Jenny Barron: “Scissorbirds”
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ASPHODEL
When the darkness seized me,
the great love of my youth,
when I dared to reach for
the forbidden flower,
the earth opened and horses
rearing like black smoke
carried me off to marry
the Invisible Lord —
Because love has two blossoms:
narcissus and asphodel.
A hundred-headed narcissus!
A hundred wishes, ten thousand —
and echo has the last word.
Narcissus — flower of youth,
rippling into departure.
Asphodel swaying in twilight
memory of wind and sun,
you have no scent except
in the mind that remembers.
Asphodel, flower of soul,
of love at the ripe hour.
The ancients understood
the soul feeds on flowers.
Even in hell, shadows
that remember flowers.
Death’s bride, bringer of springtime,
I walk in mothlike meadows.
~ Oriana
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HOLY MATRIMONY: GEROGE ELIOT’S SECULAR SACRAMENTS
When the novelist turned away from holy writ, marriage—and the sanctified text of the novel—became the center of her moral universe.
“Literature bores me, especially great literature,” the narrator of one of John Berryman’s “Dream Songs” says. George Eliot sometimes bores me, especially the George Eliot draped in greatness. Think of the extremities of nineteenth-century fiction: labile Lermontov; crazy, visionary Melville; nasty, world-hating Flaubert; mystic moor-bound Brontës; fanatical, trembling Dostoyevsky; explosive Hamsun. There’s enough wildness to destroy the myth of that stable Victorian portal “classic realism.”
It was not classic—certainly not then—and not always particularly “real.” Instead, it was a storm of madness, extravagant allegory, tyrannical ambition, violent religiosity, violent atheism. Amid this tableau, at the calm median of the century’s religious belief and its unbelief, is wise, generous George Eliot: the saintly oracle consulted and visited by young Henry James and many other important admirers (Wagner, Emerson, Turgenev), sitting on her moral throne like a more interesting Queen Victoria (the Queen was, in fact, one of her eager readers), in her distinguished house in Northwest London, named, fittingly, the Priory.
It was this George Eliot whom Virginia Woolf had in mind when she wrote, in 1919, that the long-faced, oracular Victorian had become, for Woolf’s generation, “one of the butts for youth to laugh at.” When George Eliot became respectable, she became very respectable indeed. In the eighteen-seventies, at the height of her career, she received visitors at the Priory on Sunday afternoons. Her devoted husband, George Henry Lewes, who was known to call his wife Madonna and these Sunday audiences “religious services,” bossily hovered and hosted, sometimes drawing guests to his study, where, beneath a portrait of the novelist, her manuscripts were covered, shrinelike, by a curtain.
This George Eliot was not only the celebrated author of “Adam Bede” (1859), “The Mill on the Floss” (1860), and “Middlemarch” (1871) but the purveyor of “Wise, Witty and Tender Sayings” (1872), a briskly selling book of extracts from her work compiled and prefaced by a young devotee who thanked her for having “sanctified the Novel by making it the vehicle for the grandest and most uncompromising moral truth.”
In an age that sanctified marriage, George Eliot was nearly the most sublimely married person in the land. In her letters and journals, in the manuscripts she unceasingly dedicated to her husband, she gave thanks for her marital fortune, for the beautifully sympathetic “double life” she shared with George Lewes, a distinguished essayist and thinker in his own right. Her journals describe the tranquillity of their shared days in London, or deep in the English countryside, or traveling in Germany and Italy: mornings reserved for writing, a walk or a museum visit in the afternoon, evenings for reading, often aloud to each other—a strenuous ease she called “a happy solitude à deux.”
Yet George Eliot wasn’t legally married to George Lewes, who was separated from, but could not divorce, his wife, Agnes Jervis. George Eliot wasn’t always George Eliot, either: she was Marian Evans when she first eloped for the Continent with Lewes, in July of 1854, escaping English judgment for European indifference.
Born as Mary Anne Evans in 1819, the same year as the future Queen Victoria, she grew up in the rural Midlands, a settled and conservative region that she would later fictionalize as Loamshire—the stubborn stomach of England, slow to digest politics into action. Her father, whose formal education was basic, was a shrewd and trusted estate manager for an aristocratic Warwickshire family. Mary Anne’s brother, Isaac, apparently as averse to change as his father, succeeded him in the same job.
But Mary Anne couldn’t stay put. She was a restless reader who had an aptitude for languages (one of her early crushes was on a private tutor who taught her Italian and German), and she possessed, even as a teenager, the kind of scorching, radical austerity that turns intellectuals into prophetic outsiders, a status she awarded to several of her fictional protagonists—Maggie Tulliver, Dorothea Brooke, and Daniel Deronda. The adolescent Mary Anne was herself a fervently pious evangelical, seething with Calvinist fatalism, wary of non-sacred music, and forswearing her attraction to her tutor by quoting a verse from the Book of Isaiah: “Cease ye from man.”
But on Sunday, January 2, 1842, something wondrous and strange occurred. As if the new year demanded from her a new soul, the twenty-two-year-old Mary Anne Evans, who still lived at home as her father’s housekeeper, announced that she would not go to church. In the nineteenth century, there were at least three reliable germs of religious doubt; all three infected some people at once. You might brood over theodicy (how to reconcile God’s supposedly providential goodness with the pain of the world); you might brood over evolution and the long history of the world (this sometimes overlapping with theodicean anxieties, since the long history of the world would appear to be an epic of suffering and extinction); and you might start reading the Bible stories as if they were stories, rather than divine revelation.
Mary Anne Evans succumbed to the third illness. Around this time, she read Charles Hennell’s “Enquiry Concerning the Origin of Christianity,” published three years earlier, and concluded that the Biblical accounts of Jesus’ ministry were “histories consisting of mingled truth and fiction.”
The Scriptures might not be divinely authoritative, she told her bewildered father, but there was much about Jesus’ moral teaching that she found admirable. Here was the characteristic overcorrection of the mid-century: a slightly nervous compensation for sudden loss, like overpraising a relative at his funeral.
The German scholar David Friedrich Strauss similarly compensates for the loss of God in his immensely influential revaluation of the Biblical narratives, “The Life of Jesus, Critically Examined” (1835); Ernest Renan does the same in his popular biography “The Life of Jesus” (1863). The air had gone out of the theology, but the moral cushions could still be plumped up. That inflation repelled Nietzsche, who, in “Twilight of the Idols” (1889), attacks George Eliot as one of those Victorian moralists who have “got rid of the Christian God, and now feel obliged to cling all the more firmly to Christian morality.”
Renan, a flowery stylist who splashes consoling perfume over Christ’s corpse as he flees, deserves Nietzsche’s hammer. But George Eliot was intensely sincere in both her agnosticism and her moralism. And, more than just sincere, she was strict, searching, systematic, scholarly. She had thought her way into evangelicalism; now she thought her way out of Christian belief. She translated David Strauss in the eighteen-forties. In the early eighteen-fifties, she would translate Ludwig Feuerbach’s “The Essence of Christianity” (originally published in German, in 1841), a prescient work in the literature of atheism which argues with a brisk and almost jaunty logic that the love of God is really just the love of man; that we project onto the divine those qualities which we cherish in ourselves. And she read Baruch Spinoza, beginning in the eighteen-forties with the Dutch philosopher’s “Theological-Political Treatise” (originally published in 1670) and moving on to the “Ethics” (1677), which she arduously translated from the Latin in the mid-eighteen-fifties.
Spinoza was infamous for his sometimes inscrutable variety of pantheism, in which God no longer sits outside Nature, paring his fingernails (James Joyce’s joke), but effectively is Nature, inextricable from it. The supernatural, miracle-working, interventionist God, loaded up with human attributes and projections, slips away into Nature. For all practical religious purposes—prayer, comfort, salvation, immortality—Spinoza kills off God, as many humans would understand the notion. Spinoza was excommunicated by the Jewish community of Amsterdam in 1656, and could probably still get himself excommunicated somewhere today. But he had his own way of compensating for theological lack, and its clearest articulation is to be found in his earlier work the “Theological-Political Treatise.”
In that incandescent text, Spinoza argues, among other things, that the Biblical miracles were not miraculous; that divinity is at bottom the moral law; that the essence of that law consists of loving God and loving one’s neighbor; that right living therefore has nothing to do with one’s beliefs or doctrines but is simply a matter of obeying and piously enacting the law; and that this law is divinely inscribed in our hearts.
All of which raises the haunting question of whether this universal moral law needs Scripture or the Almighty at all. Does the Good need God—or, rather, “God”? Not for a twentieth-century writer like Iris Murdoch, a novelist who is, in some ways, George Eliot’s nearest intellectual successor, and who writes, “The image of the Good as a transcendent, magnetic center seems to me the least corruptible and most realistic picture for us to use in our reflections upon the moral life.” George Eliot was always drawn to the magnetic center of the Good. It’s easy to see how appealing this kind of idea might have seemed to an intensely religious, morally provoked, and theologically dispossessed Victorian intellectual, one who was, furthermore, not many years away from attempting to write her own kind of Scripture, Scripture in a different, newer language: the sanctified novel.
This was the writer and thinker who crossed paths with George Lewes, in a Piccadilly bookshop, in 1851: fierce, unrespectable, uninsured. She had arrived in London at the start of that year, had changed her name to Marian, and by the end of it was the de-facto editor of the capital’s leading progressive journal, The Westminster Review.
During the next few years, she published there a series of brilliant essays, the most exciting of which belongs in the annals of anti-religious complaint, her decapitation of the evangelical preacher Dr. Cumming, with its devastating opener: “Given, a man with moderate intellect, a moral standard not higher than the average, some rhetorical affluence and great glibness of speech, what is the career in which, without the aid of birth or money, he may most easily attain power and reputation in English society?”
One can forget what a funny satirist George Eliot was. In “Adam Bede,” for instance, the once religious writer, who knew exactly how dreary Sundays could be, tells us that even the farmyard animals appeared to recognize the Sabbath: “The cocks and hens seemed to know it, and made only crooning subdued noises; the very bull-dog looked less savage, as if he would have been satisfied with a smaller bite than usual.” Anyone who has read “Middlemarch” remembers these formidable words about Mr. Casaubon, the parched parson and scholar: “With his taper stuck before him he forgot the absence of windows, and in bitter manuscript remarks on other men’s notions about the solar deities, he had become indifferent to the sunlight.”
But funnier and more compact is this addition, several paragraphs later: “‘Yes,’ said Mr Casaubon, with that peculiar pitch of voice which makes the word half a negative.” Casaubon, though, is almost avuncular when set alongside the loathsome Henleigh Grandcourt, from “Daniel Deronda” (1876). Like Henry James’s Gilbert Osmond, Grandcourt is terrifying in his very calm, “a handsome lizard,” a bully incapable of love who speaks to his abused wife, Gwendolen, in “an adagio of utter indifference.” And he has many dogs: “Grandcourt kept so many dogs that he was reputed to love them.”
The humanist takes human nature as it comes; the religionist tries to improve it, starting with herself. George Eliot’s novels are full of personal renunciations and reformations. Adam Bede wins the joyous ending of marrying Dinah Morris only by undergoing a moral transformation that earns an authorial blessing churchy enough to sound like something from the marriage service itself: “What greater thing is there for two human souls, than to feel that they are joined for life—to strengthen each other in all labour, to rest on each other in all sorrow, to minister to each other in all pain, to be one with each other in silent unspeakable memories at the moment of the last parting?”
Both Rosamond Vincy and Gwendolen Harleth, in “Middlemarch” and “Daniel Deronda,” respectively, learn to become better people by, essentially, wanting less. Carlisle, indeed, offers the rather brilliant insight that the relationship between Dorothea Brooke and her less morally intense sister Celia, in “Middlemarch,” may echo an element of Eliot’s marriage to Lewes: Lewes as Celia, content enough to take reality as it is, and Eliot as Dorothea, impatient to change it.
There were plenty of English Victorians, Christian at least in their self-reckoning, who wanted to improve Marian Evans’s behavior, once the news emerged that she was living with a man who was not her legal husband. Her brother, Isaac, did not communicate with his sister for the next twenty-three years, breaking his silence only after George Lewes’s death, to commend her legal marriage to Lewes’s sapless successor, a banker named John Cross. Twenty-three years represented the heart of Eliot’s literary career, the two decades in which she became the country’s most admired novelist.
Even some of those admirers were squeamish. Elizabeth Gaskell, writing to Eliot to praise her work, couldn’t avoid adding, “I wish you were Mrs Lewes . . . still, it can’t be helped.” Eliot and Lewes held their “religious” audiences on Sundays not because they were taking confession but because the business of how to socialize was so tricky: early in their marriage, Eliot decided that she would guard herself against slights by refusing all social invitations. When married men came to the Priory, they almost always came without their wives.
One of the loveliest things about George Eliot’s life is the calm confidence with which she slays the dragonish norm-keepers of Victorian morality. She wrote to her brother’s lawyer with gentle emphasis: “Our marriage is not a legal one, though it is regarded by us both as a sacred bond.” In one sense, it must have seemed as simple as that. She was blessed to love and be loved by the man she called her husband. The doubters had to catch up.
