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SciTech Chronicles. . . . . . . . .Feb 1, 2025
#Yellowstone #rhyolitic #magma #caldera #magnetotellurics #Alvin #abyssal #hadal #extremophilic #HOV #AI-designed #3D-printed #nanomaterials #nanolattice #geometries #MAV #SUPER #lidar #two-trajectory #mini-brains #HSV-1 #Alzheimer’s #latent #infections
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SciTech Chronicles. . . . . . . . .Feb 1, 2025
#Yellowstone #rhyolitic #magma #caldera #magnetotellurics #Alvin #abyssal #hadal #extremophilic #HOV #AI-designed #3D-printed #nanomaterials #nanolattice #geometries #MAV #SUPER #lidar #two-trajectory #mini-brains #HSV-1 #Alzheimer’s #latent #infections
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SciTech Chronicles. . . . . . . . .Feb 1, 2025
#Yellowstone #rhyolitic #magma #caldera #magnetotellurics #Alvin #abyssal #hadal #extremophilic #HOV #AI-designed #3D-printed #nanomaterials #nanolattice #geometries #MAV #SUPER #lidar #two-trajectory #mini-brains #HSV-1 #Alzheimer’s #latent #infections
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Kenstrosity’s Top Ten(ish) of 2025 By KenstrosityWell, here we are again! One of the longest, most eventful years in recent memory comes to a close. After all of the hardships my family, friends, and I endured at the end of last year, it was difficult to imagine what life would be like. For quite some time, it took everything in us just to continue our day-to-day existences, to reestablish or refresh our routines, and to build our lives back up. But we had tons of support, and we got through it. In fact, I’d say that we came out of everything with a better understanding of who we are, what we want out of life, and a greater drive to live more fully, more intentionally, and without regrets. Personally, I learned the value of asking more questions, making fewer assumptions, and embracing the mess of being human in today’s world. With practice in these areas, in time, I’ll grow into a better person, a better friend, and a better partner to my loved ones.
Musically, I experienced a bit of a shift. I don’t know exactly when this shift happened, but I could feel my desire for unfamiliar or less-traveled territory build. I desired weird, long, or messy records that called to me on a more personal level above all else. I craved pieces that showcased artists who wrote what they wanted (or needed) to, regardless of what others might think or say. Authenticity, creativity, memorability, imperfection, and artistic integrity became my core values when approaching new music this year.
Aside from all of that, the thing I want to do most is offer my deepest heartfelt thanks to everyone who’s stuck by me and been my support system this year. To Alex, a wonderful and gorgeous man who continually shows me more love, patience, and attention than I ever dared to ask for—and who challenges me to grow with every passing day. To Ally, Thea, Kaja, Ashe, Sophie, Chris (both of them), Sean, Malachi, Brandon, Michelle, and Jeff for being the best meatspace friends a guy could ask for, and who also show me more love than I ever dared to ask for. To new meatspace friends (Jhierry, Adrien, Forest, Logan, Nick, Zach, Brett, Blue, Brian, and Shawn) who further enrich my life with each interaction, I am excited to see how our relationships develop! To my therapist, Clint, who has helped pull me from the brink more times than I can count. To my family, Mom, Dad, and Kathy, I don’t know what I would do if they were not here with me. To Lise and Victoria, who have been and continue to be the best supervisors—and all-around cool, brilliant, creative, and inspiring people—I’ve ever known. To AMG Himself, Steel Druhm, Dr. A. N. Grier, and Sentynel for running the greatest blog on the planet and being an invaluable resource for my continued growth as a writer and contributor. To all of my fellow writers and editors, both active and inactive, who make this blog the wonderland it is and whose contributions and company continually uplift and motivate me. To the readers, our Discord members, and the metal community writ large, we wouldn’t be here without you!
Lastly, I’d like to give a shout to all the bands who released awesome records this year that fought valiantly for a spot on my list/HMs, in alphabetical order: 1914, Ancient Death, …and Oceans, Astronoid, Aversed, Blind Equation, Bodybox, Buried Realm, Cave Sermon, Changeling, Death Whore, Gloombound, The Halo Effect, Havukruunu, Helms Deep, Inoculation, Maud the Moth, Mutagenic Host, Nephylim, Pedestal for Leviathan, Proscription, Rothadás, Sarastus, Serenity in Murder, Structure, Tower, Tribunal, Vittra, Yellow Eyes. Despite these gems losing a place on my list proper for any number of reasons, I know I’ll return to them with great relish.
With all of that said, I invite all of you to bear witness to my absolutely unhinged Top Ten(ish) selections for 2025. May the rabble commence!
#ish. Epica // Aspiral – Epica is my favorite symphonic metal band. It’s no secret. They’ve been at the grindstone churning out quality records for almost 25 years with a remarkably stable lineup, and there’s every reason to expect Angry Metal Guy’s Law of Diminishing Recordings™ to catch up with them someday. Today is not that day. Aspiral is easily my favorite record since The Quantum Enigma, full of memorable songs and standout performances. It may be hookier and poppier than anything they’ve put out in the past, but accessibility looks great on Epica.
#10. Citadel // Descension – Every time I thought I knew how I felt about this record, I’d go back to it and discover more reasons to love it. Descension follows the same school of melodic death metal with long-form constructions that bands like An Abstract Illusion practice, but there’s a smoky, gothic twist to it that embodies darkness and light as a merged entity. It’s a delicate balance that Citadel treads with grace and athleticism. That feat is what ultimately elevated Descension to my Top 10 proper.
#9. Depravity // Bestial Possession – Depravity really fucked around with my cutoff for list consideration, coming in clutch one week before Turkey Day. But I am the one who found out. Riffs made to break bones and minds alike, Bestial Possession is lean, mean, and bloodthirsty. And yet, it’s smooth, refined, and streamlined. This is the work of a band that understands exactly what they want to write, and knows how to execute that vision with devastating precision. It’s death metal as we know and love it, weaponized for mass destruction.
#8. In Mourning // The Immortal –The Immortal surprised me. I fully expected it to be good. After all, In Mourning haven’t released a bad album to date. But against all odds, they managed to capture lightning in a bottle here, with songs that are impossible to resist and even harder to forget. It represents everything I love about the sadboi side of melodic death without skimping on hooks or on teeth. The Immortal might just be the pinnacle of In Mourning’s career. Who would’ve expected that after 25 years?
#7. An Abstract Illusion // The Sleeping City – In recent years, I often found myself gravitating towards concise, to-the-point records. I wanted hooks. I wanted brevity. I wanted unrelenting intensity. In 2025, that shifted. The long form became my home away from home. Epic yarns and gentle movements brought comfort and warmth to my listening schedule. With The Sleeping City, An Abstract Illusion managed to capture both the intensity I craved before and the sweeping arcs that I look for now. That it is beautiful without compromising either of those traits is nothing short of awe-inspiring. And so, here we are.
#6. Igorrr // Amen – When I look at my Top 10ish, I notice two things. Firstly, a fair number of these selections are, in some shape or form, weird or niche. Secondly, the gaps that separate one album from the other at this point are paper-thin, aside from my AotY. For French wild cards, Igorrr, accessibility ultimately put Amen here with my faves of 2025. Whimsically weird, savagely smart, and wholly unpredictable, Igorrr achieved a buttery smoothness and an unflinching confidence with these 12 absolute bangers that they’ve never shown before. A high-water mark for an act with an established reputation for excellence.
#5. Tómarúm // Beyond Obsidian Euphoria – My relationship with Beyond Obsidian Euphoria followed much the same trajectory as my relationship with its predecessor, Ash in Realms of Stone Icons. I felt confident in my score, then I started doubting its accuracy, then I’d revisit the record and feel vindicated in my original evaluation—rinse and repeat. It’s a vicious cycle, but at the end of the day, Beyond Obsidian Euphoria was always destined for my Top 5. Its epic, sprawling constructs demand so many of my spoons; emotionally, physically, and spiritually. But it gives just as many back, plus just enough extra to compel me to spin it again. It’s one helluva journey, but that’s what makes it excellent!
#4. Qrixkuor // The Womb of the World – In the world of symphonic death metal, Qrixkuor is singular. Nobody else sounds like them, and I’m convinced nobody else could. Dramatic, violent, and grotesque, but at the same time possessing a disturbing beauty, The Womb of the World sets a new standard for lushly orchestrated death metal. It’s not for the faint of heart, nor for those looking for a quick fix. But once it’s infected your mind, you belong to it. An album to be feared as much as it is to be adored.
