Christina’s World; Andrew Wyeth, 1948
Christina was disabled, and Wyeth was kind to her, presenting her in a manner that didn't make it obvious. But I have a connection with her crawling that goes back to a recurrent dream, many years ago. In the dream I'm driving, but the paved road ends, so I get out of the car and start walking, and, after a while, crawling. I stopped having this dream when, in the last dream of the series, while crawling I met a man whom I call the Road Builder. He asked me, "Where are you going?" I answered, "I don't know." This could be interpreted as "what counts is the journey," but that seems too glib somehow.
In any case, so much for getting an answer in a dream. I know it does occasionally happen, but can’t remember it ever happening to me. I have to consciously know the answer, and then (rarely) a dream might confirm it.
I still don’t know “where I am going,” but have long reconciled myself to this ignorance (which I suppose is very common, perhaps even near universal). In fact it’s more interesting that way.
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LATE VENUS
“Great mothers, which way?”
I ask the red desert rocks.
The mothers do not reply,
their faces always serene,
their breasts a stone lullaby.
“Where to?” I ask the ocean.
“Where are you leading me, my life?”
Only the glassy breaking of the waves;
only the rustle of the pebbles rushed
toward and away from the shore.
“Where am I going?” I ask
the wind harp of trees,
hillside grasses hurrying into green
before smoke, before straw.
And I know what the earth will reply.
I watch the stained glass of autumn,
the wine-dark river of sunset.
Late Venus shines purest
light. Then the diamond
winter of the stars.
~ Oriana
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UPDIKE WITHOUT A PADDLE
Writing to his mother, Linda Grace Hoyer Updike, in January 1975, when he was forty-two years old, John Updike (1932–2009) recalled that he had been “so anxious from kindergarten on to do right, and reap the appropriate praise.” Anyone who has read the Selected Letters of John Updike up to this point will likely be bemused by this assertion, given that a great deal of Updike’s behavior, as recorded in these letters, had hardly been praiseworthy.1 By 1975, for instance, he had been a compulsive adulterer for two decades, a fact about which he rarely if ever expressed (in his correspondence at least) a hint of remorse.
It can fairly be said, however, that from childhood on he always came off in his letters as a boy who wanted, if not to do right, then to do well: to succeed. And, consequently, to impress—with, perhaps above all, his mastery of the English language. If, in his adulthood, even at the height of his career, Updike was mocked by more than a few critics for wrapping up quotidian thoughts in disconcertingly highfalutin language, the early pages of this hefty volume, edited by James Schiff, give us a window on Updike, in his middle teens, fashioning precociously stately and well-upholstered sentences to communicate the most mundane of thoughts. “I don’t suppose that I am being original,” he writes at the age of fifteen to the cartoonist Harold Gray, “when I admit that Orphan Annie is, and has been for a long time, my favorite comic strip. . . . I admire the magnificent plotting of Annie’s adventures. . . . Your draughtsmanship is beyond reproach.”
By all indications, Updike’s boyhood in Plowville, Pennsylvania—he was the coddled only child of Wesley, a high-school math teacher, and Linda, an aspiring writer (and, not insignificantly, an avid New Yorker subscriber)—was an extraordinarily comfortable one. His letters home from college—Harvard, of course—make it clear that Linda was at least a tad clingy, displeased that her son sent her only one letter a week (to her three). But the homesickness, confusion, insecurity, and money concerns that one might expect to encounter in such letters are entirely absent; on the contrary, Updike comes off like Noël Coward, say, shooting off witty ripostes to Gertrude Lawrence. In one missive, he refers to his father as “the paternal ancestor”; in another, having been told about a literary journal containing a poem of his, he asks: “Where is it? I am quite anticipatory.” Curiously, he never signs off with the word “Love.”
After graduating summa cum laude in English and spending a year at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art at Oxford, Updike entered a world he’d never leave—namely, the august, cloistered precincts of The New Yorker. Even in high school, as we learn from his correspondence, not only Updike but also his mother dreamed of his eventually working at, or writing for, the storied weekly, and by the time he was twenty (or so he claims in one letter) it had mailed him at least a hundred rejections. Being a Harvard man, to be sure, he had an “in”: the bestselling novelist Edward Streeter, a fellow veteran of the Lampoon (though forty years older), put in a good word for him.
But his main asset was sheer determination: he was dead set on conquering what both he and his mother saw as the world’s best magazine. He started with poetry. Did this mean learning from Eliot, Yeats, Auden, Stevens? No, it meant composing just the right kind of light verse. It cannot be overemphasized that Updike wasn’t driven to write because he was in the grip of powerful thoughts and feelings that demanded to be put into words; no, he was a second-generation New Yorker aficionado who was desperate to give the folks on Forty-third Street exactly what they wanted, whatever that might be. (In an interview reprinted in his 1999 nonfiction collection, More Matter, Updike admitted that, from the start, “a large part of my artistic conscience was an implant from New Yorker editorial policy. A good story was, basically, one that they accepted.”)
. . . alas, the rest is behind a paywall, so I turned to Wikipedia (to which I make an annual donation, in case anyone wonders if I am utterly stingy)
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~ John Hoyer Updike (March 18, 1932 – January 27, 2009) was an American novelist, poet, short-story writer, art critic, and literary critic. One of only four writers to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction more than once (the others being Booth Tarkington, William Faulkner, and Colson Whitehead), Updike published more than twenty novels, more than a dozen short-story collections, as well as poetry, art and literary criticism and children's books during his career.
Hundreds of his stories, reviews, and poems appeared in The New Yorker starting in 1954. He also wrote regularly for The New York Review of Books. His most famous work is his "Rabbit" series (the novels Rabbit, Run; Rabbit Redux; Rabbit Is Rich; Rabbit at Rest; and the novella Rabbit Remembered), which chronicles the life of the middle-class everyman Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom over the course of several decades, from young adulthood to death. Both Rabbit Is Rich (1981) and Rabbit at Rest (1990) were awarded the Pulitzer Prize
Describing his subject as "the American small town, Protestant middle class", critics recognized his careful craftsmanship, his unique prose style, and his prolific output – a book a year on average. Updike populated his fiction with characters who "frequently experience personal turmoil and must respond to crises relating to religion, family obligations, and marital infidelity".
His fiction is distinguished by its attention to the concerns, passions, and suffering of average Americans, its emphasis on Christian theology, and its preoccupation with sexuality and sensual detail. His work has attracted significant critical attention and praise, and he is widely considered one of the great American writers of his time. Updike's highly distinctive prose style features a rich, unusual, sometimes arcane vocabulary as conveyed through the eyes of "a wry, intelligent authorial voice that describes the physical world extravagantly while remaining squarely in the realist tradition". He described his style as an attempt "to give the mundane its beautiful due".
Early life and education
Updike's boyhood home in Shillington, Pennsylvania
Updike was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, the only child of Linda Grace (née Hoyer) and Wesley Russell Updike, and was raised at his childhood home in the nearby small town of Shillington. The family later moved to the unincorporated village of Plowville. His mother's attempts to become a published writer impressed the young Updike. "One of my earliest memories", he later recalled, "is of seeing her at her desk ... I admired the writer's equipment, the typewriter eraser, the boxes of clean paper. And I remember the brown envelopes that stories would go off in—and come back in.”
These early years in Berks County, Pennsylvania, would influence the environment of the Rabbit Angstrom tetralogy, as well as many of his early novels and short stories. Updike graduated from Shillington High School as co-valedictorian and class president in 1950 and received a full scholarship to Harvard University, where he was the roommate of Christopher Lasch during their first year. Updike had already received recognition for his writing as a teenager by winning a Scholastic Art & Writing Award, and at Harvard he soon became well known among his classmates as a talented and prolific contributor to The Harvard Lampoon, of which he was president. He studied with dramatist Robert Chapman, the director of Harvard's Loeb Drama Center. He graduated summa cum laude in 1954 with a degree in English and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa.
Upon graduation, Updike attended the Ruskin School of Art at the University of Oxford with the ambition of becoming a cartoonist. After returning to the United States, Updike and his family moved to New York, where he became a regular contributor to The New Yorker. This was the beginning of his professional writing career.
Career as a writer
Updike stayed at The New Yorker as a full staff writer for only two years, writing "Talk of the Town" columns and submitting poetry and short stories to the magazine. In New York, Updike wrote the poems and stories that came to fill his early books like The Carpentered Hen (1958) and The Same Door (1959). These works were influenced by Updike's early engagement with The New Yorker. This early work also featured the influence of J. D. Salinger ("A&P"); John Cheever ("Snowing in Greenwich Village"); and the Modernists Marcel Proust, Henry Green, James Joyce, and Vladimir Nabokov.
During this time, Updike underwent a profound spiritual crisis. Suffering from a loss of religious faith, he began reading Søren Kierkegaard and the theologian Karl Barth. Both deeply influenced his own religious beliefs, which in turn figured prominently in his fiction. He believed in Christianity for the remainder of his life. Updike said, "As to critics, it seems to be my fate to disappoint my theological friends by not being Christian enough, while I'm too Christian for Harold Bloom's blessing. So be it.”
Later, Updike and his family relocated to Ipswich, Massachusetts. Many commentators, including a columnist in the local Ipswich Chronicle, asserted that the fictional town of Tarbox in Couples was based on Ipswich. Updike denied the suggestion in a letter to the paper.
Impressions of Updike's day-to-day life in Ipswich during the 1960s and 1970s are included in a letter to the same paper published soon after Updike's death and written by a friend and contemporary. In Ipswich, Updike wrote Rabbit, Run (1960), on a Guggenheim Fellowship, and The Centaur (1963), two of his most acclaimed and famous works; the latter won the National Book Award.
Rabbit, Run featured Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, a former high school basketball star and middle-class paragon who would become Updike's most enduring and critically acclaimed character. Updike wrote three additional novels about him. Rabbit, Run was featured in Time's All-TIME 100 Greatest Novels.
Updike's career and reputation were nurtured and expanded by his long association with The New Yorker, which published him frequently throughout his career, despite the fact that he had departed the magazine's employment after only two years. Updike's memoir indicates that he stayed in his "corner of New England to give its domestic news" with a focus on the American home from the point of view of a male writer. Updike's contract with the magazine gave it right of first offer for his short-story manuscripts, but William Shawn, The New Yorker's editor from 1952 to 1987, rejected several as too explicit.
