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PENELOPE IN CHULA VISTA
The wind picked up, nagging at the sails.
At the gate of the marina I asked,
“Do you really think non-monogamy
is a higher form of love?” He half
turned his head and answered in profile,
“At the highest level your lover is
God, and you surrender to God.”
“But on the human level” — he hurried
his gait — “everything is imperfect.
This man could dance himself
harp moaned, a long wailing echo
as from an empty drinking glass.
Small herons nested in the pines.
At the shore of the returning sunset,
I lean over the edge of dusk:
“How long has it been, my love?”
It’s not him I ask. Twenty years
I’ve been waiting for myself –
my shawl woven and rewoven
countless times. I say
shawl, not yet brave enough
to admit it is a shroud.
~ Oriana
*
A MEDITATION ON THE DEATH OF MICHEL FOUCAULT
(THE DAY MICHEL FOUCAULT LEFT US)
"Death left its old tragic heaven and became the lyrical core of man: his invisible truth, his visible secret."
~ Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception
"What gives the meditation on death its particular value is not just that it anticipates what opinion generally represents as the greatest misfortune; it is not just that it enables one to convince oneself that death is not evil; rather, it offers the possibility of looking back, in advance so to speak, on one’s life.
By considering oneself as at the point of death, one can judge the proper value of every action one is performing. Death, said Epictetus, takes the laborer while he is working, the sailor while sailing: “And what activity would you like to be engaged in when you are taken?”
And Seneca envisages the moment of death as the moment when one will be able to become one’s own judge, as it were, and able to measure the moral progress one will have made up to one’s final day. In letter 26 he wrote: “On the moral progress I have been able to make in the course of my life, I trust only in death… I await the day when I will pass judgment on myself and know whether virtue was only in my words or really in my heart.”
~ Michel Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the subject. Lectures at the Collège de France 1981-1982, tr. by Graham Burchell, New York: Palgrave MacMillan, [2001] 2005
The excerpt quoted above is the very last paragraph of the “Course Summary” produced by Michel Foucault for the Annuaire du Collège de France. It was first published in French in 1989, in Résumé des cours. 1970-1982, a collection of all the similar summaries he wrote for the Collège de France during that period.
Michel Foucault gave his last lecture at the Collège de France on March 28, 1984 (on The Courage of the Truth). His last words in that lecture were, ironically, "I HAD THINGS TO SAY TO YOU ABOUT THE GENERAL FRAMEWORK OF THESE ANALYSES. BUT WELL, IT IS TOO LATE.
Yes, it was too late. He didn't get the chance.
He died three months later, on June 25, 1984.
When Foucault fell ill, Gilles Deleuze called friends of Foucault to inquire about his conditions. An optimistic Deleuze commented "Maybe it's nothing, Foucault will leave hospital and come and tell us that everything is all right." But Deleuze was wrong: Foucault would die that very year. Deleuze was asked to speak at Foucault's funeral. At the funeral, Deleuze read out from Foucault's The Use of Pleasure —
"After all, what would be the value of the passion for knowledge if it resulted only in a certain amount of knowledgeableness and not, in one way or another and to the extent possible, in the knower's straying a field of himself? There are times in life when the question of knowing whether one can think differently than one thinks, and perceive differently than one sees, is absolutely necessary if one is to go on looking and reflecting at all."
Foucault’s claim that death is a primary site for becoming what one is.
“It is in death,” Foucault claimed, “that the individual becomes at one with himself, escaping from the monotonous lives and their leveling effect; in the slow, half-subterranean, but already visible approach of death, the dull, common life, at last becomes an individuality . . . and gives it the style of its truth.”
Few living thinkers have been as prolific as the dead Michel Foucault. In the thirty-eight years since his death, he has published thirteen book-length lecture courses, four volumes of interviews and papers (totaling over 3,500 pages), and countless bootlegs, plus the fourth volume of his History of Sexuality, completed shortly before his death — The Confessions of the Flesh.
We can only imagine that Foucault himself would have reacted to this state of affairs with his famous caustic laugh. For as two recently published volumes remind us, Foucault was haunted by the bond between language and death, as well as the notion that writing always, in a sense, comes from “beyond the grave.”
As he has stated in the interview he did with critic Claude Bonnefoy in 1968, "For me, speech begins after death.”
~ René Troy Tun, Facebook (Oriana: I think there is something delightfully ironic about this text appearing on Facebook, among cat videos and photos of restaurant meals — and other instances of death denial.)
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THE IMPRINT OF VIKINGS ON THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE
Vikings rewired English so deeply they even gave us the words 'they' and 'them.' Yet in France, their native tongue was swallowed entirely, leaving behind only a sailor's vocabulary.
When Scandinavian settlers established the Danelaw in eastern and northern England, they lived side-by-side with Anglo-Saxons. Because Old English and Old Norse were both Germanic languages, they shared many root words but relied on different, conflicting grammatical endings. To trade and intermarry, the two groups simplified their speech, stripping away the complex inflections and grammatical gender that characterized Old English.
This daily interaction allowed Old Norse to penetrate the deepest levels of the English language. Rather than just borrowing cultural concepts, English adopted fundamental everyday nouns and verbs: sky, egg, window, knife, husband, leg, law, take, and hit. Languages almost never borrow foundational grammar from one another, but the Norse influence was so intimate that they imported they, them, and their successfully displaced the native Old English pronouns hie, him, and hira.
Across the English Channel, the linguistic collision played out in reverse. In 911, the French King Charles the Simple granted the Viking leader Rollo the territory that would become Normandy. Rollo’s men were a small military elite settling among a much larger Romance-speaking population. They married local French women, and within a generation or two, the descendants of the Norsemen were speaking Old French.
Because Old Norse and Old French belonged to completely different language families, there was no mutual intelligibility to encourage grammatical blending. The Norsemen adopted the local language wholesale. The Old Norse vocabulary that did survive in Norman French was almost entirely restricted to maritime navigation and coastal topography. The famous Bayeux Tapestry highlights this exact cultural retention, showing the French-speaking Normans still constructing traditional Scandinavian longships a century and a half after their ancestors settled the region.
The 11th-century Bayeux Tapestry depicts Normans felling trees and building longships, illustrating the maritime heritage they retained from their Norse ancestors.
Bayeux tapestry showing long ships
Modern French still uses several of these Norse nautical borrowings. Words like vague (wave), hune (topmast), équiper (to equip or man a ship, from the Norse skipa), and crique (creek) all trace their origins directly to those early Viking settlers, a highly specialized imprint from a culture that otherwise completely dissolved into the French landscape. ~ SepiaGlyphs, Quora
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WHAT HAPPENED TO THE EARLIEST ENGLISH LETTERS LIKE THE THORN?
The Old English letters "þ" (thorn) and "ð" (eth) didn't die a natural linguistic death. Baffled by the unfamiliar characters, Norman scribes simply wrote them out of existence.
Before 1066, both letters were used to represent the "th" sounds we use today in words like "thick" and "this." When the Anglo-Saxons first adapted the Latin alphabet to write Old English, they ran into a problem. Latin lacked a character for the dental fricative sounds (/θ/ and /ð/) that were so common in Germanic languages. To solve this, they borrowed the runic symbol "þ" from the Elder Futhark and modified the Latin "d" to create "ð". For centuries, these characters were standard in English manuscripts.
Everything changed when William the Conqueror took the English throne. The conquest replaced the English ruling class with French-speaking Normans. More importantly for the alphabet, it replaced English administrators and copyists with French-trained scribes.
These incoming Norman scribes were educated in continental handwriting styles. They had no use for þ and ð in their native French or in Latin. When they encountered these unfamiliar characters while copying English texts or recording local names, they often substituted them with the Latin digraph "th," a combination they already used to transliterate certain Greek loanwords.
Because the scribes controlled the production of official documents and books, their continental habits became the new standard. Ð (eth) was the first casualty, steadily declining until it vanished from English entirely by the 1300s. Þ (thorn) proved more resilient, surviving for a few more centuries primarily as a convenient shorthand for common words like "the" and “that.”
The final blow for thorn came from another continental import: the printing press. When William Caxton established the first English press in 1476, he imported his typefaces from Europe. Continental type foundries did not cast blocks for þ. Printers had to find a substitute, and because the handwritten thorn of the era closely resembled the letter "y," they used "y" instead. This typographical compromise created the spelling "ye" in place of "the," giving rise to the modern cliché of "Ye Olde Shoppe"—a phrase that was always pronounced with a "th," never a “y."
The first folio of the Beowulf manuscript, written in Old English.
Before the Norman Conquest, English scribes routinely used characters like 'þ' and 'ð' which were absent from continental Latin scripts. ~ SepiaGlyphs, Quora
*
WHY SOME MEN SEEK REFUGE IN EVER BIGGER MUSCLES
Before my first consultation with Daniel – a composite of several young men I’ve worked with – he stands ramrod straight in the waiting room, electric with tension. His T-shirt clings to a body shaped by hours of training. Veins ripple beneath the surface of his arms. Inside my office, he speaks rapidly about his workout plan, the protein shakes he mixes every few hours, the supplements he buys at a store that sells powders in large, plastic tubs. When I ask how he’s been feeling, he smiles, shrugs noncommittally, and says: ‘All right. Trying to stay disciplined.’
Over the coming weeks, I discover that this ‘discipline’ is the organizing axis of his life. It has so exacerbated a preexisting tendency toward rigidity and anxiety that his partner insisted that, for their relationship to continue, he must seek treatment. He wakes before dawn each morning to train before school, weighs every portion of food, checks the mirror dozens of times a day. He is paralyzed by panic if he misses a workout and intense guilt if he eats something that’s not on the plan. Beneath this rigor lies an unspoken dread. If he relaxes, even for a moment, his body will betray him. Soften. Become ordinary.
Daniel is far from alone. Over the past several decades, a new disorder has taken root among boys and young men – muscle dysmorphia. It’s characterized by the conviction that one’s body is not muscular or lean enough, no matter how large or defined it is. From the outside, it might look like an issue rooted in lack of body confidence or poor self-esteem, but there is something more profound going on.
Of course healthy discipline can be grounding and meaningful. You might go to the gym because moving your body helps you feel more engaged with life or because you value the resulting physique. You take rest days when you’re tired, and pride largely stems from effort instead of outcome. But when workouts can’t be skipped without overwhelming guilt, and meals are ruled by fear, the routine no longer serves the person. In that case, discipline has morphed from a source of strength to self-punishment.
Clinically, muscle dysmorphia lives under the umbrella of body dysmorphic disorders. Its consequences are visceral: punishing diets and hours at the gym each day, often at the expense of social events. Recent studies suggest that as many as one in 10 male gym-goers show significant symptoms; among teenagers, the numbers are rising. Muscle dysmorphia afflicts more males than females, though the exact ratio is contested and many females develop the disorder, too (their experiences also deserve attention but that will have to wait until another essay).
If muscle dysmorphia isn’t a body image problem, what is it? In psychotherapeutic terms, we might say that Daniel’s strength – his muscles – are doing the work that his words cannot. They hold what cannot be thought about, transforming anxiety into motion and muscle mass. What seems to be a narrative about bodies is, underneath, about feelings. There is a cultural equation that connects self-worth with mastery and emotional control.
From an early age, many boys learn, to one degree or another, that their safety depends on strength and their sense of belonging on invulnerability. ‘Man up,’ ‘don’t be soft’: the language is so ordinary for many of us that we barely hear it. By adolescence, many have already taken on a simple, if mostly unconscious, creed: it’s better to be numb than to be vulnerable.