But it could not be quite as simple as that. Carlisle has a very sensitive chapter, for instance, about Eliot’s relation to motherhood. She and Lewes had no children of their own, but Lewes brought with him three sons—Charles, Thornton, and Bertie—from his previous marriage. Eliot was painstakingly sincere in her attentions as stepmother to the boys (who were largely absent, away at boarding school).
Playing the right role as mother, Carlisle acutely suggests, would strengthen Eliot’s claim to be Lewes’s wife. She traces the awkward growth of Eliot’s self-appellations. Letters from stepmother were first stiffly signed “Marian Lewes,” then “Mother” (though Eliot enclosed the word in quotation marks), and finally, Teutonically, “Your loving Mutter,” which seemed the best compromise. As far as one can tell, it was a loving and mutually respectful relationship.
In order to achieve what she did, she had to live the somewhat clandestine double life of the artist-spy: warm wife in the drawing room, and absolute writer in the study. Her life was a happy “solitude à deux,” but an imperative solitude nonetheless. (In “Middlemarch,” Eliot brilliantly describes Rosamond’s unhappy marriage to Lydgate as “a yoked loneliness.”)
By centering the religion of marriage, Carlisle usefully allows us to read George Eliot’s peculiar strain of religious agnosticism in its light. Eliot’s religiosity, the thing the spitefully unmarried Nietzsche so hated, was inseparable from the religion of marriage. “The very possibility of a constantly growing blessedness in marriage is to me the very basis of good in our mortal life,” she wrote to a correspondent. Perhaps the magnetic center of the Good was no more and no less than the magnet of marriage?
Return to the eloquently calm defense she offered her brother’s lawyer: “Our marriage is not a legal one, though it is regarded by us both as a sacred bond.” It is, Eliot says here, not the letter of the law but the spirit that is sacred. Inwardness is outwardness. That’s George Eliot’s “religion” in a sentence. But which comes first, the belief in the primacy of inwardness or the belief in the intimacy of marriage? Either way, the danger, from the viewpoint of official Victorian Christianity, is that the sacred has been redefined without ecclesiastical warrant. And if the sacred can be thus redefined then everything is up for grabs.
This emphasis on inwardness is obviously a kind of Protestantism—in particular, the kind of dissenting spiritual enthusiasm to which all Protestantism inevitably leads. But the sentiment is perfectly compatible with Spinoza’s theological ethics. For Spinoza, the summit of the moral law is charity, loving-kindness, and this moral law is inscribed on our hearts. We prove ourselves moral, then, not by what we profess but by how we live, and therefore by how we love; we will be known by the quality of the marriage that we make with the world, by the moral marriage we make with our neighbors. That is what Spinoza, who was himself unmarried, calls “true religion.” Everything else is hypocrisy and superstition.
So there was the religion of marriage, the religion of Spinoza, and the religion of the novel. That constituted George Eliot’s holy trinity. The novel, after all, was the greatest engine of inwardness in the nineteenth century, the form that represented but also produced a godlessly “sacred” interiority. “We all have a better guide in ourselves,” Jane Austen’s Fanny Price says, “if we would attend to it, than any other person can be.” Or than any God can be? George Eliot has Adam Bede voice what is almost a commonplace of the nineteenth-century novel when he says that “real religion” is not doctrines (what he calls “notions”) but feelings: “It isn’t notions sets people doing the right thing—it’s feelings.”
Throughout the nineteenth century, we find the novelist waging war with hypocrisies and doctrines, religious and social, and often with the civil law that ritualistically enacts them, on behalf of the particularity and saving inwardness of the stubbornly individual fictional character. You could say that the nineteenth-century novel is so full of complicated “characters” precisely because they are so furiously resisting a society that simplifies them.
Women, of course, were most obviously menaced by society’s simplifications. “We don’t ask what a woman does—we ask whom she belongs to,” Philip Wakem’s father announces in “The Mill on the Floss.” For the novelist, the natural habitat of these resistant women was marriage. And, as the century progressed, the thing they were resisting became marriage itself.
Eliot would have known better than to poke the long, exploratory fingers of the novel into the thing she had with Lewes. Perhaps the great fortune of her marriage, illegal but sacred, seemed so miraculous and undeserved that she felt as if she were holding her breath for twenty-four years? We can say with decent confidence that George Eliot’s marriage to George Henry Lewes realized, insofar as any worldly union can, the Good, here and now and not elsewhere: together they forged a brazier of love, and warmed themselves at its flame. Devotion to writing may indeed shine most vividly in Eliot’s correspondence and journals, but it did not displace marital devotion. Perhaps it even augmented it. Carlisle is struck by the “quality of devotion” that runs through the marriage, and writes movingly about its entailments: “It is attention given, work done, tasks shared, disappointments borne, anger endured, quarrels forgiven, loss grieved.”
In this spirit, Eliot wrote a remarkably beautiful and tender epigraph for the last chapter—the marriage coda—of “Daniel Deronda”: “In the checkered area of human experience the seasons are all mingled as in the golden age: fruit and blossom hang together; in the same moment the sickle is reaping and the seed is sprinkled; one tends the green cluster and another treads the wine-press. Nay, in each of our lives harvest and spring-time are continually one, until Death himself gathers us and sows us anew in his invisible fields.” She published these words in 1876. What did she already apprehend? Two years later, Death would gather her dear husband, a man about whom one of her admirers wrote, “The secret of his lovableness was that he was happy in being kind.”
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/09/11/the-marriage-question-george-eliots-double-life-clare-carlisle-book-review
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HITTITE: THE EARLIEST INDO-EUROPEAN LANGUAGE
In 1915, a linguist staring at a 3,600-year-old clay tablet recognized a shockingly familiar word: wa-a-tar (water). He had just unlocked the oldest Indo-European language.
In 1906, archaeologists excavating the ancient city of Hattusa in central Turkey discovered an archive of 10,000 clay tablets. While scholars could read the cuneiform script—a writing system borrowed from Akkadian—the language itself was complete gibberish. That changed when Czech linguist Bedřich Hrozný proved the language, known as Hittite, belonged to the Indo-European family. With tablets dating back to the 16th century BCE, Hittite is centuries older than the earliest texts in Vedic Sanskrit or Mycenaean Greek, breaking the long-held assumption that early Indo-European languages had to originate in India or Greece.
Despite the Hittite Empire being surrounded by non-Indo-European languages like Hattic and Hurrian, its core vocabulary remained distinctly familiar. Beyond wa-a-tar, Hrozný translated verbs like e-ez-za-at-te-ni (you will eat). Other basic terms like yugan (yoke) and nepis (sky/heaven) firmly anchored it to the linguistic family tree that eventually produced English.
Linguistically, Hittite is famous for proving a "ghost sound" theory. In 1879, Ferdinand de Saussure hypothesized that Proto-Indo-European must have had a series of mysterious laryngeal consonants that disappeared in all known daughter languages (like Latin and Sanskrit), leaving only traces behind by lengthening adjacent vowels.
For decades, it was an unprovable mathematical-style deduction. When Hittite was deciphered, linguists found it actually contained these primitive laryngeal consonants (often transliterated as ḫ). Hittite had preserved a primitive feature of the ancestral tongue that every other branch had lost.
Hittite also features a curiously simple grammar compared to its linguistic cousins. While ancient Indo-European languages like Latin and Sanskrit developed a complex three-gender system of masculine, feminine, and neuter, Hittite only distinguishes between two: animate (living things) and inanimate (objects). It also lacks their complex tense and mood systems. Rather than Hittite losing these features over time, linguists now believe the Anatolian branch split off from Proto-Indo-European before the masculine/feminine distinction or complex verb systems fully evolved, making it a linguistic "aunt" to the rest of the Indo-European family rather than a direct sister.
A 14th-century BCE Hittite cuneiform tablet excavated from Hattusha, describing a cultic festival.
~ SepiaGlyphs, Quora
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WHAT HAMAS UNDERSTOOD THAT WE DIDN’T
In January 2024, while Israeli soldiers were still pulling bodies from kibbutz homes, Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh addressed a conference of Islamic scholars in Doha. “We should hold on to the victory that took place on October 7 and build upon it,” he said. “Time is on our side.”
He was not being defiant. He was being accurate.
By February 2025, senior Hamas officials were describing October 7 publicly as a “historic success.” By September 2025, another Hamas official told CNN the attack had created a “golden moment” for the Palestinian cause. These were not the claims of an organization in denial about what the war had cost Gaza. They were the assessments of an organization that had run a specific calculation before the attack and was watching that calculation prove correct.
The calculation was not military. Hamas knew the IDF would respond. They knew Gaza would be devastated. They knew their own leadership would be hunted and killed. They planned the attack anyway because they were not running a military calculation. They were running an institutional one.
A document Sinwar wrote by hand in August 2022, more than a year before the attack, captures the calculation precisely. He predicted Israel would be “surprised by the attack and enter into chaos” before responding with “the means and weapons at its disposal.”
He added: “It is possible that it will even use a nuclear bomb.” He proceeded with the plan. The military risk, up to and including nuclear annihilation, was a price he had already decided to pay. The bet he was making was not military. It was institutional.
They had studied Western progressive institutions, their ideological architecture, their frameworks, their reflexes, and they concluded that those institutions would convert Jewish death into Israeli guilt, that the human rights infrastructure would perform against Israel on schedule, and that the aftermath would damage Israel more than the attack damaged Hamas.
They were right about all of it. Nearly three years later that is not argument. It is record.
The framework that activated within hours of October 7 did not arrive by accident. It was installed.
In 1978, Edward Said’s Orientalism gave the project its theoretical foundation. Said’s argument had genuine force. It also had a specific intended application, one he pursued explicitly in his parallel work as a political advocate: to embed the Palestinian cause within the emerging academic language of postcolonial theory, which was gaining institutional purchase in universities across the United States and Britain. The application to Israel was not incidental to the framework. It was the purpose.
From that foundation, the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, formalized in 2005, built the institutional campaign. BDS was not merely an economic boycott. It was an explicit effort to install a specific reading of Israel, as settler-colonial apartheid state, into the organizations that would matter: universities, student governments, trade unions, professional associations, NGOs. Its architects understood that winning the argument in academic departments was the prerequisite to winning it in the streets.
By 2023, the installation was largely complete. The vocabulary, settler, colonizer, apartheid, resistance, indigenous, occupied, had been normalized in exactly the institutions that activated within hours of October 7. The pathway from Said’s academic argument to the Harvard statement is not a straight line. It is a line. This is not conspiracy. It is documented history, with identifiable architects and traceable funding.
The project did not stop at universities and NGOs. It moved into electoral politics. The Democratic Socialists of America, which formally endorsed BDS in 2017, spent the years since October 7 hardening that commitment into ideological law. At its 2025 national convention in Chicago, DSA passed Resolution 22, “For a Fighting Anti-Zionist DSA,” making support for Israel’s right to self-defense a formal expellable offense within the organization. The vote was 675 to 524.
The politician most responsible for DSA’s national electoral relevance, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, had her endorsement withdrawn in 2024 for declining to meet the organization’s conditions on BDS. She had become a disciplinary case. DSA now counts over 120,000 dues-paying members and more than 250 elected officials across 40 states. Its endorsed candidate Zohran Mamdani won the New York City mayoralty in 2025 on an explicitly anti-Zionist platform. The framework Said built in the academy, BDS institutionalized in NGOs, is now running for office. It is winning.
Hamas watched this project unfold over decades. They did not build the framework. They read it the way a military planner reads terrain: as fixed infrastructure to be accounted for, planned around, and ultimately used. They needed only to know it was there.
Hamas knew Israel would respond militarily to a massacre of its civilians. They knew Palestinian civilian casualties would follow. They planned for it. The tunnels beneath hospitals, the weapons stored in schools, the command infrastructure embedded in civilian residential areas: these were not concealment failures or the improvised choices of a desperate organization. They were deliberate positioning, designed to ensure that Israeli military action, however precise, would produce images that the pre-installed framework would process as Israeli atrocity.
The calculation was not that Hamas would avoid Palestinian civilian casualties. It was that Palestinian civilian casualties were the mechanism. The suffering of Palestinian civilians was not the cost of the operation. It was the operation.
They also understood, because the record demonstrated across decades of previous attacks, that Jewish suffering occupies a specific position within Western progressive institutions. It is the one form of suffering for which context is always immediately and automatically available. There is always a “but.” There is always a history. There is always a framework within which the murdered can be explained as consequences rather than victims.
Rockets fired at Israeli civilians became responses to occupation. Suicide bombings became products of desperation. The pattern had held after every previous Hamas attack, at progressively larger scales. Hamas concluded it would hold at the scale of October 7. The Nova festival. Kibbutz Be’eri. The families murdered in their beds. All of it would be explained within a narrative in which the murdered bore some structural responsibility for their own deaths.
What about the human rights infrastructure? It had been rehearsing for years. The United Nations Special Rapporteur on Palestinian Territories had already addressed a conference of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad leaders and told them they had the right to resist occupation. She had described the United States as subjugated by the Jewish lobby. She held her position. The International Criminal Court had been building toward Israeli prosecutions years before October 7. The UN Human Rights Council had more standing agenda items on Israel than on every other country on earth combined. Hamas read the institutional record and concluded the machinery would fire on schedule.
And progressive movements with no shared values would march anyway. Hamas governs a territory where LGBTQ people are imprisoned or killed, where women have no legal equality, where political opposition is crushed, where free speech does not exist. The progressives who would march for Hamas the day after October 7 would be executed for their identities in any territory Hamas controls. Hamas understood this and found it strategically irrelevant. What mattered was immediate political cover while the bodies were still warm.
