*
the guy from budapest

he said — so you come from behind the iron curtain
i reluctantly confirmed — yes from poland
then he — so you’re from budapest

i corrected him with dignity — no from warsaw
and he called out loud — dick here’s a guy from budapest
in a while dick came and confirmed with joy
i’ve been in budapest once
we were building a paper factory there

with gentle resignation i explained
that poland that warsaw that gdansk
and he — Jimmy was in budapest last winter
he spent there three fabulous weeks

i’m glad to hear that i said
but i’ve never been to that city
then jimmy walked up to us
firmly shook my hand and said —
what a cool place is that budapest

in the end we sat down at the table
and drank beer all evening
telling each other fun little stories
about budapest

after returning to my hotel
I turned on the tv
the mustachioed leader of polish workers proclaimed
“the eyes of the whole world are upon you”

~ Andrzej Kosmowski, 1981 (translated by Oriana)

Being from Poland, I experience this too. Some people mishear “Holland.” One replied, “It’s wet there.” Then, assuming he’d insulted my homeland, he apologized. (If I were still an active poet, I would try to write a poem on this moist confusion — the equivalence of Poland and Holland. Tulips and narcissi mark springtime  in both places, though Polish women seem more in love with lilies of the valley, that icon of delicate femininity.)

Only twice I encountered complete honesty. After I said, "Poland," the person asking the question, a student at UCLA, replied, "Where is that?" I answered, "In Europe." In one case, the next question was  "What's the weather like in Europe?” 

In some cases, I knew the best answer included some geographical enhancement. "Poland — that's between Germany and Russia." Nobody was willing to reveal that they didn't know where Germany or Russia were. But even they tended to place Poland on the Black Sea, apparently having never heard of the Baltic.

In another encounter, a young American nun, after I answered “Poland” in response to what was to become the “eternal question,” replied with an enthusiastic, “How wonderful!” Since back then Poland was still behind the Iron Curtain, I asked, shyly, “Why do you say that being from Poland is wonderful?” — “Well, I just think it’s wonderful,” the nun said, and quickly walked away. 

It took a while longer before I understood that it’s not just that typical Americans don’t know very much geography, history, or main issues in contemporary politics (Communism was HUGE in those days, set on world domination and seemingly unstoppable, but this paled next to the news that Sears had a sale on something) — it’s that they don’t WANT to know. 

Always eager for knowledge, I could never quite understand this not wanting to know. True, I wouldn't want to undertake learning Chinese or quantum physics. But simple things? And isn't history fascinating? And seeing other countries? But one of the things that America taught is that not everyone has the drive to know. People want the familiar. This craving for the familiar is not limited to the US, but perhaps just more marked there. 

My Polish first name causes a similar confusion as mentioned in the poem, especially its diminutive. Anglo-Americans (never Hispanics!) tend to mis-hear it — or at least mis-remember it as “Sasha.” Once I lamented that there’s no point trying to reveal my Polish name because I end up as Sasha. One time I foolishly tried to object and insisted that my Polish  name wasn’t Sasha. “But just minutes ago you said it was Sasha! You said so yourself!” was one indignant reply.

People hear from they expect to hear. “Sasha” is a male diminutive of Russia “Aleksandr.” A variation on Alexander, the name is quite popular, perhaps because of its association with Alexander the Great. But here, who cares? A big advantage of Sasha is that it’s short and easy to pronounce. Let’s face it, everyone from Eastern Europe is named Sasha. They just don’t realize it.

The Ob River, western Siberia

The relatedness between the languages now known as Finno-Ugric was discovered by a Hungarian linguist János Sajnovics in the second half of the 18th century. Sajnovics established a linguistic relationship between the Sámi languages and Hungarian, and published the results of his research in his book Demonstratio idioma Hungarorum et Lapporum idem esse (1770), which was seen as a breakthrough in historical linguistics. His ideas were developed further by Hungarian linguist Sámuel Gyarmathi, who systematically demonstrated the relatedness of the Finno-Ugric languages. In the 1860s, German linguist Josef Budenz established that the Hungarian language belongs to the Finno-Ugric language family and disproved its relatedness to the Turkic languages.

At the time, the majority of Hungarians rejected their (historical / linguistic) relatedness to the Finno-Ugric peoples, whom they considered historically irrelevant and uncivilized. They propagated their relatedness to the ancient Huns and Turkic peoples, emphasizing similar words and style of warfare of the old-time Hungarians.

Today, the general consensus among linguists is that Hungarian is a member of the Finno-Ugric (Uralic) language family. Its closest linguistic relatives are the Mansi and Khanty languages, spoken in western Siberia in modern Russia. Archeological and archeogenetical researches (as well as the study of existing historical sources) also confirm that the “original” speakers of the Hungarian language originate from the region along the river Ob in western Siberia, just east of the Ural Mountains.

The Hungarians (or Magyars) led a nomadic tribal confederation that conquered large parts of Central and Eastern Europe in the 9th and 10th centuries. After their adoption of settled lifestyle and conversion to Christianity, the Kingdom of Hungary was established, that was a powerful state in Europe until the 16th century. It briefly regained major power status as part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire from 1867 until 1918. Today Hungary, with 9.5 million inhabitans, is one of the modest-sized countries of the European Union.

woman with Uralic features 

People with this look most often found in in Russia, in Finland and other Scandinavian countries. Much less often found in the Baltic states, Poland, and eastern Germany.

Although Hungarians speak a Finno-Ugric language, the Hungarian population is of mixed heritage, who mostly resemble neighboring populations in physical appearance. Already at the time of their settlement in Central Europe, people with Uralic (Euro-Mongoloid) facial features were in a minority in the Hungarian tribal confederation. Located at the crossroads of Europe, the Kingdom of Hungary was a melting pot of different ethnicities, with sizable Slavic, Latin, Germanic, Turkic, Iranian, etc populations. However, due to their political dominance, the language and culture of the Hungarians (Magyars) prevailed, and Hungarian is by far the most widely spoken Uralic language in the world.

Oriana:
I have known only a handful of Hungarians — enough, however, to make me wonder why some Hungarians appear have slightly slanted eyes. My guess was that it was their Tatar legacy — but then a lot of “ethnic Russians” would have those features as well. Only now  it’s finally clear — it’s the remote relationship to the Siberian tribes.

Not that Hungarians could be accurately called a Uralic people. Genetically, Hungarians are a veritable goulash of ethnicities, including Slovaks and Romanians. It's the language that is Uralic. It is not an Indo-European language. It shows kinship with Finnish and Estonian, as well as the Khanty and Mansi languages of Siberia. I was thrilled to read about Ugra River. 

What is now southern Poland, or "Little Poland," was once the home of the tribe of Vandals, a Germanic tribe infamous for their sack of Rome. My mother was quite happy with her name, Wanda (pronounced Vahn-da), and had no idea that is was derived from "Vandal."

 Southern Ural Mountains

*
POPE FRANCIS USED TO TEACH LITERATURE

Pope Francis is dead at 88, on the day after Easter—an appropriate Lenten epilogue for a pontiff with a keen sense of story.

60 years earlier, Francis was Jorge Mario Bergoglio, a Jesuit seminarian who taught literature and writing at Colegio de la Immaculada Concepciòn, a secondary school for boys in Santa Fé, Argentina. His students called him carucha; babyface.

The boys were in their final two years of school. At their age, Francis had part of his lung removed, contributing to a condition that would last his entire life. Not much older than his pupils, Francis had to be “distant, formal,” with one student noting he “was very polite but never smiled.”

He was supposed to teach them El Cid, a Spanish epic about the Castilian knight Rodrigo Díaz de Viva, but like other teachers, Francis was stuck between curriculum and reality. The boys balked. They wanted to read Federico García Lorca, or more “racy” works like La Celestina by Fernando de Rojas.

Pope Francis died at 88, on the day after Easter—an appropriate Lenten epilogue for a pontiff with a keen sense of story.

In 2010, Francis reunited with many of those former pupils, and told them “cuando hable de discípulos y alumnos siempre se va a estar acordando de nosotros”; that he would always think of them as his students.

He remained a teacher throughout his pontificate. His pastoral letter on literature affirms an incarnational vision of storytelling. For Francis, Jesus Christ was not mere abstraction, but a man of flesh: “that flesh made of passions, emotions and feelings, words that challenge and console, hands that touch and heal, looks that liberate and encourage, flesh made of hospitality, forgiveness, indignation, courage, fearlessness; in a word, love.” He ended his letter with the words of Paul Celan: “Those who truly learn to see, draw close to what is unseen.”

It should not be surprising that Pope Francis, who felt that literature “engages our concrete existence, with its innate tensions, desires and meaningful experiences” would stir the hearts of writers—including Toni Morrison. In 2015 the Catholic convert told NPR that “I might be easily seduced to go back to church because I like the controversy as well as the beauty of this particular Pope Francis. He’s very interesting to me.”

Francis was preternaturally Jesuit: scholarly yet pastoral, erudite but egalitarian. He was the first Jesuit pope, a phrase which feels like an impossible, Borgesian occurrence.

Francis was especially fond of “Legend,” one of Borges’s short tales. Cain and Abel encounter each other in a desert afterlife. The brothers sit, start a fire, and eat, although they “sat silently, as weary people do when dusk begins to fall.” When the flame illuminates Abel’s forehead, Cain sees “the mark of the stone.” He drops his bread, and asks for his brother’s forgiveness—but adds a question: “Was it you that killed me, or did I kill you?”

Abel says that he could not remember, but “here we are, together, like before.” And Cain responds: “Now I know that you have truly forgiven me, because forgetting is forgiving. I, too, will try to forget.”

After he wrote the generous prologue for the book by Francis’s students, Borges, then 66 and blind, made the eight hour trek from Buenos Aires to Santa Fé. The writer told Francis that he still said the Lord’s Prayer every night, despite his unbelief, “because he had promised his mother he’d do so.”

One visit, Francis went to the hotel to bring Borges to campus, but the writer asked for help first. Borges asked the young Jesuit to shave him. Francis did, with gentleness and humility that would remain with him until his final day.

https://lithub.com/the-most-literary-pope-requiescat-in-pace-francis/

*******
46% OF RUSSIAN OIL REFINERIES HAVE BEEN DAMAGED OR DESTROYED

46% of Russian oil refineries have been taken offline by Ukraine. That doesn’t mean “destroyed” — but if sufficient damage is done, this halts production.

Russia's budget revenues from oil and gas fell 17% year-over-year to 1.08 trillion rubles ($12.8 billion) in March, the Finance Ministry reported Thursday.

The government collected approximately 230 billion rubles ($2.7 billion) less in levies, which account for one-third of its total revenue, compared to March 2024.

Forced discounts on Russian oil, exacerbated by tougher U.S. sanctions and a sharp appreciation of the ruble, have significantly dented the country's budget revenues from raw materials.

For the second consecutive month, the Finance Ministry recorded a nearly 20% decline in raw material rents. Over the first quarter of the year, oil and gas revenues dropped 10% to 2.64 trillion rubles ($31.4 billion).

“The situation is sensitive. This is a noticeable loss that will have to be covered either by additional borrowing or by drawing from the National Wealth Fund, which has already been largely depleted,” said Sofya Donets, chief economist at T-Investments.

Donets estimates that annual oil and gas tax revenues may reach only 2 trillion rubles ($23.8 billion) — just 18% of the projected 10.9 trillion rubles ($129.7 billion).

Oil prices and the ruble exchange rate are emerging as key challenges for the government: a barrel of Urals crude is trading below $60, well under the $70 price assumed in the budget.

Meanwhile, the ruble's exchange rate against the dollar has risen to 84 rubles compared to the government's forecast of 96.5.

As a result, the ruble price of oil — a critical factor for budget revenues — has plunged to its lowest level since the summer of 2023, falling nearly 30% short of government projections.
“A strong ruble is a joy for Russian consumers, but a pain for budget,” said Evgeny Kogan, an investment banker and professor at the Higher School of Economics. “We receive oil and gas revenues in foreign currency and then they are converted into rubles. The stronger the ruble, the fewer rubles exporters get at the end.”

As a result, the ruble price of oil — a critical factor for budget revenues — has plunged to its lowest level since the summer of 2023, falling nearly 30% short of government projections.

“A strong ruble is a joy for Russian consumers, but a pain for budget,” said Evgeny Kogan, an investment banker and professor at the Higher School of Economics. “We receive oil and gas revenues in foreign currency and then they are converted into rubles. The stronger the ruble, the fewer rubles exporters get at the end.”

To close the growing budget gap — which in January and February was already three times the annual target — the government may have to devalue the ruble. The currency is currently overvalued by 20%, and Donets expects it to weaken to 100-105 rubles per dollar by year-end.

Meanwhile, the government has fewer reserves to offset declining revenues. The National Wealth Fund, built up over years through excess oil profits, has lost two-thirds of its liquid assets since the invasion of Ukraine three years ago. Only about $40 billion remains, the lowest level since the fund’s inception in 2008.

According to economist Olga Belenkaya of Finam, the NWF’s reserves should last about a year if Urals crude remains above $50 per barrel. 

“The key question is how far oil prices will fall and for how long they will stay low,” Belenkaya said.

