*
MY MOTHER TOLD US NOT TO HAVE CHILDREN
She’d say, Never have a child you don’t want.
Then she’d say, Of course, I wanted you
once you were here. She’s not cruel. Just practical.
Like a kitchen knife. Still, the blade. And care.
When she washed my hair, it hurt; her nails
rooting my thick curls, the water rushing hard.
It felt like drowning, her tenderness.
As a girl, she’d been the last
of ten to take a bath, which meant she sat
in dirty water alone; her mother in the yard
bloodletting a chicken; her brothers and sisters
crickets eating the back forty, gone.
Is gentleness a resource of the privileged?
In this respect, my people were poor.
We fought to eat and fought each other because
we were tired from fighting. We had no time
to share. Instead our estate was honesty,
which is not tenderness. In that it is
a kind of drowning. But also a kind of air.
~ Rebecca Gayle Howell
*
MOBY DICK AND THE INDEFINITE SUBLIME
How do you write? I mean, at all: How do you enter or approach that space where literature becomes possible? Is there some kind of protocol or password that, once cracked, grants access to those secreted troves of writerly capacity—some law that, once discerned, unlocks them? I used to imagine so and, in my youth, would flail around like a lost Egyptologist hoping to stumble across it. Despite not having found it, I nonetheless fluked my way into print, whereupon people started to ask me what the secret was. I never knew how to answer—until an acquaintance, the novelist Sheila Heti, passed me an email she’d received from her friend Miranda July, recounting a recent dream. “My dream last night,” July told Heti, “was in the form of an email from you”:
"you wrote me about how when you were in your early twenties you and your boyfriend and your best friend spent a summer writing letters to the author tom mccarthy. you were trying to figure out how to be writers and wanted advice from him. eventually he began writing you back. this was the advice he gave: “if you want to write more, buy more paper. if you want to write better, buy better paper. and most importantly, the first sentence of the book should be indented.” then he described how he loved to take a pencil and trace the invisible line from the first letter of the first sentence to the upper left corner of the page. i was thinking how i found that last part sexy and then right then you skyped me (something we did all the time) and said you found that part sexy."
Now when someone—interviewer, student, friend—poses the how-to question, I forward this email to them. The advice I (the July version of me) give(s) seems excellent, and right—but in a way whose logic isn’t visible. Think of the essay that follows as a drawing-to-the-surface of this logic.
A day or so after agreeing to give a talk about Moby-Dick to mark that novel’s 175th anniversary, I awoke from a dream of my own, the details of which escape me, but which prompted me, at 3:00 or 4:00 a.m., to jot down an outline for my lecture under the heading “The Indefinite Sublime.”
“Look,” I said on Zoom the next day to my friend Sina Najafi, editor of the wonderful Cabinet magazine. “I’ve got Moby-Dick mapped out on a single sheet of paper.
“That’s nothing,” he replied. “I’ve got it on an envelope.”
He held the latter to the camera; it was white and entirely blank. My version turned out to be bullshit, but Sina’s was bang on the money. Moby-Dick, despite being crammed with larger-than-life figures (the manic and hubristic Captain Ahab, scouring the world’s oceans for the beast that’s bitten off his leg; the gentle-giant harpooner Queequeg, who declares himself married to Ishmael, the melancholically philosophical narrator, after they share a bed at the Spouter Inn in the whaling town of New Bedford; the whaling ship Pequod’s conflicted mates Starbuck and Stubb; the multinational, multiracial crew they oversee), is nonetheless a book that’s full of blanks. There are “bitter blanks,” marble cenotaphs marking the empty graves of sailors lost at sea; sails like “blank bladders”; and blank stretches on charts.
If (for Ishmael) “wonderfullest things are ever the unmentionable,” the sea, too, “will permit no records.” The whales it hides are faceless and their brains “incapable of being adequately charted.” Behind, among, between, above these, his “snow-white wrinkled forehead” and whole body “streaked, and spotted, and marbled with the same shrouded hue”—the whiteness that represents “the visible absence of color, and at the same time the concrete of all colors”—Moby Dick himself, from the moment he looms in our narrator’s mind “like a snow hill in the air” to the end point at which his “blank forehead” wipes the Pequod from the map, acts as a giant, roving blind spot, at once the novel’s focal and vanishing point.
Here, with our talk of the unmentionable and pale, elevated visions (which Ishmael recounts using the terms “horror” and “wonder”), we cruise straight into the book’s main hunting ground, conceptually speaking. In describing whiteness as “sublime” while simultaneously cautioning that it “strikes more of panic to the soul than that redness which affrights in blood,” Ishmael is invoking a formal philosophical category—one that, like the whale, has a long head and an even longer tail.
In Peri hypsous, or On the Sublime, a treatise of reflections on literary technique, traditionally attributed to the first-century a.d. philosopher Longinus, the notion of hypsous, or sublimity, defines the combination of ecstasy (ékstăsĭs), wonder (thōûmǎ), and astonishment (ékplēxĭs) produced in the listener by verse or prose possessed of a force that burns and sweeps away all before it “like a thunderbolt or whirlwind.” Arising at charged, critical moments (kairoi), characterized by noble diction (phrasis) and by “elevated word arrangement” (synthesis), the sublime marks a kind of limit at which rhetoric surpasses itself, rupturing the bounds of language—a paradoxical formulation that leads Longinus to tie the sublime as much to moments when speech breaks down or breaks off as to ones of eloquence.
It doesn’t take high-end sonar to pick up Longinus’s echoes in Moby-Dick: the many instances of kairoi, of whirlwinds or whirlpools, thunderbolts, and, of course, strikes and blows from tails and flukes, all coupled with intensified, excited prose that bursts out intermittently into ecstatic exclamation. Not to mention the multiple uses of the term he put into circulation (by my count, eleven). As the undercurrent of this tendency, there are repeated instances of language stuttering. This arrives at the episodic level: after being assailed by Ahab’s inevitable question—“Have ye seen the White Whale?”—the captain of the passing vessel Albatross lifts his speaking trumpet to his mouth to respond, only for the instrument to fall from his hand, “and the wind now rising amain, he in vain strove to make himself heard without it.”
We get it at the level of languages or tongues themselves: the pagan Queequeg talks with what Ishmael calls a “broken phraseology,” though to the Polynesian’s ear, the Christians among whom he lives speak “gibberish” as well. And we get it at the more universal, ontological one: for Ahab, the “linked analogies” of Nature and the Soul of Man lie “far beyond all utterance.” The sperm whale’s genius, Ishmael claims, resides in “his pyramidical silence.” To underpin the general aphasia that overtakes the novel, Melville has its characters reside among these creatures’ speechless mouths—the dried whale jawbones that adorn and even steer the Pequod—and gives Moby Dick himself a deformed one.
If Longinus’s voice is quietly resonating in the text of Moby-Dick, that of his eighteenth-century descendant Edmund Burke is booming; he’s quoted twice in the book’s opening “Extracts” section alone (which, as its name suggests, is made up of quotations from all kinds of other texts that mention whales). For Burke, the sublime involves not only awe and wonder but, more darkly, horror and dread; a heightened quality of mind occasioned by extremities within the natural world, it can (he claims in his 1757 A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful) be triggered as much by serpents and other poisonous animals as by mountain ranges or waterfalls. This downward, hell-bent disposition is mirrored in Ahab’s nighttime visions of internal chasms opening, “the hell in himself” into which “accursed fiends beckon him to leap down,” or his blood anointment of the harpoon he’s reserved for the white whale, his baptizing of its barbs “in nomine diaboli.” As the critic Barbara Glenn puts it, “In Moby-Dick, the effect of the sublime is terror without divine reassurance.”
In less religious terms, Burke the empiricist seems to have lent Melville his materialism. “Methinks,” Ishmael cautions, “that in looking at things spiritual, we are too much like oysters observing the sun through the water, and thinking that thick water the thinnest of air.” The cosmos of the novel, far from being abstract, has mass, grain, and texture; nothing is more massive than the whale (“the mightiest animated mass”), and no activity is more basely material than standing knee-deep in the “leviathan gore” of whaling, “surrounded by all manner of defilements. Butchers we are, that is true.”
Yet, Ishmael insists, it’s also no less glorious than soldiery. Burke the father of conservatism bolsters the emphasis that Melville places on the capitalist nature of the Pequod’s enterprise: a floating portfolio in which all receive “lays,” or shares. And Burke the statesman, to one of whose parliamentary speeches (about whaling, no less) Melville alludes, notes the role of dread in anchoring sovereignty while also advancing its egalitarian-democratic potentiality: he seems to anticipate the strange political world of the Pequod, in which citizens and aliens, whites and nonwhites, share dividends so long as they submit to a venture steered and governed by a despot.
But what Melville takes most from Burke is his penchant for infinity. “Hardly anything can strike the mind with its greatness, which does not make some sort of approach towards infinity; which nothing can do whilst we are able to perceive its bounds,” Burke writes. And Moby-Dick is firmly locked into this approach route. Sailors in the masts stand “lost in the infinite series of the sea”; whale carcasses, once stripped and dumped, float into “infinite perspectives,” all beneath an “infinite blueness” of sky. The magnificent short chapter “The Lee Shore” holds that “better is it to perish in that howling infinite” of the tempest than “worm-like” to “craven crawl” to shore-hemmed terra firma—and, what’s more, that herein lies “that mortally intolerable truth: that all deep, earnest thinking is but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea,” because “in landlessness alone resides the highest truth, shoreless, indefinite as God.”