This was not a hope. It was a calculation. And every point of it was correct.
The proof arrived on schedule.
On October 7, within hours of the attack, 34 student organizations at Harvard University, including the Amnesty International affiliate, signed the statement. Israel entirely responsible. Apartheid regime. The only one to blame. No condemnation of Hamas. No acknowledgment of the hostages. No mention of the 1,200 murdered civilians. Before the bodies were counted.
On October 10, BLM Chicago celebrated the paragliders. The weapon used to murder 260 people at a music festival became a symbol of resistance on the social media account of America’s most prominent racial justice organization. Their subsequent statement was not an apology. “We stand with Palestine and the people who will do what they must to live free.” The people who will do what they must had filmed themselves raping women in a field.
Francesca Albanese, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Palestinian Territories, responded to Macron’s description of October 7 as the largest antisemitic massacre of the century with a single post: “The victims of October 7 were not killed because of their Judaism, but in response to Israeli oppression.” The UN’s appointed human rights monitor decided, in a sentence, that 1,200 murdered Jews were not victims of antisemitism but consequences of Israeli policy.
At a UN press conference in September 2025, she claimed the real death toll in Gaza was 680,000, including 380,000 infants under the age of five. The Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics records only 341,790 children under five living in the Gaza Strip in total. When this was pointed out, Albanese admitted she had used the figures deliberately, saying she mentioned them “in a provocative way” because it “had the effect I wanted.”
The UN’s appointed human rights monitor fabricated statistics by her own admission. She was not fired. Not censured. Confirmed for a second term. She later compared her treatment by American sanctions to that of Osama bin Laden. The institution that appointed her, and keeps her, is the institution Hamas read as a signal.
The decolonization framework, as it has been applied in Western progressive institutions for four decades, was never universal. It was always a sorting mechanism. It divided the world into colonizers and colonized, oppressors and oppressed, settlers and indigenous peoples, and assigned moral weight based on the category rather than the act. Within that system, Jews have a fixed position. They are not a people who can be colonized. They cannot be indigenous, despite representing the oldest continuously documented indigenous presence in the land the framework disputes. They are, within the framework’s internal logic, always already the oppressor, whatever the context, whatever the history, whatever is actually happening on the ground.
This is not a bug in the architecture. It is the architecture.
Jewish suffering cannot be absorbed without the whole structure collapsing, because Jewish suffering under Arab nationalism, under Soviet antisemitism, under European fascism, does not fit the assigned categories. The Jews expelled from Iraq and Egypt and Libya, nearly a million people, cannot be indigenous refugees within a system that assigns them permanent colonizer status. The Jews murdered at the Nova festival cannot be victims of racial hatred within a project that defines their people as the racial oppressor. So it excludes them. Jews are European when the argument requires them to be European. They are colonizers when the argument requires them to be colonizers. These conclusions are not the product of capture or corruption. They are what the categories were built to produce.
In September 2025, the United Kingdom, France, Canada, Australia, and Portugal formally recognized Palestinian statehood, joining more than 145 nations in doing so without requiring Hamas disarmament as a precondition. Israel’s government stated plainly that recognition without disarmament rewards Hamas. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney said recognition “in no way” legitimizes or rewards terrorism. France’s Emmanuel Macron called it necessary to establish sustainable peace. The same framework that processed Jewish death as Israeli guilt in October 2023 is now processing Hamas’s survival as a basis for diplomatic progress. The categories did not change. The application did.
This is what Hamas understood that almost no one in the West was willing to say. The framework was not going to hold them accountable. It was going to rehabilitate them. The institutions that activated within hours to condemn Israel were the same institutions that would eventually sit across tables discussing Palestinian statehood, reconstruction funding, and governance arrangements that include or implicitly legitimize the organization that murdered 1,200 people and held 251 hostage for 738 days.
Not because those institutions love Hamas. Because the framework produces this outcome. The sorting mechanism that places Jews in the category of the unprotectable places Hamas in the category of the resistance. Resistance gets rehabilitated. That is not a policy failure. It is the policy.
There is a lesson in this that is older than October 7 and older than the decolonization framework and older than the State of Israel. It is the lesson that Jewish history has delivered in every century, in different languages, through different mechanisms, with different perpetrators. There is no international architecture, no human rights framework, no progressive coalition that will reliably protect Jewish lives when protecting Jewish lives conflicts with the ideological commitments of the people running those institutions.
What it demands is clarity about where protection actually comes from and what it actually requires.
Hamas planned the attack. The institutions planned the response. Only one of them knew what the other was going to do.
https://thatjew.substack.com/p/what-hamas-understood-that-we-didnt?r=3v9rf&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web&utm_id=97757_v0_s00_e0_tv2_a1dennhb5h0k9p
Steve S:
According to Achmed Fouad Alkhatib, Palestinian writer and pundit who doesn't hate Jews or Israel, although this strategy by Hamas may have worked on the West and progressives and woke Right, it has not resonated with Gazans or with Palestinians. According to Alkhatib, Hamas is detested and unpopular in Gaza, mostly because Gazans don't appreciate being used as expendable pawns by Hamas, or being brutalized by Hamas.
According to Alkhatib, Hamas has lost power and influence in Gaza, and exists now solely through violence and intimidation which becomes more difficult for them due to reduced weaponry, funding, and leadership.
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A DECREASE IN HOMELESSNESS
California reports one of largest drops in homelessness in past year, HUD reports.
New data suggests success in Gavin Newsom’s crackdown, as Illinois, Hawaii and Florida also report notable decreases.
California reported one of the largest decreases in homelessness over the past year, according to a new report from the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).
The Golden State recorded a total unhoused population of 181,934 in 2025 – an almost 3% decrease since the year prior, placing it among the five states with the largest decreases from 2024. However, more significant drops were recorded in Illinois (44%), Hawaii (41%), Florida (11%) and New York (8%).
The new data signals at least some success on the part of Gavin Newsom, the California governor who has intensified his crackdown on homelessness over the past year. In May 2025 he announced a new model ordinance for cities and counties to address “persistent” homeless encampments, as well as $3.3bn in voter-approved funding to increase housing and drug treatment programs.
California, along with New York, had the largest population of unsheltered people recorded in 2025. Homelessness has been a key issue in this year’s gubernatorial race, as well as in the Los Angeles mayoral race.
The data also showed that the national homeless population decreased for the first time since 2016, coming down 3% from 2024. The Trump administration attempted to downplay the small one-year decrease, instead highlighting the fact that homelessness has increased 27% since 2013.
“The data is clear that the status quo of ‘housing first’ has failed to meaningfully reduce homelessness, resulting in crisis levels of people living on the streets,” Scott Turner, the HUD secretary, said in a press release. “HUD is restoring its programs to advance recovery and self-sufficiency and to ensure that taxpayer-funded benefits serve American families.”
As the administration attempted to downplay the drop in homelessness, it also sought to connect the success to its immigration policies, stating that the 2025 decrease was “attributable to decreases in Sanctuary Cities”.
The data comes from the federally mandated homeless point-in-time count, which tallies people sleeping in shelters and outside on a given day. On a single night in January 2025, there were 745,652 homeless persons in the United States.
While anti-homelessness advocates cited the decrease in homelessness as a “relief”, they also pointed out that the Trump administration’s policies may erode the progress that has been made.
“So much of the progress reflected in the 2025 PIT Count is due to targeted housing and service resources that were available in 2024 to rehouse people, including the highly successful Emergency Housing Voucher program, and new funds to address rural and unsheltered homelessness,” Ann Oliva, the CEO of the National Alliance to End Homelessness, said in a statement.
“Unfortunately, the Trump Administration has largely deprioritized these tools and worked to dismantle the very systems that drove these reductions.” Oliva pointed to the administration’s proposed cuts to permanent housing programs, which the organization found would “force at least 170,000 formerly homeless people back on the streets”.
The government has also mandated treatment for recipients of federal housing vouchers, and penalized jurisdictions that employed harm-reduction strategies such as safe consumption sites. In April 2026, HUD introduced a proposed rule that would require federally funded shelters to house prospective tenants based on their birth sex alone.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/may/31/california-homelessness-hud-data
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DIVORCE AMONGO OLDER AMERICANS
Divorce among older Americans, often called "gray divorce," has surged significantly. While overall divorce rates for younger adults have dropped, the divorce rate for Americans aged 50 and older has roughly doubled since 1990, and for those 65 and older, it has tripled. Today, about 40% of all U.S. divorces involve people 50 or older.
Why Gray Divorce is Rising
Longer Life Expectancy: People live much longer now, changing the view of how they want to spend their remaining decades.
Rejecting "Empty Shell" Marriages: Many older adults are unwilling to stay in unfulfilling, stagnant relationships once children leave home or after retirement.
Shifting Social Norms: Personal happiness and self-fulfillment take priority over societal stigma or staying together purely for stability.
Financial Independence: Higher rates of lifelong employment and financial self-reliance—especially for women—make leaving a marriage more viable.
Consequences and Challenges
Financial Strain: Splitting households later in life can devastate retirement savings, pensions, and home equity. Women face a much higher risk of post-divorce poverty.
Loneliness and Health Risks: Living alone later in life raises the risk of social isolation, which is tied to various physical and mental health issues. ~ (Google preview)
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Why the Divorce Rate for Older Couples Continues to Rise
"Gray divorce" is changing families and societies worldwide.
Since 1990, the divorce rate of people over 50 has doubled.
Researchers predict "gray divorces" will triple by 2030.
Facing relationship differences after children leave home contributes to "gray divorce.”
For more than three decades, a silent revolution has been unfolding without much comment, creating a seismic shift in American families and families in other countries. Three to four generations of families are feeling the effects. While the divorce rate in younger age groups has declined, people over 50 are divorcing in record-setting numbers.
Why is this revolution happening?
Myriad circumstances underlie the meteoric rise in gray divorce over the past 30 years. In the late 1960s and 1970s, a focus on personal happiness and self-fulfillment became prominent. In subsequent decades in most industrialized countries, life expectancy significantly increased, attitudes about marriage as a lifelong institution shifted, divorce became more socially acceptable, and women joined the workforce and became more financially independent.
Couples who married decades ago and have drifted apart or been unhappy for years become willing to face their differences about finances, interests, and emotional fulfillment and acknowledge their unsatisfying relationships. When they experience the empty nest syndrome as adult children leave home, they wonder what they now have in common. Infidelity and addictions often contribute to the decision to divorce. Spouses seek refuge from mental, emotional, and physical abuse. Betrayal from financial improprieties propels spouses to seek relief. People realize they are not living the dream they imagined when they married decades ago and are unhappy and unfulfilled. They look to the remaining decades ahead to pursue personal happiness.
The longest study on happiness
The Harvard Study of Adult Development, one of the world's longest studies of adult life, followed the lives of two groups of men for more than 80 years. A former director of the study, psychiatrist George Vaillant said, "When the study began [in 1938], nobody cared about empathy or attachment. But the key to healthy aging is relationships, relationships, relationships."
In his highly regarded 2015 TED talk, Dr. Robert Waldinger, the current director of the study, said, "It wasn't their middle-aged cholesterol levels that predicted how they were going to grow old. It was how satisfied they were in their relationships. The people who were the most satisfied in their relationships at age 50 were the healthiest at age 80."
Waldinger noted that the study's surprising finding is that taking care of our body is important but tending to our relationships is also a form of self-care. He shared the three lessons learned from the study:
Social connections are very good for us, and loneliness kills.
Living in conflict is very bad for our health.
Good relationships don’t just protect our bodies. They protect our brains.
The American Association of Retired Persons coined the term "gray divorce" in 2004 when it published a study about divorce at midlife and beyond. In 2012, researchers at Bowling Green State University named this phenomenon the “gray divorce revolution.” Their study found the divorce rate for the U.S. population over 50 doubled in those two decades and more than doubled for those over 65. Since half of the married population is 50 and over, these researchers projected that, as the U.S. population ages, by 2030, the number of persons aged 50 and older who divorce will grow by one-third.
The explosion of gray divorces is not isolated to the United States. The same trends are occurring in Canada, the United Kingdom, Japan, Europe, Australia, and India. Canada’s national statistical agency indicates that “grey divorce” has been consistently growing among those 55 and over, including those 65 and older. And rates are expected to increase as more people continue to age. The United Kingdom’s Office for National Statistics announced in 2018 that the divorce rate among those 55 or older, dubbed “silver splitters” and "silver surfers," has doubled. In the past two decades in Japan, couples married 30 years or more have seen their divorce rate quadruple. The Japanese are calling it “Retired Husband Syndrome.”
Gray divorce is an undeniable worldwide reality that is transforming the social and economic lives of divorcing couples, family members, and society.
The quest for personal happiness and self-fulfillment
People ages 50 and older who initiate a divorce report they want something more and different. Many of them grew up experiencing their parents' divorce and divorces of their friends' parents. They came of age in the late 1960s through the early 1980s when divorce became widespread and are more likely to have married as young adults, divorced, and later remarried.