#3. Cam Girl // Flesh & Chrome – Deciding where to slot this was a difficult process for me. The people-pleaser that lives in my brain—who is jacked, devastatingly handsome, and incredibly charismatic—tried to move Cam Girl’s sophomore LP down a couple of notches, purely to protect me from those who would (and likely will) tell me this kind of record is undeserving of such high placement here. But the reality is I don’t fucking want to. Flesh & Chrome is a staggering improvement on Cam Girl’s already winning formula, with an invincible selection of super-sticky and subversive tunes that haven’t left my brain since the first half of 2025. It’s among the most fun records I’ve had the pleasure of covering on this site. Above all, Flesh & Chrome earned its rightful place in my Top 3. So it is, so it shall be.
#2. ByoNoiseGenerator // Subnormal Dives – This was not on my bingo card for 2025. I used to despise everything about ByoNoiseGenerator’s brand of brutal jazzgrind. After spinning Subnormal Dives roughly 10^230049 times in the span of a few short months, with a mind-broken grin plastered permanently on my face, something snapped. It wasn’t a gradual affinity borne of a studious and painstaking process. It was a total, implosive disintegration of everything I held true. The result? BYONG is now one of my favorite bands, and I’ve come to love their previous work, too. Not many albums wield that much power. Subnormal Dives does.
#1. Flummox // Southern Progress – This is easily my biggest surprise of 2025. I never heard of Flummox before seeing this cover art on my Bandcamp feed, and I was thoroughly bamboozled by my first spin. The mix was bizarre, the songwriting highly unorthodox compared to anything I’ve heard this side of Devin Townsend, and Flummox’s refusal to settle into any one style was confounding. Yet, I simply could not stop spinning it. All year long, Southern Progress was my go-to, even on days when I just felt so numb that I didn’t want to listen to anything at all. With that commitment came understanding. Southern Progress is, simply put, a fully realized and inspired work of art, complete with relevant societal commentary. Steeped in messaging that spotlights systematic and social prejudices that plague the queer, and particularly the trans/nonbinary/gender-fluid, community (especially in the American South)—and deftly integrating branched subplots that exhibit the wide-reaching complications that neurodivergence, late-stage capitalism, and religion-based upbringings contribute to that experience—Flummox’s fifth LP greatly affected me on a personal level. More so than any other record released this year, Southern Progress feels important, not just to me, and not just to Flummox. I strongly believe everyone could learn something from this bizarre, wild, and untamable barnstormer and have a blast doing it. For these reasons, and so much more, I gratefully award Southern Progress my 2025 Album o’ the Year. Thank you, Flummox, for this wonderful gift!
Honorable Mentions
- Barren Path // Grieving – Deathgrind never sounded this good, or felt this vicious.
- Bianca // Bianca – The beauty and the beast returns, reimagined and rekindled.
- Calva Louise // Edge of the Abyss – Fiercely creative and vividly memorable, this is what happens when artists use neurodivergence and cultural diversity as assets.
- Dagdrøm // Schauder – Passionate melodic black metal for those who are looking for something a bit outside convention.
- Dawn of Ouroboros // Bioluminescence – The best vocal performance of the year meets some of the coolest progressive death songwriting I’ve heard in a minute.
- Imperial Triumphant // Goldstar – The gritty, twisted, sprawling city-dweller with a shady story to tell, and yet it glitters like the purest gold.
- Messa // The Spin – Emotive, sultry, and nuanced doom, compelling enough to seduce even the coldest heart.
- Psychonaut // World Maker – Thoughtful and deeply personal, but still crushingly heavy, post-metal from one of the best acts in the scene.
Songs o’ the Year
- Cam Girl – “Flesh & Chrome” – Simplicity and a curated collection of razor-sharp hooks will win my heart faster than anything else, and few songs this year upheld that virtue better than “Flesh & Chrome.” I haven’t been able to stop singing it to myself literally every single day since I first got my hands on this promo half a year ago, and yet the serotonin production it generates in my burned-out brain almost overwhelms me still. From the white-hot brightness of its lead melodies to the soaring brass of its addictive1 chorus and tight writing, “Flesh & Chrome” just makes me happy. Simple as.
- Citadel – “Sorrow of the Thousandth Death” – I didn’t expect to include this song on my list, but something happened once I started revisiting Descension more often. I found myself completely blown back by the artistry, the expressiveness, and the fluidity exhibited by Citadel’s epic “Sorrow of the Thousandth Death.” This unexpected emotional response completely shifted my perspective on what I was looking for in my Song o’ the Year candidates. Once I contemplated those requirements more deeply, it became clear in short order that “Sorrow of the Thousandth Death” was worthy and then some. Incredible.
- In Mourning – “As Long as the Twilight Stays” – While songs like “Flesh & Chrome” make me happy beyond all reason, others like “As Long as the Twilight Stays” break my bleeding heart. Every time the lyrics “Breathe and open your eyes / When darkness falls, a new dawn will rise / Reveal the secrets you keep / There is still hope as long as twilight stays” pierce through my eardrums, something deep from within my soul surges. That pull, strong enough to rip my heart from its bony cage, and further strengthened by weeping, layered tremolo harmonies, melts me. This is power; it is magic. I am helpless to resist.
- Flummox – “Long Pork” – Southern Progress is swimming in great songs, all of which make a strong claim for inclusion here. Ultimately, “Long Pork” won the blue ribbon for its unhinged songwriting, bizarre vocal acrobatics, harrowing instrumentation, and metamorphic storytelling. The cutting and clever lyrics may seem whimsical at first blush, but the critique they level at humanity’s gross exploitation, not only for the vast overproduction and dysfunctional distribution of food—and the systematic abuse of animals to meet that unsustainable demand—but also to the gluttony of late-stage capitalism and the chasmic wealth divide it perpetuates, sends chills through my nervous system. Sensational!
- Messa – “The Dress” – Of all the great songs 2025 had to offer, “The Dress” was the first one I felt earned a nod here. It is classy beyond all comprehension, sultry and sophisticated without being busy or especially complex. Moreover, it captivates my attention completely. An unqualified success of songwriting prowess, excellence in execution and performance, and spirited delivery, “The Dress” flows between melodies, moods, and modes as mana from otherworldly realms. I would not be surprised if, ten years from now, I still feel its magic as strongly as I do today, immune to the eroding force of time.
Non-Metal Album o’ the Year:
- Lady Gaga // Mayhem – I am absolutely obsessed with this album. I’ve been a fan of Lady Gaga for a long time, but never before did I feel so wholly ensnared by one of her records. This absolute triumph of modern pop explodes with energy, killer hooks, and an unfuckwithable vocal display that makes not singing along to each and every track entirely impossible. Mainstream though it is, Mayhem is a force, and I’ll be listening to it with glee for years to come.
Shakes Fist at Cloud Album of 2025
- Pedestal for Leviathan // Enter: Vampyric Manifestation – There will never be a day when I don’t rue how late I encountered this record, and how lame it felt to realize it had been self-released months before I picked up a December promo for it. It is listworthy, and that I treated it as if it missed my yearly cutoff because of a simple lack of awareness makes me want to shake my fists at the clouds!
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:earth:
Dear Ms. Johnson,
I am reaching out to raise significant concerns about the Iroquois Gas Transmission Enhancement by Compression (ExC) project, particularly its role in locking in long-term reliance on methane gas infrastructure.
Methane is a potent greenhouse gas with far-reaching implications for our climate and public health. Expanding infrastructure to facilitate its continued use creates an enduring dependency that is fundamentally at odds with the urgent need to transition to renewable energy sources. This is not merely a question of emissions today; it is about the decades-long legacy of methane reliance that projects like this perpetuate.
With policies increasingly favoring decarbonization, how does Iroquois reconcile this project with the clear scientific consensus that methane infrastructure poses an unacceptable risk to meeting climate targets? Beyond the immediate operational emissions, the project risks delaying investments in truly sustainable energy solutions, effectively entrenching an outdated energy model.
Communities and future generations deserve more than incremental change; they deserve transformative leadership that prioritizes a rapid shift away from fossil fuels altogether. I urge Iroquois to reconsider its trajectory and take bold steps toward aligning its operations with a net-zero future.
