A Different Type of ‘Muscle Memory’
Jan. 14th, 2026 08:00 am![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png){kind=small}
theatlantic_health_feed
Before Adam Sharples became a molecular physiologist studying muscle memory, he played professional rugby. Over his years as an athlete, he noticed that he and his teammates seemed to return to form after the offseason, or even from an injury, faster than expected. Rebuilding muscle mass and strength came easy: It was as if their muscles remembered what to do.
In 2018, Sharples and his research lab, now at the Norwegian School of Sport Sciences in Oslo, were the first to show that exercise could change how our muscle-building genes work over the long term. The genes themselves don’t change, but repeated periods of exertion turns certain genes on, spurring cells to build muscle mass more quickly than before. These epigenetic changes have a lasting effect: Your muscles remember these periods of strength and respond favorably in the future.
Intuitively, this makes sense. Past exercise primes your muscles to respond more robustly to more exercise. Over the past few years, Sharples’s lab has found that muscles have additional molecular mechanisms for remembering exercise; he and other scientists have been building on this research, too, confirming epigenetic muscle memory in young and aged human muscle, after different modes of training, as well as in mice. Now 40 years old, Sharples is still thinking about how our muscles remember but has lately been investigating the inverse trajectory: Do muscles have a similar memory for weakness?
The answer appears to be yes. “Our new data shows that muscle does not just remember growth—it also remembers wasting,” Sharples told me, of a study published in preprint on bioRxiv and currently in peer review for Advanced Science. “The more encounters you have with injury and illness, the more susceptible your muscle is to further atrophy. And, well—that’s what aging is, isn’t it?”
The Norwegian government’s research council has been funding Sharples’s research and has a vested interest in the lab’s discoveries. In the next decade, Norway is expected to become a “super-aged society,” in which more than one in five people are age 65 or older. Japan and Germany have already crossed this threshold, and the United States is expected to reach it by 2030. Age-related muscle weakness is a major factor in falling risk; falling is a leading cause worldwide of injury and death in people 65 and older. Better understanding how muscles remember and react to their weakest moments is a crucial step toward knowing what to do about it.
As part of the new study, Sharples’s team studied repeated periods of atrophy in young human muscle, using a knee brace and crutches to immobilize participants’ legs for two weeks at a time. This level of disuse, Sharples said, is comparable to real-world situations in which muscle rapidly loses size and function—limb immobilization after fractures or other injuries, periods of hospitalization or bed rest, reduced weight-bearing during recovery. A couple of years ago, I went to observe this research for my book On Muscle; one study participant, an avid skier and cyclist, told me he was shocked by how significantly the muscles in his leg deteriorated after just a couple of weeks of immobilization. The team also ran a concurrent study in aged rat muscle, in collaboration with Liverpool John Moores University; in both studies, repeated periods of disuse led to epigenetic changes—shifts in the way genes were expressed.
These changes affected the core functions of muscle cells, hampering the genes in mitochondria—the powerhouses of the cell, which generate the energy required to contract and relax muscle fibers. Letting muscles weaken suppressed genes involved in mitochondrial function and energy production in particular, including genes that are essential for muscle endurance and recovery. The researchers also found that a key marker of mitochondrial abundance dropped more drastically after repeated atrophy than after the first episode, indicating that repeated disuse makes muscle more vulnerable. In other words, the evidence suggests that every time you fall down the hole, it becomes more difficult to climb back out.
Similar changes occurred in both the young human muscle and the aged rat muscle. But the young muscle could adapt and recover. After repeated atrophy, it showed a less exaggerated gene-expression response than the aged muscle did. “There seems to be some resilience and protection with young muscle the second time around,” Sharples said. He likened this to an immune-system response: Young muscle responds better to atrophy the second time because it has encountered it before and knows how to bounce back. By contrast, aged muscle becomes more sensitive after repeated atrophy, showing a worsened response with the second episode.
How long our muscles hold on to any of these memories is still up for debate. “Because of our study periods, we do know with some certainty that epigenetic memories can last at least three to four months, and that protein changes can also be retained,” Sharples said. “How long after that is difficult to say. But we know from our studies of cancer patients that epigenetic changes in muscle were retained even 10 years out from cancer survival.”
This was startling to hear. If an adverse health event is dramatic enough, like cancer, our muscles can carry the effects of that for a decade or more. More typically, though, inactivity, aging, and repeated episodes of disuse may gradually shift the system toward a state in which weakness becomes more entrenched and recovery slower.
Understanding what drives muscle to remember being in stress situations—either beneficial, like exercise, or damaging, like illness—could help us better judge what to do about this, says Kevin Murach, an associate professor at the University of Arkansas who studies aging and skeletal muscle and who was not involved in the new study. Knowing the mechanisms that drive beneficial changes at the molecular level could help develop drugs with similar effects. On the other end of the spectrum, if illness and immobilization have long-term negative effects, Murach told me, the next question to answer is: “Can we use exercise to offset that?”
Both Murach and Sharples said the data are getting only more robust that strength training, paired with endurance or high-intensity interval training, is the best therapy to protect against age-related loss of muscle and function. “Perhaps the key takeaway is that at any point along this continuum, new exercise or loading stimuli can still shift the balance back towards growth and health,” Sharples said. “I don’t think there is a point at which muscle can’t respond at all—it simply becomes less efficient when repeatedly weakened or when older.”
Identifying genes associated with muscle growth, as well as pharmaceutical targets, could mean that drugs or gene therapy may eventually be able to assist with boosting muscle response for people who cannot exercise. Murach and Sharples cautioned, though, that stimulating muscle-cell growth can have unintended consequences, in part because growth pathways are common across cell types—including cancer cells.
What the new work does show is that our muscle mass is not a blank slate. “What we’re finding suggests that our muscles may carry a history of both strength and weakness,” Sharples said. It’s shaped by factors including age, baseline muscle health, previous atrophy events, and previous exercise training. “And that history shapes how our muscles respond in the future.” I came away from our conversation thinking about the battle between positive muscle memory for strength and negative muscle memory for atrophy as a kind of tug-of-war: The two are constantly in tension, but the more experiences you have of one or the other, the more it pulls you into its embrace.
Not only because of the loons, but also because of them (and the vultures)
Jan. 13th, 2026 08:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
radiantfracture“my journal records the vestiture of doppelgangers”
Kimblerly Blaeser
i.
Remember how the loon chick climbs to the mother’s back.
Oh, checkerboard bed and lifted wing—oh, tiny gray passenger
who settles: eyes drooping closed, webbed foot lifted like a flag!
Each day, each week, I write missives—Mayflies' transparent wings
a stained glass—fluttering across the surface of lake. An impermanence.
Imagos who transform: molt made glitter as splayed bodies on water.
I write the red crown, mad V of vulture-wings drying in morning sun.
I record red squirrel swimming (yes! swimming) across a small channel.
ii.
I barely breathe watching the narrow body (a mere slit of motion)
dark and steady like all mysterious—paddle, paddle, and arrive
now climb bedraggled and spent onto the small safety of a floating log.
It rests. We catch our breath. Now it scurries ahead to the other log end.
Here my journal stutters with a squirrel story bigger than words:
Unfathomably, it plunges back into blue chance—into uncharted.
We are never done, it says, with a body tiny enough to know.
The world is large, it says, with a courage I am greedy to learn.
iii.
Praise here all fabulous unwritten. Each shimmer of spent body,
journey from rest to blue next. Who, I ask, is the blissful beaver
devouring each yellow water lily if not our doppelganger?
Continually, I feel paws pulling, mouth filled with flower lust—
what little rooms are words in these seasons of plenty.
* * * * * *
Pádraig Ó Tuama's commentary is, as always, tender, attentive, and personal. He seems very taken by the squirrel (as who would not be?).
It's interesting that he glosses the "imago" in section i as theological, the Imago Dei. I read it first literally as a phase of insect development, and then psychoanalytically as an internalized image of an idealized self based on the Other -- but it strikes me that this second reading probably derives from Ó Tuama's source, Lacan having been raised within Catholicism.
I like Blaeser's use of "doppelganger," how slightly off-kilter and irreducible it is, how it makes the images not just celebratory but metaphysical and eerie - ties back into that reading of "imago."
What do you hear?
§rf§
The Best Flu Drug Americans Aren’t Taking
Jan. 12th, 2026 11:44 amtheatlantic_health_feedUpdated at 6:00 PM ET on January 12, 2026
Antiviral drugs for influenza, the best known of which is Tamiflu, are—let’s be honest—not exactly miracle cures. They marginally shorten the course of illness, especially if taken within the first 48 hours. But amid possibly the worst flu season in 25 years, driven by a variant imperfectly matched to the vaccine, these underused drugs can make a bout of flu a little less miserable. So consider an antiviral. And specifically, consider Xofluza, a lesser-known drug that is in fact better than Tamiflu.
The culprit behind this awful flu season is subclade K, a variant of H3N2 discovered too late to be incorporated into this year’s flu vaccine. Early data suggest the shot likely does confer at least some protection against this variant, but the jury is still out on whether that protection is much eroded from usual. What is undeniable, though, is a recent explosion of influenza cases. In New York, which was hit early and hard, the number of people hospitalized for flu broke records. Across the rest of the country, cases have been going up a “straight line,” nearly everywhere all at once, which is highly unusual, Arnold Monto, an epidemiologist at the University of Michigan who has been studying influenza for some 60 years, told me last week. Cases seem to be finally leveling off now, but much misery still lies ahead.