Some have lived for decades in marriages with conflict. Some have little or no interaction with their spouses. They ask, "Is this all there is?" and report feeling lonely and disconnected from their spouses. "Staying in this shell of a marriage is killing me" is a common refrain. The findings in the Harvard Study of Adult Development support what they say and feel. They hope that pleasure, contentment, and joy await them as they move into the next stage of their lives.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/home-will-never-be-the-same-again/202108/why-the-divorce-rate-for-older-couples-continues-to
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J..D. VANCE: COMMUNION
The chief emotion of Communion is fear. Vance fears he will jeopardize his relationship with his wife, Usha (whom he met at Yale), because his parents’ relationship imploded. When his first son was born, he writes, ‘I felt one emotion above all others: fear.’
His fear is both personal, that he will fail as a father, and social, that his country will fail his son. Vance is not alone in this feeling. Fear – of pollution, invasion, the enemy within, modernity – is endemic in the ultra-traditionalist wing of the Catholic Church and across a swathe of the US, bristling and vigilant behind its guns. Both desire their institutions to become punitive monocultures, bulwarks against the outside world.
Vance also fears civilizational death: ‘We inherited a great civilization and are slowly letting it fall into disrepair.’ He claims to fear it much more than his personal death. His terror is spurred by the empty churches and unvisited graves of the British countryside. His sentiment is an increasingly common one on the Anglo-American right, which sees Western civilization as menaced by a predictable cast of feminists, queers, socialists and foreigners. But the realization that literate, democratic culture is fragile need not result in conservative conclusions, especially when the most significant threats – climate change, untouchable oligarchs, a poisoned public sphere and ransacked administrative state – are the preferred form of Trumpian government.
Against civilizational death, Vance sketches out a relatively predictable postliberal program. It is most interesting for what it is not: neither the theocratic ‘integralism’ of Catholic reactionaries with which he is sometimes lazily associated, nor the paranoid nihilism of MAGA. It centers on a distinction between economic and public good familiar from Catholic social teaching.
When he taps an anti-consumerist vein, or decries a life-sapping culture of work, or voices misgivings about social media, he can sound briefly socialistic, but he soon loops back to more comfortable complaints about demographic decline and the destruction of the traditional family. His readiness to subordinate the ‘gods of GDP’ to social good – and to criticize Republicans for having failed to do so in the past – is shared by the post-globalization, protectionist, isolationist right. His final chapter, which reads like a revival meeting, makes explicit the link to a generic Christian nationalism: ‘Christianity is America’s creed.’
Why would anyone buy this? Vance has been a willing participant in a squalid government sunk in graft which has gutted the agencies that might restrain or regulate private avarice. The labor share of income is at a historic low. The most obvious question is not whether Vance believes what he claims to believe, but why, if he believes it, he acts as he does. Halfway through Communion he quotes, without irony, a recovering addict who passed on some homely advice: show me your friends, and I’ll show you your future. Perhaps Vance has forgotten who he’s been hanging out with.
Like many converts, Vance took Augustine as his patron saint. Few narratives of conversion can match the complex account of human and divine love in Confessions, or Augustine’s relentless probing of his own sin, portrayed as a disorder of love – ‘homo incurvatus in se’, man turned in on himself in a kind of auto-idolatry. In Augustine’s famous lyrical realization of divine love, which overturns that state, he says that it ‘called and cried and shattered my deafness’; he burns and pants for his God. Including such a passage in a politician’s memoir might, of course, risk absurdity. Later in the same section, Augustine examines the most subtle and insidious desire: ‘the desire to be revered and loved by other people’, the hunger for praise. It is, he thinks, a particular vice of those in authority over others.
Communion is a pallid affair compared with this. Vance’s admitted errors (Randianism, post-Iraq atheism) are long past and defensible. His ambition prevents any more serious self-examination, and his ambition itself stays unconfessed. After Yale, things simply happen to him: ‘I found myself going on TV,’ or campaigning for the Senate (‘a quirky intellectual project’), or ending up as vice president. The sole apology in Communion concerns a trivial remark about ‘childless cat ladies’ being the cause of America’s downfall. ‘It was,’ he writes, ‘a boneheaded comment, intentionally (and successfully) provocative rather than illuminating.’ Self-admiration oozes through the brackets. ‘What a pitiful life is this,’ as Augustine put it, ‘and what a vile form of boasting.’
Pope Leo XIV used to be head of the Augustinian Order. Since his conversion, Vance has incurred irritated correction by two popes. In response to an attempt to justify cuts to US foreign aid using the medieval concept of ordo amoris – which, in Vance’s reading, endorses prioritizing family and nation– Leo’s predecessor, Pope Francis, rebuked him in a letter to US bishops. ‘Christian love is not a concentric expansion of interests that little by little extend to other persons and groups.’ The story of the Good Samaritan, whose love extends across every social taboo and caste marker, is ‘the true ordo amoris’.
Leo’s chief theme is dignity for everyone, including migrants, prisoners and outsiders, and his harshest criticism is reserved for the violent uses of the state. Christ is ‘never on the side of those who once wielded the sword and today drop bombs’. Vance has not been shy of telling the pope to ‘be careful when he talks about matters of theology’. He complained that senior diplomats at the Vatican gave him ‘trite platitudes’ on immigration, though when the dying Pope Francis then summoned him to plead for the deported, offering ‘specific exhortations’, he shrugged them off. ‘Mater si, magistra no,’ as conservative American Catholics have put it in the past, seeking to ignore papal teaching on economic justice.
For much of the past two centuries, the Church has sought expedient support from reactionary governments, especially during the Cold War. Vance’s conversion coincided with a long incubated shift in the emphasis of Catholic leadership, away from the sexual and familial issues congenial to American politicians, and towards something like a global conscience.
Communion’s characteristic error is clearest when Vance dismisses criticisms that mass deportations are ‘too tough’, but thanks the Church for forcing a consideration of the ‘moral trade-offs’. Abstract strictness of policy is not the issue here, but wanton cruelty: the families fed maggot-infested food, the cells flooded with sewage, those beaten or asphyxiated by guards, or handed off to foreign torturers. Vance may desire ‘a more Christian economy’, but it is one ringed with razor wire.
Usha Vance is one of few people granted full reality in Communion’s otherwise solipsistic world and Vance credits her with much of his success. Speaking on TV about his conversion, she pointed out that she came from a ‘very stable’ household, and has not ‘felt the same need to seek something different’. The psychoanalytic reading is hard to resist, but in the book, Usha suggests a different interpretation: she supports Vance’s growing interest in the Church because it is good for him. ‘“Therapy didn’t work for you,” she admitted. “But church does.”’
Instrumentalism is a very common modern approach to religion: it matters as far as it makes me a better citizen, partner, member of society, or brings me pleasure or comfort. Some right-wing thinkers have revived the defense of faith as a ‘noble lie’. Is Christianity good because it is useful or because it is true? Early in the book, Vance says he believes ‘Jesus Christ’s teachings are true.’ But the program he outlines is more interested in the social utility of faith as an institution: unlike secularism, which has produced ‘racial conflict and gender division’,
Christianity is ‘the most powerful force for cultural cohesion’. Yet Christianity can be ethically difficult and politically unsettling, difficulties Communion mostly seeks to evade. Should it cease to be useful, or if evasion is no longer possible, perhaps Vance will find his way to another conversion.
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v48/n14/james-butler/short-cuts
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A PHYSICIST SPEAKS ABOUT THE A-BOMB DROPPED ON NAGASAKI
On 9 August 1945, a plutonium bomb was dropped on the Japanese city of Nagasaki, bringing an end to World War Two. In an interview with the BBC 30 years later, a US physicist who helped to assemble the bomb revealed why the blast couldn't be stopped – and the plans for more.
"It was not for lack of concern for humanity – it was because of a concern for humanity. Perhaps that was the sin."
Thirty years after he took part in the atomic bombing of Nagasaki on 9 August 1945, the US physicist Philip Morrison spoke frankly to the BBC about the decisions that were taken in the days and weeks before the unprecedented nuclear blast.
Morrison had played a key role in the Manhattan Project, the top-secret Allied program to develop the first nuclear weapons, working at the Los Alamos laboratory. The lab was directed by his former teacher J Robert Oppenheimer. Present at the Trinity test of the first atomic bomb on 16 July 1945, Morrison carried its plutonium core on his lap in the car to New Mexico.
He then traveled to the small island of Tinian, just south of Saipan, to help assemble the "Fat Man" plutonium bomb used on Nagasaki, overseeing its loading onto a B-29 aircraft on 9 August, just three days after the bombing of Hiroshima.
It was on Tinian that the US forces built what Morrison described as the "largest airport in the world". "A great coral ridge was half-leveled to fill a rough plain, and to build six runways… each almost two miles long," he said in his in a testimony to a Senate Committee in December 1945.
The scale of destruction
Morrison also revealed the scale of preparations for the fire-bombings of Japanese cities in his testimony. "In the harbor every day rode tankers, laden with thousands of tons of aviation gasoline… Down the great runways would roll the huge planes… Once every 15 seconds another B-29 would become airborne. For an hour-and-a-half this would continue… A thousand B-29s, time and again, burned many square miles of a city in a single raid."
In contrast, he relayed, "The atomic bomb was something else."
"There were no shiploads of incendiaries. Instead of all the ordinancemen and their bomb dumps, there were about 25 people from Los Alamos, a few Quonset [prefabricated corrugated steel] huts transformed into testing laboratories, and a barricaded building. The strike took off after midnight. The field was deserted… And one plane roared down the runway, took off, and set course for the cities of the enemy," he said.
Although estimates vary, it is thought that 40,000 people were killed by the initial detonation in Nagasaki, while more than 100,000 deaths were directly attributable to the bombing over the next five years. In Hiroshima, at least 80,000 people died instantly, with the cumulative death toll rising to roughly 140,000 due to severe burns, injuries and acute radiation sickness.
Morrison later surveyed the catastrophic devastation at the two Japanese cities as part of the official scientific damage-assessment team, and he remembered one moment in Hiroshima in particular. "A Japanese official stood in the rubble and said to us: 'All this from one bomb; it is unendurable'," he said. "One plane, with one bomb, had destroyed many square miles of a city, destroyed them even more thoroughly and with even less chance for resistance or escape than the 1,000-plane strike."
Yet he had hoped that the atomic bomb would not have to be used in combat, spearheading a group of young Los Alamos physicists who favored a public demonstration of the bomb prior to any use in Japan. Morrison – who was aged 30 when he oversaw the assembly of "Fat Man" in Tinian – wanted to "invite an international delegation to the desert", he told the BBC's Melvyn Bragg in 1975. "But under the circumstances of warfare, that was wishful thinking."
'Unstoppable momentum’
The physicist described a sense of unstoppable momentum, even when it became clear the Nazis would be defeated. Yet, he explained, "The war was still going on. We were marching towards a tremendous battle in the Pacific… so it would have been impossible to stop.”
The one factor that could have changed that, Morrison believed, was US President Franklin D Roosevelt, who died in April 1945. "The only chance to modify the American position strongly, I would say, would've been the survival of Roosevelt… [who] died in the midst of the development, before we knew the bomb would work, before it was determined how to use the bombs," said Morrison.
"He was the only person, I think, both with enough prestige, enough strength within the government to turn back this terrible momentum," he said.
When Harry S Truman became president, he wasn't even aware of the project, only learning about it in the hours after he was sworn in. Just over three months later, he was to give the order for the bombings.
"It's true he made the decision, but I think it's fair to say the decision made him," argued Morrison. "It would’ve been a very bold stroke indeed for him to change the thing after all those years and stop it… that chance was essentially gone with the death of Roosevelt."
The same immovable force applied to the decision to drop two bombs one after the other, according to Morrison. "It was not considered a first and a second bomb. The orders cut for the commanders were, 'Drop bomb one, and then drop bomb two as soon as you can.' It would have taken a strong man back in Washington to see the great effects of bomb one… and say, 'Well, let’s wait for bomb two.' It would've taken thought at a high level, an ability to tap into the complex links and get the right orders to the right generals," he said.
So the two bombings went ahead – and more were planned, revealed Morrison. "The original decision was that we would go on for a year dropping these bombs, if need be… I was told to put together a plan for that," he told Bragg. "I had a plan and a scheme and a schedule and a man to replace me and arrangements to go back and forth."
Whether he could have continued to do that is uncertain, once he and the other Los Alamos scientists had witnessed the aftermath. "We knew intellectually very well, both the short-range and… the feared long-range effects. But that was only by reading a book and looking at the numbers," he told Bragg. "And the difference between the numbers… and seeing the living reality, the dying reality, is a very big difference to everyone, to the whole world. So I think we knew it, but we didn't feel it.”
He recalled the reaction at the Pacific island base on the night of the Hiroshima bombing. "There was a big party that night, but most of the scientific people didn't go. The Air Force people, soldiers, they drank. They knew the war was coming to an end. It looked, it felt, like a tremendous victory." Yet, Morrison remembered, the scientists "sat around looking morose and thinking… about the end of the world".
But in the lead-up to the bombings, Morrison didn't feel compelled to pull out of the Manhattan Project. "In spite of determined and dogged opposition to this, I don't see how I could have done any differently. I didn't think of stopping at any time.”
When asked if the Allies would have dropped an atomic bomb on Berlin, had it been ready before the Nazis were defeated, he said "Oh, absolutely, like a flash… We were primarily fearful of the Germans, and they were our enemy," said Morrison.