For most men, the command to be strong is subtle. It comes from a look, a silence, many small lessons absorbed throughout development. At times, it is the father who cannot stand the sight of his son’s tears. At others, it is the coach who conflates humiliation and motivation. Or it is the online influencer whose sculpted body and confident voice holds out the possibility of transcendence. However it comes, the message is the same: don’t be vulnerable.
In psychoanalytic terms, these figures embody the paternal function (problematically named because it can be carried by people of any sex), which helps a child separate and individuate, and discover his own agency. When that works well, it fosters a sense of confidence and curiosity. When it fails, though, this autonomy becomes terror, and the wish for safety morphs into shame. At its best, the paternal function also models endurance. The grit that helps one to face hardship without denial. But when that function is shorn of tenderness, strength degenerates into suppression of one’s feelings.
In our culture, the father still most often carries the bulk of the paternal function. Many of my patients grew up with fathers who were certainly not monsters. They were men frightened by their own softness. Early in life, they equated tenderness with danger and vulnerability, and they passed down this emotional lesson like an heirloom.
The son’s strength served as the father’s reassurance, even as the father’s authority became his son’s prison. Other patients of mine discovered their paternal figures in sport, where affection is rationed and praise mostly earned through pain and competition. ‘Push through it,’ ‘don’t quit,’ ‘play hurt’. These sorts of phrases were likely intended to build resilience but they taught emotional disavowal.
As a boy grows up, these voices come to live inside his psyche. I think of this internalized father figure as a kind of ghost who watches over the boy’s every movement, every feeling. It pushes him to lift heavier, run farther, suppress a little more. It echoes in catchy slogans about ‘grind’ and ‘discipline’, in locker-room back-and-forth, and through the contempt many men feel toward their own dependence. It is the cultural atmosphere that tells boys that needing comfort is unmanly.
The first language we speak is the body’s. Before we can give hunger a name, we cry out. Before we can say ‘I’m scared,’ our stomachs feel empty. In an ideal situation, someone helps us translate these sensations into meaning. By putting feelings into words, we can reflect upon them and, thus, obtain a degree of choice in relation to them. If I know that I am sad, then I might seek out a friend’s sympathetic ear or offer myself time and space to grieve. But if I don’t know I’m sad, I’m more likely to engage in behaviors that have a driven quality, because that’s the only way that I can find to evacuate the uncomfortable feeling beneath.
Many boys aren’t taught this act of translation. Certain feelings, such as fear, shame and longing, remain largely unspoken. Not because they don’t have these emotions, but because they learned that expressing them will lead to ridicule or withdrawal. So their body becomes the only medium of expression. It becomes rigid where speech should flow and hardens where tenderness is needed. The gym, with its repetitive rituals of tension and release, becomes both refuge and language.
Muscle dysmorphia can feel deeply compelling, even righteous, to those caught by its grip. The clearly laid-out structure, the counting, the visible progress all foster a sense of coherence in a chaotic emotional life. In psychoanalytic language, we might say these men are trying to elaborate affect through action rather than in words. They are trying to manage difficult feelings with the tools they have. The bench press stands in for the conversation that never took place; the ache of lactic acid distracts from the pain of abandonment.
Over time, this language becomes self-perpetuating. The more it seems to work, the harder it is to surrender. Muscles, after all, do not seem to betray us. They do not argue, they do not abandon, they do not disappoint. And so the body becomes a refuge. The one relationship that feels safe.
When Daniel feels sad, he goes to the gym. After his workout, whatever feelings he had before have dissipated, replaced by the pride in the hardness he feels in his body. There’s nothing wrong with managing feelings this way from time to time, but for Daniel and others like him, it becomes compulsive. It empties out their inner lives so that any complicated or difficult emotions are replaced by anxiety and the drive for physical discipline and muscular strength.
When a young man like Daniel can give voice to his anger instead of channeling it into lifting ever-heavier weights, or if he can allow himself to feel his grief, the muscles of the psyche, rather than the body, can develop. This is psychic elaboration: the transformation of emotional sensation into meaning. In less technical terms, it is learning to see that feelings are not dangerous. The energy that once went into physical discipline becomes available for curiosity, relationships and other aspects of life. In our therapy together, I help Daniel learn to give voice to his feelings of fear and sadness, among others, and while he remains an avid gym-goer, his emotional repertoire begins to deepen.
Of course, none of this is limited to men with muscle dysmorphia, or even to men more generally. We all build fortresses – whether through our bodies, careers or identities – to keep our emotional fragility out of sight. Yet every fortress, however elegant, has a price: isolation, rigidity, the ache of disconnection. Life itself asks for something more porous. More human.
The goal is not to vanquish our vulnerability but to develop a different relationship to it. To see it as a marker of depth instead of a defect, as the path through which intimacy and connection, empathy and true, grounded courage enter. The body, when no longer forced to speak for what the mind cannot, becomes gentler – not a fortress, but a home: strong enough to shelter, soft enough to breathe.
https://psyche.co/ideas/why-some-men-seek-refuge-in-ever-bigger-muscles?utm_source=Psyche+Magazine&utm_campaign=d47280c51a-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2026_07_31&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_-8e23a7006c-838173901
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ELIZABETH BARTON, THE HOUSEMAID WHO PREDICTED THE DEATH OF HENRY THE EIGHTH
In the 16th Century, household servant Elizabeth Barton became a celebrated visionary – but when she defied the monarch, she paid the ultimate price with a gruesome end. Was she a charlatan or a brave heroine of the Tudor world?
After Barton publicly fell into an hours-long trance which then supposedly healed her of illness, she was declared a "genuine visionary". One eyewitness out of the thousands present said: "Her face was wonderfully disfigured, her tongue hanging out, her eyes being in a manner plucked out."
Barton then entered a small Canterbury nunnery and went on to have an enormous influence in Tudor England. Senior religious figures, noblemen and even King Henry VIII all consulted her. But her prophecies became dangerously political, and led to her tragic downfall. Now a book just out in paperback, Heroines of the Tudor World, re-assesses her significance.
Barton's rise in popularity coincided with the Reformation (the split between Catholics and the followers of Protestant reformers), which had arrived in England. By the 1520s, Protestant ideas had spread from mainland Europe. These ideas were critical of the wealth of the Catholic church and challenged the power of the Pope.
Many Catholics were worried. "They saw it all as a threat to their way of life, and anything that helped them combat that threat was going to be encouraged," says Sharon Bennett Connolly, author of Heroines of the Tudor World. Seeing Barton as a vessel for the word of God, people circulated her revelations widely through both word of mouth and writing.
"Everybody took her seriously. Whether her visions were real or not, people believed them," Connolly tells the BBC.
Besides her following of ordinary people, the "Holy Maid of Kent" or the "Nun of Kent" as Barton had become known had impressed several monks and prominent religious figures including the king's chief minister Cardinal Wolsey and the Archbishop of Canterbury. Word was then passed on to Sir Thomas More, King Henry's influential lord chancellor. More, upon meeting Barton, said he wished to witness her "great virtue" that he had heard about for "so many years".
But the lord chancellor later wrote to her with a warning: never to speak of the king or his personal affairs.
Barton went on to enjoy the personal favor of the king, and met with him many times, bonding over their devout Catholicism (Henry remained a Catholic for most of his life). However, Henry's desire to divorce, remarry and produce a male heir went directly against Catholic doctrine. Much of her prophesying was against the break with Rome, and she fervently supported Catherine of Aragon. So much so that Barton wrote to Pope Clement, warning him that there would be a plague if he turned against Catherine.
Senior figures in the Catholic Church believed Barton could influence the king, and "prevent him [from] taking a course of action that horrified them", says Diane Watt, professor of medieval English literature at the University of Surrey in the UK and the author of Women Prophets in Late Medieval and Early Modern England.
A resistance leader
This has led some to argue that the so-called Holy Maid of Kent was nothing more than a puppet for the Catholic Church, and that she was manipulated, says Watt.
"I think that perception of her as a charlatan and puppet figure is really the perception that her enemies wanted us to have. I think that she was an incredibly talented and charismatic woman," Watt tells the BBC. Another interpretation is "to see her as leading the resistance to Henry's divorce and remarriage, rather than to see her simply as a puppet of other people”.
It's worth bearing in mind that there were several powerful mystics and visionaries in medieval Europe who had the ear of kings and even the Pope. In England, Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe were well-known 15th-Century visionaries, though they didn't reach the same level of popularity as Barton, Watt says.
This might have been because her prophecies became progressively political, not just moral. "Elizabeth gained importance because she was talking about political matters in a way that other visionaries of the time didn't," says Watt.
Also, she was born a servant, and typically mystics were from a higher social class. "Unless you were a queen or a very exceptional member of the upper classes or aristocracy, women didn't really have a political voice," says Watt. "Mysticism and prophecy, if you had the support of the Church, could give women an opportunity to intervene in political matters."
Defying the king
And intervene she did. Firstly, she claimed that she had received a revelation from God that Henry would not live for seven months if he married Anne, and then that he would not be king after a month if he married her. She did not specify how or why. "She was treading a very, very fine line," Connolly says.
It was a courageous move. What was extraordinary, adds Connolly, was "the idea that this young woman… could stand up to a king and tell him that." It was treason to predict the death of a king under the Treason Act of 1351.
The king and Anne were so worried about the prophecy that in October 1532, on their way to Calais, they visited Barton in Canterbury to try to win her favor. Henry offered to make her an abbess if she were silent on the matter of his marriage, and Anne offered her a position in her household. Barton refused both, to the king's rage, but it didn't stop him marrying Anne in January 1533.
And as the months passed it was clear that the prophecies were not coming true.
She was sent to the Tower of London for interrogation by the king's new chief minister, Thomas Cromwell, where she confessed that she had never had a revelation from God. "That's why she still fascinates, because we don't know whether or not she had visions," says Connolly. "If she did [lie], she was very clever, and she fooled an awful lot of people."
Whether she was manipulated or forced into confessing we will never know, just as we will never know if she was a true prophet.
A gruesome end
On 20 April 1534, Barton and six of her loyal supporters, including her confessor Edward Bocking, were executed by hanging and beheading at Tyburn gallows. She was just 28 years old.
Her severed head was then raised on a pike and displayed on the south gate of Old London Bridge. This grisly tradition, practiced from around the 1300s to the late 1600s, was a severe and macabre warning to traitors. Sir Thomas More, Thomas Cromwell and Guy Fawkes are other famous examples of traitors who had their severed heads displayed. The Holy Maid of Kent, however, is the only woman this is known to have happened to.
Besides this grim distinction, Barton has real significance, Connolly says. "A young woman from Kent, with very little education, managed to attract people to her ideas. She showed what common people were thinking at the time.”
Unfortunately, Barton's side of the story has largely been erased from history. None of her writings, nor her followers' accounts, are known to have survived. Cromwell ensured that 700 copies of a book of her revelations, written by Bocking, were seized after printing and destroyed. A later pamphlet that was due to be circulated was also destroyed.
Academics hope that one day her revelations will be found, and in fact, a new murder-mystery novel imagines a world where a historian makes this groundbreaking discovery.
This is yet to be seen. What we are left with is official state papers by the likes of Cromwell, and the one-sided Protestant view of her, that she was a "charlatan", Watt says.
"That negative view of Barton has really influenced the history books, and that's why she's ended up becoming quite obscure, because very few people wanted to argue her case," she says. "I hope that one day that missing book of revelations by Elizabeth Barton actually does turn up."
https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20260729-the-holy-maid-of-kent-who-prophesied-the-death-of-king-henry-viii
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WHY THE “FERTILE CRESCENT” TURNED INTO A DESERT
Six thousand years ago, the Fertile Crescent was exactly that: a lush, forested wetland. It turned to sand partly because humanity's first cities accidentally poisoned their own soil.