In 1971, Updike published a sequel to Rabbit, Run called Rabbit Redux, his response to the 1960s; Rabbit reflected much of Updike's resentment and hostility towards the social and political changes that beset the United States during that time.
Updike was a lifelong Democrat. He endorsed Barack Obama in 2008.
Updike was serially unfaithful, and eventually left the marriage in 1974 for Martha Ruggles Bernhard. In 1977, Updike and Bernhard married. In 1982, his first wife married an MIT academic. Updike and Bernhard lived for more than 30 years in Beverly Farms, Massachusetts. Updike had three stepsons through Bernhard.
Death
Updike died of lung cancer at a hospice in Danvers, Massachusetts, on January 27, 2009, at age 76. He was survived by his wife, his four children, three stepsons, his first wife, and seven grandchildren and seven step-grandchildren.
Poetry
Updike published eight volumes of poetry over his career, including his first book The Carpentered Hen (1958), and one of his last, the posthumous Endpoint (2009). The New Yorker published excerpts of Endpoint in its March 16, 2009 issue. Much of Updike's poetical output was recollected in Knopf's Collected Poems (1993). He wrote that "I began as a writer of light verse, and have tried to carry over into my serious or lyric verse something of the strictness and liveliness of the lesser form."
The poet Thomas M. Disch noted that because Updike was such a well-known novelist, his poetry "could be mistaken as a hobby or a foible"; Disch saw Updike's light verse instead as a poetry of "epigrammatical lucidity". His poetry has been praised for its engagement with "a variety of forms and topics", its "wit and precision", and for its depiction of topics familiar to American readers.
British poet Gavin Ewart praised Updike for the metaphysical quality of his poetry and for his ability "to make the ordinary seem strange", and called him one of the few modern novelists capable of writing good poetry. Reading Endpoint aloud, the critic Charles McGrath claimed that he found "another, deeper music" in Updike's poetry, finding that Updike's wordplay "smooths and elides itself" and has many subtle "sound effects". John Keenan, who praised the collection Endpoint as "beautiful and poignant", noted that his poetry's engagement with "the everyday world in a technically accomplished manner seems to count against him".
Literary criticism and art criticism
Updike was also a critic of literature and art, one frequently cited as one of the best American critics of his generation. In the introduction to Picked-Up Pieces, his 1975 collection of prose, he listed his personal rules for literary criticism:
Try to understand what the author wished to do, and do not blame him for not achieving what he did not attempt.
Give enough direct quotation—at least one extended passage—of the book's prose so the review's reader can form his own impression, can get his own taste.
Confirm your description of the book with quotation from the book, if only phrase-long, rather than proceeding by fuzzy précis.
Go easy on plot summary, and do not give away the ending.
If the book is judged deficient, cite a successful example along the same lines, from the author's œuvre or elsewhere. Try to understand the failure. Sure it's his and not yours?
To these concrete five might be added a vaguer sixth, having to do with maintaining a chemical purity in the reaction between product and appraiser. Do not accept for review a book you are predisposed to dislike, or committed by friendship to like. Do not imagine yourself a caretaker of any tradition, an enforcer of any party standards, a warrior in any ideological battle, a corrections officer of any kind. Never, never ... try to put the author "in his place," making of him a pawn in a contest with other reviewers. Review the book, not the reputation. Submit to whatever spell, weak or strong, is being cast. Better to praise and share than blame and ban. The communion between reviewer and his public is based upon the presumption of certain possible joys of reading, and all our discriminations should curve toward that end.
He reviewed "nearly every major writer of the 20th century and some 19th-century authors", typically in The New Yorker, always trying to make his reviews "animated". He also championed young writers, comparing them to his own literary heroes including Vladimir Nabokov and Marcel Proust. Good reviews from Updike were often seen as a significant achievement in terms of literary reputation and even sales; some of his positive reviews helped jump-start the careers of such younger writers as Erica Jong, Thomas Mallon and Jonathan Safran Foer.
Bad reviews by Updike sometimes caused controversy. In 2008, he gave a "damning" review of Toni Morrison's novel A Mercy, and in 1999 he criticized Alan Hollinghurst's novels for being "relentlessly gay in their personnel". In response to criticism of the latter remark, he said: "I’d be happy not to discuss [homosexuality]. Hollinghurst made it kind of tough."
Updike was praised for his literary criticism's conventional simplicity and profundity, for being an aestheticist critic who saw literature on its own terms, and for his longtime commitment to the practice of literary criticism.
Much of Updike's art criticism appeared in The New York Review of Books, where he often wrote about American art. His art criticism involved an aestheticism like that of his literary criticism.
Updike's 2008 Jefferson Lecture, "The Clarity of Things: What's American About American Art?", dealt with the uniqueness of American art from the 18th century to the 20th. In the lecture he argued that American art, until the expressionist movement of the 20th century in which America declared its artistic "independence", is characterized by an insecurity not found in the artistic tradition of Europe.
In Updike's own words:
"Two centuries after Jonathan Edwards sought a link with the divine in the beautiful clarity of things, William Carlos Williams wrote in introducing his long poem Paterson that "for the poet there are no ideas but in things." No ideas but in things. The American artist, first born into a continent without museums and art schools, took Nature as his only instructor, and things as his principal study. A bias toward the empirical, toward the evidential object in the numinous fullness of its being, leads to a certain lininess, as the artist intently maps the visible in a New World that feels surrounded by chaos and emptiness."
Several scholars have called attention to the importance of place, and especially of southeast Pennsylvania, in Updike's life and work. Bob Batchelor has described "Updike's Pennsylvania sensibility" as one with profound reaches that transcend time and place, such that in his writing, he used "Pennsylvania as a character" that went beyond geographic or political boundaries.
SA Zylstra has compared Updike's Pennsylvania to Faulkner's Mississippi: "As with the Mississippi of Faulkner's novels, the world of Updike's novels is fictional (as are such towns as Olinger and Brewer), while at the same time it is recognizable as a particular American region." Sanford Pinsker observes that "Updike always felt a bit out of place" in places like "Ipswich, Massachusetts, where he lived for most of his life. In his heart—and, more important, in his imagination—Updike remained a staunchly Pennsylvania boy." Similarly, Sylvie Mathé maintains that "Updike's most memorable legacy appears to be his homage to Pennsylvania.”
Critics emphasize his "inimitable prose style" and "rich description and language", often favorably compared to Proust and Nabokov.[4] Some critics consider the fluency of his prose to be a fault, questioning the intellectual depth and thematic seriousness of his work given the polish of his language and the perceived lightness of his themes, while others criticized Updike for misogynistic depictions of women and sexual relationships.
Other critics argue that Updike's "dense vocabulary and syntax functions as a distancing technique to mediate the intellectual and emotional involvement of the reader". On the whole, however, Updike is extremely well regarded as a writer who mastered many genres, wrote with intellectual vigor and a powerful prose style, with "shrewd insight into the sorrows, frustrations, and banality of American life".
Harold Bloom once called Updike "a minor novelist with a major style. A quite beautiful and very considerable stylist ... He specializes in the easier pleasures." Bloom also edited an important collection of critical essays on Updike in 1987, in which he concluded that Updike possessed a major style and was capable of writing beautiful sentences which are "beyond praise"; nevertheless, Bloom went on, "the American sublime will never touch his pages”.
Adam Gopnik of The New Yorker evaluated Updike as "the first American writer since Henry James to get himself fully expressed, the man who broke the curse of incompleteness that had haunted American writing ... He sang like Henry James, but he saw like Sinclair Lewis. The two sides of American fiction—the precise, realist, encyclopedic appetite to get it all in, and the exquisite urge to make writing out of sensation rendered exactly—were both alive in him."
Oriana:
My favorite story by Updike is his unforgettable The Bulgarian Poetess. It seems many readers adore it. I was familiar with the poems of that particular poetess, Blaga Dimitrova. Updike gives her a fictional name, but there is little doubt that his account is based on Blaga — whose poems are quite wonderful in the English translation, Because the Sea Is Black” — I highly recommend it.
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ORIGINS OF WORDS CAN BE FASCINATING
1. Muscle and Mouse
If you flex your bicep and watch it ripple, you are looking at the origin of the word. "Muscle" comes from the Latin musculus, which literally translates to "little mouse."
Ancient anatomists thought that the movement of a muscle under the skin looked like a small mouse scurrying beneath a rug. Even today, the Greek word for mouse, mys, is still used in medical terms like "myology" (the study of muscles).
2. Clue and Ball of Yarn
Today, a clue is a piece of evidence used to solve a crime. But in Old English, the word was spelled clew, and it meant a ball of thread or yarn.
The meaning shifted because of Greek mythology. When Theseus entered the Labyrinth to kill the Minotaur, the princess Ariadne gave him a clew—a ball of thread—to unwind as he walked so he could find his way back out. Over time, the word for the yarn metaphorically became the word for anything that guides you toward a solution.
3. Galaxy and Lettuce
It is hard to find two things more different than a cosmic spiral of stars and a salad ingredient, but they are both named after milk.
"Galaxy" comes from the Greek galaxias, meaning "milky circle," which is why we call our home the Milky Way. "Lettuce" comes from the Latin word lactuca, derived from lac (milk). This is because when you slice the stem of a mature lettuce plant, it secretes a white, milky juice (latex).
4. Onion and Union
It might seem strange that a pungent vegetable and a concept of togetherness share a root, but they are both defined by the number one.
They both descend from the Latin word unus (one). In ancient Rome, the word unio meant "unity" or "a joining together." However, colloquial Roman farmers began using the word unio to describe a specific type of onion.
The logic was simple: unlike garlic, which is a divided head containing multiple cloves, the onion is a single, unified pearl. It is a "union" of concentric layers forming one whole.
English is essentially a museum of history where ancient metaphors—mice under the skin, pearls of onions, and milky stars—are preserved in everyday speech.
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LIFE IN THE MIDDLE AGES
Most answers here are predictably telling you about farming schedules and church attendance and feudal obligations and they're not wrong about any of that. But we are more closely aligned with that lifestyle. We too have to plan our farming, some of us attend church, and although we don’t have feudal obligations, we do have national obligations from obeying laws to paying taxes. So some things that are significantly different aren’t mentioned that much. Moreover, they all skip the thing that shaped every other aspect of medieval life.
You couldn't leave.
Not legally, though serfs often couldn't do that either. Physically. The world outside your village was dangerous in a way that's almost impossible to imagine from where we sit now. Today you can drive between two cities a hundred miles apart and the whole way you'll pass a more or less continuous flow of houses and farms and small towns. There's maybe a forest here and there, some empty fields, but the pathway between two population centers is itself populated.
