MY FATHER-IN-LAW
FROM THE COUNTRY OF THE DEAD
sends me a gift, my inheritance:
an envelope stuffed with banknotes,
and a purse burdened with coins.
The banknotes rustle in sepia
scrolled in Cyrillic alphabet.
Perhaps it’s Tzarist rubles,
or money from beyond
the ghetto of time.
See, he gives it back:
his passage to America,
the slaughterhouses of Chicago.
Still the coins should be worth
the trouble of dying –
even the coppers dropped
into black bottomless
pools of beggars’ caps –
I hold the purse in both hands,
afraid to look inside. Whose face
will be on those coins?
Pa, the old miser, starting with a crate
of horseradish hawked
on a street corner in Milwaukee –
He’s in the ferry business now,
takes the dead across.
From his butcher shop he’s kept
the tall white scale
to weigh the souls –
Those too heavy with regret
are hung from meat hooks to forget
that bundle of love letters
before they married someone else.
Those too light from having laughed
are pressed with stone like sauerkraut.
With frost-bitten fingers,
my father-in-law taps the coins:
“The best deal in town:
you can have these
for a song,” he says,
hoarder and herder,
his voice cracked
with millennia of hardship
and drink, worn out
with the passage
from shore to shore.
No matter whose
face, he shrugs.
See, he gives it back:
each coin the story of a life.
~ Oriana
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BLEAK HOUSE: THE DARK TRUTH BEHIND CHARLES DICKENS’ CHRISTMAS OBSESSION
Nobody celebrated Christmas quite like Dickens – yet behind the showy dinners and determined good cheer was a painful reality, only hinted at in his most famous works
When Charles Dickens’s death was announced in June 1870 the young daughter of a London costermonger asked anxiously: “Mr Dickens dead? Then will Father Christmas die too?” The story has been handed down the generations like a recipe for plum pudding, savored for the deft way it knits the novelist and the midwinter festival together into one cosy stocking.
Just the phrase “costermonger’s daughter” suggests all sorts of Dickensian themes – city grime, cheap street food, the capacity of innocent children to rise lispingly above the squalor of their circumstance. But what often gets missed is the way that the little girl’s question – if she really existed, if she ever said it – assumes how vulnerable Christmas is. Just like Mr Dickens, it could be snatched away at a moment’s notice.
It is 175 years since Dickens published A Christmas Carol, the 28,000-word novella that lay down the template for how we now celebrate (or make a point of resisting) Christmas. Prince Albert and his imported fir tree of 1841 made a contribution, of course, and so did Henry Cole and his Christmas cards of 1843, and a London sweet-maker called Tom Smith who came up with crackers in 1847. But Christmas was pulled together, codified, made visible in story and painted in sound by Dickens who dashed down A Christmas Carol in six weeks in the autumn of 1843.
The book, published on 19 December of that year, famously tells the story of Ebenezer Scrooge, a bitter old miser who is given a chance to redeem himself when he is visited in turn by four ghosts on Christmas Eve. As a result of their warning about what will happen if he fails to change his ways, the grasping old skinflint repents of his life-denying selfishness. Flushed with goodwill, he lavishes a delicious Christmas dinner on the family of his shabby and exploited clerk, Bob Cratchit.
To mark the anniversary of A Christmas Carol, the Charles Dickens Museum in Clerkenwell, London, has mounted an exhibition that is replete with all the signifiers of what has become known as a “Dickensian Christmas” but which is also, simultaneously, Dickens’s Christmas.
On display you will find the silver punch ladles with which the master of the house liked to spoon out the boozy, lemony festive drink that he made each year according to his own recipe. In the back kitchen you can see the family “copper” – a built-in brick water heater – in which Mrs Dickens simmered the plum pudding, just as frazzled Mrs Cratchit does in A Christmas Carol (since the copper was mostly used for boiling laundry it’s no surprise that the Cratchits’ pudding comes out smelling slightly of soapy old sheets). The drawing room at Doughty Street, meanwhile, is decked with the boughs of holly and mistletoe that gleam so brightly in Chapter 28 of The Pickwick Papers when Mr Pickwick, Sam Weller and their posse descend on Dingly Dell on 22 December for a fortnight of mid-winter frolic.
It was at Doughty Street, and later at the nearby addresses to which he moved his family, that Dickens would habitually enact his version of the festival. “Christmas was always a time which in our home was looked forward to with eagerness and delight,” recalled his eldest daughter, Mamie, who was born at Doughty Street. Younger brother Henry chimed in: “My father was always at his best, a splendid host, bright and jolly as a boy and throwing his heart and soul into everything.”
Guests would be offered a turkey dinner followed by a dazzling display of magic tricks courtesy of Boz himself. Dickens had only to wave his hands over a gentleman’s top hat for a steaming plum pudding to emerge; a box of bran was transformed into a live guinea pig. Even Jane Carlyle, a regular guest who could generally be counted on to say something spiky, was obliged to admit that Mr Dickens was “the best conjuror I ever saw (and I have paid money to see several)”.
Yet, as this thoughtful exhibition hints, Dickens’s hectic high spirits – at one point, says Mrs Carlyle, the naturally abstemious novelist appeared positively drunk with delight at his own sleights of hand – were driven by something darker. You have only to look at the novels to see how Christmas is often skating on thin ice. In Great Expectations Pip passes on a pork pie intended for Christmas dinner to the escaped convict Magwitch, a good deed that will blight his life. In The Mystery of Edwin Drood, the young hero goes missing on Christmas Eve, leaving behind several clues that he has been murdered by his uncle. Saddest of all, in A Christmas Carol, Scrooge is forced by the Ghost of Christmas Past to observe himself as a boy abandoned at school over the festive season, and weeps “to see his poor forgotten self as he used to be”.
The real-life roots of Dickens’s affinity with hunger, dispossession and cancelled Christmases have been identified many times. One nightmarish year when he was 12, young Charles was deprived of a home life following his feckless father’s imprisonment for debt. Wrenched out of school, the boy was set to work in a rat-infested blacking factory on the banks of the Thames, returning each night to grim lodgings in Camden Town. Permanently ravenous, on his daily stomach-rumbling walk to work he would stop in Tottenham Court Road to spend his precious dinner money on a stale half-price pastry.
So great was the trauma of this shameful year that as an adult Dickens divulged the details only to his best friend John Forster and Catherine. It is all there, though, in David Copperfield, his autobiographical novel of 1849-50, as well as in the narratives of those other fledgling boy heroes who have fallen out of the familial nest and now live unloved and hungry: Nicholas Nickleby, forced to drink watered-down milk by his schoolmaster, Oliver Twist daring to ask the workhouse beadle for more.
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This disintegration of Dickens’s early family became a psychic wound that he felt compelled to heal again and again. Hence the continual, one might say compulsive, need to assert his adult domestic happiness to both friends and strangers. Dinner parties chez Dickens amounted to a kind of theatrical performance. The curtain went up punctually – guests were typically asked to arrive for dinner “at ¼ before 7 o’clock” – and a minute’s lateness was greeted with a disproportionate coldness.
The props too were a tad stagey, putting one in mind of the nouveau riche Veneerings from Our Mutual Friend: “everything about the Veneerings was spick and span new. All their furniture was new and “the surface smelt a little too much of the workshop and was a trifle sticky”. Even kindly Mrs Gaskell couldn’t help repeating a rumor she’d heard about the Dickenses’ dinner service being solid gold. It wasn’t, of course, but there were monograms on everything, including the fish slice, which struck some guests as a bit of an over-reach for the son of a bankrupt naval clerk.
There was something oppressive, too, about the elaborate courtesy with which the guests were garnished. Besides each place-setting there was a nosegay for the ladies and a buttonhole for the men. There were “quantities of artificial flowers” (snide Jane Carlyle again) up and down the table, which was itself groaning with “overloaded desert! Pyramids of figs, raisins, oranges”. William Thackeray, yet to hit pay dirt with Vanity Fair and therefore feeling murderous about his literary rival’s sudden access to cash, couldn’t resist bitching to his mother about Mrs Dickens’s penchant for “pink satin” and her dandyish husband’s suspiciously ringleted hair. The couple, he reported gleefully on another occasion, were “abominably coarse” and “vulgar”.
The particularly observant guest might have noticed other signs that something was amiss in the Dickenses’ strenuous performance of middle-class domestic bliss. According to the gender codes of the mid-19th century, married couples were expected to organize themselves around the principle of “separate spheres”. For the lady of the house that meant running her increasingly lavish home “like the Commander of an Army” (Mrs Beeton), supervising servants and ordering food. The master meanwhile busied himself earning enough money to pay the bills for all those curtains, carpets, housemaids and fish slices that were now considered bare necessities for anyone who aspired to a certain level of bourgeois gentility.
But it didn’t work that way in the Dickens household. Documents, including some on display at Doughty Street, reveal that it was he, rather than Catherine, who ran the household. It is Mr, not Mrs, Dickens who frets about ordering a hamper from Fortnum & Mason, who drools over a fine piece of venison at the butchers, who sacks a sulky cook. Rumors about Dickens’s control freakery, in particular his habit of compulsively rearranging the furniture, had long circulated around literary London. But this appropriation of an active housekeeping role struck observers as downright weird. Nathaniel Hawthorne wondered out loud about Dickens “making bargains at butchers and bakers, and doing, as far as he could, whatever pertained to an English wife”.
All this might have been understandable had Catherine been a slapdash housekeeper or a terrible cook. But the evidence to hand suggests the exact opposite. In 1851 she pseudonymously published What Shall We Have for Dinner?, a highly useful and popular – four reprints followed quickly – set of meal plans that encompassed everything from a smart dinner for 20 to modest family suppers.
Ten years before Mrs Beeton, Mrs Dickens was organizing her Bills of Fare according to what was seasonal (for which read good, wholesome and cheap) and which combinations of food would cook best on an open range, a complicated piece of kit which required a precise choreography of pots, pans and naked flame. What Shall We Have for Dinner? was a manual for real housewives who had real budgets: showy spectaculars such as “Grenadine of Veal” and “Charlotte Russe” are balanced out with plenty of suet dumplings, raspberry jam sandwiches and endless mashed potato. The busy housewife, getting supper without the benefit of a professional cook at her elbow, would also be thankful for Mrs Dickens’s many suggestions for cold beef and lamb, not to mention the variety of ‘made dishes’ knocked up from yesterday’s left overs.
Everything suggests that Charles Dickens was fully behind What Shall We Have for Dinner?, a rare surviving copy of which can be seen at Doughty Street. He wrote the pseudonymous introduction and arranged for the book to come out with his own publishers. So it is unnerving to discover that, behind such a ringing endorsement of domestic theology, Dickens was busy retreating from the whole confected caper. In his introduction he issues a warning that, if women don’t learn to be better housekeepers, they have only themselves to blame if their menfolk start spending evenings on the town and at their clubs.