The subject, the end point, of the analogy is clear here: thinking. Moby-Dick is a giant parable of thought and knowledge. The Pequod, Ishmael tells us, “was my Yale College and my Harvard”; Queequeg he describes as an “undergraduate.” Having already scoured the world’s lexicons for whale entries, Melville frames the creatures themselves as books and chapters, a “Bibliographical system” subdividing them by size into Folio (Sperm, Right, Humpback), Octavo (Grampus, Narwhal, Killer), and Duodecimo (Porpoises). What, though, to do with the Razor Back, who “eludes both hunters and philosophers”? “Let him go. I know little more of him, nor does anybody else.”
Here’s the rub: lurking within this great knowledge system are holes, vortices of unknowledge. Indefinite as God: the phrase doesn’t simply reassert a Christian piety. It’s much more interesting than that: God denotes the indefinite—that is, truth, shoreless and unbounded. Thinking exists in a relation to what can’t be thought (not formally at least), to the hurricane that destroys thinking itself. This relation is formative and fundamental, nonnegotiable and mortally intolerable; we might, wormlike, craven, turn away from it, or we might, if we’re bold, strive to glimpse it at thinking’s limits.
Here we find ourselves smack-dab in the most fertile of all Moby-Dick’s philosophic fisheries: the Kantian one. Immanuel Kant may get name-checked only once (his last name’s lent to one of two whale heads hanging from the Pequod’s sides, the counterbalancing one being Locke), but it’s to his thought’s rhythms that the novel most profoundly moves.
As the critic Robert Doran has noted, Kant’s 1790 Critique of Judgment transcendentalizes Burke’s empiricism. While the beautiful in nature, being tied to form, involves a bound or limitation, the sublime is to be found in what Kant calls Formlösigkeit (formlessness) and pertains to an object “insofar as limitlessness is represented in it,” as Paul Guyer puts it in his translation. Like the beautiful, though, it rides on indefiniteness: “einem unbestimmten…Vernunftbegriff,” an indefinite concept of Reason (which is why my middle-of-the-night notes were bullshit, their title a tautology—the sublime’s always indefinite).
“Is it,” Melville asks of whiteness, “that by its indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation when beholding the white depths of the Milky Way?” Stabs us: Kant, too, follows Longinus and Burke in tying the sublime to onslaught and assault, to “volcanoes with their all-destroying violence, hurricanes with the devastation they leave behind, the boundless ocean set into a rage.”
It’s about force but also magnitude: mathematically, we may be capable of ascribing a figure to something unfathomably huge, but “with respect to the necessary enlargement of the imagination to the point of adequacy to that which is unlimited in our faculty of reason, namely the idea of the absolute whole”—that’s quite beyond us.
Kant returns often to this notion of inadequacy vis-à-vis the whole, vis-à-vis our ability to apprehend this within “one whole of intuition.” Our idea of infinity in nature “cannot happen except through the inadequacy of even the greatest effort of our imagination in the estimation of the magnitude of an object.” Indeed, it’s the inadequacy itself, the shortfall in presentability, that enables a kind of inverse presentation or Vorstellung—a presentation of the unpresentable. And here Kant talks of law: this fall into the “abyss” of the uncontainable-in-thought “is nevertheless a law for us.”
If Kant finds in the incomprehensible abyss a law, Moby-Dick, too, encounters laws in the sea’s unfathomable depths: not just the “laws and regulations” governing the fishery but also a law founded in the void, the exceptional space, of lawlessness. It’s hard not to picture Ahab in a MAGA cap when, pointing a rifle at Starbuck, he declares that “there is one God that is Lord over the earth, and one Captain that is lord over the Pequod.”
Jacques Lacan, in an extended passage of The Ethics of Psychoanalysis that hinges on Kant’s concept of practical reason, considers Antigone’s conflict with Creon in the Sophoclean drama. In his reading, Creon, defending the “sovereign law,” embodies Kant’s concept of the good; Antigone, by contrast, enters a space at once beyond all laws and home to “a certain legality which is a consequence of the laws of the gods that are…unwritten.”
By insisting, against Creon’s edict, on according her brother rites of burial even though she knows this will cost her her life, Antigone enters a “horizon” zone where “life can only be approached, can only be lived or thought about, from the place of that limit where her life is already lost, where she is already on the other side.” Lacan then turns to Kant, whose signature concept he’s unpacked at the Ethics’s outset: das Ding an sich, the real thing behind our apprehension of it—in other words, the non-thing, “characterized,” as Lacan puts it, “by its absence…there in a beyond,” the “strange feature around which the whole movement of Vorstellung [representation] turns.”
As Antigone, so Ahab:
All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event—in the living act, the undoubted deed—there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the moldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through…the wall? To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me.…That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him.
At the limit, love for a brother (per Antigone) or hatred toward the cause of a missing leg (per Ahab) merge into a single passion that propels its subject to a beyond where to reside is both essential and impossible. For Lacan, this constitutive impossibility structures the nature of desire—also of language, the order in which we experience and articulate the condition of being separated from the object (the real object) that our articulations orbit, and in which, as a condition of living, we forgo a to-be-wished-for communion with the Kantian “absolute whole” in favor of the constant exchange of stand-ins, substitutes, parts, tokens, signs. “And the sign,” Lacan reminds us, citing the theorist of language Charles Sanders Peirce, “is that which is in the place of something else for someone.”
This condition structures language, but it’s also amplified in visual art, which, Lacan claims, “always involves encircling the Thing,” the beyond-object that objects depicted in the work serve “to render both present and absent.” Lacan’s fellow post-Freudian Jean-François Lyotard, also surfing in Kant’s wake, concurs: “Art does not imitate nature, it creates a world apart, eine Zwischenwelt, as Paul Klee will say…in which the monstrous and the formless have their rights because they can be sublime.” The “impotence” (impuissance—Lyotard’s word for Kant’s Unangemessenheit, inadequacy) of the imagination striving to figure that which cannot be figured points the way, even within the Romantic period, to abstract and minimal art:
“Avant-gardism is thus present in germ in the Kantian aesthetic of the sublime.” Lyotard might as well be annotating the painting that Ishmael encounters at the Spouter Inn. “A boggy, soggy, squitchy picture,” it has yet an “indefinite, half-attained, unimaginable sublimity about it.” At its center, hovering over three vertical lines, is a “black mass,” a “portentous something.” What does this central splodge depict? Aha: “That once found out,” Ishmael surmises, “and all the rest were plain.” He does hazard a venture that it bears “a faint resemblance to…the great leviathan,” but this doesn’t mean the picture “realistically” portrays a whale levitating above a three-master. Rather, in standing for the very thing that can’t be represented, and for that incapacity (or impotence) itself, it heralds the advent of modern art.
I’d become friends with Ruscha when writing the catalogue essay for his 2018 exhibition at London’s National Gallery—an essay in which, to unpack the logic of his many word paintings, I had digressed through Melville’s diptych, “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids.” In these conjoined short stories, first published in Harper’s four years after Moby-Dick, the narrator visits (in the first section) a coterie of young male lawyers enjoying a sumptuous dinner in their London chambers, then (in the second section) a desolate New England paper mill staffed by frozen, waifish young women. Here a lone male apprentice, nicknamed Cupid, guides him through the workings of the factory’s mill wheel and iron-framed pistons, cylinders, blocks, rollers, and so forth, eventually inviting him to scrawl something on a scrap of paper. The narrator jots down the apprentice’s name; the latter drops the scrap into the inflowing pulp, and nine minutes later they watch it emerge at what the former ominously calls “the end of the machine.” It has become a proto-Ruscha artwork: the word Cupid looms from a sheet of foolscap. [a traditional size of writing paper measuring approximately 8.5 by 13.5 inches.]
As unconnected to the Pacific fisheries as a Berkshires paper mill might seem, Melville’s description of Tartarus’s maids will strike any Moby-Dick reader as emphatically familiar: “At rows of blank-looking counters sat rows of blank-looking girls, with blank, white folders in their blank hands, all blankly folding blank paper.” So will that of the giant contraption they “served mutely and cringingly as the slave serves the Sultan” (the simile is copied from his description of the Pequod’s bows ducking “as a slave before the Sultan”), or the narrator’s Burkean reflection that “machinery of this ponderous, elaborate sort strikes, in some moods, strange dread into the human heart, as some living, panting Behemoth might.” In fact, so resonant are these and other aspects of the tiny stories with those of the giant novel that I suspect Melville has left us a key or legend to unlock the magnum opus.
The main hinge on which such an unlocking would turn is booming, vibrating, clanking front and center in “The Tartarus of Maids”: that dread-inducing Behemoth, the “great machine” itself, and “the metallic necessity, the unbudging fatality which governed it.” That Melville twice describes it in the story as an “iron animal” should throw into sharp relief the fact that Moby-Dick’s whales are addressed repeatedly in machinic terms: the regularity of their blowing likened to that of clocks, their displacements through the ocean to “that mighty iron leviathan of the modern railway.” It’s not just whales: the seas, too, are “sledge-hammering.”
The Pequod’s sailors move around the foredeck “like machines,” and Ishmael complains that “my whole clock’s run down; my heart the all-controlling weight, I have no key to lift again.” Small machines integrated into both the larger machine (made up, as we have seen, of whale parts) of the Pequod and, larger still, the one of destiny: “The path to my fixed purpose is laid with iron rails, whereon my soul is grooved to run.” Ishmael, weaving a mat with Queequeg, has a vision of “the Loom of Time,” he himself “a shuttle mechanically weaving and weaving away at the Fates.” For Ahab, the threads serve more as strings: “Is it I, God, or who, that lifts this arm?… We are turned round and round in this world, like yonder windlass, and Fate is the handspike.”