I look forward to hearing how Iroquois plans to address these critical concerns, not just for today, but for the long-term health of our planet and its people.
Sincerely,
Jonathan
#ClimateChange #ClimateAction #connecticut #Brookfield #1900Feet #XR #XRSWCT #ExtinctionRebellion #activism #transparency #methane #StopLNG #naturalgas #methanegas
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"Laser Ranging Makes GPS Satellites More Accurate" by @hackaday - Laser retroreflector on newest #GPS satellite is the first of what will be on all upcoming GPS satellites. Similar reflectors left on the Moon by Apollo astronauts allow scientists to measure distance to the Moon to the millimeter. Same use for GPS satellites will reduce error in their estimated trajectory, and improve #positioning, #navigation & #timing #PNT derived from them. https://hackaday.com/2026/03/29/laser-ranging-makes-gps-satellites-more-accurate/ #GNSS #satellite #space
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"Laser Ranging Makes GPS Satellites More Accurate" by @hackaday - Laser retroreflector on newest #GPS satellite is the first of what will be on all upcoming GPS satellites. Similar reflectors left on the Moon by Apollo astronauts allow scientists to measure distance to the Moon to the millimeter. Same use for GPS satellites will reduce error in their estimated trajectory, and improve #positioning, #navigation & #timing #PNT derived from them. https://hackaday.com/2026/03/29/laser-ranging-makes-gps-satellites-more-accurate/ #GNSS #satellite #space
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"Laser Ranging Makes GPS Satellites More Accurate" by @hackaday - Laser retroreflector on newest #GPS satellite is the first of what will be on all upcoming GPS satellites. Similar reflectors left on the Moon by Apollo astronauts allow scientists to measure distance to the Moon to the millimeter. Same use for GPS satellites will reduce error in their estimated trajectory, and improve #positioning, #navigation & #timing #PNT derived from them. https://hackaday.com/2026/03/29/laser-ranging-makes-gps-satellites-more-accurate/ #GNSS #satellite #space
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"Laser Ranging Makes GPS Satellites More Accurate" by @hackaday - Laser retroreflector on newest #GPS satellite is the first of what will be on all upcoming GPS satellites. Similar reflectors left on the Moon by Apollo astronauts allow scientists to measure distance to the Moon to the millimeter. Same use for GPS satellites will reduce error in their estimated trajectory, and improve #positioning, #navigation & #timing #PNT derived from them. https://hackaday.com/2026/03/29/laser-ranging-makes-gps-satellites-more-accurate/ #GNSS #satellite #space
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"Laser Ranging Makes GPS Satellites More Accurate" by @hackaday - Laser retroreflector on newest #GPS satellite is the first of what will be on all upcoming GPS satellites. Similar reflectors left on the Moon by Apollo astronauts allow scientists to measure distance to the Moon to the millimeter. Same use for GPS satellites will reduce error in their estimated trajectory, and improve #positioning, #navigation & #timing #PNT derived from them. https://hackaday.com/2026/03/29/laser-ranging-makes-gps-satellites-more-accurate/ #GNSS #satellite #space
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"Student placed his eye in the trajectory of a projectile. Lawyer hints his showing up might be responsible"
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/09/us/usc-student-loses-eye-no-kings-protest.htmlHere is an example of the method of Fear-Uncertainty-and-Doubt:
#responsibility #safety #NYT #professionalism #institutionsDeceive #postFactual #bias #manipulation #news #media #doubt #FUD #press #reporting #journalism #protesting #protests #NoKings
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Oxford Scholars Blame Biomedical Research Hegemony for Fibromyalgia “Chronicity Rhetoric”
By David Tuller, DrPH
Social Science & Medicine (SSM) is a prominent interdisciplinary journal that publishes social science research related to health. A recently published SSM paper is called “Chronicity rhetoric in health and welfare systems inhibits patient recovery: a qualitative, ethnographic study of fibromyalgia care.” Part of a larger, multi-partner, Oxford-based project called Patient-centred Care for Fibromyalgia: New pathway Design, or PACFiND, the new paper is based on 59 interviews with health care providers as well as field notes from observation of service provision. The providers interviewed are from a range of specialties, but they share one characteristic: They offer services and interventions categorized as “biopsychosocial.”
In this context, “biopsychosocial” includes not just standard psycho-behavioral treatments like cognitive behavior therapy (CBT) and graded exercise therapy (GET)—the treatments recommended in the fraudulent PACE trial for ME/CFS–but also so-called “mind-body” programs. These approaches tend to toss together, in various combinations, elements of meditation, relaxation exercises, positive affirmations, neurolinguistics programming, cognitive behavior therapy, health coaching, and other modalities. Well-known examples include programs like the Lightning Process, the Gupta Program, Dynamic Neural Retraining System, and the Chrysalis Effect, the latter mentioned specifically in the paper.
The three main authors are from Oxford University; the corresponding author is a health services researcher and the senior author is a medical sociologist. (Perhaps they are colleagues of Professor Michael Sharpe, lead PACE investigator and Oxford’s self-styled “harassment” victim?) They reveal their view of the insidious nature of “chronicity rhetoric” from the start. “We focus on representations of fibromyalgia as a ‘chronic condition,’ which infiltrate and disrupt healing work,” the paper declares.
Basically, the argument goes something like this: Any approach to fibromyalgia focused on biopsychosocial “healing” is good. The rigid evidentiary demands of biomedical research’s “hegemonic position” disadvantage biopsychosocial healers, who are unfairly barred from making claims about “recovery” based solely on anecdotal accounts. Advocacy organizations are grifters who hype the “chronicity rhetoric” for fundraising purposes. The welfare benefits system further reinforces the need for fibromyalgia to be constructed as “chronic.” And so on.
This is the premise grounding the paper:
“New service models for people with fibromyalgia recognise that people are complex and integrated body-minds that are responsive to, and interactive with, their social/material environments. In other words, “everyone’s disease is the product of the individual history of exposures [including a wide range of psychosocial stressors], superimposed on their underlying genetic susceptibilities”. Psychosocial pressures get “under the skin” and need addressing to mitigate symptoms. Neurobiological concepts of Central Sensitisation and Central Sensitivity Syndrome (CSS) are important to such models, providing mechanistic explanations of fibromyalgia, and opportunities for treatments that involve desensitising (or “dampening down”) a person’s nervous system.”
Note the presumption here that any new service model presenting itself as holistic or involving “body-minds” should essentially be accepted as valid and legitimate. The same goes for the “neurobiological concepts” that offer “mechanistic explanations” and “opportunities for treatment.” The paper includes no discussion of actual evidence for these theoretical constructs and the interventions based on them beyond the pronouncements and opinions of the interviewees.
Qualitative research fulfills important functions, but being able to reach definitive conclusions about the effectiveness of interventions is not among them. So it seems rash for the authors to take at face value that whatever someone might frame as biopsychosocial “healing work” is in fact “healing work.” They have no credible grounds for making broad judgments about whether “healing work” is taking place.
All they can do repeat is anecdotal accounts. While interesting and informative, such accounts do not constitute proof of effectiveness. And in this paper, the anecdotal accounts are from biopsychosocial healers, who have an obvious interest in framing their work as successful.
Which brings us to the Chrysalis Effect.
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Advertising regulators ban Chrysalis Effect “recovery” claims
In the paper, the authors write:
“A major obstacle faced by practitioners working in biopsychosocial services is that they lack established, ‘evidence-based’ ways of demonstrating that they work (as established through gold standard clinical trials)…We illustrate how the hegemonic position of EBM [evidence-based medicine] within Biomedical Research helps to construct fibromyalgia as a chronic condition with detrimental consequences for new service development.”
From this viewpoint, the issue is not that fibromyalgia is—in reality–a chronic condition. The issue is that this perception of fibromyalgia is, I guess, a sort of illusion, even a deception, since the disease is only “constructed” as a chronic condition by larger outside forces. (Reminds me of the famous line spoken by the voluptuously illustrated cartoon character Jessica Rabbit, the wife of the eponymous character in the 1988 comedy “Who Framed Roger Rabbit”: “I’m not bad, I’m just drawn that way.”)
The paper’s example involves the Chrysalis Effect, a mind-body intervention with a history of making extravagant boasts about “recovery” from complex illnesses like fibromyalgia and ME/CFS. As a result, the UK ME Association complained to the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA), an independent regulatory body. In a 2023 decision, the ASA barred the Chrysalis Effect and its practitioners from repeating such statements.
