Why Priests? or, Gary Wills is a Bad Catholic

American writer Gary Wills is a Catholic who seems to dislike almost everything that makes the Catholic church different from other churches. I find this sort of thing bizarre; if I don't like what an institution teaches, I leave and go somewhere else. But Wills seems determined to remain a Catholic, even if the reforms he wants would pretty much end the Catholic church as it has existed for a thousand years.

His latest book, Why Priests? is an attack on the Catholic priesthood:

In his new book he brings his acknowledged erudition to bear on the institution of the priesthood, arguing not only that it has no biblical basis but, more importantly, that, notwithstanding its doubtful heritage, it has played a seminal role in the construction and maintenance of many of the core beliefs of Christianity. Without priesthood, Wills claims, there would be no belief in apostolic succession, or in transubstantiation (the belief that the communion bread and wine actually becomes the body and blood of Christ), or in the sacrificial interpretation of the Mass.

Wills describes the early Christian community as “a priestless movement” that was essentially egalitarian. The only reference of any significance to the priesthood in the New Testament comes in the Letter to the Hebrews, a letter that was traditionally attributed to St Paul but that has long been acknowledged to be of unknown provenance. The writer of the letter describes Jesus as a priest in the line of Melchizedek (a Caananite king referred to in the Book of Genesis) and over the centuries, from this idiosyncratic text, the church began to construct an account of priestly power which implied that the priesthood was established by Jesus and that his apostles could also be understood in priestly terms. This, Wills insists, is quite simply false. It has no historical basis.

It is not news to anyone raised Protestant that there is no scriptural basis for a Christian priesthood; it was one of Martin Luther's central arguments. What Wills really seems to be after, though, is not theology but power. He dislikes the hierarchical authority of the church and wants to empower the laity the run things as they wish, so there would no longer be conflicts between the hierarchy and the members over things like birth control and gay marriage. Wills is also angry, like many Catholics, about the way the church abused its power in covering up sexual abuse. But if Wills wants to belong to a church where the laity is in charge, why doesn't he become a Congregationalist, or a Unitarian? The Catholics have had a hierarchy for about 1800 years, so it seems unlikely that they would change for Gary Wills.

Wills also has a view of the Mass that is very common among non-Catholics:

Historians and theologians have long acknowledged that the official Roman Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation is a construct of the (16th-century) Counter-Reformation. It sought to impose, once and for all, a literal interpretation on an idea that, for most of the history up until then, was understood in symbolic terms. 

Here we get to what has always been for me the great weakness of Christianity, the insistence on exactness in theological matters that really ought to be left vague and mysterious. What does hoc est corpus meum mean? Or I and the Father are one? Better not to ask, but just to wonder. But Christians have always had a weakness for theological warfare, going back to their very early days, and those wars have led to ever greater precision in defining the undefinable, and a steadily lengthening list of beliefs one has to hold to be orthodox.

Reading about Wills' new book I was reminded of another great Catholic skeptic, Montaigne. Montaigne also doubted the truth of almost all the church's doctrines, and whether it was possible to know such things anyway. But unlike Wills, Montaigne was not a reformer. His attitude was that since there was no way to know what sort of church God intended, you might as well just attend the nearest one and worship as your neighbors did. That the Catholic church had existed for a thousand years was, for him, a good reason to leave it alone, since it must have being doing something right to have lasted so long, and that is about all we can expect from human institutions.

Wills' problem is that he wants his church to endorse his politics. When the bishops attack something he holds dear, like providing birth control to poor women, he is enraged at the church and wants it to change. He can't change it, so he writes polemical books. Ok, fine, we all deal with our demons as we can. But doesn't it make him wonder, a little, about the changeability of social mores, and the relationship of those changes to any sort of eternal truth? Suppose, for the sake of argument, that God calls us to be just. How are we to know what is just, without reference to the society in which we live? And if notions of justice start to change, should a religious person immediately adopt the new understanding? If the priesthood is unhistorical, so is the notion that you can't be a just and caring person without endorsing birth control and gay marriage.