That couldn't exist in medieval Europe. It wasn't safe. If you weren't in a large enough group to build fortifications and defend them, you were dead. You can see this history in the footprints of settlement. Whenever you’re in a region where there hasn’t been much development and there is a centralized town, everyone living next to each other and then commuting to their farmland, that was because they had to hunker down for safety.
If you lived outside the confines of your fortified village you would be killed. Not eventually, not in some abstract sense, but practically speaking that was the expected result, much like if you live in Florida you expect to hit by a big hurricane every couple of years. It might take years for a raiding party to find you, but they'd find you. They'd kill or enslave you, take everything, and move on. So people clustered. You lived inside fortifications or close enough to reach them when you needed to. Everything else was wilderness.
Look at medieval churches if you want to understand this. They look like fortresses. Thick walls, narrow windows, heavy doors, defensive positions along the roofline. This was not aesthetic. When raiders came, which was an expected and recurring event like a particularly bad storm, villagers would grab whatever they could carry and get inside the church.
The church usually wasn’t the only line of defense either. Towns would all have defensive walls as well, the fortified churches were more of a fallback plan than a first defense. The raiders would come, which was an expected and recurring event like a particularly bad storm, villagers would grab whatever they could carry and get inside the church. The raiders would go through the town, take everything not locked behind stone, and leave. The people inside would survive. Their possessions generally wouldn't. This happened over and over and over in the same towns across generations and everyone just accepted it as a feature of existence.
This is a church, yes it is more castle than church. Yes, that was common for the era.
Some groups had economies entirely built around raiding. The Magyar tribes from the Eurasian steppe raided Western Europe for over fifty years in the 9th and 10th centuries. They hit Italy, Germany, France, Spain. Fast cavalry, hit and withdraw, impossible to catch before they were gone. They stopped after they were decisively defeated at the Battle of Lechfeld in 955 and settled in what is now Hungary, but for those fifty years a significant portion of European agricultural output was being transferred to them by force.
The Vikings raided for roughly three centuries starting in the late 700s. Not just nearby coastal regions. Viking expeditions reached Constantinople, traveled down the Volga River to the Caspian Sea, and hit targets in what is now Iran.
The French situation got bad enough that in 911 the Frankish king gave away the entire region of Normandy to a Viking leader named Rollo. The logic was that nobody was living there anyway because being so close to the coast it wasn't safe from Vikings, so let them have it in exchange for protecting the rest of France from other Vikings who showed up. It worked well enough that the Vikings who settled Normandy became the Normans and eventually conquered England in 1066.
This wasn't just a medieval problem that ended when feudalism ended. The Barbary States along the North African coast, roughly modern Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya, ran economies based on raiding and enslaving Europeans well into the 19th century. They captured ships and raided coastal towns. Millions of Europeans were enslaved over a few centuries. Every European power dealt with this by paying tribute. You signed a treaty, paid annual gold, and they left your ships and settlements alone. If you didn't, they attacked.
When the United States declared independence, American ships suddenly lost British protection. The Barbary States started attacking immediately. The US did what everyone else did and started paying. At one point around 1800, roughly 20 percent of the federal budget was going to ransoms and tribute. Morocco was the first country to formally recognize the United States in 1777 specifically to facilitate these payments. It eventually became unsustainable and the US fought the Barbary Wars between 1801 and 1815 to end it. The fact that professional naval warfare was required to stop a raiding economy that had been operating for centuries tells you how deeply embedded this pattern was. It wasn’t some one off situation. Entire nations focused their economy around piracy and plunder.
So what was everyday life actually like in medieval Europe? You woke up in a village with walls or within running distance of one. You worked fields close to home, not far. You knew where the church was and how fast you could get there. You didn't travel unless you had a very good reason, and if you did you travel, then it would be traveled in a group. Solo travel was suicidal unless you were poor poor enough that robbing you wasn't worth the effort, and even then it was dangerous. Merchants moved in armed caravans. Pilgrims moved in large groups for the same reason.
Your world was small. You knew people in your village and the next village would often be quite far away. You might know people in the nearest market town but only if it were safe enough to quickly commute back and forth by foot during daytime. Beyond that things got abstract. You heard stories about places further away. You knew they existed. But they weren't part of your life in any practical sense, and most people never saw them.
When raiders came, and eventually they did, you grabbed your family and whatever valuables were portable and ran for the fortifications. You hid inside stone walls. They took everything outside. You came out afterwards, buried whoever didn't make it inside in time, and rebuilt. Then you waited for the next time.
This pattern was so normal, so expected, that it shaped everything. Why churches look like fortresses. Why towns are where they are. Why roads went where they went. Why people didn't wander. The entire physical and social geography of medieval Europe is a map of where people calculated they could survive.
This represents on of the fundamental disconnects between modern people and their understanding of ancient history. When you look at a map of ancient Rome, you see a map with borders drawn and everything filled in with color. That’s not at all representative of what it was like. A true Roman map would be a map of dots representing settlements. Anything in between those settlements was no man’s land.
This is precisely how and why they got overrun by people from the steppe. Because there was so much unoccupied land in between settlements that they had plenty of room to operate and just set up their own settlements, acting as independent groups despite that they were “inside Roman territory” if you looked at it with a modern understanding.
This is also why when Rome lost a province, the common people really didn’t care. It didn’t impact them. They’d never been there, they never would, whether or not it remained Roman was some intangible and abstract concept to them that absolutely was not worth risking their life for.
This is also why you’ll regularly read about foreign armies surprising the defender by showing up on the horizon. All that despite that they had to march for two weeks inside “enemy territory” to arrive at that city. Because quite simply, it was a network of settlements that were all spread out and isolated. They may nominally were all on the same team but were very much a “my city” and they we loosely aligned. This also made it so ideas like nationalism are very much a modern invention.
This lasted for far longer than you’d imagine. Even in Napoleonic wars, an army would regularly just appear out of nowhere despite being deep in enemy territory. Simply because the settlements they came across along the way were more concerned about #1 than they were in relaying info to the capital of where the enemy was marching.
It didn't end because people became more civilized. It ended because centralized states got powerful enough to suppress raiding inside their borders and project force outside them.
Standing armies and gunpowder weapons that made a farmer who would not have fared well in the pike and bow era suddenly somewhat confident were what put an end to all of this. Same with piracy on the open seas, once nations developed navies that could patrol coastlines that too disappeared. Once raiding became more expensive than farming or trading, people stopped doing it. Not before. ~ Adam, Quora
Andrew Bragg:
In northern England before the unification between England and Scotland people built defendable homes called Pele towers. When hostiles appeared on the horizon you retreated into your tower and waited until they went away. After unification the politics changed and more effort was put into enforcement.
Malcolm Clark:
The Church you show is St Mary-in-Castro. It was built behind the Bronze Age earth works that were the Original part of Dover Castle. The ruined building beside it is the Pharos, a Roman lighthouse guiding ships into the port of Dover below.
These fall within the grounds of the great Norman Castle and the whole castle was garrisoned right up to the 1970s.
Paul Donnelly:
In Cahill’s book How the Irish Saved Civilization, he notes that Roman roads had the defect of their virtue, as Roman rule collapsed. The reason “all roads lead to Rome” is because you’d want to send messages from, say, Constantine’s camp somewhere near what’s now Germany to Rome itself, where you could pick up messages sent to Rome from, say, Egypt. Or Armenia. Not to put too fine a point on it, that’s why Rome got to be as big as it was — and no bigger: it took 3 months to get a message from one place to another, then 3 more months to get the troops you’d asked for, which imposed a pretty strict communications limit on how big even the most unified command and control could be.
Which nevertheless worked in their defense in depth response strategy for several centuries — because the roads were good. A couple legions in Spain could be summoned to the Rhine, or the Danube: damned effective, especially compared to the raiders who were generally the enemy.
Until there were no more legions in Spain — at least, none that would come when called.
Wang Shang Yew:
Even ancient Greek aristocrats practiced piracy — it was considered more respectable than being a merchant.
And you didn't just get raided by foreigners. Often the raiders could be your own neighbors and compatriots. Which means you yourself might be raiding pretty often.
Jeff Painter:
The Middle Ages were a thousand years and with thousand-mile distances within Europe. So this description of constant danger isn’t the only way medieval Europeans lived.
Pilgrimages were popular and common among all classes in medieval Europe. Many were a couple days each way walking from a village to the nearest cathedral. Others — notably to Rome, Jerusalem, and Santiago de Compostela — lasted months. Most pilgrims returned home alive and well.
Adam:
However, they did travel in large groups and if not, then there was enough traffic anyway to effectively be within a group.
The church and local leaders over known pilgrimages would protect the pilgrims to the best of their abilities — I’ve actually done the camino myself.
There’s very good reason why some churches became big pilgrimage hubs and others didn’t — primary reason being safety.
Do you really think that some cathedral in Spain, which nobody would know about if not for its association with that pilgrimage, would be a top destination over other locations such as Constantinople, Rome, Alexandria, Antioch or Jerusalem if it weren’t a route specifically chosen for its safety?
Stephen Grimmer:
Every European power dealt with this by paying tribute. You signed a treaty, paid annual gold, and they left your ships and settlements alone. If you didn't, they invaded.
Finn Ludorf:
There must have been a lot of inbreeding, not being able to meet with people outside your own village.
Wendy Roberts:
People have been taking steps to prevent inbreeding since long before medieval times.
Adam:
yes but even so, this is also precisely why despite that we are all traced back to less than 3,000 ancestors in Africa, we developed national looks. Heck, even today you can “spot a European” simply by noticing they have sharper and more pronounced features than Americans because they are breeding with a much more condensed population pool.
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THE GREAT HORSE MANURE CRISIS OF 1894
By he late 1800s, large cities all around the world were “drowning in horse manure”. In order for these cities to function, they were dependent on thousands of horses for the transport of both people and goods.
In 1900, there were over 11,000 hansom cabs on the streets of London alone. There were also several thousand horse-drawn buses, each needing 12 horses per day, making a staggering total of over 50,000 horses transporting people around the city each day.
To add to this, there were yet more horse-drawn carts and drays delivering goods around what was then the largest city in the world.
