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radio silence
for the first year and a half
of my military service I was in training
for the two years after
I spent my shifts
sitting at a large radio console
listening,
trying to ferret out the secrets
of the Soviet air force
mostly
this meant
trying to dig out meaning
from tiny Russian voices buried
in rumpled beds of static
as part of my training
I learned that some of the voices on the radio
get trapped in the higher ionosphere
and bounce within that band
for years, old voices from years past
still circling the globe
but most of the voices
pass on through the atmosphere
and sail off into the void, traveling to the stars,
the human voice another bit of static
for alien ears
such a lesser static
we are
than what we hear, the sound of the
big bang continuing its expansion, waves
of such distant origin traveling
past and through us all the days of our lives,
such a joyous and holy sound,
but how I cursed it
as I sought human meaning
through its crunch and crackle, not understanding
at the time that I was listening to
the universe singing
its birth
song
~ Allen Itz
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PLAYING GOD AND SOCIAL REJECTION — WHY FRANKENSTEIN REMAINS MORE RELEVANT THAN EVER
One night during the strangely cool and wet European summer of 1816, a group of friends gathered at the Villa Diodati on the shores of Lake Geneva. "We will each write a ghost story," Lord Byron announced to the assembled party, which included Byron's doctor John Polidori, the poet Percy Shelley and the 18-year-old Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin (later Shelley).
"I busied myself to think of a story," she wrote. "One which would speak to the mysterious fears of our nature and awaken thrilling horror." Her tale became a novel, published two years later as Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus. It told the story of Victor Frankenstein, a young natural philosophy student, who, burning with crazed ambition, brings a body to life but rejects his horrifying "creature" in fear and disgust.
Frankenstein is simultaneously the first science-fiction novel, a Gothic horror, a tragic romance and a parable all sewn into one towering body. Its central tragedies – the dangers of "playing God" on one hand; parental abandonment and societal rejection on the other – are as relevant today as ever.
And are there any other fictional characters more powerfully cemented in the popular imagination? The two central archetypes Mary Shelley brought to life, the "creature" and the overambitious "mad scientist", lurched and ranted their way off the page and on to stage and screen, electrifying theatre and filmgoers as two of the most enduring icons not just in the horror genre – but in cinematic history.
Frankenstein spawned interpretations and parodies that reach from the very origins of the moving image in Thomas Edison's horrifying 1910 short film, through Hollywood's Universal Pictures and Britain's Hammer series, to The Rocky Horror Picture Show – and it foreshadowed others, such as 2001: A Space Odyssey. There are Italian and Japanese Frankensteins and a Blaxploitation film, Blackenstein; Mel Brooks, Kenneth Branagh and Tim Burton all have their own takes.
The characters or themes appear in or have inspired comic books, video games, spin-off novels, TV series and songs by artists as diverse as Ice Cube, Metallica and T'Pau's China in Your Hand: "It was a flight on the wings of a young girl's dreams/ That flew too far away… And we could make the monster live again". In 2025, sci-fi/horror director Guillermo del Toro finally realized his childhood dream of bringing Frankenstein to the screen, a true labor-of-love project that was more than 30 years in the making.
Thomas Edison’s 1910 short film was the first time the story of Frankenstein appeared on screen
As a parable, the novel has been used as an argument both for and against slavery and revolution, vivisection and empire, and as a dialogue between history and progress, religion and atheism. The prefix "Franken-" thrives in the modern lexicon as a byword for any anxiety about science, scientists and the human body, and has been used to shape worries about the atomic bomb, GM crops, strange foods, stem-cell research and both to characterize and assuage fears about AI. In the more-than-two centuries since she wrote it, Mary Shelley's tale, in the words of Bobby Pickett's 1962 novelty song, Monster Mash (itself inspired by Boris Karloff's performance), has truly been "a graveyard smash" that "caught on in a flash”.
'Mysterious fears of our nature'
"All them scientists – they're all alike. They say they're working for us but what they really want is to rule the world!" – Young Frankenstein (dir: Mel Brooks, 1974).
But why was Mary Shelley's vision of "science gone wrong" so resonant at the time? She certainly captured the zeitgeist: the early 19th Century teetered on the brink of the modern age, and although the term "science" existed, the concept of a "scientist" didn't. Great societal change often brings fear that is played out through culture. "With modernity comes a sense of anxiety about what humans can do and particularly an anxiety about science and technology, " says Fiona Sampson, author of In Search of Mary Shelley.
Frankenstein fused these contemporary concerns about the possibilities of science with fiction for the very first time – with electrifying results. Far from a completely outrageous fantasy, the novel imagined what might conceivably happen if people – and in particular overreaching or out-of-control scientists – went too far
Several points of popular 19th-Century intellectual discourse appeared in the novel. Mary Shelley's writings reveal that in that 1816 Villa Diodati tableau, Shelley and Byron discussed the "principle of life". Contemporary debates raged on the nature of humanity and whether it was possible to raise the dead. In the book's 1831 preface, Mary Shelley noted "galvanism" as an influence, referring to Luigi Galvani's experiments using electric currents to make frogs' legs twitch.
Galvani's nephew Giovanni Aldini would go further in 1803, using a newly dead murderer as his subject. Many of the doctors and thinkers at the heart of these debates – such as the chemist Sir Humphry Davy – were connected to Mary Shelley's father, the pre-eminent intellectual William Godwin, who had developed principles warning of the dangers and moral implications of “overreaching".
Despite these nuggets of contemporary thought, though, there's little in the way of tangible theory, method, or scientific detail in Frankenstein. The climactic moment of creation is described simply: "With an anxiety that almost amounted to agony, I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet." The "science" of the novel is rooted in its time and yet timeless. It is so vague, therefore, as to provide a malleable reference point for the following two centuries' greatest moments of change and fear.
But surely the reason Frankenstein became a shorthand for anxieties about science is down to the impression the "monster" and "mad scientist" have had on its audience. How did this happen? Just as the science is vague in the book, so is the description of the creature as he comes to life. The moment is distilled into a single, bloodcurdling image:"It was already one in the morning; the rain pattered dismally against the panes, and my candle was nearly burnt out, when, by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs.”
With his "yellow skin", "watery eyes" and "shriveled complexion", the creature is far from the beautiful ideal Victor Frankenstein had imagined. This spare but resonant prose proved irresistible to theater, and later film-makers and their audiences, as Christopher Frayling notes in his book, Frankenstein: The First Two Hundred Years. The shocking novel became a scandalous play and a huge hit, first in Britain and then abroad. These early plays, Frayling writes, "set the tone for future dramatizations". They condensed the story into basic archetypes, adding many of the most memorable elements that audiences would recognize today, including the comical lab assistant, the line "It lives!" and a monster who barely speaks.
James Whale’s 1931 film for Universal Pictures starred Boris Karloff as the creature
It's perhaps a double-edged sword that the monstrous success of Hollywood's incarnations (notably James Whale's 1931 film starring Boris Karloff as the creature) in many ways secured the story's longevity but somewhat obscured Shelley's version of it. "Frankenstein [the film] created the definitive movie image of the mad scientist, and in the process launched a thousand imitations," Frayling writes. "It fused a domesticated form of Expressionism, overacting, an irreverent adaptation of an acknowledged classic, European actors and visualisers – and the American carnival tradition – to create an American genre. It began to look as though Hollywood had actually invented Frankenstein." And so, a movie legend was born.
And just as Hollywood cherry-picked from Mary Shelley to cement its version, she had borrowed from historical and Biblical stories to create her own message and mythology. The subtitle of the novel, "The Modern Prometheus", recalls the figure of ancient Greek and Latin myth who variously steals fire from the gods and gives it to man, and represents the dangers of overreaching.
The novel's other great allusion is to God and Adam, and a quote from Paradise Lost appears in the book's epigraph: "Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay / To mould me man?". It is arguably the creature's humanity – and his tragedy – that in his cinematic transformations into a mute but terrifying monster, has often been forgotten.
Shelley gave the creature a voice and a literary education in order to express his thoughts and desires (he is one of three narrators in the book). Like The Tempest's Caliban, to whom Shakespeare gives a poetic and poignant speech, the creature's lament is haunting: "Remember that I am thy creature; I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel, whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed. Everywhere I see bliss, from which I alone am irrevocably excluded. I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend. Make me happy, and I shall again be virtuous.”
If the creature is perceived as a misshapen human rather than a monster, his tragedy deepens. He is first rejected by his creator, which Christopher Frayling called "that post-partum moment", and is often identified as a parental abandonment. Considering that Mary Shelley had lost her own mother Mary Wollstonecraft at birth, had just buried her own baby girl, and was looking after her pregnant step-sister as she was writing the book – which took exactly nine months to complete – birth (and death) is pertinent.
The newborn creature is alienated further as society recoils from him; he is made good, but it is the rejection that creates his murderous revenge. It's a robust allegory for a responsibility to children, outsiders or those who don't conform to conventional ideals of beauty. "The way that we sometimes identify with Frankenstein – as we've all taken risks, we've all had hubristic moments – and partly with the creature, they are both aspects of ourselves – all our selves" Fiona Sampson says. "They both speak to us about being human. And that's incredibly powerful."
The empathy and humanity that has often been lost at the heart of Shelley's novel is reinstated in the most recent adaptation, however. Before its premiere at the Venice Film Festival in 2025, director Guillermo Del Toro told Variety that his version, which stars Oscar Isaac as Victor Frankenstein and Jacob Elordi as the creature, was less a horror than about "the lineage of familial pain", with Isaac the abusive father abandoning his son, the creature.
"He was an outsider. He didn't fit into the world. He was out of place in the same way that I felt as a kid," Del Toro said of the creature, going on to describe Shelley's story as being central to his own life and work. "Frankenstein is a song of the human experience… There's so much of my own biography in the DNA of the novel."
When he was collecting a Bafta in 2018 for a different monster fable, The Shape of Water, Del Toro thanked Shelley for inspiring him. "She picked up the plight of Caliban and she gave weight to the burden of Prometheus, and she gave voice to the voiceless and presence to the invisible, and she showed me that sometimes to talk about monsters, we need to fabricate monsters of our own, and parables do that for us".
Surely it would seem unfathomable that when the then-Mary Godwin first thought up her chilling monster parable in that summer of 1816, she could have imagined that it would go so far to shape culture and society, science and fear, continuing to inspire debate – and art – well into the 21st Century.
"And now, once again, I bid my hideous progeny go forth and prosper," she wrote in the preface to the 1831 edition. The creator and creature, parent and child, the writer and her story – they went forth, and did they prosper? More than 200 years since its publication, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is no longer a tale of "thrilling horror" but its own myth, sent out into the world.
https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20180611-why-frankenstein-is-the-story-that-defined-our-fears
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Don’t look for happiness; create it. ~ Penny Dodson
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CHRISTA PIKE IN PAIN SINCE THE BOTCHED EXECUTION
Christa Pike, who survived a botched execution attempt in Tennessee last month, said Friday that she's been in pain every moment since she woke up confused in the hospital.
Pike said she'd entered the execution chamber having said her goodbyes, adding, "I had not contemplated life beyond that night."
"Several days later I woke up alone in a hospital confused and in pain," she said in a statement dictated to her lawyers. "There hasn't been a moment since that night when I haven't been in pain. My body hurts. My arms hurt. My hands hurt. My throat hurts. I still struggle to speak. And the pain isn't just physical. There is pain in my mind and in my soul."
Her statement was released exactly one month after surviving the execution attempt. It is the first public comment she has made since.
Pike, 50, was given two doses of a lethal injection drug, but her legal team confirmed shortly after the failed procedure that, in an unprecedented turn, she was alive and had been hospitalized. One witness, a media attendee, noted she could be heard loudly snoring about one hour after the procedure had started. She was then taken by ambulance to an area hospital.
Pike's attorneys said earlier this month she had pneumonia, a blood clot, couldn't swallow and was unable to move her arms or hands once she regained consciousness in the hospital. One of Pike's attorneys told reporters during a news conference that her hands "looked like if you were to blow up a surgical glove." She was able to begin walking soon after, though, and was discharged back to the prison for further treatment on Oct. 10.
"I don't know why I survived that night. I don't know what comes next," Pike said in the statement Friday. "Some days, finding hope is harder than others. For now, I am trying to heal, one day at a time."
Pike was convicted in 1995 of the brutal murder of her classmate, 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer. Court filings show that Pike, then 18, tortured and killed Slemmer, slashing her with a meat cleaver and box cutter for up to an hour in a wooded part of the University of Tennessee campus, with help from her boyfriend and a friend.
While other executions have been halted, generally they involved difficulties with finding a vein for the lethal injection. Pike is the only person known to have survived an execution attempt in the U.S. where the drug was administered, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.
It is believed Pike's veins may have ruptured before she was injected with pentobarbital, according to court documents cited by The Associated Press. The execution team used about 10 needles and tried several IV sites on both arms, her lawyer said in the filing.