Long before this ecological collapse, around 10,000 years ago, Earth entered the Holocene Climatic Optimum. Global temperatures were slightly warmer, and monsoon rain belts shifted significantly northward. The Middle East received far more rainfall than it does today. The Sahara was covered in grasslands and lakes, and the Fertile Crescent was a heavily forested arc of oaks and pistachios stretching from the Mediterranean down through modern-day Syria and Iraq. In southern Mesopotamia, the Persian Gulf extended much further inland, creating a vast, nutrient-rich estuarine environment where early humans could harvest wild grains, fish, and hunt waterfowl without needing to migrate.
The region's legendary fertility was driven by the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. These waterways carried volcanic silt from the Armenian Highlands and deposited it across the flat plains during annual floods, creating some of the most productive agricultural soil on Earth.
Two major shifts turned this verdant landscape into an arid expanse.
First, the climate changed naturally. Around 5,000 years ago, subtle alterations in the Earth's orbit caused the monsoon system to retreat southward. The reliable rainfall stopped, inland lakes evaporated, and the forests receded, leaving the region entirely dependent on the two rivers for survival.
Second, human intervention destroyed the soil. To feed rapidly expanding cities, early Mesopotamians built extensive irrigation networks. Because the southern plains are exceptionally flat and lack natural drainage, the water sat on the fields and evaporated in the sun, leaving behind trace amounts of dissolved minerals. Over centuries, this process—known as soil salinization—poisoned the land. Sumerian agricultural records document a steady decline in crop yields and a forced, desperate transition from growing salt-sensitive wheat to hardier barley.
Eventually, the salt concentrations became too high even for barley. Stripped of its forests for firewood and its native grasses by domesticated grazing animals, the topsoil lost its structural integrity.
Today, while the northern arc of the crescent in the Levant still supports rain-fed agriculture, the southern portion in Iraq and Syria is largely desertified. The ancient cities that once fed hundreds of thousands of people now sit permanently abandoned in a sterile, salty plain.
The Great Ziggurat of Ur rises from a flat, arid expanse in modern-day Iraq, a stark contrast to the lush, heavily irrigated agricultural landscape that surrounded the city in antiquity. ~ SepiaGlyphs, Quora
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CANADA’S LACK OF ARABLE LAND
Canada is the world's second-largest country, but an astonishing 95% of it is non-arable.
Terrace farming cannot expand that remaining 5%, because you cannot carve farmland out of bare bedrock.
The primary reason for this lack of arable land is a massive geological formation called the Canadian Shield. During the last Ice Age, advancing and retreating glaciers effectively sandpapered the northern half of the continent. They scraped away millions of years of accumulated topsoil and pushed it south into what is now the American Midwest, leaving behind millions of square miles of exposed Precambrian granite and basalt.
Typical Canadian Shield landscape in the Northwest Territories, showing exposed rock, sparse soil, and stunted vegetation.
Even where thin layers of soil have managed to accumulate in the millennia since the glaciers retreated, it is highly acidic and heavily forested with boreal pine and spruce.
Beyond the rock, Canada’s extreme latitude dictates a climate entirely hostile to agriculture. Large portions of the country are underlain by permafrost, where the ground remains frozen year-round. Even in areas without permafrost, the growing season is simply too short. Most staple crops require 90 to 120 frost-free days to mature, a window that does not exist across most of Canada's northern expanse.
When faced with a lack of flat farming land, civilizations in the Andes and Southeast Asia developed terrace farming to cut arable steps into steep mountainsides. But terrace farming solves the problem of slope, not the problems of soil depth or climate. Creating a flat ledge does not generate topsoil over solid granite, and it certainly does not prevent it from snowing in early September.
Furthermore, Canada has no economic incentive to blast terraces into the Rocky Mountains or truck soil onto the Canadian Shield. While 5% of Canada sounds small as a percentage, in absolute terms it amounts to over 160 million acres. That is an agricultural area larger than the entire country of France. This prime farmland—mostly concentrated in the Prairie provinces of Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba, as well as southern Ontario—produces vastly more food than Canada’s population can consume. Canada is consistently one of the world's largest exporters of wheat, canola, and pulses, all grown on flat, naturally fertile land that requires no terracing at all. ~ NovaPrism, Quora
Jeffrey Young:
You have to factor in the historically small population of Canada. It has taken this long for the total Canadian population to reach 40 million, on a par with the state of California. Canada is fortunate to have vast agricultural lands in its prairie provinces in western Canada. The next factor was how many farmers were available?
During World War Two, Great Britain desperately needed huge imports of wheat and potatoes to feed its population. The German U-Boat Kriegsmarine was doing its desperate best to sever the food line or send those ships to the bottom of the Atlantic.
One would assume Canada as a major source of wheat exports to Great Britain but it was the United States. The population of Canada during WW2 was only 8 million souls, again on a par with 1940 California.
Canada was also a steadfast, loyal Dominion member. The Canadian government introduced conscription to build the Canadian 1st Army of 180,000 men to join Britain’s 12th Army Group in the invasion of the European continent in June 1944. The loss of all of these young, able-bodied men contributed to a labor shortage in wartime Canada. As a result, Canada could not produce the absolute amount of agricultural yield needed for wartime export demands. There was plenty of food internally in Canada but not as much as demanded for export.
Great Britain met its food needs primarily from the United States. Canada and Argentina were secondary food export sources. As a note, Great Britain was under severe financial constraints to fund its vast military war machine during WW2. The U.S. added wheat and potatoes to its huge Lend Lease program to Great Britain. This largesse came to an abrupt end in September 1945. The British Government, having to provide food relief to a devastated Western Europe, introduced bread and potatoes rationing for the first time.
Canada was also a steadfast, loyal Dominion member. The Canadian government introduced conscription to build the Canadian 1st Army of 180,000 men to join Britain’s 12th Army Group in the invasion of the European continent in June 1944. The loss of all of these young, able-bodied men contributed to a labor shortage in wartime Canada. As a result, Canada could not produce the absolute amount of agricultural yield needed for wartime export demands. There was plenty of food internally in Canada but not as much as demanded for export.
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WHAT HAPPENED TO FAMOUS IMMIGRANT GATEWAY CITIES LIKE NEW YORK AFTER THEIR PEAK IMMIGRATION PERIODS?
When Congress abruptly ended mass immigration in 1924, gateway cities like New York began a long spiral into abandonment and arson. They were ultimately saved by an entirely new wave of immigrants.
For decades prior to the shutdown, cities like New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia had served as massive funnels for European arrivals. Neighborhoods were defined by their extreme density and constant churn.
When the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924 established severe national origin quotas, the endless supply of new laborers from Eastern and Southern Europe was choked off. The teeming ethnic enclaves that characterized these gateway cities stopped receiving the fresh arrivals that had kept them packed and culturally insulated.
With European labor severed, northern industrial cities faced a severe worker shortage. This economic vacuum catalyzed the Great Migration. Over the next several decades, millions of Black Americans moved from the rural South to fill factory jobs in northern cities. This demographic shift reorganized urban populations. Chicago’s South Side and New York’s Harlem transitioned into vibrant Black metropolises, changing the cultural and political landscapes of these cities.
Following World War II, a second massive shift occurred: suburbanization. Second- and third-generation European immigrants—now culturally assimilated and economically upwardly mobile—utilized GI Bill benefits and highway expansions to leave the crowded urban core. This mass exodus, commonly known as white flight, drained cities of their tax bases. By the 1970s, the former immigrant gateways had fallen into an era of severe urban decay. As municipal budgets collapsed and industries moved overseas, previously bustling neighborhoods were consumed by the blight and physical destruction famously epitomized by the South Bronx.
The trajectory of these cities changed again with the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. The law abolished the restrictive 1924 quota system, opening the doors to a massive new wave of immigrants from Latin America, Asia, and the Caribbean. These new arrivals repopulated the hollowed-out urban neighborhoods, reversing decades of population decline. They opened businesses in shuttered storefronts and stabilized local tax bases. Today, areas like Queens in New York City have evolved into the most linguistically and ethnically diverse counties on Earth, serving the exact same gateway function as the Lower East Side did a century prior, but with a new global demographic.
Queens, NY
~ SepiaGlyphs, Quora
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RATS CAN BE TRAINED TO DETECT LANDMINES
Be sure to watch this heart-warming video:
https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/?pli=1#inbox/FMfcgzQhVhXNbfssbgTcPcBTDdcGbwQb?projector=1
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THE GREAT SNEAKER SPILL OF 1990: HOW 61,000 FLOATING NIKES HELPED MAP OCEAN CURRENTS
In the wee hours of May 27, 1990, midway between Seoul and Seattle, the freighter Hansa Carrier met a sudden storm and, as freighters often do, lost some of the cargo lashed high atop her deck. Twenty-one steel containers, each 40 feet long, tore loose and plunged into the North Pacific. Five of those containers held high-priced Nike sports shoes bound for the basketball courts and city streets of America. One sank to the sea floor. Four broke open, spilling 61,280 shoes into the sea — and into the vast stream of flotsam, containing everything from sex toys to computer monitors, that is released each year by up to 10,000 overturned shipping containers.
One year later, in early June 1991, I stopped by my parents’ house in Seattle, as I did every week or two for lunch and the latest news. My mother, who loved serving as my personal clipping service, had extracted a wire story from the local paper. It reported a strange phenomenon: Hundreds of Nike sneakers, brand-new save for some seaweed and barnacles, were washing up along the Pacific coasts of British Columbia, Washington and, especially, Oregon, Nike’s home state.
A lively market had developed; beach dwellers held swap meets to assemble matching pairs of the remarkably wearable shoes, laundered and bleached to remove the sea’s traces. The details as to how they’d gotten there were sketchy, verging on nonexistent, and that piqued my mother’s curiosity. “Isn’t this the sort of thing you study?” she asked, assuming as ever that her son the oceanographer knew everything about the sea. “I’ll look into it,” I said.
I started looking and never stopped. Seventeen years and many thousands of shoes, bath toys, hockey gloves, human corpses, ancient treasures and other floating objects later, I’m still looking.
Objects like these have been falling into the sea and washing up on the shores since the dawn of navigation — for billions of years longer, if you count driftwood, volcanic pumice and all the other natural materials that float upon the waves. Ordinarily, flotsam is soon lost to human memory. The Great Sneaker Spill would have proved one more curiosity in the annals of beachcombing if my mother hadn’t asked her question, and if I hadn’t been ready to see the research doors that it opened.
Like an oceanic gumshoe, I set about tracking down the beached sneakers. When I ask shippers about flotsam washing up from their container spills, 95 percent stonewall. “We are not aware of any lost merchandise,” goes the standard answer. I could never find out what was in the other 16 containers that washed off the Hansa Carrier that day. But Nike’s transportation department was refreshingly open about this spill. Its staff provided the date, latitude and longitude and their container load plan, listing each container’s contents down to the last shoe.
Unlike many other footwear manufacturers, Nike stamps a simple identification number, a “purchase order ID” (POID), on each of its shoes. It tracks its products so meticulously that it can trace a single shoe to its mother container.
With the information Nike provided, I could determine conclusively whether any shoe that washed up had fallen off the Hansa. The first beachcombers’ reports of sneakers washing up — ”forerunners,” as one reporter called them — were equally specific. I had something that’s very rare with spontaneous flotsam (as opposed to determinate drift markers): both point A, when and where an object starts to drift, and point B, when and where it washes up.