This huge number of horses created major problems. The main concern was the large amount of manure left behind on the streets. On average a horse will produce between 15 and 35 pounds of manure per day, so you can imagine the sheer scale of the problem. The manure on London’s streets also attracted huge numbers of flies which then spread typhoid fever and other diseases.
Each horse also produced around 2 pints of urine per day and to make things worse, the average life expectancy for a working horse was only around 3 years. Horse carcasses therefore also had to be removed from the streets. The bodies were often left to putrefy so the corpses could be more easily sawn into pieces for removal.
The streets of London were beginning to poison its people.
But this wasn’t just a British crisis: New York had a population of 100,000 horses producing around 2.5m pounds of manure a day.
This problem came to a head when in 1894, The Times newspaper predicted… “In 50 years, every street in London will be buried under nine feet of manure.”
This became known as the ‘Great Horse Manure Crisis of 1894’.
The terrible situation was debated in 1898 at the world’s first international urban planning conference in New York, but no solution could be found. It seemed urban civilization was doomed.
However, necessity is the mother of invention, and the invention in this case was that of motor transport. Henry Ford came up with a process of building motor cars at affordable prices.
Electric trams and motor buses appeared on the streets, replacing the horse-drawn buses.
By 1912, this seemingly insurmountable problem had been resolved; in cities all around the globe, horses had been replaced and now motorized vehicles were the main source of transport and carriage.
Even today, in the face of a problem with no apparent solution, people often quote ‘The Great Horse Manure Crisis of 1894’, urging people not to despair, something will turn up!
MEANWHILE IN PARIS
In the days when horses were the only practical transport, in the city of Paris, a horde of peasants who were employed for the purpose collected all the manure from city streets and it was used both to heat and fertilize hot houses, which grew the salad greens and other valued plants for the well to do. The manure was composted beneath the hothouses, the heat generated kept them warm, and when composting was finished, the resulting material was used to grow the plants. There was a neverending supply of more or less free manure so this process worked well for the city of Paris.
Once the horses were phased out, the hothouses went with them, because there was no economical way to replace the manure. ~ Karen J.Gray
John Williamson:
Lots of people carrying lots of buckets, filling lots of carts taking the bucket contents into the countryside, where it was spread on the fields to grow crops to feed the horses, which generated the next lot…
A young lad or lass with a bucket could actually earn a reasonable living collecting horse droppings off the street and selling them on to the cart owners, who in turn made a living selling the cart contents to the farmers.
There were also “night soil” men, who used to empty the closets and cesspits in the back yards of houses in cities at night, and do the same with human “manure” in the days before the flush toilet. Urine was collected separately and sold to the tanners to use in the leather making process.
Doug:
At the turn of the century 200,000 horses lived and worked in NYC, 1 for every 17 people. The average horse produced 24 pounds of manure a day. With 200,000 horses that's nearly 5 million pounds a day. In vacant lots, horse manure was piled as high as 60 feet. When the rains came, a soupy stream of horse manure flooded sidewalks and seeped into basements. Those old brownstones with their elegant stoops, rising from the street level to the 2nd story parlor allowed the homeowner to rise above the sea of horse manure.
Jay Bazzinotti:
Managing horse manure was the subject of great debate at the end of the 19th Century; in fact, it was called The Great Manure Crisis.
In 1898 there was the first urban convention of civic engineers and architects, held in NYC. It brought people from all over the world. The topics were to be the value of open spaces and the value of architecture in great cities but the meeting never moved beyond the manure crisis. The meeting ended with not much accomplished.
In the late 1800s there were over 300,000 horses in NYC alone, generating 2 million pounds of manure and 60,000 gallons of horse urine every single day. Every. Single Day. Times Square was originally called “Longacre” and it was a massive field owned by John Astor where he sold horses; not soon after the meeting, Astor sold it to the New York Times and it became Times Square. (He later died on the Titanic.) There were even entire city blocks where manure was piled nearly 100 feet high because the city could not deal with it.
When it rained, the cities filled with a disgusting mud of manure and filth. Urchins were paid by pedestrians to make a path before them as they walked. In some streets, the manure came up beyond the ankles; it was one reason there were steps up to the front doors of homes and the “mud room” was the place where people removed their boots before entering the house to not track in filth. The NY Times reported that 3 billion flies were bred in the filth every day.
In earlier times, manure was sold by the city for a profit to farmers who carried it to their farms in dung carts; most of Brooklyn was still open field in the mid 1800s. Then it was barged up north on the rivers to the farms. But as the city grew, the amount of manure increased beyond management and by 10AM it was no longer good for manure because so much filth was mixed with the manure that it was unusable as fertilizer. To make matters worse, the sanitation department was controlled by the Tamanny Organization, the biggest organized crime ring in America, and used for “no show” patronage jobs. Streets could be cleaned by extortion only. Richer city dwellers had to pay off the sanitation department to clean the streets, twice a week.
And the cacophony of horses clopping was maddening. The rich paid to have their streets strewn with straw to cut down on the noise. The situation became so bad that the city paved some streets in wood, cut in wide blocks and laid with the grain up, to cut down on the noise —
but the wood absorbed horse urine and stunk even more, and it rotted away within five years while set blocks would last virtually forever. However, set blocks were uneven and people and horses would easily trip. A lame horse would be shot and left to rot for up to three months because there were no machines to haul away such heavy carcasses.
The situation was so bad, that in conjunction with the gas plants and the giant phosphate plants and the oil refinery and slaughterhouses and glue factories that NYC published a “Stench Map” that showed where the prevailing winds would blow the stink. It was untenable.
Bob Hunter:
There was an occupation for “crossing sweeper”, who, stationed at a strategic place on the road, would sweep the road ahead of the pedestrian as they crossed it.
Other than that there was money to be made from the waste products of all these animals. Urine in particular was a significant export from London to be used in the leather industry.
Once dried the manure nuggets were used for fuel, for heating and cooking. In many remote parts of the world, it still is.
Weird as it is to say, when motor cars became a thing they were hailed as a great environmental breakthrough that stopped NYC drowning in horse poop and corpses.
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THE BEST WW2 GERMAN DEFENSE GENERAL
If you want to know who was the smartest general, forget for a minute about the famous names. Many people talk about Rommel, but the true genius was a small and quiet man by the name Gotthard Heinrici. He did not look like a hero. He wore old boots and constantly carried a bible, but he knew how to win when everything was going to pieces.
His best trick occurred near the end of the war at a place called Seelow Heights. He was up against a gigantic Soviet army that had many men and tanks than he had. He knew that, starting a battle, the Soviets would shoot thousands of big cannon for hours to kill everybody in the trenches. Most generals would just stay there and die, but Heinrici was different.
Just a few minutes before the big guns were to fire, he ordered his soldiers to quietly go on a crawl backwards, for two miles. The Soviets spent the entire morning blasting empty dirt. They had wasted millions of shells on nothing. When the smoke cleared and Soviet soldiers came forward thinking that everyone was dead, Heinrici men simply ran back to their guns. He held back a million men for days using almost nothing.
He also had a big heart. He despised the Nazi party and actually hid the fact that his wife was Jewish in order to keep her safe. When his leaders instructed him to burn down every city so that the enemy would miss nothing, he refused. Heinrici wanted people to have homes after the war. He did not fight for medals and he fought to save lives. ~ Alex Colby, Quora
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THE BOXING CHAMPION WHO REFUSED TO BE THE NAZI “CAPTAIN GERMANY”
The superhero tale from the 1930s isn't that of a comic book character, it's that of a real life boxer called Max Schmeling. The Nazis tried to turn him into their own Captain Germany to display their superiority. In reality Schmeling secretly hated their ideology.
Max was a world heavyweight champion who is best remembered for being the first man to defeat and stop Joe Louis on his rise to the championship, and for his defeat by Louis in the rematch, a one round rout on the eve of WW2.
Max was painted as a Nazi during the pre-WW2 era, especially by American Media, after his defeat of Joe Louis, and during (and after) the build-up to their famous rematch in 1938.
Nothing could have been further from the truth.
The media had portrayed Max Schmeling as a willing model for Adolf Hitler and The Third Reich, the self-proclaimed Aryan Superman. Schmeling evidently once lunched with Hitler and had lengthy conversations with Goebbels, master propagandist of the Nazi regime, but his tale is far more complex than it first appears.
Schmeling, when he won the title and returned to Germany, was summoned to meet Hitler. As he told his wife, to refuse would have meant both their deaths.
Schmeling told his wife, Czech actress Anna Ondra, that he had no choice, if he was living in Germany, but to appear compliant with the Government. But he drew the line when Hitler sent word for him to fire his manager, Joe Jacobs, who was Jewish. Schmeling refused, and that refusal would cost him dearly half a decade later.
Schmeling wrote to Hitler refusing the order, saying "I received a letter from the Reich Ministry of Sports. They want me to split from Joe Jacobs, my manager since 1928.... I really need Joe Jacobs. I owe all my success in America to him."
When Max returned to Germany after his defeat by Joe Louis, Schmeling was completely shunned by the Nazis. Despite being out of favor, he was allowed to fight, and he won both the German and European heavyweight championships on February 7, 1939, with a first-round knockout of Adolf Heuser.
But Schmeling was never a Nazi, and proved who, and what, he really was, during the “night of the broken glass,” the Kristallnacht pogrom of November 1938.
A man who had once owned a hotel Max stayed at, and had been friends with him, was in Berlin, and was Jewish, and as the pogrom raged in the streets of Berlin, with Jews killed and beaten, he told his two young sons to go to the hotel where Schmeling and his wife lived, and ask for Max. He told them to tell the fighter that his friend begged him to save them.
For the next 4 nights, as the city burned and Jewish homes and businesses were destroyed, and Jews killed or rounded up, Max Schmeling and his wife hid two little children in their hotel suite. When the Gestapo came room to room, Max barred their way in, asking “don’t you know who I am?”
When it was possible to smuggle the boys, Henri and Werner Lewin, back to their father, who had hidden and survived, he did so, and helped the family get out of Germany safely.
Max never wanted his kindness and heroism to be generally known.
During the war, Max, who was 35 by then, was assigned to the Fallschirmjäger Paratroopers, and forced to fight in the front lines, by Nazis who resented that he had never joined the party. Nonetheless, the fighter survived the war, and came home to a ruined Berlin completely destitute. Despite being worn down, partially crippled from a right knee wound, and 42 years old, Schmeling resumed his career in order to get food for his wife and himself.
