Fill me with wonder

People will talk about "hygiene" and they mean extensive skin care routines and cosmetics instead of preventing the spread of contagious diseases through requiring structural renovations for better ventilation of workplaces, schools, & public spaces and universal healthcare that includes easy, accessible, free testing & vaccinations.

"One in three people are no longer eating for days at a time, warns the U.N.'s food program in Gaza. The United Nations says about 100,000 woman and children are severely malnourished in Gaza and need immediate medical care. The international organization Doctors Without Borders, known by its French acronym MSF, says 25% of the pregnant women and children ages six months to five years old whom it has been able to screen in Gaza are malnourished. Even if Gaza's severely malnourished children survive, Farrah from Nasser Hospital worries they will suffer from neurological impairments brought on by starvation. [...] after 21 months of shifting Israeli restrictions on how much and what kind of food can enter Gaza, he is seeing a shortage of significant nutritional elements in children's diets, such as iron, magnesium and calcium, because meat, vegetables and fruit are nearly impossible to obtain. The vitamin and mineral deficiencies "impact the development of a child's heart, liver and circulatory system," he says.

When you are thinking about health and nutrition, I want you to think about the people of Gaza.

My friend Mahrah (@mahrahpalestine) and her brother Mahmoud (@palestinian95) Balousha are trying to keep their parents alive.

Their father lives with diabetes, high blood pressure, and osteoporosis. How can he maintain his health with no food and constant stress? Their mother has lost 27 kilos due to starvation.

The Balousha family fundraiser has been vetted by 90-ghost and shared by fairuzfan. The campaign is hosted by @omegaversereloaded, and funds donated are transferred directly from her to the Balousha family. Donating to their campaign is completely safe and urgently necessary.

"Were resistance heroes generally friends, family, or acquaintances of those they hid, perhaps?

They were not. More than half had no prewar relationship whatsoever with any of the Jews they helped, and nearly 90 per cent helped at least one total stranger.

What about having a basement, an attic, or some savings tucked away? Did that play a role?

Again, no. The only thing that seems to have made any difference was how many rooms your house had, and that effect was minimal.

Turns out there was one circumstance that determined almost everything.

A new analysis of data gathered by the Oliners showed that when this condition was met, nearly everyone took action – 96 per cent to be precise.

And what was that condition? Simple: you had to be asked.

Those who were asked to help someone in danger almost always said yes.

In many cases, the question seems to have been a turning point, with people then helping other Jews afterwards.

And many who were asked to help went on to ask others. The resistance worked like a virus.

Those who got involved then passed on the resistance bug to others, and some individuals, like Arnold Douwes, were superspreaders, asking hundreds of people to take action.

Many such superspreaders were ministers or teachers who were respected members of the community.

Some two-thirds of resistance heroes were initiated into sheltering Jews by one of these superspreaders, while few people made a hiding place available of their own accord.

That may be it: the key to moral ambition.

Everyone has their own threshold to act, a tipping point to taking action.

There’s a minuscule minority that needs zero encouragement to stand up.

Psychologist Cass Sunstein calls these pioneers the zeros, and Arnold Douwes clearly falls into this category.

But most of us only dare to act once others have led the way.

The ones need only one person (‘If you go, so will I’), the twos take action if they have two allies, and the millions will only act if half the country has taken to the streets.

This theory also explains why revolutions can gain momentum so quickly.

The two Big Rules when instructing younger students was- 1. Compliment before Critique 2. Don’t say ‘but’, say ‘now’

Praise kids on what they get right first, especially if they are struggling. Like OP said, kids don’t like to engage with people who make them feel bad. They need encouragement when learning new things.

Number two boils down to this. If you tell a kid a compliment, then say “but you need to fix this”, that ‘but’ completely negates your compliment. It’s gone. It was canceled out like adding a negative to a positive. Using “hey, that punch is looking great, now let’s focus on your stance” doesn’t verbally cancel out the progress they’ve made. It’s like they’ve checked off something on their list of stuff to work on.

Mornings in North Wales & Rydal

Bright Morning - Kaoru Yamada 

Japanese , b. 1975 -

The number of people with chronic conditions is soaring. Are we less healthy than we used to be – or overdiagnosing illness? (Suzanne O'Sullivan, The Guardian, March 1 2025)

"Johnstone prefers to conceptualise mental health problems as survival strategies rather than brain disorders.