Even after drifting for three years in corrosive salt water, the shoes remained surprisingly supple and wearable; teenagers can do much more damage to them in one year than the sea did in three. Like seabirds, the sneakers easily rode out storms. I studied their floatability up close, in a hotel spa. Once they became saturated, the sneakers floated upside down, their soles even with the water surface; the high tops of my size-12 Flights cut the water below like the keels of sailing ships, their laces twirling like a jellyfish’s tentacles. At sea, these tough soles would protect the softer fabric from biting birds and bleaching sun. And, we confirmed with each beached sneaker, nothing grew on the soles. Foiling barnacles is no mean trick. Perhaps Nike could supply antifouling coating for ships’ bottoms.
Even today, I get a warm reception at Nike headquarters, where I’m called the “ocean doctor” and invited to speak now and then on shipping, flotsam and the sea. That’s not surprising, considering all the unexpected good publicity Nike reaped from the follow-up to the Hansa Carrier spill. Its shoes’ durability at sea impressed everyone. “Ten Nike marketing managers could huddle for a week and not come up with a better metaphor for the company’s mission — to get Nikes, with near-biblical image making and Yankee dispatch, into the hands of everyone on the planet,” Bruce Grierson wrote in Canada’s Saturday Night magazine seven years later. “It’s tempting to think the whole thing was planned.”
Over the years, many people have asked in all seriousness if I masterminded the Great Sneaker Spill. No, I respond. It’s just the inevitable result of shipping billions of shoes across the sea each year. In fact, Nike has always refrained from exploiting this potential marketing bonanza. When asked why, one company manager replied, “Floating on the water is not a sports attribute we wish to endorse.”
The study to map ocean currents proved so accurate at describing and forecasting the current-borne sneakers’ movements that we published the results in EOS, the leading oceanography journal, which goes out to some 30,000 scientists worldwide. That triggered a new tsunami of attention from both the popular media and the oceanographic community. Everyone from the National Enquirer to National Public Radio ran with the floating sneakers.
The headlines were soaked in puns: “Afoot on the Sea,” “Footloose Sea,” “Sole Travel,” “Sole Survivors,” “Lost Soles Searching the Currents,” “Not a Sole Was Saved,” “Soles Lost at Sea Sneak up on Beaches.” “Running water” took on a whole new meaning. David Letterman announced his sixth-best reason to join the navy: “If you find a Nike sneaker floating on the water, it is yours.”
But the story was more than just a source of puns and punch lines. It had real implications for the study of the world’s oceans. Building on the sneaker research, I would eventually use flotsam to calculate, for the first time, the orbits of the 11 oceanic gyres — the giant, circular currents that are, after the oceans and the continents, the earth’s largest geographical features. I know that if my mother had lived to see what her curiosity set in motion, she would be happy.
Best of all, the sneaker study had a conspicuous and, I like to think, lasting effect on oceanographic education. At least half a dozen books recount it, and I still get letters from teachers asking me to help shape their syllabuses. It’s deeply gratifying to think that some kids might dedicate their lives to studying and protecting the oceans after getting an inspirational nudge from the saga of the telltale sneakers.
https://magazine.washington.edu/feature/how-61000-floating-nikes-helped-an-oceanographer-find-his-calling/
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IS ELDEST DAUGHTER SYNDROME A REAL THING?
Growing up as the oldest sibling, author Y.L. Wolfe often felt the lines between her role and her mother’s role were blurred.
“By the time my youngest brother was born when I was almost 11, I was overwhelmed with feelings of responsibility for his welfare. I used to sit by his crib and watch him sleep just to make sure he was safe,” Wolfe, the oldest of four, told HuffPost.
“It wasn’t that I thought my mother wasn’t competent ― but more that I felt we were both responsible for the family by that point in my life,” she explained. “As if I was literally ‘other mom,’ rather than big sister.”
In other words, Wolfe is deeply familiar with “eldest daughter syndrome.” The internet is rife with thinkpieces about the plight of oldest daughters and tweets about how we ― I might as well reveal my bias here ― need to unionize: “If you are the oldest sibling and also a girl you may be entitled to financial compensation,” one woman joked on X.
Though “eldest daughter syndrome” is a pop psychology term ― you won’t find it listed as an official diagnosis in the DSM-V ― a new study suggests that there may be more science to the pseudo-syndrome than previously thought.
A University of California, Los Angeles-led research team found that, in certain instances, first-born daughters tend to mature earlier, enabling them to help their mother rear younger siblings.
Specifically, the researchers found a correlation between early signs of adrenal puberty in first-born daughters and their mothers having experienced high levels of prenatal stress.
Why does age of adrenal puberty matter? Changes in skin (acne, for instance) and body hair happen during this phase, but so do changes in brain development. Adrenal puberty processes are believed to foster social and cognitive changes; basically, superficial physical changes correlate with emotional maturity.
When times are tough and mothers are stressed in pregnancy, it’s in the mother’s adaptive best interest for her daughter to socially mature at a quicker pace, said Jennifer Hahn-Holbrook, one of the co-authors of the study and an assistant professor of psychology at the University of California, Merced.
“It gives mom a ‘helper-at-the-nest’ sooner, aiding the women in keeping the latter offspring alive in difficult environments,” she said.
Notably, adrenal puberty does not include breast development or the onset of menstruation for girls (or testicular enlargement, in the case of boys). The study posits that girls become mentally mature enough to care for their younger siblings while not being physically capable of having their own children, which would naturally draw them away from their older daughter responsibilities.
Older brothers are seemingly off the hook when it comes to this kind of parentification: The researchers did not find the same result in boys or daughters who were not first-born.
“One reason that we didn’t find this effect in first-born children who are sons could be that male children help less often with direct childcare than female children do, so mothers have less of an adaptive incentive to speed their social pubertal development,” Hahn-Holbrook explained.
Plus, she said, previous research suggests that female puberty timing is more malleable in response to early life experiences than males.
The results of this study, published in the February issue of Psychoneuroendocrinology (say that five times fast ― or just once), were a long time coming: Researchers tracked the families for 15 years, from the pregnancy stage to the babies’ teen years.
Researchers recruited women from two obstetric clinics in Southern California during routine first trimester prenatal care visits. On average, the women were 30 years of age and pregnant with one child, not twins.
It was their first pregnancy for roughly half of the participants. The women were nonsmoking and not using steroid medications, tobacco, alcohol or other recreational drugs during pregnancy. They were all over 18 years of age.
At five different stages of pregnancy, the women’s stress, depression and anxiety levels were measured, and then measured cumulatively. The depression assessment asked the women to rate the truth of statements such as “I felt lonely,” while the anxiety question asked how often they felt particular symptoms, such as “jittery.”
Of the children born to these mothers, 48% were female and 52% were male.
As the children aged, characteristics of adrenal and gonadal puberty were separately measured ― things like body hair, skin changes, growth in height or growth spurts, breast development and the onset of menstruation in females and voice changes and facial hair growth in males.
The study also measured childhood adversity to account for other factors known to correlate to early maturation or signs of puberty in children, like the death of a parent or divorce before age 5 and the absence of a father and economic uncertainties at ages 7–9.
Taking all that into account, it was the eldest girls who matured the fastest when their moms experienced high levels of prenatal stress.
Other studies suggest that there is some later-in-life payoff for highly responsible eldest girls: A 2014 study found that eldest daughters are the most likely to succeed out of any sibling type, while a 2012 study found that those who are eldest-born are more likely to hold leadership roles.
The findings ring true for Wolfe, the aforementioned author who said she felt like a second mom to her siblings growing up.
“I’m not at all surprised by what the study found,” Wolfe said. “My story is slightly different — I went through true puberty, not just adrenal puberty, at 12, though I suspect I experienced an early cognitive maturation.”
The study is interesting for another reason as well: The findings add to social scientists’ growing understanding of fetal programming, a fascinating area of study that explores how stress and other emotional and environmental factors women experience during pregnancy affect their children long after birth.
“This is a first-of-its-kind finding and is fascinating to look at through an evolutionary lens,” Molly Fox, a UCLA anthropologist and one of the co-authors of the study, said in a press release.
In an interview with HuffPost, Fox delved deeper into how fetal programming works.
“One fascinating theory is that when you’re still a fetus in your mothers’ womb, you get cues about what the world is going to be like, and your body can flexibly adjust the shape of your life-cycle to be optimally suited to those conditions you expect to encounter,” she said.
Fox and her co-authors are excited their work is out there for the public to read, especially after following the families along for so long. The fact that the findings were published just as a cultural conversation about eldest daughters broke out was just a cherry on top, especially for Fox, a co-oldest daughter. (She’s a twin.)
“As co-oldest, I think it’s a special role in any family because of the potential for closeness with my mother and capacity to help care for my younger siblings,” she said.
Spoken like a true eldest daughter.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/first-born-daughter-study-goog_l_6a0f1e34e4b084c012e3a31a?utm_source=firefox-newtab-en-us
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CONVERSATIONAL NARCISSISTS
It’s a familiar experience for many. Someone shares something meaningful in a conversation, and within milliseconds, the person they’re talking to has pivoted the discussion back to themselves. The pattern repeats itself over and over again, leaving the other person feeling unheard, drained or quietly frustrated. There’s actually a term for this phenomenon: conversational narcissism.
“Conversational narcissism is a communication pattern where someone consistently pulls the focus of the conversation back to themselves,” Tracy Ross, a licensed clinical social worker specializing in couples and family therapy, told HuffPost. “It often shows up as not really listening, interrupting or ‘one-upping’ ― where whatever you share is quickly met with a more extreme or more compelling version of their own experience. Over time, the conversation stops feeling like an exchange and starts to feel one-sided.”
Perhaps you asked someone about their work, family, relationships, life experiences, but they didn’t ask you any similar questions. “Or they ask but as soon as you start to speak you get the sense they aren’t really paying attention or aren’t really interested,” Ross explained. “Or they agree and seem to be supportive, but it quickly turns into an example from their own life.”
Although “conversational narcissism” may feel like a familiar affliction, keep in mind that it is not a clinical diagnosis. It’s also important to note that being a conversational narcissist does not automatically mean that someone has narcissistic personality disorder.
“We tend to skip to calling people narcissists these days and it creates more division and writing people off versus getting curious about their behavior and seeking ways to collaborate,” said Natalie Moore, a licensed marriage and family therapist. “There are many reasons someone may be ― or seem like ― a conversational narcissist.”
If this sounds familiar, there are some underlying factors that may be helpful to understand. Below are some of the most common reasons that could explain why some people act this way.
Insecurity And Anxiety
“For many people, conversational narcissism comes from insecurity, anxiety or a deeper sense of inadequacy,” Ross said. “Bringing the focus back to themselves can be a way of managing discomfort and insecurity or trying to feel more relevant or valued in the interaction.”
There might be an element of social anxiety as well.
“If social situations make you anxious, then only talking about things you’re familiar with can be a way to reduce anxiety over not knowing what to say,” said Chelsey Brook Cole, a psychotherapist and author of “If Only I’d Known! How to Outsmart Narcissists, Set Guilt-Free Boundaries, and Create Unshakeable Self-Worth.”
Dominating the conversation might feel safer than navigating the unpredictability and awkward pacing of genuine exchange.
“Someone with social anxiety, may struggle with reciprocal conversations, especially with people they don’t know well or in high-pressure situations,” Moore said. “With social anxiety, oftentimes the person feels uncomfortable with silences or pauses in the conversation so they may ‘fill space’ with random thoughts or stories. As they’re likely to default to things that are familiar or interesting to them, this could appear as conversational narcissism.”