The paper’s stance is that clinical trials are not appropriate for assessing the benefits of biopsychosocial treatments. And the authors appear to blame the lack of documented benefit in such trials on deficiencies in the patients, not the interventions. As they write:
“The ASA’s determination (that there was not enough trial evidence to support claims about recovery) is hooked into a dominant biomedical infrastructure, in which clinical trial evidence is the gold standard. Within these governing systems, biopsychosocial (and often locally-developed) services find it difficult to demonstrate benefit (i.e., that healing work works)…The benefits of supporting this kind of work through individualised and therapeutic coaching is difficult to prove. Clinical trials cannot account for, or control for, such diverse social challenges or the individual neurobiology that may be involved in addressing them. In practice, trials of biopsychosocial models of care may not demonstrate improved outcomes, not because the interventions (care practices) involved are unfounded (non-evidence-based), but because patients do not have the social or psychological resources to maximise benefit from them.”
I guess one could refer to the standard approach to evidence as biomedical hegemony. From my perspective, it’s just a matter of requesting some sort of convincing data to support assertions of “recovery” rather than hyping anything labeled as “biopsychosocial.”
The paper also includes a slam at advocacy organizations, including the ME Association, for adhering to the biomedical paradigm and its accompanying “chronicity rhetoric.” This position is framed as a big grift:
“In order to secure donations, patient charities and affiliated researchers emphasise that conditions such as fibromyalgia have no cure. Donations fund (almost exclusively) pharmaceutical research so that ‘one day we hope we might discover a diagnostic marker and effective treatments’ (The ME Association, 2024). It therefore makes sense for such organisations to assert that ‘getting better’ or ‘recovering’ from fibromyalgia is rare, and that chronicity is the more probable trajectory.”
Contrast that, I guess, with an approach designed to convince desperately ill people to pursue anything that promotes “recovery” and is called “holistic” or said to relate to “body-minds.” The ME Association issued a robust response to these accusations.
The paper makes similar points about the structures involved with the provision of welfare benefits. I have more sympathy for some of the concerns raised in this section. It is not a new complaint that disability programs can be so inflexible in their demands and requirements that they undermine genuine efforts by patients to return to work. In the US, for example, such restrictions have long been a problem for people with HIV/AIDS and other chronic illnesses on long-term disability.
So yes, there is a larger question about the best way to organize these systems. But that is very different from blaming the provision of benefits for generating purportedly harmful “chronicity rhetoric.”
Putting that aside, however, the major flaw in the paper’s entire argument is this–the true source of any “chronicity rhetoric” involving fibromyalgia is reality, not the coercive demands of biomedical research and the welfare benefits system. The investigators themselves note that “chronicity does accurately reflect the findings of published epidemiological research and the experience of many people with the condition.” Ok, then.
But that view, they continue, “is also challenged by practitioners and patients attempting to harness (new) understandings of neurobiology, with emancipatory goals of improvement and/or recovery…Practitioners and patients argue from practical experience that improvement and/or recovery are possible with the right support and individual resources to make changes.”
That might be. And who could possibly be opposed to “emancipatory goals of improvement and/or recovery”? But—luckily for the safety and well-being of the general public—such claims still generally require more convincing proof than glowing testimonials about “healing” on websites and in qualitative studies.
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Pink Flamingos Reveal Their Secret To Aging
"Migration has critical impacts on life trajectories by shaping mortality and reproductive outcomes. These findings are important for our knowledge on the biology of aging."
#Aging #migration #ornithology #birds #flamingo #biology #Senescence #FieldStudy https://grrlscientist.medium.com/pink-flamingos-reveal-their-secret-to-aging-758ff6fed667
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Pink Flamingos Reveal Their Secret To Aging
"Migration has critical impacts on life trajectories by shaping mortality and reproductive outcomes. These findings are important for our knowledge on the biology of aging."
#Aging #migration #ornithology #birds #flamingo #biology #Senescence #FieldStudy https://grrlscientist.medium.com/pink-flamingos-reveal-their-secret-to-aging-758ff6fed667
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Pink Flamingos Reveal Their Secret To Aging
"Migration has critical impacts on life trajectories by shaping mortality and reproductive outcomes. These findings are important for our knowledge on the biology of aging."
#Aging #migration #ornithology #birds #flamingo #biology #Senescence #FieldStudy https://grrlscientist.medium.com/pink-flamingos-reveal-their-secret-to-aging-758ff6fed667
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Seeing Around Corners
The phrase “seeing around corners” gets tossed around boardrooms and strategy meetings as though it were a compliment, a kind of secular beatification for the executive or thinker who got there first. But the phrase deserves closer scrutiny, because what it actually describes is a discipline, and one that most people refuse to practice because the conclusions it produces are uncomfortable.
The spatial metaphor is simple enough. Walking down a city street, you cannot see what waits beyond the next corner. A person who could would hold an obvious tactical advantage, whether the thing around the bend is an opportunity or a threat. When we apply that metaphor to business, politics, or creative life, we are talking about pattern recognition operating at a high level: the ability to read weak signals in the present and extrapolate them into likely futures before those futures become obvious to everyone else.
Andy Grove understood this better than most. When he recognized in the mid-1980s that Intel’s commodity memory chip business was dying, the financial data had not yet made the case undeniable. Competitors in Japan were undercutting prices, margins were thinning, and the trajectory pointed toward irrelevance. Grove asked his colleague Gordon Moore a question that has since become famous in business history: “If we got kicked out and the board brought in a new CEO, what would he do?” The answer was clear. He would get out of memory chips. So Grove and Moore did exactly that, pivoting Intel toward microprocessors and building the foundation for decades of dominance. Grove did not predict the future. He read the present more honestly than his peers were willing to, and then followed the logic to its conclusion.
That distinction matters. Seeing around corners is a discipline of interpretation, not a form of prophecy. Prophecy implies access to information no one else possesses. What Grove had was the same data available to every other semiconductor executive in the industry. The difference was his willingness to accept what the data meant rather than constructing reasons to ignore it. Most strategic failures originate in interpretation, or more precisely, in nerve. The signals were there. The pattern was legible. Someone chose not to read it.
In publishing, the same principle applies with brutal regularity. The collapse of the traditional bookstore model did not arrive without warning. Independent booksellers had been losing ground to chains for years, and the chains were losing ground to online retail long before Borders filed for bankruptcy in 2011. The warning signs were visible a decade earlier to anyone who cared to look: declining foot traffic, rising real estate costs, a consumer base increasingly habituated to the convenience of clicking rather than browsing. Publishers who saw around that particular corner had time to build direct relationships with readers, to invest in digital infrastructure, to rethink distribution. Those who waited for the crisis to arrive in full view found themselves scrambling with no lead time and fewer options.
Lead time is the currency that seeing around corners produces. The insight itself has limited value if it does not convert into action, and action requires time. Recognizing a collapsing market six months before it collapses gives you six months to prepare. Recognizing it three years out gives you three years to build alternatives, test them, and refine them before the pressure arrives. The earlier the recognition, the wider the range of possible responses. Wait too long and the range narrows to one: react.
This is why the phrase carries an implicit warning whenever someone says it is “important” to see around corners. The word “important” is doing real work in that sentence. It signals that reactive thinking is insufficient for the situation at hand, that the stakes are high enough to demand anticipation rather than response. A doctor who sees around corners catches the early indicators of a disease before it presents with symptoms. A playwright who sees around corners recognizes that audience expectations are shifting before the box office receipts confirm it. In each case, the advantage belongs to the person who treats the present as evidence rather than as a settled condition.
The discipline has a cost, though. Seeing around corners often means arriving at conclusions that no one else shares, and defending those conclusions against people who are emotionally or financially invested in the current arrangement. It also means accepting the risk that your reading of the signals is wrong, that you are abandoning a viable position based on a pattern that never materializes. Grove faced enormous internal resistance when he proposed abandoning memory chips, a product line that had defined Intel since its founding. The resistance was not irrational. People had built careers around that business. Factories were tooled for it. Customers expected it. Telling an organization that the thing it does best is the thing it needs to stop doing requires a tolerance for isolation that most people do not possess, and a willingness to own the consequences if the foresight proves mistaken.
The real question, then, is whether you are willing to act on what you see. Everyone grants that seeing around corners is a useful skill. Fewer people reckon with the fact that the history of failed enterprises is full of leaders who recognized a coming disruption, documented it in internal memos, discussed it in private meetings, and then did nothing because the present was still comfortable enough to justify inaction. Seeing is the first step. Acting on what you see, before the evidence is so overwhelming that everyone else sees it too, is the step that separates foresight from regret.
#business #corners #fear #findingOut #garden #invention #meaning #meme #philosophy #safety #tech #urban #waiting -
Cry Later: The Culture That Taught You Not to Grieve
The commands arrive early. They arrive in childhood, in the voices of parents and teachers and coaches and older relatives, and they are delivered with the same authority as instructions about traffic and hot stoves. Cry later. Hold it in. Do not show your emotions. Do not embarrass us. Be strong. Be brave. Be a man. There will be time for that later. Not here. Not now. Not in front of people.
These are grief suppressors. They are issued so routinely and across so many contexts that they have acquired the appearance of common sense. They are not common sense. They are commands to override a biological response that the body is producing for a reason. When a child is told not to cry at a funeral, the child is being told to suppress a neurochemical cascade that is already in progress. The cortisol is elevated, the amygdala has fired, and the body is doing what millions of years of evolution designed it to do when it registers the absence of an attachment figure. The command does not eliminate the response. It drives it underground, where it persists in forms the child cannot name and the adults will not recognize as grief when it resurfaces months or years later as insomnia, stomach pain, an inability to concentrate, a persistent anxiety with no identifiable source.
I have written a book about this. It is called “Go to Every Funeral: How Grief Defines the Living,” and it is published by David Boles Books Writing and Publishing, and the title comes from something I overheard in a cafe in Newark, New Jersey, about twenty-five years ago. A mother told her college-age daughter to go to every funeral, even if she did not want to, even if she did not know the dead person, because funerals are for the living and absence is remembered. I carried those six words for a quarter of a century, through the deaths of my grandmother, my grandfather, my mother, my mentor, two friends, and a cat who sat on my desk for fifteen years, and the book is the result of trying to understand why those words were true and why nobody else had ever said them to me.
The book covers a lot of ground: the neuroscience of grief, the mourning practices of elephants and crows, the history of funerals from the domestic parlor to the corporate funeral home, the economics of death as a market, the global range of mourning from the Torajan highlands to the jazz funerals of New Orleans. But the section I want to talk about here is Part Five, which is about permission. Specifically, about who gets to grieve and who gets told to stop.
The suppression commands are not distributed equally. They fall with particular weight on men, on children, on employees, and on anyone whose grief is judged to be inconvenient by the people around them. Boys are told not to cry with a frequency and an intensity that girls are not, and the instruction begins early enough that by adolescence many boys have internalized it so completely that they experience the suppression as personality rather than training. They do not cry because they are “not the kind of person who cries.” The self-description obscures the years of conditioning that produced it.
The consequences are visible in the data. Men die by suicide at rates roughly four times higher than women in the United States. They are less likely to seek mental health treatment, more likely to self-medicate with alcohol, more likely to convert emotional distress into physical aggression. These are not biological inevitabilities. They are the downstream effects of a culture that tells half its population to suppress the emotional responses the other half is permitted to express. The man who cannot cry at his father’s funeral because he was told, at age six, that men do not cry is not displaying strength. He is displaying the result of a training program that disconnected him from his own grief response, and the disconnection does not eliminate the grief. It makes the grief dangerous, because grief that cannot be expressed as grief will be expressed as something else.
The workplace runs on the same logic. The standard bereavement leave in the United States is three days for the death of an immediate family member. Three days. The body has not even begun to metabolize the cortisol surge in three days. The cognitive map has not begun to update. The neurological process of revising the brain’s internal model of the world, recognizing at the cellular level that the dead person is absent from every context in which they were expected, has barely started. And the employer expects you back at your desk, functioning, participating in meetings about quarterly targets while the fact that your mother is dead has not yet reached the parts of your brain that govern concentration.
Some companies offer five days. Some offer none. Some distinguish between the death of a spouse and the death of a parent and the death of a sibling, granting fewer days as the relationship moves outward from the nuclear center, as though the grief for a brother can be mathematically demonstrated to require less processing time than the grief for a child. The taxonomy of bereavement leave is a document written by human resources departments, and it tells the employee, in the plainest possible terms, how long their grief is permitted to inconvenience the organization.
Then there is the clinical manual. In 2022, prolonged grief disorder was added to the DSM-5-TR, giving clinicians a formal diagnostic category for grief that persists at debilitating intensity beyond twelve months. The addition was controversial among grief researchers, and the controversy is worth understanding, because it reveals how the medical establishment processes the same impulse that drives the workplace policy and the childhood command: the impulse to draw a line, to say that grief is acceptable on this side and pathological on the other, and to give the line the authority of science.
The proponents of the diagnosis argued that a subset of bereaved people, estimated at roughly ten percent, experience grief that does not follow the typical trajectory. The pain does not diminish over time. Functioning does not return. The preoccupation with the dead person remains so intense that it dominates waking life months and years after the death. These people need clinical help, and the diagnosis gives clinicians a framework for providing it, including the possibility of insurance reimbursement for treatment.
The opponents argued that pathologizing grief at twelve months imposes an arbitrary timeline on a process that has no natural expiration date. The twelve-month threshold was chosen because the clinical data showed it as a statistically significant inflection point, the point at which the probability of spontaneous recovery drops sharply. But statistical inflection points are not the same as biological boundaries. The griever at month thirteen is not clinically different from the griever at month eleven. The line exists because the diagnostic system requires lines, and the existence of the line communicates something to the broader culture: that grief beyond a year is officially a mental illness. The employer who was already impatient at three days now has clinical validation for the suspicion that the employee who is still struggling at fourteen months has something wrong with them.
The book argues that this entire apparatus, the childhood commands, the workplace policies, the diagnostic thresholds, is part of a single cultural project: the management of grief for the convenience of everyone except the griever. The child is told to stop because the adults are uncomfortable. The employee is expected back at the desk because the organization needs the labor. The patient receives a diagnosis because the clinical system requires categories. None of these interventions exists primarily to serve the person who is grieving. They exist to contain the grief, to keep it within boundaries that allow the surrounding systems to continue operating without interruption.
Meanwhile, the culture has produced a substitute for communal grief that is worse than the absence of communal grief. Social media has made performative mourning the default public response to death. When a public figure dies, the speed with which users post their condolences has become a measure of social attentiveness. The posts follow a formula: a photograph of the deceased, a statement of shock, a brief personal connection however thin, and a closing declaration of love and loss. The formula is so consistent it has been parodied, and the parodies have not slowed it down, because the function of the post is to perform belonging, to demonstrate that you are the kind of person who feels things, who notices when important people die, who participates in the rituals of the digital public square.
Some of the grief is sincere. The rest is performance, and the performance crowds out the reality. When the feeds are flooded with grief posts after a celebrity death, the person who is actually devastated, the person who had a real connection to the deceased and is not performing but drowning, finds their grief indistinguishable from the display. Their signal disappears into the noise. The communal mourning that is supposed to support the bereaved instead competes with them, reducing a specific and irreplaceable loss to one post among thousands, all using the same photographs, the same phrases, the same hashtags.
This is the inversion of what the mother in the Newark cafe was describing. She said you go to the funeral. You show up. You put your name in the book. You sit in the pew. You bring food to the house afterward. The obligation is physical: you move your body to the place where the grief is, and your presence there is the message. Social media offers the simulation of this presence without the physical fact of it. You post. You perform the gesture. You do not move your body anywhere. You do not sit in an uncomfortable chair in a room that smells like flowers and floor polish. You do not look at the face of the bereaved and allow them to see that you came. You post, and the post is seen or not seen, liked or not liked, and it scrolls away, and the next post is about something else, and the grief has been acknowledged in the same medium and at the same depth as a restaurant recommendation.
Kenneth Doka coined the term “disenfranchised grief” to describe losses the culture refuses to recognize. The death of an ex-spouse. The death of a pet. The death of a patient if you are a nurse. The death of a public figure you never met but whose work was woven into the structure of your daily life. These are real losses producing real grief, and the culture’s refusal to recognize them does not dissolve the grief. It isolates the griever, who cannot bring their loss into the social spaces where grief is processed because the spaces will not admit it. The colleague who lost a dog cannot mention it at work. The fan grieving a musician cannot break down at dinner. A nurse whose patient died that morning cannot ask for a day off. The grief has no approved venue, no sanctioned expression, no communal witness. It persists alone.
What the book asks, across all six of its parts and all seventeen of its chapters, is what happens when you add all of this up. The suppression that begins in childhood and hardens along gendered lines. The workplace that contains it in three days. The diagnostic manual that pathologizes it at twelve months. The industry that monetizes it. The digital platform that simulates it. The disenfranchisement of entire categories of loss. What you get is a culture in which millions of people grieve alone, in private, without the communal infrastructure that every human society in history built to distribute the weight of death across many shoulders. The weight did not get lighter because the infrastructure was removed. The shoulders carrying it just got fewer.
The mother in the cafe knew this. She did not use these words. She did not cite the neuroscience or the sociology or the economics. She tapped the table and told her daughter to go to every funeral, and the instruction contained everything: that grief is communal, that the community is constituted by the people who show up, that presence is the oldest technology of mourning and still the most effective, and that the dead have no needs left, and the living have every need there is.
Go to every funeral. The book is available at BolesBooks.com as a free download, and on Amazon in Kindle ($9.99) and paperback ($15.99) editions.
#bolesBooks #celebration #cremation #culture #davidBoles #funeral #grief #grieving #history #limits #midwest #timeOff #treatment -
Cry Later: The Culture That Taught You Not to Grieve
The commands arrive early. They arrive in childhood, in the voices of parents and teachers and coaches and older relatives, and they are delivered with the same authority as instructions about traffic and hot stoves. Cry later. Hold it in. Do not show your emotions. Do not embarrass us. Be strong. Be brave. Be a man. There will be time for that later. Not here. Not now. Not in front of people.
Content Note: This book contains accounts of suicide, suicidal crisis, and the deaths of family members, friends, and companion animals. Part Five includes detailed accounts of suicidal ideation and completed suicide. If you or someone you know is experiencing a mental health crisis, the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline is available 24/7 by phone or text at 988. The Crisis Text Line is available by texting HOME to 741741.
These are grief suppressors. They are issued so routinely and across so many contexts that they have acquired the appearance of common sense. They are not common sense. They are commands to override a biological response that the body is producing for a reason. When a child is told not to cry at a funeral, the child is being told to suppress a neurochemical cascade that is already in progress. The cortisol is elevated, the amygdala has fired, and the body is doing what millions of years of evolution designed it to do when it registers the absence of an attachment figure. The command does not eliminate the response. It drives it underground, where it persists in forms the child cannot name and the adults will not recognize as grief when it resurfaces months or years later as insomnia, stomach pain, an inability to concentrate, a persistent anxiety with no identifiable source.
I have written a book about this. It is called “Go to Every Funeral: How Grief Defines the Living,” and it is published by David Boles Books Writing and Publishing, and the title comes from something I overheard in a cafe in Newark, New Jersey, about twenty-five years ago. A mother told her college-age daughter to go to every funeral, even if she did not want to, even if she did not know the dead person, because funerals are for the living and absence is remembered. I carried those six words for a quarter of a century, through the deaths of my grandmother, my grandfather, my mother, my mentor, two friends, and a cat who sat on my desk for fifteen years, and the book is the result of trying to understand why those words were true and why nobody else had ever said them to me.
The book covers a lot of ground: the neuroscience of grief, the mourning practices of elephants and crows, the history of funerals from the domestic parlor to the corporate funeral home, the economics of death as a market, the global range of mourning from the Torajan highlands to the jazz funerals of New Orleans. But the section I want to talk about here is Part Five, which is about permission. Specifically, about who gets to grieve and who gets told to stop.
The suppression commands are not distributed equally. They fall with particular weight on men, on children, on employees, and on anyone whose grief is judged to be inconvenient by the people around them. Boys are told not to cry with a frequency and an intensity that girls are not, and the instruction begins early enough that by adolescence many boys have internalized it so completely that they experience the suppression as personality rather than training. They do not cry because they are “not the kind of person who cries.” The self-description obscures the years of conditioning that produced it.
The consequences are visible in the data. Men die by suicide at rates roughly four times higher than women in the United States. They are less likely to seek mental health treatment, more likely to self-medicate with alcohol, more likely to convert emotional distress into physical aggression. These are not biological inevitabilities. They are the downstream effects of a culture that tells half its population to suppress the emotional responses the other half is permitted to express. The man who cannot cry at his father’s funeral because he was told, at age six, that men do not cry is not displaying strength. He is displaying the result of a training program that disconnected him from his own grief response, and the disconnection does not eliminate the grief. It makes the grief dangerous, because grief that cannot be expressed as grief will be expressed as something else.
The workplace runs on the same logic. The standard bereavement leave in the United States is three days for the death of an immediate family member. Three days. The body has not even begun to metabolize the cortisol surge in three days. The cognitive map has not begun to update. The neurological process of revising the brain’s internal model of the world, recognizing at the cellular level that the dead person is absent from every context in which they were expected, has barely started. And the employer expects you back at your desk, functioning, participating in meetings about quarterly targets while the fact that your mother is dead has not yet reached the parts of your brain that govern concentration.
Some companies offer five days. Some offer none. Some distinguish between the death of a spouse and the death of a parent and the death of a sibling, granting fewer days as the relationship moves outward from the nuclear center, as though the grief for a brother can be mathematically demonstrated to require less processing time than the grief for a child. The taxonomy of bereavement leave is a document written by human resources departments, and it tells the employee, in the plainest possible terms, how long their grief is permitted to inconvenience the organization.
Then there is the clinical manual. In 2022, prolonged grief disorder was added to the DSM-5-TR, giving clinicians a formal diagnostic category for grief that persists at debilitating intensity beyond twelve months. The addition was controversial among grief researchers, and the controversy is worth understanding, because it reveals how the medical establishment processes the same impulse that drives the workplace policy and the childhood command: the impulse to draw a line, to say that grief is acceptable on this side and pathological on the other, and to give the line the authority of science.
The proponents of the diagnosis argued that a subset of bereaved people, estimated at roughly ten percent, experience grief that does not follow the typical trajectory. The pain does not diminish over time. Functioning does not return. The preoccupation with the dead person remains so intense that it dominates waking life months and years after the death. These people need clinical help, and the diagnosis gives clinicians a framework for providing it, including the possibility of insurance reimbursement for treatment.
The opponents argued that pathologizing grief at twelve months imposes an arbitrary timeline on a process that has no natural expiration date. The twelve-month threshold was chosen because the clinical data showed it as a statistically significant inflection point, the point at which the probability of spontaneous recovery drops sharply. But statistical inflection points are not the same as biological boundaries. The griever at month thirteen is not clinically different from the griever at month eleven. The line exists because the diagnostic system requires lines, and the existence of the line communicates something to the broader culture: that grief beyond a year is officially a mental illness. The employer who was already impatient at three days now has clinical validation for the suspicion that the employee who is still struggling at fourteen months has something wrong with them.
The book argues that this entire apparatus, the childhood commands, the workplace policies, the diagnostic thresholds, is part of a single cultural project: the management of grief for the convenience of everyone except the griever. The child is told to stop because the adults are uncomfortable. The employee is expected back at the desk because the organization needs the labor. The patient receives a diagnosis because the clinical system requires categories. None of these interventions exists primarily to serve the person who is grieving. They exist to contain the grief, to keep it within boundaries that allow the surrounding systems to continue operating without interruption.
Meanwhile, the culture has produced a substitute for communal grief that is worse than the absence of communal grief. Social media has made performative mourning the default public response to death. When a public figure dies, the speed with which users post their condolences has become a measure of social attentiveness. The posts follow a formula: a photograph of the deceased, a statement of shock, a brief personal connection however thin, and a closing declaration of love and loss. The formula is so consistent it has been parodied, and the parodies have not slowed it down, because the function of the post is to perform belonging, to demonstrate that you are the kind of person who feels things, who notices when important people die, who participates in the rituals of the digital public square.