"I am searching for meaning in what happened to me," Pike said. "One thing that has given me strength is the extraordinary love and support I have received from people around the world. I am overwhelmed by the kindness and prayers of people I have known for years and complete strangers who have never met me."
Pike's failed execution has raised questions about the lethal injection protocol in Tennessee. Hers was the second issue this year in the state. Tony Carruthers could not be executed after the execution team members spent more than an hour trying to establish an IV line for the lethal injection. The governor granted a one-year reprieve on his execution.
CBS News reviewed the state's lethal injection protocols going back to 2007 and found that over the years the protocols grew increasingly vague.
It remains unclear what will happen with Pike, even a month after the botched execution. Gov. Bill Lee, who has paused executions in the state through the end of the year, was asked about the next steps for Pike on Wednesday.
"I suspect her sentence will be the same as before unless determined otherwise by the courts," he told reporters during a press conference.
Pike's lawyers successfully petitioned the court to preserve all evidence related to the botched execution in a hearing on Oct. 7. A follow-up hearing on Oct. 23 was canceled as the judge considers multiple motions in the case. Pike's lawyer, Steve Ferrell, urged the governor to commute her sentence during an interview with "CBS Mornings" days after her botched execution.
"The least that could happen now is that we at least take death off the table and start looking for what the future could be for her," Ferrell, of the Federal Defender Services of Eastern Tennessee, told "CBS Mornings" on Oct. 5.
One-third of Americans back a second attempt at executing Pike, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll from earlier this month.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/christa-pike-botched-execution-statement/?utm_source=firefox-newtab-en-us
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THE MYSTERIOUS BASQUES
For decades, the Basques were heralded as Europe's "most ancient" unmixed people. In reality, Bronze Age steppe invaders replaced virtually 100% of their local male lineages.
The "ancient" myth stems from language. Euskara is Europe’s only surviving pre-Indo-European language isolate. Because their language had no known relatives, early 20th-century anthropologists assumed the Basque people had remained completely isolated in the Pyrenees since the Neolithic period, untouched by outside gene flow.
Ancient DNA analysis completely upended this assumption. Around 4,500 years ago, Yamnaya-descended Steppe pastoralists migrated into the Iberian Peninsula. Far from repelling them, the local population was profoundly transformed. The newcomers replaced about 40% of the local population's overall ancestry. Today, the dominant Y-chromosome haplogroup among Basque men is R1b-DF27, a direct genetic legacy of the Yamnaya. Consequently, modern Basques possess roughly 20 to 25% Steppe ancestry.
This creates the paradox regarding Southeastern Europeans. The agricultural societies of the Aegean and the Balkans were heavily populated by Early European Farmers. When Steppe pastoralists migrated into these dense southern regions, their genetic signature was heavily diluted by the sheer number of locals. As a result, modern Greeks and Albanians often carry less Yamnaya ancestry (around 10 to 20%) than the supposedly "unmixed" Basques.
If Basques absorbed the same Bronze Age migrations as their neighbors, why are they still considered a genetic time capsule? The answer lies not in the Stone Age, but in the Iron Age.
Basque country. The rocky coastal headland of Gaztelugatxe in the Basque Country. Formidable terrain allowed the Basque people to remain relatively isolated from the Roman and Moorish migrations that later reshaped the rest of the Iberian Peninsula.
After the initial mixing of local farmers and Steppe pastoralists, the Basque ancestors utilized their rugged geography to wall themselves off. While the rest of the Iberian Peninsula and Southern Europe spent the next three millennia absorbing Romans, Visigoths, North African Moors, and Eastern Mediterranean gene flow, the Basques remained genetically static.
The Basque people are not uncontacted survivors of the Paleolithic era. Their survival is a linguistic anomaly where the language of the local mothers outlived the languages of the incoming Steppe fathers.
Genetically, they are ancient only in the sense that they are a perfectly preserved snapshot of Iron Age Iberia—a population that absorbed the Bronze Age shockwave, and then simply stopped mixing. ~ NovaPrism, Quora
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THE DREAM OF A PERFECT BABY: IS EUGENICS POISED TO MAKE A COMEBACK?
~ For a very long time, I dreamed of being cured. I was born in 1981. I learned to walk early enough, but I stumbled and fell more easily than other children. My parents began to worry that something was wrong, that my muscles were weaker than they should be. Eventually, at the age of three, I was diagnosed with a form of spinal muscular atrophy (SMA). In the 1980s, the precise mechanics were not yet understood, but the condition was known to be hereditary, probably linked to a recessive gene. It was also known to be progressive. As I aged, my muscles would not keep pace. At eight, I began to use a wheelchair for longer distances. By the time I was 18, I rarely walked outdoors any more.
It is hard to be young and to know that you are growing weaker rather than stronger. I had all the same aspirations that my non-disabled friends did, but I lived in fear of the future in a way they did not. I spent a lot of time thinking about what my life would have been like if I didn’t have SMA. The images in my head were of something like a double: myself, only rid of this one deficit, imprecisely defined, but encoded somewhere in my body.
In the 1990s, the human genome began to be mapped. Medical genetics grew ever more precise. I was vaguely aware of this, of the fact that genetic conditions such as mine were being better understood with every year. With that understanding came the possibility, however faint, that there might be some form of treatment for me beyond the interminable hours of painful, barely-worth-it physical therapy I took after school.
At some point, it did strike me that before medical genetics could even begin to pursue a treatment, an SMA gene would be identifiable in embryos. My other self might be me, cured. Or he might be someone living in my stead, while I’d never been born at all.
As science progressed, this other self came to seem more concrete, more knowable than ever. It was an immensely attractive image. In almost every other respect, I was happy to be me. I didn’t bother to ask who I might have been if my eyes were blue, like my sister’s, instead of brown. I didn’t ask whether I’d have been happier with a talent for music instead of languages. Only this one error in my genome would need to have been corrected, and I would have been me, only better.
Eventually, this perfect shadow-self faded away, for many reasons. But last year it came back to haunt me, as I read about a series of adverts placed by a company called Nucleus Genomics. Throughout the New York City subway system, Nucleus promised prospective parents that they could now have their “best baby”. By way of posters claiming that “height is 80% genetic” and “intelligence is 50%”, potential customers were led to a website detailing an expensive, comprehensive IVF procedure. Up to 20 embryos would be screened for every genetic disorder under the sun, but also for eye and hair color, and for traits ranging from strength and longevity to insomnia and male-pattern baldness.
It was a sales pitch perfectly tailored to the present moment. We already seek to optimize ourselves in every way, through healthy, precisely monitored living. Through the measurement and quantification of exercise routines, nutrition and even sleep patterns, we can assess whether we are living our lives in the best possible way, so why not have the best baby as well? Although we may not be immortality-seeking billionaires, we are all constantly living under the relentless imperative to strive for human perfection, in our own generation and the next. And although it has taken on a new, consumerist form, centered on the individual self, that imperative has a familiar name: eugenics.
Genomics companies tend to avoid the label eugenics, and for good reason. Although the word derives from the Greek for “good birth”, in the wake of the second world war, eugenics was broadly disavowed as a racist, pseudo-scientific movement. Its stated aim was to improve the human species, but its most tangible results were the involuntary sterilization and forcible institutionalization of “inferior” people in many countries and, in Nazi Germany, the mass murder of people deemed a threat to the master race.
In the preceding decades, however, eugenics was popular among scientists, politicians and the general public. Although many of its champions were elitist, sexist and racist reactionaries, there were eugenic progressives, eugenic socialists and eugenically minded feminists. While some eugenicists advocated the forced sterilization of people deemed unfit to reproduce, some advocated women’s right to birth control as a means of social improvement. After all, the belief that many traits in human beings were strongly hereditary was not incompatible with the belief that humans also needed good sanitary conditions, public health and welfare systems, and access to education if they were to realize their full potential.
It is impossible to understand the appeal of eugenics without realizing that it held both utopian and dystopian elements. This is particularly important, because the return of eugenics also involves both. And eugenics really has returned, including under its old name. What may be called the neo-eugenic revival sometimes takes an explicitly racist, white-supremacist form. It talks about birthrates, IQ levels and the impending “civilizational collapse” of the west. It focuses on what it sees as distinct, unequal racial groups. It harkens back to classical eugenic dystopias, such as the influential American writer Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race, published in 1916, an inspiration for Tom Buchanan’s racist rants in The Great Gatsby.
This form of neo-eugenics is easy to dismiss for people who think of themselves as enlightened. However, another form of neo-eugenics is arguably much more pervasive. It is careful about words and labels, and it eschews the state management of populations for a focus on individual freedom of choice. In one sense, this form of eugenics never really went away.
Towards the end of the last century, some philosophers and bioethicists began to defend what they called “liberal eugenics”. Nicholas Agar and Julian Savulescu are among the figures who have argued that this form of eugenics, driven by parental freedom of choice, is something entirely different from the repressive eugenics of the past, which sought to mobilize the state to marginalize or even exterminate entire groups.
The origins of this reorientation are much earlier. According to the historian Nathaniel Comfort, eugenics was already beginning to shift its attention from the population to the individual during the middle of the 20th century, in tandem with the rise of medical genetics. This was partly because repressive eugenic policies were controversial, and partly because medical genetics was a burgeoning science, very different from the pseudo-scientific assumptions of the past.
In the US, eugenic records offices kept a hodgepodge of observations based on prejudices about race, class and gender. Medical genetics clinics were building knowledge and tools with actual, and growing, predictive power. Today, prenatal screening procedures have been part of standard medical practice for decades, mostly directed at the identification of disabilities and illnesses. Down syndrome is becoming very rare in countries that facilitate screening. Denmark, for instance, now sees the termination of over 95% of pregnancies where Down has been identified.
Of course we want the best for our children. In a neoliberal society, one obsessed with maxxing every aspect of life, the “best” might easily come to mean competitive advantage. A company such as Nucleus knows this. Playing on the term “generational wealth”, its website suggests that customers can purchase “generational health”, providing a kind of embodied insurance policy against deteriorating public health and social services. In the 20th century, eugenics was a project for the nation state; in the 21st century, it has reinvented itself as the logical extension of capitalist individualism.
There are still problems with the science. Nucleus’s claims about height and intelligence being genetic to a particular degree refer to population-level estimates of how much of the variation in a group is due to genetics (and are contested, at that). They do not mean “you can reliably decide how smart and tall your child will be”, even if that was a likely takeaway for some people. But in a way, applying population-level logic to individuals makes perfect sense. States need to manage their populations for instrumental purposes – to keep the economy growing, to avoid public health emergencies and to have enough soldiers available to fight wars.
For a long time, this management was carried out in paternalistic or authoritarian ways. But, as the philosopher Michel Foucault argued, a signal feature of the modern state is that it operates through governmentality – by providing the incentives for citizens to manage themselves in ways that align with state interests. If we, as individuals, freely decide to treat ourselves and our families as miniature populations to be optimized for health and productivity, that saves the state quite a lot of effort. But what does this mean for our sense of ourselves?
As the biologist and historian Adam Rutherford has pointed out, eugenics was always about control. The word itself was coined in 1883 by Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin who saw evolution as a process to be managed and directed. With the discovery of natural selection, it seemed obvious to Galton that “what nature does blindly, slowly, and ruthlessly, man may do providently, quickly, and kindly”, as he put it in his seminal 1904 essay, Eugenics: Its Definition, Scope, and Aims.
An enduring image from the early decades of the movement is the “eugenics tree” commissioned for the Second International Congress of Eugenics, held in New York City in 1921. Growing from roots labelled with disciplines across the natural sciences, social sciences and humanities, the tree is surrounded by the words “eugenics is the self direction of human evolution”. In that image, the accumulation of knowledge as well as biological processes are provided with a teleology. But what are their goals? What is all the control, management and optimization really for?
To Galton, and to the generations of committed eugenicists who succeeded him, eugenics was politically and morally necessary in order to prevent societal disaster due to degeneration. Following earlier thinkers such as Thomas Malthus, they worried that too many poor and undesirable people were reproducing. In a short time, the superior peoples, whether defined as the upper class or as “Anglo-Saxons”, “Nordic types” or “Aryans”, would be outbred and outcompeted by their natural inferiors.
Eugenics’ proposal of wholesale management of the population was thus made in service of a particular ideal of humanity, where the universal “best” was defined in a strikingly narrow way. Through the notion of “hereditary genius”, Galton presented the privileges of wealth and class as innate qualities; while he explained undesirable traits such as “vagrancy” and “criminality” as the causes, rather than the consequences, of poverty, deprivation and marginalization. Galton’s eugenic utopia was an idea that reflected the prejudices of a particular place and time.
The same is true of liberal eugenics in our own time. We may question whether the genomics companies’ promises of “best babies” are credible. But it may be more important to ask what their notion of the “best” is. What do they see as valuable and worthless in a human life?