In the “Extracts,” Melville cites the opening passage of Thomas Hobbes’s 1651 Leviathan: “By art is created that great LEVIATHAN called a COMMONWEALTH, or STATE (in Latin, CIVITAS) which is but an artificial man.” But this quotation is partial; Melville has omitted the preceding sentences arguing that, since life is already machinic (“a motion of Limbs,” the heart a spring, nerves strings, joints wheels), “all Automata (Engines that move themselves by springs and wheels as doth a watch) have an artificial life.” A Hobbesian vision of statehood (in which assemblies act as muscles, governors and viceroys as tendons moving public limbs, and so forth) runs through Moby-Dick. “Ye are not other men, but my arms and my legs,” Ahab cautions his crew. Leviathan, though, is a treatise not just on politics but (like Moby-Dick) on knowledge too: far from being “born with us,” reason, Hobbes argues, is “attained by industry,” by joining names into chains of assertion, up and up until we attain the Rube Goldbergian systemhood that “men call SCIENCE.” In a register that anticipates Kant’s, Hobbes argues that “when a man reasons, he…is conceiving of the consequence of the names of all the parts, to the name of the whole; or from the names of the whole and one part, to the name of the other part.”
We’re back in Lacan’s realm of substitutions, stand-ins, things marking the place of other, missing things—the realm, that is, of the linguistic sign. And feeling our way back, at the same time, toward the Freudian understanding of technology as prosthesis: godlike suprabiological extension (of the power of sight, hearing, motion) that’s also a diminution of biology, in the manner of an artificial body part. Melville is a perfect Freudian, make no mistake. Ahab, commissioning a second ivory leg after the first one splinters, calls the blacksmith Prometheus, saying he’ll “order a complete man,” fifty feet high, with steel shoulder blades—all in the same breath that he bewails his crippled dependency.
He understands all too well that, in hunting the white whale, he’s homing in on the ground zero of his prosthetic condition. And Melville, who understands even better that the zero beyond the zero of prosthesis is castration, delights in tilting the compass needle that way whenever he can. Look at how he has the splintering old leg smite Ahab’s groin, or a New Bedford sailor adorn a bench with a ship carving, his jackknife “working away at the space between his legs.” And look indeed at the severed whale phallus he shows us on the Pequod’s deck, which the whale “mincer” cuts armholes in and dons like a liturgical robe, turning him (censor be damned) into “a candidate for an archbishoprick.”
We, too, are now homing in on the core drama underlying both “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids” and Moby-Dick. I’m going to call this the Drama of Failed Nuptials. The movement from the first to the second of the two short stories is a move from bachelors to maids, while the stories’ protagonist is a bearer and a distributor of seed: “Having embarked on a large scale in the seedsman’s business,” he visits the mill to source the paper “that comes into use with seedsmen, as envelopes.” Bachelors’ seed, though, is precisely what fails to reach these women, virgins all (save for one old ex-nurse): their bodies, far from swelling with conception, are instead ravaged by the “fine, poisonous particles” that, issuing from the old clothes they shred for pulp, lacerate their lungs. It’s not unlikely, the narrator muses, that (since here, as on the Pequod, we’re amid the flows of globalized capitalism) “among these heaps of rags there may be some old shirts, gathered from the dormitories of the Paradise of Bachelors.” As in Marcel Duchamp’s The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, the suitors disrobe, the mill wheel grinds, and seeds are propelled toward their female targets but, missing their marks, fall short.
This drama—this exact same drama—runs through Moby-Dick. It’s sperm that the Pequod’s trading in; fat, ambergris, and baleen may also be harvested, but it’s the sticky fluid spermaceti, wrapped in what Ishmael twice calls its “envelope” of blubber inside the whales’ giant heads, that forms the vessel’s main commodity. “Don’t ye love sperm?” cries the Pequod’s third mate, Flask, as he cajoles his crew. “There goes three thousand dollars, men!—a bank!” The Pequod encounters a ship called the Bachelor en route home after such a successful voyage that not a barrel, cask, or butt remains empty: “Everything was filled with sperm, except the captain’s pantaloons pockets, and those he reserved to thrust his hands into, in self-complacent testimony of his entire satisfaction.”
Later, they cross paths with the Virgin, which, having yet made no scores, is “clean” and “well deserving [of] the name.” The language of nuptials appears again and again: from the “glistening white membrane, glossy as bridal satins,” lining sperm whales’ mouths, to sailors stepping onto “the immaculate deck…as bridegrooms new-leaped from out the daintiest Holland” sheets. The curtain rises on the drama’s final act as the sun, “even as bride to groom,” surrenders herself to the sea with “fond, throbbing trust”; in this act’s fatal third scene, Moby Dick, “shrouded in a…veil of mist,” breaches and sinks, leaving the water “creamed like new milk” around his “marble trunk”—before bursting and emptying all barrels, casks, and butts. This is no fruitful union, though, no moment of conception: the wrecking of the Pequod sees its sperm unprofitably shed across the ocean’s surface, there to float, ungatherable, past a third ship, the Rachel, named after the biblical figure who—initially infertile, then later shown weeping for her long-lost offspring—found herself twice childless.
Freud recounts, in an early paper titled “Obsessive Actions and Religious Practices,” the case of a Viennese housewife who would compulsively arrange her tablecloth so as to render visible a stain on it—a neurotic reenactment, he suggests, of her wedding night, when her impotent husband, failing to stain the bridal sheet, poured red ink on it for the servants to see the next day. If, in “The Tartarus of Maids,” a boy named Cupid leads us through the rites of Hymen (failed rites: the paper sheets that the factory produces are as blank as the frustrated housewife’s or as the maids’ skin, with its “consumptive pallor”), in the novel, endless darts or arrows stab at Moby Dick’s white surface without drawing that deep-dark blood that would betoken conquest.
This broad-reaching failure—to penetrate, inseminate, gestate, and deliver to the world the object of one’s labors—is rendered (of course) as fiction, in signs, in language. But it’s also, as we’ve seen, reinscribed within that rendition as a failure of language and the sign. The very word sperm, Ishmael notes, is (in the world of whaling, at least) a misnomer, “philologically…absurd,” since the fluid to which it refers isn’t (as it is in men) “quickening humor.” Philology opens the book’s very first section, which shows the pale Usher, or grammar-school teacher, who supplies the word for “whale” in thirteen languages, holding (since he is “Consumptive”) the handkerchief that he would have regularly checked for blood. There’s blood flecked all throughout “The Tartarus of Maids” as well: next to the mill, powering its wheel, Blood River regularly flows; the pulping room is “stifling with a strange, blood-like, abdominal heat.”
The only thing to issue from this sanguine incubator, though—“moist and warm,” after the same number of minutes as months needed to gestate a baby—is, as we’ve also seen, a new (feeble, “half faded”) sign. Like magi, we’re being called to witness the birth of the sign itself, in all its inadequacy, to take part in an epithalamium instituting the domain not of Eros but the signifier “Cupid,” not sperm but “sperm,” not consummation but consumption. “All sorts of writings,” the narrator of “The Tartarus of Maids” muses, “would be writ on those now vacant things—sermons, lawyers’ briefs, physicians’ prescriptions,” and so on.
Here we arrive right at the pulpy, vibrating heart of Melville’s vision. His extraordinary achievement in Moby-Dick, as elsewhere, is to process the monumental themes we’ve been discussing (reason and knowledge, mind, world, fate, the Thing) within the framework and machinery (the rollers, cylinders, and blocks) of writing. Not to write about them but (quite the reverse) to make them be, ultimately and at base, about writing, and to make writing both the subject of the agon and the stage on which it plays out. Ahab has, embedded in his artificial leg, a “little oval slate, smoothed ivory, where he figures up the latitude”: the space of his prosthesis is the space of writing. This condition, not the mere fact of his amputation, is the source of his great anguish: “Cursed be that mortal inter-indebtedness which will not do away with ledgers. I would be free as air; and I’m down in the whole world’s books.”
Moby-Dick is a queer book, in every sense. Just as the Pequod’s actual compass needles are turned or “transpointed,” the novel, turning away from the normal or “normative” structures and couplings of the nineteenth-century form, envisages, in tender scenes of men’s hands squeezing sperm together, or what Queequeg calls the “marriage” between him and Ishmael, new or off-the-map combinations.
It’s Queequeg, the undergraduate with broken phraseology, who ends up providing the most essential act of document supply. Covered in tattoos that represent “a complete theory of the heavens and the earth,” thus transforming him into a “wondrous work in one volume” that (since the ink runs over parts invisible to him) “not even himself could read, though his own live heart beat against them,” Queequeg wiles away his spare hours transcribing these tattoos onto the coffin he commissioned when he fell ill but has no immediate use for now that he’s recovered. This coffin is what Ishmael will float on after surviving, “on the margin,” the Pequod’s wreck, thus allowing him to be picked up by the Rachel and, more importantly, the story of Moby-Dick to be brought to us, the readers. It is a literal narrative vehicle.
If this episode is a mise en abyme, a parable of broken articulation and unreadability embedded in a larger one, then it, too, is disrupted by a smaller one embedded within it. As the coffin is planed and joined, and the crew gathers around the supposedly dying Queequeg, the African American cabin boy, Pip (whom Ahab will later adopt), serenades the Polynesian with his nonsensical, elliptical utterances: “Form two and two! Let’s make a General of him!… Rig-a-dig, dig, dig! huzza!…Queequeg dies game!…I say; game, game, game!”
He’s been talking like this ever since falling from a whaleboat for the second time. The first time, Stubb rescues him and, reminding him that whales fetch thirty times what he would in an Alabama slave market, advises him: “Never jump from a boat, Pip, except—but all the rest was indefinite, as the soundest advice ever is.” Left to float at sea for an hour before being rescued the second time, he comes face-to-face with “the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs,” and goes mad. As Melville, reprising his earlier loom imagery, puts it in what for me is Moby-Dick’s most haunting line: “He saw God’s foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it.”