Dickens reading to his two daughters, Mamie and Katey
Which, it turns out, is exactly what he was doing himself. It was during the Doughty Street years that Dickens secured election to both the Garrick and the Athenaeum, gentlemen’s club for men who preferred a home-away-from-home rather than Home itself. Then, from the early 1850s, it was noticeable that Dickens was presiding over fewer dinner parties with Catherine, preferring instead to invite people to supper at his “gipsey tent” AKA the Covent Garden office of Household Words, the weekly magazine that he edited. Crates of champagne and claret were ordered in advance, and the food was sent in from the hotel around the corner. “I loathe domestic hearths, I yearn to be a vagabond!” he wrote to a friend in 1848, in what was supposed to be a joke but sounds like a cri de coeur.
When the final marriage separation came, in 1858, Dickens was quick to put it about that the relationship had failed because Catherine was a bad housekeeper and even worse mother. To one friend he wrote of his wife and the children that she “has never attached one of them to herself, never played with them in their infancy, never attracted their confidence as they have grown older”.
The fact that he had fallen in love with another woman and wanted to be free to embark on an affair was apparently neither here nor there. Instead, opprobrium was heaped on Catherine by the Dickens camp, led by Forster, who managed to imply, without quite saying, that Mrs Dickens’s increasingly large girth and what Dickens termed her “mental disorder” was the result not of 12 pregnancies and accompanying postnatal depression, but rather a failure to keep her appetites within bounds. Catherine’s enjoyment of food was used as a weapon against her for many years, with one influential literary biographer even attributing the “famous breach” partly to her being too fond of her own recipes and becoming, while still young, “mountainously fat”.
So it should come as no surprise that A Christmas Carol, with its message about family cohesion, the forgiving of slights and, above all, the sacramental quality of a really plump turkey, is a text that everywhere strains with ambivalence. For one thing, there’s the obvious conundrum that a tale written to preach about the blighting effect of financial profit and loss on human relations was actually conceived as a money spinner. By the autumn of 1843 Dickens, who at 31 no longer counted as a boy wonder, was having to face the fact that his early commercial and critical success were over.
In contrast to the great triumphs of Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby, his current novel, Martin Chuzzlewit, wasn’t selling. It even looked as if the Great Boz might be required to pay back some of his handsome advance to his publishers Chapman & Hall. His home life wasn’t easy either. Catherine was expecting her fifth child, Dickens’s father, the Micawberish John Dickens, was sponging off his son, and the rent on the new family house at Devonshire Terrace was proving punitive.
So Dickens made a shrewd, calculated attempt at writing what today we’d call a Christmas stocking filler. The publishing market had been changing its rhythms radically in recent years, with the festive period now emerging as the peak time to release new titles, partly as a consequence of the way that cheap print allowed ordinary working people to give books as presents. Dickens was also clear that he didn’t want to be in the position of having to split the profits with anyone, so he decided to publish at his own expense, bypassing Chapman & Hall completely.
We know how the story ends. Ebenezer Scrooge learns that relationships are not about paying the least you can get away with and shutting yourself up in the prison of your lonely heart until you crumble into dust. He learns to love, not in the romantic sense (there will be no Mrs Scrooge), but in the familial sense of giving away his affection to his estranged nephew and his impoverished clerk’s family, expecting nothing in return, and yet gaining everything in this new universe of feeling.
But there is another story here, and we know how that one ends, too. Dickens may have conceived of A Christmas Carol as a quick and clear-sighted punt on the British public’s increasing hunger for novelty books, but that doesn’t mean that it didn’t work its own transformative magic on him as well. Forster reported that he “wept over it, and laughed, and wept again, and excited himself to an extraordinary degree”. “He walked thinking of it fifteen and twenty miles about the black streets of London”, often at very late hours of the night.
That year he kept Christmas with an extraordinary zest; “such dinings, such dancings, such conjurings, such blind-man’s buffings, such theater-goings, such kissing-out of old years and kissing-in of new ones, never took place in these parts before”. For one brief midwinter moment Dickens seemed to have healed his relationship with his traumatic past and a present that was beginning to show hairline fractures by plunging into warm Christmas cheer, a cheer that he worked hard to conjure into being. It couldn’t last of course, and it didn’t.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/dec/20/bleak-house-the-dark-truth-behind-charles-dickens-christmas-obsession
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WHY DID MOST LANGUAGES KEEP THE ROMAN NAMES FOR THE DAYS OF THE WEEK?
Medieval Christian Europe aggressively scrubbed paganism from its temples. So why did they let the days of the week remain dedicated to deities like Thor, Woden, and Venus?
The primary reason most languages kept these names is that timekeeping systems are notoriously resistant to top-down change. By the time Christianity became the dominant religion of the Roman Empire, the seven-day planetary week was deeply entrenched in commerce, astrology, and daily life. It was simply too ingrained in the secular fabric of society to easily uproot.
The Catholic Church actually did try to erase these pagan references. Church leaders instituted an ecclesiastical calendar that referred to the weekdays as feriae (festivals or days). Sunday was the Lord's Day (Dies Dominica), Monday was the second feria (Feria secunda), Tuesday the third, and so on. Clergy used this system in official liturgy, but commoners across Europe largely ignored it. People already had a working system for doing business and planning their lives, and they had little interest in changing it.
The exceptions to this rule required very specific, localized pressures. In Portugal, a zealous 6th-century bishop named Martin of Braga led a successful crusade against the pagan names. He argued vehemently that it was a sin for Christians to speak the names of pagan deities during Holy Week. His strict insistence took root in the local liturgy and eventually spilled over into everyday Portuguese, resulting in segunda-feira (Monday) through sexta-feira (Friday). Greek, heavily influenced by the Eastern Orthodox Church's liturgical traditions, similarly adopted numerical names for most days.
For the rest of Europe, the pagan names survived as linguistic fossils. Romance languages kept the Latin roots (like the French mardi for Mars), while Germanic languages translated the Roman gods into their local equivalents, turning Mars into Tiw (Tuesday) and Jupiter into Thor (Thursday). Ultimately, linguistic habit proved stronger than religious decree, leaving modern calendars as a daily monument to ancient pantheons. ~ SepiaGlyphs, Quora
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HOW HITLER DISMANTLED DEMOCRACY
We tend to remember fascism in its flourishing, at the height of its power: societies marked by dictatorship, a total war machine and the absence of individual rights. But it is an irreducible feature of fascism that it begins as a democratic phenomenon.
“The big joke on democracy,” the Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels wrote in May 1928, “is that it provides its mortal enemies the means to its own destruction.” The Harvard historian Peter E. Gordon agrees. Fascism’s “trademark,” he recently observed, is to deploy “democratic procedure even as it seeks to destroy the substantive values of democracy from within.”
In the 21st century, as liberal societies teeter, journalists and scholars have taken an interest in earlier moments of democratic sabotage. Two years ago, the historian Timothy W. Ryback published “Takeover: Hitler’s Final Rise to Power,” an account — in minute and often thrilling detail — of the six months leading up to Adolf Hitler’s appointment to the chancellorship of Germany in January 1933.
His book focused especially on the hubris of two of Hitler’s enablers: Gen. Kurt von Schleicher, the former chancellor and conservative institutionalist who hoped Hitler’s brownshirts would crush the left on his behalf; and Alfred Hugenberg, the media magnate who published Hitler’s propaganda and eventually joined his cabinet. Both men hoped to contain and usurp Hitler’s movement, assuming it would be them and their patrician ilk, not a common thug like Hitler, who would reap the rewards of the Nazi assault on democracy.
These themes and characters return in Ryback’s “53 Days: How Hitler Dismantled a Democracy.” The new book serves as something of a coda to “Takeover,” extending the timeline to Hitler’s first seven weeks in office — providing, as Ryback writes, “a step-by-step account of how Hitler disabled and then dismantled his country’s democratic structures and processes in less than two months’ time.”
In “53 Days,” we see Hitler’s war on the press, his purging of the civil service, his elimination of civil liberties and his crushing of resistance by the federated German states. It all culminates on March 23, 1933, with the Reichstag’s approval of the aptly named “Enabling Act,” which suspended the Weimar Constitution and handed Hitler unfettered power. As a pat New York Times headline reported the next day: “Quick Action in the Reichstag: Vote Dictatorship for Hitler Regime.”
To a remarkable degree, Ryback’s brisk narrative titrates the exact proportion of detail and context to enliven these moments and never dawdles over any single standoff; the book, which is a short 244 pages, really moves. While Ryback’s prose is mostly taut and interesting, he does sometimes indulge in needless adverbs: Hitler is “fiercely anti-democratic, belligerently nationalistic and viciously racist”; Goebbels, “fiercely, possessively, viciously loyal”; and the Nazi Party, “belligerently” nationalistic and “assertively” socialist.
These occasional tics are less distracting, however, than Ryback’s frequent, at times gratuitous, winks at the Trumpian present. To be clear, Ryback rarely if ever compares Donald Trump and Adolf Hitler explicitly. Instead, he summons and summarizes details from the Nazi past that unmistakably rhyme with the present, leaving it to his discerning readers to make the connection.
Between “Takeover” and “53 Days,” Ryback has made something of a hobby out of these allusions in articles he’s written for The Atlantic, the first of which, titled “How Hitler Dismantled a Democracy in 53 Days,” inspired the new book. Other entries include “What Happened When Hitler Took On Germany’s Central Banker,” “Hitler’s Greenland Obsession” and “Hitler’s Edifice Complex,” the last of which explored Hitler’s obsession with “adding an expensive new wing to the Reich chancellery.”
It would appear these historical set pieces have achieved their intended effect: We learn in the acknowledgments that the California governor Gavin Newsom provided Ryback with an “unexpected impetus” to write “53 Days” when he told the former Texas representative Beto O’Rourke that the author’s original Atlantic piece “scared the hell” out of him.
That this trick can be performed so effectively, again and again — by a capable historian — is evidence enough that the analogy is not completely tendentious.
Like Trump, Hitler was known for his coarse manners, “oversensitive vanity” and need to be the center of attention. Like Trump, he campaigned against the “parliamentarian swamp.” He sued to have the results of the April 1932 elections annulled, subjected the civil service to a DOGE-style loyalty purge, justified his most extreme actions as “retribution” and mass-amnestied violent National Socialist agitators, just as Trump did the insurrectionists of Jan. 6.
But as I read “53 Days,” the relentless fire hose of almost too-perfect analogies raised my suspicion: Are these details the most historically salient? Or were they only chosen for their resonance with the present? Worst of all, Ryback’s coyness — paired with the barreling pace of his narrative — deprives his readers of the equally valuable flip side of historical analogy: that is, disanalogy, the opportunity to contrast our two epochs and glean something from the differences.