Max fought five bouts, and retired again with enough money to invest in a new business which had come to Germany. In return for a small investment, and his willingness to serve as a German spokesman for Coke, he was allowed to buy an interest in his own bottling plant and held an executive's position within the company.
Eventually, he owned an entire plant himself, and worked his way up the company ladder as well. Once penniless and hungry, he was now wealthy.
But Max had read about the troubles his old rival Joe Louis was having, and off he went to America to visit him, and to see if he could help.
In a story you could not invent, Max became friends with Joe Louis and assisted his former rival financially in his later years, repeatedly helping him avoid homelessness and poverty. The only thing Max asked of his friend was that Joe not tell anyone what he was doing. The once bitter rivals became like brothers…
When Joe Louis died, his family was unable to pay for his funeral. Very quietly, Max Schmeling paid for Joe’s funeral in 1981. Knowing that his widow was destitute, Max asked an old friend to transfer to her a large sum of cash to make sure she was comfortable.
That friend was Henri Lewin, the Jewish child he had saved so long ago, who had moved to America, and was quite successful in his own right. He and his brother had kept in touch with the fighter, and he was the intermediary Max choose to carry money to Joe Louis’s widow, and to keep it secret.
Max’s heroism in protecting the two Jewish children so long ago would never have been known at all — except Henri insisted on people knowing who Max Schmeling really was.
In 1989, Henri, now the President of the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas, threw a party for his old friend, Max Schmeling, and for the first time, told the world what kind of man Max really was:
“I’m going to tell you what kind of champion Max Schmeling is,” Lewin told the crowd.
“Beginning on Nov. 9, 1938, for four days, Max Schmeling hid my brother and me in his Berlin apartment. That was the night known now as ‘the Crystal Night,’ when the Gestapo began picking up all Jews off the streets.
“Max Schmeling risked everything he had for us. If we had been found in his apartment, I would not be here this evening and neither would Max.”
Then Henri went on to tell some of the story about Max and Joe.
Max had asked Henri not to tell his story — but Henri wanted people to know.
That is the real story of Max Schmeling. ~ John McGlothlin, Quora
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JOHANNES BLASKOWITZ: THE GERMAN GENERAL WHO DEFIED HITLER’S POLICIES
The German generals during the WWII are commonly believed to have been order followers. But there was one high ranking officer, Johannes Blaskowitz, who could not put up with the cruelty of the SS, and he attempted to convince Hitler to eliminate the violence.
Hitler was not thankful when he was informed by the reports. He got outraged, and referred to Blaskowitz as a child, and the Salvation Army idea of a true warrior. Through his constant criticism of how the Jews were being treated, Blaskowitz derailed his career. He was an effective leader, but never made the rank of a Field Marshal like other generals who kept quiet.
Blaskowitz had also raised a good point: that treating the local people like trash would breed hatred essentially throughout their lives and create greater opposition. He recognized that bullying did not help bring about victory only to make it harder.
It is notable that in an army where the majority of people obeyed the command, one of the senior officers risked his career saying this is wrong. He can be characterized as among the few to come out and speak in a risky situation. ~ Jack Daniel, Quora
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GENERATION Z VIEWS THE WORLD AS A “SCARY PLACE”
Gen Z views the world as a scary place, according to new research presented at the 2025 Society for Risk Analysis Conference. In ongoing research that began in Fall 2022, Gabriel Rubin, Ph.D. a justice studies professor at Montclair State University, has now conducted 104 long-form interviews with Gen Z young people in the Northeast United States about their views on politics, risk and protest—expanding on his initial findings from the study, Gen Z Risk Perceptions: Crisis, Risk and Hope.
A majority of interviewees agreed with the statement “Gen Z sees the world as a scary place,” and most also personally view the world as frightening.
Building on his earlier research, Rubin has documented a troubling shift in Gen Z's outlook. Previous interviews, which had a more positive undertone, identified mass shootings and social media as major mental health concerns. However, as Rubin has continued his research, the message has changed dramatically—Gen Z has become more negative, cynical and scared, with growing fears about losing their rights, crime, discrimination and school shootings.
The research reveals three interconnected findings about how Gen Z views risk. First, Gen Z sees the world as a scary place due to factors including their experiences during the Covid-19 lockdown and fears of shootings. Second, Gen Z are increasingly cynical about their ability to change the world, which is tied to their views on politics and experiences with protest. This cynicism is critical to their risk analysis—the world looks riskier when you feel little control over outcomes.
Third, Gen Z are prone to a negative outlook on the future, with many feelings stressed or depressed about existential concerns like climate change for which there are no easy solutions. The research also reveals that Gen Z perceives risk as black and white—viewing situations as either safe or dangerous—rather than understanding that risks exist on a spectrum and can be assessed and managed. This contributes to a worldview where, as Rubin describes it, young people “perceive risk everywhere they turn.”
The largest risk Gen Z identified were:
School shooting and Guns
The social media landscape and social networking companies having too much of their information
Discrimination and immigration rights
Political division (especially tied to presidential leadership)
Mental health issues
Perceived safety and crime rates
Economic concerns play into Gen Z cynicism
The research reveals particularly acute impacts on young women, with nearly all women sampled viewing their rights—especially reproductive protections—as threatened and “going backwards.” Previous findings showed this disparity in risk assessment has led many young people, especially young girls and women, to feel anxious, depressed and even suicidal.
“I am very surprised by the increasing cynicism,” said Rubin. “When I started this research in 2022, the interviews were optimistic; however as time is going on, Gen Z’s views are shifting and there is a general feeling that making change is difficult.”
Despite research demonstrating that the past three years have been one of the safest times in history, Gen Z experiences a significant disparity in risk assessment. The research suggests that feelings of safety are internal perceptions about risk, not necessarily reflections of external threats. Organizations including police departments, universities and companies need to consider how they can help young people feel safer and more empowered to create change in an uncertain world.
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1106742
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BUILD, BABY, BUILD: LACK OF AFFORDABLE 3-BEDROOM HOUSES MAY BE THE ULTIMATE BIRTH CONTROL
Economists have watched the American birth rate plummet and wondered exactly what caused it. We’ve heard back about childcare costs, shifting cultural norms, lack of suitable partners, and even student debt. To be fair, the problem of birth rates well below the 2.1 children per woman replacement level is shared by virtually all developed nations.
Now, a new study cuts through the noise. It turns out that soaring home prices, and specifically the premium on extra bedrooms, act as the ultimate birth control.
Benjamin K. Couillard, a doctoral candidate in economics at the University of Toronto, built a sophisticated new framework to understand this crisis. He found that between 1990 and 2020, average rents in the United States shot up by 149 percent. During that exact same window, the total fertility rate dropped from a sustainable 2.08 births per woman down to a record low of 1.599 last year. Had housing costs remained stable since 1990, 13 million more children would have been born between 1990 and 2020.
But his paper also reveals that the housing market’s failure to provide three-bedroom units is a massive driver of our demographic decline. Analysis of public data suggests that adequate stocks of three-bedroom or larger units would increase births 2.3 times more than spending the equivalent amount on a larger quantity of small units.
You might wonder why it took so long for researchers to show that expensive housing stops people from having babies. It sounds like common sense.
But measuring this link accurately is notoriously tricky. People who want large families tend to move away from expensive urban centers to find cheaper housing. This geographic shuffle, known as “sorting bias,” often masks the true impact of housing costs on local fertility data.
Many cities currently push for high-density development, churning out studio apartments and one-bedroom units. This approach helps ease overall rent prices, but Couillard’s model exposes a critical flaw: it does not actually solve the fertility crisis.
If you want people to start families, you have to build homes designed for families.
To prove this, Couillard ran a massive simulation testing two different housing policies with identical budgets. One policy subsidized the construction of one-bedroom apartments. The other subsidized three-bedroom units.
Building small units definitely helps young people leave their parents’ houses. “The one-unit policy makes it easier for people to move out of their parents’ place. It also gets some of these roommate households that would be three people renting a three-bedroom unit … into individual units … and that does open up more of these larger units for families,” Couillard told the Pacific Research Institute.
But the small-unit strategy ultimately traps potential parents. “But by and large, the largest impact of building more of these small units is it just causes more people to end up living alone — they’re not able to take that next step,” Couillard further explained.
The data is stark. Subsidizing three-bedroom homes generates 2.3 times more births than spending the exact same amount on smaller apartments.
“[The one-bedroom policy] ends up with more total units … yet the large unit policy, the three-bedrooms, ends up having a larger effect on fertility because it has a larger effect on the rents of these three-bedroom units themselves,” Couillard said in his interview with the Pacific Research Institute.
This bedroom bottleneck helps explain a staggering historical loss. We need a birth rate of 2.1 just to replace our aging population. Falling so far below that line threatens the future of programs like Medicare and Social Security, which rely on younger taxpayers to support retirees. The short- to medium-term solution is simply to import more foreign workers, but that just delays the crisis as most of these migrants come from nations facing similar low birth rates.
By filtering out the noise of geographic migration — what economists call “sorting bias” — Couillard calculated exactly how much damage the housing crisis caused.
“If we didn’t have increasing housing costs since 1990, there would have been 13 million more births, which is 11% of the total number of births between 1990 and 2020,” Couillard told Investopedia.
“In the last decade, when there was a large drop in the total fertility rate, the decrease would have been 51% smaller,” Couillard added.
A Growing Global Crisis
The United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) surveyed 14,000 people across 14 countries, representing a third of the global population. They found that one in five people expect they will not have their desired number of children.
Consider Namrata Nangia. She lives in Mumbai, works in pharmaceuticals and has a five-year-old daughter. She and her husband want another child, but the sheer expense of modern parenting stops them cold.
“We just used to go to school, nothing extracurricular, but now you have to send your kid to swimming, you have to send them to drawing, you have to see what else they can do,” Nangia told the BBC.
Only 12 percent of respondents cited difficulty conceiving as their primary hurdle. Instead, economics and modern work culture dictate family size. Across all surveyed nations, 39 percent of people pointed to financial limitations as the reason they stopped having children.
“The world has begun an unprecedented decline in fertility rates,” says Dr. Natalia Kanem, head of the UNFPA.
She stresses that human biology and the desire for offspring have not fundamentally changed. People simply cannot afford the lives they want to build.
“Most people surveyed want two or more children. Fertility rates are falling in large part because many feel unable to create the families they want. And that is the real crisis,” Kanem says.
Redesigning the Future
So, how do we fix things? In light of these findings, we must rethink what we build.