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Liberal eugenics accentuates the positive. In an attempt to distance itself from the forced sterilizations of the past, it prefers to focus, as Nucleus does, on human improvement and enhancement. But as Rutherford notes, in biology you cannot select for something without selecting against something else. Positive eugenics and negative eugenics are two sides of the same coin; without an idea of what is undesired, there can be no notion of the desirable.
For the Victorian eugenicists, the “best” was an amalgam of racial fantasies about “Nordic” or “Aryan” types conflated with the privileges of the upper classes, defined against the undesirable character of brown and black people, and the underclass.
For the new eugenics in its liberal form, positive qualities coalesce around productivity and competitive advantage. The ideal human is strikingly close to the ideal worker, someone who is smart, efficient and unlikely to ever take a sick day.
Against this ideal stand the unwanted lives of people with disabilities and chronic illnesses. Intellectual disability was among eugenics’ biggest bugbears, but a range of other conditions recur as targets to be eradicated. In a way, this is unsurprising. Disability really does mean disadvantage. That is something I know in my bones – and my muscles. Disability, as the scholar Tom Shakespeare has written, is a predicament. It means limitation and restriction; it can mean pain and suffering. There are simple reasons why I longed so deeply for a cure. The reasons why and how that longing began to fade are more complex.
As it turned out, medical genetics really did produce an effective treatment for spinal muscular atrophy. About a decade ago, a drug called nusinersen was being developed. Some studies suggest that if it is administered early enough, it can wholly counteract the symptoms of the condition, while arresting its progression in adults. But medical genetics also proved that I didn’t have SMA after all. The original diagnosis was made on the basis of muscle biopsies and clinical guesswork. When a test for the genetic markers for SMA became available, mine came back negative. Instead, I was shown to have an even rarer condition – rarer, and less likely to attract research funding. I am tempted to quote Franz Kafka, who once remarked that there is infinite hope in the universe, only not for us.
But, in truth, that isn’t quite apt. Losing both the original diagnosis and the possibility of a treatment felt like a wave of sorrow, tinged with relief. Strange as it may seem, it also gave me a greater sense of freedom, that my life was really my own.
Don’t get me wrong. If there was an actual cure for my condition, I would take it. But there won’t be one, at least not for me. Too much time has passed; too much of my life is behind me. It is my life as it unfolded, and I try my best not to compare it to lives I didn’t live.
It is easier to think this way in your forties than in your teens. In the company of my non-disabled friends, I see plenty of injuries, illnesses and vaguely defined aches. We all have the markings of life. It’s not exactly that my disability ceases to matter as I grow older. In one way, it’s quite the opposite, as I feel the physical impact of the world on my muscles and joints. But I do feel a sense of convergence with my kith and my kin about the tenuousness and frailty of it all, about the need to take care of each other, as we hurtle towards what is coming.
Call it a kind of realism. Those of us who have kids know another side of it. If you plan to have a particular kind of child, you are setting yourself up for failure. Every parent I know has had to abandon their notions of what they thought their children would be for the reality of their particular children. I don’t think any one of them subscribed to the idea of an ideal baby. I hope they didn’t. Such an ideal is a terrible thing for parents as well as children to live up to.
This is the most corrosive effect of liberal neo-eugenics: in positing that an individual ideal of embodiment is something that can be specified, quantified and realized, it creates a framework for torturing both our children and ourselves. Why are we not this perfect thing? Why are we not fitter, happier, more productive? I’m not particularly sentimental about the value of disability in any particular case, but I think it is crucial to acknowledge disability as part of human variation. In treating ever more traits and qualities as things to be measured, ranked and diagnosed, we are doing the opposite – turning variation itself into something like disability.
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For me, hope comes from working to change the world so that it accommodates imperfection. One of the reasons I dislike liberal eugenics is that its individualist ethos runs counter to political measures that have mattered immensely in my lifetime. I believe we should direct our efforts toward making better societies rather than making better people.
During the postwar era, in parallel with the eugenic shift from the population level to the individual level, disability began to become a socio-political issue rather than a medical one. What the sociologist Mike Oliver once called the “personal tragedy theory” of disability was challenged by a social model that explained how people with a range of different impairments and illnesses were made disabled by societal structures.
Essentially, what constitutes “disability” varies with place and time. Although dyslexia can be hugely disadvantageous in the modern world, in a non-literate society it amounts only to neurological difference. The kind of mobility impairment that I have – that is, being unable to walk for more than a few steps, or get up from the floor – is restricting under any circumstances. But it is orders of magnitude more disabling in a society without wheelchairs, or wheelchair accessibility. In between these extremes, there are conditions, illnesses and impairments that amount to disability in some contexts but not in others.
The goal is not to abolish cures, but to abolish the idea that only cures, or the prenatal optimization of an embryo, can make for a life worth living. For the disability movement, the aim has always been to make a better world for everyone: a world where people with all kinds of bodies can thrive and flourish. That includes both people who were born disabled and people who had disability thrust upon them. It is a project that accounts for human variation, and the variability of life.
That is why it stands opposed to the neo-eugenic notion that there is a “best baby”; the best, in the singular, is not something the human species should be striving towards at all. It also bears remembering that the majority of disabilities do not stem from wholly genetic causes, but from an interaction of human genetic variation with the wear and tear of the world. There are good reasons to research cures, treatments and interventions whenever possible; there are equally good reasons to temper our expectations for how the human species may be perfected.
Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, a scholar of disability and bioethics, has put forward the “case for conserving disability”. It is a provocative case, for the obvious reason that disability, and chronic illness, are qualities which entail vulnerability and dependence on others. But, then again, so does the human condition. We are born helpless, and we age into helplessness. Even if we come into the world equipped for perfect health, we are always at risk of illness and injury. Neo-eugenics offers a vision of total independence, of a disconnect from society. Measured against such an ideal, all of us fall short. However strong and self-reliant we may think ourselves to be, we are a social species, with few prospects of surviving, let alone thriving, on our own.
The aim of control, and so of predictability, is intrinsic to eugenics’ notion of the ideal society. But who wants to live in a fully controlled, fully predictable world? A world where an external entity tells you how to live your life down to the last detail, what to eat, when and where to move, what to watch, all in the name of becoming your best possible self? Oh, right.
Against this vision of total algorithmic control, we must appeal to the unpredictability of the human condition. Shortly after the second world war, Hannah Arendt wrote her magnum opus The Origins of Totalitarianism, in which she traced the construction of “superfluous people” – whole swathes of the population made disenfranchised and killable by states that saw them as useless at best and dangerous at worst. Eugenics was central to this idea of superfluousness: of people who were incidental to the future of the species, or the nation, or the race.
Arendt described totalitarianism as, among other things, a vision for the absolute closure of the future, against all alternatives. In a subsequent book, titled The Human Condition, she laid out the alternative principle, by which human societies could grow and develop. That principle was plurality – the encounter with difference. Only this encounter provided the possibility for what Arendt saw as humanity’s highest calling – namely action: something with unforeseeable consequences and unpredictable results.
With her notion of plurality, Arendt was not referring to disability as such. But the concept can be extended to human embodiment. As humans, we are very much alike, but we are not the same. We may share the same bodily needs that must be met if we are to flourish, but our varying capabilities, talents and preferences mean that flourishing may look very different from one case to the next. Against the narrow-minded eugenic idea of “the best baby”, we can perhaps set another concept of Arendt’s: what she called natality. With each birth, with each new person, something wholly unique comes into being. And the world is made anew.
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CHILDFREE MIDLIFE MILLENNIALS
Childfree millennials have fewer obligations to contend with as they contemplate their second acts.
Midlife is the last biological off-ramp from a childfree path, the last opportunity to change your mind.
~ Leading up to my 40th birthday, I didn’t anticipate a midlife crisis. I was fresh off the heels of one existential roundabout, the "to be or not to be" parenthood dilemma. Didn’t I get a pass? An exemption? Credit for time served? Hadn’t I individuated and self-actualized enough?
Apparently not.
One crisis doesn't preclude you from another.
My midlife crisis came about nine months after the big 4-0, as if it had to gestate like a baby. Seemingly out of nowhere, I was grappling with the realities of aging (my back hurts when I sneeze and I have high cholesterol?!). Not to mention the pesky problem of my mortality—life was likely half over (at best!). Just because I didn’t have a kid didn’t mean I was exempt from tangoing with these realities.
In pop culture and media, the midlife narrative usually focuses on parents. Their kids no longer need, want, or like having them around. They no longer recognize their romantic partner turned co-parent. They have newfound time and energy to feel and process emotions after years on autopilot. And the prognosis is usually not positive. They are stuck in a career rut in an unfulfilling corporate role, disenfranchised with the suburban life and nuclear family they were told would provide meaning. That’s the midlife crisis we know by heart.
Millennials are the first generation to opt out of parenthood in large numbers, thanks to factors good and bad (good: increased awareness and agency; bad: cost of living and the likelihood of climate catastrophe). Without children and the traditional life path, what shape does our midlife malaise take?
How the childfree midlife crisis is similar... And different
In many ways, it can be similar. We grapple with deteriorating health and aging (ours and that of our loved ones). We have careers that pale in comparison to what we thought we’d accomplish. We are driven to do an inventory of our lives and decide how to enhance the ROI of what’s left. That brings me to a major benefit of the childfree midlife crisis. We have fewer obligations and more flexibility to make big moves, write our own scripts, and take risks to jump-start our second act.
But it ain’t all sunshine. Many childfree middle-aged women return to the question they had put to bed, only to find it reawakening like a teething baby. Am I sure I don’t want kids?
Middle age is the last biological off-ramp from the childfree path. Your reproductive window only remains open a crack, and it’s now or never if you want to change your mind a final time—as everyone has been telling you you’d do since you revealed your childfree choice.
At midlife, we see female celebrities make the leap into motherhood after years of deferring and demurring. Hilary Swank just announced she’s pregnant with her third child—at 52. My grandmother was younger than that when I was born. Of course, celebrities have a lot more options than we mere mortals (access to the latest medical interventions, surrogates, and full-time nannies once the babies are born). But as humans, it’s hard not to compare yourself to those held up to us as the ideal. Aubrey Plaza, Cameron Diaz, and Eva Mendes are all recent examples of famous women we thought—or at least hoped—were childfree who had a child (or children) later in life.
And it’s not that we aren’t happy for them to follow the path that’s best for them, but it can feel like we’ve lost them to the other side.
You'll change your mind
It also reinforces the "You’ll change your mind" narrative that has always sounded vaguely threatening to me. When people say you’ll change your mind to brush off your carefully considered decision, it can feel like you’re childish, immature, and just haven’t seen the light yet. It also doesn’t take into account that you may have already changed your mind. I certainly did—a dozen or more times. I flip-flopped and fence-sat through my 20s and 30s and even wrote a book about it.
I always assumed that I would have kids one day, and it was only through disentangling myself from societal and cultural messaging and unlearning a lot of beliefs that I was able to say with confidence and conviction that I do not want to have children. Changing your mind can be a gift if it’s measured and considered and not a panic-fueled split-second decision. Staying true to your carefully considered and hard-won path can also be a gift.
My doctor laughed when I recently expressed disappointment that my blood work showed I am not yet in perimenopause or menopause. I know that change will bring about its own challenges, but I’m so excited for that reproductive window to finally close. The latch will be secured, a padlock attached, and maybe some boards will be nailed over the frame for good measure. Then—at last—I can smile smugly at the folks who told me I’d change my mind.
Conclusions
Like everything else, the midlife crisis hits a little different when you don’t have kids, but it still exists. Who knows how many healthy years you have left. If there are any big moves or bold steps you want to take, this is the moment. And you can do so without jeopardizing the well-being of your (nonexistent) kids.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-middle-aged-millennial/202610/childfree-midlife-millennials
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ARE WE ON THE BRINK OF WORLD WAR THREE?
Are we on the brink of a new world war? This bleak subject is increasingly invoked by leaders, soldiers and officials, from Donald Trump to Vladimir Putin to the heads of our military and intelligence services. It’s an urgent theme, then, for the FT foreign affairs columnist Gideon Rachman to explore in his latest survey of global diplomacy. Rachman draws his title from the expression, sometimes attributed to Trotsky: “You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you” – the idea being that conflict doesn’t much care whether we like to think about it or not: it will come knocking on our doors regardless.
Trotsky
Clearly, humanity is in a particularly unsafe spot right now, but seeing our security issues laid out like this, catalogued and mapped and analyzed, they seem almost overwhelming. To summarize: the most powerful, nuclear-armed states – the US, China and Russia – are led by unscrupulous, self-dealing “strongmen”, each of whom is playing with the nationalist “Great Again” politics epitomized by Trump. Democracy is being rolled back around the world, and even bastions of liberalism such as the UK, France and Germany seem vulnerable to takeover by the Putin-friendly far right. The so-called rules-based international order and its institutions – the UN, the WTO, Nato – are being deliberately undermined by the aforementioned strongmen, and are as weak now as they have ever been.
Putin has described the new world order with the term “might makes right”, and the result is that conflicts have been breaking out at a rate unprecedented in the postwar era. According to Rachman, there were 61 in 2024 alone, and 11 full-blown wars. This included Gaza as well as some conflicts far less visible in the west, such as the one in Sudan, which by mid-2025 had led to 150,000 battlefield deaths. In 2026 many “state-based conflicts” are ongoing, including the largest land war in Europe since 1945 (in Ukraine) and the most disruptive in the Middle East for more than 20 years (Iran). Although these are mostly confined to their regions, they have begun to overlap and spread, as Russia deploys North Korean troops and tests Nato’s resolve, Iran throttles global shipping, and Ukraine advises Gulf states on drone use. And even as these grind on, others threaten to explode, including between India and Pakistan, North and South Korea, and China and Taiwan.
Of these potential flashpoints, it is Taiwan that may offer the fastest route to a world war, since it could bring China and the US into direct conflict. For decades, Taiwan’s security was guaranteed by US naval superiority; now Beijing, after a massive military buildup, has more warships than Washington. It’s said that the single Chinese shipyard on Changxing Island has more capacity than all US yards combined. Still, Xi Jinping knows that if the US comes to Taiwan’s aid, the result would be a bloodbath, which is why US presidents have mostly been keen to emphasize the US’s commitment to Taiwan. But Trump has been far more ambivalent – declaring in May this year, for instance, that “I think the last thing we need right now is a war that’s 9,500 miles away” – which only increases the risk of China attempting an assault.
It’s here, in the shifting power balance between China and the US, that the root of the new global insecurity lies. Whatever you think of American hegemony, the US maintained a sort of stability, after the cold war, in which victims could plausibly appeal to international law. The 2003 invasion of Iraq destroyed that system, and US failure there and in Afghanistan persuaded future presidents against intervention.
Three times, between 2012 and 2015, Obama chose not to step in to address illegal acts by the Assad regime, Russia and China, which signaled an American retrenchment. The Trump administration has taken this further, reverting to the kind of isolationist, tariff-based protectionism that postwar institutions such as the UN security council and WTO were built to avoid. It’s hard not to spot echoes here of the 1930s – the time, incidentally, when the slogan “America first” was popularized.
How to offset these risks? Rachman surveys a handful of mechanisms that have helped maintain the peace, and finds them wanting. The rules-based international order, for instance, barely functioned in its heyday; now, as Mark Carney put it plainly, it “no longer works”: we are living through a “rupture”. What about spreading democracy and economic stability as a path to peace – a principle exemplified by the “Golden Arches” theory, which states that no two nations with McDonald’s will wage war on each other? There’s no comfort here either, as that was proved wrong in the 1990s, and the number of democracies has been declining steadily since 2006. Then there’s deterrence, which still by and large keeps us safe. But it hasn’t stopped fighting between nuclear-armed India and Pakistan, and China and North Korea are rapidly expanding their atomic arsenals.
What we’re left with, then, as American primacy declines, is a global version of Trump’s “Donroe doctrine”, in which each major power gets a “sphere of influence” where they call the shots. In this scenario, Washington rules over the Americas, Beijing over east Asia, and Moscow the old Soviet zone. Clashes are sorted out by one-to-one conversations between authoritarian leaders. But what if these rulers fall out? And anyway, who wants to live in the shadow of an overbearing neighbor?
While the outlook of War Is Interested in You is undoubtedly gloomy, Rachman’s book is not. His writing is engaging and anecdotal, and he brings vast experience to bear on a vital subject. He won’t go so far as to say a new world war is inevitable, but the threat is becoming impossible to ignore.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2026/oct/26/war-is-interested-in-you-by-gideon-rachman-review-how-close-is-world-war-three
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THE SURVIVAL OF AMERICAN DEMOCRACY DEPENDS ON TAXING THE BILLIONAIRES (THE GUARDIAN)
It is essential not just to fund the public goods the nation needs, it is indispensable to restore a sense of fairness
Money doesn’t buy happiness, we’re told. Even some economists agree. The Nobel prize-winning economists Daniel Kahneman and Angus Deaton once proposed that rising income increased people’s emotional wellbeing only up to a ceiling of about $115,000 in today’s money.
They probably hadn’t met many billionaires. The ultra-rich may not pursue happiness in the joyful sense of the word. But they will try every trick in the book to hang on to their stash and woe betide the tax authority that tries to lay a finger on their treasure.
And this poses one of the most intractable challenges not only to the solvency of the American state, but to the survival of American democracy.
From the technological Olympus of Silicon Valley to the urban canyons of Wall Street, a narrow club of vastly wealthy plutocrats sits on a ballooning share of the nation’s resources. One per cent of Americans at the apex of the economy are hoarding over 31% of the nation’s total wealth, a cool $55tn in net worth.
Getting them to share with the rest of society, to fund redistribution or pay for public goods, is proving pretty much impossible. Their ability to move resources around, hide profit across jurisdictions, and minimize income to hoard wealth until they die appears to put them beyond the reach of taxation.
One recent research paper found that the country’s richest 384 oligarchs paid only 24% of their economic income in 2025, compared with 30% for the average taxpayer. And not all of them are getting top-notch tax advice. Reporting by ProPublica revealed that some of the richest Americans – like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffett and Michael Bloomberg – live largely tax free.
California is experimenting with a budgetary Hail Mary pass: In November, Californians will be called to vote on Proposition 40, a one-time 5% tax on the wealth of billionaires residing in the state on 1 January of this year. If the plutocracy’s income is off limits, the thinking goes, best to target its gargantuan assets.
California’s gambit is “the first-ever tax on billionaire wealth enacted anywhere in the world” – according to an open letter endorsing the move by six Nobel prize-winning economists on the left side of the political spectrum. “It will kickstart a movement to tax ultra-high-net-worth individuals in other states – and eventually at the federal level and in other countries,” they raved. The vote “may well come to be seen as a turning point in the battle between democracy and oligarchy”.
Moreover, Prop 40 could raise real money. As of early October, 260 billionaires lived in the state, according to the Forbes billionaires’ list, amassing nearly $2.5tn in wealth. Based on these numbers, the 5% tax would raise some $110bn, much of which would go to replace Medicaid funding nixed in Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act last year.
Still, the move is proving controversial even among left-leaning economists and politicians. Governor Gavin Newsom, who is virtually certain to run for the Democratic nomination ahead of the 2028 presidential election, is opposed. So is Xavier Becerra, the Democrat running to succeed him as governor. They fear that such a move will spark a flight of the oligarchs to lower-tax jurisdictions.
The Nobelists note that the California’s proposed billionaire tax was sneaked in to prevent billionaires from fleeing to avoid it: “Some affected taxpayers may have tried to leave between the time they learned about the proposed ballot initiative – in late November 2025 – and January 1st of 2026,” they wrote. “But the window was so short that it is unlikely any significant number of billionaires successfully cut ties with the Golden State in such a short period of time.”
In fact, between January and October the number of billionaires living in California grew by 20. Elon Musk may believe that welfare recipients are the “parasite class” and empathy is “the fundamental weakness of western civilization”. But perhaps California’s billionaires feel enough empathy for less fortunate humans to part with a paltry $110bn, especially since their wealth has grown by a cool $400bn so far this year.
Not all billionaires move to avoid taxes. Trump’s 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which capped the state and local tax deduction, was expected to prompt the rich to flee high-tax blue states in droves, as they could no longer deduct their state and local tax payments on their federal tax returns. But a study by a Cornell sociologist and an economist at the treasury department found almost no impact on the migration rates of the affluent, at least in the first year following the change.
Indeed, the rich in New York City are hit by a top city income tax rate of 3.9% on top of a 10.9% state tax, compared with zero in Miami. Still, there are 154 billionaires in New York state, according to a report by Oxfam. Nine of the 10 richest live in the city. The only state with more billionaires than New York is, wait, high-tax California.
Still, Newsom and Becerra have a point. California’s richest billionaires have gone feral over Prop 40. Google’s Sergey Brin has helped coordinate about $200m to oppose it and promote two countervailing propositions, 41 and 42 that, if passed, would emasculate the tax. One would bar retroactive taxes – putting wealth accumulated in the past off limits – and forbid new taxes on financial assets or other personal property.
The opposition is gaining traction. A poll in September found that Prop 40 falls just short of majority approval. Just in case, the fast money has tried to flee the state, to make it out before deadline. In the run-up to Christmas of 2025 Brin and the Google co-founder Larry Page moved many of their business interests out of California. They also bought homes out of state. Travis Kalanick, former CEO of Uber, followed Musk to Texas. Paypal and Palantir mogul Peter Thiel moved his residence to Miami last year.
While some of the more optimistic analyses assume that avoidance tactics by California billionaires will reduce the taxable pot of wealth by only about 10%, others are less sanguine. Even if it passes, the tax will be taken to court, including on grounds that retroactive taxation violates due process, and may not survive litigation. Some assets – real estate, notably – will not be taxed. Foreign billionaires may wiggle out under double taxation treaties. And more billionaires will leave, assuming that though it was billed as a one-time affair, the new tax will become permanent. This will hit future income tax revenues.
Altogether, economists from Stanford University concluded that the new tax would raise only around $30bn, while the flow of lost income tax revenue would cost state coffers nearly $39bn, in net present value. The estimate fits with results from studies of attempts to avoid wealth taxes in Swiss cantons. It also checks with behavioral responses of the rich to other forms of taxation. For instance, Enrico Moretti, an economist at the University of California Berkeley, and Daniel Wilson of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, found the location of the very rich is highly sensitive to estate taxes.
These should be the most American taxes of them all, a good fit for a democratic nation that conceives itself as a meritocracy; a tool to prevent the emergence of a hereditary aristocracy passing economic and political power down the generations. Still, the rich don’t much care for them.
In 2001, George W Bush did what Republican presidents do: he cut taxes. But his Economic Growth Tax Relief and Reconciliation Act included an annoying twist: it eliminated the credit offered by the federal government to offset the estate tax burden imposed by states on the ultra-wealthy. All of a sudden, billionaires’ estate tax liability became dependent on which state they lived in. Dying as a resident of New York, Pennsylvania and Connecticut, which had estate taxes, abruptly become way more costly than dying in a state with none, like Texas, Florida … or California.
By 2010, over a fifth of billionaires in the Forbes 400 list who originally lived in a state that levied an estate tax state had moved to a non-estate tax state, while only about 1% had made a move in the opposite direction. Moretti and Wilson estimated that by 2017 states with estate taxes had lost 23 of 72 Forbes 400 billionaires who lived there in 2001. Altogether, Forbes 400 wealth subject to state estate taxes fell from some $203bn in 2001 to about $122bn 16 years later.
States with estate taxes didn’t just lose the income tax revenue of their departing billionaires. Extra losses not considered in Moretti and Wilson’s analysis include the effect of plutocrats relocating their businesses. Moreover, estate taxes could well deter other billionaires from moving into the state, or encourage those who remained to try more aggressive tax avoidance strategies than usual.
In light of the difficulties in taxing billionaires and even the lesser rich, there is an argument out there that a less progressive, flatter tax structure could do better at raising money. European countries fund a large share of their generous welfare programs with value added taxes on consumption, which are more difficult to avoid but place a heavier burden on lower-income people who consume a larger share of their paychecks.
And yet the idea of letting plutocracy off the hook seems unacceptable. Brin has said Prop 40 reminds him of the Soviet Union, which he fled with his parents in 1979. Apparently he prefers a social arrangement more like the one that prevailed in the Tsarist Russia in which a narrow few amass vast riches unencumbered by a responsibility to contribute to societal wellbeing. That’s the America we all live in now.
If American democracy is to survive this moment, it must figure out a way for billionaires to contribute more. It is essential not just to fund the public goods the nation needs to function. It’s indispensable to restore a sense of fairness to the American experiment. Democracy cannot endure without it.
Let’s see what happens next month in California. But the hard truth for blue states eager to raise more revenue to fund the social safety net and pay for public goods is that they are not up to the task, given competition with Republican-run states where taxes are anathema. As Moretti points out, the tax gap between red states and blue states has become enormous. California’s top marginal rate is 13.5%. Florida’s is zero. The temptation for the next Tsarist plutocrat to move from the first to the second is not insignificant.
Indeed, Moretti and Wilson have another research paper that looks at what top scientists and engineers do when states raise income taxes. “People do leave,” Moretti told me. “These are not billionaires, but only highly paid workers.”
The good news is that while there are many ways in which California’s attempt at taking a nibble out of billionaires’ wealth may fail, it is not technically impossible to tax the oligarchy. There are various options available. Federal estate tax rules could be cleansed of the myriad loopholes that allow dynastic wealth to accumulate, such as those allowing unrealized capital gains to accrue forever tax free and bequeathed to heirs with the gains reset to zero. Taxes on capital income could be raised to restore fairness between taxation on capital and labor.