To name just one potentially illuminating disparity: Hitler’s rise was not possible without paramilitary violence. The Nazis were a murderous gang before they were a meaningful parliamentary force, and the SA and the SS played an indispensable role in consolidating Hitler’s hold on society. America today is a violent place, of course; for many observers, ICE resembles a secret police and fantasies of retributive violence no doubt animate certain seamy factions of Trump’s coalition. But there is no analogue in contemporary life to the organized political violence that pervaded German society in the interwar years. Trump achieved his ends by other means.
There is surely plenty to learn from the rise of the Third Reich. In “53 Days,” Ryback introduces us to Emil Gumbel, a social democrat who observed that “the Nazis knew how to mobilize sentiments and overcompensate for feelings of inferiority” — which is the essence of MAGA. And in 1933, Hitler urged his violent Brownshirt thugs to “keep calm and disciplined,” which Ryback — laying it on a little thicker than usual — describes as a “halfhearted appeal to step back and stand by,” evoking Trump’s 2020 message to the Proud Boys.
Readers who share the assumption of likeness are given the delicious opportunity to nod knowingly. But historical writing should aspire to higher aims and riskier arguments than those that merely flatter the sentiments of anti-Trump partisans who, overwhelmed by the present, find satisfying displeasure in echoes from the past.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/01/books/review/53-days-timothy-ryback.html?utm_source=firefox-newtab-en-us
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SCOTLAND’S “FORGOTTEN EINSTEIN” 
Parton Kirk, like many others, is no longer needed by the Church of Scotland
In a small south of Scotland village you can find the grave of a giant figure in the scientific world.
James Clerk Maxwell's final resting place is in the church graveyard at Parton — situated about midway between Castle Douglas and New Galloway.
Described as "Scotland's forgotten Einstein", his work paved the way for many of the modern devices we take for granted, such as mobile phones, radio and television.
However, the area faces an uncertain future with Parton Kirk no longer needed by the Church of Scotland and potentially going up for sale on the open market.
James Clerk Maxwell's work paved the way for many modern-day devices
Born in Edinburgh in 1831, Clerk Maxwell moved to Glenlair in Dumfries and Galloway as a child.
He attended university in both Edinburgh and Cambridge where his scientific talent was soon recognized.
The concept of electromagnetic radiation originated with Clerk Maxwell and is credited as paving the way for Einstein's special theory of relativity.
He died in Cambridge in 1879 but was buried back in southern Scotland.
Like many churches across the region and beyond, Parton Kirk is surplus to requirements but the local community has been offered the chance to buy it.
However, they need to raise £50,000 by 1 November in order to do so.
Paul Hodson, who chairs the community council, said it was a situation they had been preparing for for some time.
"We have been looking at this since 2008 as we knew this day was coming," he said.
A few years ago a feasibility report was produced into a potential future use.
"We would like to see the building retained and put to use as a Clerk Maxwell Science and Community Center as part of a wider regional development of the science offering and tourist route rather than just for the Parton community itself," Hodson said.
A meeting is being held in the village to assess the level of local support.
'Father of modern science'
However, Hodson said there was no doubt that the prominent scientist deserved to be better known.
"He's known as the father of modern science," he said.
"He developed the theory of electromagnetic waves and he came up with the mathematical formula to explain them.
"So all our modern communications are based on Clerk Maxwell's work.
"He died young — so that's why we don't remember him in the same way that we do Einstein — but all the later physicists' works are based on Maxwell's foundations.”
If there is enough backing from locals, the fundraising will begin in earnest to try to ensure the plans can proceed.
"We have to start with a will," said Hodson.
"It's never about the money — I think if you have the will, you can move mountains, and the money will come.
"But without that will, we might as well stop at this stage."
A Church of Scotland spokesman confirmed it had agreed to offer a deal to the community and had allowed it until 1 November to raise the necessary funds.
"Failing this, Parton Kirk, which is currently still in use as a place of worship, will be placed on the open market," he said.
"The congregation of Parton Kirk is now part of new union of churches known as Galloway Dee linked with Glenkens, which is in the process of preparing to call a new minister."
Last year, nearly a third of all church buildings sold by the Church of Scotland went to community groups.
The sale proceeds are held for the benefit of newly formed congregations to cover the costs of maintaining, refurbishing and developing other buildings they own.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cjw5d121x9lo
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FORGET POSITIVE THINKING; NOW IT’S “RESILIENT OPTIMISM”
Optimism is neither luck nor a personality trait. It's a daily practice.
Optimism isn't wishful thinking. It's a skill you build through small, intentional actions every day.
Rational optimism faces reality head-on. It doesn't deny hardship. It helps you move through it instead.
Rest isn't a reward for burnout. It's a strategy for resilience, better decisions, and stronger performance.
Big change rarely comes in leaps. It grows from the next small, constructive step you choose to take.
In a world that has gone rogue, topsy-turvy, or just plain crazy, remaining an optimist feels optional at best. Enter Resilient Optimism: The Science of Sustaining a Positive Mindset in Tough Times (September 22, 2026, from Harvard Business Review Press) by Michelle Gielan, former CBS anchor turned positive psychology researcher.
Although we are born with certain propensities and traits, optimism is indeed a learned practice. As a former CBS news anchor during the Great Recession in 2008, Gielan sought to provide a path forward for people. What interested her most was what makes some people handle conflict better than others, At the time, she suggested to her producer that they do a weekly segment called Happy Week to help people rethink their financial challenges.
I’ve always been wary of the kind of positivity that asks us to smile through grief, uncertainty, or exhaustion in that “fake it ’til you make it” kind of way. It is fake, at best. Toxic at worst.
Thankfully, Gielan takes a different approach altogether. Drawing on over a decade of research in positive psychology and neuroscience, she argues that resilient optimism is not about ignoring reality or the challenges we face. It’s about training our attention, our habits, and our responses so that hope has a place to land.
Her timing couldn’t be more relevant. The latest World Happiness Report points to growing disconnection, with nearly one in five young adults worldwide saying they have no one they can count on for support. At the same time, Gallup’s 2026 workplace report shows employee engagement has dropped to just 20 percent, while stress, anger, and sadness remain very high.
In other words, many of us are not looking for cheerleading. We’re looking for stability, or at least guardrails we can count on.
What I appreciate most about Gielan’s work is that it focuses on small, repeatable behaviors rather than grand transformations. Little steps can make a big difference, such as the bus driver in rural Tennessee who modeled wearing her seat belt, thereby inspiring not only her busload of children, but the entire town to do the same.
In her book, Gielan offers five practices to strengthen resilient optimism:
1. Recalibrate your mindset.
Notice what’s working, keep track of small wins, and be intentional about the information you consume. It is amazing how that little shift can go a long way in how your day unfolds.
2. Transform your stress response.
Instead of treating stress as proof that you’re failing, learn to see it as a signal that something meaningful is happening.
3. Triage your commitments.
Ask what truly matters and let go of obligations that create noise without impact. She encourages people to move from being “the one who handles everything” to being the leader who channels energy where it matters most, including delegating to those who can do it even better.
4. Recharge more intelligently.
Rest is not a prize for surviving burnout; it’s part of the strategy for avoiding it. In true power of slow fashion, she illustrates how rest can lead to better professional outcomes too. In one study, those who took 11 or more vacation days per year had a 30 percent higher likelihood of receiving a raise or promotion.
5. Connect the dots.
Human beings are designed to detect patterns. Look for small moments of meaning, momentum, and positive action that can interrupt the spiral of helplessness.
In a recent interview, she admits that “a barrage of negative information feeds us a lie that our behavior doesn’t matter.” But when people get engaged with what they could do to make a difference, it literally transforms their lives. This is where Gielan’s message aligns with something I often write about in The Power of Slow. Change rarely arrives in dramatic breakthroughs. More often, it shows up in the next step that builds upon the one before it.
Gielan puts it beautifully: “Resilient optimism isn’t about getting it right every day. It’s about choosing the next small, constructive step—again and again.”
The book includes studies linking optimism with better health and performance, along with stories of leaders and teams who have used adversity as a catalyst rather than a dead end. But the deeper takeaway is simpler and, I think, more comforting: Optimism is not a personality trait reserved for the naturally upbeat. It is a skill that can be strengthened. While we all have a baseline personality that leans toward optimism or pessimism, it is characteristic we can learn with practice.
Resilient Optimism offers something more than just inspiration. It offers a practical way to stay grounded without becoming cynical, and hopeful without being naïve. When the world feels loud, fast, and frayed at the edges, that may be exactly the kind of optimism we all could use.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-power-of-slow/202607/move-over-positive-thinking-here-comes-resilient-optimism
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OPTIMISM MAY REDUCE THE RISK OF DEMENTIA
New research highlights the health benefits of optimism. A recent longitudinal study of over 9000 older adults associated higher optimism with better cognitive function and reduced risk of dementia.
Optimists are “people who expect good things to happen to them,” feeling positive about the future. Being optimistic can help us thrive in many ways. Research has associated optimism with better emotional and physical health, lower likelihood of depression, better immune function, greater academic success, the ability to persevere amidst life’s challenges, and the capacity to learn and grow even after trauma.
The good news is that research has revealed that we can increase our optimism with psychological interventions or practices. Whatever your level of optimism, you can boost it with one of these practices:
1. Best Possible Self Intervention
Clearly imagine a future in which you have achieved your goals and everything has turned out as well as possible. To connect with your best possible self, take time to reflect. Imagine your future, visualize what you’d like to achieve, and imagine what it would look like and feel like if you realized all your deepest dreams. Now write down what you’ve imagined in as much detail as possible.
2. Self-Compassion Intervention
When dealing with difficult feelings, try these three steps to build your self-compassion and strengthen your optimism:
Mindfulness. Instead of attacking or shaming yourself, tune in to how you feel. Ask “What am I feeling?” and name your feelings, whatever they might be. For example, “I feel sad. . . scared. . . anxious. . .ashamed. . .hurt. . . angry. . . worried” or something else.
Common humanity. Remind yourself that it’s only human to feel this way. Tell yourself, “It’s OK. No one’s perfect.”
Kindness to yourself. Actively soothe yourself with kind words, saying something like, “I know this is hard and you’re really hurting right now. I’m here for you.”
3. Gratitude Intervention
Pause to acknowledge and be thankful for the good things in your life each day. Here are three ways to cultivate greater gratitude:
Begin the day with gratitude. When you wake up in the morning, think of one thing to look forward to. This can be anything from appreciating the taste of your morning coffee to beginning a new project, meeting with a friend, enjoying your favorite hobby, or something else.
Pause for moments of gratitude. During the day, pause periodically to focus on something you’re grateful for. For example, you can appreciate the beauty of sunlight shining through the trees, the bright blue sky overhead, a greeting from a neighbor, a message from a friend, smiling at a loved one, and more.
Practice gratitude at the end of the day. Research has found that listing three things you’re grateful for at the end of the day can relieve stress, improve your health, help you overcome adversity, and build greater hope. Try this practice yourself by keeping a gratitude journal, writing down three things you’re grateful for at the end of each day.