For flu, antivirals are a second but oft-overlooked line of defense after vaccines. “We are dramatically and drastically underutilizing influenza antivirals,” Janet Englund, a pediatric-infectious-disease specialist at the University of Washington, told me. Even the older, more commonly prescribed drug Tamiflu reaches only a tiny percentage of flu patients every year. Actual numbers are hard to come by, but compare the estimated 1.2 million prescriptions for Tamiflu and its generic form in 2023 with the some 40 million people who likely got the flu in the winter of 2023–24. Xofluza is even less popular, and exact prescription numbers even harder to find. But they are possibly somewhere from just 1 to 10 percent that of Tamiflu.
The two antivirals are equally effective at allaying symptoms, both shortening the duration of flu by about a day. But Xofluza, which was approved in 2018, offers some tangible benefits over Tamiflu.
First, Xofluza is simply more convenient, a single dose compared with Tamiflu’s 10, which are taken over five days, twice a day. It also causes fewer of the gastrointestinal side effects, such as vomiting and nausea, that patients on Tamiflu will sometimes experience. All in all, a course of Xofluza might be easier for you—or your kid already queasy from the flu itself—to get down and keep down. (That is, if they are old enough to take it: Xofluza is approved for kids ages 5 and up in the United States, but ages 1 and up in Europe; only Tamiflu is recommended for kids down to newborn age as well as for women who are pregnant or breastfeeding.)
Second, Xofluza makes you less contagious to the rest of your family. It drives down the amount of virus spewed by sick patients more quickly than Tamiflu, possibly because of differences in how the two drugs work. Whereas Xofluza stops the virus from replicating, Tamiflu can only prevent already replicated viruses from exiting infected cells to infect others. In a study that Monto led last year, Xofluza cut household transmission by almost one-third compared with a placebo. Tamiflu might reduce transmission too, according to other studies, but probably to a lesser degree than Xofluza.
Third, Xofluza is better at heading off serious post-flu complications such as pneumonia or myocarditis. Patients on Xofluza needed fewer ER visits and hospitalizations than did those on Tamiflu, according to studies of large real-world data sets from insurance claims and medical records. This means that Xofluza should be the antiviral of choice for high-risk patients, including those over 65, who are most prone to these complications, Frederick Hayden, a flu expert at the University of Virginia who led one of the original Xofluza trials, told me. (Hayden has consulted on an unpaid basis, aside from travel expenses, for the companies behind Xofluza.)
The fourth advantage is less relevant to this season because the dominant subclade belongs to the influenza A family. But Xofluza is noticeably more effective against influenza B than Tamiflu, which tends to falter against this family of viruses.
Despite these benefits, awareness of Xofluza remains low. “It hasn’t been used as much as it should be,” Monto said, for reasons of cost and accessibility. Tamiflu, first approved in 1999, is available as a generic for less than $30 even without insurance. Xofluza is still patented and runs $150 to $200 a person. Because it’s less popular, pharmacies are less likely to stock it, making doctors less eager to prescribe it, and so on. In October, though, the company that markets Xofluza in the U.S. launched a direct-to-customer program that sells the drug for the comparably bargain price of $50 without insurance, along with same-day delivery in some areas. Even the flu-drug experts I spoke with, though, were not all aware of this new, more accessible route. The CDC still lists Tamiflu first and foremost in its recommendations, too.
For flu antivirals to be more widely used would also require better testing. Both Xofluza and Tamiflu are most effective within the first 48 hours of symptoms, and the earlier the better. Traditionally, a sick person would have to get to a doctor, get a flu test, get a prescription, and finally get to a pharmacy—which can easily put them past the first 48 hours. But COVID popularized at-home rapid testing, and combination COVID-flu tests have landed on pharmacies shelves recently. With telehealth and home delivery, you can get an antiviral without ever leaving the house.
Still, the at-home tests are expensive, Englund pointed out, about $20 a pop here, compared with just a couple of bucks in Europe. The expense can add up for a whole family. In Japan, where antivirals are widely used, nearly everyone with a flu-like illness gets a routine rapid test and, if necessary, antivirals, both largely covered by the public health-care system. (Xofluza was developed by the Japanese company Shionogi, which also makes Xocova, a promising COVID antiviral my colleague Rachel Gutman-Wei has written about that is not available in the U.S.)
If the U.S. were better at using antivirals, especially in the high-risk patients, the number of Americans dying of flu—roughly 38,000 last year—would likely drop, Cameron Wolfe, an infectious-diseases expert at Duke, told me. Doctors recommend that people at high risk for flu take antivirals prophylactically, upon exposure to anyone with flu, before symptoms appear. Both Xofluza and Tamiflu as prophylaxis can cut the chances of getting sick by upwards of 80 percent.
For healthy people who fall ill, antivirals can ease the burden of flu, which is nasty even when it is not deadly. “I don’t want you to be out of work longer than you need to be. I don’t want you to not be a caregiver for your kids,” Wolfe said. “Maybe you have business travel coming up, and I don’t want you to be sick still on that plane.” With challenges around access to antivirals, he said that “the best drug is the one you can get.” Both Tamiflu and Xofluza can make this historically bad flu season a little more bearable.
This story originally stated that Xocova, not Xofluza, when given as a prophylaxis for flu, cut the chance of illness by 80 percent. Xocova is a COVID antiviral.
A little late, but better than not...
Jan. 10th, 2026 05:37 pmtwistedchickThat said, here is the link to "Camelot Station", which John M. Ford wrote as a Christmas card some years back.
It blows my head apart, reading it, as if I were standing on a high place near a ruined castle looking at the people moving about below in the town, while knowing they were also at some point in that ruined castle beside me as ghosts or living humans. You'll see.
The Flu Really Is That Bad
Jan. 10th, 2026 08:00 amtheatlantic_health_feedThe flu situation in the United States right now is, in a word, bad. Infections have skyrocketed in recent weeks, filling hospitals nearly to capacity; viral levels are “high” or “very high” in most of the country. In late December, New York reported the most flu cases the state had ever recorded in a single week. My own 18-month-old brought home influenza six days before Christmas: He spiked a fever above 103 degrees for days, refusing foods and most fluids; I spent the holiday syringing electrolyte water into his mouth, while battling my own fever and chills. This year’s serving of flu already seems set to be more severe than average, Seema Lakdawala, a flu virologist at Emory University, told me. This season could be a reprise of last winter’s, the most severe on record since the start of the coronavirus pandemic—or, perhaps, worse.
At the same time, what the U.S. is experiencing right now “fits within the general spectrum of what we would expect,” Taison Bell, an infectious-disease and critical-care physician at the University of Virginia Health System, told me. This is simply how the flu behaves: The virus is responsible for one of the roughest respiratory illnesses that Americans regularly suffer, routinely causing hundreds of thousands of people to be hospitalized annually in the U.S., tens of thousands of whom die. (So far this season, the flu has killed more than 5,000 people, including at least nine children.) Influenza is capable of even worse—sparking global pandemics, for instance, including some of the deadliest in history. These current tolls, however, are well within the bounds of just how awful the “seasonal” flu can be. “It’s another flu year, and it sucks,” Bell said.
Although flu is a ubiquitous winter illness, it is also one of the least understood. Scientists have been puzzling over the virus for decades, but many aspects of its rapid evolution and transmission patterns, as well as the ways in which our bodies defend against it, remain frustratingly mysterious. Flu seasons, as a rule, differ drastically from one another, and “we don’t have a great understanding of why one ends up being more severe than another,” Samuel Scarpino, an infectious-disease-modeling researcher at Northeastern University, told me. Experts’ flu-dar has also been especially out of whack in recent years, since the arrival of COVID-19 disrupted typical flu-transmission patterns. (An entire lineage of flu, for instance, may have been driven to extinction by pandemic-mitigation measures.) The virus is still finding its new norm.
Even so, a few things about this season’s ongoing torment are clear. Much of the blame rests on the season’s dominant flu variant—subclade K, which belongs to the H3N2 group of influenza. As flus go, H3N2s tend to be more likely to hospitalize and kill people; most of the worst flu seasons of the past decade in the U.S. have been driven by H3N2 surges. Subclade K doesn’t seem to be an unusually virulent variant, which is to say it’s probably no more likely to cause severe disease than a typical version of H3N2. But it does seem to be better at dodging our immune defenses, making the net effect similar, because it can lead to more people getting sicker than they otherwise would. That’s not a trivial effect for a disease that, even in mild cases, can cause days of high fevers and chills, followed by potentially weeks of that delightful run-over-by-a-truck feeling.
At UVA Health, Bell has seen a major uptick in people testing positive for the virus in recent weeks. Like others, his hospital is close to full, straining its capacity to treat other illnesses, he said. In Michigan, too, where Molly O’Shea cares for children at multiple pediatric practices, “we are seeing a ton of influenza, just a ton,” she told me. “Our schedule is overflowing.” Several of her school-age patients have wound up in the hospital, despite being previously healthy; a few have ended up with serious complications such as pneumonia and brain inflammation. The worst cases, she said, have been among the children who didn’t get their annual flu shot.
Flu vaccines are not among the most impressive immunizations in our roster. Although they’re generally pretty effective at protecting against severe disease, hospitalization, and death, they don’t reliably stave off infection or transmission. And they’re frequently bamboozled by the virus itself, which shape-shifts so frequently throughout the year, as it ping-pongs from hemisphere to hemisphere, that by the time flu vaccines roll out to the public, they’re often at least a little out of sync with what’s currently circulating.
That’s another aggravating factor this year. Researchers first detected subclade K in June, months after experts selected the strains that would go into the fall flu-vaccine formulation. Recent data suggest that vaccination may still elicit some immune defenses that recognize subclade K, and preliminary estimates from the United Kingdom suggest that this year’s formulations may be especially effective at preventing severe disease in children, who, along with the elderly, are highly vulnerable to the flu. (For all the misery my family endured, none of us ended up in the hospital—which suggests that our vaccinations did their job.)
Children also tend to be the biggest drivers of flu’s spread. “They are the source, many times, of explosions of transmission,” Lakdawala told me. In the U.K., for instance, which experienced an unusually early start to the flu season, school-age kids appear to have driven much of the epidemic, Scarpino pointed out. In the U.S., too, case rates among children have been particularly high. Although the vaccine primarily limits severe disease, it can also affect how quickly the virus travels through a community. And yet only about half of American kids get the vaccine each year, despite long-standing universal recommendations for annual immunization. “It’s a vaccine that parents have never really treated as a vaccine that every child should get,” O’Shea said.
Those choices might be influenced by the ways many people underestimate the flu—a term often used to describe any cold-weather ailment that comes with a runny nose, cough, or even gastrointestinal upset. In reality, flu has long ranked as one of the U.S.’s top 10 or top 15 causes of death—a scourge that, through its impact on the health-care system, the workforce, and the economy at large, costs the country billions of dollars each year. Against such a substantial threat, we should be using “everything in our toolbox to protect ourselves,” Lakdawala said.
Yet the Trump administration is actively impeding the process of flu vaccination. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has also said that it may be “a better thing” if fewer people are immunized against the flu—and insisted, incorrectly, that “there is no scientific evidence that the flu vaccine prevents serious illness, hospitalizations, or death in children.” The federal government recommended annual flu vaccines for all children until earlier this month, when HHS pushed through changes that demoted multiple immunizations from its recommended schedule. HHS now says that families should consult with their health-care provider before taking the shot. Such a recommendation suggests that the vaccines’ overall benefits are ambiguous enough to require discussion—and puts an additional burden on both patients and health-care providers, who can administer what was once a routine vaccine only after a conversation that must then be documented.
The nation’s leaders have also compromised one of the country’s best chances to develop more effective, better-matched flu vaccines in the future, by defunding research into mRNA vaccines. The current flu-vaccine manufacturing process takes so long that the included strains for the Northern Hemisphere must be selected by February or so—which provides plenty of time for the virus to evolve before the autumn rollout begins, as happened this year. “We pretty regularly have a bad match for the flu,” Scarpino said. mRNA vaccines promised the possibility of faster development, allowing researchers to stay more closely on the flu’s heels and switch out viral ingredients in as little as two or three months. That degree of flexibility also would have sped the response to the next flu pandemic.
In an email, Andrew Nixon, HHS’s deputy assistant secretary for media relations, disputed the characterization that the department’s new policies impede flu vaccination, writing, “Providers continue to offer flu vaccines, and insurance coverage remains unchanged. The recommendation supports shared clinical decision-making between patients and clinicians and does not prevent timely vaccination. People can continue to receive flu vaccines if they choose to do so.”
For the current season, much of the U.S.’s fate may already be sealed: Fewer than half of Americans have gotten a flu vaccine this season, while the virus continues to spread. “If you find yourself in a place where there are people sick with flu, you’re probably gonna get sick,” Scarpino said. That logic likely holds true for his own family, in Massachusetts, where flu activity has been high for weeks. They’ve so far made it through unscathed, but Scarpino said, “I feel like it’s a matter of time.”
America Has Entered Late-Stage Protein
Jan. 10th, 2026 07:30 amtheatlantic_health_feedOn a recent Tuesday morning, I was blessed with a miracle in a mini-mart. I had set out to find the protein bar I kept hearing about, only to find a row of empty boxes. But then I spotted the shimmer. Pushed to the back of one carton, gleaming in its gold wrapper, was a single Salted Peanut Butter David Protein Bar. It was mine.
David bars are putty-like rectangles of pure nutritional efficiency: 28 grams of protein stuffed into 150 calories, or roughly the equivalent of eight egg whites cooked without oil. They are booming right now. After all, in this era of protein mania, one must always be optimizing. A Quest bar might get you 20 grams of protein for just under 200 calories, but David—named after Michelangelo’s masterpiece—does more for less. “Humans aren’t perfect,” promises one David tagline, “but David is.” Why, given the possibility of perfection, would you accept eight grams less?
If a food with more protein is better, then it follows that a food with less is worse. After eating my David bar, I couldn’t help but feel a little bit bad about my dinner of brown rice and spicy chickpeas. A cup of Eden Foods organic chickpeas (240 calories) gets you a measly 12 grams. Now that I was living in the world of David, I was newly ambivalent about eating anything that wasn’t chunks of unadulterated protein. I am fueling, I thought, shoving cubes of baked tofu into my mouth. Did you know that green peas have an unusual amount of protein for a vegetable? With unsettling frequency, I began to add frozen peas to my dinners. (They’re not great on cacio e pepe, it turns out.)
I have become quietly obsessed with this one single macronutrient. How could I not be? Everything is protein now: There are protein chips and protein ice creams and cinnamon protein Cheerios. Lemonade is protein, and so is water. Last month, Chipotle introduced a “high protein cup” consisting of four ounces of cubed chicken. Melanie Masarin, the founder and CEO of Ghia, a nonalcoholic-drink brand, recently told me that an investor asked her whether Ghia has plans for a high-protein aperitif. No, but the investor’s logic was obvious: Healthy people, the kind who tend to watch their drinking, only want one thing. This week, the federal government released its latest set of dietary guidelines—including a newly inverted food pyramid. At the top is protein.
[Read: Protein madness has gone too far]
In some ways, protein is just the latest all-consuming nutritional fixation. For decades, the goal was to avoid fat, which meant that pretzels were good and peanut butter was bad and fat-free Snackwell’s devil’s-food cookie cakes were a cultural phenomenon. Then Americans rediscovered fat and villainized carbs. But protein is different. Whatever your dreams are, protein seems to be the answer. It supports muscle gain, for those trying to bulk up, but it’s also satiating, which means people trying to lose weight are also advised to eat more protein. It has the power to make you bigger and more jacked, but also smaller and more delicate. People on GLP-1s are supposed to be especially mindful of their protein intake, to prevent muscle loss on extremely low-calorie diets, but so are weight lifters.
It is a nutritional philosophy that encourages not restriction but abundance: as much protein as possible, all the time. You can have your cake and eat it too (as long as it is made with “protein flour”). In a world where the very act of eating feels fraught, layered with a lifetime of rules and fads and judgments about what food is and is not “good,” protein offers absolution: You don’t have to feel bad about this. It has so many grams! What a beautifully straightforward recommendation: Eat more of this one thing that happens to be everywhere, and that frequently tastes good.
The low rattle of protein mania—the protein matchas and protein Pop-Tarts and protein seasonings to sprinkle on your protein chicken cubes—can be as maddening as it is inescapable. Everybody knows that you are supposed to eat a varied diet with many different types of foods that provide many different nutrients. But only protein is endowed with a special kind of redemptive power. Nobody is pretending that tortilla chips are a cornerstone of a balanced diet, but if they’re protein tortilla chips (7 grams), well, then maybe they’re at least fine. This is fantastic news if your goal is to enjoy tortilla chips, but it does have a tendency to recast all food that has not been protein-ified—either by nature or by the addition of whey-protein isolate—as a minor failure. It is depressing to look at a pile of roasted vegetables, arranged elegantly over couscous, and think: I will try harder tomorrow. I know, because I do it.
Protein is supposed to allow people to realize their untapped potential—to make us stronger and sharper. I suspect, though, that I would be stronger and sharper if I could stop ambiently thinking about my protein intake. That the world is now covered in a protein-infused haze provides constant reminders that I am falling short. Lots of protein evangelists will tell you that this is how cavemen ate, and therefore it is good. I think the best part of being a caveman would be not worrying about protein.
As nutritional trends go, there are worse obsessions than protein. Even if there is still significant debate about how much protein one needs, you are unlikely to send yourself into kidney failure because you protein-maxxed too hard. But the fanatical focus on protein as the true answer, the universal key to transforming the body you have into the one you want—7 grams, 28 grams, 11 grams, a chicken smoothie—feels eerily familiar. We counted calories, grams of fat, carbohydrates, trying to distill the messy science of nutrition into one single quantitative metric. Protein, for all its many virtues, is just another thing to count.
A Handful of Communities!
Jan. 10th, 2026 01:59 amkalloway posting in ![[site community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/comm_staff.png){kind=small}
dw_community_promo![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
videogamefanworks Community Description:
videogamefanworks is the place to post the following, for any video game or visual novel:Fanfiction, Fanart, Icons, Meta, Recs for Fanworks, Etc.
mobilegames Community Description: A Dreamwidth community for mobile & gacha gaming. Basically, if it's available on Android and/or iOS, it's welcome here. We have a mostly-weekly general post and any news, info, etc. can be posted whenever.
smallweb Community Description: A community for all things smallweb, including personal websites, the fediverse, and more.
octobercest Community Description: A fest for incest in fiction running all year! Normally, posting is open every October but for 2026 we're going all year!
makezines Community Description: We want to make zines, and we want to encourage others to make zines!
Thank you, Heather Cox Richardson
Jan. 9th, 2026 10:55 pmhudebnikhttps://archive.org/details/ArmyTalkOrientationFactSheet64-Fascism/mode/2up
It's self-congratulatory wartime propaganda, of course, but it makes very clear that we can't assume fascism will never come to our shores, and must learn how to recognize it when we see it, even if it's wrapped in an American rather than a German, Italian, or Japanese flag.