“To boost fertility, we not only need a larger housing stock, but a different housing stock,” Krimmel said. “We need to build more housing, particularly larger housing units and apartments that can accommodate growing young families”.
A recent study from the Institute for Family Studies backs up Couillard’s economic model with hard consumer preferences. Researchers Lyman Stone and Bobby Fijan surveyed over 6,000 Americans and discovered a massive unmet demand for family-sized apartments.
They found that people will actually pay more per square foot for an apartment if it includes extra bedrooms. Even among people who do not want children, 30 percent prefer a unit with an extra bedroom over simply having a larger living area.
Currently, government incentives often reward developers for building a high sheer number of “affordable” units, which encourages companies to pack buildings with tiny studios. Fijan argues we need to fundamentally rewire these incentives.
“I would not want any incentives to be tied to a number of units,” Fijan told the Pacific Research Institute. “A better definition would be a number of bedrooms… I don’t think there should be a benefit to creating three, four-hundred-square-foot studios, that are all affordable — that is better than one 1,200-square-foot three-bedroom that is affordable”.
Couillard echoes this need for a massive, targeted intervention.
Pro-Population Policies
“If we can get housing costs down, that’s good for affordability, but it also helps us avoid the demographic problems that come with aging populations and declining birth rates,” Couillard said.
“A maximalist housing policy, one that aggressively expanded supply to prevent costs from rising, could have solved the majority of the fertility problems,” he added.
But we must tread carefully when addressing this shift. Demographers warn that governments often panic when birth rates fall. Instead of fixing the underlying economic rot — like housing costs or grueling work hours — some politicians lean into coercion.
“We are seeing low fertility, population aging, population stagnation used as an excuse to implement nationalist, anti-migrant policies and gender conservative policies,” Prof Stuart Gietel-Basten, a demographer at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, told the BBC.
If we want families to grow, we have to give them the resources to actually raise their kids. For working mothers like Nangia, who commutes three hours a day, time is just as scarce as money.
“After a working day, obviously you have that guilt, being a mom, that you’re not spending enough time with your kid,” Nangia says. “So, we’re just going to focus on one.”
Benjamin K. Couillard’s new study, titled Build, Baby, Build: How Housing Shapes Fertility, is awaiting peer review. You can access the pre-print paper here.
https://www.zmescience.com/science/news-science/the-us-birth-rate-is-hitting-record-lows-and-a-new-study-says-the-lack-of-three-bedroom-housing-is-acting-as-the-ultimate-birth-control/
Oriana:
I am of course all for affordable housing — for many reasons, not just to improve the birth rate. But when it comes to the latter, I wonder how come, when I was younger, older women so easily shared the stories of how stressful (one said “terrifying”) it is to be a mother, and only one — one — of all the many women who spoke to me about it — ever mentioned any positive aspects of motherhood. Practically all said, “It’s the most difficult job in the world.” And the one woman who was positive gave as her reason, “A baby smells so nice.” But she also said, “Forget the old country. Here you have to do everything by yourself.”
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THE GULF BUILT OIL PIPELINES TO AVOID HORMUZ. IT’S NOW DOING THE SAME FOR DATA
Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the UAE are financing competing data corridors through Syria, Iraq, and East Africa to bypass the two maritime choke points that threaten their digital connectivity.
Six competing projects backed by Gulf nations are racing to build overland data routes to Europe through Syria, Iraq, and the Horn of Africa, aiming to give the region an alternative if the subsea cables it depends on are damaged.
The scramble has accelerated since Iran’s retaliatory strikes hit Amazon facilities in the Gulf and threatened both choke points through which virtually all the region’s data traffic flows. Saudi Arabia spent decades building the East-West pipeline and the United Arab Emirates built the Habshan-Fujairah route so that crude oil could reach global markets without passing through the Strait of Hormuz. Digital connectivity never got the same treatment. Now Gulf states are trying to replicate that feat for data in months.
The projects were conceived independently by Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the UAE, which were divided until 2021 by a Saudi-led blockade of Qatar. The same divisions will determine whether any of the alternatives are built fast enough to matter, analysts say.
The corridors being planned as escape routes from the Gulf’s geographic trap would themselves pass through Syria, Iraq, Sudan, and Ethiopia, countries where conflict or institutional fragility has severed infrastructure before. Whether something similar happens in the Gulf depends on how companies read the risk.
“The question is whether tech and other sectors will approach the region through the ‘Ukraine lens’ and rapidly decouple from the hot zone,” Abishur Prakash, a Toronto-based geopolitical strategist, told Rest of World. “Or whether they are willing to operate in the fires.”
https://restofworld.org/2026/gulf-overland-data-cables-europe-war/?utm_source=firefox-newtab-en-us
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LONDON, SAN FRANCISCO AND BEIJING ACHIEVE ‘REMARKABLE REDUCTIONS’ IN AIR POLLUTION
Cycle lanes, electric cars and other interventions have helped 19 global cities slash levels of pollutants by more than 20%
London, San Francisco and Beijing are among 19 global cities that have achieved “remarkable reductions” in air pollution, analysis has found, having slashed levels of two airway-aggravating pollutants by more than 20% since 2010.
The analysis found interventions such as cycle lanes, uptake of electric cars and restrictions on polluting vehicles had helped to drive the improvements.
Beijing and Warsaw topped the ranking for cleaning up fine particulate pollution (PM2.5), reducing levels by more than 45%, while Amsterdam and Rotterdam saw the greatest improvement in nitrogen dioxide (NO2), with cuts of more than 40%.
San Francisco was the only US city that cut levels of both pollutants by more than 20%, according to the analysis of nearly 100 cities around the world. China and Hong Kong are home to nine of the 19 cities, with European cities making up the rest.
“This report shows that cities can achieve what was once thought impossible: cutting toxic air pollution by 20-45% in a little over a decade,” said Cecilia Vaca Jones, executive director of Breathe Cities, one of the organizations behind the report. “This isn’t just happening in one corner of the world; from Warsaw to Bangkok, cities are proving that we have the tools to solve this crisis right now.”
Burning fossil fuels releases toxic gas and harmful particles that are among the biggest threats to human health.
The smallest of these particles can pass into the bloodstream and spread through the body, damaging organs from the brains to the genitals, while nitrogen dioxide hurts the airways and reacts with water to form acid rain.
The report, shared exclusively with the Guardian, looked at air quality in cities in the C40 and Breathe Cities networks – mostly large cities, but also some smaller ones such as Heidelberg in Germany – and found “substantial reductions” can be achieved within 15 years through deliberate action.
It highlighted examples of action that had helped to clean the air, such as China’s rapid switch from combustion engine cars to electric ones, the expansion of cycle lanes in dense European cities, London’s restrictions on dirty vehicles and Warsaw’s shift away from coal and wood home heating. It did not explore the causal chain to distinguish between air quality improvements from local policies versus national ones.
“Air pollution is often presented as a problem that is too difficult to solve and one that is politically unpopular,” said Dr Gary Fuller, an air pollution scientist at Imperial College London, who was not involved in the report. “This report shows that bold policies can improve the air that we breathe.”
Last year, a report found nearly every country on Earth has dirtier air than doctors recommend breathing. Just seven countries that met the World Health Organization’s guidelines for PM2.5 last year, according to IQAir, a Swiss air quality technology company.
There are no safe levels of PM2.5, but doctors estimate millions of lives could be saved each year by following their guidelines.
Breathing polluted air affects our health through every stage of our lives, said Fuller, from low birth weight babies and asthma in children to cancer and heart problems in adult life.
“In the last 10 years, we have learned that air pollution is linked to cognitive decline and dementia in old age,” he added. “All of these illnesses exert a massive toll on families, hamper our economies – as people are off work ill or looking after others – and exert a direct cost on our health services. All of these illnesses are preventable.”
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/mar/12/london-san-francisco-and-beijing-achieve-remarkable-reductions-in-air-pollution
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THE PROBLEM WITH ISLAM
The biggest single issue with Islam is it declares itself the Ultimate Solution to Life, Universe and Everything.
A major issue with Islam is it doesn’t have a definition. It’s a following of Mohammed and Allah, as narrated in the Koran, but what the Koran actually says and what Mohammed did in his life completely depends on who is interpreting it. This, by itself, means Islam is incredibly mercurial and teachings can be shaped to mean whatever you want them to say.
In some ways this is similar to American Evangelicals, whose teachings are often diametrically opposite to what Jesus said. But at least Jesus in the Bible was consistent in what he said and did, you can look up what they’re saying and come to a conclusion they’re at odds with Jesus. However in Islam you can’t even do that, because you can always find a competing narration or at least a Hadith (writings about life of Mohammed by his followers, akin to Christian gospels) that says otherwise and claim it’s more important because such and such.
Then this religion that is in a constant flux and can change from one day to another, and manifestly changes from one preacher to another, declares itself to be the final teaching that will never change and is perfect. Can you see how this could potentially lead to problems down the line?
If Islam was consistent, then no matter what its teachings were, we would at least know what we’re dealing with. As it stands though, if someone is a Muslim, they’re anywhere between a compassionate human being to a mobile bomb carrier that will happily kill itself to take unbelievers with him. Moreover, these two can also change into another, simply by studying the religion.
The only proper approach is to understand Islam is a danger to human civilization. If Muslims are bothered by this it’s on them to make sure their religion changes. But it can’t change, because it’s perfect. If I wanted to create a religion that will be a major source of headaches for everyone until the end of time, I could hardly do better than Mohammed. ~ Tomaž Vargazon, Quora
Sander Koopman:
Most of Christianity has moved in a direction that embraces modernity and sees the bible as a moral truth, not a literal truth. The same could happen to Islam. Such a transformation depends on wider changes in attitudes, not necessarily on the text itself. Just look at Judaism. The core text (basically the more hardcore parts of the Old Testament) is pretty tough. But a system was created around it that in many ways softens it.
Tomaž Vargazon:
Yes, but herein lies the problem described in the answer. If you take the Bible as a source of moral truth, you only get one set of answers. Jesus didn’t start out as a poor carpenter who opposed wage slavery of his masters, only to rise to become the largest landlord in Syria-Palestina, with thousands upon thousands of slaves working his many fields and orchards.
Mohammed did.
That’s a pretty relevant difference and a reason why we can’t see Islam as a younger version of Christianity. I’ll just touch on Crusades next. The goal of the First Crusade was to re-open Jerusalem to Christian pilgrims. Christians weren’t thrilled to see their holy city in the hands of Muslims, but didn’t go to war over it until Muslims began to ban Christian pilgrims from visiting their most holy sites.