In this theory, experiences that are described as “symptoms” are actually a reaction to threats and a manifestation of what a person needs to do to overcome that threat.

Humans are essentially social beings. Troubled behaviour and low mood are inseparable from their social environment and relationships.

As Johnstone says, what is classed as mental illness can be a person’s attempt to be protected, valued or to find their place.

For Anna, this might mean examining how events such as the need to change schools in the middle of an academic year affected her.

Her subsequent feelings and actions might be better regarded as a survival strategy rather than as a brain disorder.

“Our behaviour is an intelligible response to our circumstance, history, belief systems and bodily capacities,” Johnstone says.

When mental health problems are viewed in this way, recovery starts to seem far more possible.

The importance of this is illustrated by the story of Prof Paul Garner, a UK-based senior medical doctor and researcher.

In March 2020, Garner caught Covid-19 and was shocked to find himself severely fatigued weeks after the acute infection seemed to have passed.

His initial infection had been mild but the aftermath left him feeling as if he had been hit “around the head with a cricket bat”.

At points, he felt he was dying. He had a new symptom every day: muggy head, upset stomach, tinnitus, pins and needles, breathlessness, dizziness.

In a blog for the British Medical Journal, he described his illness as like “an Advent calendar, every day there was something new”.

Garner is an infectious disease specialist. He expected that he, of all people, should be able to explain what was happening to his own body, but found he couldn’t.

He wondered if the virus had triggered some novel immunological disorder that did not exist in medical textbooks.

So he turned to the internet for answers and found he was not alone. In long Covid support groups, there were lots of people who shared his exact experience. Marathon runners who could no longer walk after mild Covid.

Through the long Covid groups, he found his way to communities of people who had developed chronic fatigue syndromes after other infections. Many of these people had been ill for decades.

His original expectation, based on his medical knowledge, was that he should get steadily better with time, recuperation and gentle increases in activity.

But that was not marrying with his unfolding reality. A 10-minute bike ride taken on a good day had provoked a three-day relapse.

So Garner decided to learn from the narratives of those who had been dealing with non-recovery for much longer than him.

They recommended pacing: working within the limits of his energy levels rather than trying to exercise his way out of the situation.

He took advice from a friend: “Stop trying to dominate the virus … accommodate it.” He learned to do less.

That brought him to a baseline in which he was not getting worse – but he was not getting better, either.

That could have been where Garner’s story ended. By September 2020, he had improved but he was no longer recovering further.

So he started searching beyond the non-recovery stories, for those with more positive outcomes.

That was how he found Recovery Norway, a group of people who once had chronic fatigue syndrome but had beaten it.

The group gave him a recovery mentor as well as another perspective and, crucially, a recovery identity.

He realised that while pacing had helped him at the start, he had then become obsessed with it.

As he described in his blog, he had started to unconsciously monitor signals from his body until he became paralysed with fear.

He believed long Covid was a metabolic disease that had damaged his mitochondria, but the Norway group made him think differently.

He didn’t doubt the virus had triggered the fatigue but felt he had later become caught in a vicious cycle of illness driven by his fear.

Viruses cause fatigue in order to make people rest, which promotes recovery.

But, in Garner’s case, his recovery had gone awry because he inadvertently conditioned his body to stay tired.

Garner realised he had to retrain his brain to react differently to the fatigue if he was to get better.

“I suddenly believed I would recover completely,” he writes. “I stopped my constant monitoring of symptoms. I avoided reading stories about illness and discussing symptoms, research or treatments by dropping off the Facebook groups with other patients. I spent time seeking joy, happiness … and overcame my fear of exercise.”

By the end of 2020 he had made a full recovery.

—

ADHD used to have a recovery identity. In the 1960s and 70s, the DSM described it as condition that went away in adolescence.

By the 90s, it was recognised that the symptoms did not always disappear completely but did lessen as people got older. Some studies found remission in up to 60% of people.

Severe ADHD lessened but often persisted, while people with mild ADHD could expect a chance of full recovery.

But ADHD is slowly being incorporated into the identities of many young people. Some support groups discourage the attempt to overcome ADHD traits.

People are told to unmask and to share their ADHD selves with others.

But learning to control our moods, behaviour and impulses is part of growing up, whether one has ADHD or not.

We all become more socially competent, gain focus and are better able to cope through practice.

Encouraging young people to do otherwise may be well-intentioned but potentially sets them up for non-recovery.

The rise in subtler ADHD presentations in adults may also undermine a young person’s expectation that their difficulties will disappear in time.

The snow outside - Kaoru Yamada 

So many unmarried men (Ellie Robson, Aeon, Feb 11 2025)

"Here Midgley describes a fairly prevalent caricature of a philosopher; an individual who develops her ideas in private, free from the distraction of children, dependents, partners and pets.

It is a lifestyle born of many privileges: quiet spaces, prolonged periods for deep thought, plentiful resources.

Virginia Woolf noted that deep thinking requires ‘a room of one’s own’, and Midgley is making a similar point.

But Midgley is also critical of this picture of the philosophical life.

The lives and concerns of others do not seem to factor into it – all one needs is one’s own mind.

But rather than hold up this model as one of a wizened intellectual, Midgley compares this kind of lifestyle to that of a teenager.

Though certainly simplistic (and possibly insulting to actual teenagers), there is some truth in Midgley’s account of the lifestyles of many famous philosophers.

Again, Woolf observed the struggle for women to find ‘a room of one’s own’ amid the battle to lead a life beyond domestic duties.

This historical fact, we might think, is what prevented women from attaining the conditions deemed necessary for producing books that now ground entire traditions of philosophy, like René Descartes’s Meditations – or Immanuel Kant’s body of writing (Kant lived alone and virtually never left his hometown of Königsberg).

If Midgley is right, many common trends in philosophy today may be the consequence of the fact that most of our ‘great’ philosophers were bachelors.

Midgley is doing more here than simply pointing out an interesting piece of trivia.

Her claim, developed in the rest of ‘Rings and Books’, is that this observation is of philosophical significance.

She argues that the lifestyle of the ‘philosophical adolescent’ must have impacted their conception of what counts as ‘good’ or ‘proper’ philosophy.

Midgley thought that by missing out on close meaningful relationships in their personal lives, many philosophers were encouraged to think of philosophy itself in a particular way – as the opposite of intimate and relational: abstract and remote.

In short, Midgley thinks forms of social detachment may foster forms of philosophical detachment. (…)

Her point is essentially this: certain philosophical problems seem important only because of the kinds of lives lived by the philosophers who thought about them.

With Descartes still firmly in her crosshairs, Midgley points to the example of the so-called ‘problem of other minds’ – the epistemic problem of working out whether we can really know that anyone other than ourselves exists.

Midgley argues that someone who has been pregnant, ie, had another someone living inside them, would never consider this an important question worthy of deep, philosophical contemplation.

She writes:

"I wonder whether they would have said the same if they [philosophers like Descartes] had been frequently pregnant and suckling, if they had been constantly faced with questions like, ‘What have you been eating to make him ill?’, constantly experiencing that strange physical sympathy between child and parent … if in a word they had got used to the idea that their bodies were by no means exclusively their own? That, I suggest, is typical human experience. But you don’t get it in examples in the textbooks. It is supposed to be an irrational topic." (…)

According to traditional epistemology, what can be said to ‘really’ exist must be objective – existing independently of a given knower or their body.

This is why Descartes searched for knowledge accessible to any thinking person, a ‘view from nowhere’, available no matter a person’s social location.

But feminist theories of knowledge argue that we shouldn’t think of objectivity in this narrow way.

Instead, knowledge should be seen as socially entangled with our emotions, interests, relationships, background beliefs and bodies.

And factors such as these should not be discarded as inappropriate or merely subjective.

The knowledge of those playing domestic roles in a household was bound up with tasks like ‘constantly lending eyes and hands to the child that requires them’, to use Midgley’s own example.

But the perspective of an embodied person is so unfamiliar to the philosophical tradition that it has been often deemed an unphilosophical perspective – or, as Midgley put it, ‘irrational’.

The Inquiry: Where are we in the battle against inflation?

"In the decade that followed the Great Financial Crisis, inflation rates remained low and steady, and in some cases even threatened to turn negative, as economies around the world struggled to recover.

This era came to an abrupt end in recent years following the double economic shocks of the Covid pandemic and Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

Many central banks and senior policymakers were caught on the back foot as inflation rates soared to levels not seen for nearly half a century in some countries.

Although rates have since come down from those highs, they are still proving tricky to completely get under control, causing concern among some observers.

Orestes being purified by Apollo

Red-figured bell-krater