Collections: Hoplite Wars: Part IVa, The Status of Hoplites
Jan. 9th, 2026 09:31 pmacoup_feedThis is the last part of our four-part series (I, II, IIIa, IIIb, Intermission) on the debates surrounding ancient Greek hoplites and the phalanx formation in which they fought. We’ve spent the last two entries in this series looking at warfare quite narrowly through the lens of tactics: hoplite spacing, depth, fighting style, and so on. I’ve argued for what I regard as a ‘blended’ model that sits somewhere between orthodoxy and heterodoxy: no ‘shoving’ othismos, but the hoplite phalanx is a shield wall, a formation with mostly regular spacing that is intended for shock and functions as a shock-focused shield wall formation likely from a relatively early date.
This week, we’re going to now ‘zoom out’ a bit and ask what implications the hoplite debate has for our broader understanding of Greek society, particularly polis Greek society. Hoplites, as warriors, were generally found in the Greek poleis but of course not all Greeks lived in poleis and areas of Greece without poleis largely lacked hoplites as well. In particular, our understanding of the place that hoplites have in polis society has a bunch of downstream implications in terms of social structure, the prevalence of slavery and even the question of how many Greeks there are in the first place.
I ended up having to split this into two parts for time, so this week we’re going to focus on the social status of hoplites, as well as some of the broader implications, particularly demographic ones, of a change in our understanding of how rich hoplites were. Then next week we’re going to close the series out by looking at hoplite ‘discipline,’ training and experience.
As always, if you like what you are reading, please share it as I rely on word-of-mouth to find readers! And if you really like it, you can support this project over at Patreon; I don’t promise not to use the money to buy a full hoplite panoply, but I also don’t not promise to do that. And if you want updates whenever a new post appears, you can click below for email updates or follow me on Twitter and Bluesky for updates when posts go live and my general musings; I have largely shifted over to Bluesky (I maintain some de minimis presence on Twitter), given that it has become a much better place for historical discussion than Twitter.
Orthodox Yeoman Hoplites
The key question we are asking here is fundamentally “how broad is the hoplite class?” That is, of course, a very important question, but as we’ll see, also a fiendishly tricky one. It is also a question where it can be unclear sometimes where scholars actually are which can render the debates confusing: heterodox scholars write articles and chapters against something called the ‘myth of the middle-class hoplite‘1 but it isn’t always clear exactly what the bounds of the model they’re arguing against is, in part because orthodox scholars are not generally proposing hard numbers for the size of the hoplite class.\
Post-Publication Edit: We’ve already had some confusion in the comments so I want to leave a clarifying edit here. We’re about to dive into a lot of questions about the percentage of people in the hoplite class. But all of the scholars involve calculate those figures on a different basis – in particular does the denominator include women? children? slaves? the elderly? I try to homogenize those estimates here as best I can, often aiming for a ‘percentage of free households‘ (so the enslaved excluded) or ‘percentage of adult males’ (so women and children excluded, but slaves included) in a given status type. But I am afraid you will have to keep track fairly closely of exactly what percentage of what we’re calculating (and of course it is entirely possible I have simply made a math error somewhere, although I have tried to be careful).
By way of example, I want to take Victor Davis Hansen out to the woodshed on this point – because his half of this specific disconnect was brought up in the comments early in this series – in terms of the difference between how he sometimes imagines in words the size and social composition of the hoplite class and then how it looks when he uses numbers. In The Other Greeks, VDH’s preference for describing the hoplite polis of the late Archaic is ‘broad-based’ a term he uses for it about three dozen times, including on when he talks about the “broad base of hoplite yeomanry” and how “when middling farmers were in control of a Greek polis government it was broad-based: it was representative of the economic interest of most of the citizenry” and when he references “the yeomanry […] who had built the polis and created broad-based agrarian governments.”2 These references are, in my digital copy, all within 3 pages of each other. They certainly give the impression of a middling, yeoman-hoplite class that dominated the typical polis. And indeed, in his more pop-focused works, like the deeply flawed Carnage and Culture (2001) he posits Greece as the origin point for a western tradition that includes “equality among the middling classes” tied to the hoplite tradition, which certainly seems to suggest that Hanson thinks we should understand the hoplite class as broad, covering even relatively poor farmers, and with a great degree of internal equality.
But then flash forward three whole pages and we’re calculating the size of that ‘broad-based’ class and we get a line like, “the full-citizen hoplites […] composed about twenty percent of the total adult resident population of Boeotia.”3 And pulling out just that second quote, someone might express confusion when I say that the heterodox argue that the hoplite class is small and exclusive, a rejection of the ‘middle class’ yeoman-hoplite of the orthodox school, because look there is VDH himself saying they’re only 20%! But equally, one may question the fairness of describing such a rate of enfranchisement as ‘broad-based!’
Now on the one hand VDH’s argument in this passage is about the relative inclusivity of ‘moderate’ oligarchies (the ‘broad-based’ ones) as compared to radical Greek democracies and so the question of the relative breadth of the hoplite class itself is not particularly his concern. But I think he’s also hiding the ball here in key ways: Boeotia is a tricky test case – unusual and famous for both its significant cavalry (drawn from an unusually wealthy aristocracy) and light infantry manpower (drawn from an unusually impoverished peasantry). VDH notes the low property qualifications for citizenship in Boeotia but does not stop to consider if that might be connected not to the hoplites, but to the unusually large numbers of Boeotian light infantry.
Moreover, there is a lack of clarity when presenting these percentages as to exactly what is being included. VDH’s 20% figure is 20% of the total “adult resident population,” rather than – as we might expect – a percentage of the adult male population or frequently the free adult male population. So he is actually asserting something like almost 45% (really probably 43 or 44%) of free households serve as hoplites (once we adjust for women and the elderly), which, as we’ll see, I think is pretty doubtful.4 For the sake of keeping comparisons here ‘clean,’ I am going to try to be really clear on what is a percentage of what, because as we’ll see there is in fact, a real difference between the orthodox assumption of a hoplite class of 40-50% of free households and the heterodox assumption that is closer to 25% of free households.
So when I say that heterodox scholars generally argue for a smaller, economically elite hoplite class while orthodox scholars generally assume a larger ‘yeoman’ hoplite class, it can be tricky to pin down what that means, particularly on the orthodox side. We need apples-to-apples number comparisons to get a sense of where these folks differ.
And I think the place to actually start with this is Karl Julius Beloch (1854-1929); stick with me, I promise this will make sense in a second. Beloch’s Die Bevölkerung der griechisch-römischen Welt (1886, “The Population of the Greco-Roman World”) is the starting point for all of the debates of Greek and Roman demography, the first really significant, systematic effort to estimate the population of the entire classical world in a rigorous way. Now if you recall your historiography from our first part, you will quickly realize that as a German writing in the 1880s, Beloch was bound to have drawn his assumptions about Greek society and the social role of the hoplite class from those early Prussian and German scholars who serve as the foundation for the orthodox school. They were, after all, writing at the same time and in the same language as he was. Equally useful (for us) Beloch’s basic range of estimates for Greece remain more-or-less the accepted starting point for the problem, which is to say that a lot of current historians of ancient Greece when they think about the population of the Greek poleis are still ‘thinking with Beloch’ (typically mediated by Corvisier and Suder, La population de l’Antitiquité classique (2000)).
So analyzing Beloch’s approach – and because he is estimating population, he is forced to use numbers – can give us a sense of the society that the ‘orthodox’ vision of hoplites imagined at its inception and which it largely still imagines when it thinks in terms of raw population numbers. And that can help us lock down what we’re actually arguing about.
In very brief, Beloch had a problem to solve in estimating the population of Greece. Whereas in Roman Italy, he had census data to interpret, we have no equivalent in Greece (ancient reports of population in Greece are rare and almost invariably unreliable). So instead he adopts the method of estimating from maximum military deployments, the one number we reliably get from ancient sources. Doing so, of course, requires squaring away some key questions: what percentage of adult males might be called up for these armies? Our sources often give us only figures for hoplites, so this question really becomes, ‘what percentage of adult males served as hoplites?’ And then following on that, what percentage of people were female, children, elderly or non-free?
Beloch answers those questions as follows: he assumes that roughly half of all free households are in the hoplite class, so he can compute the free adult male population by multiplying hoplite deployments by two, that he can compute the free population by multiplying the adult male population by three, and that the non-free population is around 25% of the total (significantly concentrated in Sparta and Athens), including both slaves and serfs. You can see the logic in these assumptions but as I am going to argue all of these assumptions are wrong, some more wrong than others. We’ll come back to this, but I think Beloch’s key stumbling block (apart from just badly underestimating the number of children in a pre-modern population – he should be multiplying his adult males by four, not three) is that he largely assumes that the Greek poleis look more or less like the Roman Republic except that the Romans recruit a bit further down their socio-economic ladder. And that’s…not right, though you could see how someone working in the 1880s might jump to that expedient when the differences in Greek and Roman social structure were less clear.
Greeks are not Romans and the Greek polis is not the Roman Republic.5
Nevertheless those assumptions suggest a vision, a mental model of the social structure of the typical Greek polis: wealthy citizens of the hoplite class make up roughly half of the free households (he explicitly defends a 47/53% breakdown between hoplite and sub-hoplite), while the landless citizen poor make up the other half. Beloch assumes an enslaved population of c. 1m (against a free population of c. 3m), so a society that is roughly 25% enslaved, so we might properly say he imagines a society that is roughly 37.5% hoplite class (or richer), 37.5% poorer households and 25% enslaved households. And returning to a moment to VDH’s The Other Greeks (1995), that’s his model too: if 20% of adults (not just adult males) were citizen-hoplites in Boeotia, then something like 43% of (free) households were hoplite households (remember to adjust not just for women, but also for the elderly),6 which is roughly Beloch’s figure. It is a touch lower, but remember that VDH is computing for Boeotia, a part of Greece where we expect a modestly larger lower class.
What does it mean for a society if the hoplite class represents approximately 40% of households (including non-free households)?
Well, this suggests first that the hoplite class is perhaps the largest or second-largest demographic group, behind only free poor citizens. It also assumes that nearly all of the propertied households – that is, the farmers who own their own farms – both served as hoplites and were members of the hoplite class.7 In particular, this imagines the ‘typical’ member of the hoplite class (this distinction between hoplites and the hoplite class will matter in a moment) as a middling farmer whose farm was likely small enough that he had to work it himself (not having enough land to live off rents or enslaved labor), essentially a modest peasant. Moreover the assumption here is that this broad hoplite ‘middle class’ dominates the demography of the polis, with very few leisured elites above them and a similar number of free poor (rather than a much larger number) below them.
And I want to note here again there is an implicit – only rarely explicit (Beloch makes the comparison directly) – effort to reason from the social model we see in the Roman Republic, where the assidui (the class liable for taxes and military service) as a group basically did include nearly all farmers with any kind of property and ‘farmers with any kind of property’ really does seem to have included the overwhelming majority of the population. There’s an effort to see Greek ‘civic militarism’ through the same frame, with the polis a community made up of small freeholding farmers banding together.8 I think scholarship has not always grappled clearly enough with the ways in which Rome is not like an overgrown polis, but in fact quite different. One of those differences is that the assidui is a much larger class of people than anything in a polis, encompassing something like 70% of all adult males (free and non-free) and perhaps as much as 90% of all free households. That is an enormous difference jumping even from 37.5% to 70%. What that figure suggests is both that Roman military participation reached much more robustly into the lower classes but also that (and we’ll come back to this in a moment) land ownership was probably more widespread among the Roman peasantry than their Greek equivalents.
In short part of what makes the Roman Republic different is not just where they draw the census lines, but the underlying structure of the countryside is meaningfully different and that has very significant impacts on the structure of Roman society.9 Taken on its own evidence, it sure looks like the organization of land in the Greek countryside was meaningfully less equal10 and included meaningfully more slaves than the Italian countryside, with significant implications for how we understand the social position of hoplites. And that brings us to the heterodox objections and thus…
Divisions Among Hoplites
The response to the ‘yeoman hoplite’ model of hoplite orthodoxy has been Hans van Wees’ assault on the ‘myth of the middle-class hoplite.’11
What van Wees does is look specifically at Athens, because unlike anywhere else in the Greek world, we have the complete ‘schedule’ of wealth classes in Athens, denominated in agricultural production. He’s able to reason from that to likely estate size for each of the classes and from there, given the size of Attica (the territory of Athens) and the supposed citizen population (estimates from 40,000 to 60,000) the total size of each wealth class in terms of households and land ownership, in order to very roughly sketch the outlines of what wealth and social class in Attica might have looked like. Our sources offer little sense that they thought Athenian class structure was ever unusual or remarkable beyond the fact that Athens was very big (in contrast to Sparta, which is treated as quite strange), so the idea here is that insights in Athenian class divisions help us understand class divisions in other poleis as well.
What he is working with are the wealth classes defined by the reforms of Solon, which we haven’t really discussed in depth but these are reported by Plutarch (Solon 16) and seem to have been the genuine property classifications for Athenian citizens, which I’ve laid out in the chart below. Wealth was defined by the amount of grain (measured in medimnoi, a dry measure unit of 51.84 liters), but for non-farmers (craftsmen and such) you qualified to the class equal to your income (so if you got paid the equivalent of 250 medimnoi of grain to be a blacksmith, you were of the zeugitai, though one imagines fairly few non-landowners qualify for reasons swiftly to become clear).
| Name | Wealth Requirement | Notional Military role | Percentage of Population Following van Wees (2001) |
| Pentakosiomedimnoi (“500 Bushel Men”) | 500 medimnoi or more | Leaders, Officers, Generals | 1.7-2.5% |
| Hippeis (‘horsemen’) | 400 medimnoi | Cavalry | 1.7-2.5% |
| Zeugitai (‘yoked ones’) | 200 medimnoi (possibly reduced later to 150 medimnoi) | Hoplites | 5.6-25% |
| Thetes (‘serfs’) | Less than 200 medimnoi | Too poor to serve (later rowers in the navy) | 90-70% |
Now traditionally, the zeugitai were regarded as the ‘hoplite class’ and that is sometimes supposed to be the source of their name (they were ‘yoked together’ standing in position in the phalanx), but what van Wees is working out is that although the zeugitai are supposed to be the core of the citizen polity (the thetes have limited political participation) there simply cannot be that many of them because the minimum farm necessary to produce 200 medimnoi of grain is going to be around 7.5 ha12 or roughly 18 acres which is – by peasant standards – an enormous farm, well into ‘rich peasant’ territory. It is, in fact, roughly enough farm for the owner to not do much or any farming but instead subsist entirely off of either rents or the labor of enslaved workers.13
In short, the zeugitai aren’t ‘working class’ ‘yeoman farmers’ at all, but leisure-class elites – mostly landlords, not farmers – albeit poorer than the hippeis and pentakosiomedimnoi even further above them. And that actually makes a great deal of sense: one of the ideas that pops up in Greek political philosophy – albeit in tension with another we’ll get to in a moment – is the idea that the ideal hoplite is a leisured elite and that the ideal polis would be governed exclusively by the leisured hoplites.14 Indeed, when a bunch of Greek-speakers (mostly Macedonians) find themselves suddenly in possession of vast kingdoms, this is exactly the model they try to build their military on (before getting utterly rolled by the Romans because this is actually a bad way to build a society). And of course Sparta’s citizen body, the spartiates, replicate this model as well. Often when we see elements in a Greek polis try to create an oligarchy, what they are intending to do is reduce political participation back to roughly this class – the few thousand richest households – which is not all the hoplites, but merely the richest ones.
Of course with such large farms there can’t be all that many zeugitai and indeed there don’t seem to have been. In van Wees’ model, the zeugitai-and-up classes never supply even half of the number of hoplites we see Athens deploy; they only barely crawl over half if we assume the property qualification was (as it probably was) reduced at some point to just 150 medimnoi. Instead, under most conditions the majority of hoplites are thetes, pulled from the wealthiest stratum of that class (van Wees figures these fellows probably have farms in the range of ~3 ha or so, so c. 7.5 acres). Those thetes make up the majority of hoplites on the field but do not enjoy the political privileges of the ‘hoplite class.’ And pushing against the ‘polis-of-rentier-elites’ model, we often also find Greek sources remarking that these fellows, “wiry and sunburnt” (Plato Republic 556cd, trans. van Wees), make the best soldiers because they’re more physically fit and more inured to hardship – because unlike the wealthy hoplites they actually have to work.
What the transition to the Athenian democracy meant was the full enfranchisement of this large class of thetes, both the fellows who could afford to fight as hoplites (but previously didn’t have the rights of them) and the poorer citizen thetes.
And of course this isn’t only Athens. The only other polis whose complete social system we can see with any clarity, of course, is Sparta and when we look there, what do we find? A system where political participation is limited to the rentier-elite class (the Spartiates), where there is another class of poorer hoplites – the perioikoi, who fight as hoplites – who are entirely blocked from political participation. It appears to be the same kind of dividing line, with the difference being that the spartiates had become so dominant as to deny the perioikoi even citizenship in the polity and to physically segregate themselves (the perioikoi lived in their own communities, mostly on the marginal land). It is suggestive that this sort of divide between the wealthy ‘hoplite class’ that enjoyed distinct political privileges and other ‘working-class’ hoplites who did not (and yet even far more poor farmers who could not afford to fight as hoplites) was common in the polis.
That leaves the notion of a truly ‘broad-based’ hoplite-class that runs a ‘broad-based’ agrarian polis government that consisted of ‘middle-class’ ‘yeoman’ hoplites largely in tatters. Instead, what you may normally have is a legally defined ‘hoplite class’ that is just the richest 10-20% of the free citizen population, a distinct ‘poor hoplite’ class that might be around 20% and then a free citizen underclass of 60-70% that cannot fight as hoplites and also have very limited political participation, even though many of them do own some small amount of land.
Once again, if you’ll forgive me, that looks nothing like the Middle Roman Republic, where the capite censi (aka the proletarii) – men too poor to serve – probably amounted to only around 10% of the population and the light infantry contingent of a Roman army (where the poorest men who could serve would go) was just 25%.15 So whereas the free ‘Roman’ underclass of landless or very poor is at most perhaps 35% of (free) households,16 the equivalent class at Athens at least (and perhaps in Greece more broadly) is 60% of (free) households. Accounting for the enslaved population makes this gap wider, because it certainly seems like the percentage of the enslaved population in Greece was somewhat higher than Roman Italy. It is suddenly less of a marvel that Rome could produce military mobilizations that staggered the Greek world. Greeks are not Romans.
This is a set of conclusions that naturally has significant implications for how we understand the polis, particularly non-democratic poleis. Older scholarship often assumes that a ‘broad’ Greek oligarchy meant rule by the landholding class, but if you look at the number of enfranchised citizens, it is clear that ‘broad’ oligarchies were much narrower than this: not ‘farmer’s republics’ (as VDH supposes) but rather ‘landlord‘s republics.’17 That is quite a different sort of state! And understanding broad oligarchies in this way suddenly restores the explanatory power of what demokratia was in Greek thought: it isn’t just about enfranchising the urban poor (a class that must have been vanishingly small in outside of very large cities like Athens) but about enfranchising the small farmer, a class that would have been quite large in any polis for reasons we’ve discussed with peasants.