Some of the grief is sincere. The rest is performance, and the performance crowds out the reality. When the feeds are flooded with grief posts after a celebrity death, the person who is actually devastated, the person who had a real connection to the deceased and is not performing but drowning, finds their grief indistinguishable from the display. Their signal disappears into the noise. The communal mourning that is supposed to support the bereaved instead competes with them, reducing a specific and irreplaceable loss to one post among thousands, all using the same photographs, the same phrases, the same hashtags.
This is the inversion of what the mother in the Newark cafe was describing. She said you go to the funeral. You show up. You put your name in the book. You sit in the pew. You bring food to the house afterward. The obligation is physical: you move your body to the place where the grief is, and your presence there is the message. Social media offers the simulation of this presence without the physical fact of it. You post. You perform the gesture. You do not move your body anywhere. You do not sit in an uncomfortable chair in a room that smells like flowers and floor polish. You do not look at the face of the bereaved and allow them to see that you came. You post, and the post is seen or not seen, liked or not liked, and it scrolls away, and the next post is about something else, and the grief has been acknowledged in the same medium and at the same depth as a restaurant recommendation.
Kenneth Doka coined the term “disenfranchised grief” to describe losses the culture refuses to recognize. The death of an ex-spouse. The death of a pet. The death of a patient if you are a nurse. The death of a public figure you never met but whose work was woven into the structure of your daily life. These are real losses producing real grief, and the culture’s refusal to recognize them does not dissolve the grief. It isolates the griever, who cannot bring their loss into the social spaces where grief is processed because the spaces will not admit it. The colleague who lost a dog cannot mention it at work. The fan grieving a musician cannot break down at dinner. A nurse whose patient died that morning cannot ask for a day off. The grief has no approved venue, no sanctioned expression, no communal witness. It persists alone.
What the book asks, across all six of its parts and all seventeen of its chapters, is what happens when you add all of this up. The suppression that begins in childhood and hardens along gendered lines. The workplace that contains it in three days. The diagnostic manual that pathologizes it at twelve months. The industry that monetizes it. The digital platform that simulates it. The disenfranchisement of entire categories of loss. What you get is a culture in which millions of people grieve alone, in private, without the communal infrastructure that every human society in history built to distribute the weight of death across many shoulders. The weight did not get lighter because the infrastructure was removed. The shoulders carrying it just got fewer.
The mother in the cafe knew this. She did not use these words. She did not cite the neuroscience or the sociology or the economics. She tapped the table and told her daughter to go to every funeral, and the instruction contained everything: that grief is communal, that the community is constituted by the people who show up, that presence is the oldest technology of mourning and still the most effective, and that the dead have no needs left, and the living have every need there is.
Go to every funeral. The book is available at BolesBooks.com as a free download, and on Amazon in Kindle ($9.99) and paperback ($15.99) editions.
#bolesBooks #celebration #cremation #culture #davidBoles #funeral #grief #grieving #history #limits #midwest #timeOff #treatment -
Cry Later: The Culture That Taught You Not to Grieve
The commands arrive early. They arrive in childhood, in the voices of parents and teachers and coaches and older relatives, and they are delivered with the same authority as instructions about traffic and hot stoves. Cry later. Hold it in. Do not show your emotions. Do not embarrass us. Be strong. Be brave. Be a man. There will be time for that later. Not here. Not now. Not in front of people.
These are grief suppressors. They are issued so routinely and across so many contexts that they have acquired the appearance of common sense. They are not common sense. They are commands to override a biological response that the body is producing for a reason. When a child is told not to cry at a funeral, the child is being told to suppress a neurochemical cascade that is already in progress. The cortisol is elevated, the amygdala has fired, and the body is doing what millions of years of evolution designed it to do when it registers the absence of an attachment figure. The command does not eliminate the response. It drives it underground, where it persists in forms the child cannot name and the adults will not recognize as grief when it resurfaces months or years later as insomnia, stomach pain, an inability to concentrate, a persistent anxiety with no identifiable source.
I have written a book about this. It is called “Go to Every Funeral: How Grief Defines the Living,” and it is published by David Boles Books Writing and Publishing, and the title comes from something I overheard in a cafe in Newark, New Jersey, about twenty-five years ago. A mother told her college-age daughter to go to every funeral, even if she did not want to, even if she did not know the dead person, because funerals are for the living and absence is remembered. I carried those six words for a quarter of a century, through the deaths of my grandmother, my grandfather, my mother, my mentor, two friends, and a cat who sat on my desk for fifteen years, and the book is the result of trying to understand why those words were true and why nobody else had ever said them to me.
The book covers a lot of ground: the neuroscience of grief, the mourning practices of elephants and crows, the history of funerals from the domestic parlor to the corporate funeral home, the economics of death as a market, the global range of mourning from the Torajan highlands to the jazz funerals of New Orleans. But the section I want to talk about here is Part Five, which is about permission. Specifically, about who gets to grieve and who gets told to stop.
The suppression commands are not distributed equally. They fall with particular weight on men, on children, on employees, and on anyone whose grief is judged to be inconvenient by the people around them. Boys are told not to cry with a frequency and an intensity that girls are not, and the instruction begins early enough that by adolescence many boys have internalized it so completely that they experience the suppression as personality rather than training. They do not cry because they are “not the kind of person who cries.” The self-description obscures the years of conditioning that produced it.
The consequences are visible in the data. Men die by suicide at rates roughly four times higher than women in the United States. They are less likely to seek mental health treatment, more likely to self-medicate with alcohol, more likely to convert emotional distress into physical aggression. These are not biological inevitabilities. They are the downstream effects of a culture that tells half its population to suppress the emotional responses the other half is permitted to express. The man who cannot cry at his father’s funeral because he was told, at age six, that men do not cry is not displaying strength. He is displaying the result of a training program that disconnected him from his own grief response, and the disconnection does not eliminate the grief. It makes the grief dangerous, because grief that cannot be expressed as grief will be expressed as something else.
The workplace runs on the same logic. The standard bereavement leave in the United States is three days for the death of an immediate family member. Three days. The body has not even begun to metabolize the cortisol surge in three days. The cognitive map has not begun to update. The neurological process of revising the brain’s internal model of the world, recognizing at the cellular level that the dead person is absent from every context in which they were expected, has barely started. And the employer expects you back at your desk, functioning, participating in meetings about quarterly targets while the fact that your mother is dead has not yet reached the parts of your brain that govern concentration.
Some companies offer five days. Some offer none. Some distinguish between the death of a spouse and the death of a parent and the death of a sibling, granting fewer days as the relationship moves outward from the nuclear center, as though the grief for a brother can be mathematically demonstrated to require less processing time than the grief for a child. The taxonomy of bereavement leave is a document written by human resources departments, and it tells the employee, in the plainest possible terms, how long their grief is permitted to inconvenience the organization.
Then there is the clinical manual. In 2022, prolonged grief disorder was added to the DSM-5-TR, giving clinicians a formal diagnostic category for grief that persists at debilitating intensity beyond twelve months. The addition was controversial among grief researchers, and the controversy is worth understanding, because it reveals how the medical establishment processes the same impulse that drives the workplace policy and the childhood command: the impulse to draw a line, to say that grief is acceptable on this side and pathological on the other, and to give the line the authority of science.
The proponents of the diagnosis argued that a subset of bereaved people, estimated at roughly ten percent, experience grief that does not follow the typical trajectory. The pain does not diminish over time. Functioning does not return. The preoccupation with the dead person remains so intense that it dominates waking life months and years after the death. These people need clinical help, and the diagnosis gives clinicians a framework for providing it, including the possibility of insurance reimbursement for treatment.
The opponents argued that pathologizing grief at twelve months imposes an arbitrary timeline on a process that has no natural expiration date. The twelve-month threshold was chosen because the clinical data showed it as a statistically significant inflection point, the point at which the probability of spontaneous recovery drops sharply. But statistical inflection points are not the same as biological boundaries. The griever at month thirteen is not clinically different from the griever at month eleven. The line exists because the diagnostic system requires lines, and the existence of the line communicates something to the broader culture: that grief beyond a year is officially a mental illness. The employer who was already impatient at three days now has clinical validation for the suspicion that the employee who is still struggling at fourteen months has something wrong with them.
The book argues that this entire apparatus, the childhood commands, the workplace policies, the diagnostic thresholds, is part of a single cultural project: the management of grief for the convenience of everyone except the griever. The child is told to stop because the adults are uncomfortable. The employee is expected back at the desk because the organization needs the labor. The patient receives a diagnosis because the clinical system requires categories. None of these interventions exists primarily to serve the person who is grieving. They exist to contain the grief, to keep it within boundaries that allow the surrounding systems to continue operating without interruption.