Analysts at MMI have warned that if oil prices remain low, the government may have no choice but to slash expenditures to maintain fiscal stability.

https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2025/04/03/russias-oil-and-gas-revenues-fall-17-year-on-year-in-march-a88596

*
TWISTING REALITY IS THE NAME OF PUTIN'S WAR GAME 

Russian Government banned image number 4072

The Kremlin’s strategic tradecraft of blurring the line between fact and fiction has become one of its most potent tools in modern warfare. Known as maskirovka, it relies on propaganda and deception to inflate perceptions of Russian power and obscure its vulnerabilities. 

The sudden collapse of the Syrian regime, once a cornerstone of Moscow’s influence in the Middle East and a key Russian protectorate, was a global humiliation for Russia. Paired with the assassination of a senior general in the heart of Moscow and persistent failures in Ukraine, these events threaten to undermine the Kremlin’s self-image as a dominant geopolitical power.

Since its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Russia has consistently distorted perceptions of its military prowess and successes on the battlefield. From the beginning, the Kremlin has claimed swift victories and minimal losses, in contrast with reliable, independent assessments that state otherwise. State media have routinely downplayed Ukrainian resistance and exaggerated Russian military successes, creating a parallel reality for domestic consumption and international intimidation. 

Take the Kremlin’s portrayal of the Battle of Kyiv in the early stages of the war, for example. Despite failing to capture the Ukrainian capital and suffering significant losses, Russian propaganda painted the withdrawal as a strategic “goodwill gesture,” continuing a longstanding Russian tradition of inflating military capability through propaganda.

When confronted in the physical theater of combat, the Russian military often defaults to brute force tactics where human lives, especially Russian, are expendable. British Defense Intelligence assesses that 700,000 Russian personnel have been killed or wounded between the start of the war and Nov. 22, 2024, with Russian troops currently averaging 1,600 killed in action per day.

Lenin is supposed to have said, “A lie told enough times becomes a truth.” The quote is also attributed to Joseph Goebbels. In reality, it belongs to the English writer Isa Blagden from her 1869 novel The Crown of a Life. Though Lenin never said it, this fact proves the statement itself, demonstrating that propagandists often fool even themselves. Everything is indeed not always as it seems.

Perhaps Putin’s most significant success in the Ukraine war was staring down the Wagner mutiny, an operation led by Russian mercenaries and not Ukrainian troops. In a 2023 Helsinki speech, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken declared: “The Kremlin often claimed it had the second-strongest military in the world, and many believed it.” Hype and reality are two diametrically opposing concepts. 

The Russian military’s formidable and invincible reputation is one of the most successful propaganda myths perpetuated by the Kremlin, bolstering the morale of its own citizens and intimidating its adversaries. 

This allows the Kremlin to justify war with historical Russian narratives, drumming up domestic support by claiming to protect Russian-speaking minority populations in Ukraine, or exploiting antisemitism and invoking “de-Nazification.” In 2014, Putin presented his seizure of Crimea as a “peaceful reunification,” obscuring the violations of international law.

This tradition of obfuscation dates to Soviet times. Josef Stalin was infamous for airbrushing from the records those who fell from grace. Even the most iconic depiction of the Red Army’s triumph over Nazi Germany, the iconic image of the Soviet flag flying over the Reichstag, was staged and heavily altered to rival the emotional impact of the Iwo Jima photograph. 

During the 1939-40 Winter War against Finland, Soviet propagandists grossly misrepresented the conflict’s reality, painting a picture of inevitable victory against a weak opponent. The outnumbered and outgunned Finns mounted a formidable resistance. A single Finnish sniper named Simo Häyhä killed 505 Soviet soldiers in 110 days. The Soviets’ losses were so high that they exposed the Red Army’s glaring weaknesses to the world — a humiliation so profound that it emboldened Hitler to believe that invading the Soviet Union would be as simple as to “kick in the door.” 

More recently, Moscow’s concocted image of military invincibility was dented in Syria in 2018, when Russian forces faced off against U.S. soldiers in direct combat for the first time in a century. In the Battle of Khasham, 30 U.S. commandos and supporting air power decimated a force of 500 Russian mercenaries and pro-Syrian government troops. 

Putin’s KGB background has shaped his preference for covert operations over direct confrontation. He responds to those who challenge his ideologies with state-ordered executions both at home and abroad. The Kremlin always initially denies involvement but welcomes the perpetrators with a red carpet, a hug and a medal on their return to the motherland in prisoner swaps.

Kremlin activities beyond Ukraine increasingly reflect a strategy of constant intimidation. Regular incursions by Russian planes into NATO airspace, with Sweden being a recent example, demonstrate an ongoing effort to test international resolve. When all other intimidation methods fail, the Kremlin often dangles the nuclear card like a deranged person threatening to pull out a grenade pin in a crammed elevator.

When the Biden administration allowed Ukraine to use U.S.-made weapons to strike Russian territory, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov declared a “qualitatively new phase of the Western war against Russia,” and vowed that Moscow “will react accordingly.” Moscow has now published a new nuclear doctrine stating that any attack on Russia by a non-nuclear state, aided by a nuclear state, will be considered an act of aggression by both parties. But this recent nuclear saber-rattling is believed by few of Ukraine’s allies, who understand that its primary objective is manipulation and deterrence projection. As Putin understands it, the West is increasingly calling his bluff. This heightens the risk of escalation, calculated or accidental, maintaining psychological dominance and thus heightening the very danger he aims to avoid.

After the 2014 Russian invasion of Crimea, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and U.S. President Barack Obama discussed how Putin may not have been in touch with reality. The fact that Putin went largely unchallenged suggests that perhaps it was the other way around. What we allow to become real in the metaphysical mind inevitably manifests in the physical world. He demonstrated his mastery of the concept when he boasted about taking over  Crimea “without a single shot being fired.” 

Sun Tzu said that the acme of skill is to defeat an enemy without fighting. He recognized the cognitive domain as being like the high ground of a battlefield, as important as any other military capability. 

Indeed, everything is perception. 

As cognitive sovereignty emerges as one of our generation’s greatest national security challenges, the world must learn to fight ideologically, militarily and cognitively by preemptively maintaining information superiority to counter totalitarian and autocratic regimes’ mind games. Winning the cognitive battle means reclaiming the narrative and demonstrating that reality, not propaganda, dictates the course of history. 

https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2025/04/24/twisting-reality-is-the-name-of-putins-war-game-a88865

*
RUSSIANS WANT TO BE FEARED

Russians want to be feared. They want to be the conquerors of lands. They even dress newborn babies as soldiers.

A maternity hospital in Siberia dressed babies in military uniforms for discharge.

The Kuzbass Regional Maternity Hospital in the city of Kemerovo is running a promotion, dedicated to the 80th anniversary of the end of WW2, which in Russia is pompously celebrating as “the Victory Day” on May 9, 2025.

Local nurses sewed miniature caps and khaki raincoats to dress newborns for discharge.

“This initiative is intended to remind us of the connection between generations, the courage of the defenders of the Fatherland, and that even the smallest citizen of Russia is part of a great history,” the maternity hospital’s VKontakte page says.

The “defender of fatherland” brainwashing now starts at birth in Russia. Mothers are reminded that their babies are going to be sent to army as soon as they turn 18. (Russia has compulsory military service.)

And then these “defenders” are sent to capture “Russia’s historic lands”, which Putin tells them must be part of Russia.

Like what they are doing in Ukraine now.

First the “defenders” from artillery and strategic missile units hit cities with bombs and missiles — and then infantry “defenders” are sent to capture the ruins. City by city.

Putin wants to be tsar of all Europe.

Vladivostok to Lisbon. 

He of course prefers to get the lands “peacefully” — so that people don’t fight back. ~ Elena Gold, Quora

Copeacado:
From womb to tomb, just as in the Tsarist Era when they conscripted their serf soldiers for life.

*
WOMANOSPHERE: THE ANTI-FEMINIST MEDIA TELLING WOMEN TO BE THIN, FERTILE, AND REPUBLICAN

A crop of conservative personalities such as Brett Cooper and Candace Owens, and outlets like Evie, are convincing young women of a gender-essentialist worldview

On the most recent episode of her YouTube show, the rightwing commentator Brett Cooper joined the rest of the world in jeering Katy Perry, Gayle King and Lauren Sánchez’s brief flight to space.

“These women were completely dependent on men who built this spacecraft,” she said with a cheeky smirk. “Frankly, we all are, because men built civilization. They built the homes that we live in, they built the studio that I am recording in … the spaceships that all of these rich celebrities are flying around in.” The difference between Cooper and feminists, she says, “is I choose to acknowledge that and celebrate it and be grateful.”'

The Blue Origin flight was prime fodder for Cooper, a bubbly, fast-talking 23-year-old with silky espresso brown curls and colorful Pinterest-friendly prints on the wall behind her. She posts biweekly videos commenting on hot-button social and cultural issues. Thumbnails on YouTube depict her – eyebrows raised quizzically, mouth agape in faux surprise – alongside titles like SNOW WHITE EPIC FAIL and CAPTAIN AMERICA HATES AMERICA? in yellow all caps. These cultural flashpoints serve as her evidence that young women are finally “waking up” to the lies feminism has apparently told them.

There is a sizable audience for Cooper’s brand of disarming anti-feminist content. She had the second-fastest growing political YouTube channel in the first quarter of 2025 with over 900,000 new subscribers, according to data analyzed by researcher Kyle Tharp. Her Spotify audience is about 60% female, a spokesperson told Semafor.

Analyses of the 2024 election widely heralded the “manosphere” – the coalition of bro podcasters and YouTubers popular with male audiences – as key to delivering Donald Trump’s victory. According to an AP poll, 56% of men under age 30 went for Trump compared with 41% four years prior. By meeting young men where they were at, Trump and his surrogates were able to reach voters who are typically among the least politically engaged segments of society.

Now, there are the beginnings of an organized effort to create a similar alternative rightwing media ecosystem targeting young female US audiences – one of the few demographics that has, until now, leaned substantially Democratic.

This new “womanosphere” includes Cooper’s channel as well as lifestyle magazines like the Conservateur and Evie, Candace Owens’s Club Candace, Alex Clark’s Maha (“Make America Healthy Again”) talkshow Culture Apothecary, conservative Christian influencer Allie Beth Stuckey’s Relatable, and swimmer turned anti-transgender activist Riley Gaines’s podcast Gaines For Girls. Draw the circle a bit wider and you get the “tradwives” posting homemaking content on Instagram, the edgelord It Girls of Red Scare, and “femcel” influencers positioning themselves as the female answer to Tate.

While the women behind these outlets all have different styles and tactics, they are mostly aligned in their desire to return to a gender-essentialist worldview: women as submissive homemakers, men as strong providers.

Like the manosphere influencers, these outlets are animated by a grievance against “wokeness” and the belief that conservatives are the real oppressed minority. They claim that the liberal media and Hollywood are promoting feminist propaganda, and so they must fight back.
Though they present themselves as independent thinkers, their ideology lines up neatly with the Trump administration’s quest to dismantle reproductive rights, roll back protections for LGBTQ+ people, and advance an anti-science agenda that puts the health of millions of Americans at risk.

It’s not only rightwingers who have gripes with contemporary feminism. Many on the left have been critical of shallow “girlboss feminism” (the bipartisan backlash to the embarrassing Blue Origin flight being a case in point), noting that impossible expectations are placed on women in a crassly capitalist society that offers little support for working mothers. According to a 2023 survey run by the non-profit Catalyst, four in 10 women said they felt they would need to change jobs in order to manage childcare demands, and the US is still the only rich country in the world without a national paid parental leave policy. 

Yet for this new womanosphere, the response is not advancing policies like paid family leave or affordable childcare, but to return to an idealized, illusory past where being a wife and mother was viewed as a woman’s sole purpose.

Young women are particularly vulnerable to these appeals. Like their peers in the manosphere, these commentators are capitalizing on a real crisis of loneliness and economic precarity facing gen Z. “Social media has truly given gen Z a warped sense of reality,” said Cooper, who has described dating apps as “treacherous” and a “barren” landscape.

The alternative vision these influencers are proposing is scarily retrograde and would strip women of their freedom and economic independence. “You want to go back and sit in a cubicle when you could have this, like, beautiful amazing child that you’ve created with the love of your life?” Cooper asked rhetorically on a recent podcast appearance.

Instead of trying to have it all, women, she said, need to change their priorities because “if you aren’t going to the gym, if you aren’t taking care of yourself, if you don’t like children, if you only care about your career, and you hate the patriarchy,” then a desirable man is “not going to go for you.”

The type of woman these commentators valorize is thin, straight, fertile, traditionally feminine, conventionally attractive to men and white – though they try to avoid overt racism, instead opting for sentiments like, “as a minority woman, I’m here to say that you’ll be happier and more fulfilled if you aren’t consumed by thinking about your race.” 

Anyone who falls outside of this narrow mold is subject to relentless mocking and disparagement. Though they have different tactics and tones, like their cohorts in the manosphere, they play with the idea that calling women fat or ugly is fun and transgressive – framing it as part of a virtuous quest to rid society of woke, feminist ideals.