One of the values of religion, in my view, is that it calls us to take the very long view. To drag the church into the latest political brouhaha, as both Wills and the bishops are doing, to my mind defeats the whole purpose of having a church. It should, I think, exist beyond whatever is preoccupying you at the moment, and call your attention to things that are not on the Congressional agenda. By all means, if you feel that your belief in justice or mercy calls you to action, take action. But a God of the whole universe has a lot of territory to look after, and it seems to me a stretch to assume he or she has a strong position on the Affordable Care Act.

Today's Castle: Pernštejn, Czech Republic

Pernštejn is one of the Czech Republic's most famous castles. It was the seat of the Lords of Pernštejn, who played an important part in politics of late medieval Bohemia. There was a castle here by 1300, but most of what you see today was built in the 1400s. The projecting bits were added in the early 1500s by an owner who wanted more space and light but without changing the basic structure.

The castle is scenically placed in the mountains of southern Moravia, and it is today surrounded by forests.

The name is probably a Slavic corruption of the German Bärenstein, Bear Rock, which makes me think of Beorn and his Carrock.

The castle has a famous ghost, the White Lady, who is said by some to be a serving girl who was cursed by a priest for her vanity. Hence her habit of appearing in mirrors.

Although the exterior of the castle looks much as it did in 1525, the interior was extensively renovated in the 17th century. Ah, the Baroque. This is the chapel, of which the less said, the better.

But the same period gave us this marvelous library.

The castle has appeared in so many films that it has its own page at the Czech Film Institute -- I think this is Van Helsing.

This is a very fine photograph of the castle by somebody who signs himself SwedishNerd.

Maya Origins and the Persistence of Ritual Spaces

Some archaeologists recently dug down to the very lowest layer of the oldest known Maya city, Ceibal, and what they found is quite interesting:

The 3,000-year-old finds consist of remnants of a square platform and a long platform separated by a plaza, say archaeologist Takeshi Inomata of the University of Arizona in Tucson and his colleagues. Critically, the two structures run from east to west. Renovations to the square platform transformed it into a 6- to 8-meter-high pyramid by around 2,700 years ago. A new version of the long platform was built behind the original at that time. That layout, joining a square or pyramid with a platform in an east-west alignment, formed the centerpiece of ritual areas in many later Maya cities. Ceremonial structures at Ceibal and nearby sites got the cultural ball rolling, the researchers suggest, in a Maya society that eventually featured writing, a complex calendar and massive temples.

So at the bottom this dig they did not find people who were recognizably Mayan but not yet possessed of Mayan-style ceremonial architecture. Instead, they found people who were not Mayan in most ways but already had the basic temple-courtyard complex that would be the ceremonial center of every Maya city to come. Their conclusion was that the ceremonial complex came first, and that Mayan culture grew from the fusion of previously disparate peoples through the adoption of the religion and its rites.

A comparable argument, I suppose, would be to say that the civilization of western Europe formed from the disparate cultures of the early Middle Ages largely through the spread of the Latin church.

The complication here is that there was a Mayan culture of village life that seems to have existed long before the Mayan cities rose and endured long after they were swallowed by the jungle. Our reconstructions of rural Mayan houses in 500 CE look remarkably like photographs from the 1950s. But Mayan civilization, the cities and writing and kingdoms and great art, was something rather different. It had a beginning and an end. What the relationship was between that civilization and the long-lasting routines of village life is a very hard question. But from what we know about that civilization, about the lives of the priests and nobles who lived in the great cities, public ceremonies were key to their style of life. So in this sense, the rituals certainly may come before the high civilization of the classic Maya, and they may have been the key node around which that style of living grew.

Rostra from the Punic Wars

Bronze ram or rostrum, one of ten recently found during a survey of the sea bed off Sicily. The rams way about 125 kg each, or 275 pounds. They bear inscriptions in Latin or Punic, and seem to date to the period of the First Punic War (264-241 BCE).