After the war, Morrison became a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, campaigning against nuclear proliferation in the vanguard of the "no third bomb" movement. "It goes without saying that, like most of the scientists of the project, I am completely convinced that another war cannot be allowed," he said in his 1945 Senate testimony.
And he believed the Allies should have done one thing in particular. "I firmly believe that a proper warning should have been given," he said. "Looking back, there's no justification for not giving a proper and suitable warning."
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AUSTRALIA LEADS THE WORLD IN RENEWABLE ENERGY
Quietly, and with surprisingly little fanfare from the rest of the world, Australia is pioneering a revolution in home renewables and battery use, proving what is possible with the right policies. The country was already one of the global leaders in domestic solar power, with panels on one in three homes. It also remains, however, a major contributor to the climate crisis through its vast fossil fuel exports. But it is batteries that are giving Australia a new burst of speed.
Nearly 60% of the household-scale battery capacity installed across almost 200 countries – every nation except China – this financial year will be in the southern continent, according to a recent analysis. Since July, about 415,000 have been connected. It is roughly one unit for every 25 Australian homes.
Industrial-scale batteries are being built nearly as quickly, with Australia (population: 27 million) trailing only China (1.4 billion) and the US (350 million) in new capacity after connections more than doubled last year. The increase in battery usage big and small is starting to bring down the cost of electricity from the nation’s spindly power grid, which includes more than 40,000km (24,850 miles) of transmission lines and cables between tropical far-north Queensland and the southern island state of Tasmania.
“It’s amazing,” says Tristan Edis, the author of the analysis and a director with the consultancy Green Energy Markets. “It shows again that if you go big with a technology, and you kick it off big from the start, you can make a really significant difference. If you’re a battery manufacturer focused on residential right now you really must be focused on Australia.”
Batteries counter the long-used arguments against renewables – that they are unpredictable and intermittent and therefore put extra burdens on a national grid which must have an expensive backup power source such as gas in place. Instead, batteries mean solar power can be stored and used when it is needed.
From early on in the renewable revolution, batteries were envisaged as a critical part of the puzzle. Homes would be able to install panels on their roofs to capture and convert solar energy, and batteries in their homes to store the energy and use it when they needed it. But while solar panel prices fell rapidly a few years ago, it is only in recent years that batteries have become similarly available and affordable.
The US-Iran war and subsequent rise in energy prices has highlighted the advantages of renewable technologies like this, and the number of installations around the world has moved from a trickle a few years ago (Arsenal football ground being an unlikely pioneer) to a growing tide. China is far ahead, spending more on it than every other country combined. But among the rest, Australia has jumped the pack.
Australia is a global leader in generating electricity from solar energy on per capita terms.
Previously, power prices would rocket in the evenings as gas-fired power – the most expensive form of energy generation on the Australian grid – was turned on to meet peak demand. With solar and wind now providing nearly half the electricity, and coal-fired power plants gradually closing, gas has been used to fill gaps after the sun sets.
But batteries are increasingly taking over that role. Total gas-fired generation was 24% lower across three months this summer compared with the year before. Tennant Reed, the climate change and energy director with the Australian Industry Group, representing more than 60,000 businesses, says it has “completely changed how electricity prices are formed”.
“The role of gas used to be in the evening to meet the evening peak and that came at a cost, because gas is not a cheap fuel. But more and more, every day, it is batteries that are surging into the market at 6pm,” he says. “Gas will still play a backup role but, on average, batteries are not as expensive as gas peakers and they are pushing those [gas plants] out even as electricity demand increases.”
In fairness, the battery usage rise has been possible partly because Australia is a world leader in household solar on per capita terms, though no government set out for this to be the case. More than a third of houses have panels due to a happy accident of uncoordinated policies, simple and quick permitting and widespread public support. Australia is, of course, blessed with lots of sunshine, and solar may not be as productive in more temperate countries.
But it is a global story, according to Dave Jones at the energy analyst organization Ember.
“Home batteries are in the middle of a revolution, large grid-scale batteries have collapsed in price in the last two years, and the quality of them has remarkably improved, with far less critical minerals, a far longer lifetime, and with fire hazard all but eliminated. That is now feeding into the home battery market, and the home battery of today is vastly superior to the home battery of a couple of years ago.
“Already in California, across 2025, there was more solar generation in the early evening than at lunchtime, because of batteries,” Jones said. “Batteries are even good enough now to give 24x365 electricity, with the largest 1GW 24x365 plant under construction.”
The battery revolution has not been free. It was triggered by a generous taxpayer-funded subsidy from Anthony Albanese’s Labor government. Starting last July, it committed A$2.3bn (£1.4bn) over four years to cut the upfront cost for households by 30%.
The rebate was expected to support 1m battery installations by 2030, but it quickly became clear that was unrealistic. With more than 1,000 batteries being installed each day, take-up far exceeded forecasts.
A solar home battery and inverter
Facing calls from political opponents for the program to be cut to reduce costs, the government announced in December it would reduce the rebate for bigger batteries, but lift the total funding to A$7.2bn to keep it going to the end of the decade. The overall goal was doubled to 2m batteries.
Some critics saw the revamp as a missed opportunity. Thomas Longden, a senior research fellow at Western Sydney University who has studied where batteries have been installed, says the government should have used it to ensure the rollout targeted all parts of the country, and not favor the wealthy.
“Do we care about where these batteries go? I think we should,” Longden says. “We need to ensure there are batteries across the whole country and not just in pockets in the big cities. If that means the scheme is slower but better-targeted as part of a fast and fair transition then that is something we should consider.”
The climate change and energy minister, Chris Bowen, acknowledges the program does not reach everyone directly – renters, in particular, are in effect excluded. But he says it has been embraced in and around his western Sydney electorate, which is not a wealthy part of the city, and argues the program is an investment for the whole country. “When those people [with batteries] aren’t calling on gas at night or are using less gas that’s reducing prices for absolutely everyone.”
The government has also attempted to make use of the surplus solar power – and to quell anger over the rising cost of living – by announcing a “solar sharer” program under which electricity retailers will have to offer three hours a day of free electricity to all customers, including renters. It has been broadly welcomed, though there are concerns power bill savings may be eroded if electricity companies respond by increasing other charges.
Emma Hewitt is among those to benefit from the battery scheme. A single parent who lives with her seven-year-old daughter south of Perth, she was progressively electrifying her home – solar panels, replacing a gas cooktop, leasing an electric car through her employer – when the subsidy was announced. It prompted Hewitt, a local government worker, to go for an interest-free loan to cover the rest of the cost of a 16kWh storage unit, which has allowed her to cut her reliance on the grid and save hundreds of dollars on her quarterly power bill.
“I don’t have huge amounts of savings but I can afford to pay things off out of my wages,” she says. “It has been something that I’ve wanted to do for a while, largely because I’m worried about the planet that my daughter will inherit and the incredible damage that burning fossil fuels does to that planet.”
The battery revolution has also given solar panels a boost just as some state government subsidies were removed. Against all expectations, a record for Australian solar installations was set in March as people replaced their aging panels with new, larger ones to make the most of their storage systems. That record was broken again in April.
Australia’s rise as a household energy powerhouse has done nothing to change its ongoing support for fossil fuel expansion. It remains a world-leading exporter of coal and gas, with the Albanese government having approved 36 polluting developments since its election four years ago.
It also faces challenges in the rollout of large-scale wind and solar farms. The Clean Energy Council, an industry lobby group, this week warned that while multiple records were broken in 2025, commitments on new developments were at a decade low due to an uncertain investment market and delays and cost blowouts in transmission connections.
They mean a national government target of 82% of electricity from renewable sources by 2030 remains in doubt.
Battery construction, however, shows little sign of slowing. That transformation is evident at the site of the now destroyed Liddell coal stacks, which fell so spectacularly this week.
The energy company AGL – for years, Australia’s most polluting fossil fuel company – has commissioned a 500 megawatt, two-hour duration battery system to help replace it. It is due to start full commercial operation next month.
Alison Reeve, the energy and climate change program director at the Grattan Institute think tank, says it neatly illustrates how the energy system has been rewritten, almost overnight.
Under the new model, households are producers and players in the market, not just consumers. Older forms of generation are increasingly being squeezed out. And the advent of batteries with longer durations means past criticisms of solar energy – that the sun doesn’t shine at night – is being “blown out of the water”.
“It is a profound change in how you run an energy market. The message is that if you can make rooftop solar happen, you can make a number of other changes really easily. And storing energy just opens up so much more flexibility in the system,” she says. “We’ve just found a new way to do it.”
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/ng-interactive/2026/may/31/cheaper-energy-bills-battery-revolution-climate-crisis
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HOW THE COMPUTER GOT ITS REVENGE ON THE SOVIET UNION
CONDEMNED AS A CAPITALIST TOOL, THE COMPUTER WOULD HELP EXPOSE THE USSR’S WEAKNESS
In 1950, with the Cold War in full swing, Soviet journalists were looking desperately for something to help them fill their anti-American propaganda quota. In January of that year, a Time Magazine cover appeared that seemed to provide just the thing. It showed an early electromechanical computer called the Harvard Mark III, and boasted the cover line, “Can Man Build a Superman?”
Here was a target that checked the ideological boxes. In May of 1950 Boris Agapov, the science editor of the Soviet Literary Gazette, penned a scornful critique of the American public’s fascination with “thinking machines.” He scoffed at the capitalist’s “sweet dream” of replacing class-conscious workers and human soldiers—who could choose not to fight for the bourgeoisie—with obedient robots.
He mocked the idea of using computers for processing economic information and lampooned American businessmen who “love information [like] American patients love patented pills.” He poured contempt on the Western prophets of the information age, especially the most prominent of them—cybernetics creator Norbert Wiener, a mathematics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Cybernetics, which was then just a couple of years old, declared that control and communication mechanisms in biology, technology, and society were fundamentally the same. Of course, Agapov did not actually read Wiener’s famous book on the topic, called Cybernetics; the content of his article makes clear that all he knew about cybernetics was borrowed from the January 23 issue of Time, and possibly largely from its cover image.
In the paranoia-filled environment of the Soviet media, Agapov’s article was perceived as a signal from above. The psychologist Mikhail Iaroshevskii took the hint and published two scathing attacks on cybernetics, one in the Literary Gazette and another in a 1951 collection of papers titled Against the Philosophizing Henchmen of American and English Imperialism. He accused Wiener of reducing human thought to formal operations with signs, and labeled cybernetics a “modish pseudo-theory” fabricated by “philosophizing ignoramuses” and “utterly hostile to the people and to science.”
He went on to cite Wiener’s well-known remark that the computer revolution was “bound to devalue the human brain” in the same way that the industrial revolution had devalued the human arm. While Wiener meant his comment to be a liberal critique of capitalism, and called on having “a society based on human values other than buying and selling,” Iaroshevskii apparently interpreted it as a misanthropic escapade. “From this fantastic idea,” he wrote, “semanticists-cannibals derive the conclusion that a larger part of humanity must be exterminated.”
Like Agapov, Iaroshevskii hadn’t bothered to read any of Wiener’s writing. Actually, it wouldn’t have been easy: Wiener’s Cybernetics was withdrawn from Soviet libraries after Agapov’s attack. Instead, Iaroshevskii drew his arguments for his critique largely from Agapov’s earlier article.
As one critic echoed another, repeating older accusations and making up new ones, an anti-cybernetics campaign coalesced. Critics didn’t let their ignorance of the actual content of cybernetics stop them—in fact, it helped to unleash their imagination. Skillfully manipulating a handful of quotations of Wiener taken out of context, they stretched the clothing of cybernetics over an ideological straw man.
Wiener’s passing remark that “information is information, not matter or energy” was exaggerated to become the claim that information had “nothing to do with matter or consciousness,” and the critics concluded that cybernetics was marching along a “straight road toward open idealism and religion” (both were, of course, pejorative terms in the Soviet Union).
Philosophers chimed in, bashing cybernetics for “clinging to the decrepit remnants of idealistic philosophy,” as well as for being “mechanistic” in reducing the activity of the human brain to “mechanical connection and signaling.” Cybernetics, they claimed, was doubly guilty. It deviated from dialectical materialism, the official Soviet philosophy of science, in two opposite directions—toward idealism and toward mechanicism—at the same time. The media portrayed it as both “idealistic” and “mechanistic,” “utopian” and “dystopian,” “technocratic” and “pessimistic,” a “pseudo-science” and a dangerous weapon of Western military aggression.
Soviet critics ignored, or possibly were unaware of, Wiener’s openly pacifist stand, which he had taken after Hiroshima, and his refusal to participate in military research.
The trouble with these public attacks against the use of computers was, of course, that the country desperately needed computers. The military, in particular, recognized the value of the nascent technology, and the risks of being left behind.
So, in a classic example of “doublespeak,” the Soviet Union began to secretly pursue military computing while condemning the West for doing the same. While the press ridiculed American “fantasies” of robots giving military orders, Sergei Sobolev, the chief mathematician of the Soviet nuclear weapons program, tirelessly promoted the development of new computers. These included the Soviet Union’s first computer, the MESM, and its first small computer, the M-1.
The Soviets even launched a capitalist-style competition between two competing programs in January 1950, the same month that Time Magazine ran its famous cover. Each top-secret program was tasked with building large, high-speed electronic computers for military calculations. One, called the BESM, was developed by the Soviet Academy of Sciences; the other, Strela, by the Ministry of Machine-Building and Instrument Construction.