Young women have been hailed as the saving grace of the Democratic party, the force that will deliver us from all those angry young men spending all their time listening to podcasts, but that’s not a given. While young women still went blue in 2024, Joe Biden’s 35-point lead in 2020 dwindled to a 24-point lead for Kamala Harris. Other demographics, like Black and Latino men, broke with historical trends to shift to the right this election. 

Emily Amick, an influencer and political analyst who has been observing the trend on her Substack, said that people might underestimate the womanosphere’s impact at their peril. “What we saw in the 2024 presidential election was that the manosphere had a lot more impact than a lot of people expected,” Amick said. “I believe that the conservative movement is running the same play with women, and in 2028 we are going to see a massive impact of the messaging machines they have been building.”

A ‘conservative Cosmo’

Flipping through the homepage of Evie magazine – which launched online in 2019 and is now in print – you might mistake it for a regular glossy women’s magazine. There are pieces about the best nail color for fall and what to ask your stylist if you want Sabrina Carpenter’s hair.
But read deeper and you’ll notice that the Cosmo-esque sex tips about the art of oral sex and mastering cowgirl come with a disclaimer that they are “intended for married women” only. You’ll see headlines like Want Your Husband To Get You Pregnant? Cook Him These 10 Dishes and What Do JD Vance’s Blue Eyes And Sydney Sweeney’s Curves Have in Common? America Misses Classic Beauty And Wants It Back.

These pieces are written in a chatty, knowing tone designed to make it seem like everything they are saying is common sense, while dispatching their enemies with high school-bully cruelty. A recent piece called Why I Love Being A Hot Mom oscillated between glib declarations like “skinny sex is the best sex” and diatribes from the author about how she despises “mediocre motherhood” and the “lack of self-control, unattractiveness, and state of disease” that results from embracing body positivity. (Disagree with her? You’re probably a “sorry, sad, chronically online gutter goblin”.)

In the past two decades, mainstream women’s outlets have made attempts to emphasize overall wellbeing instead of outer beauty and valorizing thinness above all. Evie sees this as wokeness run amok. They want to bring back your mother’s – or your grandmother’s – women’s magazine, in which it was OK to celebrate a certain body type over others. “When we encounter a heavily tattooed, blue-haired, obese, gender-neutral individual with a bull-ring, that person is communicating to us that they actively disregard the standards for normality that the majority of people agree on,” read a 2021 piece titled Objective Feminine Beauty Is Not A Relic Of The Patriarchy.

Evie was started by married couple Brittany and Gabriel Hugoboom as a sort of “conservative Cosmo.” As Brittany Hugoboom told the New York Times in a March profile, their goal was to build a “one-stop shop for femininity” that runs counter to the “casual sex, careerism or ideological activism” she attributes to feminism.

In addition to Evie, the Hugobooms run a menstrual cycle wellness app backed by Peter Thiel that encourages fertility planning through cycle-tracking. Along with ads for the app in their print issue, their content frequently decries the dangers of the pill and IUDs. “Our reproductive organs are made for just that – creating new life – not warding off sperm and altering our insides to make conception close to impossible,” read a recent Evie piece. Though some young women may recoil when conservative men like JD Vance and Elon Musk opine on birthrates and fertility, outlets like Evie are able to repackage a similar message in a more approachable way.

Maggie Bullock, a women’s magazine veteran who co-writes the Spread, a newsletter about the industry, said she saw outlets like Evie as trying to be something of a “gateway drug” into more extreme conservative ideologies. “Like, we’re nice and we’re pretty and we’re not that radical, don’t worry, we’re just telling you the truth,” she said. “It feels like a wolf in sheep’s clothing.”

Jessica Marie Baumgartner, a 41-year-old former Evie freelancer and self-identified “conservative pagan” mother of five based outside St Louis, Missouri, said that though she had written for other rightwing outlets before Evie, she was attracted to “being able to write specifically about women’s issues” like breastfeeding, home birth and home schooling. She was turned off by what she saw as an “obsession with sex” in mainstream women’s magazines. “They started writing articles about younger and younger sex, with younger and younger underage minors. And that was when I was just like, ew, what’s happening here?”

Baumgartner, like many of Evie’s writers, looks nostalgically to the past as a solution for society’s ills. “I think a lot of people are moving toward the conservative movement because we’re realizing that our grandparents had these very beautiful values that gave us a lot to look forward to,” she said. “We’re all working multiple jobs. We’re all so tired, we’re barely able to keep up with our kids. We barely know our neighbors. Everybody is so stretched thin because our values have shifted away from what really matters.”

Evie’s reach shouldn’t be overstated – it has 210,000 followers on Instagram, compared with Cosmopolitan’s 4m, and has only put out three print issues in four years – but they’re increasingly finding new ways to garner attention. The cover of Evie’s 2024 print issue featured Ballerina Farm influencer Hannah Neeleman – whose posts about homesteading and home schooling her eight kids on their Utah farm have garnered her 10 million Instagram followers – milking a cow in a bonnet and white peasant dress.

While quitting one’s corporate job to bake pies, milk cows and raise beautiful babies while wearing flowing nap-dresses may look like an appealing form of escapism, Bullock said this lifestyle propaganda was serving a much more sweeping and nefarious conservative agenda. As she put it: “If you’re going to tell a generation of young women that it’s bad to be a feminist, the Trump administration is pro-woman, that they should be having babies immediately and more of them and the pill is bad for them, that is a huge setback you’re proposing for American women.”'

‘A real parasocial relationship’

From Phyllis Schlafly in the 1970s, who helped mobilize young Christian women against the Equal Rights Amendment, to Ann Coulter and Moms for Liberty, women have long played a role in spreading conservative propaganda. But what sets these new voices apart is that they don’t all market themselves as political commentators. 

In this sense, they are cribbing from the success of the manosphere, which won new Maga converts in part because most of its leading figures weren’t explicitly partisan. Multi-hours-long podcast episodes and Twitch streams from the likes of Rogan, the Nelk Boys or Theo Von are typically much more weighted to cover sports, gambling, drugs and dating than they are to talk about which bill is passing in the Senate.

The leading voices of the womanosphere are using a similar strategy. As Brittany Hugoboom put it in an op–ed for the rightwing outlet Quillette: “Conservatives will never win if they imagine themselves as combatants atop defensive battlements, hurling abuse on the mass media. We need to involve ourselves in the creation of pop culture.”

But while Maga has piggybacked on the manosphere’s existing popularity in fields like wrestling and comedy, many of the loudest voices in the womanosphere have already been political media operatives. Cooper, Candace Owens, Allie Beth Stuckey and Alex Clark all have longstanding ties to conservative media outlets like the Blaze and the Daily Wire as well as the conservative activist group Turning Point USA, which was instrumental in turning out the vote for Trump.

Over the past few years, Turning Point has poured millions into cultivating an alternative rightwing media space. After the election, the group told the New York Times that they had incubated about 350 rightwing influencers. “We made long-term investments in creators and in influential voices that we believe will be the opinion shapers of tomorrow,” executive director Charlie Kirk told the outlet.

“Influencers are not advertisements. They are in the bathroom with you, they are holding your hand when you break up with your boyfriend, they are helping you make dinner for your kids. You have a real parasocial relationship,” said Amick.

Take Candace Owens. Over the past five years, Owens has become a polarizing figure even on the right. In addition to vitriolic criticism of Black Lives Matter and #MeToo, Owens’s controversial claims that, for example, the Jewish mystical practice Kabbalah is a “pedophile-centric religion” have drawn condemnation from Jewish advocacy groups.

But her new site Club Candace, looks, at first glance, like a completely different venture. With a pleasing orchid purple color scheme, a cutesy cursive logo and slick interface, the Club Candace website marks Owens’s attempt to brand herself as a more mainstream women’s lifestyle influencer, offering a book club and fitness app specifically targeted at new mothers.

Like Cooper, Owens has figured out how to ride the coattails of the algorithm by choosing subjects that will shoot to the top of people’s social media feeds. She has become one of the leading commentators on the Blake Lively-Justin Baldoni scandal. On a recent YouTube video, which has garnered more than 2.5m views, she riffed: “Ryan Reynolds obviously has to be deported back to Canada,” saying this was the rare issue in which the left and right can “come together.” 

With a scrappy muckraking style that includes digging up documents and hunting down first-person sources – she recently shared a message she claims she received from Reynolds’s childhood teacher – Owens’s content is perfectly targeted to the era of the obsessive TikTok sleuth. Yet her defense of Baldoni is of a piece with her longtime quest to take down the #MeToo movement, which she has derided as “a witch-hunt on men.”

Viewers who initially tuned in for Owens’s dissection of Lively’s lawsuits will soon find themselves mired in conspiracy theories that the French president Emmanuel Macron’s wife is trans – “I would stake my entire professional career” on the fact Brigitte Macron “was born a man”, Owens has said – and claims that Chrissy Teigen’s pro-choice advocacy is an attempt to “glamorize child sacrifice.”

Likewise, people who come to Club Candace looking for another book club like Oprah’s or Reese Witherspoon’s will find themselves exposed to texts like The Assault on Truth, a controversial book attacking Sigmund Freud (which Owens has cited to claim: “Sigmund Freud was a homosexual man whose best friend was a pedophile”).

Yet her rebrand seems to be working. As EJ Dickson wrote in the Cut, this segue into celebrity content has found her a much broader audience of listeners that cuts across the political spectrum, with her views quadrupling since this time last year. She’s hot on Cooper’s heels as the fourth-fastest-growing political YouTube channel.

Wellness influencers go Maha

Alex Clark is a 32-year-old influencer who used to host the podcast POPlitics, from which she garnered a loyal fanbase of “cuteservatives” who came to her for conservative takes on pop culture topics like: Who’s the Bigger Crybaby: Colin Kaepernick or Prince Harry?

But during the pandemic Clark became obsessed with wellness, and last year, she launched her new series, Culture Apothecary. Now, half a million subscribers tune in twice a week to see Clark – perched on a fuzzy pink armchair in a cozy olive green and gold-accented living room – interview guests on the harms of artificial food dyes and how to raise your kids to “love biblically” amid ads for brands like Cowboy Colostrum.

The coalition drawn to fringe wellness ideas is multifaceted: from the “crunchy” moms frightened of toxic chemicals they believe are in our food and pharmaceuticals, to the chronic illness sufferers frustrated with a medical system they feel has let them down. Yet the savvy voices of the womanosphere have responded by weaponizing genuine anxieties – which have complex roots and few easy answers – and serving up far-right propaganda on a platter. “It’s sneaky,” Clark told the Washington Post. “I want to be seen as: Alex Clark, cool girl, loves health and wellness, happens to be conservative. I’m not trying to beat people over the head with that. I don’t think that’s persuasive.”

Mikayla Hantula, 25, from Fresno, California, said she felt a lot of judgment from her doctors for her opposition to hormonal birth control and her skepticism around vaccines (the latter led her pediatrician to refuse to give her care). Listening to Clark’s podcast, however, she found what she wanted to hear. “Wanting to do things naturally, they kind of look at you like you’re wackadoodle,” she said. “The difference is someone like Alex is willing to bring someone on that’s willing to say: ‘Here are all the harms in birth control that we’re seeing. Why are we not talking about this?’”

The titles of Clark’s videos take a harmless just-asking-questions tone that invites people to click and see for themselves. Yet far from providing options for women, Clark allows her guests to peddle scientifically dubious claims in service of a Christian conservative worldview. An episode called To Vax or Not to Vax: Educating Parents on the Options features an interview with the outspoken anti-vaccine doctor Bob Sears, who has been disciplined by California’s state medical board for wrongly exempting a two-year-old patient from vaccinations. 

It also doesn’t take long for Aaron Kheriaty, the Catholic thinktank fellow interviewed on Is IVF a Huge Ethical Mistake, to tell listeners that there is no such thing as an ethical way to perform IVF. (“While it may be uncomfortable or inconvenient to hear the things that you’ve said today in this interview, the facts are on your side,” agreed Clark, nodding solemnly.)

Clark’s crusades against topics such as birth control – that it “accelerates aging”, “induces abortion,” causes cancer and fertility issues – make more sense in light of the Trump administration’s pro-natalist policy agenda, which organizations like Turning Point USA and Project 2025 have spent years crafting.

“It’s all tied together with the goal of shaming women who have sex and who might get pregnant, and ensuring that they really are forced into the idea of this nuclear family because it preserves current power structures,” said Dr Jennifer Lincoln, an OB-GYN in Portland, Oregon. “They come at it from this Maha angle of ‘we have to protect women,’ and then they legislate away people’s choices to use these medicines that are literally life-saving for so many people.”

They are feeling pretty good about how far they’ve come. In a recent interview with Lara Trump on her Fox News show, Cooper said that it was “incredibly cool” for young people to be conservative now. As she put it: “I think Democrats have their work cut out for them.”

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/24/womanosphere-conservative-women

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CURRENT PARENTING TRENDS THAT ARE BOUND FOR EXTINCTION

Trends come and go in popularity, and those pertaining to parenting are no exception. 

Redditor GroundJealous7195 asked, "What parenting advice accepted today will be criticized or outdated in the future?" Here are some parenting trends that people would love to see go extinct.