Ant Professions and Computerized Science

Interesting study by Swiss biologist Danielle Mersch and colleagues on how ant workers changes specializations as they age:

The researchers found that around 40% of the workers were nurses, which almost always stayed with the queen and her brood. Another 30% were foragers, which gathered most of the colony’s food and were found near the entrance to the nest. The rest were cleaners, and these were more likely to visit the colony’s rubbish heaps.

The workers move between jobs as they get older — nurses are generally younger than cleaners, which are younger than foragers. Honeybees go through similar transitions from young nurses to older foragers, but this study provides the clearest evidence yet that ants do the same.

Nevertheless, these career changes were not clear-cut. “You can find very old nurses and very young foragers,” says Mersch.

Even more interesting to me is the way the data was collected:

The team reared six colonies of carpenter ants (Camponotus fellah) in the lab and tagged each worker with paper containing a unique barcode-like symbol. The colonies — each comprising more than 100 ants — lived in flat enclosures filmed by overhead cameras. A computer automatically recognized the tags and recorded each individual’s position twice per second. Over 41 days, the researchers collected more than 2.4 billion readings and documented 9.4 million interactions between the workers.

Got that? 2.4 billion readings in 41 days. As computers get ever faster and scientists learn to use them more cleverly, all sorts of interesting research possibilities open up.

Steinhardt Judaica Collection at Auction

Sothebys is auctioning off the Michael and Judy Steinhardt Judaica Collection, a huge trove of Jewish artifacts from the Renaissance to the present. Above is one of the prize items, an Italian Torah dating to 1457. Estimate $4 to 6 million.

Sundial with Jewish Hours, made in the Netherlands by Jacques de Succa in 1601.

Polish candelabra, nineteenth century.

Venetian Torah crown and finials, 1870.

More on the Black Guerrilla Family Scandal

Baltimore Sun reporter Dan Rodricks tried to talk to the warden of the Baltimore City jail about the arrests of a bunch of inmates and guards on corruption charges. According to the indictment, gang leader Tavon White had five children by four guards, and once boasted, "This is my jail":

Ricky Foxwell is listed as acting administrator of the detention center. So I called over there and asked to speak with him.
 "You can't just call over here like this," said the man who answered the phone.
"Why not?" I asked.
"You can't just call here and expect to speak directly to the warden."
OK, then, maybe I should ask for Tavon White? Is he still in charge?
The man, who sounded a little aggravated, told me to call a number for "public relations." So I called that number and got a voice mail.

English Country House Libraries

I just know that if I could work in one of these I would be a hugely productive author and toss off book after book. How could you not? Above, Chatsworth.

Kingston Lacy House.

Calke Abbey.

Belton House.

Stourhead.

Scotney House.

Dunster Castle.

Most of these pictures come from the National Trust's Treasure Hunt blog.

More Genetic Evidence for Indo-European Migrations

I just love the way the authors of the latest genetic history of Europe talk about their work:

Ancient DNA recovered from a series of skeletons in central Germany up to 7,500 years old has been used to reconstruct the first detailed genetic history of modern Europe. The study, published today in Nature Communications, reveals a dramatic series of events including major migrations from both Western Europe and Eurasia, and signs of an unexplained genetic turnover about 4,000 to 5,000 years ago. The research was performed at the University of Adelaide's Australian Centre for Ancient DNA (ACAD). Researchers used DNA extracted from bone and teeth samples from prehistoric human skeletons to sequence a group of maternal genetic lineages that are now carried by up to 45% of Europeans. . . .

"We can follow over 4,000 years of prehistory, from the earliest farmers through the early Bronze Age to modern times." "The record of this maternally inherited genetic group, called Haplogroup H, shows that the first farmers in Central Europe resulted from a wholesale cultural and genetic input via migration, beginning in Turkey and the Near East where farming originated and arriving in Germany around 7,500 years ago," says joint lead author Dr Paul Brotherton, formerly at ACAD and now at the University of Huddersfield, UK.

ACAD Director Professor Alan Cooper says: "What is intriguing is that the genetic markers of this first pan-European culture, which was clearly very successful, were then suddenly replaced around 4,500 years ago, and we don't know why. Something major happened, and the hunt is now on to find out what that was."

Gosh, I wonder! Could it be the dreaded Indo-European migration, which European scholars are not allowed to mention? Because 5000 years ago is exactly when linguists think those languages should have entered Europe.

Eventually archaeologists and anti-Nazis are going to have to give up their crazed opposition to the notion of Indo-European migrations and admit that the languages didn't wander into the continent by themselves.

News You Can Use

What's the best course of action if you find yourself stuck in a bathroom with a tiger?

Something I wonder about all the time! And now, via National Geographic, tiger "expert" Philip Nyhus has the answer:

1. “Stay calm. The tiger is probably just as surprised as you are.”
2. “You’d want a barrier between you and that tiger. There’s pretty much no good that comes from people and tigers coming together. If you have a door, close the door.”
3. “Distance would be important. Keep your distance. Don’t get close.”
4. “Don’t look like food: Don’t run with your back to the tiger. That may actually set off a tiger. A tiger is hard-wired from more than 10,000 years of evolution to run after small things and grab them by the neck and crush the vertebrae. So if you are facing the tiger, it is probably a good thing. Try and look big. Walk backward slowly.”
5. “Call for help. Make noise.”
6. If things aren’t going well: “Throw something at it to distract it.”

Got that? Of course, if you are actually in a bathroom with a tiger, 2 and 3 are not much help. And having read 4, and gotten that image of crushed neck vertebrae in your mind, 1 is going to be a lot more difficult. So I think a combination of 5 and 6 is probably your best bet.

Brown-Vitter and the Big Banks

It looks for now like the "break up the big banks" caucus has given up on actually breaking up our biggest banks. Instead, Senators Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) and David Vitter (R-Louisiana) have introduced legislation that would raise capital requirements for the "too-big-to-fail" banks to make it less likely that they will fail. Matt Yglesias:

Specifically, they want banks with over $400 billion in assets to finance their investments at least 15 percent with equity (i.e., money raised from retained earnings or selling shares) and at most 85 percent with debt. Smaller banks would face a lesser threshold in the 8-9.5 percent range. This addresses the issue of "too big to fail" in what I think is the best possible way, making it much less likely that large banks will fail. . . .

The bank lobby, dutifully quoted in today's Politico Morning Money, is going to tell you that curbing risky investments by large banks will curtail economic growth. I think that's probably true if you ignore the cost of large bank failures and panics. If you pretend that lightly regulated banks will never fail or that failures of large banks have no social or economic cost, then clearly regulations aimed at curbing risk-taking are going to be pointless and harmful. But does anyone really believe that? I sure don't.

Whistler in East London

From Spitalfields Life:

American-born artist, James Abbott McNeill Whistler, was only twenty-five when he arrived in London from Paris in the summer of 1859 and, rejecting the opportunity of staying with his half-sister in Sloane St, he took up lodgings in Wapping instead. Influenced by Charles Baudelaire to pursue subjects from modern life and seek beauty among the working people of the teeming city, Whistler lived among the longshoremen, dockers, watermen and lightermen who inhabited the riverside, frequenting the pubs where they ate and drank.

Above, The Pool of London. These etchings were made during his first months in the city.

Billingsgate Market.

Black Lion Wharf, Wapping.

Song for the Dead

The evening becomes evening.
No one will shelter you.
And at that time
The otter will come toward you
To make you afraid.
But do not be afraid.
Receive her as your sister.
The otter knows
The order of the rivers,
The lay of the fords,
Will get you across,
Will save you from drowning,
Will carry you to the cold springs
To refresh you
After the shudder of death.

Also before you
The wolf will appear
To make you afraid.
But do not be afraid.
Receive him as your brother.
The wolf knows
The order of the forests,
The grain of the paths,
He will lead you
On the level road
To a king's son,
To paradise
Where life is good,
The hill for playing:
There is your place;
The field of peonies:
There is your heart.