Now it’s your turn. How will you strengthen your optimism and increase your ability to thrive?
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/your-personal-renaissance/202606/new-research-shows-optimism-reduces-the-risk-of-dementia
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HOW TO DEAL WITH PROCRASTINATION
If you've resolved to quit procrastinating, it might help to know there's more to it than just delaying tasks. Therapist Anastasia Locklin describes chronic procrastination as "an inability to regulate negative or fearful emotions or feelings."
Research shows that people tend to prioritize short-term mood over long-term goals and that they're more likely to put off tasks that don't have quick rewards. As Locklin says, "Your present self often values immediate gratification over the long-term goals."
But with a little intention and effort, it is possible to combat procrastination.
Why we procrastinate
Procrastination and perfectionism often go hand in hand. As some researchers have concluded, perfectionists "experience a chronic sense of falling short of their own personal standards," triggering their procrastination.
Locklin says the mental narrative goes something like this: "I'll just wait until I'm in a setting or situation where I can be completely perfect at it."
Culture is to blame for some forms of procrastination. Black women tend to put off self-care activities — like vacations and doctor's appointments — because they're often taught (and expected) to prioritize caring for others. "I know personally, for myself as a woman of color, some of the things that I've been told is that if you care for yourself and only care about yourself, then you're selfish," Locklin shares.
Black women can also feel like they have to work twice as hard to be recognized in their careers. "I think sometimes we attach our self-worth to our own productivity and [feel] we're only as valuable as how successful we are," Locklin explains. "That makes us almost put our own self-care and self-preservation on the back burner."
HOW TO FIGHT PROCRASTINATION
Identify small goals. Set a goal to work on something for a short, fixed amount of time — say, 10 minutes.If you need more structure, Locklin recommends trying the Ivy Lee method. At the end of each workday, make a list of six things to work on the following day. List them out in order of true importance. Tackle those things and only those things the next day.
Use natural patterns to prioritize tasks. If you're a morning person, do important tasks in the morning. If you have midday slumps, take that time to organize and create your list for the next day.
Don't be too hard on yourself. Research shows self-compassion can help you cope with procrastination-related stress. Remember every success is just that: a success!
Plan ahead. If you're procrastinating wellness and rest, plan ahead and delegate. Block out vacations in advance and put systems in place with co-workers so that you can work toward your time away and feel secure that all your goals at work are being met.
Meet with a therapist. Finally, if you're having trouble addressing procrastination on your own, meet with a therapist. One treatment approach, called cognitive behavioral therapy, can help improve coping skills by focusing on current barriers and solutions to those problems.
https://www.npr.org/2021/01/11/955692434/procrastination-is-more-than-putting-things-off-heres-how-to-kick-the-habit
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MORE DEATHS THAN BIRTHS EXPECTED IN ENGLAND EVERY YEAR FROM NOW ON
Deaths are expected to outnumber births in the UK every year from 2026, according to projections from the Office for National Statistics (ONS).
The UK population is now expected to grow at a slower rate than previously thought, reaching 71 million by 2034, owing to a sharp fall in migration.
Declining fertility rates also mean the number of children in the UK is expected to fall in the next decade while pensioners are expected to grow faster than working age adults.
Previous projections suggested the population would continue to grow until 2096, but now "the population is projected to peak in the 2050s before decreasing," James Robards, ONS head of household and population projections, said.
The population is expected to grow by 1.7 million in the 10 years after 2024 as shown by the dotted red line in the graph above.
This is far slower than the growth seen in the previous decade due to people having fewer children and having them later in life.
Between mid-2024 and mid-2034, the ONS projects:
6.4 million people will be born
6.9 million people will die
7.3 million will immigrate to the UK on a long-term basis
5.1 million people will emigrate long-term from the UK
Deaths are projected to outnumber births by nearly half a million people in that 10-year period.
The ONS stressed the figures, which cover the next 100 years of the UK's population, are projections and not predictions or forecasts. It warned real numbers could be higher or lower depending on future births, deaths and migration levels.
Fall in net migration
The ONS now expects net migration — the difference between the number of people coming to the UK and those leaving — to add 2.2 million people to the UK population in total between 2024 and 2034.
That is lower than previously projected as the ONS now treats the post Brexit immigration peak as a "blip" rather than an ongoing trend, said Dr Madeleine Sumption, of Oxford University's Migration Observatory.
"In the short term, the projections suggest net migration will fall temporarily before bouncing back up again."
Net migration to the UK peaked near a million people in 2023 and has since fallen to just over 200,000 people.
A Home Office spokesperson said: "While these projections do not directly take into account recent policy changes, we must go further to reduce the levels of migration.
"That's why we are introducing sweeping reforms to our immigration system, ending over-reliance on cheap labor whilst attracting the brightest and the best to the UK.”
More pensioners and fewer children
By 2034 pensioners are expected to make up a fifth of the population. Despite the rising state pension age they are the fastest growing section of the population, while the number of children is projected to fall by 1.6 million.
Meanwhile, the number of working age people will increase by 1.5 million, but not as quickly the 1.8 million extra pensioners.
In December, a House of Lords report found that young people would be hardest hit by the failure of successive governments to adapt to challenges posed by an aging population.
Policies governments have used to address the impact of declining fertility and rising life expectancy in the UK — raising the state pension age or increasing immigration for example —were not adequate solutions on their own, the report said.
Pressure on pensions, health, and social care
The growing aging population "will add to pressure on the NHS, the state pension and the wider public finances", said Stuart McDonald, head of longevity and demographic insights at pension consultants LCP.
"For the NHS, the challenge is not simply a larger population, but a larger population at ages associated with greater healthcare need."
He added: "But for pensions, the projections will intensify an already difficult debate about whether people can realistically and fairly be expected to work longer."
Sarah Scobie, Deputy Director of Research at the Nuffield Trust, warned end-of-life care services are "ill-prepared for an increase in deaths as the population ages overall".
"Hospital care accounts for over 80% of public expenditure on health care for people in the last year of life, and most of that is spent on emergency care," she said.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ckgpjd2zzl8o
'IT'S NOT A NICE WORLD TO BRING CHILDREN INTO': BIRTHS FALL TO THE LOWEST LEVEL IN 50 YEARS
"It's just not a very nice world to bring people into, and why would I consciously do that when I can choose not to?"
Stacey Waring, 40, a nurse from Nottingham, says global uncertainty has made her think twice about starting a family.
She is one of an increasing number of people having either no or fewer children, contributing to a national and global picture of falling birth rates.
In 2025, births in England and Wales fell for the fourth year in a row to their lowest level in nearly half a century, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS).
Waring suggests that bringing children up in the UK today is less appealing than it was for her parents' or grandparents' generations.
`"If I think of the childhood that I had, I was one of the last generations to grow up playing outside without a mobile phone, and it's very different now," she adds.
But she says she feels lucky to live at a time when people have more choice about whether to start a family.
"If I'd had children, I'd have had to reduce my hours at work," she says.
"I'm a huge traveler and go away whenever I can in my camper van, which I wouldn't be able to do if I had children."
Births fall to lowest level in nearly half a century
Birth rates in the UK have been falling steadily since 2010. There were 585,000 live births in 2025, a fall of 10,000 on the year before and the lowest overall figure since 1977.
The estimated number of children born per woman fell to just under 1.4 for England and Wales in 2025, down from 1.9 in 2010.
Women are also having their first child later than ever before, at an average age of 29.6 years old.
That is about two years older than in 2010 when the most recent decline in fertility rates started.
Births where at least one of the parents was born outside of the UK increased to 40%, up from 30% over the same timeframe.
'It's heartbreaking'
Georgina Tuffour, 35, would love to have a larger family but says that the rising cost of living makes that difficult.
The trainee nurse and her Uber driver husband already have three children, aged 10, eight and six, and she worries about having more.
"My daughter wants to register for everything at school, my son loves to play the drums and that costs £50 a month," she says.
"I've had to say to them that I cannot afford to sign all of them up and that breaks my heart, so imagine having another?"
Tuffour, who contacted BBC Your Voice, says she feels the government has been doing more to support young families, but would like to see more policies to help pay for the cost of childcare.
Dr Paula Sheppard, an anthropologist at the University of Oxford, says the rising cost of living partly explains why people are waiting until they have "a lot more proverbial ducks in a row" before having more children.
"They're waiting for a better job, better salary, better house, better neighborhood, and it takes longer to get those things in the current climate," she adds.
"People have always wanted the best for their kids, but the cost of having children is increasing — food costs more, clothes cost more – so absolutely the economy makes a difference.”
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cvgzdq23xpgo
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‘LOCKED TO THE SUN AND MOON' — COULD STONEHENGE PREDICT ECLIPSES?
In August 1966, a US astronomy professor shared his astonishing findings with the BBC. He believed that the Neolithic stone circle was built to predict eclipses.
Experts have long debated the meaning of Stonehenge, the prehistoric stone circle in the south-west of England. They have speculated that the mysterious monument might have been a place to commemorate the dead, a sacrificial altar, or a site of other religious ceremonies. But in August 1966, a Boston astronomy professor, Gerald Hawkins, told the BBC's Chronicle program that he'd solved the puzzle thanks to a peculiar configuration of numbers – and an early IBM computer.
Hawkins' theory formed the basis of his popular and influential 1965 book Stonehenge Decoded. The British-born scientist suggested to the BBC that alignments of the huge slabs and archways meant that "circles at Stonehenge could have been used as a computer to follow the Moon, and predict eclipses". Eclipses, such as those witnessed around the world this month, could have been accurately foretold by ancient Britons – more than 4,500 years ago.
In the BBC footage, Hawkins gestured to an exact scale model of Stonehenge, showing how in the biggest circle, marking the circumference of the site, there are 56 holes. "Fifty-six was the only number that would fit a certain pattern of the Moon," he claimed, suggesting that the holes "make a simple counting device for predicting eclipses".
The meaning for those who built Stonehenge was, he believed, significant. "Eclipses are spectacular events that surely aroused the deepest emotions of our primitive ancestors," said Hawkins. "The light of the Moon, which is, of course, borrowed from the Sun, is cut off. It passes into the Earth's shadow. The Moon turns from silvery white to red. The ancients regarded it as blood red and attributed ominous meanings to it."
Stonehenge Decoded had "the surprising effect of silencing speculation for several decades", said a 2007 article in the British magazine Current Archaeology.
An astronomical observatory
According to Hawkins, it was "the first theory concerning the purpose of Stonehenge that has been academically accepted and published in the scientific journals". Although the connection between the site and summer solstice had been recognized since the 18th Century, the professor took the idea further, proposing that what had been seen as a temple of Sun-worship could have been a sophisticated "astronomical observatory".