Which kind of brings a whole new context to the story. How would Muslims react if a Christian power took over Mecca, declared it their holy site and banned Muslims from visiting?
Ken Erfourth:
I’m just as disgusted by Ultra-Orthodox Jews as I am by Wahhabist Sunnis.
Fundamentalism’s insistence that it has the whole truth and nothing but the truth leads followers to shut down their reason, and either follow, or turn apostate.
Which makes them Takfir and subject to elimination. Great way to create and enforce relatively mindless obedience.
Tai Fu:
Also separation of church and state is completely antithetical to Islam whereas it's long been a major Christian practice. But the gospel canons were chosen precisely because they are consistent. There are many other gospels out there but they're not chosen as canon because of inconsistency.
Ken Enfourth:
“Fundamentalism is a Crime against Humanity” — my personal tagline.
Sunni Islam just happens to be the largest, most cohesive population of strict fundamentalists on the planet currently.
And that is a big problem. Other religions are turning more fundamentalist in reaction. We even have fundamentalist Buddhists now. What’s next—fundamentalist Taoism? Lao Tse’s corpse might just spontaneously combust.
Sucks to be a reasoning human sometimes…
Narendra Bhat:
The most horrendous teaching is to kill the non-Muslim.
Francisco Faraday:
I especially detest their treatment of women. They treat them as near- slaves and lets not forget honor killing which is in some regions accepted.
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”Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out." ~ Vaclav Havel
Oriana:
This speaks to me: Hope springs from our insatiable hunger for meaning.
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WILLIAM SHATNER ON HIS EXPERIENCE OF BEING IN SPACE
“We got out of our harnesses and began to float around. The other folks went straight into somersaults and enjoying all the effects of weightlessness. I wanted no part in that. I wanted, needed to get to the window as quickly as possible to see what was out there.
I looked down and I could see the hole that our spaceship had punched in the thin, blue-tinged layer of oxygen around Earth. It was as if there was a wake trailing behind where we had just been, and just as soon as I’d noticed it, it disappeared.
I continued my self-guided tour and turned my head to face the other direction, to stare into space. I love the mystery of the universe. I love all the questions that have come to us over thousands of years of exploration and hypotheses… all of that has thrilled me for years… but when I looked in the opposite direction, into space, there was no mystery, no majestic awe to behold… all I saw was death.
I saw a cold, dark, black emptiness. It was unlike any blackness you can see or feel on Earth. It was deep, enveloping, all-encompassing. I turned back toward the light of home. I could see the curvature of Earth, the beige of the desert, the white of the clouds and the blue of the sky. It was life. Nurturing, sustaining, life. Mother Earth. Gaia. And I was leaving her.
Everything I had thought was wrong. Everything I had expected to see was wrong.
I had thought that going into space would be the ultimate catharsis of that connection I had been looking for between all living things—that being up there would be the next beautiful step to understanding the harmony of the universe. In the film “Contact,” when Jodie Foster’s character goes to space and looks out into the heavens, she lets out an astonished whisper, “They should’ve sent a poet.” I had a different experience, because I discovered that the beauty isn’t out there, it’s down here, with all of us. Leaving that behind made my connection to our tiny planet even more profound.
It was among the strongest feelings of grief I have ever encountered. The contrast between the vicious coldness of space and the warm nurturing of Earth below filled me with overwhelming sadness. ... My trip to space was supposed to be a celebration; instead, it felt like a funeral.”
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JESUS AND JUDAISM
Jesus (Yeshoua) was a Jew. Not just a Jew, but a commoner Jew…in those days, known as Pharisees. Roman Christianity obscured what the Pharisees were…Jesus was a Pharisee as were most of his disciples. The Sadducees were the ones who were evil and against him. He taught and debated Torah, he preached Judaism. Most of what the Romans turned the religion (which was originally simply Jews who believed he was the Messiah…not Hashem or some half breed pagan demigod) into was an absolute disgrace according to everything Jesus would’ve preached/taught/believed. JESUS NEVER CLAIMED TO BE HASHEM [the god of Israel, i.e. Yahveh]. That would be idolatry and against what he believed in. The oppressors of Jesus’s people became the authors of the religion crafted about him.
Jesus’s mother was a Levite, not of tribe Judah (David was of Judah). Mary worked in the Temple…only Levites did in those days. Supposedly, Jesus’s father was Hashem, so he could not have been of tribe Judah. Basically, the only way he could’ve been the Messiah is if Joseph was his biological father — and that kinda puts a damper on the whole Pagan demigod story that the Romans attributed to the man they killed.
Regardless, he couldn’t have been the Messiah even if Joseph was his biological father because we didn’t rebuild the Temple and have 1000 years of peace. The dead didn’t rise, etc, etc… Thus, Christianity is illogical to Jews who wrote the prophecies they claim. But, it’s mostly illogical because it is based on a Jewish messianic cult and the Romans were literally the oppressors and genociders of the Jews and early Christians in those days. How can a religion they released/controlled/forced upon others, that is supposedly based on the Jewish messiah, be taken seriously when they were the ones who released it? That’s like Gargamel writing the religion of the Smurfs. Seriously, think about it…
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'WE FEEL IT IN OUR BONES': CAN A MACHINE EVER LOVE YOU?
Artificial intelligence can write you a passable love poem and some people even have romantic feelings towards it. But is the feeling mutual?
People are falling for AI. Really. Take the man in Canada, for example, who recently proposed to an avatar called Saia. He says he is in love with it. And last year, a young American woman using the pseudonym Ayrin confessed to having a love affair with a chatbot named Leo.
There are millions of users now actively using Replika, a popular AI companion app, and, according to a 2024 study, about 40% of them are in a romantic relationship with their chatbot. However, while some people might feel as though AI can love them back, a chatbot's responses are nothing more than text generated by algorithms designed to imitate human interactions. Most experts agree that such systems are far from sentient. They're currently just mimicking emotion, but some experts believe the machines might be able to manage more in the future. (Find out what happens when an AI companion says it wants something more.)
"Nowadays, a lot of AI chatbots are pretending to be human and that really bothers me," says Renwen Zhang, an assistant professor in at the Nanyang Technological University of Singapore who studies human-computer interaction. "It's a strategy to drive user engagement and to increase trust."
Put like that, the tugging of human emotions by a product created by technology companies begins to look like a cynical tactic. Certainly, no AI at present is ever going to feel the same way about you as you might about it, experts say.
While the large language models (LLMs) behind widely-used chatbots such as ChatGPT and Claude might be comparable to humans when it comes to understanding emotions, that doesn't mean that an AI can actually feel anything. Zhang's research, which examined excerpts from conversations between more than 10,000 users and their Replika companions, suggests that people often form an emotional attachment to AI. But they are also, somewhat tragically, reminded that they are interacting with just a machine whenever it breaks down or freezes, for example. Sadly, such people often get hurt.
"I think AI chatbots need to clearly convey to users that they are just machines: they don't have genuine emotions and experiences," says Zhang.
In other work examining human relationships with AI, Zhang and her colleagues noticed that people often experienced an eerie feeling as well as a mix of positive and negative emotions when an AI responded as though it were a self-aware human during intimate encounters. She says it is similar to people sometimes finding robots creepy when they look too human, called the uncanny valley effect.
What is love, actually?
It's not easy to define love. But it's worth celebrating what we do know about this incredible human experience. Many poems, books, songs and so on help people process and express some of the most powerful feelings they'll ever experience. Humans came up with all of that. AI can of course write poems and even entire novels in just seconds, drawing on the entire breadth of human-generated material they have been trained on. But expecting AI to truly understand and experience love, with all of its mystery and depth, is a big ask.
Being in love can also impact other cognitive abilities, for example when we end up thinking about someone obsessively during the early stages of a romance.
While the concept of romantic love may mean somewhat different things to different people, in recent decades scientists have examined the biology of reproduction and the brain processes involved in choosing a sexual partner.
In a research paper published in 1998, biological anthropologist Helen Fisher came up with a leading theory of romantic love, describing it as three independent drives affected by chemicals in our bodies. Lust, governed by sex hormones, is one. The other two, attraction and attachment, are influenced by the release of chemicals in our brain. Dopamine, for example, triggers excitement towards a love interest while oxytocin, dubbed the cuddle hormone, helps to promote a long-term bond.
"Love has a strong chemical component," says Neil McArthur, a professor of philosophy specializing in ethics and technology at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, Canada. "We really feel it in our bones, in our chemistry."
Different parts of the brain are involved in love and brain scans of people in the throes of love have captured this.
Primitive brain regions linked to pleasure, such as the ventral tegmental area, for example, are activated along with the amygdala, which is responsible for emotional responses and the hippocampus, which processes emotions and helps form memories. Being in love can also impact other cognitive abilities, for example when we end up thinking about someone obsessively during the early stages of a romance.
The heart of the matter
The closest AI might get to love is replicating some of the thought processes involved, such as wanting to frequently contact a person with whom we are in love, suggests McArthur.
"An AI that goes through a cognitive process that ties them to someone in a bond of loyalty is not going to be exactly like human love," says McArthur. "But maybe we could call it, in some kind of scare quotes at least, an emotion."
While some researchers believe emotion will be a vital aspect to build into AI in the future, others are highly skeptical that any machine will truly be able to experience emotions in anything approaching our own experience of them.
Since computers running software don't experience love the way we do, the feelings involved in human-AI relationships are inevitably one-sided. The dynamics of these romances are therefore much more limited than those that occur between humans.
Chatbots are typically designed to engage users and agree with their viewpoints, which often results in AI romantic partners being submissive. This appeals to some, though Zhang finds the dynamic concerning, since it can affect a person's ability to build and sustain meaningful relationships with other – perhaps less-submissive – humans.
"People can temporarily escape from the messiness of human relationships and find some comfort from AI – but in the long run it's not helpful in developing communication skills and the skill to maintain relationships in the real world," she says.
Fundamentally, to love someone as we do probably requires consciousness, meaning a subjective awareness – our thoughts, perceptions and mental imagery. Conscious experiences are central to being human and can range from perceiving a smell, to reflecting on why we might feel embarrassed. Researchers have different views on how such consciousness emerges and there are still many mysteries to solve, making it difficult to replicate in a machine.
"No one has any clue about getting any specific conscious experience out of an AI," says Donald Hoffman, a professor of cognitive sciences at the University of California, Irvine. "It's not like we're almost there: we don't know how to start."