Economists Erick Zwick of the University of Chicago and Owen Zidar of Princeton propose that restoring the tax schedule to where it was in the Clinton administration 30 years ago would raise $5tn over a decade and do wonders for America’s public finances. The main challenge to that is political: it requires an overhaul of a political equilibrium that over the last 50 years has largely revolved around cutting taxes.
But restoring fairness and efficacy to the American state is in the end not a task for the states. Altogether, the government collects almost 3% of GDP less in taxes than it did at the turn of the century. Over 2% of that decline was about federal revenues. The average central government in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development today raises twice as much in taxes, as a share of GDP, as the US federal government.
Fixing this is, of course, a political problem, one that will remain intractable as long as half of the political spectrum believes its only job on this Earth is to cut taxes. But it would be helpful for the fleet-footed billionaires to give some thought to the social contract in which they want to live; whether they are interested in broad-based prosperity or, rather, they are happy to slink into their castle, raise the drawbridge, and hope societal upheaval does not interrupt dinner.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/oct/27/democracy-tax-billionaires
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AMERICAN SUPERMARKETS A SHOCK TO SOVIET CITIZENS
When Soviet citizens first saw Western supermarkets, the abundance was so shocking they often assumed the stores were fake. One defector even found U.S. cat food tastier than Soviet human rations.
For decades, state media assured the public that while the USSR was building a utopian future, the Western working class was starving and exploited under capitalism. Discovering the truth systematically dismantled the ideological foundation of the state. The first major crack occurred in 1959, when the United States hosted the American National Exhibition in Moscow’s Sokolniki Park.
Instead of showcasing military technology, the U.S. brought consumer goods: color televisions, washing machines, Pepsi-Cola, and a model suburban kitchen. The contrast to Soviet reality was so severe that Premier Nikita Khrushchev famously argued with Vice President Richard Nixon over the exhibit, insisting the kitchen was a propagandistic fake and that ordinary Americans did not live in such luxury. Many ordinary Soviet citizens who attended the exhibition left with the exact opposite impression, taking home a glimpse of Western abundance that directly contradicted state narratives.
As more Soviets encountered Western life firsthand, the shock deepened into disbelief. When pilot Viktor Belenko defected to the United States with a top-secret MiG-25 fighter jet in 1976, his CIA handlers took him to a standard American grocery store. Belenko was so stunned by the sheer volume of goods and the complete absence of lines that he initially assumed the store was a CIA front staged specifically to trick him. As he explored the aisles, he unknowingly bought the aforementioned cat food—assuming it was a meat paste for humans—and famously noted its superior quality.
The ultimate breaking point came from the very top of the Soviet hierarchy. In 1989, Boris Yeltsin—then a newly elected member of the Soviet parliament—made an unscheduled stop at a Randall's grocery store in Clear Lake, Texas. Even with his elite status and access to the best goods the Soviet Union had to offer, Yeltsin was overwhelmed by the tens of thousands of items available to ordinary Americans. He reportedly told his aides that if the Soviet public saw the inside of an American supermarket, there would be a revolution.
The realization that the West wasn't just richer, but fundamentally better at providing for everyday citizens, shattered the core promise of the Soviet state. When the USSR finally collapsed, it wasn't just because of political failure, but because the average citizen had realized the "exploited" Western proletariat lived better than the Soviet elite.
~ Sepia Glyphs, Quora
Oriana:
I like best the story of how one member of the Soviet delegation, a particularly dedicated Communist, broke down and started crying after she entered an American supermarket.
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THE DISCOVERY OF VILCABAMBA, THE FABLED “LOST CITY”
In 1911, a US professor claimed he had discovered the ancient mountain stronghold of the last Incan king deep in the Peruvian Andes. Yet 53 years later, another explorer proved he was mistaken – and shortly afterwards, a BBC crew followed his trail.
"No one now disputes that this was the site of ancient Vilcabamba." So wrote the Yale academic who brought the Peruvian ruins of Machu Picchu to global attention in 1911. Hiram Bingham III was recruited by locals to look for a lost Incan city fabled for its hidden treasures – and he firmly believed that's what he had found.
Yet 50 years later, Bingham's conviction was challenged by another US explorer nicknamed "the real Indiana Jones". In August 1964, Gene Savoy claimed to have found the same lost city – around 60km (37 miles) northwest of Machu Picchu. He believed his expedition had identified the mountain stronghold of the last Inca king at Espíritu Pampa (the "Plain of the Spirits" or Vilcabamba), a set of ruins in remote cloud forests, high above a tributary of the Amazon.
Just six weeks after Savoy's discovery, a BBC crew followed in his footsteps, traveling by rubber dinghy (and capsizing) on rapids, ascending steep canyon slopes with mules, and hacking through jungle to the site. "Scraps of information they'd picked up on the way made them doubt some of Savoy's claims," revealed the presenter. "But, having come so far, they had to get on and see for themselves."
The stakes were high. Perhaps they would find "the heart of an unknown city, where it seems likely the last Inca emperor gathered the remnants of his people".
By the early 20th Century, Vilcabamba (meaning "sacred plain" in Quechua, an ancient Indigenous language) had become a fabled city, as much rooted in legend as history. After failing to prevent the Spanish conquistadors seizing his capital of Cusco in 1536, the Incan king Manco led his vanquished people into the mountains beyond.
There, it was said, a few thousand of them built palaces and temples in Manco's capital in exile, where he had taken his golden treasures, his glittering idols, and the mummies of his ancestors.
According to the 16th-Century friar Martín de Murúa, who chronicled the Spanish conquest of Peru, "The Incas enjoyed scarcely less of the luxuries, greatness and splendor of Cusco in that distant or rather exiled land”.
Beyond a place of exile, Vilcabama was also a center for Incan resistance, where they planned guerilla warfare against the Spanish and sparked rebellions further afield. Yet in 1572, facing an invasion, the Incas set the city ablaze and fled.
The last Inca capital was swallowed up by the jungle – and its location remained a mystery for centuries.
In search of the fabled lost city
Bingham had been recruited by Peruvian landowners in 1909, to find out whether a place known as Choquequirao ("cradle of gold") was the fabled lost city. The 34-year-old, who later went on to become a US senator, was an assistant professor in Latin American history who happened to be traveling in the area. He was not an archaeologist, nor was he looking for Inca ruins.
But a local government official, Juan José Núñez, the prefect of Apurímac, refused to take no for an answer.
"Núñez insisted that as I was a doctor, a PhD, I must know all about archaeology and could tell him how valuable Choquequirao was as a site for buried treasure," wrote Bingham. "My protest that he was mistaken in his estimate of my archaeological knowledge was regarded by him merely as evidence of modesty."
Bingham went on to reveal: "I knew very little about the Inca." He relied instead on a book published by the British Royal Geographical Society, called Hints to Travelers, which contained suggestions as to what to do when confronted by an archaeological site.
Hiram BinghamBingham, who was not an archaeologist, mistakenly claimed the ancient site of Machu Picchu as the fabled lost city
Skeptical that there was any gold at Choquequirao, or that it was the famed lost city, Bingham was nevertheless inspired by his trip to lead a Yale expedition in 1911 to find the last Inca refuge. "There seemed to be an unknown region behind the ranges, which might contain great possibilities. Perhaps Manco's capital was hidden there," he said.
In fact, guides had taken Bingham to the site identified by Savoy 50 years later, 150 km (93 miles) northeast of Cusco. But plagued by bad weather, running short of food, and with his porters threatening to desert, he swiftly moved on, before claiming to have found the lost city at Machu Picchu.
Another daring explorer takes on the expedition
In 1964, Savoy – a 37-year-old explorer from Portland, Oregon – reached the area near Espíritu Pampa, together with Peruvian explorer Antonio Santander Cascelli. Locals initially refused to guide them to the site, fearing a tribal legend that the gods would kill those who revealed its location. After much persuasion, the Peruvians led Savoy and Santander to the moss-covered ruins of Vilcabamba.
"We couldn't believe our eyes," said Savoy. "Each day, it became more fantastic."
Savoy and Santander found ruins spread across three mountain plateaus, which included a palace, granite and limestone buildings and fountains – the first plateau alone was roughly four times the size of Machu Picchu. Their exploration of the area led Savoy to believe that "the site was a refuge used by the last Incas caught up in the throes of a final struggle against the new conquerors”.
Yet after just a fortnight, their guides began to leave, fearful of the tribal superstitions. "Normally, they would be friendly and smiling," said Savoy. "But when we got them into those woods, they changed." They decided to leave and return later for further investigations.
Just six weeks after their expedition, a BBC crew made the same journey. "For 400 years few Europeans had been that way, let alone one with a movie camera," wrote Tony Morrison, the director of the film made for David Attenborough’s BBC Adventure series. "After a week of heavy walking and a long descent into dense, frequently rain-soaked montane-forest, we reached the ruins of the Inca settlement."
The jungle had protected the city for centuries, with those attempting to explore it having to hack at kapok trees, creepers, vines and ferns. According to one report, "Great trees had clamped their roots around the walls and over the terraces, and their branches were interlaced by vines as thick and strong as telephone cables."
"I hate the danged jungle," said Savoy – adding, however, "I would rather die out there than not explore."
Savoy and Santander's discovery did not prove that the ruins at Espíritu Pampa were the last Inca capital. But something that they found there was to lead to confirmation that it was Vilcabamba – roof tiles.
"These tiles are so far the strongest tangible evidence," said the BBC presenter in 1964. "They're Spanish in design but bear distinctive Inca influence in the coloring and markings."
And their significance was later recognized by John Hemming, director of the Royal Geographic Society in London from 1975 to 1996 and, Inca expert. He was able to match eyewitness accounts of Vilcabamba – including chronicles by the friar Martín de Murúa – to details of the site.
The discovery of the tiles was unusual, since the Incas normally used thatch. Yet in Murúa's description of the Inca capital in exile, there was an important clue: "The Incas had a palace on different levels, covered in roof tiles.”
Savoy later said: "The city has been rumored to exist for so long that it had almost passed from history to myth. Now we have turned it back to history." So it seems that in 1911, Bingham had walked within a few feet of the place he had been seeking – the final refuge of the Inca empire.
For Savoy, however, a mystery remained. "Only a small part of the Inca gold and jewels were ever recovered," he told Esquire in 1967, "and I have reason to believe that [they] threw the rest of it into lakes and caves rather than have it fall into the hands of the Spaniards. On previous expeditions I found lakes that weren't on any maps, and uncharted walled-up tunnels."
The discovery of what seems to have been the last Inca city – even now, mostly buried in jungle, its stonework strangled by vines and tree roots guarding its doorways – has raised more questions than answers.
"The area is fascinating because it still hasn't been disturbed or looted," Javier Fonseca, an archaeologist with Peru's ministry of culture, told The Guardian in 2018. There have even been reports of another city, deeper in the forest.
"We know that the so-called 'lost Inca treasure' has not been found," said Savoy in 1967. "If this treasure exists… then we may speculate as to its whereabouts."
https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20260814-how-a-real-indiana-jones-claimed-he-had-found-the-ancient-lost-city-of-the-incas
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HOW SOCIETY CHANGED AFTER THE FALL OF ROME
The fall of the Roman Empire wasn't a sudden apocalypse. Instead, society quietly unspooled until the bustling political center of the known world became a literal cow pasture.
When the western half of the empire collapsed in the fifth century, the complex infrastructure that held it together—taxation, standing armies, and Mediterranean-wide trade networks—disintegrated with it.
The most immediate change was deurbanization. Cities like Rome, which once boasted a population of over a million, shrank to tens of thousands as people fled to the countryside. Without the empire’s grain ships arriving from Egypt and North Africa, large urban populations could not be sustained. The economy shifted from a cash-based system of specialized trade to localized barter and subsistence farming.
In the countryside, a new social hierarchy began to emerge. Without a central Roman army, rural populations sought protection from local strongmen and landowners. These warlords, often descended from the Germanic tribes that had conquered Roman territory, built fortified estates. In exchange for safety, peasants bound themselves to the land and their lord, laying the economic and social foundation for the feudal system that would dominate the Middle Ages.
The Germanic successor states—such as the Franks, Visigoths, and Ostrogoths—did not want to destroy Rome; they wanted to inherit it. They adopted Christianity, minted their own coins, and blended their tribal laws with Roman administration. In the power vacuum left by the emperor, the Catholic Church became the most stable civic institution in Western Europe.
Bishops stepped in as local administrators, and monasteries emerged as isolated centers of agricultural innovation and literacy, preserving what remained of classical knowledge.
Because the massive tax base and slave labor networks of the Roman Empire disappeared, the ability to build on a monumental scale vanished. The Colosseum, massive aqueducts, and sprawling bathhouses gave way to localized building projects. The successor kingdoms built smaller stone structures, sometimes by dismantling abandoned Roman civic buildings to reuse the masonry.
The Church of San Juan de Baños, built by the Visigoths in Spain in 661, reflects the shift away from monumental Roman engineering toward smaller, localized Christian architecture.
This loss of centralized resources affected more than just architecture. Papyrus imports from Egypt became increasingly rare, forcing European scholars to rely on expensive, locally produced animal-skin parchment. To record new Christian theology or legal codes, monks routinely took ancient Roman manuscripts, scraped off the ink of classical works by authors like Cicero or Archimedes, and wrote directly over them—a physical erasure of the old world to make room for the new.
~ SepiaGlyphs, Quora
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HOW THE SUEZ CANAL CRISIS CHANGED THE WORLD
The military attempt to reverse Egypt’s nationalization of the Suez Canal in 1956 was a disaster for Britain. What were the consequences?
Withdrawal of Israeli troops during the Suez Crisis, 14 December 1956.
‘It exposed the extent of the decline of Britain’s influence’
The Suez Crisis is widely regarded as a pivotal turning point in Britain’s postwar history.
Writing in 1963, the historian Elizabeth Monroe famously described it as the end of Britain’s ‘moment in the Middle East’, arguing that four decades of imperial predominance effectively concluded with Anthony Eden’s failed attempt to regain control of the Suez Canal.
Although Britain’s influence had been declining before 1956, the events in Egypt exposed the extent of that decline to British MPs who had been reluctant to acknowledge changing geopolitical realities. Most significantly, Suez demonstrated that Britain could no longer undertake major military interventions unilaterally.
President Dwight D. Eisenhower, frustrated by the lack of prior consultation and angered by the operation’s timing during his re-election campaign, exerted considerable pressure on the British government to halt the intervention. An internal Foreign Office assessment subsequently concluded that Britain could ‘never again resort to military action, outside British territories, without at least American acquiescence’.
Suez also revealed the fragility of Britain’s postwar economic position. Military action triggered pressure on the pound and compelled the government to seek support from the International Monetary Fund. Eisenhower encouraged the IMF to withhold support until Britain agreed to a ceasefire. Eden later reflected that ‘we must review our world position and our domestic capacity more searchingly in the light of the Suez experience, which has not so much changed our fortunes but revealed our realities’.
During the following decade these strategic and economic constraints, combined with the rise of Arab nationalism, prompted a reassessment of Britain’s role east of Suez. By 1967 the government had announced plans to withdraw from the region, a process that culminated in the independence of Bahrain and Qatar and the formation of the United Arab Emirates, accompanied by an expanding American presence in the region. From a British perspective, therefore, the Suez Crisis changed the world by accelerating its transition from imperial power to junior partner of the United States in the Middle East. The consequences of this shift continue to be felt today.
‘There was no grand American plan to take control of the Middle East’
When Israel, in collusion with Britain and France, moved to attack Nasser’s Egypt in October 1956, the response of the United States was decisive. The Eisenhower administration led the diplomatic charge at the United Nations to force a ceasefire on its closest allies. At the same time, the US refusal to bail out Britain when the pound came under speculative attack on the foreign exchanges generated financial pressure which ultimately proved vital in persuading Eden’s government to halt military action. Britain’s moment in the Middle East appeared to be over, with time called by its closest ally in Washington.
The promulgation of the Eisenhower Doctrine in January 1957 – which proclaimed the United States’ readiness to come to the aid of any nation in the Middle East threatened by another controlled by the forces of international communism – seemed to put the seal on a new era of American hegemony in the region. But appearances can be deceptive. There was no grand American plan to take control of the Middle East. Circumstances, in the shape of Eisenhower’s re-election campaign, the Soviet invasion of Hungary, and the underhand Anglo-French-Israeli collusion plan – which involved Britain and France pretending to have no foreknowledge of the Israeli attack and intervening as ‘peacekeepers’ – dictated the US response to the Suez Crisis.
The Eisenhower Doctrine proved to be a damp squib. When the administration decided to respond to an appeal for help from the Lebanese president Camille Chamoun in July 1958 – who feared for his overthrow following the 14 July Revolution in Iraq, which was itself precipitated by Suez – it concluded that the Doctrine was inapplicable. It intervened instead under the terms of the United Nations Charter. Moreover, the manner of intervention, with armed marines storming in over the main pleasure beaches of Beirut to be met not by armed insurgents, but watching bathers, showed that the US still had a lot to learn about the dynamics of the region.
The US did eventually emerge as the new hegemonic power in the Middle East. However, that shift was not an immediate result of Suez, but of a longer process of change culminating in the 1990-91 Gulf crisis which ushered in America’s own moment in the Middle East.
‘Arab nationalism appeared to be the force of the future’
It was transformative in many ways. It exposed the collapse of the old European imperial order, accelerated the rise of the United States and the Soviet Union as the dominant external superpowers in the Middle East, and, while it did not create Arab nationalism, it propelled it to the height of its influence.
Having been formally elected as Egyptian president on 23 June 1956, Gamal Abdel Nasser announced the nationalization of the Suez Canal – a potent symbol of Western domination since its construction in the mid 19th century – just over a month later on 26 July ‘on behalf of the Egyptian people’. ‘Operation Musketeer’ – the attempt to regain control of the waterway and overthrow Nasser – failed spectacularly. The Eisenhower administration, furious that its allies had acted behind its back and fearful that the invasion would give the Soviet Union a foothold in the Arab world, forced their withdrawal. The intervention thus accelerated the very geopolitical decline it had sought to arrest.
In the Arab world, however, Suez had an altogether different meaning. Nasser snatched a stunning political victory from the jaws of defeat. His defiance transformed him almost overnight into the symbolic leader of the Arab world. Suez showed that an Arab state could challenge the colonial powers and win.
Nasser skillfully harnessed this moment to the ideology of pan-Arab nationalism, presenting Arab unity, sovereignty, and independence as parts of the same historic struggle: ‘The whole Arab nation will stand by us in our common fight against aggression and domination.’ His prestige surged from newly independent Morocco to Iraq, unsettling conservative monarchies and inspiring nationalist movements. The United Arab Republic – a political union between Egypt and Syria – was declared in February 1958. The overthrow of Faisal II in Iraq that July was carried out by officers emboldened by Nasser’s success.
Until Egypt’s devastating defeat by Israel in the Six-Day War in June 1967, Nasser remained the most powerful symbol of revolutionary Arab politics. Suez was therefore a classic example of the law of unintended consequences: an attempt to destroy Nasser elevated him and, for a generation, made Arab nationalism appear to be the force of the future.
‘Europe was plunged into an energy panic’
The Suez Crisis was the world’s first oil supply shock: never before had a chokepoint critical to the oil trade been shut overnight. As soon as British and French planes began dropping bombs on 31 October Egyptian crews scuttled ships in the canal.
Europe was plunged into an energy panic.
Europe’s dependence on the canal had been established decades earlier. Oil climbed from 2 per cent of total Suez traffic in 1913 to nearly 25 per cent by 1938. During the First World War militaries became convinced of oil’s superiority over coal. In the 1920s this spread to the wider economy. By the late 1920s Europe had moved from being a net exporter of energy, mostly coal, to a net importer, due to its growing reliance on oil.
This process accelerated after the Second World War. Coal, which had supplied more than 90 per cent of Europe’s energy in 1939, was in critically short supply. Wartime destruction, overworked coalfields, and labor unrest meant coal could not sustain recovery. Oil was the solution and it became abundant just as coal was becoming scarce. Between 1944 and 1950 Saudi Arabia’s daily output exploded from 21,000 to more than 540,000 barrels. Oil was the single largest item on the Marshall Plan’s budget, accounting for between 10 and 12 per cent of its funds. By the mid-1950s Europe relied on the Middle East for 90 per cent of its oil. Half of that passed through the Suez Canal.
By November 1956 Europe was living with the dire consequences of the canal’s closure. Britain, France, and Denmark all imposed oil rationing; Belgium, the Netherlands, and Switzerland banned driving on Sundays. The US had the power to alleviate Europe’s predicament but was in no hurry to do so. Eisenhower was furious with London and Paris; only after they accepted his demand to withdraw from Egypt did the US begin an ‘oil lift’ from the Americas and the Caribbean. For Europe, the lesson was brutal: its energy future lay in American hands. The following attempt to diversify suppliers meant turning increasingly to the Soviet Union, a trend which led to the dangerous dependence on Russia that we see today.
As to the canal itself, almost five million barrels move through it daily. It remains incredibly profitable. This August alone, Egypt’s earnings reached $567 million. This explains why it was worth fighting for in 1956.
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SEAGRASS, OUR GREAT BENEFACTOR
Seagrasses are found in shallow salty and brackish waters in many parts of the world, from the tropics to the Arctic Circle. Seagrasses are so-named because most species have long green, grass-like leaves. They are often confused with seaweeds, but are actually more closely related to the flowering plants that you see on land. Seagrasses have roots, stems and leaves, and produce flowers and seeds. They evolved around 100 million years ago, and today there are approximately 72 different seagrass species that belong to four major groups. Seagrasses can form dense underwater meadows, some of which are large enough to be seen from space.
Although they often receive little attention, they are one of the most productive ecosystems in the world. Seagrasses provide shelter and food to an incredibly diverse community of animals, from tiny invertebrates to large fish, crabs, turtles, marine mammals and birds. Seagrasses provide many important services to people as well, but many seagrasses meadows have been lost because of human activities. Work is ongoing around the world to restore these important ecosystems.
algae versus seagrass
Algae or "seaweeds" (left) differ from seagrasses (right) in several ways. Algae on the seafloor have a holdfast and transport nutrients through the body by diffusion, while seagrasses are flowering vascular plants with roots and an internal transport system.
Even though seagrasses and seaweeds look superficially similar, they are very different organisms. Seagrasses belong to a group of plants called monocotyledons that include grasses, lilies and palms. Like their relatives, seagrasses have leaves, roots and veins, and produce flowers and seeds. Chloroplasts in their tissues use the sun's energy to convert carbon dioxide and water into sugar and oxygen for growth through the process of photosynthesis.
Veins transport nutrients and water throughout the plant, and have little air pockets called lacunae that help keep the leaves buoyant and exchange oxygen and carbon dioxide throughout the plant. Like other flowering plants, their roots can absorb nutrients. Unlike flowering plants on land, however, they lack stomata—the tiny pores on leaves that open and close to control water and gas exchange. Instead, they have a thin cuticle layer, which allows gasses and nutrients to diffuse directly into and out of the leaves from the water. The roots and rhizomes (thicker horizontal stems) of seagrasses extend into the sediment of the seafloor and are used to store and absorb nutrients, as well as anchor the plants.
In contrast, seaweeds (algae) are much simpler organisms. They have no flowers or veins, and their holdfasts simply attach to the bottom and are generally not specialized to take in nutrients. Scientists are studying what genes were lost and which were regained as seagrasses evolved from algae in the sea to plants on land, and then transitioned back to the sea. The entire genome of one seagrass, the eelgrass Zostera marina, was sequenced in 2016, helping us understand how these plants adapted to life in the sea, how they may respond to climate warming, and the evolution of salt tolerance in crop plants.
Where are seagrasses found?
Seagrasses grow in salty and brackish (semi-salty) waters around the world, typically along gently sloping, protected coastlines. Because they depend on light for photosynthesis, they are most commonly found in shallow depths where light levels are high. Many seagrass species live in depths of 3 to 9 feet (1 to 3 meters), but the deepest growing seagrass (Halophila decipiens) has been found at depths of 190 feet (58 meters). While most coastal regions are dominated by one or a few seagrass species, regions in the tropical waters of the Indian and western Pacific oceans have the highest seagrass diversity with as many as 14 species growing together.
Antarctica is the only continent without seagrasses. 
Seagrasses are found across the world, from the tropics to the Arctic. Shades of green indicate the number of species reported for a given area. The darker shades of green indicate more species are present.
GROWTH AND REPRODUCTION
Seagrasses grow both vertically and horizontally—their blades reach upwards and their roots down and sideways—to capture sunlight and nutrients from the water and sediment. They spread by two methods: asexual clonal growth and sexual reproduction.
Asexual Clonal Growth: Similar to grasses on land, seagrass shoots are connected underground by a network of large root-like structures called rhizomes. The rhizomes can spread under the sediment and send up new shoots. When this happens, many stems within the same meadow can actually be part of the same plant and will have the same genetic code—which is why it is called clonal growth. In fact, the oldest known plant is a clone of the Mediterranean seagrass Posidonia oceanica, which may be up to 200,000 years old, dating back to the ice ages of the late Pleistocene. In some seagrass species, a meadow can develop from a single plant in less than a year, while in slow-growing species like Posidonia it can take hundreds of years.