In 1961, he had visited Stonehenge to try and understand "how the monument was supposed to mark the sunrise". As he told the BBC five years later, "I looked around in the dawn light at Stonehenge… between the great stone archways. I felt that my view was controlled, confined. The archways seemed to force me to look at certain points on the horizon. What was I supposed to see?"
Struck by the way ancient architects had framed his sightline, Hawkins returned to the US with charts of the site, plotting the positions of its center point and each stone, archway, hole and mound.
Attempting to determine "exactly what would have been seen at the time of Stonehenge… would be long and tedious and had probably deterred others before me", Hawkins told the BBC. "Fortunately, I had the use of a calculating machine, the electronic computer."
At the Harvard-Smithsonian Observatory in Massachusetts, Hawkins and his team instructed the computer to calculate what would have been seen along each alignment at the time Stonehenge was built. He used the calculations as the basis for Stonehenge Decoded.
As the BBC presenter said in 1966, "The computer yielded some tantalizing results." Many of the Stonehenge alignments seemed to point to positions of the rising and setting Sun and Moon. According to Hawkins, "Stonehenge was locked to the Sun and Moon as tightly as the tides. It was an astronomical observatory. And a good one, too."
While the marking of solar positions at midwinter and the equinoxes was "natural to expect", he told the BBC, "the Moon at Stonehenge was a surprise. The Moon is a very difficult thing to observe because it changes its position so much more complicatedly than the Sun."
Critics of the theory
Hawkins concluded that the purpose of Stonehenge was clear. "There can be no argument about whether it was a temple or an observatory. It was both, because the Sun and Moon were gods in those days."
If this were true, Stonehenge was "a device that priest-rulers could have used to enhance their power", argued a 1965 article in Time magazine. "On the day or night that their stone computer predicted an eclipse, they might well have summoned their subjects to Salisbury Plain to observe a spectacle that terrorized most ancient peoples. When the eclipse started, the priests probably intoned the prayers that enabled the Sun or Moon to escape the blackness."
Even at the time, there were critics of his theory, with some pointing out that three of the 56 holes intrinsic to it might have simply been caused by the former growth of trees. As the British archaeologist Richard Atkinson wrote in the New York Review of Books in 1966, "That the layout of Stonehenge has some astronomical significance is not in doubt… The interpretation of that alignment, however, and of any other astronomical characteristics of the monument, requires the exercise of scholarly caution."
And new investigations since the 1960s have discredited Hawkins' ideas. "It's a dead theory today, in the dustbin filled with so many discounted theories about Stonehenge," says Prof Michael Parker Pearson, who led a landmark study transforming modern understanding of the monument. The eclipse computer was, he says, "a trendy metaphor for the time… but now wildly inappropriate for understanding Stonehenge".
While Hawkins thought the construction of the monument was a more integrated assembly, "we now know that Stonehenge was built in a very different, multi-stage sequence over a period of more than 1,500 years," Parker Pearson, a professor at University College of London's Institute of Archaeology, tells the BBC. "We also know that the solstice lunar standstill orientations are not actually precise – they were to within one or two degrees only – so it was never an instrument for measuring time, but rather a monument celebrating particular solar and lunar movements.
"We do have evidence from as far back as 1000BC in Britain that people tracked and probably predicted lunar eclipses," adds Parker Pearson, "but that's 1,500-2,000 years after Stonehenge's heyday.”
https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20260828-the-startling-1960s-theory-that-stonehenge-was-a-prehistoric-computer
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HOW CHRISTIAN APOLOGISTS DEAL WITH THE DELAY IN CHRIST’S SECOND COMING
The Second Coming in clouds of glory
The New Testament makes it clear that Jesus promised to “return” to earth, descending from the clouds with a host of angels, while his disciples were still living.
And not just his disciples.
Jesus said his accusers would see him return with power from the clouds.
Revelation says the men who pierced Jesus would see him return from the clouds.
The famous christian apologist C. S. Lewis called such prophecies the most embarrassing part of the bible.
Here are some of the verses in question:
Mathew 16:28―"I tell you the truth, there are some standing here who will not experience death before they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom.”
Luke 9:27―"I tell you the truth, some who are standing here will not taste death before they see the kingdom of God."
Mark 13:30―I tell you the truth, this generation will not pass away until all these things take place.
Mark 14:62―[Jesus speaking to his accusers said] "You will see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of the Power and coming with the clouds of heaven.
"
Behold, he cometh with clouds; and every eye shall see him, and they also which pierced him: and all kindreds of the earth shall wail because of him. Even so, Amen. (Revelation 1:7)
How do christian apologists deal with such damning verses?
Unlike C. S. Lewis, most christian apologists studiously ignore these verses, then have conniption fits when they are quoted.
How christians hate to have the “wrong” bible verses quoted! ~ Michael Burch, Quora
Rudy Wittshirt:
Not a chance in hell!
The “return” of this 2000 year-old dead guy is predicated on the claim that he got up and walked around after getting himself killed. But there will never be a “second coming!” Too many lies about the crucifixion/resurrection!
Based on the bible…all of it combined…the likelihood that this Jesus character actually came back from the dead once is a claim replete with made-up scenarios and outright falsehoods. The sequence of events in the new testament is an escalation of claims…from the empty tomb to the “feel my wound” incident to the three hours of darkness and the dead rising from their graves for a walkabout…all written piecemeal over a period of nearly 100 years after the estimated date of death of the savior-who-couldn’t-even-save-himself…to entice new converts…and distract from the fact that Jesus never really ever showed up that one time…and certainly not twice.
Michael Burch:
Yes, the big fish kept getting bigger and bigger, fishier and fishier.
The stories evolved over at least 100 years and charlatans were still trying to sneak a fake trinity verse into the bible as late as 1552.
Bill Bess:
As that great philosopher, George Carlin, said, “you have to stand in awe of the greatest bullshit story of all time”
Steve Malone:
Pure speculation. But it could be that God was persuaded to change the plan. It has happened before with Moses and Sodom.
Shawn Mckeon:
The error is thinking that his 2nd coming is a physical thing and not a Spiritual one. It happens “Within you” where his Kingdom is, as he said several times
Looking “outward” for a physical return will never happen.
Oriana:
While it sounds modern and sophisticated to say that the “Second Coming” can happen only in the psychological sense, “within you” — implying a transformation within an individual psyche — one need not be a biblical scholar to realize that the gospels predicted a literal re-entry, Christ descending in the clouds of glory. It’s amusing to realize that it’s the constant emphasis on those clouds that obliterates the attempts at a metaphorical, purely psychological meaning. (And besides the clouds, there are other details pointing to the literal meaning. Note also that Jesus is obviously a sky god.) For those raised in strict religiosity, it is indeed a shock to realize that Jesus is not coming back — never, never, never, never.
And I think it psychologically healthier to realize that nobody is coming to save you. Once past that delusion, you can form a realistic plan of how to improve your life — and/or help others.
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HOW THE CARTHUSIANS RESISTED THE REFORMATION
The martyrdom of English Carthusian monks in 1535, engraving, Rome, 1555.
‘Good Jesu, what will you do with my heart?’ These were supposedly the final words of Prior John Houghton, as the knife plunged into his chest. He was executed on 4 May 1535: a brutal business at Tyburn, the site famous for its garish public executions.
Houghton and his fellow accused were dragged through the London streets and hanged, before being cut down, disemboweled while still breathing, and, finally, decapitated. Their severed body parts were sent around the city for public display, a ‘pitiful and strange spectacle’, and a stark reminder of their high treason.
The convicted were devout men, and included three leaders of Carthusian charterhouses: priors John Houghton of the London Charterhouse, Robert Lawrence of Beauvale, and Augustine Webster of Axholme. The Carthusians were a monastic order renowned for their deeply contemplative lifestyle. Established in France during the 11th century, the Order pursued a hermit-like existence of solitude and prayer. The Carthusians arrived in England in the 12th century, and nine monasteries were founded between 1178 and 1429. By 1540 they were all gone.
What crime had these godly men committed to elicit such violence? Quite simply, they refused to accept the Acts of Succession and Supremacy passed in 1534. The first had legitimized Henry VIII’s new marriage to Anne Boleyn and any heirs that it would produce, and the second declared Henry as the supreme head of the Church of England. These Acts were part of the severance of England from the spiritual authority of the pope which, in the reigns of Henry VIII’s children Edward VI and Elizabeth I, would develop into a move to Protestantism.
Almost immediately after the Act of Succession was published in March 1534, royal commissioners began to pressure the monks of the London Charterhouse to submit. The Carthusians were a significant target; due to their respected spiritual authority for ‘holiness of life and … learning’, their compliance might have spurred acceptance from the wider population. Henry’s mistrust may have also developed from earlier disputes with the Carthusians. In 1521 Nicholas Hopkyns of the Hinton Charterhouse in Somerset had prophesied that Henry would die heirless – a treasonous offense that likely tainted Henry’s perception of the Order.
When first questioned by the commissioners in April 1534 Prior Houghton was evasive, stating that the monks should not meddle with the king’s affairs. This pacified them. However, the Carthusians could not avoid swearing a formal oath of allegiance for long. The commissioners returned a few weeks later. When asked his views, Houghton questioned how the longstanding marriage between Henry and Katherine, which had complied with Church customs, could possibly be annulled; for this, he was imprisoned for a month in the Tower of London. By the commissioners’ third visit in May 1534 Houghton was more tactful, increasingly aware of the uneasy situation. He signed the Oath of Supremacy, acknowledging Henry, but included the caveat ‘as far as the law of God permits’. This was not active resistance, but it was defiance. It bought him time but, with the Treasons Act coming into force in early 1535 criminalizing any denial of Henry’s supremacy, the issue was not settled.
Around this time the priors of Beauvale and Axholme arrived at the London Charterhouse and, alongside Houghton, were increasingly uncomfortable with what was being asked of them; accepting Henry as head of the Church would defy their obedience to the pope. They asked to meet with Thomas Cromwell, an instrumental player in dissolving the monasteries, to find a solution that did not compromise their values. This was a terrible idea. Cromwell not only denied their request but sent them immediately to the Tower of London. Joined by Bridgettine Father Richard Reynolds of Syon Abbey, the four men were interrogated ruthlessly, taken to Westminster, and charged with denying the king as supreme head of the Church. When asked a final time for submission, they refused, stating that ‘there is one Catholic Church, of which the bishop of Rome is the head’. The verdict was guilty, and the sentence was death.
After the executions, a dismembered arm of John Houghton was returned to the Charterhouse as a reminder of the price of his defiance. To the monks within, it held very different value. The arm was affixed to the front gate with strict instructions that it not be removed. However, three days later, the arm fell. It was quickly retrieved by the lay brothers and smuggled away. As a final piece of their beloved prior, the arm was treated with the deepest compassion. It was placed in a box with the shirt that Prior Houghton had supposedly worn to his death, and was, so the story goes, secretly buried somewhere on Charterhouse grounds.