Pip’s flailing, stumbling free association harks back to Shakespeare’s mad Poor Tom-Edgar, or any number of holy fools, but it also points forward, in its syntactic and grammatical modulations, its collaging and ejaculations, to the work of Hugo Ball and Tristan Tzara, of Antonin Artaud, Gertrude Stein, and James Joyce—anticipates, that is, the language of the avant-garde. How do you write? I never know what to answer. In this great book of whiteness, it’s two Black figures who unlock and open the first of these modes into the second—and, in doing so, unroll the blank sheet on which modernity will write itself. ~ Tom McCarthy
https://yalereview.org/article/tom-mccarthy-indefinite-sublime
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THE OUTPOURING OF WOMEN’S SUPPORT FOR LINDSAY CLANCY
Hundreds of people have been showing up outside a Massachusetts courthouse to show support for Lindsay Clancy, who's on trial after being charged with killing her three children in 2023.
The defendant in a murder trial isn't often the subject of sympathy and support. Yet hundreds of people showed up outside of a Massachusetts courthouse last week to rally for Lindsay Clancy. She's on trial for allegedly killing her three children in 2023. Her attorney is arguing what's known as the insanity defense, saying that Clancy was experiencing postpartum psychosis.
On Thursday, there was basically a sea of people dressed in pink — about 400 people, mostly women. Some wore buttons saying they were, quote, "standing with Lindsay." Some carried signs saying things like — you're a good mom. And — the system failed you. Renee Kimball of Maine, the lead organizer, said she made a social media post asking people to meet at the courthouse to, quote, "stand in peace for Lindsay.”
Kimball says she spontaneously decided to do this after watching the trial in Maine and hearing about Clancy's repeated attempts to get postpartum mental health care.
I think that every one of us women believe that could be any one of us, any one of us who have dealt with mental health — anxiety, depression, postpartum. I think we just know that any one of us could be sitting in her chair, and it should not take for it to get to tragedy.
Kimball says the turnout has been overwhelming, and it shows that maternal mental health care needs to improve. Many of the demonstrators said they also experienced postpartum issues, and they had a hard time getting the attention and support they needed, if at all. Louise Saunders, a mother of two from Massachusetts, said it's especially tough for new moms to admit that they need help because of stigma and concerns their kids could be taken away.
It's been so in the dark. And as women, we're told to smile, and, you know, it's natural to be a mom. So if you aren't really into it and you can't do it well with a smile, then you're not doing it right.
If a woman like Clancy, a labor and delivery nurse who understood the healthcare system and had resources, couldn't get help, then who can?
The group was really diverse — young women with children, older women who said this resonated with their own experiences. And they came from all over the country. Brenda Speller, a mom of six, flew in from Tennessee.
We don't feel like there's enough support for women, especially postpartum, but mental health in general. I think some things could have been very different if maybe society took it a little more seriously.
And then the crowd cheered as Clancy's attorney, Kevin Reddington, walked up to the courthouse. He says this trial is shining a light on a mental health care system that he believes is too short on time with patients and too reliant on prescription drugs.
When a woman is going through what so many people do, and they go to a doctor, and the doctor says, Here. Take this pill. Take that pill. Take this pill — and then they basically treat them for 15, 20 minutes and send them on their way, it's just not right.
That's the center of the defense argument — that Clancy was not in her right mind and was overmedicated.
Reddington has had several medical experts testify that Clancy was experiencing postpartum psychosis and was prescribed 13 different medications in the months before the killings.
Prosecutors have called their own medical experts who say Clancy did not have postpartum psychosis. Their witnesses have included some of Clancy's healthcare providers who have testified that, yes, she was depressed and trying different medications, but it was not psychosis. Prosecutors say Clancy was fine the day of the killings, functioning normally. But they don't dispute that Clancy was a devoted mother to her children who were 5 years old, 3 years old and 8 months old when they were killed.
Clancy's attorney Kevin Reddington says her psychosis was linked to the stress, sleep deprivation and hormonal changes that follow childbirth. Reddington said she also has bipolar disorder. After strangling her children, Clancy jumped from a second-story window and remains paralyzed from the waist down.
It's been really interesting to watch how this case has galvanized attention. At the start of the trial, there were a few spectators, media and Clancy's family in the courtroom. Now there are lines to get in, and people have been turned away. Demonstrators also rallied at the state hospital where Clancy is being held, and another demonstration was scheduled at the courthouse on Monday.
Reddington says Clancy repeatedly sought help: She turned to multiple outpatient providers, tried various drugs they prescribed, called a suicide hotline, went to an emergency room, and even checked herself into a psychiatric hospital.
"Women are being dismissed, neglected and ignored when we speak up," said April Vincent, a 52-year-old paralegal from Providence, Rhode Island. "We're scared because nobody takes us seriously.”
The women stood silently for more than an hour ahead of Thursday's proceedings, where a chaplain called by the defense testified about visiting Clancy in the hospital after the killings.
At the sight of Reddington outside the courthouse, the crowd broke into applause.
Toward the end of their rally, supporters formed a circle, said the Lord's Prayer, held up their arms and formed hearts with their hands. Some held flags from different countries to show that the support for Clancy was global.
Researchers estimate that postpartum psychosis — which is more serious and less common than postpartum depression — afflicts 1 to 2 per 1,000 women after delivery.
Jeanne Zaborski, a 72-year-old retired nurse from Rockland, Massachusetts, said she hopes the case raises awareness about postpartum health. She and many others at the rally said they had been following the trial almost daily.
"It's very sad," Zaborski said. "I am a mother. I am a grandmother. I have a sister who had problems after birth and it's just very sad. I hope Lindsay gets the care she needs and deserves and other women will come together like we did today.”
In court, Sheila Cavanaugh, a chaplain at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, testified that when she first visited Clancy after the killings, she was unconscious. By Jan. 31, 2023, Clancy was conscious and no longer connected to a ventilator, Cavanaugh said, but "her emotional state was very neutral — a flat affect."
Cavanaugh said she "vividly remembers" one of the first things Clancy said to her.
"She said to me, as I held her hand to comfort her, 'I'm so glad my children are safe,'"
Cavanaugh said. "I replied theologically to Lindsay. I said, 'Lindsay, your children are safe. They're safe in heaven with God.'"
"We prayed for them," said Cavanaugh, who saw Clancy more than 200 times and has visited her at the state mental hospital where she resides.
Cavanaugh said Clancy "alluded to hearing a voice, and the voice, according to Lindsay, told her that if she did not follow the command, neither she nor her children would be safe."
Their last visit was right before the trial started. She said Clancy "talks frequently about her children."
"She loves them deeply," Cavanaugh said. "She carries immense grief."
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
REDDINGTON: She's so beat up and just so upset. This'll really help her out, I think. That's all. So...
UNIDENTIFIED SUPPORTER #1: Tell her we love her.
UNIDENTIFIED SUPPORTER #2: Thank you.
UNIDENTIFIED SUPPORTER #3: Thank you, Kevin.
UNIDENTIFIED SUPPORTER #4: Thank you, Kevin.
UNIDENTIFIED SUPPORTER #2: Thank you. Good luck. Good luck. *
If you or someone you know is in crisis, you can call or text the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline at 988 or call the National Maternal Mental Health Hotline.
National Maternal Mental Health Hotline: call or text 1-833-TLC-MAMA (1-833-852-6262), 24/7
https://www.npr.org/2026/08/23/nx-s1-5940882/why-hundreds-showed-up-to-support-murder-trial-defendant-lindsay-clancy
[Oriana: I fused the two PBS articles]
From Reddit:
Yougetdueprocess:
I think this is more the result of decades and centuries of medical misogyny and lack of research into women’s diseases and how they present. I would not be surprised if PPP, for example, isn’t as rare as we think, but, rather, missed more often than we think and that research funding is negligible like most ailments that are specific to women. So, it’s a systemic issue of the neglect of women’s healthcare rather than an individual doctor issue.
pamperwithrachel:
She has bipolar disorder as well. Women with bipolar disorder are 10 times as likely to suffer from postpartum psychosis.
MissMountRose:
Best case scenario, this woman is paralyzed and spends the remainder of her life in a state institution. She’s already in hell in many ways. The worst case is she committed a terrible, unforgivable crime with malicious intent and is in prison the rest of her life. 3 children are dead and there are no winners.
To me, all signs point to a post partum psychotic episode. Our healthcare system is not set up to provide adequate care for mothers in many ways, our country is not set up to provide support for parents. That’s not an indictment of the healthcare providers either — so many are doing the best they can in the current environment.
scottishcastle:
I think it’s gross that her husband is already remarried and has another kid. Men really can move on from anything in the speed of light. Replacement wife, replacement family.
I’m also side-eyeing the new wife. Really, this seemed like husband material to you?
sadgrad2:
The only thing I know for sure is she didn't get the help she needed. I am incredibly sad for her.
donntfeedtheclients:
this case is compelling because almost all women who’ve raised young children can relate to feeling overwhelmed, and the mental ups and downs of being post-partum with multiple kids.
Her outcome was extreme, but she was very “normal” beforehand. She was a good mom with no history of mental illness, who begged for help and wasn’t able to get it adequately despite being in the medical field. She could be any young mom. It’s proof mental illness is real and doesn’t discriminate. People see themselves in her, and she’s living their nightmare.
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WHY ANCIENT GREEKS AND ROMANS SHAVED
The clean-shaven faces on ancient statues hide a bloody reality. Men originally prized thick beards, until an agonizing daily scrape with a dull bronze blade became a mandatory symbol of power.
The massive shift in facial hair fashion began with Alexander the Great in the 4th century BC. During his campaigns, Alexander noticed that thick beards were a fatal liability in hand-to-hand combat; Persian soldiers could easily grab a Macedonian soldier's beard and pull him to the ground. Alexander ordered his entire army to shave. Because he was viewed as a god-like conqueror, his clean-shaven face became the ultimate symbol of youth, vigor, and power, and the Hellenistic world eagerly copied him.