I think there’s also a less directly important but even more profound implication here:
Wait, How Many Greeks Are There?
The attentive reader may be thinking, “wait, but Beloch’s population estimates assume that the hoplite contingent of any Greek polis represent half of its military aged (20-60) free adult males, but you’re saying that number might be much lower, perhaps just 30 or 40%?”
I actually haven’t seen any scholars directly draw this connection, so I am going to do so here. Hell, I’ve already seen this blog cited quite a few times in peer-reviewed scholarship so why not.
If it isn’t already clear, I think when it comes to the size of the hoplite class, van Wees is correct and that thought interlocks with another thought that has slowly crept into my mind and at last become lodged as my working assumption: we have significantly under-counted the number of Greeks. Or, more correctly, everyone except Mogens Herman Hansen has significantly under-counted the number of Greeks. So good job to Mogens Herman Hansen, everyone else, see me after class.
Now these days the standard demographic reference for the population of Greece is not Beloch (1886), it is Corvisier and Suder, La population de l’Antitiquité classique (2000). Unlike Beloch, they do not reason from military deployments, instead they reason from estimated population density. Now I want to be clear, they are reasoning from estimated rural population density, which is not the same as reasoning from built-up urban area18 The thing is, we can’t independently confirm rural population density from archaeology (unlike urban area estimates) so this method is entirely hostage to its assumptions. So the fact that Corvisier and Suder’s estimates fall neatly almost exactly on Beloch’s estimate (a free population of c. 3m in mainland Greece) might suggest they tweaked their assumptions to get that result. And on some level, it is a circular process, because Beloch checks his own military-based estimates with population density calculations in order to try to show that he is producing reasonable numbers. So if you accept Beloch’s density estimates at the beginning, you are going to end up back-computing Beloch’s military estimates at the end, moving through the same process in reverse order.
But you can see how we have begun to trouble the foundations of Beloch’s numbers in a few ways. First off, we’ve already noted that his multiplier to get from military aged males to total population (multiply by three) is too low (it needs to be four). Beloch didn’t have the advantage of modern model life tables or the ability to see so clearly that mortality in his own day was changing rapidly and had been doing so for a while. Adjusting for that alone has to bring the free population up to support the military numbers, to around 4m instead of 3m (so we have effectively already broken Corvisier and Suder (2000)). Then there is the question of the prevalence of the enslaved; Beloch figures 25% (1m total), but estimates certainly run higher. Bresson, L’économie de la Grèce des cités (2007/8) figures perhaps 40-50% and 30% is also a common estimate, though we are here, in practice, largely guessing. Even keeping the 25% figure Beloch uses, which we now have to acknowledge may be on the low side, we have to raise the number of enslaved to reflect the larger free population: 1.33m instead of 1m, for a new total of 5.33m instead of Beloch’s original 4m.
But then if the number of men who fight as hoplites is not, as Beloch supposes, roughly half of polis society, but closer to 40% or even less, then we would need to expand the population even further. If it is, say, 40% instead of 50%, suddenly instead of Beloch’s computation (very roughly) of 500,000 hoplites giving us 1,000,000 free adult men giving us 3,000,000 free persons, resulting in a total population of 4,000,000 including the enslaved, we have 500,000 hoplites implying 1,250,000 free adult men implying 5,000,000 free persons, to which we have to add something like 1,500,000 enslaved persons19 implying a total human population not of 3 or 4m but of c. 6,500,000.
And there’s a reason to think that might be right. The one truly novel effort at estimating the population of Greece in the last few decades (and/or century or so) was by Mogens Herman Hansen. Having spent quite some time on a large, multi-scholar project to document every known polis (resulting in M.H. Hansen and T.H. Nielsen, An Inventory of Archaic and Classical Poleis (2004)), M.H. Hansen decided to use that count as a basis to estimate population, assigning a rough estimate to the size of small, medium and large poleis – using the built-up urban area of poleis we knew relatively well – and then simply multiplying by all of the known poleis to exist at one point in time. The result, documented in M.H. Hansen, The shogtun method: the demography and ancient Greek city-state culture (2006), produced an estimate of 4-6m for mainland Greece and I think, to be frank, Hansen pulled his punch here. His method really produced the top figure in that range, a significantly higher figure that generally postulated for Greece.20
My strong suspicion – which the evidence is insufficient to confirm definitively – is that van Wees is right about the relative size of the slice of men who fight as hoplites (distinct from the ‘hoplite class’) and that M.H. Hansen is correct about the population and that these two conclusions interlock with each other to imply a rather different Greece in terms of equality and social structure than we had thought.
Looping back around to what is my repeated complaint this week: we were often conditions to think about Greek agriculture, the Greek peasantry, the Greek countryside through the lens of the much better documented Roman Italian agriculture, peasantry and countryside. After all, it is for Italy, not Greece, that we have real census data, it is the Roman period, not the classical period, that gives us sustained production of agricultural treatises. We simply have a much better picture of Roman social structures and so it was natural for scholars trying to get to grips with a quite frankly alien economic system to work from the nearest system they knew. And that was fine when we were starting from nothing but I think it is a set of assumptions that have outlived their usefulness.
This isn’t the place for this argument in full (that’s in my book), but briefly, the structure of the Roman countryside – as we come to see it in the late third/early second century BC – did not form naturally. It was instead the product of policy, by that point, of a century’s worth of colonial settlements intentionally altering, terraforming, landholding patterns to maximize the amount of heavy infantry the land could support. It was also the product of a tax-and-soldier-pay regime (tributum and stipendium) that on the net channeled resources downward to enable poorer men to serve in that heavy infantry.21 Those mechanisms are not grinding away in mainland Greece (we can leave Greek colonial settlement aside for now, as it is happening outside of mainland Greece), so we have no reason to expect the structure of the countryside to look the same either.
In short the Romans are taking steps to ‘flatten out’ their infantry class (but not their aristocracy, of course), to a degree, which we do not see in Greece. Instead, where we get an ideology of economically equal citizenry, it is an ideology of equality within the leisured elite, an ‘equality of landlords’ not an equality of farmers. We should thus not expect wealth and land distribution to be as ‘flat’ in Greece as in Italy – and to be clear, wealth distribution in Italy was not very flat by any reasonable standard, there was enormous disparity between the prima classis (‘first class’) of infantry and the poorest Roman assidui. But it was probably flatter than in Greece within the infantry class (again, the Roman aristocracy is a separate question), something that seems confirmed given that the militarily active class in Roman Italy is so much larger and more heavily concentrated into the heavy infantry.22 Consequently, we ought not assume that we can casually estimate the total population of Greece from hoplite deployments, supposing that the Greeks like the Romans, expected nearly all free men to serve. Instead, the suggestion of our evidence was that in Greece, as in many pre-modern societies, military service (and thus political power) was often the preserve of an exclusive affluent class.
Implications
But returning to Greece, I would argue that accepting the heterodox position on the social status of hoplites has some substantial implications. First, it suggests that there was, in fact, a very real and substantial social division within the body of hoplites, between wealth hoplites who were of the ‘hoplite class’ as politically understood and poor hoplites who fought in the same way but only enjoyed a portion of the social status implied. That division suddenly makes sense of the emergence of demokratia in poleis that were more rural than Athens (which is all of them). The typical polis was thus not a ‘farmer’s republic’ but a landlord’s republic.
At the same time, this also substantially alters the assumptions about ‘yeoman hoplites’ who have to rush home to pull in their harvests and who are, in effect, ‘blue-collar warriors.’ Instead, the core of the hoplite army was a body – not a majority, but a significant minority – of leisured elites who had slaves or tenants doing most of their farming for them. What kept hoplite armies from campaigning year-round was as much poor logistics as yeoman economics (something clear in the fact that spartiates – by definition leisured elites – didn’t campaign year-round either).
Finally, if we extend this thinking into our demographic analysis, we have to accept a much larger population in Greece, with all of the expansion happening below the men who fought as hoplites (both the hoplite class and our poorer working-class hoplites). It suggests a remarkably less equal social structure in Greece – indeed, perhaps less equal than the structure in Roman Italy – which in turn significantly caveats the way we often understand the Greek polis as a citizen community relatively more egalitarian and free than the absolute monarchies which pervaded Egypt and the Near East.
And of course, for one last return to my pet complaint in this post, it should reinforce our sense that Greek are not Romans and that we cannot casually supply the habits, economics or social structures of one society to the other to fill in gaps in our evidence. In particular, the assumption that the Greeks and Romans essentially share a civic and military tradition is a thing that would need to be proved, not assumed.23
Visual Kei of the Day
Jan. 9th, 2026 07:12 amelyusion posting in dw_community_promo
If you like Japanese rock/metal bands dressed in various degrees of ostentatious fashion, please consider joining
vkotd to share your favorite v-kei songs or discover new ones. I'm looking forward to seeing fans on Dreamwidth's taste! ♪♪♪ ヽ(ˇ∀ˇ )ゞ
The Bones of Children’s Mouths Are Being Wrenched Apart
Jan. 9th, 2026 08:50 amtheatlantic_health_feedEvery night before bedtime, my daughter tilts back her head so that a pair of metal plates inside her mouth can be cranked apart another quarter of a millimeter. We turn a jackscrew with a wire tip; it spreads the bones within her upper jaw. At times she groans or even cries: she says that she can feel the pressure up into her nose.
This is normal. My daughter is 9 years old. She has a palate expander.
So does her best friend, and, by her count, so does nearly one in four of the kids in her fourth-grade class. On Reddit’s r/braces forum, a practitioner based in Frisco, Texas, said he was surprised by “how many parents ask me, ‘Hey, does my child need an expander? Everyone else seems to have one.’” His colleagues seemed to notice something similar. “Everybody’s being told they have a narrow jaw, and everyone's being given an expander,” Neal Kravitz, the editor in chief of the Journal of Clinical Orthodontics, told me.
A generation ago, getting braces was a rite of passage into seventh grade. Today, the reshaping of a child’s smile may commence a few years earlier, at 7, 8, or 9 years old. At that point, the two sides of the upper jawbone haven’t yet joined together, a fact that is propitious for a different orthodontic process: instead of straightening, expansion. During this phase of life, when kids still have some baby teeth, a tiny dungeon rack may be wedged between a child’s upper teeth, then used to spread her upper jaw and—proponents say—introduce essential room for sprouting teeth.
The expander is an old device; debates about its use are hardly any younger. What seems to have been the first expander was described in 1860, in the journal The Dental Cosmos, by a San Francisco dentist named Emerson Angell. He wrote of “an apparatus, simple and efficient,” that he’d placed into the mouth of a young patient. Then he’d told her to expand it, day by day, by advancing a central screw—just as my daughter does today. But the journal’s editors were skeptical of Angell’s work. We “must beg leave to differ with the writer in the conclusion arrived at,” they announced in a prefatory note, foreshadowing a long disagreement within the field.
This concerned the merits of expansion versus those of extraction—whether a child’s jaw should be broadened to accommodate her teeth, or whether certain teeth should be pulled to accommodate her jaw. Around the turn of the 20th century, the influential orthodontist Edward Angle favored jaw broadening; he believed that all children should have their teeth intact, nestled in a capacious jaw, as exemplified by a human skull that had been ransacked from an Indian burial mound not far from where he practiced, which he called “Old Glory.” A few decades later, though, orthodontic research found that expanded jaws might still “relapse” into a narrow shape. By the 1970s, pulling teeth became the rule, Daniel Rinchuse, a Seton Hill University professor of orthodontics, told me.
This consensus was itself short-lived, he said—not because the field had come across some new and better mouth-expanding tech but because of fears about the supposed ill effects of doing too many extractions. Some dentists claimed that what was then the standard approach in orthodontics could even lead to painful disorders of the temporomandibular joint, or TMJ. In the face of these concerns, expanders made a comeback.
Eventually, some orthodontists started claiming that expanders had another major benefit—that prying open a child’s palate could improve her breathing and prevent sleep apnea. Some now recommend this airway-focused intervention not just for kids my daughter’s age but for toddlers too.
The basis for the trend was never really scientific, though. “Do expanders prevent obstructive sleep apnea? In capital letters: NO WAY,” Kravitz said. “There are endless research papers on this stuff.” The problem isn’t that expanders have no value, he continued; it’s that they’re clearly overused. According to Rinchuse, who co-edited the book Evidence-Based Clinical Orthodontics, the idea that extracting teeth will lead to joint disorders has never been proved. Indeed, no “high-quality evidence” supports expansion of the upper jaw for any reason, he said, except in cases where a child has been diagnosed with posterior “crossbite.” He said that, overall, orthodontic practice is less constrained by evidence than other fields of health care are, because the ill effects of bad decisions will be slight. As he put it, “In orthodontics, no one dies.”
Steven Siegel, the current president of the American Association of Orthodontists, acknowledged that some practitioners may be inclined to put a rack on every child’s palate: “There are some abuses,” he told me. But he also argued that the recent increase in expander use hasn’t really been dramatic, and that for the most part, the devices are used to positive effect. For people with a narrow jaw and crowded teeth, he said, expanders can prevent the need for extractions down the road; some kids, at least, could see improvements in their breathing. When I noted that I’d heard the opposite on both counts from Kravitz and Rinchuse, he responded that they simply disagreed. “I have great respect for both of them,” he said. “I would say that there is a controversy.”
For the record, my daughter is delighted by the treatment she’s received: In a recent family interview, conducted over breakfast, she described her course of orthodontics as “cool and fun.” Her orthodontist (who happens to be a former high-school classmate) has been thoughtful and communicative, and I’ve recommended her to several other families. Still, despite the fact that no one dies from orthodontics, one might also choose to avoid a treatment that costs several thousand dollars, has disputed benefits, and may cause modest pain—not to mention any moral injury that may accrue from tilting back your daughter’s head and cranking open metal plates to wrench her face apart.
And despite whatever caused expander mania, its existence can be jarring for a parent who grew up in the prior era of orthodontics. Indeed, the period during which this trend developed—from, say, the late 1980s until the early 2020s—happens to coincide with the stretch that intervened between my own entry into middle school and my daughter’s. For my fellow members of this cohort, expansion of the fourth-grade palate appears to be a strange and sudden social norm. During one visit to the orthodontist, my daughter and I found a handful of children about her age seated in a line of dental chairs, with technicians leaning over each of them to turn the screw of their expander. It was like we’d all gathered there for some initiation rite for children of the tribe that dwells on Cobble Hill in Brooklyn—a ritual of widening.
Not long after that, I called up Luke Glowacki, an anthropologist at Boston University who co-directs a research project in Ethiopia’s Omo Valley, where body modifications—and dental modifications in particular—are not uncommon. He told me about social groups there and elsewhere in which a child’s teeth might be filed down to points or a person’s lower lip stretched out with a plate.
Is orthodontics any different? It presents itself as curative and scientific, but many orthodontists’ websites are replete with beauty claims as well: An expander may “protect your child’s facial appearance” or provide “enhancement to the facial profile.” Siegel said that a broadened palate gives “a more aesthetic width of the smile.” Kravitz said that it could help shrink the unattractive gaps inside a person’s cheeks—“dark buccal corridors,” in the language of the field.
In East Africa, dental and other body modifications carry similar ambiguities of purpose. Filing down a person’s teeth, for instance, or removing them altogether “may also be done for ostensible health reasons,” Glowacki said. Some body-modification rituals could be understood to ward off harmful spirits, for example. In other words, they’re prophylactic. Glowacki also told me about a Nyangatom woman he knows who has scars carved into both her shoulder and forehead. The former are purely decorative, but she’d received the latter on account of being sick.
Glowacki is a parent, too, and I asked him whether his training as an anthropologist affected how he thought about expanders or other anatomical procedures, such as ear piercing, that are carried out on children in the United States at industrial scale. “You’re not gonna find any society in the world that doesn’t modify their body in some way in accordance with their ideas of beauty or of health,” he said. “We’re doing what societies all over the world do.” If now I’ve paid an orthodontist to reshape my daughter’s mouth, maybe that’s just human nature.
Eat More Deer
Jan. 9th, 2026 07:00 amtheatlantic_health_feedUpdated at 5:14 p.m. ET on January 9, 2026
The deer were out there. The crisp tracks in the snow made that clear. Three hours into our hunt through the frigid New Hampshire woods, Ryan Calsbeek, a rangy 51-year-old biology professor at Dartmouth, guessed that 200 animals were hiding in the trees around us. Calsbeek and I were 20 feet up a pignut hickory, crouching on a creaky platform. His friend Max Overstrom-Coleman, a stocky 46-year-old bar owner from Vermont, had climbed a distant tree and strung himself up by a harness, readying his compound bow and swaying in the wind. Shivering in camo jackets and neon-orange beanies, we peered into the darkening forest, daring it to move.
I had joined Calsbeek’s December hunt to try to get my hands on high-quality red meat. Calsbeek had yet to kill a deer that season, but in previous years, he told me, a single animal kept his family of four well fed through the winter. His young daughters especially liked to eat deer heart; apparently, it’s marvelously rich and tender. My mouth watered at the thought. The last time I’d tasted venison was more than a decade ago at a fancy restaurant in Toronto, where it was served as carpaccio, drizzled in oil and so fresh that it may as well have pranced out of the woods and onto my plate.
A bounty of such succulent, free-range meat is currently running through America’s backyards. The continental United States is home to some 30 million white-tailed deer, and in many areas, their numbers are growing too rapidly for comfort. Each year, a white-tailed doe can typically birth up to three fawns, which themselves can reproduce as soon as six months later.
Wherever deer are overabundant, they are at best a nuisance and at worst a plague. They trample gardens, destroy farmland, carry ticks that spread Lyme disease, and disrupt forest ecosystems, allowing invasive species to spread. They are involved in tens of thousands of car crashes each year in New York and New Jersey, where state wildlife departments have encouraged hunters to harvest more deer. In especially populated regions, wildlife agencies hire sharpshooters to cull the animals. Last year, New Hampshire legislators expanded the deer-hunting season in an attempt to keep the population under control. By the looks of the forest floor, which was pitted with hoof marks and scattered with marble-shaped droppings, that effort was falling short.
Over the past decade, some states have proposed a simple, if controversial, strategy for bringing deer under control: Couldn’t people like me—who don’t hunt but aren’t opposed to it—eat more venison?
Venison may not be a staple of American cuisine, but it has a place in many people’s diets. Health influencers laud it as a lean, low-calorie, nutrient-dense source of protein. Venison jerky sticks are sold at big-box stores and advertised as snacks for people on Whole30 and keto diets. Higher-end grocery stores, such as Wegmans and Whole Foods, sell ground venison for upwards of $12 a pound, roughly twice the cost of ground beef.
Part of the reason venison is so expensive is that most of it is not homegrown. It’s mostly imported from New Zealand, which has sent more than 5 million pounds of the stuff to the U.S. every year since 2020. Beef, the dominant red meat in the States, has historically been more affordable. But beef prices jumped nearly 15 percent in 2025, and the conventional kind sold in most supermarkets comes from cattle raised in abysmal conditions. If high-quality venison were cheaper and more widely available, it could be an appetizing alternative.
In recent years, a few deer-swamped states, including New Jersey and Maryland, have tried to legalize the sale of hunted venison, which would deliver two key benefits: more deer out of the ecosystem and more venison on people’s plates. Despite the sport’s association with trophies, many deer hunters are motivated by the prospect of obtaining meat, and they can only consume so much. “It’s for your own table,” Overstrom-Coleman said as he fixed climbing sticks onto a tree to form a makeshift ladder. He had already stocked his freezer full of venison this season (“That son of a bitch,” Calsbeek whispered, once we’d left our companion in his tree) and planned, as many hunters do, to donate any excess meat to a food bank.
Hunting is waning in popularity, in part because younger people are less keen on participating than older generations. Efforts to bring in more hunters, such as programs to train women and youth in outdoor skills, are under way in many states. Women are the fastest-growing demographic, and they participate largely to acquire food, Moira Tidball, the executive director at the Cornell Cooperative Extension who leads hunting classes for women, told me. Still, interest is not growing fast enough for the subsistence-and-donation system to keep deer numbers in check.
[Read: America needs hunting more than it knows]
It’s hard to imagine a better incentive for deer hunting than allowing hunters to sell their venison to stores and restaurants. But the idea is antithetical to a core tenet of American conservation. For more than 100 years, the country’s wild game has flourished under the protection of hunters and their allies, steadfast in their belief that the nation’s animals are not for sale.
The last time this many white-tailed deer roamed America’s woodlands, the country didn’t yet exist. To the English colonists who arrived in the New World, the deer bounding merrily through the forests may as well have been leaping bags of cash. Back home, deer belonged to the Crown, and as such, could be hunted only by the privileged few, Keith Tidball, a hunter and an environmental anthropologist at Cornell (and Moira’s spouse), told me. In the colonies, they were free for the taking.
Colonists founded a robust trans-Atlantic trade for deer hide, a particularly popular leather for making work boots and breeches, which drastically reduced the deer population. In Walden, Henry David Thoreau notes a man who preserved the horns “of the last deer that was killed in this vicinity.” The animals were already close to disappearing from many areas at the beginning of what ecologists have called the “exploitation era” of white-tailed deer, starting in the mid-19th century. Fifty years later, America was home to roughly half a million deer, down 99 percent from precolonial days.
The commerce-driven decimation of the nation’s wildlife—not just deer but birds, elk, bears, and many other animals—unsettled many Americans, especially hunters. In 1900, Representative John Lacey of Iowa, a hunter and close friend of Theodore Roosevelt’s, introduced a bill to ban the trafficking of America’s wildlife. (As Roosevelt, who notoriously hunted to collect trophies, wrote in 1913, “If there is to be any shooting there must be something to shoot.”) The Lacey Act remains one of the most binding federal conservation laws in existence today.
[From the May 1906 issue: Camping with President Theodore Roosevelt]
The law is partly contingent on state policies, which make exceptions for certain species. Hunters in most states, for example, can legally harvest and sell the pelts of fur-bearing species such as otters, raccoons, and coyotes. But attempts to carve out similar exceptions for hunted venison, including the bills in Maryland and New Jersey, have failed. In 2022, the Mississippi attorney general published a statement that opened up the possibility of legalizing the sale of hunted deer, provoking fierce opposition from hunters and conservationists; today, the option remains open but has not led to any policy changes. Last year, an Indiana state representative introduced a bill that would allow the sale of hunted venison, but so far it has gone nowhere.
The practical reason such proposals keep failing is that allowing the sale of hunted meat would require huge investments in infrastructure. Systems to process meat according to state and federal laws would have to be developed, as would rapid testing for chronic wasting disease, an illness akin to mad cow that could, theoretically, spread to humans who eat infected meat, though no cases have ever been reported. Such systems could, of course, be implemented. Hunted deer is sold in some common grocery stores in the United Kingdom, such as Waitrose and Aldi. (Notably, chronic wasting disease is not a concern there.)
[Read: Deer are beta-testing a nightmare disease]
Although the sheer abundance of deer makes them easy to imagine as steaks on legs, several experts cautioned that some people’s affection for the animals runs deep. Deer are cute; they’re docile; they’re Bambi. David Drake, a forestry and wildlife professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, likens them to America’s “sacred cow.” As Drake and a colleague have outlined in a paper proposing a model for commercialized venison hunting in the U.S., any modern system would be fundamentally different from the colonial-era approach because it would be regulated, mostly by state wildlife agencies. But powerful coalitions of hunters and conservationists remain both faithful to the notion that wild game shouldn’t be sold and fearful that history will repeat itself. As the Congressional Sportsmen’s Foundation, a national hunting association, puts it, “Any effort to recreate markets for game species represents a significant threat to the future of our nation’s sportsmen-led conservation efforts.” Some of the fiercest pushback to the New Jersey law, Drake told me, came from the state wildlife agency.
The only U.S. state with a deer-related exception to the Lacey Act is Vermont. During the open deer-hunting season (which spans roughly from fall to winter in the Northeast) and for 20 days afterward, Vermonters can legally sell any meat that they harvest. This policy was introduced in 1961, and yet, “I am not aware of anyone who actually takes advantage of it,” Nick Fortin, a wildlife biologist at Vermont’s Fish and Wildlife Department, told me. He added that the department, which manages the exasperated homeowners and destabilized forests that deer leave in their path, has been discussing how to raise awareness about the law.
Even after I explained the 1961 law to several Vermont hunters, they were hesitant to sell me any meat. Hunted meat is meant to be shared freely, or at most bartered for other items or goodwill, Greg Boglioli, a Vermont hunter and store owner, told me. I met Boglioli at the rural home of his friend Fred Waite, a lifelong hunter whose front room alone was decorated with 20 deer heads. I had hoped to buy venison from Waite, but he insisted on sharing it for free. After all, he had plenty. His pantry was crammed with mason jars of stewed venison in liver-colored brine. On a table in the living room was the scarlet torso of a deer that his son had accidentally hit with his truck the other day, half-thawed and waiting to be cooked.
During our hunt, I found Overstrom-Coleman to be more open to the idea of selling the venison he hunted. “I guess that would be a pretty excellent way to share it,” he said. Earlier in the season, he’d killed a deer in Vermont, and he was willing to sell me some of the meat the next day. At least, I thought as I stared into the motionless woods, I’d be going home with something.
[From the July/August 2005 issue: Masters of the hunt]
By the time the sun went down, the only deer I’d seen was a teetering doe in a video that Overstrom-Coleman had taken from his tree and sent to Calsbeek. “Too small to kill,” he texted; he’d meet us in the parking lot. The air was glacial as Calsbeek and I trudged empty-handed toward the trailhead, hoofprints glinting mockingly in the light of our headlamps. From the trunk of the car, we took a consolation swig of Wild Turkey from a frosted bottle, and Overstrom-Coleman reminded me to visit the next day.
I found his chest freezer stuffed with paper-wrapped packages stamped with Deer 2025. He handed me three and refused to let me pay. Back home a few days later, I used one to make meatballs. Their sheer depth of flavor—earthy and robust, with a hint of nuttiness—made me wonder why I bothered to eat farmed meat at all.
This article originally misidentified Max Overstrom-Coleman’s hunting weapon.
rydra_wongContext: in Dark Souls, you can put down a summon sign so that other players can* summon you into their game to help them out (at the risk of also opening themselves up to potential hostile invaders).
You can only be summoned by people in the same rough level range as you, so if I don't feel like moving on yet from an area after I’ve completed it, I often put down my summon sign and hang around for a bit before I level up out of the usual range for that area. It’s been a lot of fun.
VERY IMPORTANT CONTEXT: there is no channel for voice or text communication. There's a very limited menu of gestures, and a few signals (e.g. repeatedly tapping the block button to jiggle your shield or weapon, which generally seems to communicate "I'm here, let's go!") which the fandom has evolved by default.
This makes communication challenging. But it also means it makes zero demands on my capacity for verbal conversation or pretending to be a semi-normal human being.
( Cut for length )
(no subject)
Jan. 8th, 2026 07:05 pmtwistedchickPoem post: stunbone
Jan. 8th, 2026 01:39 pmradiantfractureIf everything is shining on me
Friend, you have buttsense
you have stone buns, as your grandma says
Here in the driftwood feeling sundrunk, sunbent
Sensate among the ebb tones of the sea
I thought you said stun bone
You draw with a stick among the ebb stones
The tide wriggles up the sand grooves
Your breathing makes the subtones shimmer
You draw the water up to bait our shoes
Just for the craft of it, just because you can do it
Like a gull riding on the sky tide
Laughing at our temporary ruin
* * * * * *
Every morning very nearly without fail I solve the Merriam-Webster Blossom puzzle, and then I re-solve it to see if I can get a higher score, and if I'm not careful this becomes a kind of intellectual busywork I can use to distract myself from actual writing.
So a thing I'm trying to do (among all the other things) is to use the puzzle as a prompt. Inevitably each group of letters generates a semantic zone. Real and nonce words produce themselves. The letterset today was BENOSTU.
Here's a less complete poem from Sunday (letterset EINRTVW):
The riverine interview of winter,
that inept vintner: cool distillate
interrogates the view, shreds and repurposes it,
turns window to vitrine
where the morning light, when it comes,
cold citrine, tobacco stain,
will ennerve us, animate the inert twin
...Not sure what I planned to do with that twin, but I will let you know.
§rf§