Both agencies poured enormous resources into these flagship projects and in 1954, Strela was declared the winner. Seven copies of the gigantic, room-sized machine were produced and put to military service, helping with the design of the hydrogen bomb, nuclear strike efficiency simulations, missile defense system design, and various navy and air force projects.
An improved version of the BESM became the fastest computer in Europe, and soon went into production as well. Computer specialists paid lip service to the anti-cybernetics campaign during their political education sessions, and then went to work developing new military control and communication systems based on cybernetic principles.
Working with computers required special care: One had to avoid using any suspicious cybernetic terms. Even the phrase “logical operations” was risky, because it might be interpreted as implying that machines could think. Instead of “computer memory,” researchers used the more neutral, technical term, “storage.” “Information” was replaced by “data,” and “information theory” by the convoluted expression “the statistical theory of electrical signal transmission with noise.”
A joke about Stalin’s henchman, Beria, who was responsible for the nuclear weapons program, became popular. Beria comes to his boss and asks permission to use the notorious field of cybernetics for military purposes. Stalin puffs on his pipe and says, “Okay, but just please make sure the other Politburo members don’t find out.”
By 1953, Soviet cybernetics had spent three years in the doghouse. Its fortunes finally began to turn when, in March of that year, Stalin died, and when the Soviet Union tested its first thermonuclear device five months later (the United States had tested theirs two years before). Scientists and engineers, emboldened by the reputation they had earned for their military work, began to push back against ideologues and Party hacks, who had been supported by Stalin.
Disciplines that had been suppressed under Stalin, such as genetics and mathematical economics, began to come back to universities and research labs. Scientists and computer specialists began arguing for a similar rehabilitation of cybernetics. In August 1955, the journal Problems of Philosophy, which had published scathing critiques of cybernetics, suddenly reversed its position, like a weathervane sensing the winds of change. It published a landmark article in support of the discipline, called The Main Features of Cybernetics.
The article was signed by three heavyweights from the world of military computing, and dismissed all ideological accusations against cybernetics. Instead of trying to reconcile it with dialectical materialism, the authors simply stated that it works, and therefore it must be ideologically correct. Having read Wiener’s work in the classified sections of military research libraries, they synthesized a Soviet version of cybernetics that drew its legitimacy from the practical value of computer technology.
The article spurred cybernetics enthusiasts to promote the introduction of computers into various sectors of the civilian economy—from transportation and industrial automation, to weather forecasting and economic planning. Once again, the ideological clichés of the regime were brought to bear, but this time in support of the burgeoning field. Researchers began publishing an annual series called Cybernetics in the Service of Communism, stressing the bright prospect of computers helping to build a new society.
Party leaders were soon convinced, and the 1961 Communist Party Program singled out cybernetics as crucial to the construction of communism. The government issued a string of resolutions authorizing the construction of new computer factories, and the popular press began touting computers as the “machines of communism.” The word “cybernetics” abandoned its spot on the blacklist and became a trendy moniker. Genetics was now “biological cybernetics,” non-Pavlovian physiology “physiological cybernetics,” and mathematical economics “economic cybernetics.”
Cybernetics was adopted as a new language for the organization of biological systems, and in physiology, it helped replace the simplistic Pavlovian scheme of conditional reflexes, based on a telephone switchboard metaphor, with more sophisticated models that compared the brain to an information processor. Even the law turned its attention to “judicial cybernetics”; legal scholars dreamt of making their concepts “as exact as [those] of mathematics, physics, and chemistry.” The Soviet computer had been rebooted.
The cybernetics agenda in economics and management was especially daring. In a remarkable pre-Internet vision, researchers proposed to link together all Soviet enterprises through a unified national computer network which would process economic information in real time and optimize the entire economy. The proposal caused serious alarm among CIA analysts, who began to suspect that cybernetics was becoming too powerful a tool in the hands of the Soviet government.
They raised concern with the Kennedy administration, and in October 1962 Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., President Kennedy’s special assistant, wrote a memo in which he gloomily predicted that the “all-out Soviet commitment to cybernetics” would give the Soviets “a tremendous advantage.” Schlesinger warned that, “by 1970 the USSR may have a radically new production technology, involving total enterprises or complexes of industries, managed by closed-loop, feedback control employing self-teaching computers.” A special expert panel was set up to investigate the Soviet cybernetic threat.
What Schlesinger may not have appreciated is the degree to which the Soviet establishment was appropriating cybernetics for the purpose of maintaining their administrative hierarchies, and resisting reform. When the Soviet government launched a mammoth effort to introduce computerized management systems into the economy for production control and planning in the 1970s, it did so without fundamentally changing management structures or the balance of power.
This proved to be a grave mistake. The centrally planned Soviet economy was poorly prepared for computerization. Its cumbersome bureaucracy was too slow to implement rapid changes in production and distribution, and it was ruled by industrial ministries which, like separate fiefdoms, did not want to share their information or decision-making power.
Each ministry therefore created its own information management system, disconnected from and incompatible with the others. Instead of transforming the top-down economy into a self-regulating system, bureaucrats used their new cybernetic models and computers to protect their power. Expensive and largely useless information management systems were strewn across the country.
The results of top-down computerization were devastating. New computer systems accumulated ever-increasing amounts of raw data and generated terrifying heaps of paperwork. In the early 1970s, roughly 4 billion documents per year circulated through the Soviet economy. By the mid-1980s, after Herculean efforts to computerize the bureaucratic apparatus, this figure rose by a factor of 200 to about 800 billion documents, or 3,000 documents for every Soviet citizen.
All this information still had to pass through narrow channels of centralized, hierarchical distribution, squeezed by institutional barriers and secrecy restrictions. Management became totally unwieldy. To get an approval for the production of an ordinary flat iron, for example, a factory manager had to collect more than 60 signatures. Technological innovation became a bureaucratic nightmare.
Big Brother, who wanted to see everything and know everything, became overwhelmed with information that was often distorted by lower-level officials trying to present a rosy picture.
Vast clogs of inaccurate information paralyzed the decision-making mechanism, while accurate information was exchanged only locally, like black-market goods or forbidden books in the samizdat. Computers, once vilified and now championed, were constant in one thing: They amplified the virtues and deficits of the system that implemented them. After all, the key idea behind cybernetics was control via feedback. In the hands of self-motivated free agents, it was a powerful economic engine. In the hands of a single controlling agency, it brought stagnation.
Or, as computer scientists like to say, “garbage in, garbage out.” Called in to prove the superiority of socialism, information technology eventually proved the ineffectiveness of the Soviet regime.
The irony of the situation was not lost on Soviet humor. As one joke tells it, Brezhnev is gifted with the latest in artificial intelligence, so he asks it “When will we have built communism?”
The computer responds, “In 17 miles.” Brezhnev thinks, “There must be something wrong,” and repeats the question. The computer again replies, “In 17 miles.” Angered by the incomprehensible reply, Brezhnev orders a technician to investigate the machine. “Everything is correct,” replies the technician after some time. “You said it yourself: Every five-year plan is one step toward communism.”
https://nautil.us/how-the-computer-got-its-revenge-on-the-soviet-union-235368
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HOW TWO ABANDONED U.S. MILITARY FREEZERS HELPED CREATE GELATO
To understand how that creamy deep-green pistachio, chocolate-striped stracciatella or sun-yellow crema made it onto your cone, you have to venture back to a modest Tuscan dairy shop and a couple of abandoned US military freezers.
The Italian ice age
Long before modern Italians were ordering gelato from beachside resorts, their ancient Roman ancestors were chilling honey-sweetened wines and fruit syrups with mountain snow, creating sorbet‑like icy treats. By the 9th Century in Sicily, the island's Arab rulers were blending snow from Mount Etna with sweetened citrus, jasmine and rosewater to make sherbet – a legacy that lives on in Sicilian granita today.
By the Renaissance, cooks across northern Italy were experimenting with fruit purées and spiced creams chilled with Alpine snow, which paved the way for Bernardo Buontalenti's 16th Century breakthrough in Florence. The architect enriched the mixture with eggs and milk, producing a custard-like base that froze into something far silkier than the snow-filled creams that had come before, and creating the template for modern gelato.
Soon after, artisans in Florence, Venice and Sicily began producing frozen creams in micro-batches, using hand-cranked sorbettiere (ice cream makers) and natural ice harvested from snow pits. These early gelato prototypes were dense, custard-forward and unstable, melting quickly and requiring constant attention. Because freezing relied on snow, salt and manual labor, gelato-making was a hyper-local neighborhood craft. Even when electric refrigeration arrived in the late 1920s, production remained limited due to the high cost.
Gelato simply couldn't travel; it had to be made and eaten close to home. That's where Tuscan creativity met American engineering.
The American difference
Empoli, a Tuscan town west of Florence, was still piecing itself back together in 1946 after the brutal fighting that had led to its World War Two liberation two years earlier.
In the calm that followed, Romeo Bagnoli, a railway crossing keeper, took over a modest dairy shop on Via del Giglio. By 1946, his eldest son, Renzo, had turned it into a bar called Sammontana serving coffee, pastries, and, in the summer, small batches of gelato with their one unreliable refrigerator.
After the war, abandoned Allied machinery was available for everyday Italians to purchase.
Renzo and his brothers, Sergio and Loriano, acquired two industrial-grade American military freezers and later salvaged commercial ice cream machinery from a scrapyard, reworking the parts until they could produce continuous batches – allowing them, for the first time, to freeze gelato steadily rather than in tiny stop-and-start portions.
This American addition had huge implications: unlike the fattier ice cream, which had already been popular in the US for nearly a century and can tolerate longer freezing cycles, gelato needs a fast, consistent freeze to maintain its dense texture. The Bagnolis could now produce smooth, stable gelato without ice crystals in large enough batches that they could sell it beyond their neighborhood, while still preserving the artisanal character that defined Tuscan gelato.
With their freezers humming in the back of the dairy shop, the Bagnoli brothers began tinkering with their early gelato recipe to create a mix that stayed smooth after freezing – a major hurdle before the 1940s.
They adjusted fat ratios; used ingredients like gelatin to keep the formula smooth; and slow-churned their ingredient bases so the resulting mixture was fluffy, not dense. Their repeatable formulas marked the beginnings of a consistent, scalable model of making gelato that later became industry-wide practice across Italy.
With insulated trucks not yet available, the brothers also built their own temperature‑controlled supply chain: packing metal canisters in ice and salt, lining wooden crates with straw and adapting military supply boxes into makeshift insulated containers. By 1948, they were delivering their Sammontana gelato by bicycle around Empoli and across Tuscany in a small truck.
"[The Bagnoli brothers] devised a six‑liter canister that fit neatly into their improvised supply chain. Bars and cafes could scoop directly from the canister," said Italian food historian Luca Cesari. "When they began lending bar owners their freezer units free of charge, the model was complete."
It was the blueprint for modern Italian gelato distribution: consistent product, standardized containers and a network of bars to serve it – none of which would have been possible without leftover WWII parts.
"When [my family] found the equipment left behind from the war years, they were quick and clever enough to see potential where everyone else saw scrap metal," said Leonardo Bagnoli, the third generation of the family to lead Sammonta. "Those pieces became the backbone of… gelato that could travel beyond a single shop, a single city, until it reached all of Italy, and from there, today, the world.”
These innovations happened at the start of Italy's post-war "economic miracle" period, which transformed Italian life. Between 1950 and 1963, wages rose, rural families migrated to cities and disposable income increased. The spread of beach resort culture and the rise of the evening passeggiata (post-dinner walk) created a new rhythm of outdoor leisure.
Portable, inexpensive and synonymous with pleasure, gelato – now served in convenient cones and tiny to-go cups – fit into the nation's new image perfectly.
Soon, the brothers were delivering their new and improved gelato across Tuscany
What started as a local, bike-distributed business soon transformed into a nationwide fleet of temperature-controlled trucks bringing the Bagnoli's new, ready-to-scoop gelato to shops from Sicily to the Alps.
How Sammontana shaped Italian gelato
Today, whether you're unwrapping a Sammontana cone at a beach in Liguria, ordering a scoop from an artisanal gelateria in Puglia or visiting one of the thousands of worldwide gelaterie that have popped up outside of Italy in recent years, you're tasting the legacy of this marriage between Italian artistry and US tech.
Adopting this new refrigeration model, other gelato companies like Algida, Motta, Spica and others soon followed. Yet, "industrial‑scale ice cream did not eliminate [early] artisanal gelato," said Eduardo Zucchini, spokesperson at the Gelato Museum Carpigiani in Bologna, the world's only museum dedicated to artisanal gelato. "Industrial gelato forced artisanal gelato to evolve, and ultimately, Italy developed both a strong industrial sector and a large network of independent, artisanal gelaterie. Competition from industrial producers [like Sammontana] encouraged artisanal gelaterie to improve hygiene, technology and professional organization.”
Along the way, Sammontana, and gelato in general, became synonymous with Italian summers.
"For many Italians, Sammontana evokes a ritual: peering into the freezer at a beach kiosk, choosing an ice cream by its wrapper, having a cone after a swim, or a stop at an Autogrill rest stop during a long family drive," said Rome-based cookbook author Katie Parla. "There's as much emotional attachment to the wrapper, the place and the moment as there is to the gelato itself."