The Romans adopted this Greek trend but added their own cultural spin. Around the 3rd century BC, barbers (tonsores) were introduced to Rome from Sicily. By the late Roman Republic and early Empire—the era of Julius Caesar and Augustus—being clean-shaven was the ultimate visual marker of a civilized Roman citizen. Foreigners and unconquered peoples were heavily bearded; therefore, a smooth face proved you were disciplined, hygienic, and distinctly Roman.
The shaving equipment of the era was primitive and physically punishing. A Roman man relied on a novacula—a crescent-shaped razor forged from iron or bronze.
These metal blades dulled extremely fast and had to be constantly resharpened on a whetstone. There was no foaming shaving cream. The skin was merely splashed with water or rubbed with a thin layer of olive oil before the scraping began. The Roman poet Martial frequently complained about the facial butcheries of his time, noting that a razor's slash was a regular part of a man's morning. Men who could not tolerate the razor opted for alternatives that were just as painful, such as plucking the hairs out with tweezers or rubbing the face smooth with a rough pumice stone.
Because the process was so dangerous to do to yourself, almost no Roman man shaved himself at home. Instead, they went to the tonstrina (the local barbershop).
Visiting the barber became an essential daily ritual of Roman social life. Men would sit for hours, gossiping and discussing politics while the barber carefully navigated their necks with a dull bronze blade. The significance of the barber was so great that a young Roman man's very first shave was celebrated with a religious ceremony known as the depositio barbae, where his first facial hairs were offered to the household gods. ~ SepiaGlyphs, Quora
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FAT USED FOR COOKING IN THE MIDDLE AGES
Lard, butter, and olive oil ruled the medieval kitchen. But for up to 150 days a year, the Catholic Church banned animal fats, plunging half of Europe into a culinary crisis.
When it wasn't a fasting day, the fat sizzling in the pan depended entirely on geography.
In Northern and Central Europe, the undisputed king of the kitchen was lard (rendered pig fat). Pigs were uniquely suited to medieval peasant life; they were cheap to keep, thrived foraging for acorns in nearby woodlands, and yielded a massive amount of fat relative to their size. Lard was shelf-stable, calorie-dense, and used for everything from frying vegetables to enriching pottages and baking pastries.
Butter was also a daily staple in the North, particularly in regions with good pastureland like Scandinavia, Britain, and the Low Countries. Though the nobility sometimes looked down on butter as a peasant staple, it was consumed in vast quantities. Tallow (rendered beef or mutton fat) was less desirable for cooking due to its waxy texture and strong flavor. It was usually reserved for making cheap candles, though the poorest households would cook with it during harsh winters.
Meanwhile, Southern Europe operated on a completely different culinary foundation. The Mediterranean climate of Italy, Spain, and southern France was less hospitable to vast dairy herds but perfect for olive groves. Olive oil was the everyday standard for both the rich and the poor, used for frying, dressing, and preservation.
When the Church's calendar shifted to one of those 150 "lean days"—which included every Friday, the entirety of Lent, and various holy days—all animal products were strictly forbidden. This meant no meat, no dairy, and critically, no lard or butter.
For Southern Europeans, this was a minor inconvenience, as they already cooked with olive oil. But for Northern Europeans, it was a massive culinary crisis. Olive oil was an expensive luxury import, and by the time it reached the North, it was often rancid. To survive fasting days, Northerners had to rely on locally pressed vegetable oils, including walnut, hempseed, linseed, and rapeseed oil.
The affluent could afford imported olive oil or sweet almond oil, but the peasantry despised the harsh-tasting local seed oils they were forced to endure. The resentment over forced oil consumption was so high that in cities like Rouen, the Church allowed wealthy citizens to pay a special tax for the right to eat butter during Lent, using the funds to build the cathedral's famous "Butter Tower."
An illustration from a 1432 manuscript of Boccaccio's Decameron depicts a medieval domestic cooking scene over an open hearth.
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HOW NOT TO DIE ALONE — A NEW GUIDE TO DATING
I always try to convey to my clients that dating is a learned skill, with a step-by-step process — and if you follow the plan, you will meet your future partner. Logan Ury has a plan and walks readers through every step of that process in her new book, How to Not Die Alone.
Not only is Ury a behavioral scientist for the dating app Hinge, she also has over a decade of experience studying human behavior at various technology companies, including Google.
The three kinds of daters
In her book, Ury categorizes frustrated daters into three primary categories, and they each have unique challenges.
The Romanticizer: If you are caught up in the fairytale about how you want your love story to play out, this could be you.
The Maximizer: If you are a swipe addict with a checklist of qualities for the next best match, you fall into this category.
The Hesitater: If you have trouble getting started dating or have a million reasons for why this isn't your time to find love, this is definitely you.
Best practices for finding love
Each of these types has unique challenges and recommendations — but some of Logan's advice is universal, regardless of your dating style. Here are three things you can do today to shift your love life for good:
Develop a growth mindset: If you look at dating as a set of learned skills and see the process as a learning opportunity, you'll be less stressed about each individual interaction.
Create a pre-date ritual: Figure out what gets you into a good dating mood. Maybe it's a specific playlist or outfit you like to wear, or perhaps it's a call to your best friend to hype you up. Make sure you enter each date from a place of optimism and possibility.
F*** the spark: This is actually one of the chapter titles in How to Not Die Alone. Chasing the spark based off of initial chemistry alone is a losing battle — and I have witnessed this too, among my clients and podcast listeners. Instead of prioritizing butterflies, look for deeper elements of connection and a window into your date's values. Go on that second date and see what unfolds.
Understanding your dating pitfalls and developing a strategy can help you move into the relationship you want. It might not come in the exact package that you envision, but a deep connection and relationship that can blossom over time is worth more than a million dead-end dates.
https://www.npr.org/2021/02/08/965397828/how-to-fall-in-love-according-to-hinges-relationship-scientist
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A FASCINATING LOOK AT A CONSTELLATION OF FACTORS WHICH MAKE A BOY MORE LIKELY TO BECOME GAY
This is the most informative video on the development of same-sex attraction that I have ever watched:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJur1jDGlqE
- Having older biological brothers increases the probability that a later-born boy will be gay.
- With each older biological brother, the likelihood increases by roughly 15% to nearly half depending on the study and baseline.
- This pattern does not apply to adopted or stepbrothers, which suggests a biological process in the womb rather than a social one.
Scientists believe this happens because a mother’s immune response to male pregnancies can change slightly with each successive boy, affecting hormone levels during fetal development.
Twin studies show that if an identical twin is gay, the other twin has a higher chance of being gay too, pointing to a strong genetic component, though it is not 100% predictive. (The other twin and a 50-50 chance of being gay.)
Specific gene variants (like those near chromosomes 13, 14, and X) have been linked in studies to areas of the brain that handle hormone regulation and development, such as the hypothalamus. You can learn more about how researchers look at DNA in Is Homosexuality in Your Genes?
- Pre-natal hormone exposure in the womb helps shape brain structure and physical pathways related to attraction.
- Brain scans and studies have noted small structural differences in areas like the hypothalamus between gay and straight individuals, mirroring these early developmental influences.
- Large population analyses, like the genetic and behavioral review discussed in New study finds there is no single gene, confirm that sexuality is a natural human variation shaped by thousands of tiny biological and environmental factors working together.
Recent research suggests that 11% of American adults acknowledge at least some same-sex attraction, 8.2% report that they’ve engaged in same-sex behavior, but only 3.5% identify as lesbian, gay, or bisexual. This shows that what people feel or do is not always the same as how they identify themselves.
Oriana:
There are many aspects of sexuality that we don’t yet understand, but we do know enough to state that there is no single “gay gene” — it’s rather various genes in specific configurations with other genes and specific environmental circumstances (perhaps an absent or hostile father, and/or being bullied by older brothers) that predispose a son to being gay. To the best of our current knowledge, prenatal exposure to hormones (being exposed to testosterone due to the activation of the y chromosome during pregnancy is the strongest example) seems to be the strongest biological determinant, rather than any particular genes. Cultural factors also no doubt play a role.
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IS ENGLISH CLOSER TO GERMAN OR FRENCH?
Open an English dictionary, and French loanwords outnumber all others. But listen to the words used most frequently in everyday speech, and almost every single one is Germanic.
This massive influx of Romance vocabulary into the broader dictionary is the result of the Norman Conquest in 1066, which installed a French-speaking ruling class in England for centuries. Because the nobility spoke French while the commoners spoke Old English, the language absorbed thousands of French terms for law, government, art, and cuisine.
Despite this heavy French influence, linguists classify English as a Germanic language. The distinction comes down to the difference between a language's adopted vocabulary and its genetic structure.
Before the Norman Conquest, Old English was almost entirely Germanic. A text like the epic poem Beowulf is unintelligible to modern English speakers without study, bearing a much closer visual and grammatical resemblance to modern Frisian, Dutch, and German.
The first page of the epic poem Beowulf, written in the West Saxon dialect of Old English.
While English adopted a massive amount of French vocabulary, it kept its Germanic skeleton. The core building blocks of everyday English (words like the, is, you, and, water, man) are all Germanic. French gave English its complex, specialized vocabulary, which is why English has pairs like cow (Germanic) for the animal and beef (from French boeuf) for the meat served to the nobles.
More importantly, the grammar of English is Germanic. English forms its past tense using the Germanic system of strong and weak verbs—changing the internal vowel (sing, sang, sung) or adding a suffix (walk, walked). It uses Germanic auxiliary verbs (will, must, can) and forms comparative adjectives with "-er" and "-est" (fast, faster, fastest). French grammar relies on an entirely different system of conjugations and syntactic structures that English never adopted.