Sexual Reproduction: Seagrasses reproduce sexually like terrestrial grasses, but pollination for seagrasses is completed with the help of water. Male seagrass flowers release pollen from structures called stamens into the water. Seagrasses produce the longest pollen grains on the planet (up to 5mm long compared to under 0.1mm for land plants typically), and this pollen often collects into stringy clumps. The clumps are moved by currents until they land on the pistil of a female flower and fertilization takes place.
There is also evidence that small invertebrates, such as amphipods (tiny shrimp-like crustaceans) and polychaetes (marine worms), feed on the pollen of one seagrass (Thalassia testudinum), which could help to fertilize the flowers in a way similar to how insects pollinate flowers on land.
Self-pollination happens in some grass species, which can reduce genetic variation. Individual seagrass plants avoid this by producing only male or female flowers, or by producing the male and female flowers at different times. Just like land grasses, fertilized seagrass flowers develop seeds. Seagrass seeds are neutrally buoyant and can float many miles before they settle onto the soft seafloor and germinate to form a new plant. A few seagrass species such as the surfgrass Phylospadix can settle and live on rocky shores. Animals that eat seagrass seeds—including fish and turtles—may incidentally aid with their dispersal and germination if the seeds pass through their digestive tracks and remain viable.
The 72 species of seagrasses are commonly divided into four main groups: Zosteraceae, Hydrocharitaceae, Posidoniaceae and Cymodoceaceae. Their common names, like eelgrass, turtle grass, tape grass, shoal grass, and spoon grass, reflect their many shapes and sizes and roles in marine ecosystems. Seagrasses range from species with long flat blades that look like ribbons to fern or paddle-shaped leaves, cylindrical or spaghetti blades, or branching shoots.
The tallest seagrass species—Zostera caulescens—was found growing to 35 feet (7 meters) in Japan. Some seagrass species are quick growing while others grow much more slowly. These distinct structures and growth forms affect how seagrasses influence their environment and what species live in the habitats they create.
Ecosystem Benefits
Seagrasses are often called foundation plant species or ecosystem engineers because they modify their environments to create unique habitats. These modifications not only make coastal habitats more suitable for the seagrasses themselves, but also have important effects on other animals and provide ecological functions and a variety of services for humans.
Seagrasses have been used by humans for over 10,000 years. They've been used to fertilize fields, insulate houses, weave furniture, thatch roofs, make bandages, and fill mattresses and even car seats. But it's what they do in their native habitat that has the biggest benefits for humans and the ocean. Seagrasses support commercial fisheries and biodiversity, clean the surrounding water and help take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. Because of these benefits, seagrasses are believed to be the third most valuable ecosystem in the world (only preceded by estuaries and wetlands). One hectare of seagrass (about two football fields) is estimated to be worth over $19,000 per year, making them one of the most valuable ecosystems on the planet.
Seagrasses are known as the "lungs of the sea" because one square meter of seagrass can generate 10 liters of oxygen every day through photosynthesis. Seagrass leaves also absorb nutrients and slow the flow of water, capturing sand, dirt and silt particles. Their roots trap and stabilize the sediment, which not only helps improve water clarity and quality, but also reduces erosion and buffers coastlines against storms. Seagrasses can further improve water quality by absorbing nutrients in runoff from the land. In nutrient poor regions, the seagrass plants themselves help nutrient cycling by taking up nutrients from the soil and releasing them into the water through their leaves, acting as a nutrient pump.
Creation of Living Habitat
Seagrasses don't just provide shelter for free-swimming animals, but also are a habitat for non-moving organisms, such as these sea anemones.
Seagrasses are often called nursery habitats because the leafy underwater canopy they create provides shelter for small invertebrates (like crabs and shrimp and other types of crustaceans), small fish and juveniles of larger fish species. Many species of algae and microalgae (such as diatoms), bacteria and invertebrates grow as “epiphytes” directly on living seagrass leaves, much like lichens and Spanish moss grow on trees.
Other invertebrates grow nestled between the blades or in the sediments—such as sponges, clams, polychaete worms and sea anemones. The accumulation of smaller organisms amongst and on the seagrass blades, as well as the seagrass itself, attracts bigger animals. As a result, seagrasses can be home to many types of fish, sharks, turtles, marine mammals (dugongs and manatees), mollusks (octopus, squid, cuttlefish, snails, bivalves), sponges, crustaceans (shrimp, crabs, copepods, isopods and amphipods) polychaete worms, sea urchins and sea anemones—and the list goes on.
Some of these organisms are permanent residents in seagrass meadows, while others are temporary visitors. A single acre of seagrass can support upwards of 40,000 fish and 50 million small invertebrates, and there are often tens to hundreds more animals in a seagrass bed compared to adjacent bare sandy areas. Hundreds of species live in the seagrass near the Smithsonian Marine Station at Fort Pierce in Florida. A number of the species that depend on seagrasses are important for commercial and recreational fisheries.
In fact, in all regions of the world fishermen will specifically seek out seagrass beds for their abundance of fish. It is because of the wide variety of different species that live amongst the grasses that seagrass beds often form important "biodiversity hotspots." Not only do seagrasses support a diversity of marine life, but populations of a given seagrass species can themselves be very genetically diverse and this diversity itself is linked to higher animal abundances. Understanding how seagrass genotypic diversity does this is an active area of research.
Foundation of Coastal Food Webs
Seagrass beds are important feeding grounds for thousands of species around the world, and they support this diverse food web in three different ways. Some organisms—primarily large grazers like manatees, dugongs, green sea turtles and geese—eat the living leaves directly, and seagrass forms a major component of their diets. For example, an adult dugong eats about 64 to 88 pounds (28 to 40 kg) of seagrass a day, while an adult green sea turtle can eat about 4.5 pounds (2 kg) per day.
Many of these large grazers are endangered, in large part because of habitat destruction and hunting, but once they were very common. It's estimated that before Europeans settled the Americas in the 1400's, the number of green sea turtles supported by seagrass meadows was 15 to 20 times the number and biomass of large hooved animals in the Serengeti Desert alive today. These abundant large grazers probably kept seagrass meadows cropped short like a putting green.
The epiphytic organisms growing on the surface of the seagrass blades provide other sources of food. Some epiphytic bacteria can extract nitrogen from the environment and make it available to larger animals. Small invertebrate mesograzers, such as crustaceans and snails, feed on epiphytes, and in doing so can help keep the seagrass clean, acting as mutualistic partners (or housekeepers) that promote seagrass growth. They are in turn consumed by larger crustaceans, fish and birds and are important links in the coastal food web. But, this partnership isn't always positive. Occasionally when some mesograzer species are at very high densities they can create thick masses of mucus and sediment tubes that block light to the seagrass leaves, and they can even eat the seagrass directly.
Dead seagrass leaves also play an important role in coastal ecosystems. When the leaves die, they decay on the sediment or are washed onto the beach, supporting a diverse community of decomposers that thrive on rotting material. Some of these living and dead seagrass blades are also washed to other areas of the ocean, feeding organisms in ecosystems as far as the deep sea.
Blue Carbon
Atmospheric carbon is captured by coastal mangroves, seagrasses and salt marshes at a rate five times faster than tropical forests.
Seagrasses are capable of capturing and storing a large amount of carbon from the atmosphere. Similar to how trees take carbon from the air to build their trunks, seagrasses take carbon from the water to build their leaves and roots. As parts of the seagrass plants and associated organisms die and decay, they can collect on the seafloor and become buried, trapped in the sediment. It has been estimated that in this way the world's seagrass meadows can capture up to 83 million metric tons of carbon each year.
The carbon stored in sediments from coastal ecosystems including seagrass meadows, mangrove forests and salt marshes is known as "blue carbon" because it is stored in the sea. While seagrasses occupy only 0.1 percent of the total ocean floor, they are estimated to be responsible for up to 11 percent of the organic carbon buried in the ocean. One acre of seagrass can sequester 740 pounds of carbon per year (83 g carbon per square meter per year), the same amount emitted by a car traveling around 3,860 miles (6,212 km).
Threats and Conservation
Seagrasses are capable of capturing and storing a large amount of carbon from the atmosphere. Similar to how trees take carbon from the air to build their trunks, seagrasses take carbon from the water to build their leaves and roots. As parts of the seagrass plants and associated organisms die and decay, they can collect on the seafloor and become buried, trapped in the sediment. It has been estimated that in this way the world's seagrass meadows can capture up to 83 million metric tons of carbon each year.
The carbon stored in sediments from coastal ecosystems including seagrass meadows, mangrove forests and salt marshes is known as "blue carbon" because it is stored in the sea. While seagrasses occupy only 0.1 percent of the total ocean floor, they are estimated to be responsible for up to 11 percent of the organic carbon buried in the ocean. One acre of seagrass can sequester 740 pounds of carbon per year (83 g carbon per square meter per year), the same amount emitted by a car traveling around 3,860 miles (6,212 km).
Seagrasses are vulnerable to physical disturbances, such as wind-driven waves and storms. Some animals, such as skates and rays, disturb the rhizomes and roots of seagrasses, ripping up the seagrass as they forage for buried clams and other invertebrates. However, the direct and indirect effects of human activities account for most losses of seagrass beds in recent decades. Some fast growing seagrass meadows are able to rebound from disturbances, but many grow slowly over the course of centuries and are likely to be slow to recover and are thus most vulnerable.
Nutrients, such as those from fertilizers and pollution, wash off the land and into the water, causing algal blooms that block sunlight necessary for seagrass growth. Sediment washing into the water from agriculture and land development can also damage seagrass beds by both smothering the seagrass and blocking sunlight. Similarly, dredging can both directly remove seagrass plants and cause lower light levels because of increased amounts of sediments in the water. Boat anchors and propellers can leave "scars" in a seagrass bed—killing sections of the seagrass and fragmenting the habitat. This fragmentation of seagrass beds can increase erosion around the edges, as well as influence animal use and movement within the seagrass bed.
Disease has also devastated seagrasses. In the early 1930s, a large die-off of up to 90 percent of all eelgrass (Zostera marina) growing in temperate North America was attributed to a "wasting disease". This die-off was so severe that a small snail specialized to live on eelgrass went extinct as a result. The disease was caused by the slime mold-like protist, Labyrinthula zosterae, which also ravaged eelgrass populations in Europe. This disease still affects eelgrass populations in the Atlantic and has contributed to some recent losses, though none as catastrophic as in the 1930s. Eelgrass leaves that are weak or stressed are more susceptible to the disease, developing brown spots and lesions that reduce the plant's ability to photosynthesize, eventually killing the plant.
Episodes of warm seawater temperatures can also damage seagrasses. Temperature affects how enzymes and metabolism work, influencing how organisms grow. Rising water temperatures tend to increase rates of seagrass respiration (using up oxygen) faster than rates of photosynthesis (producing oxygen), which makes them more susceptible to grazing by herbivores. Increased temperature also increases seagrass light requirements, influences how quickly seagrasses can take up nutrients in their environment, and can make seagrasses more susceptible to disease. Large eelgrass declines have been observed in the Chesapeake Bay in years in which water temperatures have persisted for several days above 30°C (86°F), the thermal limit for this species.
Removal of fish can also lead to seagrass death by disrupting important components of the food web. When large predators are removed, intermediate predators can become more abundant, and they in turn cause the decline of the smaller organisms that keep the blades of the seagrasses clean. This has been observed most strikingly in the Baltic sea with the disappearance of cod due to overfishing and corresponding increases in smaller fishes and crustaceans which limited epiphyte-grazing invertebrates, resulting in seagrass decline.
In addition to the small epiphytic algae, larger algae also compete with seagrasses, and introduced invasive seaweed species can displace native seagrass species. One important example is the invasion of Caulerpa taxifolia, a seaweed nicknamed "the killer algae." Released into the Mediterranean in the 1980s from aquaria, by 2000 it covered more than 131 square kilometers (50 square miles) of the Mediterranean coastline, overgrowing and replacing the native Neptune seagrass (Posidonia oceanica) and reducing the ecosystem's biodiversity. Since then, invasive Caulerpa has been found in California and southwestern Australia where eradication programs are in place to prevent its spread.
Neptune grass (Posidonia oceanica) is a slow-growing and long-lived seagrass native to the Mediterranean.
Most management that protects seagrasses focuses on maintaining their biodiversity and the services these habitats provide for humans and ecosystems. There is no international legislation for seagrasses, and so protection typically occurs by local and regional agencies. Actions taken to help seagrasses include limiting damaging practices such as excessive trawling and dredging, runoff pollution and harmful fishing practices (such as dynamite or cyanide fishing).
There are also attempts to rebuild and restore seagrass beds, often by planting seeds or seedlings grown in aquaria, or transplanting adult seagrasses from other healthy meadows. Some of the most successful restoration stories come from the Chesapeake Bay and coastal Virginia in the Eastern United States where, through 2014, the Virginia Institute of Marine Science has seeded 456 acres with 7.65 million seagrass seeds.