Traditional Romanian song translated by W.S. Merwin

This is My Jail

The infamous Black Guerrilla Family, Maryland's powerful prison gang, is back in the news:

Thirteen female prison guards were charged by the Maryland U.S. Attorney’s Office in an indictment unsealed Tuesday in federal court. They allegedly smuggled into the prison cell phones, prescription pills and other contraband uncovered during a year-long corruption investigation of state detention facilities.

At the center of the investigation was an alleged leader of the gang, Tavon White, who prosecutors said had sexual relationships with at least four of the prison guards, fathering five children since his incarceration in Baltimore in 2009.

In one wiretapped cell phone call in January, White told an acquaintance, “This is my jail. You understand that? I’m dead serious. I make every final call in this jail.”

The indictment, which also charged seven inmates and five co-conspirators, outlined the enduring power of gangs within some Maryland detention facilities as well as a highly organized and profitable smuggling enterprise. While in prison, White bragged about earning $16,000 during a slow month, and he used the money to buy several luxury cars, including a Mercedes Benz and a BMW, prosecutors said.

According to an affidavit unsealed Tuesday, prison gang leaders strategically recruited female prison guards and other inmates to smuggle, deliver and pick up payments throughout the Baltimore City Detention Center and several connected facilities, including the Baltimore Central Booking Intake Center.

I love it that Tavon White bought expensive cars even though he is in prison and can't even see them, let alone drive them. But you have to respect a man who is sent to prison but then has five children by four different guards.

The BGF is a big operation with a lot of Afrocentric ideology and a law code in Swahili, and besides these guards it has members throughout the Baltimore city government.

What Movie Does the Boston Bombing Remind You Of?

The movie we’re in is more “Fight Club” than “The Battle Of Algiers.”

--Noah Millman

For those who don't know the movies, that would mean the violence was more rage for its own sake than coherent politics.

How to Get 100,000 Followers

Post pictures of hot men, of course. These are from My Daguerreotype Boyfriend. Above, Swiss psychologist Herman Rorschach of the Rorschach test in 1910.

Anton Chekhov.

Alexander Turnbull, at 23 in 1891. A wealthy New Zealander best known for his book collection.

Hilary Mantel, Bring Up the Bodies

I think Hilary Mantel is the best writer in the world. Bring Up the Bodies is a brilliant book that hypnotized me from the first paragraph. Reading it is like falling into a river and being swept away, now tumbling through rushing rapids, then drifting through quiet oxbows, but always in the stream's powerful grip until you bob into a beautiful pool at the end, awed and stunned. Mantel's chronicle of Thomas Cromwell, beginning in Wolf Hall and continuing in Bring Up the Bodies, is the best book I have read since One Hundred Years of Solitude. Of all the serious books I have read in the past twenty years it is the most enjoyable; of all the entertaining books I have read, it is the most profound. And while One Hundred Years of Solitude has the best first sentence ever, I think Bring Up the Bodies has the best ending.

Thomas Cromwell was for a time Henry VIII's right hand man. He helped bring about the fall of Catherine of  Aragon and the marriage to Anne Boleyn, and then he engineered Boleyn's fall so Henry could marry Jane Seymour. He also helped bring about Henry's break from Rome and the reformation of the English church. For all of this he has been intensely controversial ever since. For some reason much of the hatred that belongs to Henry devolved instead on his servant Cromwell, who became the classic wicked adviser. He was therefore a bold choice to make the hero of a major novel. But it works brilliantly. Wolf Hall follows Cromwell's rise to greatness, from blacksmith's son to soldier to Cardinal Wolsey's "man of business," and thence into Henry's service when Wolsey fell. Bring Up the Bodies finds Cromwell at the height of his wealth and power, gathering more and more of the English government into his hands, managing the dissolution of smaller and more corrupt monasteries to the profit of the king and his friends, and watching anxiously for Anne Boleyn to bear the son that was the whole point of her marriage to Henry. When Anne fails in this duty and Henry tires of her, a new crisis overtakes the court, and Cromwell must find his way through it.