Even the conversational rhythm of English remains tied to its roots. When English speakers place stress on the first syllable of a root word—saying WA-ter instead of wa-TER—they are following a specific accent rule established in Proto-Germanic thousands of years ago, a rhythmic pattern French never adopted. ~ Quora
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RICHARD FEYNMAN’S MOVING LETTER TO HIS DEAD WIFE
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VENUS ATE ITS MOON
Scientists have long speculated why Venus, with a similar size, mass, and structure to Earth, doesn’t have a moon. New UC Riverside research shows it’s because our hungry twin likely swallowed it.
In the past, scientists have theorized that Venus possibly had a moon at one time that got hit with something massive, obliterating it. Other theories centered around the idea that Venus never underwent a collision that formed a moon in the first place.
The new research, published in The Astrophysical Journal, shows that neither theory fits. “My study shows Venus didn’t require a catastrophe to arrive at what we can see today,” said UCR astrophysicist and lead author Stephen Kane. “It turns out the gravity of the planet itself combined with the rate at which it spins naturally caused the moon to collapse on top of it.
”Scientists can precisely measure the distance between Earth and the moon because NASA’s Apollo 11 landing left mirrors there. “We know that the moon is slowly moving away from the Earth, at a rate of around four centimeters per year,” Kane said. This distancing, Kane said, is happening because Earth spins at a relatively fast 24 hours per rotation. The energy from this spinning gets transferred to the moon, causing it to distance itself.
Venus has the exact opposite situation. It takes that planet 243 Earth days to complete a single rotation. So, rather than gradually moving away, the slow spin and the planet’s gravity would cause a moon to spiral inward toward a collision.
To test this idea, Kane wrote computer models based on the physics of how planetary bodies interact through gravity. He first reproduced the evolution of Earth and its moon to make sure the model accurately represented a known system.
Then he varied Venus’ rotation rate and the size of its hypothetical moons, testing moons with masses ranging from half to ten times the mass of Earth’s moon. In most simulations, the result was the same: the moon crashed into Venus. And the more massive the moon, the faster it crashed.
When I made this discovery, I was shocked,” Kane said. “I thought surely the broad range of scenarios I was exploring would lead to a variety of results. But it all went pretty much in the same direction.”
The finding does not prove that Venus once had a moon. Kane believes it may have, but whether one ever formed remains an open question. The study does show that if Venus had a moon, it could not have continued existing indefinitely.
Finding physical evidence of such a collision would be difficult. Roughly 80% of Venus’ surface is similar in age, evidence of a major resurfacing event about a billion years ago that erased much of the planet’s earlier geological history.
Evidence could instead lie beneath the surface. Scientists believe Earth’s moon formed after a massive collision early in the planet’s history, and seismic studies have revealed unusual structures deep inside Earth that may be remnants of that event. Similar measurements on Venus could offer clues about whether it once absorbed a moon.
Such a collision could also help scientists understand another longstanding mystery about Venus: whether Earth’s nearest planetary neighbor was ever capable of hosting life.
A moon crashing into Venus would have transferred enormous energy and angular momentum to the planet, potentially changing its rotation, geology, and climate. If Venus once had oceans or other conditions favorable to life, such an impact could have altered the course of the planet’s evolution.
The implications extend beyond Venus. Scientists searching for potentially habitable worlds around other stars often look for planets resembling Earth and consider the presence of a moon one factor that could influence habitability.
Earth’s moon drives tides, may have helped keep the planet geologically active, and has profoundly influenced Earth’s evolution.
Scientists do not know, however, whether a large moon is necessary for life.
“My feeling is there are benefits to having a moon, but it isn’t required for habitability,” Kane said. “The moon has definitely changed the way Earth has evolved through time, but we don’t fully know how important that role is.”
Kane’s findings suggest that even planets capable of forming moons may not be able to keep them. Slowly rotating worlds could send their moons spiraling toward their surfaces, dramatically changing the planets in the process.
“When people think about Earth twins around other stars, one question they ask is, ‘Does it have a moon?’” Kane said. “My study shows a disturbing scenario for many of those cases. If these planets don’t rotate fast enough, the moon will crash to the surface, and that would change the course of history for those planets.”
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1143908
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GREENHOUSE GAS BENEFITS OF AGRICULTURAL IRRIGATION OUTWEIGH EMISSION COSTS
Irrigating U.S. crops prevents higher greenhouse gas emissions by avoiding land conversion, groundbreaking new research by Colorado State University shows.
Agricultural irrigation allows the United States to grow more food on less land. If irrigation were suddenly shut off, the land change required to make up for lost yield would produce significantly more greenhouse gas emissions than those emitted by irrigating – 363 times more.
CSU scientists estimate the emissions saved by avoiding land-use change would equate to 363 years’ worth of today's U.S. annual greenhouse gas emissions from irrigation.
Converting natural ecosystems to agricultural use releases carbon that's stored in soil and vegetation. Land use and land conversion for agriculture to produce food, fiber and fuel contribute nearly a quarter of global greenhouse gas emissions, making the sector a key priority for emissions reductions, the study published today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences states.
“It was clear from this work that irrigation has a net positive effect on emissions,” said lead author Avery Driscoll, who conducted the research as a CSU Ph.D. student. “The avoided emissions from reductions in indirect land-use change were much greater than the direct emissions, and that could decline further with electrification.”
Pumping water for irrigation – both on farms and for interbasin transfers – uses energy, which creates the most emissions related to irrigation. This is also the easiest source to solve, the researchers said, by replacing fossil fuel pumps with electric pumps. They suggested policymakers might consider incentives for electrification when developing climate-smart agriculture programs.
In previous studies, the researchers outlined direct emissions from irrigation, which also include smaller amounts of nitrous oxide released through microbial respiration and the dispersal of dissolved carbon dioxide when groundwater is sprayed on fields. Their new research is the first study to compare the costs and benefits of direct and indirect emissions from irrigation.
The avoided emissions due to irrigation amount to 6.86 gigatons – more than the total annual emissions of the U.S. in 2024 (5.91 gigatons), or about 13% of total global emissions that year, Driscoll said.
The researchers said the study demonstrates that climate-smart agricultural policies must consider both direct and indirect emissions impacts.
“This comprehensive approach to accounting for direct emissions from the field and for the indirect land-use impacts lets us identify local opportunities to reduce emissions, through pump electrification and grid decarbonization, while also maximizing benefits associated with increasing productivity,” said Driscoll, who is now a postdoctoral researcher at Purdue University. "Ideally, this is a win-win for addressing local emissions and also harnessing the global benefits of irrigation.”
To estimate the amount of land and emissions spared, the researchers first mapped yield benefits at the county level across the United States, calculating a ratio of rainfed to irrigated yields using existing survey data and a machine learning model. They then used a global economic model that simulates production, consumption and trade flow to determine how U.S. production would change if it were all rainfed. Based on economic supply and demand, and accounting for the suitability of different crop types in different regions, the global economic model mapped land use change in the absence of U.S. agricultural irrigation.
Using maps of carbon stored in biomass and soils and data on how carbon stocks change under land-use change, they estimated emissions associated with land-use change.
The researchers noted that the study did not look at other agricultural management practices that can lead to emissions, such as nitrogen application on crops or methane from livestock.
“We're able to show this large benefit of U.S. irrigation to greenhouse gas emissions from the food system,” said co-author Nathan Mueller, a CSU associate professor in the departments of Ecosystem Science and Sustainability and Soil and Crop Sciences. “Yet, when we talk about water use, particularly in the western U.S., there are trade-offs with every use and trade-offs beyond food and beyond greenhouse gas emissions. Our work provides one piece of the puzzle to help examine some of the very complicated societal cost-benefit questions surrounding water use.”
Much of the western U.S. relies on irrigation for food production.
CSU alumnus Alex Brown’s family has been farming and ranching the same land in Yuma County, Colorado, for 120 years.
“We need irrigation to fulfill our needs and our duty to continue to feed the world,” Brown said, adding that if they couldn’t irrigate, farmers would have to plow up less productive and more ecologically sensitive pastureland for crops, and they would be dependent on unreliable rainfall. "As the population increases, the demand for food increases and the demand for agriculture on less land increases.”
Brown said producers in Yuma County – one of Colorado’s top-producing counties for crops and livestock – take conservation seriously. His family continually works to improve irrigation efficiency through technology and modern equipment.
“I'm very passionate about it because I'd love to see our farm continue on for generations,” Brown said about using water wisely.
“Irrigation is a powerful adaptation strategy,” study lead Driscoll added. “It increases productivity; it increases resilience to heat and drought stress, and of course, maintaining and increasing agricultural production is a critical priority. At the same time, we need to reduce food system emissions, so understanding how those two challenges interact with one another is a priority. This work allows us to grasp some of those trade-offs and synergies a little better.”
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1143964
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AT RISK OF HORRIFIC CONTAMINATION': THE SOVIET NUCLEAR SUBMARINE WRECK THAT IS A 'TICKING TIME BOMB’ '
Komsomolets is a timebomb waiting to explode' Soviet submarine jpg
In 1989, the Komsomolets sank off the Norwegian coast. Four years later, the BBC reported on plans to seal in its torpedoes' toxic plutonium."Komsomolets is a time bomb ticking away at the bottom of the Norwegian Sea.
"And unless something is done about it, and done about it quickly, we're all in danger." This is how the risk posed by a sunken Soviet nuclear submarine was described by Russian Greenpeace activist Dimitri Litvinov in a 1993 BBC news report.
Resting one mile (1.6km) deep in the sea near the coast of Norway after a fire caused it to sink four years earlier, the Komsomolets had prompted international concern. Two nuclear-tipped torpedoes inside were corroding, risking the release of 9lb (4kg) of plutonium into the Norwegian Sea.