Family Dynamics Or Upbringing
The way we learn to communicate as children has a big impact on adulthood as well.
“If talking loudly or rapidly was the only way to be heard growing up, they might have developed this type of communication pattern as an attempt to be seen and respected,” Cole said.
Lauren Maher, a licensed marriage and family therapist specializing in anxiety, trauma and narcissistic abuse recovery, explained that this dynamic can cut both ways.
“Oftentimes children that came from families where ‘children are meant to be seen and not heard’ ― or conversely, where they had to be more loud or aggressive to be heard ― will find that they aren’t sure when they should or shouldn’t speak in conversations and find that nuances that seem obvious to others are not clear to them,” she said. “They may try to bring the conversation back to themselves as a point of connection or as a way to bond.”
For others, it’s simply a learned behavior that was part of their family culture.
“Growing up in families where people had to compete to be heard, or where listening wasn’t modeled or valued,” Ross said. “Simply put, they don’t understand how to just listen and be present for someone else’s experience. What looks like self-focus may actually be a habit formed over time that takes conscious work to unlearn.”
Lack Of Awareness
Sometimes conversational narcissism isn’t driven by anxiety or childhood wounds. It’s just a blind spot.
“Some people are genuinely unaware that they are monopolizing a conversation,” Cole said. “With time and effort, they can learn to stop engaging in conversational narcissism.”“Some people genuinely believe that sharing their own experience is a form of empathy,” Ross added. “They’re trying to connect, but it lands as redirecting and hijacking the conversation. The key is that the behavior exists on a spectrum, and the underlying reasons can vary.”
Neurodivergence
Not all behavior that looks like conversational narcissism comes from self-centeredness. Some of it reflects genuine neurological differences in how people process social cues and communication rhythms.
“The field of psychology is currently exploding with new understanding of neurodivergence,” Moore explained. “One area of divergence from the ‘norm’ is communication styles. Autistic and ADHD individuals often have differences in attention regulation, executive functioning and information processing, as well as in how they interpret and respond to social cues and perspectives. This can look like conversational narcissism from the outside, when it’s actually someone trying to connect by sharing something meaningful or relevant from their own experience.”
ADHD in particular can make conversations feel fast and challenging to navigate.
“A person with ADHD may struggle with focus and find that their mind is moving quickly in conversations, which could cause them to interject or change the direction of the conversation,” Maher said. “It’s important to remember not to make assumptions about someone’s motives right away.”
Narcissistic Patterns
While conversational narcissism often has more benign roots, it can also reflect a bigger issue.
“In some cases it can reflect a more entrenched narcissistic style, where there is a real lack of interest in others,” Ross said.
A conversational narcissist may also be an actual narcissist who strongly needs recognition and attention from others. “A personality structure of narcissism can be a driving force for this kind of behavior,” Cole said. “Narcissists are selfish, entitled, grandiose, and exploitative, so conversational narcissism allows them to focus on the only thing they really care about: themselves.”
Maher noted that there are specific red flags suggesting you’re dealing with more than a communication habit.
“If you notice that a person displays traits of conversational narcissism that are also paired with contempt, dismissiveness, grandiosity or self-aggrandizing behavior, then you may be dealing with someone who is indeed narcissistic,” she said. “When confronted with their behavior, they are likely to become defensive, irritable, blame you for bringing it up or criticize you for not being empathetic.”
While other people might respond to your feedback about their communication styles and make adjustments, someone with NPD is unlikely to have this reaction.
“If this behavior is coming from a fundamentally narcissistic person, no amount of trying to solve this will make it better,” Cole said. “As with any narcissist, less is more. The less energy you give them, the more you maintain your energy and sanity.”
“The reality is that narcissists don’t use conversations as opportunities for connection ― they use them as opportunities for control,” she added. “So once you recognize that someone isn’t interested in having a balanced conversation, doesn’t listen when you speak, and is only invested in the conversation when it serves them… slow down, step back, and look for the exit.”
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/conversational-narcissism-reasons_l_69d2dcc4e4b05537a7f192fd
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PHRASES NARCISSISTIC PARENTS OFTEN USE
1. ’You’re too sensitive.’
“A fairly universal phrase many narcissist parents use is accusing their child of being too sensitive. Often this arises when a child asserts a boundary, verbalizes a need that is counter to their parents or expresses an emotion like anger or sadness,” said Hannah Alderete, a licensed mental health counselor and the author of “Break Free From Narcissistic Mothers.”
In these cases, their parent might respond with “You’re too sensitive” or “You always make such a big deal out of everything.” They might even ask, “Can’t you take a joke?” or call their child a “crybaby.”
“A narcissistic parent will often use these phrases as a way to invalidate their child’s feelings and avoid taking responsibility for their own behavior,” Maher said. “The irony is that many narcissists are perpetually hypersensitive and dysregulated themselves, but by projecting this onto other people, they are able to shift blame and avoid accountability.”
But this approach invalidates a child’s emotional experience and distorts their sense of reality.
“It sends the message that their feelings are wrong or unreliable, which may cause them to doubt themselves and internalize blame,” said Marie-Line Germain, author of “Narcissism at Work: Personality Disorders of Corporate Leaders” and a professor of human resources and leadership at Western Carolina University. “Over time, this messaging can interfere with the child’s ability to trust and understand their own emotions.”
As a result, the child might struggle to express needs in relationships.
“They learn to associate their feelings with being ‘too much’ or somehow inappropriate,” Alderete said. “Without a solid connection to their emotions, children learn to rely on external validation to determine who they are, what they want and what’s ‘allowed’ for them.”
2. ’That’s not what happened.’
“If a child says the parent hurt their feelings, the parent might say, ‘I did not hurt your feelings’ or ‘that never happened,’” said Virginia Gilbert, a licensed marriage and family therapist specializing in high-conflict divorce and attachment trauma. “Feeling consistently minimized and gaslit makes the child believe that they have no value, that their needs don’t matter.”
She added that children of narcissists might start to feel that they’re too difficult and not worthy of love. They may rely on their parents to make decisions due to eroded self-confidence.
“Narcissists are master manipulators and experts at gaslighting and will try to make their children believe an alternate reality,” said journalist and “Married to a Narcissist” author Catenya McHenry. “They often will use psychological abuse to make someone believe what actually happened is not what happened.”
This kind of gaslighting has an even broader mental health impact into adulthood.
“Children of narcissists will often start to question their own perception or sanity when faced with repeated denials of their reality,” Maher said. “Over time, they may start to say things like, ‘I don’t know, maybe I’m just crazy.’ In therapy, we often work to help people trust their own perceptions and rebuild self-trust.”
3. ‘I only do/say this because I love you.’
“Another phrase I hear narcissistic parents say is along the lines of, ‘I only do this because I love you,’” Alderete said. “The problem with this type of statement is that it pairs the word love with something unloving. The way a child might interpret this statement is to assume that love is a permission slip for harmful behavior.”
She added that children who internalize this incongruent behavior and message might find themselves in toxic relationships as adults, with similar excuses to justify harmful actions. The effect is feelings of deep grief and a self-perception that you’re unlovable or deserve poor treatment.
Chelsey Brook Cole, a psychotherapist specializing in narcissistic abuse, added that this framework sets up a trauma bond wherein criticism and control are confused for caring and closeness.
“Narcissists use these kinds of phrases to say something hurtful while maintaining the ‘moral high ground,’” she said. “If you get upset, they can claim you misunderstood them rather than admitting to their insult. You end up distrusting your own intuition as you convince yourself that they ‘really do love you’ and if they’re harsh, it’s because they ‘love you so much.’”
4. ‘After everything I’ve done for you, this is how you treat me?’
“To a narcissistic parent, love isn’t an unconditional gift ― it’s an unpayable investment,” Cole said. “They view basic parental duties ― providing food, shelter, or clothing — not as responsibilities they chose to take on, but as favors you are now expected to ‘pay back.’”
Such a message turns love into something that must be earned. It cultivates and weaponizes a sense of obligation to maintain control.
“This manipulative tactic often conditions a child to become a guilt-driven people-pleaser who struggles to establish healthy boundaries,” Germain said.
Children who hear that comment may feel wrong for having basic needs or that their existence is a burden. The same goes for phrases like “I gave up everything for you.”
“A child may be left with a lifelong sense of guilt and that they owe the narcissistic parent obedience, compliance, time and an equal degree of sacrifice,” said Margaret Ward-Martin, a psychotherapist who founded The Grace Project to work with survivors of narcissistic abuse.
5. ‘I’m the only one who will ever really love you.’
“This statement serves as a tactic to create isolation and total dependency,” Germain said. “This rhetoric aligns with the narcissistic need to exert control by systematically depleting a child’s psychological energy and self-worth. By convincing the child that the world outside the parent-child bond is hostile or unloving, the parent sabotages the child’s social confidence.”
Narcissistic parents might also say things like, “No one will ever love you as much as me.”
Although these comments are not true, Ward-Martin noted that children who grow up hearing such statements may never have the chance to learn otherwise.
“This sets up a child up to feel unfulfilled and likely to forge unhealthy attachments in relationships,” she said. “This is ugly early modeling.”
Children who are exposed to this kind of indoctrination often grow up with a fear of independence as they are conditioned to believe they cannot find love or safety elsewhere.
“Narcissists often manipulate their children into believing they have no power or control of their own and in their own lives and over their own voice,” McHenry said. “They don’t want their children to be better than them and they manipulate their children over time, eventually affecting their self-esteem and self-confidence.”
She pointed to statements like “You will never be ____ without me.” It’s a way assert superiority and breed self-doubt, anxiety and co-dependency.
6. ’Why can’t you be more like your sister or brother?’
“Narcissistic parents routinely pit siblings against each other,” Cole said. “This keeps the children competing for the parent’s attention and love, makes children easier to manipulate and allows the parent to avoid responsibility. If one child starts setting a boundary, the parent might say, ‘Your brother never treats me like this; he’s so much more helpful.’”
This competitive hierarchy for parental approval creates jealousy, competition, guilt, anger and confusion ― ultimately creating a sense of overwhelm, dominance and devaluation that makes it easier for a narcissist to maintain control.
“Such comparisons frequently breed lifelong sibling rivalry and a pervasive sense of inadequacy,” Germain said. “Over time, this leads to profound identity confusion, as the child abandons their authentic self to adopt whatever persona they believe will finally win the parent’s favor.”
These comparisons indicate that approval is tied to performance rather than to personal or internal factors.
“Emotional expression becomes something to suppress rather than explore,” Swithin said. “Children learn to manage how they are perceived instead of learning who they are.”
7. ‘You are such an embarrassment / disappointment / disgrace.’
“Typically, narcissistic parents are all about performance and achievement,” said therapist and “Disarming The Narcissist” author Wendy Behary. “They tend to fall short on the notion of connection, unconditional love, the idea of really focusing on interpersonal skills and reciprocity and empathy. They fall short because they’re so focused on status and winning and being extraordinary, often living vicariously through their children.”
Because narcissists view their children as extensions of themselves, they view their successes as carrying out a positive legacy. On the flip side, their children’s missteps are not opportunities for resilience but rather moments to criticize and shame, using labels such as “embarrassment,” “disappointment,” and “disgrace.”
“These comments make the child feel worthless and desperate, frightened and depressed,” said Linda Martinez-Lewi, a psychotherapist who has published multiple books on dealing with narcissists. “This is a direct attack on the child’s core identity. Some children treated with such disdain and cruelty can develop a deep inner shame that stays with them into adulthood.”
She noted that these sorts of statements make children feel inadequate and defective simply for being their authentic selves. They learn to tie their self-worth to their performance and achievement because reputation is all that matters.
“A child may stop trying when mistakes are conditioned to result in shame,” Ward-Martin said, adding that perfectionism is another big issue in these dynamics.
Karyl McBride, a licensed marriage and family therapist and author of “Will the Drama Ever End? Untangling and Healing from the Harmful Effects of Parental Narcissism,” noted that even when a child does a perfectly fine job with something, their narcissistic parent might respond with “You can do better.”
“The message is that ‘nothing is ever good enough,’” she said.
Thus, the child will feel incapable, leading to unhealthy dependence and fear of abandonment. Good parenting is about fostering a healthy balance between autonomy and connection as children work toward their goals.
“Parents raise a child with a sense of their own capability and worth by saying things like, ‘How are you going to make that happen? What support do you need?’” Ward-Martin said.
8. ‘I don’t know what I’ve done to make you hate me.’
After a child sets a boundary, Cole noted that narcissistic parents often say something evasive like “I don’t know what I’ve done to make you hate me” or extreme like “I’m sorry I’m such a bad mother/father.”
“If they admit they know why you are upset, they would have to take responsibility,” she explained. “By saying ‘I don’t know what I’ve done,’ they maintain their victimhood and innocence. It’s their way of saying ‘Your anger and boundaries are invalid and unjustified.’”
By jumping to extremes and declaring themselves “bad,” narcissists make it difficult to discuss specific issues at hand as well. Instead, they use what Cole describes as “performative” shame to regain power by painting you as a bully.
“You learn that your honesty hurts others,” she said. “This leads to emotional constriction ― you stop being honest about your feelings because you don’t want to be ‘mean’ or make someone feel bad.”
These messages can cause you to feel responsible for everyone’s emotions and avoid saying how you feel. You might also struggle to trust you own reality and thus over-explain in relationships, anticipate being misunderstood and feel like you have to “prove” your perspective is valid.
9. ‘You’re the only one who understands me.’
“Narcissistic parents frequently utilize triangulation, a tactic where they insert a third party into a relationship to manipulate, foster competition and maintain dominance over a child,” Germain said. “Rather than engaging in direct or safe communication, the narcissistic parent leverages others to secure their own power.”
A common method involves the parent inappropriately confiding in the child about their other parent to create an “us vs. them” alliance and burden them with intense guilt, divided loyalties and toxic dependence.
“A statement like ‘I don’t know how I’ll carry on living when you leave’ is manipulation and guilt tripping,” Ward-Martin added. “A child is not responsible for their parents but may feel it, crushingly, and make life choices accordingly.”
In addition to asserting that their child is the only one who can understand or take care of them, narcissistic parents might also try to create this kind of pressure and remove autonomy in the opposite way.
“They might say ‘I know you better than you know yourself,’” McBride said, adding that the implication is “Therefore, listen to me.”
It’s another way to overpower a child’s self-worth when their individuality threatens the narcissistic parent’s control.
“By saying such things, the child’s sense of self may be compromised and they grow up second-guessing themselves, thinking dad or mom knows best,” Ward-Martin noted. “It takes a strong individual to understand that they are autonomous, and that their parents were wrong.”
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/narcissist-parents-common-phrases_l_69810eaee4b040ef29097c9b?origin=article-related-life
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WHY PEOPLE HOARD, AND HOW YOU CAN HELP THEM
‘All this stuff is my trauma.’
Perhaps the first thing that comes to mind when thinking about hoarding is the extreme clutter and chaos depicted in popular TV shows. In contrast, this BBC Ideas animated short offers a humanizing look at a condition too often reduced to its most visible symptoms. Drawing on an interview with a woman recovering from hoarding disorder, the film combines personal testimony with broader insight into the issue – examining the circumstances that shaped her behavior, its overlap with other conditions, and why people struggle to get help. Alongside her story of recovery, the film also shares practical advice, both for those experiencing hoarding disorder and for those seeking to support a loved one living with it.
Please click on the lilnk below to see the video:
https://psyche.co/videos/why-people-hoard-and-how-you-can-help-them
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OUR CHANGING MORAL VIEWS
The gap between what we believe and how we behave raises an uncomfortable question: Are our moral principles easily overridden by selfishness or circumstances?
Audun Dahl’s Theory on Shifting Moral Views
Not necessarily, according to a new book by Audun Dahl, associate professor of psychology at Cornell's College of Human Ecology and director of the Developmental Moral Psychology Lab. His book, Between Fixed and Fickle: Why Our Moral Views Keep Changing, draws on decades of research to offer an evidence-based theory of why moral views shift.
Dahl describes a familiar pattern of thinking he calls the story of the "fixed and fickle." First, we treat our own moral convictions as fixed and self-evident — so obvious that no reasonable, well-meaning person could see things differently. But when we encounter people who disagree, we conclude their moral sense must be fickle — easily corrupted by self-interest, irrationality, or unruly emotion.
It's a tidy explanation, and a flattering one as it lets us keep our convictions intact while writing off anyone who disagrees with us. It's also politically useful, since it insulates one's followers against the other side's counterarguments.
“In that story, moral change gets chalked up to amoral forces, across the lifespan, across situations and across history,” Dahl said. “My book tries to rid us of that story, outside and inside psychology.”
Dahl’s book points out a blind spot in the “fixed and fickle” explanation: it's usually a story we tell about other people. Few of us look back at our own moral evolution from childhood through adulthood and attribute changes to our own selfishness or poor reasoning. We tend to assume we got lucky and ended up with the "correct" morality, while everyone who disagrees must have gone wrong somewhere.
Dahl's Three Reasons for Moral Change
Dahl's alternative explanation is that people typically change their moral views when they encounter genuine reasons to do so. His book identifies three types of reasons that people change their beliefs.
People can develop new moral concerns, such as believing that all current and future humans deserve equal rights.
They can form new connections between existing concerns and new issues. For example, someone may realize that today's fossil fuel use will harm tomorrow's children.
People can shift how they balance competing concerns. For instance, they can decide that modest sacrifices today, like flying less, or eating less meat, are worth it to slow climate change and protect future generations. “These three types of reasons for moral change can bring changes across our lifetimes, from one situation to the next, or even across history,” Dahl said.
In the book, Dahl makes an important point: Understanding why someone changes their moral views is separate from evaluating whether that change was positive or negative.
“Science can help us realize why our moral views keep changing, but it can’t tell us how our moral views ought to change,” he said. “When you learn the reasons for my moral changes, you might judge me more mildly, or you might judge me more harshly, depending on what you learned my reasons are.”
The take-home message is: The next time you find yourself baffled by someone whose moral views differ sharply from your own, or surprised by how much your own views have shifted over time, it's worth thinking about the reasons behind the change. Dahl's research suggests that kind of curiosity tends to reveal a much less cynical picture of human nature than the "fixed and fickle" story would have us believe.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/evidence-based-living/202606/why-do-our-moral-views-keep-changing
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THE MYSTERY DEATH OF SIMONETTA VESPUCCI, BOTTICELLI’S BIRTH OF VENUS MODEL
New research into the cause of death of Simonetta Vespucci, model for the world-renowned Birth of Venus by Sandro Botticelli has been published by researchers at Queen Mary University of London, Universita Campus Bio-Medico di Roma, and the University of California in the journal Endocrinology, Diabetes & Metabolism.
Seven years ago the researchers suggested she probably suffered from a pituitary adenoma; in this new paper they have looked at more documents to conclude an expansion of the adenoma causing tumor apoplexy – a sudden medical emergency — was the probable cause of her premature death, aged twenty-three.
Simonetta Vespucci, born Cattaneo (Liguria, January 28th 1453), was well known in Florentine high society for her manners and intellect, and given the title La Sans Par (‘the Unrivalled’) by the humanist, Poliziano, and was close to both Lorenzo and Giuliano de’Medici.
In 1469, she married Marco Vespucci, descendant of a noble family of Florentine bankers. She was painted by her devoted admirer and close friend, Sandro Botticelli, five times. When she died, her body was exposed to public veneration, vestita e scoperta (dress in white, face uncovered); the highest homage to illustrious Renaissance figures. She still rests in the church of Ognissanti, and in 1510 Sandro Botticelli would ask to be buried at her feet, in a final devotional act to his muse.
While Simonetta's features are now thought to embody the esthetic canons of the Renaissance, the authors have researched her premature death, and particularly the symptoms of her final days, and concluded that both her symptoms and features suggest a pituitary tumor was the cause rather than the TB (consumption) once suspected. They also hypothesize that dancing or a suspected rape by the infamous Alfonso II D'Aragona, Duke of Calabria could have precipitated a medical emergency.
First author Dr Domiziana Nardelli, Ear Nose and Throat (ENT) Resident at the Universita Campus Bio-Medico di Roma said: “Letters between Piero Vespucci and Lorenzo de'Medici about Simonetta’s final days discuss how she collapsed during a ball and was then resting in a darkened room where she suffered from terrible headaches, hallucinations, vomiting and high fever. These are all symptoms of a rapidly expanding pituitary tumor.”
Senior author Paolo Pozzilli, Clinical Research Professor at Queen Mary Unviersity of London said: “Botticelli’s Allegorical portrait of a Woman shows a woman – the model is Simonetta Vespucci – lactating, and yet we know she had no children. This is a surprising way to portray her and we believe that this – along with changes in facial traits – could show the real physical symptoms of a prolactin-growth hormone secreting adenoma. We’ve confirmed this possible diagnosis using a facial recognition algorithm based on a pre-trained deep learning model, on five portraits of Simonetta.
“It’s also possible that the irregular eye positioning in the Birth of Venus — the ‘strabismus’ or squint later considered a trait of piety and beauty – may be caused by the pituitary tumor.”
When a single worm was discovered in the depths of our planet's crust, it began an extraordinarily lucky series of events that transformed our understanding of life at extreme depth.
If you could drill into the ground beneath you and descend into Earth's crust, you'd be uncomfortable pretty quickly. As sunlight vanishes and you sink a little closer towards the planet's molten core, the temperature and pressure mounts, while deep groundwater fills the cracks and holes in the rock. At torrid depths of 0.8 miles down (1.3km), you'd be forgiven for thinking nothing could be alive down here.
But if you're lucky, you might see them: billions upon billions of bacteria, sometimes forming bright orange or white mats – and if you could whisk out a microscope, maybe even a tiny worm using appendages on its mouth to hoist itself along the rock.
This is Halicephalobus mephisto, the devil worm, on the prowl for microbes. Though miniscule – only as long as the width of several human hairs – it's a whale in this Lilliputian ecosystem. When it dies in the snot-like microbial film growing on the rock, scientists imagine, its body is consumed by bacteria and other life forms, helping to fuel this strange, Hadean cycle of life.
Before the 1980s, most biologists didn't think that life existed more than 30cm (1ft) or so below the ground. The detection of deep-dwelling bacteria – and the 2011 discovery of the devil worm – represented a seismic shift in our understanding of the Earth's depths.
The worm's story demonstrates how life, even animal life, finds a way without the Sun's energy or an oxygen-rich atmosphere, radically expanding what scientists thought was possible for living things and sparking new ideas about life's origins and future.
"If you can find a worm down there, what else are we missing?" marvels geomicrobiologist Karen Lloyd of the University of Southern California. "It's just full of possibilities."
Thanks to an extraordinarily lucky series of events, scientists managed to produce offspring from that single devil worm and have been avidly studying its descendants to understand how the species survives in the hot, dark Earth.
Enter the deep biosphere
The first convincing reports of deep-subsurface life emerged in the 1990s. In 1997, for instance, bacteria were found as deep as 2.8km (1.7 miles) deep inside a gas borehole.
In the early 2000s, the worm biologist Gaetan Borgonie, who founded the non-profit research institute Extreme Life Isyensya in Belgium, wondered whether a group of small worms called roundworms, or nematodes, might also exist deep underground.
Borgonie recalls older scientists scoffing at the idea that more complex life might exist in the depths. But Borgonie, knowing how tough the little animals are, felt it was worth exploring. After all, when the space shuttle Columbia catastrophically disintegrated into the atmosphere in 2003, and an on-board experiment with nematodes fell 64km (40 miles) to the ground, the animals survived – and were found happily multiplying.
In 2008, Borgonie teamed up with other experts in extreme life to visit the Beatrix gold mine in South Africa. At 0.8 miles (1.3km) down, the team accessed holes that had been drilled into the mine's walls to tap the roughly 37C (99F) water inside the rock and let it run through filters designed to catch small life forms, Borgonie recalls. After filtering more than 6,000 liters (1,300 gallons) of water, they caught one tiny worm.
At two other South African mines, they filtered even larger amounts of water – more than 12 million liters at one of them – and found a handful of different species of roundworms, along with some other invertebrates, fungi, and several microscopic life forms.
"I had never expected to find an entire zoo," Borgonie says. Most of the species are also known from surface environments, but the worm from the Beatrix mine – whose tail was broken from the filtering process – was a species Borgonie didn't recognize. In 2011, they reported that it was new to science and gave it a name: Halicephalobus mephisto.
There was surprising diversity of multicellular life in water from deep mines, including several types of worm
A broken tail is a death sentence for a nematode. But fortunately, the individual was a female, and it was parthenogenetic – meaning it can reproduce by itself without having to mate – and laid eight viable eggs before it died. "We were very, very lucky" that the individual survived, says Borgonie; he's never found another devil worm.
"It was the worm that lived. Like Harry Potter," marvels John Bracht, a genomics researcher at American University in Washington, DC.
Some of the worm's descendants have ended up in Bracht's lab, where they're raised in petri dishes under similar conditions as the devil worm's cousin, Caenorhabditis elegans, an intensively studied nematode species that lives on rotting fruit. There are some differences: mephisto doesn't swim in water and instead clings to the sides of a plastic tube, an ability that probably helps it latch onto underground rocks.
Evidently not a fan of eating Caenorhabditis elegans' food – the bacterium E. coli – devil worms wriggle towards other bacteria that land and establish colonies in the dishes.
Importantly, mephisto does poorly at room temperatures; at 20C (68F) where its growth slows down and takes eight days to complete its life cycle. It prefers temperatures of 37C (99F) – conditions that usually kill Caenorhabditis elegans but where mephisto happily reproduces every two days.
Adaptations for resilience
It's challenging to study a species by only examining the descendants of a single individual, especially ones that have been away from their native habitat for a long time. But Bracht has found clues as to how the worm survives deep underground.
When he and his colleagues sequenced mephisto's DNA in 2019, they discovered unusually high numbers of genes that produce heat-shock proteins, molecules that protect other proteins from damage caused by extreme temperatures.
More recently, in 2024, Bracht's team took a close look at another molecule called cytochrome oxidase c, a key component in the process of consuming oxygen and using it to make the energy required to sustain life.
Through a series of experiments, Bracht learned that mephisto's cytochrome oxidase c only performs at high temperatures; at room temperature, the molecule shuts off, slowing down energy generation – explaining why the worms are so sluggish in these conditions.
Bracht hypothesizes that that off-switch could be a survival tactic. "They're ensuring that they reproduce more in the better environment, which would be the warmer one," he says.
Bracht is currently studying whether the devil worm's parthenogenetic reproduction strategy is also a survival tool. Because devil worms may not often encounter others of their kind in the vast expanses of the underworld, this kind of asexual reproduction may sometimes be their only way to make offspring.
Asexual reproduction is thought to come at a cost, however, as it doesn't create the healthy genetic diversity that comes from the mixing of genetic material when males and females mate – which is why many scientists consider asexually reproducing species to be doomed to extinction. (Read more about the surprising success of some all-female species.)
Perhaps devil worm males do exist – allowing for some sexual reproduction when individuals encounter one another – but they just haven't been discovered yet, Bracht speculates. In any case, the worms showcase just how adaptable nematodes are. "Any place you find a food source, and there's a possibility for animals to get there, nematodes will evolve to land in that niche."
Resilience in the depths
It's a mystery how these life forms got here. Research by Borgonie and geobiologist Cara Magnabosco at ETH Zürich in Switzerland suggests that at least some nematodes move down from surface environments through water, perhaps helped along by the shudders of earthquake activity; some species survive whereas others perish.
"There must be some connectivity and transport of them from the surface to this deep environment," Magnabosco says.
In all, Magnabosco and others have estimated that microbes of the deep biosphere make up a considerable chunk of life on the planet, accounting for 12 to 20% of the total biomass of Earth's microbes. These underground bacteria – which have evolved sophisticated strategies to source carbon and energy from the dark world around them – probably play an important role in supporting more complex life forms like nematodes.
They not only provide food, but may also produce small amounts of oxygen that deep nematodes need, Lloyd says. And by influencing the acidity levels inside deep watery caverns, "they can help create a clement environment for larger things to grow in", Lloyd says. The invertebrates, in turn, provide food for microbes: nitrogen when they defecate, and carbon from their bodies when they die, Borgonie adds.
Such underworld ecosystems may have been thriving for aeons. Research by Maggie Lau of China's Institute of Deep-Sea Science and Engineering and her colleagues has found evidence that one species of deep-dwelling bacterium may have been in the Earth's crust since the fragmentation of the supercontinent Pangea, which began about 165 million years ago, back when dinosaurs roamed the world.
The devil worm and its subterranean brethren may well be some of the most enduring kind of life on Earth. Studying the deep biosphere, experts say, could help us better understand the conditions under which living things first came into existence, and even help inform searches for extraterrestrial life; if there is life on Mars, it's probably lurking under the surface.
And should a life-killing asteroid hit Earth and sterilize its surface, life could arise again from the critters that dwell underneath.
"As humans, we think we rule the world, but we don't," says biochemist Esta van Heerden, a lead environmental scientist at the South African bioremediation company iWater, who was part of the team who discovered the devil worm. "That has been extremely humbling for me – to understand they have been here for millions, if not billions, of years and they will remain here long, long after we've gone.”
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20260729-devil-worm-the-worlds-deepest-living-animal
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PREVIOUSLY UNKNOWN INTERCELLULAR ELECTRICITY MAY POWER BIOLOGY
~ The human body relies heavily on electrical charges. Lightning-like pulses of energy fly through the brain and nerves and most biological processes depend on electrical ions traveling across the membranes of each cell in our body.
These electrical signals are possible, in part, because of an imbalance in electrical charges that exists on either side of a cellular membrane. Until recently, researchers believed the membrane was an essential component to creating this imbalance. But that thought was turned on its head when researchers at Stanford University discovered that similar imbalanced electrical charges can exist between microdroplets of water and air.
Now, researchers at Duke University have discovered that these types of electric fields also exist within and around another type of cellular structure called biological condensates. Like oil droplets floating in water, these structures exist because of differences in density. They form compartments inside the cell without needing the physical boundary of a membrane.
Inspired by previous research demonstrating that microdroplets of water interacting with air or solid surfaces create tiny electrical imbalances, the researchers decided to see if the same was true for small biological condensates. They also wanted to see if these imbalances sparked reactive oxygen, "redox," reactions like these other systems.
This foundational discovery could change the way researchers think about biological chemistry. It could also provide a clue as to how the first life on Earth harnessed the energy needed to arise. "In a prebiotic environment without enzymes to catalyze reactions, where would the energy come from?" asked Yifan Dai, a Duke postdoctoral researcher.
"This discovery provides a plausible explanation of where the reaction energy could have come from, just as the potential energy that is imparted on a point charge placed in an electric field," Dai said.
When electric charges jump between one material and another, they can produce molecular fragments that can pair up and form hydroxyl radicals, which have the chemical formula OH. These can then pair again to form hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) in tiny but detectable amounts.
"But interfaces have seldom been studied in biological regimes other than the cellular membrane, which is one of the most essential part of biology," said Dai. "So we were wondering what might be happening at the interface of biological condensates, that is, if it is an asymmetric system too.”
Cells can build biological condensates to either separate or trap together certain proteins and molecules, either hindering or promoting their activity. Researchers are just beginning to understand how condensates work and what they could be used for.
Because the Chilkoti laboratory specializes in creating synthetic versions of naturally occurring biological condensates, the researchers were easily able to create a test bed for their theory. After combining the right formula of building blocks to create minuscule condensates, with help from postdoctoral scholar Marco Messina in Christopher J. Chang's group at the University of California, Berkeley, they added a dye to the system that glows in the presence of reactive oxygen species.
Their hunch was right. When the environmental conditions were right, a solid glow started from the edges of the condensates, confirming that a previously unknown phenomenon was at work. Dai next talked with Richard Zare, the Marguerite Blake Wilbur Professor of Chemistry at Stanford, whose group established the electric behavior of water droplets.
Zare was excited to hear about the new behavior in biological systems, and started to work with the group on the underlying mechanism.
"Inspired by previous work on water droplets, my graduate student, Christian Chamberlayne, and I thought that the same physical principles might apply and promote redox chemistry, such as the formation of hydrogen peroxide molecules," Zare said. "These findings suggest why condensates are so important in the functioning of cells.”
"Most previous work on biomolecular condensates has focused on their innards," Chilkoti said. "Yifan's discovery that biomolecular condensates appear to be universally redox-active suggests that condensates did not simply evolve to carry out specific biological functions as is commonly understood, but that they are also endowed with a critical chemical function that is essential to cells.”
While the biological implications of this ongoing reaction within our cells is not known, Dai points to a prebiotic example of how powerful its effects might be. The powerhouses of our cells, called mitochondria, create energy for all of our life's functions through the same basic chemical process. But before mitochondria or even the simplest of cells existed, something had to provide energy for the very first of life's functions to begin working.
Researchers have proposed that the energy was provided by thermal vents in the oceans or hot springs. Others have suggested this same redox reaction that occurs in water microdroplets was created by the spray of ocean waves.
"Magic can happen when substances get tiny and the interfacial volume becomes enormous compared to its volume," Dai said. "I think the implications are important to many different fields.”
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2023/04/230428153615.htm
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SUGAR IS A POISON, SAYS UCSF OBESITY EXPERT
The rise of obesity is usually blamed on too much eating and not enough exercising, but Robert Lustig, MD, a UCSF pediatric neuroendocrinologist, asks us to look beyond the obvious. Yes, more Americans are overweight today than 30 years ago. Kids are still getting heavier, compared with prior generations of kids. That leads some UCSF researchers to warn that heart disease and other health problems will grow in future decades. But behaviors that some might refer to as gluttony and sloth are merely consequences of the true cause of the epidemic, Lustig says. Food was just as abundant before obesity’s ascendance. The problem is the increase in sugar consumption. Sugar both drives fat storage and makes the brain think it is hungry, setting up a “vicious cycle,” according to Lustig.
More specifically, it is fructose that is harmful, according to Lustig. Fructose is a component of the two most popular sugars. One is table sugar — sucrose. The other is high-fructose corn syrup. High-fructose corn syrup has become ubiquitous in soft drinks and many other processed foods. Lustig presented his case against fructose in a UCSF Mini Medical School course on diet and nutrition, part of a series sponsored by the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute.
Audience members may have been surprised to hear such unequivocally strong statements from a researcher. Lustig framed the obesity epidemic as a societal issue that pits the food-selling agenda of federal agencies and profit-seeking behavior of major corporations against public health needs.
Lustig quit working in the lab a decade ago. Now he spends more time with pediatric patients. He is on the front lines of the world’s weight woes, treating kids who already are obese, a condition that sets the stage for health problems that begin long before these children become adults. Lustig still conducts clinical research. He evaluates dietary lifestyle, as well as pharmacologic interventions that might hold the pounds at bay. He tracks down associations between diet, lifestyle and health outcomes in an effort to identify biological mechanisms that will explain them.
Insulin and Leptin
Lustig’s own groundbreaking studies more than a decade ago stimulated the development of his controversial ideas about metabolism and biological feedback in weight control. One not-yet-popular idea is that, calorie for calorie, sugar causes more insulin resistance in the liver than other edibles. The pancreas then has to release more insulin to satisfy the liver’s needs. High insulin levels, in turn, interfere with the brain’s receipt of signals from a hormone called leptin, secreted by fat cells, Lustig believes.
In the 1990s, Lustig worked with children diagnosed with hypothalamic obesity, a disorder that can occur after brain tumor surgery. The children were making more insulin than was necessary for normal energy storage in fat cells. Lustig thought the kids were not receiving signals from leptin, which helps send a message that the appetite has been sated. Lustig concluded that the children’s brains were fooled into thinking that they were starving. Lustig administered a drug called octreotide, known to block insulin release. Insulin levels fell; the children ate less, lost weight, spontaneously became more active and improved their quality of life.
Lustig tried the same treatment with obese adults, and found that a subset responded in the same way as the children with hypothalamic obesity. Eating stimulates secretion of insulin and leptin. The conventional view holds that insulin, like leptin, feeds back in the brain to limit food intake, Lustig explains. But Lustig does not think that chronically elevated insulin levels feed back negatively to curb eating. Instead, chronically elevated insulin blocks leptin’s negative feedback signal, Lustig believes. “Most people think insulin does the same thing as leptin,” he says. “I think it does just the opposite.” Lustig believes that fructose generates greater insulin resistance than other foodstuffs. Fructose calories, therefore, fail to blunt appetite in the same way as other foods.
A CALORIE IS NOT JUST A CALORIE
Lustig also is at odds with mainstream scientific viewpoints when it comes to explaining how fructose is shunted through biochemical pathways and converted into fat and other molecules. Unlike conventional calorie counters, Lustig does not believe all food calories have the same impact on fat storage and energy expenditure, regardless of whether they come from fat, protein or carbohydrate. Fructose, a type of carbohydrate, is not metabolized like other foodstuffs, and not even like glucose, the other major carbohydrate, Lustig says. In addition, Lustig claims that fructose is just as bad as alcohol in causing fat storage in the liver — and in causing fatty liver disease.
Lustig advances these controversial ideas primarily by citing already published studies, most of them by other researchers. But he also tries to enlist bench scientists in research collaborations in the hopes that additional studies will prove to others that these ideas are correct.
SUGAR IS WORSE THAN FAT
Each sucrose molecule consists of one molecule of fructose joined to one molecule of glucose. In the gut, these two components are quickly split apart. High-fructose corn syrup is a less expensive mixture of glucose and fructose. There is no point in belaboring the difference, Lustig says. “High-fructose corn syrup and sucrose are exactly the same,” Lustig says. “They’re equally bad. They’re both poison in high doses.” Over the past century, Americans have increased their fructose consumption from 15 grams per day to 75 grams per day or more, Lustig explains.
The trend accelerated beginning about three decades ago, when cheap, easy-to-transport high-fructose corn syrup became widely available. Much of processed food labeled “reduced fat” instead has sugar added to make it more palatable, Lustig says. But when it comes to harmful health effects, sugar is worse than fat, he claims. Consumption of either results in elevated levels of artery-clogging fats being made by the liver and deposited in the bloodstream. But fructose causes even further damage to the liver and to structural proteins of the body while fomenting excessive caloric consumption, Lustig says.
FOUR SIMPLE GUIDELINES
Lustig prescribes four simple guidelines for parents coping with kids who are too heavy:
Get rid of every sugared liquid in the house. Kids should drink only water and milk.
Provide carbohydrates associated with fiber.
Wait 20 minutes before serving second portions.
Have kids buy their “screen time” minute-for-minute with physical activity.
Fructose is abundant in fruit. Fruit is fine, Lustig says, but we should think twice before drinking juice or feeding it to our kids. The fiber in whole fruit contributes to a sense of fullness. Lustig says it is rare to see a child eat more than one orange, but it is common for kids to consume much more sugar and calories as orange juice. Eating fiber also results in less carbohydrate being absorbed in the gut, Lustig notes. In addition, he says, fiber consumption allows the brain to receive a satiety signal sooner than it would otherwise, so we stop eating sooner.
Exercise burns only a modest amount of calories, Lustig notes. But it does have other benefits. Exercise improves insulin sensitivity in skeletal muscle, lowering insulin levels in the bloodstream. Exercise reduces stress and, therefore, reduces stress-induced eating, according to Lustig. Lastly, exercise increases metabolic rate. The directive to balance active play with computer, video and TV time is the most difficult one to comply with, Lustig says. But failure to limit sugar intake appears to be the most predictive of poor weight control in children, he adds. “You are not what you eat; you are what you do with what you eat,” Lustig concludes. “And what you do with fructose is particularly dangerous.”
https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2009/06/104177/sugar-poison-says-ucsf-obesity-expert
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FOODS THAT INCREASE TESTOSTERONE
Fatty fish and fish oil:
Fatty fish like salmon, tuna, mackerel, herring, sardines, and trout are high in nutrients that are essential for hormonal health, like vitamin D, zinc, and omega-3 fatty acids. Research found that certain high-fat foods, like fried foods, can decrease testosterone levels, whereas healthy fats like fatty fish can be beneficial for overall health.
Some studies also show that males with lower vitamin D levels are at risk of developing hypogonadism than those who don’t. This is because vitamin D is essential for male reproductive health. A 2024 study in Japan involved 1,545 older males and found that those who ate higher amounts of fatty fish had higher levels of testosterone. If you don’t eat fish, you can consider taking a fish oil supplement to get its benefits.
Leafy greens:
Dark, leafy greens are a good source of micronutrients, especially magnesium, a mineral that is essential to maintain optimal testosterone levels, particularly in older men. Magnesium can increase testosterone bioactivity because it lowers oxidative stress, which is an imbalance between the presence of reactive oxygen species and the body’s capacity to quickly detoxify the reactive intermediates or repair the harm they cause in your body.
Oxidative stress and inflammation can lower testosterone levels, so these necessary nutrients are important to address oxidative stress to maintain healthy testosterone levels. A study performed on 399 men who were 65 or older found that men who had higher magnesium levels in their blood had higher testosterone levels than men who lacked magnesium in that age group. Additionally, a Taiwanese study found that low intake of leafy green vegetables is directly linked to low testosterone. So, make sure you eat magnesium-rich leafy greens such as spinach, kale, and collard greens for healthy testosterone levels.
Shellfish:
Shellfish such as oysters and clams are good sources of zinc, selenium, and omega-3 fatty acids, which support optimal testosterone levels because zinc serves an essential role in reproductive health; zinc deficiency causes hypogonadism. That’s the reason high-dose zinc supplements are effective in treating hypogonadism in some men; however, zinc supplements are not recommended for treating hypogonadism. Still, you can consider oysters because they contain more zinc per serving than any other food. Studies also found that shellfish like oysters have an antioxidant effect that enhances Leydig cells’ efficiency, which is the main source of testosterone. You can also consider zinc, selenium, and omega-3 fatty acids rich seafood to support your hormonal health.
Cocoa:
Cocoa is a good source of magnesium and flavonoid antioxidants. Flavonoids are a powerful antioxidant that lowers inflammation in the body. Studies found this specific antioxidant can provide an effective boost to testosterone production. A 2-month study from India found that young males who consumed cocoa seeds noticed an increase in testosterone levels than people who received a placebo. So, consider eating cocoa products like cocoa powder, dark chocolate, and cacao nibs for better health benefits.
Honey:
Honey contains boron, a natural mineral that helps increase testosterone production by enhancing the efficiency of testosterone-producing Leydig cells. It also boosts levels of luteinizing hormone (LH), which triggers the production of testosterone in the testicles. Honey also contains chrysin, which is a potent aromatase inhibitor that blocks the aromatase enzyme from converting testosterone into estrogen and may promote higher testosterone levels.
Eggs:
Eggs are an essential source of protein, cholesterol, vitamin D, and omega-3s, all of which help to increase the production of testosterone. It also contains selenium, which is an essential antioxidant associated with higher testosterone production. A 2021 study on 30 male athletes compared their testosterone levels, where some consumed egg whites and others the whole eggs. After 12 weeks of resistance training, the males who consumed whole eggs had higher testosterone levels and lower body fat compared to the other group. You can consult your doctor on how many whole eggs you can eat throughout the week.
Garlic:
Garlic is also rich in flavonoids, which are essential for combating inflammation and free radicals in the body that make cells age prematurely. A 2018 review of studies reveals that garlic boosts testosterone levels and sperm production for fertility.
Researchers also found that these effects of antioxidants in garlic can increase the efficiency of testosterone-producing cells (Leydig cells) in the testicles. It also contains a compound called allicin, which lowers your cortisol levels, a hormone produced to manage stress by the adrenal gland, where testosterone is also produced. Lowering the amount of stress in the body helps produce more testosterone by the adrenal gland. You can add it to your meals to boost your testosterone levels.
Onions:
Onions are an excellent source of several nutrients and antioxidants. A 2019 study reveals that onions may support male testosterone levels by increasing the production of luteinizing hormone, enhancing the antioxidant defense mechanism in the testes, which lowers inflammation and insulin resistance. More clinical trials are needed to confirm, but you can add onion as a salad or in food to get its benefits.
Olive oil:
Olive oil offers many health benefits, including boosting testosterone levels. It is rich in monounsaturated fat and vitamin E, an antioxidant. It helps to increase a person’s overall fat intake, promoting testosterone production. A small study in Morocco involving 60 healthy young males consuming 25 milliliters of extra virgin olive oil (around 5 teaspoons), found increased testosterone levels (by 17%) and LH levels by less than 42% after 3 weeks. These results show that olive oil can be a good choice for cooking food.
Lemon:
Lemons, along with other citrus fruits, are a great means of boosting testosterone levels because they contain vitamin A, which is required for testosterone production, and lower estrogen levels, which make testosterone more effective.
https://doralhw.org/10-foods-that-boost-testosterone-levels/
Oriana:
Unprocessed red meat increases testosterone production; I suspect it wasn't mentioned for reasons of political incorrectness.
Actually the original purpose of a vegetarian diet was to lower testosterone; it seems that monks were the ones who made use of that knowledge. Likewise, vegetarian women often lose their monthly cycle. Diet definitely affects sex hormones.
*
ending on beauty:
B FLAT
A black hole hums as it spins,
astrophysicists announced. It sings
one melancholy note, B flat —
many octaves too low for the human ear.
Perhaps that primordial B flat
is a greeting to other black holes,
singing each to each
across the black mother void —
a prelude to the yet undetected
birth song of stars being born
in their black-hole nests —
and not just the anthem
of everything leaving everything —
galaxies rushing off
to more important places;
a lover quickly walking away.
~ Oriana