I gather that Mantel plans a third book, following Cromwell to his fall and execution. I cannot decide if I like this idea or not. I would love more of her Cromwell and her England, but I have come to know her Cromwell better than I have ever known any fictional character, and though he is a grasping thug, his death would still sadden me. His world -- his family, his friends, his allies and enemies, his thoughts and schemes, his his houses and furniture -- has become mine, for many joyful hours.

What We Hate and Fear

When Osama bin Laden was killed, he was replaced at the top of the FBI's Most Wanted list by Eric Toth, accused child pornographer.

Michael Yamashita

American photographer who has done a lot of work for National Geographic. Lots of great pictures on his web site.

Don't Get Fooled Again

The usual terror hawks have been out in force, explaining why the Boston bombing  means we should continual our perpetual War on Terror. Ignore them. Conor Friedersdorf:

John Yoo thinks this case shows the inadequacy of the law-and-order approach. "How is this a victory for traditional law enforcement?" he asks in an item at the American Enterprise Institute's blog. "Two young brothers, lightly armed, killed several innocent civilians, wounded 170, killed an officer and wounded another, and shut down one of America's great cities. We had a whole city trapped in its homes and paramilitary forces in its streets. Law enforcement alone means the nation lies vulnerable to attacks on soft targets and must expend enormous resources to catch the killers afterwards. A pre-emptive strategy based on intelligence and the use of force overseas seeks to prevent such attacks further from our shores. That option should be preferred by everyone compared to what we've seen in Boston these last five days."

What a slippery rhetorician. Obviously, the United States should preempt terrorist attacks using intelligence when possible. Does anyone disagree? Can anyone deny that we already dedicate significant resources to intelligence gathering? Yoo writes as if that wasn't happening prior to Boston. For years now, we've also been preemptively using force overseas. The drone war waged in Pakistan, Yemen, and elsewhere didn't stop the Tsarnaevs. And it is difficult to imagine any preemptive war that could have stopped two legal residents of the U.S. from attacking their city. Exactly which country would Yoo have had us invade to stop those bombs? But never mind. Yoo has an ideological predisposition to preemptive war. So he implies that it would've made us safer in this case, even though that makes no sense given the facts. It should also be noted that the Tsarnaevs did not shut down a major American city. Boston wasn't shut down by their bombs. The day after the marathon, Bostonians kept calm and carried on.

Let us resolve never to be led by fear of terrorists into another stupid war.

Entrapment, Conspiracy, and Trust

Sunday morning I found myself sitting beside the basketball court next to a man who is sure the Boston bombing was a "false flag" operation organized by the FBI. He had been reading Infowars and was up on the details of weird stuff around the bombing. But he kept coming back to the way the FBI has entrapped other would-be terrorists over the years, like the model airplane guy. He referred to these cases, which I agreed were dubious actions, as "false flag operations."

I have been thinking about this. Some people have not taken away from those entrapment cases what they are supposed to think, that the FBI is working hard to protect us. No, what they see is that the FBI is in the habit of contacting potential terrorists and supplying them with weapons for its own purposes. And what are the FBI's purposes? Certainly one of them is to increase its own power and budget and so on. So if they would entrap some poor slob and give him explosives so they could arrest him and stage a big press conference to crow about how great they are, why wouldn't they go farther and let help a guy kill a few people so they can stage an even bigger press conference and get even more attention and support?

I think the people pushing the aggressive Bush-Cheney anti-terrorism line have missed something important here. The more they stress secrecy and toughness and achieving security by any means necessary, the more people will decide that the whole government is lying to them. This lack of trust is a huge problem for any society but especially a democracy. Obama's biggest failure, in my view, has been his obsession with secrecy, hiding from us not just what the government is doing but even the legal justifications for why it can do these things and keep them secret.

I suggested Sunday that if the Boston bombing had really been a government plot, they would have disappeared the bombers rather than leaving them hanging around Boston to be caught by the police. He said, "Well, the government has him now, and everything will come through their filter. Will you believe what they say?" And he kind of had me there, because whether the questioning is done by the Boston PD or the FBI or some psychologist working for the CIA, I will have doubts about the value of anything that comes out of the interrogation.