State-of-the-art Soviet technology went into the design of the Komsomolets, which was unique for the depths it could reach. It was expected by Nato to be the first in a class of large attack submarines, but no further vessels of its kind were built. According to a 1994 BBC Horizon documentary, "The Komsomolets was to be the Soviet Union's secret invincible weapon, the only submarine in the world able to cruise and launch nuclear missiles from 1,000m [0.62 miles] deep, twice the depth at which Western submarines can operate. Today, the Komsomolets is a technical and scientific disaster."
When the fire broke out on 7 April 1989, the crew managed to bring the submarine up to the surface – but it sank after five hours afloat, killing 42 of the 69 crew members. As it went down, an escape pod shot five trapped seamen to the surface, with just one man able to climb out before it filled with water.
As the Komsomolets hit the bottom, near the Norwegian coast, an explosion ripped open the submarine's titanium pressure hull and brought seawater into contact with the nuclear torpedoes. A research mission by Russian oceanographers found that parts of the submarine's hull had "burst and crumbled from the explosion, like glass”.
After the disaster, scientists were divided over what to do. Russian scientist Igor Spassky of the Rubin Institute, which designed the Komsomolets, told the BBC's Ben Brown in 1993 that it was not a catastrophic situation – although he did want the submarine to be raised out of the sea. "Within a decade, the two nuclear warheads on the ship will be fully corroded by an electrochemical reaction involving salt water… and the highly toxic plutonium will escape from the damaged torpedoes and into the environment," he told the US Naval Institute. "
According to environmentalists," said Brown in his BBC report, "if that happens, the sailors who died here would not be the only victims of the Komsomolets. The lives of many more people, they say, would be at risk, because the rich fishing grounds here would then be subject to horrific contamination." Yet a report released in 1993 by an international team of scientists concluded that the submarine was unlikely to contaminate fisheries.
Despite conflicting views on the dangers posed, efforts were made to mitigate potential contamination. Deep-sea engineering operations between 1995 and 1996 sealed hull fractures and torpedo tubes to contain radioactive material. The work finished 30 years ago, in July 1996. But investigations by the Norwegian government have since revealed that the submarine is still leaking – and the sealant was only expected to last 30 years.
An indefinite potential hazard
A report published in March 2026 found that while the torpedoes remain sealed, the reactor is degrading, periodically releasing visible plumes of radioactive material into the sea. The team from the Norwegian Radiation and Nuclear Safety Authority (DSA) said that the leak is not constant but occurs in sporadic bursts from specific locations along the hull, with a "cloud" seeping out of a ventilation duct.
They don't believe the current levels are harmful, however. "Radioactive releases from the reactor… have had little impact on the surrounding marine environment," says Ingar Amundsen, acting director of the DSA's Department for International Nuclear Safety and Security.
Yet that could change – with both the submarine's nuclear reactor and nuclear-armed torpedoes posing threats, according to Hans Kristensen, director of the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists. Corrosion of the submarine over time could impact current radiation levels, he tells the BBC. "That depends on other factors such as the oxygen level of the seawater around and inside the submarine wreckage, and the condition of the sealant.”
He also points to changing currents as a factor influencing how quickly radioactive materials might be released from the wreckage and potentially enter the food chain via bottom feeders and fish. "The fact that the submarine has already been sealed once is an official acknowledgement of that risk," Kristensen adds.
"Nuclear fuel is in direct contact with seawater and deteriorating," says Amundsen. "Further work should be carried out to understand the mechanisms behind the releases, the corrosion processes taking place, and their implications for further releases." But that isn't going to happen any time soon. "The depth of the submarine, close to 1,700m, makes it difficult to implement any mitigation actions, and we are not aware of any such plans for the moment."
Kristensen argues that more should be done. "At the minimum, a new expedition should be carried out to determine the current condition. With a half-life of 24,000 years, warhead plutonium will remain a potential hazard indefinitely by human standards.”
https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20260709-the-nuclear-submarine-wreck-that-is-a-time-bomb
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PUMPING OUT THE AQUIFERS CHANGES THE TILT OF THE EARTH’S AXIS
Pumping out groundwater from aquifers actually shifts the Earth's rotational axis.
The amount: A landmark study published in Geophysical Research Letters found that humans pumped roughly 2,150 gigatons of groundwater between 1993 and 2010
The movement: Redistributing this massive amount of water—mostly pumped from mid-latitudes like western North America and northwestern India and eventually ending up in the oceans—shifted the Earth's rotational pole by nearly 31.5 inches (80 centimeters).
The rate: The planet's spin axis drifts eastward at an average rate of about 1.7 inches (4.36 cm) per year due to this water displacement.
How It Works
Mass redistribution: Just like moving a heavy weight on a spinning carousel changes how it wobbles, shifting water from underground aquifers to the open ocean changes the planet's angular momentum.
Sea level rise: The water pumped from underground doesn't vanish; it flows into the sea, contributing measurably to global sea-level rise and altering how mass is distributed across the globe's surface.
Climate context: While natural shifts happen due to melting glaciers and core dynamics, groundwater depletion has turned out to be one of the single largest climate-related drivers of this rotational drift over recent decades.
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CAN WE REALLY SLOW DOWN THE AGING PROCESS?
https://www.bbc.com/reel/video/p093919p/watch
Aging is inevitable, but we all want to stay fit and healthy for as long as possible as we age. And biological age — a person’s physiological state rather than the actual time since their birth — is a good measure of how well you are aging.
Biomarkers in the blood, called epigenetic clocks, can measure biological age by looking at methyl groups attached to DNA. Previous research has shown that these epigenetic tags on DNA change over the course of a person’s lifetime.
Now, a study looking at these blood biomarkers has found that some dietary, lifestyle and pharmacological interventions may change the methylation patterns on a person’s DNA and indicate how fast they are aging.
The study, published in Nature Medicine, found that a Mediterranean diet, regular physical exercise, some diabetes and weight-management medications, and some anti-inflammatory drugs might be linked to slower aging.
Şebnem Ünlüişler, Chief Longevity Officer and genetic engineer at the London Regenerative Institute, who was not involved in the study, explained for Medical News Today:
“The important contribution of this study is its scale and standardized approach. The researchers harmonized data from 51 longitudinal intervention studies and applied the same panel of 16 epigenetic clocks and 94 additional DNA methylation biomarkers. This made it possible to compare how different biomarkers respond to different interventions more systematically. The study also suggests that newer biomarkers trained to predict mortality risk or the pace of aging, particularly DunedinPACE and PCGrimAge, may be more responsive than clocks designed primarily to predict chronological age.”
Corresponding author Raghav Sehgal, PhD, Associate Research Scientist in Psychiatry at the Yale University School of Medicine, said that while their results were interesting, they cannot prove that these interventions slow aging.
“Biomarkers are useful because they may let us see biological changes over months or years, rather than having to wait decades for outcomes like disease or death. But they are not a replacement for long-term studies. We still need to show that changes in these measures actually translate into people staying healthier, functioning better, or living longer,” Sehgal told MNT.
Medical treatments, lifestyle changes have greatest impact on longevity The researchers combined data from 51 anti-aging intervention studies, measuring more than 110 DNA methyl biomarkers related to aging. They then looked at the effect of various interventions — diet, exercise, certain medications, and over-the-counter supplements — on these biomarkers.
Two lifestyle interventions were effective in reducing epigenetic aging, according to the biomarker measurements — following a healthy diet, such as a Mediterranean, low-carbohydrate or low-fat diet, and engaging in regular exercise.
They saw the greatest effect with some medications. Metformin, a first-line treatment for type 2 diabetes, semaglutide, a GLP-1 agonist prescribed for type 2 diabetes and weight control, and anti-TNF therapies, which are used to control inflammation, all significantly decreased age across all 16 epigenetic clock biomarkers.
“Pharmacological interventions showed the largest average effects, while lifestyle and dietary interventions tended to produce more consistent responses across different biomarkers,” Ünlüişler told MNT.
For supplements, there was little evidence of anti-aging effects. “The evidence for supplements was limited and inconsistent,” Sehgal told us. [Oriana: I suspect that they didn’t look at berberine, which has benefits beyond those of metformin, a well tested blood sugar lowering and life extending drug]
Medications have greater effect on people with existing conditions
However, Ünlüişler cautioned against taking these types of medication solely for anti-aging purposes:
“The findings involving metformin, semaglutide and anti-TNF therapies [such as Humira and Enbrel] are scientifically interesting, but they should not be interpreted as evidence that these medications should be taken by healthy people to slow aging.”
Examples of Natural TNF Inhibitors
Curcumin: The active compound in turmeric that helps suppress inflammatory cell signaling. [Oriana: Normally I don’t recommend specific brands, but the only type curcumin that I found effective is the OMAX Hydrocurc]
Resveratrol: A polyphenol found in red grapes and Japanese knotweed that blocks inflammatory pathways. [I confess that I haven’t found an effective brand of resveratrol. Maybe with more research and experimenting, I’ll find a brand that seems to make a noticeable difference.] Natural sources of resveratrol include red and purple grapes (especially the skins), unsweetened grape juice, blueberries and cranberries, walnuts and peanuts (including peanut butter), tangerines and oranges.
Green Tea Catechins: Antioxidants in green tea that reduce the production of TNF-α. Black tea also block TNF-α, but black tea isn’t trendy in research the way green tea is.
Omega-3 Fatty Acids: Healthy fats found in fish oil and flaxseeds known for general anti-inflammatory effects [No matter which brand is your favorite, I recommend eating fatty fish and sea food.]
Extra virgin olive oil
Nuts: walnuts and peanuts, macadamia nuts, macadamia oil.
Chocolate: Dark chocolate and raw cocoa powder.
Kefir (Unexpectedly, I found it at Costco!!)