Unfortunately, this bloody story did not end there. The following month, three more monks of the London Charterhouse walked defiantly to their deaths for refusing to accept the Oath.
Then, in 1537, four monks from the London Charterhouse were hanged from the York city battlements. As Maurice Chauncy, a surviving Charterhouse monk, later wrote, the final group of ten monks and laybrothers from the London Charterhouse was accosted in May 1537, ‘loaded with chains and thrust into a foul prison called Newgate’. Disease ravaged the monks, and all but one died. The survivor, William Horne, was not spared. He was hung, drawn, and quartered at Tyburn in 1540 with a group of other Catholics: a final emblem of Carthusian resistance.
The prior of Sheen monastery had previously written to the monks remaining at the London Charterhouse to ‘advise them not to die for the cause, but save themselves and their house and submit to the Prince’. They did swear allegiance to Henry, but the monastery was closed in 1537 nonetheless and the monks disbanded, with many fleeing abroad.
Chauncy wrote favorably of John Houghton’s final moments: ‘If only, my reader you had beheld the merciful man … how kindly he spoke to his executioner … and lovingly he embraced and kissed him.’ Chauncy’s words preserve a pious image of the Carthusians, but we can imagine how appalled many were by these events. The bishop of Faenza wrote in 1535 of the ‘cruelty of the king of England to certain religious men’, just one of many to spread the news across Europe.
The executions of the Carthusian monks offer a small insight into England’s break with Rome and the reshaping of the religious landscape. They demonstrate the painful divisions of Henry VIII’s reign and the human cost of the dissolution of the monasteries.
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SINGAPORE’S PLAN TO RAISE BIRTHRATES
When Singapore's Prime Minister Lawrence Wong gave his annual address in late August, he said his government would invest vast new resources to tackle a national crisis: the dangerous decline in the island country's birth rate.
"We want to make a fundamental shift in how we support families," Wong said. "We will walk alongside parents throughout the journey of raising their children."
The package Wong unveiled offers the equivalent of roughly $55,000 per baby. The plan starts with a $7,000 cash payment at birth and is followed by annual payments and credits that continue until the child is 16 years old. According to Wong, the steps are needed to counter a looming demographic crisis that he said threatens "our ability to keep Singapore going."
Singapore, a much smaller nation with a population of just over 6 million, is different in many ways from the U.S. Birth rates have fallen much more rapidly. But Karen Guzzo, an expert on family development and demographic trends at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, said many American couples who are weighing parenthood need this kind of help.
"I was reading through what Singapore is doing, and it's hard not to drool with envy," Guzzo said. "It [offers] investments in children and family for an extended period of time, and I think that's really important."
Population decline is an "existential" crisis for some countries
The urgency in Singapore to address falling birth rates grew earlier this year when the country's deputy prime minister, Gan Kim Yong, told Parliament that the nation's "total fertility rate" — a figure estimating the number of children each woman will choose to have in her lifetime — had plunged again.
In 2000, Singapore's total fertility rate matched the current rate of the U.S., which is roughly 1.6 children per woman. But in 2025, the rate slid to just 0.87, according to government data. Singapore's leaders say that's so low, it could lead to a population collapse of more than 50% in a single generation.
"This is an existential challenge," Gan told Parliament, warning that the country's demographic crisis could soon face a point of no return. "Over time, it will be practically impossible to reverse the trend because we will have fewer and fewer women who can bear children."
To counter that trend, Singapore's new family program will also include more affordable daycare and better access to housing. It roughly triples the amount of paid leave, allowing married couples with three children to take up to 24 days off work each year. The plan also expands efforts to help fathers spend more time parenting.
Most demographers and economists say Singapore's national campaign is unlikely to dramatically boost birth rates, especially in the short term. But it could offer a model for slowing or halting alarming declines.
"There are certainly elements that other countries could learn from in this new package, including affordable childcare and reducing the housing burden for young families," said Xiujian Peng, who studies Asian demographic trends at Victoria University in Australia.
A growing number of nations, including Chile, China, Italy, Japan, Poland and South Korea, have seen birth rates fall to levels similar to Singapore, where demographers say rapid population aging and decline are possible.
What about the U.S.?
Birth rates in the U.S. are still nearly twice those of Singapore, but have fallen steadily since 2007. They now stand well below the "replacement rate" that researchers say is needed to maintain a stable population.
The number of young people in the U.S. under age 25 has already begun to fall, while the population of retirement-age seniors is surging.
"I do think [U.S. birth rates] are likely to continue trending downward," Guzzo said. She noted that efforts to support family size in the U.S. have so far been much more modest than in other countries. "We're tweaking with child tax credits and we've got the Trump accounts. Those things aren't going to do much."
Many U.S. families are eligible for a federal child tax credit, and President Trump created savings accounts, which may come with $1,000 in government seed money for some babies born while he's in office. But those benefits are a fraction of what Singapore is offering.
According to the U.S. Labor Department, most American workers get no paid family leave. Trump has been an outspoken opponent of any role for the federal government helping with childcare, one of the biggest costs for families.
"Don't send any money for daycare," Trump said during a speech on April 1. "The United States can't take care of daycare, that has to be up to a state. We can't take care of daycare, we're a big country, we have 50 states we have all these other people, we're fighting wars, we can't take care of daycare."
But Guzzo said this is the moment, before the U.S. reaches a demographic breaking point like Singapore's, when an ambitious family support program might help the most. "There is more potential if we could just help people have the kids they want to have," she said.
In rolling out Singapore's plan, Wong said women and families won't be pressured to have more kids. "Ultimately, of course, the decision to have children is a deeply personal one," he said. His speech avoided the kind of pro-natalist, culture war language that often shapes debates over parenting in the U.S.
Wong also acknowledged this new program won't solve his country's demographic crisis. He said that means the country, whose citizens are mostly ethnic Chinese, will need high rates of immigration well into the future.
That part of Singapore's demographic strategy is unpopular with many Singaporeans. Roughly 40% of the country's population is already made up of noncitizens, many of them Indian and Malay. But Wong said to survive, his country will have to welcome foreign migrants and workers.
"If we rely only on births, our citizen population will shrink. We will age more rapidly, and there will be fewer younger Singaporeans to support a growing number of seniors," he said.
Here again, demographers and economists say U.S. policy looks very different. Despite historically low birth rates that keep falling, the Trump administration is working to strip visa status from hundreds of thousands of migrants now living in the U.S. legally. That move is expected to force many young families, including those with American children, to leave.
https://www.npr.org/2026/08/31/nx-s1-5944260/singapore-initiative-declining-birthrates
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THE PLAGUE OF CONSTANT SNACKING
Back in the 1950s when Dr. Kelly Brownell was a young boy, snacking didn't really exist.
"Children ate three meals and maybe one snack," he says. And typically that snack occurred in one place: at home. "Nobody ate in their automobile. Maybe if you took a long trip, your parents would make sandwiches to bring along, but that would be about it," says Brownell, who's an emeritus professor of psychology at Duke University.
Today kids' eating patterns look strikingly different. Children eat, on average, about three snacks a day today, eight nationally representative surveys found. Children eat nearly everywhere they go, and a large portion of their snacks are ultraprocessed foods.
Many parts of kids' lives have shifted since the mid 20th century. But, Brownell says, there's a major driver that's systematically reshaping families' eating habits.
Earlier this year, he and his colleagues at Harvard University and the University of Michigan published extensive evidence in The Milbank Quarterly that the ultraprocessed food industry intentionally shifted the social norms around families' eating habits. "So norm after norm after norm has been changed, and it doesn't mean that things have changed in a positive way," he says.
Many pediatricians, including the American Academy of Pediatricians, recommend toddlers to tweens eat about five times a day: three meals and about two snacks.
But this advice doesn't take into account the rise of ultraprocessed foods, says pediatrician Tamara Hannon at the Indiana University School of Medicine, who chairs the nutrition committee at the AAP. "The problem is what we know about child nutrition comes from studies with feeding kids no processed foods but fruits, vegetables, and whole foods. So foods that our grandmothers made," she says. "So the 'snacks' in these studies are really not what we, in our culture, consider snacks," Hannon adds.
It's time, Brownell and Hannon say, for pediatricians and parents to push back against these industry practices.
A world designed to trigger continual snacking
Throughout the 20th century, the ultraprocessed food industry used a series of tactics to make snacking throughout the day not only acceptable but even expected, says Ashley Gearhardt, who's a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan and contributed to the new study.
First off, the industry launched marketing campaigns, often targeted to children, to turn all contexts in which parents used to say, "No," to eating into snacking zones. They sprinkled vending machines around communities – at schools, pools, parks and sporting events. They made ultraprocessed snacks available at gas stations, train stations and airports. "So now it's not just cake at birthday parties anymore. It's cake for breakfast; it's cake in the car after you go to the gas station. It's 24-7," she says.
Second, big food companies added preservatives to snacks so they don't spoil in your purse or in the car. They designed special packaging so snacks are convenient to carry around and quick to consume on-the-go. "That means you can have a purse full of snacks all the time that isn't going to go bad," Gearhardt says.
The result? "It has become so normal for children to constantly be snacking, snacking, snacking," she says. "This new normal is certainly a huge benefit to the food industry."
But it's probably not beneficial for many children. Studies have found that large, high-calorie snacks are associated with obesity in children ages 2 to 5, as is the consumption of ultraprocessed foods, in general. These snacks account for about half of the added sugar children consume. They also boost children's intake of saturated fat and sodium.
How to reset your child's snacking habits
To fight back – and ensure your child receives the nutrients they need – researchers suggest these four new rules for the modern food world:
1. Cut out ultraprocessed snacks with high "total carbohydrate," including crackers, pretzels, puffs and pea snacks
The problematic snacks aren't just the ones with added sugar, Gearhardt says. Parents should also avoid packaged snacks with a high level of "total carbohydrate." These foods often contain large amounts of refined starches from white flour, corn, peas and potatoes. In your body, these carbs act similar to the way sugar behaves.
"These carbs also spike your blood sugar, too," she says. So two hours later, when their blood sugar crashes, kids want another high-carb snack. "These foods actually set kids up to be in this kind of craving and crashing cycle, as sugary foods do," she says. "If the snack is delivering a high level of carbohydrate, be very skeptical," Gearhardt adds.
Most of these snacks also have high levels of sodium, she adds. "In our research, we see that salt combined with a carbohydrate is one of the key ingredient combinations that makes you want to eat more and more and more.”
2. Realize that just because a child wants – or demands – a snack doesn't mean they're actually hungry
Big food companies have engineered ultraprocessed snacks to coax kids into eating even when they're not truly hungry, Duke's Kelly Brownell has found. "With these foods, their brains and guts don't behave as they should," he says. "Cues created by the food industry start to drive their eating instead of a biological need for food."