1. "Never saying no to children. We teach kids by modeling behavior. I do not want my daughter to internalize that 'no' is a bad word, or that we don't say it to people we love, or that it's only for emergencies, or that she needs special extenuating circumstances to give her permission to say no. I say no when I mean no, and I want my daughter to do the same."

2."Over-scheduling children. So many kids go from daycare to lessons and then straight to bed almost every day of the week. On top of that, they have multiple lessons or activities on the weekends and no downtime to be bored at home. Kids need time to be bored.”
children exercising

3. "The popular idea that time outs are bad. Time outs work great. It's an immediate natural consequence. Can't play nice? Go sit over there and calm yourself away from polite society."

4. ”Waiting so long to potty train. It is not normal for typically developing kids who are almost five years to still be soiling themselves."

5. ”Not teaching kids to deal with frustration and other negative emotions early on. Instead, parents give in to every demand, which lets kids expect that everyone else will do the same.”

6. ”Kids online, and I'm not just talking about letting kids on social media. Rather, I'm pointing to family bloggers/vloggers sharing images of their kids everywhere."

7. ”I think we’re going to see pushback against over-involved/helicopter parenting. These parents don't allow kids to practice independence. Their kids have no opportunity to learn to cope with mistakes and disappointments until these realities are thrown on them all at once as adults."

8. ”Beige everything. We went from overstimulating colors from the 2000s to everything being beige and understimulating."

9. ”Accommodations. Back when I was a kid, accommodations were hardly even a thing. Some kids just weren’t cut out for academics, end of story. We just let them fall by the wayside. I made it, but none of my brothers did. Oh well. We don’t do that anymore, thank goodness. We support students with additional needs. Up to a third of all students now have IEPs or 504s, including both of my own kids and when done right, it allows them to succeed. However, what I have observed is that outcomes vary. A lot..."

10. ”Kids with additional needs must learn how to function and how to self-advocate. My friend went full tiger mom on every teacher who said it was time for her AuDHD son to start being responsible for turning in his own homework. It's not fair, he can’t. It’s the teacher's job to retrieve it from him. The teachers stopped fighting her. Guess who didn’t graduate college? 

He is (or was) a good kid who was super smart and, in my opinion, perfectly capable of living a perfectly normal and successful life. He certainly could have turned in his own homework in high school had his mom not convinced him otherwise. She is now wringing her hands and crying for sympathy because she believes she did everything possible. I watched that slow train wreck in real time; I wasn’t the only one who tried to redirect her, but she would not listen. 

11. "Barriers should always be minimized or eliminated... that should go without saying. But the cold, cruel world cannot and will not revolve around each and every one of us. Adults all prioritize the needs of children. But if kids are not gradually weaned from supports where possible, or taught to take responsibility for getting their needs met, they risk falling on their faces when they hit independent adulthood."

12. ”Letting babies play on iPhones and iPads. As a Kindergarten teacher, I'm crossing my fingers that this becomes outdated. The research is out there, but it's also the easy way to keep a kid quiet all day every day, so I don't know if enough people will change."

13. ”Parents being present for every single moment of a child's life. Many children these days have no unsupervised time. In the future, we will realize how harmful this is to children's development and parental wellbeing."

14. ”Cry it out sleep training. I understand that as babies get older, they need chances to self-soothe, but I think some parents take it really far. I have heard of people who put the baby down for bed at 7 p.m. and don't respond to them until morning.

15. ”Not giving children any privacy. I don't mean posting pictures of them online. Rather, I mean parents who track their kids' phones, texts, and emails. Kids have zero privacy. My son is 14 and most of his friends' parents are shocked that I don't check his location, have parental alerts on his phone, or go through his messages. My parents couldn't track me. Yes, I did dumb things, but that's part of growing up. They don't have real independence and the opportunity to make mistakes if you're constantly watching them. I can access my son's location, but we have it set up to alert him if I do. Trust goes both ways. I trust him to make good choices and he trusts me not to read through his discord, messages, and emails.

16. ”Feeding kids ultra-processed food as part of our regular diet. I think the next generation will be appalled by what we feed our kids today. They will ask why we let our kids eat food with so many preservatives and artificial products lol. I think our grandkids will wonder why we allowed companies to put so much crap in our foods!"

17. ”Not demanding that toddlers help with chores. Yes, it's inconvenient. Yes, it makes the chore take longer. Yes, it means you sometimes have to reset the table because your two year old put all the forks in her mouth. But toddlers want to help, and getting them to participate when they're young makes them feel more connected to the household. It also means they'll know how to do things when they're big enough to do it independently. I see so many kids aged ten or even older who can't or won't help with basic tasks like doing the dishwasher or setting the table."

18. ”Giving your kids screentime will be the smoking of our generation for kids under five."

19. ”Limited and inconsistent parental leave. I hope that when our kids are having kids, they are shocked to hear how difficult it is for many Americans to stitch together sufficient leave."

20.”Exclusive breastfeeding rather than bottle or breast and bottle when needed. It may take a while for the evidence to catch up to policy, but the current trend of telling mums to avoid the temptation of formula feeding is unhelpful nonsense."

21. ”Baby-led weaning! This seems so unnecessary and so dangerous if done wrong. Hell, if it's done right, it still seems scary and dangerous. Kids will learn to eat, there is no reason to rush them into eating solid whole pieces of food so early."

https://www.buzzfeed.com/hannahloewentheil/parenting-trends-that-will-disappear

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SOLAR AND WIND BOOM PUSHES WORLD PAST 40% CLEAN ELECTRICITY IN 2024

Solar is the main driver of renewables growth, with generation doubling in three years

Clean power is set to outpace fast demand growth, leading to a decline in fossil generation in the coming years

London, 8 April  – The world reached a new milestone as low-carbon sources – renewables and nuclear – provided 40.9% of the world’s electricity generation in 2024, passing the 40% mark for the first time since the 1940s, according to a report by global energy think tank Ember.

Renewables were the main driver of overall clean growth, adding a record 858 TWh in 2024, 49% more than the previous high in 2022. Solar was the largest contributor for the third year running, adding 474 TWh to reach a share of 6.9%. Solar was the fastest-growing power source (+29%) for the 20th year in a row. Solar electricity has doubled in just three years, providing more than 2,000 TWh of electricity in 2024. Wind generation also grew to 8.1% of global electricity, while hydro’s share remained steady at 14% – the single largest renewable source.

“Solar power has become the engine of the global energy transition,” said Phil MacDonald, Ember’s managing director. “Paired with battery storage, solar is set to be an unstoppable force. As the fastest-growing and largest source of new electricity, it is critical in meeting the world’s ever-increasing demand for electricity.”

Ember’s sixth annual Global Electricity Review provides the first comprehensive overview of the global power system in 2024 based on country-level data. It is published today alongside the world’s first open dataset on electricity generation in 2024, covering 88 countries that account for 93% of global electricity demand, as well as historical data for 215 countries.

The analysis finds that, despite the rise in renewables, fossil generation saw a small 1.4% increase in 2024 due to surging electricity demand, pushing global power sector emissions up 1.6% to an all-time high.

Heatwaves were the main driver of the rise in fossil generation, accounting for almost a fifth (+0.7%) of the increase in global electricity demand in 2024 (+4.0%), mainly through additional use of cooling. Without these temperature effects, fossil generation would have risen by only 0.2%, as clean electricity generation met 96% of the demand growth not caused by hotter temperatures.

“Amid the noise, it’s essential to focus on the real signal,” continued Mr MacDonald. “Hotter weather drove the fossil generation increase in 2024, but we’re very unlikely to see a similar jump in 2025.”

Aside from weather effects, increasing use of electricity for AI, data centers, electric vehicles and heat pumps is already contributing to global demand growth. Combined, growing use of these technologies accounted for a 0.7% increase in global electricity demand in 2024, double what they contributed five years ago.

Clean power set to grow faster than demand

The report shows that clean generation growth is set to outpace faster-rising demand in the coming years, marking the start of a permanent decline in fossil generation. The current expected growth in clean generation would be sufficient to meet a demand increase of 4.1% per year to 2030, which is above expectations for demand growth.

“The world is watching how technologies like AI and EVs will drive electricity demand,” continued Mr MacDonald. “It’s clear that booming solar and wind are comfortably set to deliver, and those expecting fossil fuel generation to keep rising will be disappointed.”

Beyond emerging technologies, the growth trajectories of the world’s largest emerging economies will play a crucial role in defining the global outlook. China and India are already shifting towards meeting their growing electricity needs with clean energy.

More than half of the increase in solar generation in 2024 was in China, with China’s clean generation growth meeting 81% of its demand increase in 2024. India’s solar capacity additions in 2024 doubled compared to 2023. These two countries are at the forefront of the drive to clean power and will help tip the balance towards a decline in fossil generation at a global level.

“Clean-tech, not fossil fuels, is now the driving force of economic development,” concluded Mr MacDonald. “The era of fossil growth is coming to an end, even in a world of fast-rising demand.”

https://ember-energy.org/latest-updates/world-surpasses-40-clean-power-as-renewables-see-record-rise/#:~:text=Solar%20electricity%20has%20doubled%20in%20just%20three,14%%20%E2%80%93%20the%20single%20largest%20renewable%20source

Twenty-one percent of adults in the survey reported that they had serious feelings of loneliness.

Age (Hint: it is not what you might expect.)

People between 30-44 years of age were the loneliest group — 29% of people in this age range said they were “frequently” or “always” lonely

Among 18–29-year-olds — the rate was 24%
For 45–64-year-olds, the rate was 20%
Adults aged 65 and older reported the lowest rate: 10% felt lonely

There were no real gender differences found — men and women experienced similar rates of loneliness — nor were there major differences based on political ideology or race or ethnicity. However, adults with more than one racial identity had much higher levels of loneliness: 42% in this category reported they were lonely.

There were notable differences between income but not education levels. Americans earning less than $30,000 a year were the loneliest — 29% in this category reported feeling lonely, while 19% of Americans earning between $50,000-100,000, and 18% of those making more than $100,000 a year said they were lonely.

What does it feel like to be lonely?

In the surgeon general’s advisory, loneliness is described as a state of mind: “a subjective distressing experience that results from perceived isolation or inadequate meaningful connections, where inadequate refers to the discrepancy or unmet need between an individual’s preferred and actual experience.”

The MCC report helps to further explain why social isolation is not the same as loneliness. For example, one person in the survey who experienced loneliness described having plenty of family members around but not feeling appreciated by them. Another person said they were “surrounded” by other people “who only are present in my life because [I] am useful” to them.

In their findings, the researchers also note what they describe as “existential loneliness,” or a “fundamental sense of disconnection from others or the world.” Of those who were lonely, for example, 65% said they felt “fundamentally separate or disconnected from others or the world,” and 57% said they were unable to share their true selves with others.

The MCC researchers found a strong correlation between loneliness and mental health concerns. In the report, 81% of adults who were lonely also said they suffered with anxiety or depression compared to 29% of those who were less lonely. They also noted a complex interaction between troubled feelings, where loneliness, anxiety, and depression all feed into each other.

What are some of the leading causes of loneliness in America, according to all who were surveyed?

Technology — 73% of those surveyed selected technology as contributing to loneliness in the country

Insufficient time with family — 66% chose this issue as a reason for loneliness in America
People are overworked or too busy or tired —  62% surveyed picked this concern

Mental health challenges that harm relationships with others —  60% of people rated this as a significant problem

Living in a society that is too individualistic —  58% named this as a cause of America’s loneliness problem

No religious or spiritual life, too much focus on one’s own feelings, and the changing nature of work — with more remote and hybrid schedules —  were perceived causes of loneliness selected by around 50% of people who participated in the survey

At least three-quarters of people who were surveyed highlighted these solutions to loneliness: 

Reach out to family or friends
Learn to love myself
Learn to be more forgiving of others
Find ways to help others

Among their own recommendations, the MCC researchers stress the need to promote a culture that cares and serves others. “Collective service can provide important connections that relieve loneliness,” they state, as well as “cultivate meaning and purpose and mitigate mental health challenges.”

 They also urge public and private leaders to build up social infrastructure in order to help people develop meaningful relationships with others. Three-quarters of those surveyed said they wanted “more activities and fun community events,” where they live and “public spaces that are more accessible and connection-focused like green spaces and playgrounds.”

https://www.gse.harvard.edu/ideas/usable-knowledge/24/10/what-causing-our-epidemic-loneliness-and-how-can-we-fix-it

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HOW TO OVERCOME LONELINESS IN MARRIAGE

Even in the closest, most committed marriages, loneliness can creep in. It’s a painful reality that many couples experience, but one that’s rarely talked about. You may share a home, a routine, and even a deep love, yet still feel emotionally isolated. The reasons for this vary—life’s stresses, unspoken resentments, or simply growing apart over time.

But what’s important is knowing that loneliness in marriage isn’t inevitable. In fact, February 2025 research from the Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy has found

Here’s how you and your spouse can incorporate them into your married life.

Gratitude, Forgiveness, and Loneliness in Marriage

The 2025 study analyzed data from 1,614 newly married couples—looking specifically at their feelings of loneliness, their ability to forgive their partner, how often they expressed gratitude, as well as their overall satisfaction with their marriage.

The findings were unsurprisingly clear-cut: Loneliness was indeed linked to lower relationship satisfaction for both husbands and wives. Even if only one partner felt lonely, both partners’ relationship satisfaction sank. However, when spouses actively practiced gratitude and forgiveness, this negative impact was statistically significantly weakened, with their relationship being much less likely to suffer.

Fascinatingly, there was a caveat: when husbands alone were more forgiving, it also positively affected their wives’ relationship satisfaction—even when the husbands themselves were feeling lonely. This suggests that forgiveness helps more than just the person who offers it; the positive effect of one person’s forgiveness cascades into the relationship as a whole.

Chelom Leavitt, Ph.D., the lead author of the study, emphasized the power of perspective in this regard. “Loneliness is real and something that a lot of us deal with,” she explained. “However, we don’t have to just be victims of it. We can take a proactive stance and invest in our well-being by practicing a little more gratitude and forgiveness with ourselves and our partners.”

How to Practice More Gratitude in Your Marriage

The most common misconception about gratitude as a concept is that it only entails platitudinal “thank yous.” In reality, it’s so much more than this—and so much more powerful. True gratitude means fully appreciating your partner and your relationship, even during the moments that seem meaningless or routine.

Often, partners unconsciously fall into a pattern of taking each other for granted—most especially in a long-term relationship. Grand gestures may be explicitly appreciated, but the small acts of kindness that hold your marriage together may go unacknowledged.

The coffee you wake up to without asking; the “How was your day?” or “Tell me more” after work; the flirty or funny memes they send you; the jars they open for you; the lunches they pack for you; the outings they take with the kids that allow you some alone time—we speak so often of these “little things” that matter most, yet forget to give them the recognition they deserve.

Making the concerted effort to notice and acknowledge these small declarations of love can go a long way in keeping the connection alive. Here’s how to start:

Show, don’t tell. No more generic “Thank yous.” Genuine gratitude requires specificity, like, “Thank you for making my coffee this morning—it really started my day off right.” Or, “I love how patient you were with the kids tonight. I know it wasn’t easy.”

Start a gratitude ritual. Some couples also find it very helpful to share one thing they appreciate about each other before bed or over dinner. It doesn’t have to be grand—sometimes, it’s the little things that matter most.

Always look for the good. When things aren’t perfect—because they almost never are—gratitude will shift your focus. Instead of dwelling on what your partner didn’t do, find something they did do and acknowledge it.

And, most importantly, gratitude shouldn’t just be reserved for your partner; you also need to extend it to yourself. Take a moment to acknowledge what you bring to the marriage, whether it’s your kindness, your sense of humor, or your ability to keep things running smoothly. In some cases, loneliness may stem from within—by not recognizing your worthiness—rather than from what your spouse is or isn’t doing.

Practicing Forgiveness—for Your Partner and Yourself

Much like gratitude, forgiveness is commonly misrepresented. To forgive isn’t necessarily to forget; burying past problems in your mind and pretending that they never happened is not what forgiveness means. Rather, to forgive is to let go—to release your resentment so that it doesn’t weigh you or your relationship down. And just like gratitude, it’s a practice that benefits both partners.

Here’s how to use it right in your relationship:

Always opt for the benefit of the doubt. Instead of seeing mistakes as proof that your partner doesn’t care, try to view them through a lens of understanding. Maybe they were overwhelmed, distracted, or didn’t realize how their actions affected you. That doesn’t excuse the odd hurtful behavior, but it certainly makes it easier to move forward.

Forgive the small things first. Not every annoyance needs to be an argument. If they forgot to take out the trash, left their socks on the floor, or snapped at you after a long day, ask yourself: Is this worth holding onto, or can I let it go? In most cases, you can. Choosing to remain angry or bitter is exactly that: a choice.

Let actions speak. Sometimes, actively showing your forgiveness is more powerful than just verbalizing it. A reassuring touch, a thoughtful gesture, or simply moving past a mistake without bringing it up again is the best way of showing your partner that you’re choosing them over your resentment.

Once again, forgiveness isn’t just reserved for your partner. The absolution you so readily give to others is something you deserve, too. Too often, we hold ourselves to impossibly high standards—berating ourselves for every mistake. But just like your spouse, you are only human. Put yourself or your spouse on an unreachable pedestal, and you’re bound to feel lonely up there with no way to reach them.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/social-instincts/202504/2-powerful-ways-to-overcome-loneliness-in-marriage

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WHEN HITLER’S GENERALS KNEW THE WAR WAS LOST

The German Empire maintained its fighting strength for an extended period before realizing defeat. The Nazi defeat gradually dawned on everyone in an endless series of severe setbacks. After achieving rapid victory at the beginning the war Hitler's top commanders began recognizing they were losing the battle.

During the early months of war their army carried many victories into battle. Poland? Gone. France? Crushed. The Soviet Union seemed on the brink of total downfall after a few short weeks. Blitzkrieg worked. The Wehrmacht advanced through Europe using its perfect fighting machine design. But then came Moscow. They didn’t take it. During winter conditions made it difficult for supply shipments to reach their destination. Soviet resistance stiffened. Confidence cracked.

Then came Stalingrad, 1942–43. The military failure at Stalingrad hurt Germany at its core. An entire German army failed to escape the overwhelming army surrounding them. It shattered illusions. The Soviet military resistance held its ground against enemy forces. From there, reality set in.

Kursk ended all chance of success in the eastern theater by 1943. During its offensive to break Soviet defenses Germany experienced strong enemy counterattacks. As the Allies started their invasion in Italy they also struck the Normandy beachhead. D-Day—June 1944—opened the West. One side of the problem became fatal for Germany when it experienced defeat from both directions.

During winter 1944 the German military tried its final great effort against Allied forces at the Battle of the Bulge. It failed. Big time. Once this happened every top-ranked military leader recognized the path to defeat. Germany was on the verge of crash while losing ground.

They properly assessed the situation in early 1945 given the Axis Powers situation. The war was lost. People kept fighting mainly because they felt trapped by duty even if they recognized that their cause was hopeless. Germany was finished. The machine that conquered Europe had broken down while being surrounded and bleeding.

The end did not arrive instantly through an explosion. It came in pieces. Together the signs showed clearly that the war was about to end.
~ Mike John, Quora

Si: WW2 IN NORTH AFRICA
They also took a heavy defeat at El Alamein by the Commonwealth forces led by the British 8th Army, which spelled the end for the Italian and German forces in North Africa whose aim was to take the Suez Canal, cutting the British off from the Global British Empire . To lose the canal would put another 10 days on top of a two week journey from Persia dramatically increasing fuel costs and drastically slowing the supply of oil and other commodities.

The Anglo American landings in Tunisia blocked Rommel's escape with the advancing 8th Army from the East after dealing the Axis a mortal blow at El Alamein was to sandwich the Axis with the Anglo American Army which it did. Hitler had lost any hope of getting his hands on Middle Eastern oil which was controlled by the British Empire. The Axis lost a total of killed captured and wounded at over 640,000 with the Royal Navy controlling the Mediterranean and the allied army’s now in total control of North Africa their war aims lay in tatters. The Allied armies had secured supply lines, the oilfields and had a perfect springboard into Sicily and then Italy. Later on in the war not long after D Day U.S. forces landed in the French Mediterranean coast.

North Africa like the Italian campaign like the coming Western Front or for that matter the Burmese land war and the Pacific island hopping may have been smaller than the mammoth battles of the Eastern front where the numbers of men , vehicles and materiel involved was astounding however strategically they were as equally as important. The loss of the Africa campaign was another big pointer to the outcome of the war — Stalingrad was of course the most dramatic indication of Hitlers destiny.

Kursk , the largest tank battle in human history, meant it was simply a matter of time before the European Axis was defeated. Stalin disregarded British intelligence tipping him off for Barbarossa; he didn’t do so at Kursk where the mighty Red Army was dug in, prepared and waiting for the massive German onslaught with large reserves to counter attack in which they did pushing the once all conquering German army back to the starting line and in a little over 2 years forcing the German and Axis armies 1,250 miles west fighting for every inch of territory until the eventual fall of Berlin and the collapse of the Third Reich. ~ Quora

Mark Couch:
Thank you for saving me the effort of writing up the North African campaign as a defeat, in terms of manpower, as catastrophic as Stalingrad. This is sorely overlooked in most assessments of why the war was basically over in 1943.

The 2 calamitous defeats in Stalingrad & Tunisia cost the Germans so much manpower it was unlikely to ever recover. Then the debacle of Kursk permanently shifted the initiative on the Eastern Front was basically the final nail in the Reich’s coffin.

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THE SOLDIER’S REWARD: LOVE AND WAR IN THE AGE OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION AND NAPOLEON

The revolutionary government also implemented numerous changes to French law, including the secularization of marriage (that is, making it a civil ceremony) in 1791, buttressed by the legalization of divorce in 1792.

Jennifer Ngaire Heuer’s The Soldier’s Reward: Love and War in the Age of the French Revolution and Napoleon examines romantic relationships and marriage at a time when many men of marriageable age were facing a military service that would rip them from their families and romantic partners. The ‘reward’ refers to the promise of marriage awaiting men after an (undetermined) period of military service in defense of the nation.

By 1793 the French were at war with much of Europe, leading to the mass mobilization of citizen-soldiers in August of that year (the famous levée en masse). By 1815 more than three million French men had fought in the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. Many of them did not return, and many of those who did had suffered grievous injuries. Popular theatrical pieces, songs, and engravings celebrated the courage and patriotism of the wounded, who, in these accounts, often returned to a faithful prospective wife who was more impressed by the heroism of her injured fiancé than by a suitor who had shirked his patriotic duty.

In the popular play Rose and Aurèle (1794), the young heroine chooses to marry her returning love, Aurèle, who has lost an arm and suffered damage to his face. She rejects as cowardly another suitor, Lormeuil, who has avoided military service due to being a few months too old, telling him that he should have fought regardless of his age.

Sometimes in these fanciful narratives a wealthy benefactor would even provide the lucky couple with financial support in recognition of the soldier’s sacrifice, as in The Guinguette, or Celebrations for the Peace (1801). The ‘real’ man was the citizen who had fought for his country.

But as Heuer’s impressive research demonstrates, the disconnect between fantasy and reality was profound. Peasant families needed the labor of their sons, and often sought to help them evade military service. Many men returning from the battlefield were injured in ways that made them undesirable partners, or even a burden to a future wife.

The financial ‘rewards’ that the state (or imaginary patrons) provided to its citizen-soldiers were meager, or non-existent. While theatrical productions valorized the man willing to serve his country (as well as the young women who overlooked disfiguration), reality was more sobering. The family economy of the French peasant and urban worker depended upon the labor of both spouses; the loss or impairment of a young man could consign an entire family to poverty.

Reliant on conscription, the Napoleonic regime had a stake in promoting the belief that love, honor, and financial support awaited the returning war hero. The state sometimes even arranged marriages between veterans and suitable young women, along with government-provided dowries. These unions were celebrated in public festivals. In 1803, shortly after the Peace of Amiens, the English writer Anne Plumptre reported on a state-sponsored festival uniting 12 soldiers with 12 young women to celebrate the Feast of the Assumption; the government paid the cost of the weddings and provided dowries. As Heuer shows, however, these state-authorized marriages did not always actually take place and the promised dowry often remained unpaid.

Marriage was not just a reward for soldiers; it could also be a way out of military service, especially as, over time, fewer men were willing to sacrifice themselves for Napoleon’s war machine. Heads of households were less likely to face conscription, and so becoming one became expedient. While the levée en masse had encouraged all men, married and single, to serve the Old Regime, the Jourdan Law of 1798, which codified conscription, signaled a return to the expectation that young, single men would dominate the military ranks.

However, a quick marriage was not always easy to arrange, leading at times to wildly inappropriate ‘paper marriages’ between men in the prime of life and elderly women as a way of avoiding conscription. In November 1809 the prefect of the department of the Nord denounced 18 suspicious marriages between young men and elderly women, one of whom was 99 years old. This probably seemed like a good option when divorce by mutual consent – enshrined in the 1792 law – made it possible to end the marriage once the danger had passed. But the Napoleonic Code of 1804 made divorce significantly more difficult, while the Bourbon Restoration ended the possibility altogether in 1816, leaving some couples unhappily bound for life.

Napoleon’s final defeat in 1815 and the return of the Bourbons brought an end to the constant warfare that had shaped French life for nearly 25 years. However, soldiers were returning to a very different country, in which capitalism and consumerism would play an increasingly important role. Just as war and revolution had triggered debates and new attitudes towards romance and matrimony, so too did the imperatives of a modern urban society.

These changes are explored in Andrea Mansker’s Matchmaking and the Marriage Market in Postrevolutionary France. Mansker places at the center of her analysis two marriage brokers, Claude Villiaume and Charles de Foy, who took advantage of the burgeoning press and print advertising in the first half of the 19th century to promote their consumer-based approaches to courtship. Marriage was touted not only as a reward for soldiers (although returning soldiers were among Villiaume’s target audience), but as the right of all French men and women. It was also a marketplace, and the broker could help both men and women – especially those of the rising bourgeoisie – better position themselves in the competition for suitable spouses.

Like Heuer, Mansker is as interested in the fantasies that the matchmaking trade generated as she is in the reality of the business itself, especially since, in the case of Villiaume, the veracity of his stories – for example, that of a young, wealthy single mother, ‘Emilie’, who sought a sexless marriage to an aging and financially needy nobleman – is as unclear to the historian as it was to contemporary readers.

A former soldier who served time in prison under Napoleon for his erratic behavior (including a suspected assassination attempt on Napoleon), Villiaume used his story-telling skills to secure his release from confinement. In his advertisements in the petites affiches (classified ads), Villiaume wove narratives for men and women searching for love, highlighting the element of chance – ‘hasard’ – at play at the marriage market. To counter the sketchy reputation of matchmakers, he emphasized that he was simply helping to improve his clients’ chances, bringing together two individuals whose opportunities in anonymous urban spaces could be much improved by his assistance.

Foy, even more than Villiaume, claimed the title of professional for himself, insisting on his competence, altruism, and expertise in his advertisements, and proudly displaying the business license the French state had granted him (and for which he paid a yearly tax). In a series of court cases against clients who refused to pay his fee, he emphasized the added value of his services. However, his emphasis on secrecy for his clients – as well as his veiled threats to expose those who denigrated his services or refused to pay – hinted that his profession was not as respectable as claimed.

Public discussion of matchmaking services in the 19th century highlighted questions about the meaning of marriage – questions that the French Revolution had triggered. Was marriage simply a civil contract that could be dissolved if the parties were unhappy with the arrangement? Who should arrange marriages: parents and family members, or the spouses themselves? Was marriage a consumer good that conferred material benefits as the tradition of arranged marriages among the French elite suggested? Or was marriage a sacred union, whose primary purpose transcended the material?

These questions were never entirely resolved. Foy succeeded in numerous lawsuits defending the validity of marriage brokerage contracts in the 1840s and 1850s, but a ruling by the Court of Cassation in 1855 amid a conservative backlash under the Second Empire asserted that marriage was indeed different from other contracts, especially since, until its legalization in 1884, divorce remained impossible. Marriage brokerage continued to flourish, however, and dowries and material resources continued to provide motivation for it even as the language of love dominated.

Some of the changes in attitudes towards marriage that Heuer and Mansker emphasize in these fascinating books were already underway in the 18th century, before war and revolution upended all social, legal, and political arrangements: that is, an emphasis on companionate marriage, individual choice, and the contractual nature of the relationship.

But marriage remains among the most complicated and fraught of institutions because of its emotional and practical considerations. A successful marriage promises joy and fulfillment; an unhappy one destroys lives. It is no surprise that the debates which surrounded the subject more than two centuries ago continue to be fought today.

https://www.historytoday.com/archive/review/soldiers-reward-and-matchmaking-and-marriage-market-review

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ALLIGATORS ARE BREATHING NEW LIFE INTO THE EVERGLADES

From the edge of the Miccosukee Indian Reservation, in the north of the Florida Everglades, it is a short fan-boat ride through grassy swamp to get to an island that 18-year-old Hector Tigertail's family visit each year. For decades, this family "hammock" – as the tree-covered islands that poke out from the Everglades are known – has been their retreat; a place where the family can camp, cook and hunt. But they share this particular island with at least one permanent resident: an American alligator that, at around 7ft (2.1m) from nose to tail, is the largest female he's ever seen. 

Tigertail's family, members of the Miccosukee Tribe of Indians of Florida, and this powerful reptile, which locals refer to as Mama Gator, have lived side by side for much of the 60-year-old animal's life, he explains. This intimate coexistence provides a chance to observe how alligators meticulously shape their surroundings. Through the dry season between December and May, she excavates a "gator pond" with her snout, claws and tail, a depression where water pools and she can wallow, keep cool and mate. At the start of the rainy season (from June to November), she builds a raised nest for her clutch of eggs, from mud, grass and twigs – a time when the humans know to keep a respectful distance from the protective mother. In return, for the next few years, they are often rewarded with the sight of Mama and her baby gators in tow. 

"We like to call her Mama Gator because she's everybody's grandma," says Tigertail.

In recent years, scientific research is adding support to something Florida's Miccosukee Tribe have long known: alligators like Mama play vital roles as "guardians of the Everglades" and engineer their environment in ways that protect freshwater ecosystems. Alligators carry around nutrients that feed ecosystem webs, and their ponds and nests provide refuges where plants, fish and frogs live. New data hints that that alligators may also benefit us.

"Apex predator or not, alligators are actually very helpful and they can change the ecosystem significantly," says Tigertail, who researches alligators for the Miccosukee Tribe's Fish and Wildlife Department. "During the dry season, a lot of animals –  deer, fish, otters, turtles, birds –  follow the alligators."

For those like biologist Christopher Murray who has spent decades closely studying alligators, it's high time to move past their reputation as cold-hearted killers and recognize the varied roles they're playing as caring and constructive ecosystem engineers. While the cute, herbivorous beaver is widely celebrated for stewarding temperate wetlands, it is the "gnarly swamp monsters" who deserve plaudits in the southeastern United States and many other places, says Murray, associate professor at Southeastern Louisiana University. "I think we're just beginning to understand that crocodilians, in general, and specifically alligators, do a lot more good than we think.”

From near-extinction to mass appreciation

Alligators are often called "living fossils," relatively untouched by major evolutionary changes for at least eight million years, with remarkably similar ancestors already hunting swamps alongside the dinosaurs. Yet, beginning in the 1850s, the arrival of rifle-wielding European settlers into the wetlands of Florida and Louisiana drove this evolutionary line to the verge of extinction. 

More than 10 million alligators were killed by commercial hunting up to the 1960s, driven by the popularity of their hides for bags, belts and boots, with others shot for sport or "just for fun" according to historical accounts. In 1967, American alligators were placed on endangered species lists, leading to nationwide hunting bans that allowed populations to recover. Today, the species is recognized as a standout conservation success story, as the population has rebounded to more than three million alligators estimated to live in the wild in the states of Florida and Louisiana, and thousands more spread across the south-eastern United States.

Just as conservationists began fighting to save the species from extinction in the 1960s and 1970s, researchers began documenting their important ecological roles. In the wet season, the raised ridges around the edge of these nests are relatively dry land where some plants can escape flooding and provide platforms where smaller reptiles build their own nests. Meanwhile wading birds build their own nests above alligators, which act as "bodyguards," keeping raccoons and other predators away from the birds' eggs. (More recent research has shown that this is a macabre but overall mutually beneficial arrangement with alligators being rewarded with snacks from chicks that fall from the nests.)

Mike Heithaus, professor of biological sciences at Florida International University, explains that, despite its lush appearances, the Everglades can be a nutrient poor environment. A largely flat wetland, dominated by grass-like plants, many key nutrients are carried out to sea by great slow-flowing seasonal rivers, some kilometers wide.

In the dry season, when the water level falls, research since the mid-20th Century has shown that alligators' habit of excavating holes created variety in the otherwise monotonous landscape, with unique communities of plants, animals and algae around ponds. These holes can be architecturally diverse – created by one alligator or up to a dozen together – incorporating eclectic "burrows and hidey-holes", says Heithaus, including underwater caverns, where the alligator can stay submerged for hours. These aquatic environments form refuges in which fish like juvenile largemouth bass survive the dry season but can also be "death traps" which lure birds in search of a snack, he adds. 

We're now learning these are surprisingly dynamic systems. Research in 2023 showed that it was not only the construction of the ponds that counted "but actively being in the pond matters", says Heithaus. As the alligators move, they continually stir up the sediment to keep those nutrients in the water. "The alligators are moving around; they're pooping in there. 

That's providing nutrients which algae – that form the base of the food web – rely on. So, you kind of prime the pump: you feed the bottom of the food chain and [the nutrients] come all the way up." 

Without alligators, there would be much less nutrients circulated in the water, says Heithaus. "You put alligators there, and you get food and water, and that's happy times for most critters in the Everglades.”

Although attacks on humans are very rare, alligators remain feared by many.

Ecclectic alligators

This research also reveals a lesser-seen side of alligators, spotlighting them as remarkably sophisticated and adaptable creatures. The alligator's reputation as a "man-eating monster" was inspired long ago by accounts like William Bartram's widely reproduced (and wildly inaccurate) stories of encountering alligators in Florida swamps with "clouds of smoke" erupting from their nostrils. Although attacks on humans are very rare, these cold-blooded animals remain feared by many as killers or "weird swamp things," says Murray, who has worked with alligators for more than two decades.

Those who live up close with alligators see other qualities. One alligator in the state of Georgia, named Wally, was even docile enough to be domesticated as an "emotional support alligator," providing comfort and "hugs" to help alleviate his owner's depression. 

Despite the reported gentleness of some individuals, it is recommended to stay at least 9m (30ft) away from alligators in the wild. Alligators are carnivores, powerful enough to bring down a wild deer or feral boar but "naturally they're going to be more of a flighty, non-confrontational animal," says Kendall Osceola, who worked at the Miccosukee Indian Village, the tribe's cultural center. The Miccosukee learn a strict set of rules from a young age for sharing their coastal homes with gators. "We were always told if there's a body of water in Florida, there's going to be an alligator in there. So, keep a careful eye on any pets or anything small around the water line," she says. Yet Miccosukee stories depict them as "benevolent creatures", she says.

Today, alligators have adapted to live in the urbanized environments of golf courses, canals and sewers. Researchers have been surprised by how varied and flexible alligators are, explains Heithaus, yet research in 2011 found behaviors that have shocked even those who study them. Near Miccosukee village, in an area where alligators live in mangrove forests alongside a fast-flowing river, Heithaus and Adam Rosenblatt fitted trackers to alligators, finding that similar alligators lived very different lives – some were "couch potatoes" who remain close to home, while others were "commuters" who travel long distances to coastal areas. "Tag two alligators – same size, both males, 20m (65.6ft) apart on the shore – and one will not move more than 7km (4.3 miles) in total in three months, and the other might do 800km (497 miles)," says Heithaus.

While American alligators have been spotted swimming out in the ocean in the past, prior to this research this behavior was believed to be extremely rare, says Heithaus. Unlike crocodiles, alligators lack specialised glands to process salt, yet this monitoring showed that some alligators frequently venture out into the ocean when there are abundant saltwater fish and crabs to feast on. "When we first got some data suggesting the alligators were down in these saltwater environments for maybe 18 hours at a time, we were looked at like we had two heads – people didn't believe it at all," says Heithaus. "And I think it's one of the cool things we're finding across sharks, alligators, and lots of animals – that there's a lot more behavioral adaptability and individual specialization than we would have thought – bold individuals, shy individuals; exploratory individuals, stay-at-home individuals.”

Crucially, at a time when the Gulf Coast is being hard hit by the impacts of climate change, we are also learning that alligators may affect their environments' ability to capture carbon. By analyzing soil samples across Louisiana, Murray was recently able to demonstrate in a study that areas with high numbers of alligators are rich carbon stores. 

"What this paper says to me is: look, we rescued the American alligator from extinction," he says, "but what we didn't realize, back then, was that maybe we were actually doing a lot more for the environment – in the context of carbon sequestration and the battle against climate change – than we previously thought.”

The next step, says Murray, is to show that alligators are actively contributing to higher carbon storage in these areas – and how. We have good reason to think alligators, as apex predators, may be playing a similar "top-down" role to the famed wolves of Yellowstone, whose return has reduced herbivore grazing on small trees and helped forests to regrow. The theory of trophic cascades developed by Utah State University ecologist Trisha Atwood has shown that apex predators are not only vital for ecosystem health but could have big impacts on CO2 dynamics. This could be particularly important in freshwater ecosystems like Louisiana's tidally inundated wetlands, which store enormous amounts of carbon, says Murray, but can turn into a carbon source when they dry out.

Murray hopes his forthcoming research can provide further evidence about the value of supporting healthy alligator populations. Although hunting bans were the most important step to save the species from extinction, efforts to protect and restore populations are ongoing and involve groups who are often less recognized, he says. Among them are commercial alligator ranchers who retrieve eggs from the wild, incubate them and raise them through the first few years of life in enclosed or semi-wild environments, safeguarding them when they are most vulnerable to predation and disease. 

This form of early-years care, known as "head-starting," is common in conservation initiatives that aim to help endangered animals – from Eastern indigo snakes to burrowing owls. But, in Louisiana, this is a "self-funded" system driven by ranchers, says Murray. These ranchers are required to release 5% of alligators they raise into the wild, while the rest are treated as livestock that can be butchered for meat and hides. 

In the Everglades, head-starting is also carried out by the Miccosukee, who rescue eggs in years when water levels in the Everglades rise, threatening to drown eggs, or temperatures fall to levels that can harm baby alligators. "Sometimes I would be at home and my uncle would tell me: 'Hey, the temperature is dropping really fast. It's going to be a really cold night. So get on the airboat and we have to go out there before the cold weather kills them'," says Tigertail.

Despite their fearsome reputation, all this hints at a future where humans and alligators coexist, with these reptiles recognized as "helpful participants" in solutions to the challenges we both face, says Murray. "If you think historically, alligators and other crocodilians have been revered as a sacred entity in cultures around the world. Do they command respect? Yes. But are they monsters? Are they to be feared? No.”

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20250417-how-alligators-keep-floridas-everglades-healthy

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HOW TO SURVIVE AN APOCALYPSE
With France about to advise its citizens on how to survive an ‘imminent threat’, it’s time to wise up to what the real essentials are

It’s a fairly strong indication that your US presidency is not going well when, within three months of your taking office, one of your closest allies feels the need to issue its entire population with a manual on how to survive an “imminent threat.” According to French media reports, that is what the French government is planning in the form of a 20-page booklet to go out to its citizens this summer. And while it’s intended for use against natural disaster or medical threat, we all know what we’re really talking about here. The French government would like to remind its people that, in the event of a nuclear attack, they must remember to close the doors and windows.

My dad recalls Buckinghamshire county council issuing a similar pamphlet in the 1980s, for when Russia dropped an atomic bomb on Aylesbury. My family didn’t need the advice, as it happened; in the event of the collapse of civil society, my mother’s Tupperware and plastic-bag reserves that filled an entire floor-to-ceiling cupboard would’ve pushed us to the top of any barter-based value system. Plus, for at least a week, we could have lived like kings on decades-old gravy and bolognese sauce loosened from the permafrost of the chest freezer in the garage like the body of a caveman after an ice age.

To my mother’s disappointment, this opportunity to be vindicated in the face of my dad’s occasional efforts to have a clearout never came to pass. My own history as a prepper, meanwhile, shows definite signs of generational decline. In New York, I lived through the incredible two-and-a-half-hour blackout of 2019, in which the lights of Broadway went out and people kept themselves together by singing old-timey songs and wondering if it was OK to order in pizza. (The answer to that was, slightly shockingly, yes.) 

Back then, I had an outdated emergency bag in the closet stocked with baby formula and tiny bottles of water and I made a promise to myself that night: that in the event of another disaster, I would not be reliant on a torch in the shape of a ladybird, or use my last 2% of phone battery to look at Twitter.

That promise needs refreshing. We live in a new world now, one in which defense spending takes priority over foreign aid, Russia is once again a threat to Europe and the US can’t be relied upon to save us. In the French government booklet there will, reportedly, be emergency numbers, radio channels and encouragement, should the need arise, to get involved in civil defense-type efforts including volunteer firefighting.

This assumes that some semblance of order survives. My nearest London tube station is one of the city’s deepest, but I’ve seen enough apocalypse shows to know that hiding underground is not the answer; you have either to head north, to a national park where you can outrun the cannibals and hunt game, or barricade yourself in your apartment for three months until the initial anarchy has burned itself out and you can go on a scavenging run to the shops.

And, of course, you must be prepared. After the blackout, I bought a torch so powerful it could double as Mace if you could get an aggressor to look straight into it, and I’m definitely thinking about finding the cable to charge it. I’m also starting to stock up, although it strikes me that the French have left out one important piece of advice from their booklet. A lot of people in New York have generational trauma from relatives who did, indeed, flee Europe decades ago, and the ones I know would point out that missing from the French guidelines is alcohol.

This isn’t a joke. The shrewd prepper understands that if things collapse and money becomes useless, the value of alcohol – for anesthetic, sterilization, sedation – rises to the very top of the new currency system. You can pack your tiny bottles of water and buy your tins, but my advice to you, if prepping, is to grab three bottles of premium whisky and a bottle of Tanqueray – which you are absolutely not allowed to touch until the bombs start falling.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/mar/19/preppers-survive-apocalypse-france-imminent-threat

eamonmcc:
The fact that we have two individuals such as Trump and Putin now pushing the western world in a direction with a destination that anyone can only guess at, with most of the western world looking on in sheer horror, is something that has to force deeply searching questions but especially 'How did we get to this cliff edge?’

Germany plans expenditure of many hundreds of billions of euros on (effective) rearmament, figures that we haven't seen (adjusted) since the 1930s-40s. That alone tells you we are in unchartered waters.

80 years of relative peace, progress, prosperity and rights and freedoms previously unknown in western history have all been put on ice while this operetta from hell plays out. It can only be hoped that we will be frightened into ensuring that nothing like it ever happens again. How we will do that is now the biggest question of its type that we have faced since the lights went out on western civilization between 1914-1945. And the way things have been going since 1989, those lights are now flickering, Titanic-like.

We learned to tame these forces but we got distracted and the price of our distraction and our unforgivable hubristic scoffing at history now means a possible re-running of western history's darkest phases.

The last time we were so close to such dark moments, during the cold war, the Kennedys and MLK held out the prospect of hope and it is for their ability to inspire hope

A new study found high levels of plastic in the arterial plaque of stroke and vision-loss patients.

Cells in plastic-filled plaque also showed signs of altered gene activity, but it's unclear why.

Tiny, microscopic bits of plastic have been found almost everywhere researchers look — including throughout the human body.

Microplastics and their even tinier cousins, nanoplastics, are probably flowing through your blood and building up in your organs like the lungs and liver.

Now, a new study is connecting the dots on microplastics' mysterious correlation with heart attack and stroke risk.

"There is some microplastics in normal, healthy arteries," Dr. Ross Clark, a University of New Mexico medical researcher who led the study, told Business Insider before he presented his findings at the meeting of the American Heart Association in Baltimore.

"But the amount that's there when they become diseased — and become diseased with symptoms — is really, really different," Clark said.

Clark and his team measured microplastics and nanoplastics in the dangerous, fatty plaque that can build up in arteries, block blood flow, and cause strokes or heart attacks.

Compared to the walls of healthy plaque-free arteries, plaque buildup had 16 times more plastic — just in the people who didn't have symptoms. In people who had experienced stroke, mini-stroke, or vision loss, the plaque had 51 times more plastic.

"Wow and not good," Jaime Ross, a neuroscientist at the University of Rhode Island who was not involved in the study but has studied microplastics in mice, told BI after reading the results.

"It's very shocking to see 51 times higher," she said, adding that in her research, a signal that's just three times stronger is "very robust and striking."

What exactly the plastics are doing in there, if anything, remains a mystery. The new study offers some possible clues, though.

This research has not yet undergone the scrutiny of peer review, but Clark said he plans to submit it for publication in a peer-reviewed scientific journal later this year, after replicating some of their results.

Genetic activity looked different with plastic

Clark is a vascular surgeon, not a microplastics specialist. However, he got the idea for this study by talking with his colleague Matthew Campen, who recently discovered that human brains contain a spoon's worth of plastic.

"We realized together that there really wasn't a lot of data on nanoplastics and microplastics in the vascular system, within blood vessels," Clark said.

Previous research had found that people with microplastics in their arterial plaque were more likely to have a heart attack or stroke or die.

Tracking microplastics in the human body is a new scientific endeavor as of the last couple years. It's not perfect.

Clark's team heated the plaque samples to more than 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit to vaporize plastic polymers and break them down into smaller organic molecules, which can be identified and measured by their mass and other properties.

Unfortunately, the lipids in plaque can break down into chemicals that look very similar to polyethylene, the most common plastic found in everything from plastic bags to car parts.

"Because we know about this problem, we've taken a lot of steps to remove those lipids and confirm their removal, so that we're sure we're measuring polyethylene," Clark said.

Clark is trying to get funding to further study interactions between microplastics and immune cells in the walls of blood vessels. He hopes to expand this research beyond the carotid artery and also run some animal experiments to test for cause and effect.

"We just don't know," Clark said. "Almost all of what we know about microplastics in the human body, no matter where you look, can be summed up as: It's there, and we need to study further as to what it's doing, if anything."

https://www.businessinsider.com/microplastics-artery-plaque-mysterious-link-stroke-heart-attack-2025-4

Oriana:
This reminds me of the time when lead was being added to gasoline, and soon lead started showing up everywhere: in human tissues, in the water, in the air. Change in car technology, more so than concern about the health damage caused by lead, lead to the cessation of lacing gasoline with lead. Given our knowledge of  lead toxicity, it’s shocking to realize that it took decades. Likewise, it will probably take decades to come up with an economically viable substitute for plastics — if such a substitute is ever found (yes, there is already some research going on; I plan to explore the topic in future issues of my blog). 

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REWIRE YOUR BRAIN FOR LONGEVITY

Some of the most time-tested ways to strengthen neural connections—like movement, learning a new language, picking up a musical instrument, or getting deep, consistent sleep—are also the most accessible. Strong relationships, meaningful conversations, and playful curiosity also fire up networks across the brain, keeping you mentally sharp and emotionally steady as you age.

What ties them all together? Neuroplasticity: the brain’s ability to change and adapt through experience.

Your brain is constantly adapting and evolving. Every time you learn something new, regulate stress, or engage with someone meaningfully, you reinforce pathways that help you thrive longer.

The trick is consistency.

That’s where microhabits come in. Small, daily actions that work with your brain’s natural reward systems to create what behavioral scientists call habit loops—cues, behaviors, and rewards that, when repeated over time, rewire the brain’s baseline. These shifts aren’t just cognitive—they’re structural. Even two minutes of the right activity can nudge your brain toward a more resilient, long-lived trajectory.

Here are five microhabits that can start rewiring your brain for clarity, creativity, and

1. Take a Two-Minute Breath Break

Breathwork: intentional breathing exercises that reduce stress and improve focus.
Breathwork doesn’t just reduce stress in the moment—it can actually shift your brain’s baseline over time.

A 2023 randomized controlled trial in Cell Reports Medicine compared three types of daily five-minute breathwork practices with mindfulness meditation over one month. All techniques improved mood and reduced stress signals in the body, like heart rate, breathing patterns, and nervous system balance. But exhale-focused breathwork—specifically a practice called cyclic sighing—had the strongest impact. Participants who practiced this technique experienced significantly greater improvements in mood and reductions in physiological stress markers than those who meditated.

Start simple: Take a few deep breaths followed by extended exhales. Inhale through your nose for four counts, then exhale slowly through your mouth for six or more counts. Repeat for two minutes.

This activates your parasympathetic nervous system, reduces activity in the brain’s threat-detection centers, and builds long-term emotional regulation. Over time, it reshapes your brain’s stress circuits—making calm your new default.

2. Ask One New Question a Day

Curiosity isn’t just good for your mindset—it’s rocket fuel for memory. An fMRI study by researchers at the University of California, Davis found that when people were deeply curious about something, their brains lit up in ways that helped them not only remember answers to trivia questions better, but also retain incidental information they weren’t even trying to learn. In states of high curiosity, activity surged in the midbrain and hippocampus—areas tied to memory and motivation. Dopamine: a neurotransmitter linked to motivation, pleasure, and learning.

Dopamine-driven state of anticipation doesn’t just improve memory for what you’re curious about—it can also “rescue” memories for unrelated things happening at the same time. In other words, being curious primes your brain to absorb more of the world.

Try this:
Each day, pick one thing you don’t know about and give it five minutes of your full attention. Look it up. Find someone who knows a lot about it and email them a question. It doesn’t have to be practical—it just has to be interesting to you.

When you follow your curiosity, you’re not just learning—you’re physically training your brain to be more open, resilient, and capable of long-term growth.

3. Switch Hands for Routine Tasks

Neuroscientist Dr. Michael Merzenich, a pioneer in brain plasticity, has long championed the idea that using your non-dominant hand to perform daily tasks helps create new neural pathways. When you brush your teeth, hold your coffee mug, or stir a pot with your opposite hand, you’re giving your brain a micro challenge that encourages adaptability.

It won’t feel graceful at first—but that’s the point. Complexity and novelty activate underused brain circuits, strengthening communication between hemispheres and enhancing cognitive flexibility. Start with one task per day. These tiny disruptions to your routine promote adaptability at the neural level—literally rewiring your brain to stay sharp and agile with age. 

4. Microdose Nature (Even Through a Window)

A study published in Frontiers in Psychology in 2019 showed that even short periods of exposure to natural environments—as little as 10 minutes—significantly lowered salivary
If you can’t take a walk, sit near a window with a view. Listen to birdsong. Watch a nature video. These moments may feel too small to matter, but they register with your nervous system in measurable ways.

By lowering stress hormones like cortisol, these microdoses of nature reduce activity in the brain’s fight-or-flight centers and help restore balance in systems linked to memory, attention, and emotional regulation. Over time, they contribute to a more flexible, resilient brain—one better equipped to adapt, learn, and thrive.

5. Revisit One Positive Memory Before Bed

Nighttime is prime real estate for emotional encoding and memory consolidation. Two new studies published in 2024 suggest that reactivating positive memories before sleep may help reduce emotional distress and strengthen psychological resilience.

In one study, participants practiced imagery rescripting, a novel sleep technique where people transform a negative memory into a more positive version. The result: stronger emotional regulation and reduced distress. A second study found that reactivating a positive memory during sleep weakened the emotional weight of a competing negative memory and improved recall of the positive one the next day.

Before bed, bring to mind a moment that made you feel connected, confident, or calm. Replay it gently. This micropractice helps reinforce emotional strength while you sleep—and over time, it reshapes memory networks in the brain, laying down patterns of optimism and resilience that support long-term mental health.

The Super Age Takeaway: Microhabits are not hacks. They are small, meaningful commitments to your future self. With just a few minutes a day, you can lay down the mental infrastructure for clarity, energy, and joy well into your later decades.

https://superage.com/the-5-microhabits-that-rewire-your-brain-for-longevity/
(my thanks to Violeta Kelertas)

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DO WE REALLY LIVE LONGER THAN OUR ANCESTORS?

In 1841, a baby girl was expected to live to just 42 years of age, a boy to 40. In 2016, a baby girl could expect to reach 83; a boy, 79.

The natural conclusion is that both the miracles of modern medicine and public health initiatives have helped us live longer than ever before – so much so that we may, in fact, be running out of innovations to extend life further. In September 2018, the Office for National Statistics confirmed that, in the UK at least, life expectancy has stopped increasing. Beyond the UK, these gains are slowing worldwide.

This belief that our species may have reached the peak of longevity is also reinforced by some myths about our ancestors: it’s common belief that ancient Greeks or Romans would have been flabbergasted to see anyone above the age of 50 or 60, for example.

Augustus, Rome’s first emperor, died at 75 .

In fact, while medical advancements have improved many aspects of healthcare, the assumption that human life span has increased dramatically over centuries or millennia is misleading. Overall life expectancy, which is the statistic reflected in reports like those above, hasn’t increased so much because we’re living far longer than we used to as a species. It’s increased because more of us, as individuals, are making it that far.

“There is a basic distinction between life expectancy and life span,” says Stanford University historian Walter Scheidel, a leading scholar of ancient Roman demography. “The life span of humans – opposed to life expectancy, which is a statistical construct – hasn’t really changed much at all, as far as I can tell.”

Life expectancy is an average. If you have two children, and one dies before their first birthday but the other lives to the age of 70, their average life expectancy is 35. Most of human history has been blighted by poor survival rates among children, and that continues in various countries today.

The 6th-Century ruler Empress Suiko, who was Japan’s first reigning empress in recorded history, died at 74 years of age.

This averaging-out, however, is why it’s commonly said that ancient Greeks and Romans, for example, lived to just 30 or 35. But was that really the case for people who survived the fragile period of childhood, and did it mean that a 35-year-old was truly considered ‘old’?

If one’s thirties were a decrepit old age, ancient writers and politicians don’t seem to have got the message. In the early 7th Century BC, the Greek poet Hesiod wrote that a man should marry “when you are not much less than 30, and not much more.” 

Meanwhile, ancient Rome’s ‘cursus honorum’ – the sequence of political offices that an ambitious young man would undertake – didn’t even allow a young man to stand for his first office, that of quaestor, until the age of 30 (under Emperor Augustus, this was later lowered to 25; Augustus himself died at 75). To be consul, you had to be 43 – eight years older than the US’s minimum age limit of 35 to hold a presidency.

In the 1st Century, Pliny devoted an entire chapter of The Natural History to people who lived longest. Among them he lists the consul M Valerius Corvinos (100 years), Cicero’s wife Terentia (103), a woman named Clodia (115 – and who had 15 children along the way), and the actress Lucceia who performed on stage at 100 years old.

Then there are tombstone inscriptions and grave epigrams, such as this one for a woman who died in Alexandria in the 3rd Century BC. “She was 80 years old, but able to weave a delicate weft with the shrill shuttle,” the epigram reads admiringly.

Not, however, that aging was any easier then than it is now. “Nature has, in reality, bestowed no greater blessing on man than the shortness of life,” Pliny remarks. “The senses become dull, the limbs torpid, the sight, the hearing, the legs, the teeth, and the organs of digestion, all of them die before us…” He can think of only one person, a musician who lived to 105, who had a pleasantly healthy old age. (Pliny himself reached barely half that; he’s thought to have died from volcanic gases during the eruption of Mt Vesuvius, aged 56).

In the ancient world, at least, it seems people certainly were able to live just as long as we do today. But just how common was it?

Age of Empires

Back in 1994 a study looked at every man entered into the Oxford Classical Dictionary who lived in ancient Greece or Rome. Their ages of death were compared to men listed in the more recent Chambers Biographical Dictionary. Of 397 ancients in total, 99 died violently by murder, suicide or in battle. Of the remaining 298, those born before 100BC lived to a median age of 72 years. Those born after 100 BC lived to a median age of 66. (The authors speculate that the prevalence of dangerous lead plumbing may have led to this apparent shortening of life).

The median of those who died between 1850 and 1949? Seventy-one years old – just one year less than their pre-100 BC cohort.

Of course, there were some obvious problems with this sample. One is that it was men-only. Another is that all of the men were illustrious enough to be remembered. All we can really take away from this is that privileged, accomplished men have, on average, lived to about the same age throughout history – as long as they weren’t killed first, that is.

Still, says Scheidel, that’s not to be dismissed. “It implies there must have been non-famous people, who were much more numerous, who lived even longer,” he says.

The Roman emperor Tiberius died at the age of 77 – some accounts say by murder.

Not everyone agrees. “There was an enormous difference between the lifestyle of a poor versus an elite Roman,” says Valentina Gazzaniga, a medical historian at Rome’s La Sapienza University. “The conditions of life, access to medical therapies, even just hygiene – these were all certainly better among the elites.”

In 2016, Gazzaniga published her research on more than 2,000 ancient Roman skeletons, all working-class people who were buried in common graves. The average age of death was 30, and that wasn’t a mere statistical quirk: a high number of the skeletons were around that age. Many showed the effects of trauma from hard labor, as well as diseases we would associate with later ages, like arthritis.

Men might have borne numerous injuries from manual labor or military service. But women – who, it's worth noting, also did hard labor such as working in the fields – hardly got off easy. Throughout history, childbirth, often in poor hygienic conditions, is just one reason why women were at particular risk during their fertile years. Even pregnancy itself was a danger.

“We know, for example, that being pregnant adversely affects your immune system, because you’ve basically got another person growing inside you,” says Jane Humphries, a historian at the University of Oxford. “Then you tend to be susceptible to other diseases. So, for example, tuberculosis interacts with pregnancy in a very threatening way. And tuberculosis was a disease that had higher female than male mortality.”

Childbirth was worsened by other factors too. “Women often were fed less than men,” Gazzaniga says. That malnutrition means that young girls often had incomplete development of pelvic bones, which then increased the risk of difficult childbirth labor.

“The life expectancy of Roman women actually increased with the decline of fertility,” Gazzaniga says. “The more fertile the population is, the lower the female life expectancy.”

Missing People

The difficulty in knowing for sure just how long our average predecessor lived, whether ancient or pre-historic, is the lack of data. When trying to determine average ages of death for ancient Romans, for example, anthropologists often rely on census returns from Roman Egypt. But because these papyri were used to collect taxes, they often under-reported men – as well as left out many babies and women.

Tombstone inscriptions, left behind in their thousands by the Romans, are another obvious source. But infants were rarely placed in tombs, poor people couldn’t afford them and families who died simultaneously, such as during an epidemic, also were left out.

And even if that weren’t the case, there is another problem with relying on inscriptions.

“You need to live in a world where you have a certain amount of documentation where it can even be possible to tell if someone lived to 105 or 110, and that only started quite recently,” Scheidel points out. “If someone actually lived to be 111, that person might not have known.”

The Roman empress Livia, wife of Augustus, lived until she was 86 or 87 years old.

As a result, much of what we think we know about ancient Rome’s statistical life expectancy comes from life expectancies in comparable societies. Those tell us that as many as one-third of infants died before the age of one, and half of children before age 10. After that age your chances got significantly better. If you made it to 60, you’d probably live to be 70.

Taken altogether, life span in ancient Rome probably wasn’t much different from today. It may have been slightly less “because you don’t have this invasive medicine at end of life that prolongs life a little bit, but not dramatically different,” Scheidel says. “You can have extremely low average life expectancy, because of, say, pregnant women, and children who die, and still have people to live to 80 and 90 at the same time. They are just less numerous at the end of the day because all of this attrition kicks in.” Of course, that attrition is not to be sniffed at. 

Particularly if you were an infant, a woman of childbearing years or a hard laborer, you’d be far better off choosing to live in year 2018 than 18. But that still doesn’t mean our life span is actually getting significantly longer as a species.

On the Record

The data gets better later in human history once governments begin to keep careful records of births, marriages and deaths – at first, particularly of nobles.

Those records show that child mortality remained high. But if a man got to the age of 21 and didn’t die by accident, violence or poison, he could be expected to live almost as long as men today: from 1200 to 1745, 21-year-olds would reach an average age of anywhere between 62 and 70 years – except for the 14th Century, when the bubonic plague cut life expectancy to a paltry 45.

Queen Elizabeth I lived until the age of 70; life expectancy at the time could be longer for villagers than for royals.

Did having money or power help? Not always. One analysis of some 115,000 European nobles found that kings lived about six years less than lesser nobles, like knights. 

Demographic historians have found by looking at county parish registers that in 17th-Century England, life expectancy was longer for villagers than nobles. “Aristocratic families in England possessed the means to secure all manner of material benefits and personal services but expectation of life at birth among the aristocracy appears to have lagged behind that of the population as a whole until well into the eighteenth century,” he writes. This was likely because royals tended to prefer to live for most of the year in cities, where they were exposed to more diseases. (Is it still true that cities are less safe? Find out more in our story on whether the countryside is a healthier place to live today).

But interestingly, when the revolution came in medicine and public health, it helped elites before the rest of the population. By the late 17th Century, English nobles who made it to 25 went on to live longer than their non-noble counterparts – even as they continued to live in the more risk-ridden cities.

Surely, by the soot-ridden era of Charles Dickens, life was unhealthy and short for nearly everyone? Still no. As researchers Judith Rowbotham, now at the University of Plymouth, and Paul Clayton, of Oxford Brookes University, write, “once the dangerous childhood years were passed… life expectancy in the mid-Victorian period was not markedly different from what it is today.” A five-year-old girl would live to 73; a boy, to 75.

Not only are these numbers comparable to our own, they may be even better. Members of today’s working-class (a more accurate comparison) live to around 72 years for men and 76 years for women.

Britain’s Queen Victoria died in 1901 at the age of 81. During her reign, a girl could expect to live to about 73 years of age, a boy to 75.

“This relative lack of progress is striking, especially given the many environmental disadvantages during the mid-Victorian era and the state of medical care in an age when modern drugs, screening systems and surgical techniques were self-evidently unavailable,” Rowbotham and Clayton write.

They argue that if we think we’re living longer than ever today, this is because our records go back to around 1900 – which they call a “misleading baseline,” as it was at a time when nutrition had decreased and when many men started to smoke.

Pre-Historic People

What about if we look in the other direction in time – before any records at all were kept?

Although it is obviously difficult to collect this kind of data, anthropologists have tried to substitute by looking at today's hunter-gatherer groups, such as the Ache of Paraguay and Hadza of Tanzania. They found that while the probability of a newborn’s survival to age 15 ranged between 55 percent for a Hadza boy up to 71 percent for an Ache boy. Once someone survived to that point, they could expect to live until they were between 51 and 58 years old. Data from modern-day foragers, who have no access to medicine or modern food, write Michael Gurven and Cristina Gomes, finds that “while at birth mean life expectancies range from 30 to 37 years of life, women who survive to age 45 can expect to live an additional 20 to 22 years” – in other words, from 65 to 67 years old.

The Roman empress Domitia died in 130 at the age of 77.

Archaeologists Christine Cave and Marc Oxenham of Australian National University have recently found the same. Looking at dental wear on the skeletons of Anglo-Saxons buried about 1,500 years ago, they found that of 174 skeletons, the majority belonged to people who were under 65 – but there also were 16 people who died between 65 and 74 years old and nine who reached at least 75 years of age.

Our maximum lifespan may not have changed much, if at all. But that’s not to delegitimize the extraordinary advances of the last few decades which have helped so many more people reach that maximum lifespan, and live healthier lives overall. Perhaps that’s why, when asked what past era, if any, she’d prefer to live in, Oxford’s Humphries doesn’t hesitate. “Definitely today,” she says. “I think women’s lives in the past were pretty nasty and brutish – if not so short.”

https://getpocket.com/explore/item/do-we-really-live-longer-than-our-ancestors?utm_source=firefox-newtab-en-us

Oriana:
The dream of reversing aging is very much alive. The idea is that aging should be about maturation, not deterioration. Does it mean immortality? Not only are we very far from it, but we seem to have a built-in biological clock that takes care of our removal. But ten or twenty more healthy, productive years? Scientists are working on it. Meanwhile, I think the only centenarian in my family put it best: “Eat less, walk more.” 

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ending on beauty:

They say Ulysses, wearied of wonders
Wept with love on seeing Ithaca
Humble and green. Art is that Ithaca
A green eternity, not wonders

Art is endless like a river flowing
It passes, yet remains, a mirror to the same
Inconstant Heraclitus, the same
And another, like the river flowing

~ Jorge Luis Borges (from Ars Poetica)