ONCE MORE: ARE WE EATING TOO MUCH PROTEIN?
Which macronutrient is truly critical to your diet?
Answer: all of them. Together, they’re essential for keeping your body functioning; they give you energy and make sure all your cells are working properly.
However, you’d be forgiven for thinking that protein is more essential than the others – and that you’re not getting enough of it.
After all, why else would food companies have quadrupled the amount of high-protein products available worldwide over the past decade, with the investment in such produce expected to rise almost eight per cent every year until at least 2028?
What could the motive be for squeezing protein into everything from snack bars, breakfast cereals and drinks to pasta, yogurts and much, much more?
Quite simply, protein sells. The food industry’s high-protein drive is sadly not all part of a public health plan to fix a hidden diet deficiency in society. In fact, while many of us (including half of Americans) are aiming to increase our daily protein intake, most of us are already eating too much of it.
How much you really need
Protein is, of course, incredibly important to our bodies. Made up of long chains of molecules known as amino acids, it is protein’s job to repair cells in our bodies, particularly after exercising.
“Our muscles are rapidly turning over tissue. Every 60 days, all the proteins in our muscle are broken down and rebuilt,” says Graeme Close, professor of human physiology at Liverpool John Moores University.
“Protein is important in our immune cells, skin, biological enzymes – a huge number of processes. If we’re not consuming enough, we can become deficient in any of these areas.”
Found in high quantities in foods like cheese, fish, meat, eggs, beans and legumes, the World Health Organization recommends healthy adults eat 0.8g of protein per kg (0.01oz per lb) of their body weight every day. That means a person weighing 80kg (176lb) needs about 64g (2.3oz) of protein a day – about two chicken breasts.
However, you’re unlikely to only eat two chicken breasts in a day. Protein can also be found in smaller quantities in the likes of pasta (roughly 3g/0.1oz per serving), milk (8g/0.3oz per cup) and peas (8g/0.3oz per cup) – all of which adds up.
Considering this, it’s little wonder men and women are eating, on average, 81g (2.9oz) of protein per day. For most people, this is at least 20 per cent beyond recommendations.
But it’s worth noting there are some groups that will require more protein than others. For instance, it’s recommended malnourished patients eat between 1.2–1.5g per kg (0.02oz per lb) per day.
Similarly, those aged over 65 also need to increase their intake to between 1.2 and 2g per kg (0.02–0.03oz per lb) of weight per day to help maintain all-important muscle.
“It’s inevitable that we start to lose muscle as we get older, and this can lead to reduced mobility, strength, independence, and quality of life,” says Dr Oliver Witard, reader of exercise metabolism and nutrition at Kings College London. “When it comes to how much protein we need, context is key.” But what if you regularly exercise or are even a professional athlete? Surely you’ve got good reason to reach for a supplement? Probably not. While athletes are often advised to have high-protein diets, this often just means eating more foods overall, not solely protein drinks.
“Athletes generally perform a lot of physical activity, which means they also need to consume a lot of food to ensure they stay in energy balance,” says Luc van Loon, professor of physiology of exercise and nutrition at Maastricht University Medical Centre in the Netherlands. “Therefore, most already consume a lot of protein in their diet, which means that they generally don’t need to add more.”
In short, unless you’re above 65, or have special circumstances, you’re probably getting more than your fair share. Protein deficiency isn’t the problem here, but a surplus probably is.
An excess of protein
What happens if you consume too much protein? Let’s be clear: there’s actually little evidence that too much protein can lead to serious issues you might associate with veiny bodybuilders.
For instance, a high-protein diet has been linked to compromising kidney function, but only for people with underlying problems, according to Witard.
However, there are real issues with increasing the ratio of protein in your diet, particularly if you’re extremely active. “For athletes, the main risk associated with increasing protein intake is that this means compromising other macronutrients,” Witard says.
“If it’s at the cost of carbohydrates, this could be counterproductive in a period of intense training.”
For the rest of us, there’s one big risk in eating too much protein: weight gain.
Protein, after all, is still calories. And any excess protein you don’t use is simply stored as fat.
True, eating an excess of protein may not be as bad for you as eating the same amount of carbohydrates. As one meta-review found, protein appears to have a ‘protective effect’ against weight gain when a person is consuming excess calories – especially when this is combined with weight training.
However, the full impact of this effect isn’t yet clear. And, as van Loon argues, overconsuming any macronutrient is likely to cause you problems.
“Overeating – eating more calories than you’re burning – increases the chance of developing chronic metabolic diseases,” explains van Loon. This, in turn, greatly increases your risk of obesity.
In other words, unlike what the washboard abs displayed on supplement packets suggest, eating more high-protein foods could well lead you to develop more belly fat than muscle.
In summary, overeating protein regularly may lead to conditions such as:
Atherosclerosis (hardened arteries) and heart disease
Cancer
Digestive issues
Type 2 diabetes
The source matters
So far, so worrying. But obesity may be the least of your woes depending on how you source your protein.
“While there’s no definite link between overall protein intake and risk of death, greater intake of animal protein is associated with a higher risk of death. And plant protein is associated with a lower risk,” says Walter Willett, professor of epidemiology and nutrition at Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health, in the US.
As Willett explains, this is largely because of the saturated fat and cholesterol that’s found in animal (and thus meat) cells. Plants, however, contain more unsaturated fats, fiber and healthy phytochemicals such as flavonoids.
This means that going ‘full caveman’ and ramping up your red meat consumption is likely to greatly increase the risk of cardiovascular disease and reduce your life expectancy – especially if all those sirloin steaks are replacing whole grains and healthy plant oils in your normal diet.
But what about the clichéd stereotype of the ‘weedy vegetarian’? Surely meat is a better source than plants for building muscle? Not necessarily.
Although past research suggested animal protein tends to be better digested due to differences in its structure, recent studies have indicated plant-based sources of protein are by no means inferior.
Indeed, a review of studies in 2021 concluded there's little difference, in terms of muscle strength or lean body mass between animal and plant protein – however, those on a plant-based diet generally have slightly leaner mass without fat.
“When it comes to building muscles and having an optimal immune response, it ultimately doesn’t seem to matter where your protein comes from,” Close says.
Due to the risk to your overall life expectancy, the best sources of protein, Close argues, are mostly plants – including nuts, beans and other soy foods, and whole grains. However, he still recommends getting your protein from a range of foods, including occasional fish, poultry and dairy products.
(Pro tip: if you’re interested in maximizing muscle growth, scientists recommend consuming protein throughout your day, across a minimum of four meals.)
However, if you rely solely on plant proteins and want to grow any muscle, there is one catch: you need to make sure your diet contains all the essential amino acids (the amino acids your body can’t produce on its own).
Indeed, a review of studies in 2021 concluded there's little difference, in terms of muscle strength or lean body mass between animal and plant protein – however, those on a plant-based diet generally have slightly leaner mass without fat.
“Individual plant proteins are typically deficient in at least one of the nine essential amino acids, typically lysine or methionine. But, importantly, not both. You need them all to build muscle,” Witard says.
“Lysine is particularly important because it is both a signal and a substrate. Once lysine appears inside the muscle cell, it acts like a traffic light signal, and the proteins that control metabolism are switched on.”
This all means, Witard says, you need to ensure you’re consuming complementary plant-based protein sources to tally up your essential amino acid requirements. For instance, while lentils contain a lot of lysine, they aren’t a great source of methionine. Grains, such as oats, however, are a good source of methionine. Eat them both in a day and you’ll have a complete protein. Other examples of complementary proteins to eat together include pasta with peas, black beans with rice, or whole-wheat bread with peanut butter.
By combining complementary proteins, to ensure you have all the amino acids covered, there’s no reason plant proteins can’t be as useful for muscle health and performance as animal protein, Willet says. And there are some plant proteins with higher levels of lysine than others, including corn (maize), lentils, peas and quinoa.
What about protein supplements?
Of course, meat and grains aren’t the only sources of protein nowadays – there’s also a burgeoning market of bars and powders boasting an impressive amount of muscle fuel on the packet. However, don’t be too taken in.
“I’d much prefer people getting protein from natural sources,” Close says. “In my industry, we talk about the ‘whole-food approach’. And where this isn’t possible, that’s when you can look to a supplement.”
This isn’t just an expert being snobby. Ultimately, the likes of protein bars are often ultraprocessed foods, which have been associated with an increased risk of obesity due to being dense in calories and sneakily ramping up your appetite.
“But protein bars and shakes don’t need to be totally avoided if they’re made from healthy plant sources and not loaded with sugar,” Close adds.
“Sometimes they’re convenient, for example, on a long bike ride. And they’d usually be better than a bar or shake made mostly from refined starch and sugar. But again, most people don’t need them.”
From the perspective of a person’s whole diet, such products may only make up a small part of their daily protein intake, says van Loon – and what a person eats throughout the entire day is much more important.
“However, there are other ways to improve diet besides only taking protein supplements. You should only supplement on top of a good diet,” he says.
Overall, the occasional protein shake won’t do you much harm. Do it every day, however, and you might have a problem. You’ll be left consuming a horde of unneeded calories, with your bank balance slimming a lot faster than your waistline.
So relax: although the health industry wants you to think you have a serious diet deficiency – one that can only be solved by purchasing several expensive barrels of powder – your protein intake is (very likely) nothing to worry about.
https://www.sciencefocus.com/the-human-body/overeating-protein-driving-up-fat-levels
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ending on beauty:
GRAND CANYON
Sky folds into the vertical.
Ridges plow furrowed clouds.
This continent could go on by itself,
this trail heal without a scar —
surface of the human,
this canyon
stepping back into earth,
this land diving endless
into time before time,
it could become
unimaginable —
America, still undiscovered,
burning on the horizon.
~ Oriana
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