Think of the conspiracy theorists as the canary in the coal mine of trusting the government. Where they lead, millions more may soon follow.

More Kris Kuksi

Kris Kuksi was one of the first artists I featured here, back in December 2008. Since then he has been very busy. His web site now shows dozens of these "mixed media assemblages," as he calls his mad sculptures. Above is Capricorn Rising, 2012. He makes these in a wide range of sizes; this is one of the larger ones at 72 by 80 inches (1.8 x 2.1m).

Neo-Roman Opera House, 2013. His web site describes his early life like this:

Born March 2, 1973, in Springfield Missouri and growing up in neighboring Kansas, Kris spent his youth in rural seclusion and isolation along with a blue-collar, working mother, two significantly older brothers, and an absent father. Open country, sparse trees, and alcoholic stepfather, all paving the way for an individual saturated in imagination and introversion. His propensity for the unusual has been a constant since childhood, a lifelong fascination that lent itself to his macabre art later in life. The grotesque to him, as it seemed, was beautiful.

Detail of Triumph, 2012. How can he make so many? They look like they would each take a year.

Detail of Andromeda, 2011.

Caravan Assault Apparatus, 2008

And one drawing, Barasingha,2010.

Forget about Antioxidants

When biochemists first started to look in detail at how diseases damage our cells, they found that oxidizing agents, or oxidants, or "free radicals," were at the tip of the spear. These compounds can break apart proteins, scramble DNA, and so on. This led to what we might call the Oxidant Theory of Disease and Aging: what is killing us is oxidizing agents. So, clearly, what we need to stay healthy is antioxidants, compounds that disable oxidants before they can damage us. For the past twenty years people have been swallowing beta-carotene, vitamin E, vitamin C, and selenium in hopes of living forever.

No such luck. No major study has ever found that antioxidants make people healthier or extend life. In fact, the biggest meta-study yet done found that large doses of antioxidants seemed to shorten life. Probably that was because some of the people swallowing lots of selenium did so because they had good reason to worry, like a strong family history of cancer. But certainly nobody has found any good effects from taking these pills.

The biochemistry has been studied in detail using transgenic mice. We have gotten so good at fiddling with mouse genes that we can order up mice with just about any biochemical peculiarity. Mice have been created that overproduce the enzymes that get rid of excessive antioxidants in the body, and that therefore have fewer free radicals floating around. Their cells indeed show less evidence of being damaged by oxidants. Yet they live no longer than other mice. Nobody knows why, but a good guess, based on what we  know about the body's exquisite chemical balance, is that whatever bad effects oxidants have on cells is balanced out by some good effect they have elsewhere.

Kas Thomas summarizes:

The story you've been fed about antioxidants being good for you because they stave off the buildup of toxic free radicals (which supposedly are a major cause of aging and disease)? That's all rubbish.

At the Tadpole Ponds

Ben, Clara and I walked down to the river today to look for tadpoles. We went by the river first, and were surprised to see some in little eddies off the main current. Give how fast the river rises during heavy rains, this seems like a high-risk place to put your babies.

But there they were.  Maybe they washed into the river in Friday night's rain.

Then over to the tadpole ponds, which are on the river floodplain but sheltered from all but the biggest storms. Tadpoles by the thousands. When we brought some of these home a few years ago, they turned into tiny dark gray tree frogs, but I know nothing about tadpoles so I couldn't tell you if all the ones in these ponds are the same species or not.

Sebastião Salgado, In Love with Planet Earth

Sebastião Salgado's new photographs celebrate the beauty of the earth. He says of them,

With this project, I fell in love with my planet. This work is not about landscapes. It is about love. . . . this project restored my soul.

Above, bats in tamarind trees, Madagascar.

Salgado is astonishing. If you ever doubted that photography is an art, at which some people are geniuses, you have only to peruse this slide show. Above, volcanoes in Kamchatka, with a line of clouds separating a 2,600-foot crater from the huge base of Kamen volcano, rising to 15,000 feet.

Caimans in the Panatal wetland, Brazil.

Baobab trees, Madagascar.