"Then it's very hard to distinguish whether kids are snacking because they're physiologically hungry, or because the processed foods have set up biological cravings," he adds. And these cravings can cause meltdowns and tantrums if they're not addressed.
The solution? Wean kids off the processed snacks and onto whole foods. "So give them 75% of the processed snack and 25% slices of fruit at first," Brownell explains. "Then slowly over time, move to 50% fruit slices, then 25% and then zero. If the child turns down the whole food, then they're not physiologically hungry," he says.
3. Focus on what kids are eating instead of how frequently they snack
In a recent study, the number of daily snacks didn't correlate with a child's risk for obesity or their diet quality, says Jennifer Orlet Fisher, who's a behavioral nutritionist at Temple University. But something did matter: what caretakers offered children.
Orlet Fisher recommends sticking to whole and minimally processed foods for snacks, like produce, nuts, beans and dairy. When kids nibble on these foods, then snacking actually improves their diet. It increases their intake of often-missing vitamins and fibers, and it also helps kids develop a desire for and love of vegetables, Orlet Fisher says.
But just keep the portion size small, adds Dr. Tamara Hannon at the Indiana University School of Medicine. "Snacks are really a piece of fruit or a vegetable, maybe with some cheese, or a banana with some nuts," she says. "They are a very small amount of food.".
4. Stop carrying around ultraprocessed snacks
Children don't need to eat everywhere they go, Gearhardt says. With food available in many locations, it trains children neurologically to crave and expect snacks throughout their daily routine. If you stop carrying around ultraprocessed snacks in your purse or backpack – and the snacks are truly not available – children will stop associating eating with your purse or backpack. Eventually their bodies and brains will adjust and stop expecting them.
https://www.npr.org/2026/07/31/nx-s1-5910817/kids-snack-doctor-recommend-diet-nutrition
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VEGAN DIET MAY LOWER INFLAMMATION
A recent study suggests that eating a vegan diet, even for a short time, may help reduce inflammation and slow biological aging.
The diet aids in these areas by altering DNA methylation patterns, which are chemical markers that regulate gene expression.
Vegan dietary plans have gained popularity in recent years, with an increasing number of people opting to reduce or eliminate animal products from their diets. Concerns about animal welfare, the environmental impact of food production, and the potential health benefits likely influence this growing adoption.
As vegan options have become more widely available, following a vegan eating plan has also become more accessible and convenient. As a result, veganism has developed into a more mainstream dietary choice.
Now, a small randomized clinical trial suggests that eating a vegan diet for as little as 4 weeks may help reduce inflammation and even slow biological aging.
The findings, published in MedComm, indicate that healthy adults who followed a vegan diet for 4 weeks developed changes in DNA methylation, an epigenetic process that can influence gene activity. Some of the changes were associated with a less inflammatory immune profile and measures of biological aging.
However, the study involved only 48 healthy adults, and lasted for a month. As such, larger, longer-term studies are needed to determine whether the changes persist and translate into better health outcomes.
What did the study find?
Researchers from the University of California, San Diego, and the University of Freiburg analyzed blood samples from 48 healthy adults who first followed a standardized diet for a week. Participants were then randomly assigned to follow either a vegan diet or a meat-rich diet for a month.
The diets were designed to provide similar amounts of calories, allowing the researchers to investigate whether differences in food composition, rather than simply calorie intake or weight change, could account for the observed changes.
DNA methylation involves chemical modifications that do not alter underlying DNA, but can influence whether particular genes are more or less active. The researchers examined more than 800,000 DNA methylation sites across the genome before and after the dietary intervention.
They found several changes in the vegan group involving pathways related to immune function, metabolism, cell growth, insulin signaling, DNA repair, and cellular responses to stress.
As such, it suggests that adopting a vegan dietary plan may influence mechanisms that regulate gene activity.
“I find these findings interesting, but it is important we are careful with how we state the headline,” said Michelle Routhenstein, MS, RD, CDCES, CDN, a registered dietitian nutritionist who specializes in heart disease at EntirelyNourished, and who was not involved in this study.
Similar previous research supports findings
“In 2023, we published the results of an 8-week study conducted in 22 pairs of identical twins. Our results were very similar to the recent study,” explained Christopher Gardner, PhD, the Rehnborg Farquhar Professor of Medicine at Stanford University, and Director of Nutrition Studies at the Stanford Prevention Research Center, who was also not involved in the study.
“We looked at chronological vs. biological aging with epigenetic clocks (similar to the recent study) and telomere length. In just 8 weeks, the twins randomized to these diets had aging measures that improved relative to their matched identical twins that were assigned a healthy omnivorous diet,” he continued.
Omnivores vs. vegans
“In our study, compared to the omnivorous study participants, the vegan participants experienced lower LDL-cholesterol, lower fasting insulin, lower weight, less aging (according to markers), and had improved gut microbiome impacts.” — Christopher Gardner, PhD
“We are not surprised by these recent findings, and are pleased to see that the types of findings we got in our study are being replicated in other studies. The replication makes the strength of the findings better solidified,” Gardner added.
Could a vegan diet cause a shift toward a less inflammatory state?
The DNA methylation patterns in those following a vegan dietary plan were associated with lower proportions of neutrophils and higher proportions of CD4 T cells.
Neutrophils are white blood cells that play an important role in defending the body against infection. However, excessive or prolonged inflammatory activity can contribute to tissue damage and chronic disease. CD4+ T cells help coordinate and regulate immune responses against disease and infection.
The methylation-based estimates also correspond with blood-cell measurements obtained during the original trial. This provides additional evidence that the detected changes reflect differences in immune cell composition.
However, this does not mean that a vegan eating plan necessarily prevents inflammation or inflammatory disease.
Instead, the findings suggest that changing dietary patterns may influence biological pathways involved in the body’s immune response.
Did the vegan diet actually make people biologically younger?
Unlike chronological age, which measures how many years a person has lived, biological age measures how the body is functioning. Researchers can estimate it using epigenetic clocks, or mathematical models based on DNA methylation patterns.
Two of the aging measures used in the study, PhenoAge and GrimAge, suggest that biological aging slowed in the vegan group during the 4-week intervention.
However, a third measure, Blood&Skin, produced a different result, showing age acceleration instead. This is important as different epigenetic clocks measure different aspects of aging and do not necessarily provide identical results.
Therefore, the findings should not be interpreted as a vegan eating plan reversing aging. Instead, they provide preliminary evidence that a short-term dietary intervention can affect molecular markers that researchers associate with biological aging.
What does this mean for people considering a vegan eating plan?
The findings support the role of nutrigenomics, which is the study of how diet and genes interact to affect a person’s health and risk of developing diseases.
A well-planned vegan diet can provide substantial amounts of vegetables, fruits, whole grains, legumes, nuts, and seeds.
However, simply removing animal products does not automatically make a dietary plan healthy. A vegan diet can also include highly processed foods that are high in added sugars, sodium, or saturated fats, and may require a person to to pay attention to nutrients that can be more difficult to obtain from plant foods, including vitamin B12.
“It is important to recognize that when someone replaces a meat-heavy diet, they may also be eating less saturated fat and processed meat, which has been associated with aging,” Routhenstein told Medical News Today.
“I would not interpret these findings as meaning that animal foods are inherently inflammatory. It is more likely that the overall shift toward more plant foods and less processed and meat-heavy foods is influencing several pathways involved in inflammation and metabolism.”
Diet quality matters
“[T]he quality of the diet matters within a vegan diet. A diet can technically be vegan while being high in refined carbohydrates, sugary foods, fried foods, and highly processed vegan products,” Routhenstein said.
“[Y]ou do not have to go fully vegan to support healthy aging and longevity. Increasing the amount and variety of plant foods in your diet can provide many of these benefits while still allowing you to include animal foods,” she added.“A good quality vegan diet is typically composed of foods and food groups that are recommended, and avoids or minimizes foods that are of low/lower nutritional quality,” Gardner told MNT.
“The recent study looked at inflammation and aging. However, there are decades of studies that suggest a good quality vegan diet is associated with lower risk of heart disease, cancer, diabetes, obesity and stroke, and their risk factors,” he said.
Study limitations
While encouraging, the study has several important limitations.
It was a small study that only included 48 healthy adults. As such, it may not be representative for how different people may respond to a vegan eating plan. Additionally, the intervention only lasted 4 weeks, so it is unclear whether the DNA methylation changes would remain after returning to usual diets, or whether maintaining a vegan diet for longer would produce larger or different effects.
Furthermore, the researchers only measure methylation changes in blood. Epigenetic patterns can differ between tissues, so changes in blood do not mean that identical changes may occur in organs such as the liver, brain, muscle, or adipose tissue.
The study also only measured molecular markers rather than long-term clinical outcomes. This means that it does not demonstrate that a vegan eating plan can prevent cancer, cardiovascular disease, dementia, or other age-related conditions, nor does it establish that the diet extends lifespan.
While further research is necessary, the findings suggest that the relationship between diet and health may extend beyond calories, body weight, and conventional blood markers, potentially reaching into the mechanisms that help regulate how cells function.
Oriana: BUT WHAT ABOUT PHYSICAL ATTRACTIVENESS?
Some people note that vegetarians, especially vegans, look older, frail, and altogether less attractive. Vegetarian women often lose their monthly cycle and/or experience early menopause; both sexes may experience lower sex drive, or none (that’s why it’s easier for vegetarian monks to maintain chastity). I suspect the main problem here is insufficient essential fatty acids. Quality olive oil might solve this problem. Also, plant protein is more difficult to absorb and utilize, so in some cases more attention to protein intake from many sources may solve this deficiency.
In summary, I wish to emphasize that a low-fat vegan diet leads to a drop in sex hormones, and that hormonal “glow of youth” is quickly gone. Dry skin and dry, straw-like hair are markers of a diet deficient in fatty acids (or else they can a consequence of menopause — again, we are dealing with sudden drop in sex hormones). Correcting dietary deficiencies or using hormone replacement may help resolve the skin and hair problem.
Now, that doesn't mean that a woman on the typical minimalist hormone replacement will have the fabulous skin and hair that is the glory of "rubenesque" women. But hormone deficiencies need to be corrected, be it to minimal rather than optimal levels.
Significant calorie restriction can also produce the “withered” look. Those who use calorie restriction in the hope of life extension may decide that the sacrifice of round-cheeked good looks and sex drive is worth a few extra years of life. Women who lose their periods due to vegetarian diet may at first rejoice; eventually, however, they may suffer from bone loss and muscle loss. There is also some degree of neuron loss and mild cognitive dysfunction; to my knowledge, this is not as well publicized as bone loss. The worsening of memory is usually attributed simply to aging rather than deficient diets and decreased hormone levels.
This is not to say that aging has nothing to do with it. Of course it does, but when you study aging, one of the first things you note is the drop in the levels of sex hormones. There is also less protein repair and more inflammation — again, areas where diet can make a significant difference. By the way, an anti-inflammatory diet need not be synonymous with a vegan diet. A typical anti-inflammatory diet is built largely around omega-3 fatty acids, so the consumption of fatty fish — or using fish oil supplements — is highly recommended. Add to this high-quality olive oil, and you can be a vegetarian and look great too.
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SHORT INTENSE WORKOUTS RELEASE HEART-PROTECTIVE PROTEINS
Adding sprint intervals to exercise may benefit cardiometabolic health, a new study finds.
A new study found that shorter yet intensive exercises, such as sprint intervals, may be more effective at improving cardiometabolic health markers than moderate-intensity exercises, like consistent cycling.
Over the last few years, researchers have been focusing on finding new ways people can improve their cardiometabolic health — the health of their cardiovascular and metabolic systems and how they interact.
For example, how efficiently your blood vessels deliver oxygenated blood throughout your body can affect how well your mitochondria burn fuel and produce energy. A well-functioning cardiovascular system also affects the ability of hormones and blood sugar to reach their targets and of the body to remove waste.
Past studies show that people with poor cardiometabolic health may have an increased risk of developing diabetes, chronic kidney disease, and fatty liver disease.
The good news is that you can improve your cardiometabolic health by making healthy lifestyle choices, such as eating a healthy diet, not smoking, limiting alcohol, getting enough quality sleep, managing stress, and being physically active.
Now a new study published in Cell Reports Medicine adds to our understanding of cardiometabolic health and exercise.
Researchers found that more intensive exercises, such as sprint intervals, may be more effective at improving cardiometabolic health markers than moderate-intensity exercises, like consistent cycling.
Comparing sprint intervals to moderate intensity cycling
In a clinical trial with 19 healthy young men, researchers evaluated the immediate blood protein response to either 90 minutes of moderate continuous cycling or six sets of 30-second all-out sprint intervals.
To assess long-term health implications, they then cross-referenced these exercise-activated proteins with medical records from over 53,000 UK Biobank participants, finding that many sprint-induced proteins linked directly to a lower risk of heart and metabolic disease.
“Both forms of exercise (sprint-interval and moderate intensity) are growing in popularity and are regularly used in clinical and general populations,” Paul Cohen, MD, PhD, Albert Resnick, MD, Associate Professor and head of the Laboratory of Molecular Metabolism at The Rockefeller University in New York City, and senior author of this study, told Medical News Today.
“It is important that we better understand the metabolic responses stimulated by different exercise intensities to help inform how we design and implement exercise programs,” he said.
Sprinting changes 32 proteins linked to type 2 diabetes, obesity
At the study’s conclusion, researchers found that sprint interval training caused changes in more than 200 metabolites — small molecules produced or used during metabolism — and led to an immediate increase in the levels of proteins needed for blood vessel growth, tissue remodeling, and hormonal signaling.
“Exercise stimulates the release of proteins and metabolites into the circulation to communicate across diverse organs,” Luke Olsen, PhD, postdoctoral associate in the Laboratory of Molecular Metabolism at The Rockefeller University in New York City, and first author of this study, explained to MNT. “For example, a contracting muscle might secrete a protein into the circulation to notify the liver that it needs more fuel (sugar or fat). These fuels are then released by the liver and taken up by the muscle, permitting continued muscle contraction.”
“Such crosstalk is instrumental to coordinating the body’s response to exercise and, ultimately, driving its health benefits,” Olsen continued. “Our findings highlight just how extensive and rapid this communication can be following high intensity exercise.”
Additionally, scientists discovered that of the 33 proteins associated with a lower risk of cardiometabolic problems such as obesity and type 2 diabetes, sprinting altered 32, while only 3 were altered during moderate-intensity exercise.
“We know that high intensity exercise, such as sprinting, promotes body-wide adaptations that can be metabolically beneficial,” Cohen said. “However, what mediates these changes has remained largely unclear. Our data pinpoint specific proteins that could contribute to these beneficial effects and provide a potential link between high intensity exercise and improved cardiometabolic health.”
A few minutes of sprinting doesn’t replace benefits of regular exercise
MNT spoke with Socrates Kakoulides, MD, cardiologist and chief imaging officer of Baptist Health Heart & Vascular Care, part of Baptist Health South Florida, who was not involved in this study.
Kakoulides commented that his first reaction to these findings was that this is a fascinating look at how strongly the body can respond to exercise intensity.
“We have known for a long time that physical activity is one of the most important things people can do to improve cardiovascular and metabolic health, but this study helps us better understand what may be happening at a molecular level,” he explained.
“What stood out to me was how quickly short bursts of very intense exercise changed proteins and metabolites circulating in the bloodstream. Those signals appear to affect communication between different tissues and organs and may help explain some of the cardiometabolic benefits we associate with vigorous exercise,” Kakoulides said.
“At the same time, I would not want patients to interpret these findings as meaning that a few minutes of sprinting replaces the benefits of regular exercise,” Kakoulides continued.
“This study primarily examined molecular responses to different types and intensities of exercise. It gives us important clues about the biology, but we still need additional research to understand how these changes translate into long-term outcomes such as reducing the risk of heart disease, diabetes, or obesity,” he added.
MNT also spoke with Joshua Scott, MD, primary care sports medicine physician and co-director of Non-operative Orthopedics and Sports Medicine at Cedars-Sinai Orthopedics and Sports Medicine in Los Angeles, who likewise was not involved in this study.
Scott said that while sprinting may have triggered changes in many metabolites, leading to a surge in proteins involved in blood vessel growth, tissue remodeling, and hormone signaling, the question is how that translates into real-life scenarios that help our patients live a happier, healthier lifestyle.
“I think the question is whether or not those translate to real-world changes,” he continued. “We know that some of the metabolites are associated with better cardiovascular health, type 2 diabetes, and metabolic disorders, but we really need to study that in multiple different individuals and translate that to longer life and a healthier lifestyle over time.”
Obviously, sprinting is not for everyone. Kakoulides said the most important message is that you do not have to sprint to benefit from exercise.
“Moderate physical activity remains extremely valuable for cardiovascular and metabolic health,” he said.
“For someone who is already exercising and has been medically cleared to increase the intensity, one practical approach may be to incorporate brief periods of greater effort into an activity they already enjoy. That could mean walking briskly or uphill for a short period and then returning to a comfortable pace, increasing resistance or speed briefly on a stationary bicycle, or adding faster intervals while swimming or using an elliptical machine,” Kakoulides said.
Scott agreed: “I think for those of us that are exercising on a regular basis, mixing things up and doing more higher intensity exercises, we know has some benefit even if you’re not able to sprint. Higher intensity exercises have been shown to be more helpful than doing just low to moderate intensity exercises, but obviously that needs to be done under the direction of a healthcare professional.”
“Ultimately, the best exercise program is one that is safe, sustainable, and performed consistently,” Kakoulides added. “Adding intensity can be another tool, but it does not replace the importance of regular movement, aerobic exercise, and strength training.”
https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/sprints-endurance-study-short-workouts-release-heart-protective-proteins-diabetes-risk
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ENDOMETRIOSIS MAY BE DUE TO A BACTERIAL INFECTION
Endometriosis is known to leave young girls and women bedridden during each menstrual cycle. However, this could soon become a distant memory. So suggests a Japanese study 1 published in 2023.
A significant new hope has arisen for all women suffering from endometriosis (sidenote: Endometriosis Endometriosis is a chronic gynecological disease linked to the presence of tissue similar to the uterine mucosa outside the uterine cavity, particularly in the peritoneum and ovaries. ) : a bacterium of the Fusobacterium (sidenote: Fusobacterium is a genus of filamentous bacteria that lives in the mouth (dental plaque), digestive system, vagina and, to a lesser extent, the uterine cavity. This pathogenic bacterium is implicated in periodontitis (inflammation at the base of the tooth) and colorectal cancer.) genus may be involved, representing a potential target for treatment. In particular, a simple course of antibiotics may be enough to make this pathogenic bacterium retreat, reducing the painful lesions.
Bacterial effect countered by an antibiotic
Japanese researchers from Nagoya University 2 have shown that, in laboratory mice used as a model, vaginal inoculation with bacteria from the genus Fusobacterium induced lesions typical of endometriosis, which were more numerous and more severe than in control mice. This suggests that Fusobacterium is involved in the genesis of the disease; but it also leads to possible solutions. Indeed, antibiotic treatment targeting Fusobacterium reduced the number and weight of lesions in the mice. This discovery raises the hope that this antibiotic treatment may also be effective in women.
“Eradication of this bacterium by antibiotic treatment could be an approach to treat endometriosis for women who are positive for Fusobacteria infection, and such women could be easily identified by vaginal swab or uterus swab,” according to Professors Yutaka Kondo of Nagoya University, the lead researcher of this study.
Analysis of the mechanisms at play
But that’s not all. The Japanese team carried out numerous experiments to try and understand the mechanisms involved. This meticulous work led to the following hypothesis: the presence of Fusobacteria in the uterus activates the women’s immune system, provoking a cascade of reactions that leads to the production of a protein called transgelin, which in turn promotes the development of endometriosis.
Clinical study underway
The involvement of the microbiota in endometriosis has been suspected for some time. For example, analyses of the vaginal flora have been used to predict the severity of the disease, while 90% of women affected by endometriosis also have associated digestive disorders (irritable bowel syndrome in particular). Nevertheless, these new results were sufficiently promising for the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at Nagoya University Hospital to launch a clinical study in 2023 into the use of an antibiotic.
Pending the results, please do not take antibiotics without a prescription or medical advice. If used incorrectly, you may reduce their effectiveness for when you really need them.
https://www.biocodexmicrobiotainstitute.com/en/bacterium-blame-for-endometriosis
Oriana:
This situation reminds me of how gastric ulcers were thought to be caused by stress — and then it turned out that the main cause was an infection by Helicobacter pylori (commonly called H. pylori), and could be treated with antibiotics rather than tranquilizers.
At this point, it seems that H.pylori have developed resistance to the most common antibiotics. Amazingly enough, there is a little-known cure, known as black seed (Nigella sativa). The seed can be bought online or in some Asian stores. You can brew it yourself — with a slice of ginger to enhance overall antibacterial action. H. pylori has not developed resistance to the complex compounds found in black seed.
In the case of endometriosis, hormones certainly play a huge role. Ultimately, I predict the cure will be twofold: high dose bio-identical progesterone to prevent the overgrowth of endometrial tissue, and the appropriate antibiotics.
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Ending on beauty:
TWO OWLS IN LOS ANGELES
They glide over the roofs
in ghost-silent flight.
Then they perch in parallel,
each on a TV antenna.
Absolute in upright stillness,
urn-shaped bodies
on the metal branches
that draw signals from the city sky,
the owls are ambassadors,
come to relay messages
even to us, unvisited as we are
by the gods.
Only my lover and I,
meeting here in
secret, see them.
~ Oriana
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