These days, Sammontana is Italy's largest gelato and frozen-dessert company. And while their original dairy shop no longer exists, the company remains a family-owned business run by the third generation of the Bagnoli family in Empoli.
Since 1957, the company has used the slogan "Gelati all'italiana" (Gelato the Italian way) – a subtle nod to their product's US origins.
"That slogan is, in my mind, one of the most important slogans in 20th‑Century Italian food history," said Cesari."It [distinguishes] its gelato from the ice cream American soldiers had introduced during and after the war. It defines Italianness by negation [and] simply means 'not American'. And it works because the difference is real and perceptible.”
https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20260813-how-us-tech-helped-create-modern-italian-gelato
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IS AN HERBICIDE CAUSING PARKINSON’S?
The scientific debate over paraquat’s safety has been building for decades. Studies dating back to the late 1990s have linked paraquat exposure to Parkinson’s disease. A 2002 study found that mice injected with paraquat lost dopamine neurons, a hallmark of Parkinson’s.
A 2011 study found that farmers who sprayed paraquat were 2.5 times as likely to develop Parkinson’s as those who did not. A 2024 study found that people living or working near areas sprayed with paraquat had double the risk of developing Parkinson’s.
Research linking paraquat to Parkinson’s is “one of the strongest databases out there linking a chemical exposure to a disease”, said Deborah Cory-Slechta, a University of Rochester neurotoxicologist.
Ray Dorsey, a neurologist at the Atria Research and Global Health Institute, said it’s a common misconception that people with Parkinson’s developed it primarily because of aging or genetics. About 85% of Americans with Parkinson’s carry no known genetic risk factor for the disease, he said.
“The principal causes of Parkinson’s disease are not inside of us, not in our DNA, but outside of us, in our environment,” said Dorsey, who published a book on the disease last year that identified Hebron as a hotspot. “The continued use of paraquat is likely sowing the future seeds of Parkinson’s disease.”
The herbicide has been banned in over 70 countries, including China, Brazil and the entire European Union. But not the United States.
Under Joe Biden’s administration, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) determined that it needed more time to examine the health risks of paraquat use. The agency has warned about the herbicide’s toxicity, noting that “one small accidental sip can be fatal”, and requires sprayers to undergo special training. The agency has stopped short of linking exposure to Parkinson’s disease, as other government health bodies have done abroad.
Last November, the agency said it would require paraquat manufacturers to study how far paraquat vapors travel from the initial spray site. That announcement came after Syngenta, one of the world’s largest producers of paraquat, submitted new data that suggested vapors may travel miles farther than previously thought.
The company, based in Switzerland, stood by the product’s safety.
“While Syngenta has great sympathy for those suffering from Parkinson’s, we reject the claim that our product is the cause,” said a Syngenta spokesperson, Dimitri Houtart, in a statement to New York Focus. The Guardian additionally invited comment from Syngenta and did not receive a response.
Houtart pointed to a 2013 study conducted by the company’s scientists that found that paraquat did not cause the neuron damage associated with Parkinson’s, even with high doses in the brain. He also cited recent research conducted by the California and Australian governments that did not find a causal link between Parkinson’s and paraquat exposure.
In 2022, the Guardian and the New Lede published internal documents revealing that Syngenta was aware of the mounting research linking the herbicide to Parkinson’s disease. The company monitored scientists studying the links, lobbied the EPA to bar critical scientists from sitting on advisory panels, strategized ways to “influence academia, and regulatory and NGO environments”, and created a team to respond to external scientific publications.
The overall goal, the internal documents revealed, was “to protect people and our reputation”.
This March, Syngenta announced that it would stop making paraquat by the end of June. The company cited “significant competition from generic producers” as the reason; a spokesperson said that the change was not made in response to litigation or safety concerns.
Generic paraquat produced by other companies poses similar risks.
“Without a ban, there’s nothing stopping another company from swooping in and filling the void,” said Nathan Donley, a senior scientist and pesticide expert at the Center for Biological Diversity, an environmental advocacy group.
When New York lawmakers try to enact a ban next year, they will go up against the New York Farm Bureau, the state’s largest agriculture advocacy group and one of the lead opponents of the bill. The group did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
A week before the legislative session ended, Renée St Jacques, the Farm Bureau’s director of public policy, told The Capitol Pressroom, a radio show, that if paraquat is “used with the safety precautions in place, farmers are safe”.
Now 73 years old, Giambatista wonders what her life would be like if Parkinson’s hadn’t taken the things she loved most. Would she still be singing if the disease hadn’t reduced her voice to just above a whisper? Would she paint more if her trembling hands could hold a brush?
She struggles to understand why manufacturers continue to sell something so seemingly toxic, and why lawmakers haven’t done more to stop them.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/aug/05/herbicide-paraquat-new-york-parkinsons?utm_source=firefox-newtab-en-us
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HOW MUCH SUNSHINE DO WE NEED?
Some people just need a few minutes per day in the summer – while others require much longer.
Photographs of Coco Chanel returning bronzed after a Mediterranean cruise in 1923 popularised the idea of tanning and sunbathing. Her tan became a status symbol and transformed Western attitudes to sunshine.
From the early to the mid-1900s, heliotherapy – the therapeutic use of sunlight – was used to treat rickets and tuberculosis in sanatoriums, and a "healthy tan" was actively encouraged.
A century later, our relationship with the Sun has become much more complicated. In the past 50 years, increased skin cancer rates have led to a medical rethink, and public health campaigns have shifted towards avoidance and heavily promoted the use of sunscreen. The evidence linking excessive sun exposure with skin cancer risk still holds up today.
But in recent years, so-called "moderate" sun exposure – time-limited bursts of exposure, in the middle of the day – has been found to be beneficial for our mental health, vitamin D levels and immune system. Studies also show it reduces the risk of certain cancers, boosts cardiovascular health, and improves cognition and sleep. So, how can we reap the benefits while avoiding the dangers? And how much sunshine do we really need?
Why do we need sunshine?
Moderate sun exposure helps the body produce vitamin D, which is essential for bone health and muscle function. Some studies show that high vitamin D levels are linked to lower cancer incidence and mortality, as well as a reduced risk of developing type 2 diabetes.
Sunshine also lowers blood pressure. When UVA rays hit our skin, they trigger the release of nitric oxide, which causes our blood vessels to dilate. This reduces the risk of heart attacks and strokes.
A landmark study of 29,518 Swedish women over 20 years found that sunshine avoiders had double the mortality rate (from all causes) compared with the highest sun exposure group. Conversely, sunbed use correlated with an increased overall mortality and cancer mortality rate. Another Swedish study conducted in 2011 found that women who used a sunbed once a month or more for at least a decade had a 90% increase in all-cause mortality.
Rebecca Mason, a professor of physiology at the University of Sydney in Australia, says that getting adequate vitamin D levels helps to "dampen inflammation, respond to invading pathogens, and manage your immune system so it doesn't attack your own cells".
Sunshine has been shown to improve sleep and boost cognitive health. Morning sunlight contains blue light wavelengths that trigger your brain into thinking it's daytime, increasing cortisol and suppressing the sleep hormone melatonin. This leaves us feeling more alert and energized. Higher exposure to daytime light can improve cognitive performance, reaction times and memory. In one study involving over 360,000 participants, daytime sunlight exposure (specifically around 1.5 hours) was linked to a reduced risk of developing dementia.
Sunlight exposure also increases the level of the chemical messenger serotonin in the brain, which help us to feel calmer and more focused. Patients treated for severe depression in sunny rooms have been shown to recover more quickly. Meanwhile, insufficient exposure to daylight can increase the risk of depressive symptoms, low mood and insomnia.
How much sunshine do we need?
While guidance varies according to age, geography and skin type, experts typically recommend short, frequent bursts of sunshine.
Mason says that, in terms of vitamin D synthesis, exposure is most effective in the "middle of the day, little and often", when UVB levels are at their highest.
For people with light skin, Mason recommends regular, short bursts of sunshine on most days of the week, with the hands, arms or legs uncovered for a few minutes at a time. In very high UV areas, this exposure should be taken in the mid-morning or mid-afternoon instead.
Those with dark skin may need significantly more sun exposure, because the higher levels of melanin also mean that vitamin D production from the Sun takes longer. One study found that in the spring and summer in UK, those with dark brown skin need around 25 minutes of sun exposure at midday to produce adequate vitamin D.
Those with very pale skin, a personal or family history of melanoma, or who have lots of moles, are at high risk of developing skin cancers and need to take more precautions, says Mason.
This also applies to people who are taking immunosuppressants. For people with pale skin, some research suggests that all sun exposure — even the tiny amounts needed to produce vitamin D — may come with an increased cancer risk. More research is needed though, particularly on whether this is also the case in people with darker skin.
"They can still get a few minutes of exposure – [but it's] best to have more skin exposed for a shorter time, and do so more often, than for a longer time less frequently," she says. This is most effective nearer midday, where there is more UVB relative to the amount of UVA, compared to at other times of day. While UVB is the primary cause of skin cancer, it is essential for making vitamin D. Earlier or later in the day, you won't get as much UVB, and you’ll be exposed to relatively more damaging UVA, which is linked to skin aging and also plays a role in the development of skin cancer.
However, after that, Mason stresses, "they need to cover up carefully”.
In rare cases, such as those with the condition albinism, it might not be suitable to have unprotected sun exposure at all.
In winter, people need to spend a longer duration of time outdoors to generate enough vitamin D, depending on how much skin is exposed, and where you are. In certain parts of the world, such as Melbourne and Hobart, Mason says there isn't enough UVB to make a significant amount of vitamin D during the winter.
"We only need small to moderate amounts to have good health," says JoAnn Manson, a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston. Manson stresses that prolonged unprotected exposure should be avoided, particularly between the hours of 10:00 and 16:00, adding that incidental sun exposure is effective, be it through exercising or running errands outdoors.
"The benefit and risk balance of sun exposure differs according to people's skin type and color," says Lesley Rhodes, a professor of dermatology and photobiology at the University of Manchester in the UK.
Studies show that darker skin provides better protection against UV-induced DNA damage, whereas lighter skin is vulnerable even at very low UV levels, emphasizing the need for personalized sunshine exposure guidance. People with darker skin have higher levels of melanin, which acts as a natural filter against harmful UV rays.
But while how much sun protection you need from the Sun varies depending on your skin type and how much UV there is around, everyone, including people with dark skin, should wear sunglasses in the Sun, says Mason.
In a world-first, Australia and New Zealand adopted a more personalized approach when they updated their sunshine exposure guidelines in 2024 and split their populations into three groups, according to skin type and risk of skin cancer.
What are the risks of too much Sun?
Spending excessive time in the Sun does not increase vitamin D production, but does increase the risk of sunburn, pigmentation and premature aging, and is the leading cause of skin cancer.
In the UK, the number of new melanoma cases (the riskiest type of skin cancer) diagnosed in a year has reached a record high, rising above 20,000 for the first time. The non-profit Cancer Research says too much UV light exposure or sunbed use was part of the cause, with an estimated nine in every 10 cases thought to be avoidable. Skin cancer is also the most common form of cancer in the US, and 112,000 people are expected to be diagnosed with invasive melanoma in the US this year.
How climate change is increasing sun risks
Climate change increases the risk of skin cancer, as warmer atmospheric conditions allow more solar radiation to reach the Earth's surface. Over the past two decades, there has been a <4% annual increase in melanoma incidences in Scandinavia, which directly correlates with more frequent heatwaves and longer summers in the region. People living in previously cooler regions are also not used to taking protective measures, such as wearing a hat, sun-shielding clothing and sunscreen.
Limiting sun exposure during childhood and adolescence is critical as research shows that the amount of sun exposure a person has in the first 20 years of their life determines, to a substantial degree, the likelihood of developing skin cancer. (Read more about why sunscreen is not enough to prevent sunburns).
Too much sun exposure can also cause cataracts. These cloudy patches on the lens of the eye are usually easily treatable with surgery, but can ultimately lead to blindness if left untended. Doctors recommend that people wear sunglasses with UV 400 lenses to protect their eyes from harmful rays.
What if you don't get enough Sun?
If you live in a place with little sunlight, you are likely to develop low vitamin D levels, especially during the winter, says Rhodes. People with darker skin, limited outdoor access, photosensitivity issues or who cover up their skin are at risk of vitamin D deficiency.
Sustained deficiency can lead to bone deformities, such as rickets or osteomalacia. Rickets first emerged as an urban epidemic in 17th-Century Britain, when heavy coal usage left cities like London smoke-laden and blocked UV from reaching skin.
However, vitamin D deficiencies can be easily corrected with supplements. The debate around whether all adults need to take vitamin D supplements remains more contentious. The supplementation guidance varies according to age, and country-specific guidelines. (Read more: Should everyone be taking vitamin D?)
In some countries with limited winter sun, such as the US and Canada, it is common practice to fortify foods like mushrooms, cereals, and dairy products with vitamin D.
It is important to not take too much vitamin D, experts warn. Consuming more than 4,000 IU (100 micrograms) daily is widely considered harmful as it can lead to hypercalcemia, which can weaken bones, and damage the kidneys and the heart.
A century on from the Coco Chanel tanning effect, our understanding of the risks, as well as the rewards of sun devotion, has been shaped by evolving health advice and sun safety campaigns.
As Mason stresses, little and often is best. By prioritizing short, frequent bursts of sunshine at midday, taking protective measures, and avoiding prolonged exposure – particularly in the peak hours of the day – we can reap the benefits of sunshine while minimizing the risk of sunburn and skin cancer.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20260807-how-much-sunshine-do-we-really-need?at_objective=awareness&at_ptr_type=email&at_email_send_date=20260812&at_send_id=4653137&at_link_title=https%3a%2f%2fwww.bbc.com%2ffuture%2farticle%2f20260807-how-much-sunshine-do-we-really-need&at_bbc_team=crm&at_audience_id=266492954
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FAT DISTRIBUTION AND DEMENTIA RISK
Excess body fat is well-known to increase the risk of health issues like heart disease and diabetes. Now, however, scientists have found a connection between fat distribution – specifically on the arms and belly – and the risk of developing dementia.
Dementia, a broad term for neurodegenerative diseases including Alzheimer’s, is becoming increasingly prevalent. By 2050, an estimated 139 million people worldwide are expected to suffer from it.
To put that into context, the Alzheimer’s Society reports that one in three people born in the UK today will develop dementia.
Despite its increasing prevalence, the exact causes of dementia are complex and not fully understood. However, a new study published in Neurology, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology, indicates that high levels of body fat in the belly or arms may significantly raise the likelihood of developing this debilitating condition.
“Our significant findings support our hypothesis that it is not merely the absolute weight of fat and muscle, but their distribution and quality, that significantly impacts the risk of developing neurodegenerative diseases,” Dr Shishi Xu, lead author of the study, told BBC Science Focus.
The study involved 412,691 people, 8,224 of which went on to develop neurodegenerative diseases, including dementia and Parkinson’s.
After statistically accounting for other factors that could impact disease rates – namely, high blood pressure, smoking and drinking status and diabetes – the team found that people with high levels of belly fat were 13 per cent more likely to be diagnosed with neurodegenerative diseases.
Meanwhile, people with high levels of arm fat were 18 per cent more likely.
It’s not all doom and gloom, though. The researchers also found that high muscle strength can reduce disease risk by 26 per cent.
“Our study may help build up a more comprehensive causal chain for the relationship between our body and future neurodegenerative risk,” Xu said. “If at the very beginning you can actively modify your body composition, your future risk of neuro-degeneration can also be further decreased.”
The team suggests that targeted interventions to decrease belly and arm fat could be more effective for neuro-degeneration protection than general weight control.
Xu added, “Modifications like engaging in resistance training, reducing sedentary behavior and adhering to a balanced diet can effectively reduce abdominal fat as well as enhance muscle strength, which may potentially offer greater neuroprotective benefits than weight-focused anti-obesity medications.”
The findings add to a growing body of evidence that suggests fat is inextricably linked to the risk of developing a neurodegenerative disease.
A study presented at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America in November 2023, for example, tied visceral belly fat in midlife to changes in the brain related to Alzheimer’s.
Further back, in 2018, researchers showed that higher levels of abdominal fat in older adults are associated with cognitive decline.
Still, scientists aren’t sure what the underlying mechanisms behind the relationship are. The dominant hypothesis, Xu explained, “is that fat accumulation in the abdomen and arms appears to have a poisonous and inflammatory effect on other organs, including the cardiovascular system”.
The researchers noted that the link between belly and arm fat and neurodegenerative diseases is partly explained by the occurrence of cardiovascular diseases like heart disease and stroke.
Xu said that the next step for the team is to conduct a series of studies exploring how body composition influences other health outcomes, such as heart failure. Their goal is to build a more complete understanding of fat’s impact on overall health.
https://www.sciencefocus.com/news/belly-and-arm-fat-increases-dementia-risk
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VEGETARIANS AND CANCER
Vegetarians have a substantially lower risk of five types of cancer, a landmark study on the role of diet has revealed.
The research, using data from more than 1.8 million people who were tracked over many years, found that vegetarians had a 21% lower risk of pancreatic cancer, a 12% lower risk of prostate cancer and a 9% lower risk of breast cancer compared with meat eaters. Combined, these cancers account for around a fifth of cancer deaths in the UK.
Vegetarians also had a 28% lower risk of kidney cancer and a 31% lower risk of multiple myeloma, according to the study published in the British Journal of Cancer.
Dr Aurora Pérez-Cornago, the principal investigator on the study, which was carried out while she was based at the University of Oxford, said: “This study is really good news for those who follow a vegetarian diet because they have a lower risk of five cancer types, some of which are very prevalent in the population.”
While being vegetarian appeared to be protective overall, the scientists also found that those who follow a vegetarian diet had nearly double the risk of the most common type of cancer of the esophagus, known as squamous cell carcinoma, compared with meat eaters. This may be due to vegetarians being deficient in key nutrients such as B vitamins, the team suggested.
Vegans had a 40% higher risk of bowel cancer when compared with meat eaters. This may be due to the low average intake of calcium (590mg a day, compared with the UK recommendation of 700mg a day) and lower intakes of other nutrients.
The researchers said more work was needed to establish whether meat consumption was problematic or whether something specific in vegetarian diets lowers cancer risk – and the answer might vary depending on cancer type.
“My feeling is the difference is more likely to be due to the meat itself, but that’s an opinion that we haven’t looked at directly,” said Prof Tim Key, emeritus professor of epidemiology at the University of Oxford and co-investigator.
Although there is a known link between red and processed meat consumption and bowel cancer risk, until now it has not been possible to reliably assess the link between diet and less common cancers due to the typically low numbers of vegetarians and vegans included.
To overcome this, the latest study drew on data from various studies on diet and health from across the world. This allowed the researchers to compile data from about 1.64 million meat eaters, 57,016 poultry eaters (no red meat), 42,910 people who ate fish and no meat (pescatarians), 63,147 vegetarians and 8,849 vegans, who were followed for an average of 16 years. Factors that could influence cancer risk, such as body mass index and smoking, were taken into account.
The study, funded by the World Cancer Research Fund, investigated 17 different cancers, including those of the gastrointestinal tract, lung, reproductive system and urinary tract, and blood cancer.
There was no evidence for vegetarians having a lower risk of bowel cancer, compared with meat eaters. This is likely to be due to the intake of red and processed meat in the people in the study being relatively low compared with those included in more recent cohorts and, Key said, the findings were “not incompatible” with previous results highlighting the association between red and processed meat and bowel cancer.
“It could be that if we had had more people with very high intakes of meat in the meat-eating group, the results could have been different,” he added.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2026/feb/27/vegetarians-have-substantially-lower-risk-of-five-types-of-cancer
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TIMING OF MEALS AFFECTS WEIGHT LOSS
It's not only what you eat that matters – your body clock plays an important role in how you metabolize food. Eating dinner earlier can change how our bodies metabolize the food.
“Have breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince and have dinner like a pauper," my Spanish friend and colleague Javier Hirschfeld told me when I asked about typical Spanish eating habits. It's a saying that has been drilled into him from an early age.
In Spain, it's common for lunch to be your biggest meal of the day while evening meals tend to consist of light bites. "Some people skip dinner altogether or have a piece of fruit and yogurt," he says.
In the UK and US, it's more usual to have a light lunch followed by a bigger meal in the evening. But we may have got things backwards – that's according to an emerging scientific discipline, chrononutrition. It suggests that healthy eating is not only about what we eat, but also when we eat it.
From reducing obesity to preventing cardiovascular disease, numerous studies now show that our internal body clock, or circadian rhythm, plays a powerful role in how we process food – and our overall health. Here's why – and how to schedule your meals to capitalize on it.
Set your clock to the right 'time'
Marta Garaulet, from the University of Murcia in Spain, first became interested in the impact of meal timings after making observations in her weight-loss clinic. Over a decade ago, she observed two patients who experienced different weight-loss results, despite living together and following the exact same diet.
One had lunch around 13:00 [1 p.m.], while the other could only eat later because of her class schedule. "That was the only difference," says Garaulet. The student eating an earlier lunch had lost much more weight after six-weeks. This led her to investigate the intriguing possibility that meal timing itself could have a huge influence on weight loss.
Together with colleagues from the University of Murcia, Garaulet followed 420 adults in Spain who took part in the same weight-loss program over 20 weeks to find that those who ate an earlier lunch lost more weight and lost it more quickly compared to those who chose to eat lunch later in the day.
Similarly, in a small randomized controlled trial, 32 healthy women ate the same meals for two weeks. Those who ate a later lunch showed poorer blood sugar control and burned fewer carbohydrates. Numerous studies have since found that our circadian rhythm influences our hunger, digestion and metabolism.
But why should eating the exact same food at a different time of day have such a powerful effect? When I asked this question to Frank Scheer, a professor of medicine and neuroscientist at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts, he told me that it's because "we're not the same person in the morning and the evening from a biological point of view."
Our internal body clock regulates almost all aspects of our physiology, he says.
That's because eating at a time when our body clock suggests it's time for sleep could create a biological mismatch called "circadian misalignment."
One example of this can be seen in how we regulate blood sugar. In a 2022 study of more than 800 adults, researchers gave each one a glucose drink designed to mimic the carbohydrate content of a typical evening meal. They found that participants processed it less efficiently when they consumed it one hour before bedtime rather than four hours earlier.
Those who drank it closer to bedtime had higher blood sugar levels and produced less insulin, the hormone that helps to regulate our blood sugar. Researchers believe melatonin, which rises as the body prepares for sleep, plays a key role in this process.
"If you eat when melatonin is elevated in the evening, your glucose control is going to be impaired," says Scheer, who was also involved with the study. The effect was even greater in people carrying a common variant of the MTNR1B gene, which has been associated with an increased risk of type 2 diabetes. Over time, later eating could therefore increase the risk of developing the condition, which has steadily been increasing worldwide.
Eat earlier to be less hungry
The effects of later eating may extend beyond blood sugar control. Research has found that later eating made participants feel hungrier the next day by disrupting the hormones that regulate appetite and satiety. Those who ate later produced less leptin, a hormone that tells our brains when we're full.
At the same time, meal timing influences how our bodies store fat. Instead of breaking fat down, later eating can lead our cells to store fat. Over time, this could make it more difficult for the body to stay at a healthy weight.
Meal timing may therefore be especially important for people who carry genetic variants that make them more likely to put on weight. In a study of nearly 1,200 adults, an international team of researchers – including Scheer – found that later eating was linked to a higher body mass index among individuals with higher risk of obesity, while eating earlier reduced this risk.
Eat a big breakfast for better heart health
There may be heart health benefits to earlier eating too. In a study of more than 100,000 people in France, those who ate breakfast later had a higher risk of cardiovascular disease. The researchers also found that a longer overnight fast, achieved by eating earlier in the evening rather than delaying breakfast, was associated with better heart health.
This may be particularly relevant for shift workers, as well as other groups vulnerable to "circadian disruption," researchers note. For those who do work at night, the advice is therefore to limit food intake to the daytime where possible – though this may not be safe for everyone (eg health workers may need to eat to keep their energy levels up).
If you do get hungry, stick to smaller protein-rich snacks and try to delay eating breakfast to the morning, if it fits your schedule.
Be mindful of whether you are a 'lark' or 'owl'
Of course, when we eat isn't entirely within our conscious control. Our chronotype – the concept that some of us are morning larks or night owls – has been found to influence our mealtimes.
Morning types are more likely to follow a Mediterranean diet, whereas evening types are more likely to delay meals and eat more energy-dense foods later, says Giovanna Muscogiuri, an assistant professor at the University of Naples Federico II in Italy.
Crucially, our chronotype also influences how our bodies respond to food. Morning types tend to have earlier peaks in insulin sensitivity as well as an earlier release of melatonin than evening types, who as a result of later eating, are more vulnerable to poorer glucose control and weight gain.
She therefore says that we should be more mindful of our "lark" or "owl" predisposition and that later eaters would benefit from gradually adopting earlier evening meals.
Then we also need to consider that the duration and quality of our sleep affect our hunger and cravings. If we are sleep-deprived we are more likely to overeat and choose energy-dense foods, which might lead to weight gain over time, says Muscogiuri.
How to eat smarter
The practical advice is relatively simple. Aim to eat at regular times and eat fiber-rich carbohydrates such as whole grains, legumes (beans, peas and lentils) as well as fruit, earlier in the day when the body is better able to process them. In the evening, opt for a lighter meal, ideally one rich in protein.
In a recent review Muscogiuri also recommends that in the evening, it would benefit us to include foods that help to support sleep, such as nuts and seeds, as well as tryptophan-rich sources of protein, such as chicken, salmon and tuna, as tryptophan has been shown to improve sleep quality.
I'm certainly going to pay closer attention to my internal body clock in future. The Spanish habit of making lunch the largest meal is particularly appealing – one thing I might try is cooking in the morning before my work day begins. Perhaps I'll even have a paella.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20260807-whats-the-best-time-of-day-to-have-dinner
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ending on beauty:
OF BACH AND HARMONY
Bach gave to all an equal right —
no voice is made to serve as mere
accompaniment or background for
a privileged superior.
And so through time a prayer ascends
in single spirit, and in many senses:
power in a unity depends
on little independencies.
~ Blaga Dimitrova (Yes, Updike’s “The Bulgarian Poetess”)