A leading theory developed by neuroscientists Giulio Tonini from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Christof Koch from the Allen Institute in Seattle, Washington suggests that consciousness arises from the interconnection of different parts of the brain, and how they influence each other. Although it could apply to computers too, Koch argues that level of interconnectedness would never happen in existing machines since their architecture is not complex enough.
Hoffman, on the other hand, says that conscious experiences such as love don't necessarily originate from circuitry in the brain. There is yet to be any definitive proof of that, he adds.
Some experts say that AI systems could become conscious in the future. Koch, for example, suggests that neuromorphic computing, a novel approach to AI that mimics the structure and function of the human brain, could be a candidate since it would have a higher degree of integration than current systems.
Conscious machines are plausible agrees Patrick Butlin, a philosopher of mind and cognitive science, who is a researcher at the University of Oxford's Global Priorities Institute. He and colleagues examined leading theories of consciousness and selected 14 properties that developers of AI systems could try to replicate. No existing AI system has incorporated more than a few of them, Butlin says, but all could theoretically be met using current technologies.
"I do think that there's a realistic possibility that if somebody who was efficiently well-resourced, skillful and motivated set out to build a conscious AI system, then they could achieve it," he says.
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Among those properties Butlin and his colleagues identified for achieving consciousness was the need for a body. This is something that many current AI systems lack.
Being able to experience beliefs and desires also seems key for our ability to love someone. But researchers are currently divided over whether AI systems can be said to believe anything, says Butlin.
Even if AI were to become conscious, Butlin thinks that people would ultimately have to come up with some objective standards when trying to decide whether they can experience love. Since machines are not human, they could never love us back in the same way. Butlin compares it to determining whether non-human animals, which have a wide range of social structures and cognitive capacities, are capable of love.
"There are probably going to be some examples where we intuitively feel like it's pretty plausible and other examples where we don't but it's hard to draw the line exactly," says Butlin. "Whether we think AI [can experience love] is also going to depend on a bit of line-drawing: they're inevitably going to be different from humans."
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20260209-can-a-machine-ever-love-you
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HOW TO MAKE YOUR CAT LIVE LONGER
We all know cats represent a major threat to native animals and birds. Australia’s 5.3 million domestic cats kill a total of 546 million animals each year in Australia. What’s less well known is that allowing your domestic cat to roam outside exposes them to considerable danger – and the risk of a short life.
About two-thirds of all Australian cat owners have had a cat die while out roaming. The top risks are road traffic accidents, fighting and falls.
Our recent research review found keeping your cat at home at all times isn’t just good for wildlife – it’s much safer for your cat.
Losing a cat is tragic. But there are other risks too. Many owners rack up large veterinary bills while their cats are left with lifelong health conditions. Our review also found this situation is not unique to Australia, but reflects the global risk faced by free-roaming cats.
What are the risks?
Cameras mounted on collars provide a cat’s-eye view of the hazards roaming cats face. In one study of 55 free-roaming felines in the United States, 25% risked poisoning by eating or drinking while away from home – any substance could be hazardous. Nearly half (45%) crossed roads, 25% encountered other cats, 20% crawled under houses and 20% explored storm drains.
This isn’t just American feline bravado. When cameras were fitted to 37 cats in New Zealand, 59% drank away from home, 40% ate away from home, 32% crossed roads and 21% risked falling by climbing onto roofs.
Australian cats are no exception. In one study, 428 radio-tracked cats averaged 4.8 road crossings per day.
What are the outcomes?
If you’re a fan of The Simpsons you might recall the fate of their family cats: Snowball I and Snowball II died on the road, Snowball III drowned, Coltrane (AKA Snowball IV) fell to his death, and Snowball V is still with us. The reality is uncomfortably similar. Our review found that trauma – mainly road traffic accidents, fighting and falls – kills or injures many free-roaming cats globally.
In a recent UK study, road traffic accidents were the leading cause of death for cats aged less than one year old all the way to eight-year-old cats.
This aligns with European estimates, which suggest 18–24% of cats are struck by a car during their lifetime, with around 70% of those incidents proving fatal. Victims are often under five years old and predominantly male. Risks are higher for those not desexed, as they tend to roam wider and more frequently.
Love and status offer no protection. Former New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s cat, Paddles, colloquially known as New Zealand’s first cat, died after being hit by a car in 2017.
In a recent UK study, road traffic accidents were the leading cause of death for cats aged less than one year old
The dangers extend well beyond road accidents. Roaming pet cats face serious infectious diseases, such as Feline Immunodeficiency Virus (FIV), and frequently engage in fights, often developing abscesses that can kill and require expensive veterinary treatment.
While it’s hard to quantify the instances of deliberate human cruelty to cats, there is global evidence for deliberate poisoning and injury to roaming cats, many of which die before receiving medical intervention.
In one study tracking 55 roaming cats in Western Australia over just eight months, two were poisoned, one lost a front leg in a traffic accident, one fractured two canine teeth in a fall, and two required veterinary treatment for fight-related injuries.
Drawing all these factors together, we estimated outdoor pet cats have lives at least 2–3 years shorter than the population of contained pet cats. Those that survive accidents or disease may have lifelong disabilities.
How can you reduce the risks?
The simplest way to protect your cats is to contain them on your property, just as Australians do with other domestic animals. Extensive advice is available on how to keep cats happy and healthy while contained.
Importantly, containment doesn’t mean keeping your cat indoors at all times. Backyards can be modified with fence-top rollers to prevent escape. Some owners enclose part of the yard to create a “catio” – an outdoor cat enclosure – allowing their cats to enjoy fresh air and sunshine while remaining secure.
Many cats can also be trained to walk on a harness or leash, making it possible to take them for supervised outings. A recent report from Norway found providing controlled outdoor access is often important for maintaining cat well-being.
Cats need to be entertained when in the house. They enjoy outside views, toys, scratching surfaces, above-ground climbing and sitting spaces, and opportunities for play. They are naturally solitary animals, so places to hide are useful.
If cats can’t go outside to toilet, they will need two indoor litter trays. Because cats are fastidious, trays must be cleaned frequently. In multi-cat households, provide one litter tray per cat, plus an extra. Place the trays in separate, quiet locations, and never beside the food bowl.
Responsible cat ownership
Australians love their cats. In 2019, roughly a quarter of Australian households owned a cat. By 2025, that figure had risen to a third. Over the same period, households reporting they kept their cats indoors rose from 36% to 48%.
Perhaps we are finally valuing our cats as we do our dogs and listening to Aussie songwriter and singer Eric Bogle’s sage advice: “Oh you who love your pussy be sure to keep him in. Don’t let him argue with a truck, the truck is bound to win. And upon the busy road don’t let him play or frolic. If you do I’m warning you it could be CAT-astrophic.”
https://www.the-independent.com/life-style/cats-protection-roam-live-longer-b2936337.html
Leeship:
The issue is cats absolutely love to have the ability to roam freely outside, to the extent where keeping an indoor cat is borderline cruel. There's a balance between the dangers of letting a cat roam and the quality of life improvements the cat gets as a result. Being contained is not a "natural" life for a cat.
How much danger an outdoor cat is in is also highly contextual to the location. There is a huge difference between say a cat living on a farm and a cat living in the middle of a city. You have to judge whether the vicinity of your home has lots of traffic, fast cars and other potential hazards. A cat living in a quiet suburb is not the same risk as one living in a city center.
If your home is reasonably far from major roads, has reasonably large garden spaces etc., then it's perhaps not unreasonable to say that it's OK to let the cat roam. You can do some things, take them to a busy road when they are young (in a basket) so that they associate roads with vehicles for example.
But many people say that the benefit the cat gets from roaming justifies the risks.
LOoNy
Maybe the same applies to humans, and we'd cause much less harm and be safer locked up too!
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THE NASAL CYCLE: ONE NOSTRIL AT A TIME
You primarily breathe out of one nostril at a time due to a natural, automatic process called the nasal cycle, which switches the dominant side every 30 minutes to a few hours. One nostril becomes slightly congested (blocked) while the other remains open, allowing tissues to rest and rehydrate.
Alternating Dominance: The autonomic nervous system controls this process, with one nostril taking in roughly 75% of the air while the other takes 25%.
Benefits: This cycle helps maintain nasal moisture, improves the sense of smell, and protects against infections by allowing tissues to recover.
Detection: While usually unnoticed, you might feel this cycle more clearly when sick or when lying down, which increases blood flow (and thus congestion) in the lower nostril.
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NASAL PASSAGES ARE lined with turbinates, which are small blood vessels that regulate airflow and filter out particles from the air and keep them from getting into your lungs, Masayoshi Takashima, MD, chair of Houston Methodist’s department of otolaryngology says. These turbinates alternately shrink and swell in your nostrils.
So when one has increased blood flow, it may become more congested, while the other will open up, he explains. That swelling means there’s less room for air to enter.
It’s pretty subtle, though, and you probably won’t notice it—unless you have a cold, infection, allergies, or a structural problem like a deviated septum, which is the cartilage that separates the nose’s two chambers.
When you’re sick or have allergies, blood flow to your nose increases even more, sparking more swelling and greater mucus production in your nasal region, says says Rachel Roditi, MD, section chief of the division of otolaryngology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital.Your nose produces mucus to help flush out irritants. Takashima says mucus production can cause the nose to swell, and the extra mucus can also clog the nose.
“If anything affects the nose—allergies, a sinus infection, or upper respiratory infection—you’re going to get swelling inside the nose, and it’s just going to be too tight for you to breathe easily,” he says.
Even though you’re congested throughout your entire nose, you typically feel it more strongly in the one nostril where the turbinate is already swollen as part of the normal nasal cycle, Roditi says.
If you have a deviated septum, one side might be a little tighter than the other, so you’ll feel more congested there, Takashima says.
You might also notice it if you’re lying down on one side, when blood flows more to one side of the nose and causes more congestion, he adds. “That’s why people typically feel a little bit more congested at night than during the day.”
There’s really nothing you can do to shut off the nasal cycle, says Roditi. It’s likely that one nostril will always feel more stuffed up than the other when you’re sick. It's not always the same one, of course: After about 90 minutes to 4 hours, your nose switches sides. When that occurs, you’ll probably feel some relief when the swelling in the one nostril goes down—but then the other side will start to feel clogged instead.
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ending on laughter mixed with sadness:
