reason to continue the research, rather than proof that coffee is an anti-aging treatment.”
Trinh said while we can’t stop chronological aging, we may be able to influence how well the body ages.
“The goal should not simply be to add years to life; it should be to add healthy, functional years,” he continued. “This is especially important as populations live longer. Delaying the onset of disability, cognitive decline, or chronic disease by even a few years could have a major impact on patients, families, caregivers, and healthcare systems.”
“Research into receptors such as NR4A1 may help scientists identify new prevention strategies, biomarkers, and therapeutic targets, although those possibilities still require rigorous human testing,” Trinh added.
Ways to activate the NR4A1 protein
For those who may not want to drink coffee, MNT asked Trinh if there were any other ways to activate the NR4A1 protein for its potential health benefits.
Trinh said that at this point, we do not have a clinically proven diet, supplement, or lifestyle prescription specifically designed to activate NR4A1 in people, and that distinction is important.
“The compounds that appeared most active in this study were not primarily caffeine,” he detailed. “They included plant-derived polyphenols such as caffeic acid, chlorogenic acid, and ferulic acid. Related compounds are found in a variety of fruits, vegetables, and other plant foods, and previous laboratory research has identified substances such as resveratrol, quercetin, and kaempfero as potential NR4A1 ligands.”
“However, we do not yet know whether consuming a particular food produces enough of these compounds in human tissues to generate a meaningful NR4A1 effect,” Trinh added.
For those who do not drink coffee, Trinh said the most responsible advice remains to follow an overall healthy pattern:
follow a diverse, plant-rich diet
exercise regularly
obtain adequate sleep
avoid smoking
manage blood pressure, cholesterol, and blood sugar.
“Those behaviors have much stronger human evidence behind them than attempting to target one receptor through a particular food or supplement,” he added.
https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/how-coffee-may-help-slow-down-aging-according-to-a-new-study#Ways-to-activate-the-NR4A1-protein
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GO AHEAD, DRINK YOUR COFFEE
For most healthy adults, up to 400 mg of caffeine a day is considered safe.
Depending on the coffee and how it's prepared, the most favorable cardiovascular outcomes are consistently seen in people drinking 2-4 cups a day. Moderate coffee consumption has been associated with lower risks of cardiovascular disease, heart failure, stroke, Type 2 diabetes, and premature death.
One recent study of more than 43,000 Americans estimated that people drinking 1-2 cups daily lived about two years longer after age 50 than non-drinkers. That doesn't prove coffee adds years to life. It does add to a remarkably consistent body of evidence linking moderate coffee consumption with better long-term health.
The story is more complex than simply saying coffee is "good" or "bad." Recent randomized trials suggest coffee may increase premature ventricular contractions in some people but does not appear to trigger atrial fibrillation and may even reduce recurrences in selected coffee drinkers.
Coffee Shouldn’t Be Confused with Energy Drinks
Although both coffee and energy drinks may contain caffeine, energy drinks may deliver larger doses rapidly and frequently contain sugar, concentrated stimulants, or other ingredients. They also have been associated with heart rhythm disturbances and other cardiovascular complications.
Coffee Is More Than Caffeine
One of the greatest advances in coffee research has been recognizing that coffee is not simply a caffeine delivery system. A cup of coffee contains hundreds of biologically active compounds, including chlorogenic acids, polyphenols, melanoidins, trigonelline, antioxidants, and other compounds created during roasting and brewing. Together, these substances may influence inflammation, oxidative stress, insulin sensitivity, vascular function, and metabolism.
Years ago, my UF colleagues and I measured caffeine in commercially available coffees and found enormous variation, even in the same beverage purchased from the same coffee shop on different days. We also showed that "decaffeinated" did not mean caffeine-free. The study received widespread media attention because it questioned whether a cup of coffee delivered a predictable dose of caffeine. It reinforced an important lesson: coffee is a remarkably complex beverage, not simply a dose of caffeine.
What Coffee Teaches Us About Addiction
Coffee illustrates an important principle I have spent much of my career teaching.
As my late friend and colleague, Dr. Roland Griffiths, liked to point out, millions of people are physiologically dependent on caffeine. My response was always the same: "Exactly—and that's why dependence and addiction are not the same thing." Tolerance and mild withdrawal symptoms are normal consequences of a brain that learns and adapts. Stop caffeine, and the brain adapts again.
I've often used coffee to teach medical students a fundamental principle of addiction medicine. Addiction is a behavioral and clinical syndrome marked by loss of control, compulsive use, craving, and continued use despite harmful consequences. Coffee reminds us that withdrawal alone is not addiction.
Individualized Medicine Replaces One-Size-Fits-All Advice
Perhaps the most important message from the American Heart Association is that one size rarely fits all.
Pregnancy, anxiety, insomnia, certain arrhythmias, medication interactions, and other conditions may justify reducing caffeine intake.
The timing of coffee may matter as well. A cup consumed early in the day is not the same exposure as several cups consumed late in the afternoon or evening, particularly for someone vulnerable to insomnia. Medicine is moving away from universal recommendations and toward individualized care.
Coffee consumption is associated with later age-at-onset of Parkinson’s disease
Peering Ahead
Researchers keep investigating how genetics, the gut microbiome, aging, timing, and coffee’s many bioactive compounds influence cardiovascular disease, depression, Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease, and healthy aging. I enjoy watching the science of coffee evolve because it parallels what I have seen throughout my career in addiction research. Early answers are often simple. Better answers are usually more subtle.
I have watched coffee move from a guilty pleasure to a suspected cardiovascular villain and now back toward a remarkably complex beverage whose effects depend on the person drinking it.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/addiction-outlook/202607/go-ahead-drink-your-coffee
Oriana:
Coffee makes most people feel better: more alert, in better emotional mood, “bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.” This makes some people decide against it— perhaps due to the long-time association of pleasure with sin. There has been no public health campaign to let the public know that coffee has many health benefits, aside from improving cognitive function. Lowering the risk of Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s means less suffering and millions of healthcare dollars saved. But does the average person know that coffee is good for both the heart and brain?
It's also good for the liver, lowering the risk of liver disease, including cirrhosis and liver cancer. And it's good for the gut microbiome, increasing its richness and promoting beneficial bacteria.
Sure, coffee is already the main source of antioxidants consumed daily. But there is no need to feel that it is a “guilty pleasure.” On the contrary, it is a healthy pleasure.
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ending on beauty:
ARCHAIC PENELOPE
It’s my waiting that creates you.
The tapestry I weave,
unraveling you in dreams,
is your secret map.
How you try
to read over my shoulder!
You’re too close,
thinking you are too far.
Here’s a seaweed-dripping cave
and a sea-nymph’s bribe:
immortality, but nothing else
will ever happen in your life —
and you pick mortality,
that beautiful blood flower.
At the cold mouth of the earth,
the dead greet you, arms of mist —
like an echo of the future
in their shroud of finished past.
high above the ledge of bones,
the Sirens unriddle all.
Days slide off the loom of hours.
The moon sets, mottled with regrets
like a lamp with islands of dead moths.
Again you dream of home.
Wreathed with horizons,
you want me
to stroke your neck,
stiff from looking ahead;
weary of women
opening like shores,
you want my body to lead
into the body of silence.
You beg to know
how the story ends —
and it is I
who tie you to the mast.
~ Oriana
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