As of 2015, the seagrass Zostera marina has increased from these seeded plots to cover 6,195 acres. Seagrass restoration in Tampa Bay, Florida, has also experienced important success including improvements in water quality and the associated fish community. For restoration to work, it is critical that the causes of the original decline in seagrasses have been eliminated.
However, seagrass populations globally are still in trouble. Some simple steps everyone can take to help seagrasses and other marine habitats include: don't litter, limit the amount of fertilizer and pesticides you use, don't dump anything hazardous down the drain, be careful when boating by going slow and avoiding shallow areas, and support local conservation efforts.
https://ocean.si.edu/ocean-life/plants-algae/seagrass-and-seagrass-beds
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HUMANS USED TO “RUN HOTTER”
150 years ago, average human body temperatures appear to have been higher than now. Scientists are still exploring exactly why.
In the 1860s, the German physician Carl Wunderlich, was faced with a burning question. Was fever its own disease, or a symptom of an illness underneath?
At a time when thermometers were not routinely used, Wunderlich embarked on an ambitious mission. Over 15 years, he gathered the armpit temperatures of 25,000 patients, of all ages and both sexes, resulting in over a million readings.
From this vast dataset Wunderlich calculated an average, 37C (98.6F), for healthy adults. This became the benchmark for tracking normal human body temperature. If that rose above 38C (100.4F), it signaled fever, he wrote.
Even though others had already arrived at the same conclusion, Wunderlich's dataset was so large that his figure has since enjoyed an "exalted status" as a universal diagnostic tool, says Philip Mackowiak, a medical historian and infectious disease expert at the University of Maryland.
But more recent research suggests that the average normal body temperature has also changed over the last century and a half. Was the original baseline wrong? Or is a fast-changing world changing our biology?
Cooling off
Wunderlich "established a lot of what we know to be true" about body temperature variation says Julie Parsonnet, an infectious disease clinician at Stanford University.
From his dataset, which measured mostly working-class patients at the Leipzig hospital where he was medical director, Wunderlich discovered that normal temperature varies. He noticed that women have higher temperatures than men, temperature declines with age, and also increases with the time of day.
Yet the average individual today has also now been shown to be cooler than their counterpart 150 years ago, with American men running about 0.59C lower than in the early 19th-Century.
A decade ago, Parsonnet's team analysed three large datasets involving multiple temperature readings from nearly 190,000 people in the United States, taken between 1862 and 2017. "The new normal [for adults] seems closer to 97.5F (36.39C)," she says.
Numerous studies, both before and since, echo Parsonnet's findings.
Nor is the downward trend limited to people living in developed countries. The average body temperature of Tsimanes, a semi-nomadic indigenous community living in the Amazon rainforest, used to hover around 37C in the early 2000s, says biological anthropologist Adrian Jaeggi at the University of Zurich in Switzerland. But in 2018, following two decades of rapid socioeconomic change, their average fell to 36.5C (97.7F).
Why have average body temperatures fallen?
A handful of explanations could explain the lower averages we see today. Parsonnet, for instance, believes, they are the result of healthier overall populations. In Wunderlich’s day, life expectancy was 38 years. Today, it's nearly double that.
"People didn’t live the healthy lives that we live now," says Parsonnet. "They [often] had lots of things wrong with them – tuberculosis, terrible dental care, dysentery, rheumatic fever, and osteomyelitis."
"When your immune system is trying to defend you against all these things that are trying to kill you, it consumes calories. And calories are another word for heat," Parsonnet says.
Likewise, with the Tsimanes, vaccines and improved sanitation have improved health, says Jaeggi. Toilets and shoe-wearing are also more common now than 20 years ago, he notes, reducing the number of hookworm infections acquired by walking barefoot on contaminated soil.
Indoor air temperatures are also now easier to control. Air conditioning is present in at least 88% of US homes, while a similar share of UK houses have central heating.
"Most of our lives are spent in a perfect climate, in what’s called a thermal-neutral zone where we don't have to work to maintain our temperature," says Parsonnet. "And if you don’t have to work, you don't produce energy, and you don’t produce heat."
Could Wunderlich have been mistaken?
Mackowiak, however, thinks the fall in average body temperature might be due to something else entirely.
When he had the chance to examine one of Wunderlich's glass thermometers in person, Mackowiak told me he noticed that it was calibrated roughly 2C higher than modern thermometers. This means that any readings made via these instruments would be 2C warmer than they should have been.
Back then, measuring temperatures were a cumbersome affair, says Mackowiak. Mercury-in-glass thermometers, roughly a foot long, had to be first calibrated with fixed points such as boiling water and melting ice. Patients would then have to lie still for 15 to 20 minutes because "it took a while for the temperature to register in those thermometers," he said.
In other words, Wunderlich's figure might have been flawed to begin with. He also took armpit temperatures, rather than the oral readings that are more common today – making his measurements tricky to compare to modern ones.
Four factors that shape your baseline
1. Age: older people run cooler. Our metabolism slows as we age and our body's not as active, so uses less energy, says Waleed Javaid, an infectious disease doctor at West Virginia University.
2. Gender: women are warmer than men. Even outside menstrual cycle spikes, in elderly women, body temperatures are higher, says Parsonnet. Scientists don’t really know why this is the case, she adds; "we just have a different setting."
3. Time of Day: the early morning dip. "Temperature has a circadian rhythm," says rheumatologist Jonathan Hausmann at the Boston Children’s Hospital and Massachusetts General Hospital, who's recent study observed a dip from 03:00-05:00 and a peak between 16:00-18:00. Probably reflecting increased activity during the day.
4. Height and weight: one lowers, the other raises. Body temperature declines with height because more surface area loses more heat, whereas temperature goes up a little bit with weight, explains Parsonnet.
Parsonett, however, doesn't think faulty calibration is to blame for Wunderlich's overestimate. When she and her team analyzed body temperature data collected from Union Army veterans between 1862 and 1930, they found that those born earlier did indeed have higher average temperatures than those born later."Because we compared people born in different years who were measured at the same time, and people born in the same year measured at different times, you can separate out the instrument [effect] from the age and birth year," she explains.
Parsonett's team was further convinced when they looked at two other, more modern, datasets – and saw a similar drop. These comprised temperatures taken between 1971 and 2017, "using thermometers that would be expected to be similarly calibrated".
A new temperature guide
Does all this mean it's time to rethink the special significance accorded to 37C (98.6F)?
Some already have, including two authoritative sources widely used by physicians. This includes the book Harrison's Principles of Internal Medicine and the UptoDate online database.
Yet while having a benchmark figure for your own body temperature can be a helpful guide, most experts caution against putting too much emphasis on a single value.
"It's important not to take these kinds of thresholds too seriously as they don’t represent sharp boundaries – no one would argue that 36.99C is somehow radically different from 37.01C," says Jaeggi.
Still, when temperatures drop too low or spike too high – typically below 35C (96F) or above 40C (104F) for adults – it is an indicator that something more serious could be going on in your body.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20261030-why-humans-maybe-ran-hotter-two-centuries-ago
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BLACK TEA HELPS PREVENT VASCULAR DISEASE
Researchers found that black tea was associated with the lowest risk of cardiovascular disease, with a relative reduction of at least 35%.
Although not as effective as black tea, green tea was also associated with a lower risk of vascular disease.
“Both black and green tea contain beneficial antioxidants and polyphenols that may support cardiovascular health. Although black tea showed a greater association with reduced vascular disease risk in this study, I would not necessarily recommend switching from green tea to black tea based on these findings alone,” said Yi.
“The differences may be influenced by lifestyle habits, preparation methods, and other factors,” he added.
“I generally recommend drinking whichever type of unsweetened tea a person enjoys, while avoiding excessive sugar or high-caffeine tea products.”
BUT AVOID “BURNING HOT” TEA
The temperature of the tea impacted the risk of vascular disease, researchers found.
Compared with people who did not drink tea, those who drank tea with a “burning hot” temperature had a 16% higher risk.
The researchers did not obtain information about the specific temperatures of the tea. Instead, the information was based on the subjective perception of the participants.
Yi told MNT, “This is an interesting finding because we typically associate tea consumption with cardiovascular benefits. The increased risk associated with extremely hot tea may potentially involve thermal injury and inflammation, although the exact mechanism remains unclear.”
He added, “Since this is an observational finding, we cannot conclude that hot tea directly causes vascular disease. Nevertheless, allowing tea to cool before drinking it is a simple and reasonable precaution.”
In the Science Media Centre debrief, Charalampos Rallis, PhD, Reader in Genetics, Genomics, and Fundamental Cell Biology, Queen Mary University of London, who was not involved with the study, said the following:
“The authors tested many comparisons and some of the more striking findings, such as those on black tea and ‘burning hot’ tea, should be treated as exploratory.”
As the new research is an observational study, it cannot prove that drinking tea directly reduces the risk of vascular disease.
Other factors also need to be considered when supporting vascular health. The study found that regularly drinking tea alongside avoiding smoking and having high physical activity led to the biggest vascular disease risk reduction.
“I think this is one of the most important findings because it reinforces that cardiovascular health depends on multiple lifestyle factors rather than one particular habit,” said Yi.
“Avoiding smoking and maintaining regular physical activity are among the most effective ways to reduce cardiovascular disease risk. Tea consumption may provide additional benefits, but it should complement established preventive measures rather than replace them.”
Yi concluded:
“I would emphasize that tea can be part of a heart-healthy lifestyle, but it is not a substitute for managing established cardiovascular risk factors such as high blood pressure, diabetes, high cholesterol, and smoking. The potential benefits are encouraging, but additional research is needed to determine whether tea consumption itself directly reduces cardiovascular events.”
https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/drinking-this-much-tea-daily-may-help-protect-your-heart-study-finds#Can-tea-really-support-vascular-health
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THOSE NAUGHTY CENTENARIANS
You can eat leafy greens and jog daily, only to be outlived by a whiskey-drinking chain-smoker. But behind that rare survivor lies a hidden biological armor—and an invisible graveyard.
When you notice a 95-year-old who smokes a pack a day and eats bacon for breakfast, your brain registers it as a contradiction. This is a classic cognitive blind spot called survivorship bias. You are observing a rare statistical outlier who survived despite their habits, while ignoring the millions of people with the exact same lifestyle who died of heart attacks or lung cancer in their 50s and 60s. That invisible graveyard makes the rare survivor seem more common than they are.
The biological armor comes down to genetics. Once a person passes age 80, and especially past 90, DNA plays an outsized role. Certain rare genetic variants, such as those in the FOXO3 and CETP genes, provide this exact defense. They protect cells from the oxidative stress and damage caused by smoking, poor diet, and aging. These individuals do not just age slower; they are actively insulated against the consequences of their habits. Conversely, someone who inherits genetic risk factors, like the APOE e4 variant linked to Alzheimer's disease, must work harder to avoid disease, and even strict health habits might not overcome their genetic predisposition.
Furthermore, traditional health guidelines usually focus entirely on physical inputs like diet and exercise, missing the profound impact of psychological and social factors. Chronic stress, loneliness, and a lack of purpose carry mortality risks similar to smoking 15 cigarettes a day. A person who eats junk food but possesses a deeply supportive social network and low stress levels might biologically outcompete an anxious, lonely fitness fanatic who obsesses over every calorie.
Living a healthy lifestyle is not a guarantee of a long life, just as driving with a seatbelt does not guarantee survival in a car crash. Health guidelines deal in probability, not certainty. Following healthy guidelines fundamentally loads the dice in your favor. Ignoring them loads the dice against you. A few people will roll a winning number despite terrible odds, but they are the exception, not the rule.
Winston Churchill lived to be 90 despite a lifelong habit of heavy cigar smoking and drinking, frequently serving as the ultimate anecdotal counter to healthy living guidelines
Jeanne Louise Calment quit smoking at the age of 117. “She didn't give it up for health reasons, but because she didn't like having to ask someone to help her light a cigarette after she was almost blind.” (Quora)
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ending on beauty:
ADAM’S LANGUAGE
I wake and dream: What language am I in?
Dazed with creation, he stares at me.
I tell him like a happy child:
I am in Adam’s language.
My voice this morning has a higher pitch —
I recognize my cousin Zula’s voice.
Across the ocean, mountains, graves,
she seems to ask, “Why don’t you trust
the syllables you tasted first,
the tongues of wind over the Baltic dunes?”
But I want Adam, the yet unharmed
man in the Garden before the exile,
tendrils of fingers still divine.
Let’s name again the animals.
Let’s fish in the newborn river
for shiny silver vowels.
But Adam is forbidden —
we are the fruit of Eden,
our first language lost
like the face of the Unknown God.
The burning branches of I AM
will never speak to us again.
I grieve that I am homeless.
A larger self replies:
All languages are Adam's.
Beloved, you are home.
~ Oriana
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