Meanwhile, the culture has produced a substitute for communal grief that is worse than the absence of communal grief. Social media has made performative mourning the default public response to death. When a public figure dies, the speed with which users post their condolences has become a measure of social attentiveness. The posts follow a formula: a photograph of the deceased, a statement of shock, a brief personal connection however thin, and a closing declaration of love and loss. The formula is so consistent it has been parodied, and the parodies have not slowed it down, because the function of the post is to perform belonging, to demonstrate that you are the kind of person who feels things, who notices when important people die, who participates in the rituals of the digital public square.
Some of the grief is sincere. The rest is performance, and the performance crowds out the reality. When the feeds are flooded with grief posts after a celebrity death, the person who is actually devastated, the person who had a real connection to the deceased and is not performing but drowning, finds their grief indistinguishable from the display. Their signal disappears into the noise. The communal mourning that is supposed to support the bereaved instead competes with them, reducing a specific and irreplaceable loss to one post among thousands, all using the same photographs, the same phrases, the same hashtags.
This is the inversion of what the mother in the Newark cafe was describing. She said you go to the funeral. You show up. You put your name in the book. You sit in the pew. You bring food to the house afterward. The obligation is physical: you move your body to the place where the grief is, and your presence there is the message. Social media offers the simulation of this presence without the physical fact of it. You post. You perform the gesture. You do not move your body anywhere. You do not sit in an uncomfortable chair in a room that smells like flowers and floor polish. You do not look at the face of the bereaved and allow them to see that you came. You post, and the post is seen or not seen, liked or not liked, and it scrolls away, and the next post is about something else, and the grief has been acknowledged in the same medium and at the same depth as a restaurant recommendation.
Kenneth Doka coined the term “disenfranchised grief” to describe losses the culture refuses to recognize. The death of an ex-spouse. The death of a pet. The death of a patient if you are a nurse. The death of a public figure you never met but whose work was woven into the structure of your daily life. These are real losses producing real grief, and the culture’s refusal to recognize them does not dissolve the grief. It isolates the griever, who cannot bring their loss into the social spaces where grief is processed because the spaces will not admit it. The colleague who lost a dog cannot mention it at work. The fan grieving a musician cannot break down at dinner. A nurse whose patient died that morning cannot ask for a day off. The grief has no approved venue, no sanctioned expression, no communal witness. It persists alone.
What the book asks, across all six of its parts and all seventeen of its chapters, is what happens when you add all of this up. The suppression that begins in childhood and hardens along gendered lines. The workplace that contains it in three days. The diagnostic manual that pathologizes it at twelve months. The industry that monetizes it. The digital platform that simulates it. The disenfranchisement of entire categories of loss. What you get is a culture in which millions of people grieve alone, in private, without the communal infrastructure that every human society in history built to distribute the weight of death across many shoulders. The weight did not get lighter because the infrastructure was removed. The shoulders carrying it just got fewer.
The mother in the cafe knew this. She did not use these words. She did not cite the neuroscience or the sociology or the economics. She tapped the table and told her daughter to go to every funeral, and the instruction contained everything: that grief is communal, that the community is constituted by the people who show up, that presence is the oldest technology of mourning and still the most effective, and that the dead have no needs left, and the living have every need there is.
Go to every funeral. The book is available at BolesBooks.com as a free download, and on Amazon in Kindle ($9.99) and paperback ($15.99) editions.
#bolesBooks #celebration #cremation #culture #davidBoles #funeral #grief #grieving #history #limits #midwest #timeOff #treatment -
Cry Later: The Culture That Taught You Not to Grieve
The commands arrive early. They arrive in childhood, in the voices of parents and teachers and coaches and older relatives, and they are delivered with the same authority as instructions about traffic and hot stoves. Cry later. Hold it in. Do not show your emotions. Do not embarrass us. Be strong. Be brave. Be a man. There will be time for that later. Not here. Not now. Not in front of people.
These are grief suppressors. They are issued so routinely and across so many contexts that they have acquired the appearance of common sense. They are not common sense. They are commands to override a biological response that the body is producing for a reason. When a child is told not to cry at a funeral, the child is being told to suppress a neurochemical cascade that is already in progress. The cortisol is elevated, the amygdala has fired, and the body is doing what millions of years of evolution designed it to do when it registers the absence of an attachment figure. The command does not eliminate the response. It drives it underground, where it persists in forms the child cannot name and the adults will not recognize as grief when it resurfaces months or years later as insomnia, stomach pain, an inability to concentrate, a persistent anxiety with no identifiable source.
I have written a book about this. It is called “Go to Every Funeral: How Grief Defines the Living,” and it is published by David Boles Books Writing and Publishing, and the title comes from something I overheard in a cafe in Newark, New Jersey, about twenty-five years ago. A mother told her college-age daughter to go to every funeral, even if she did not want to, even if she did not know the dead person, because funerals are for the living and absence is remembered. I carried those six words for a quarter of a century, through the deaths of my grandmother, my grandfather, my mother, my mentor, two friends, and a cat who sat on my desk for fifteen years, and the book is the result of trying to understand why those words were true and why nobody else had ever said them to me.
The book covers a lot of ground: the neuroscience of grief, the mourning practices of elephants and crows, the history of funerals from the domestic parlor to the corporate funeral home, the economics of death as a market, the global range of mourning from the Torajan highlands to the jazz funerals of New Orleans. But the section I want to talk about here is Part Five, which is about permission. Specifically, about who gets to grieve and who gets told to stop.
The suppression commands are not distributed equally. They fall with particular weight on men, on children, on employees, and on anyone whose grief is judged to be inconvenient by the people around them. Boys are told not to cry with a frequency and an intensity that girls are not, and the instruction begins early enough that by adolescence many boys have internalized it so completely that they experience the suppression as personality rather than training. They do not cry because they are “not the kind of person who cries.” The self-description obscures the years of conditioning that produced it.
The consequences are visible in the data. Men die by suicide at rates roughly four times higher than women in the United States. They are less likely to seek mental health treatment, more likely to self-medicate with alcohol, more likely to convert emotional distress into physical aggression. These are not biological inevitabilities. They are the downstream effects of a culture that tells half its population to suppress the emotional responses the other half is permitted to express. The man who cannot cry at his father’s funeral because he was told, at age six, that men do not cry is not displaying strength. He is displaying the result of a training program that disconnected him from his own grief response, and the disconnection does not eliminate the grief. It makes the grief dangerous, because grief that cannot be expressed as grief will be expressed as something else.
The workplace runs on the same logic. The standard bereavement leave in the United States is three days for the death of an immediate family member. Three days. The body has not even begun to metabolize the cortisol surge in three days. The cognitive map has not begun to update. The neurological process of revising the brain’s internal model of the world, recognizing at the cellular level that the dead person is absent from every context in which they were expected, has barely started. And the employer expects you back at your desk, functioning, participating in meetings about quarterly targets while the fact that your mother is dead has not yet reached the parts of your brain that govern concentration.
Some companies offer five days. Some offer none. Some distinguish between the death of a spouse and the death of a parent and the death of a sibling, granting fewer days as the relationship moves outward from the nuclear center, as though the grief for a brother can be mathematically demonstrated to require less processing time than the grief for a child. The taxonomy of bereavement leave is a document written by human resources departments, and it tells the employee, in the plainest possible terms, how long their grief is permitted to inconvenience the organization.
Then there is the clinical manual. In 2022, prolonged grief disorder was added to the DSM-5-TR, giving clinicians a formal diagnostic category for grief that persists at debilitating intensity beyond twelve months. The addition was controversial among grief researchers, and the controversy is worth understanding, because it reveals how the medical establishment processes the same impulse that drives the workplace policy and the childhood command: the impulse to draw a line, to say that grief is acceptable on this side and pathological on the other, and to give the line the authority of science.
The proponents of the diagnosis argued that a subset of bereaved people, estimated at roughly ten percent, experience grief that does not follow the typical trajectory. The pain does not diminish over time. Functioning does not return. The preoccupation with the dead person remains so intense that it dominates waking life months and years after the death. These people need clinical help, and the diagnosis gives clinicians a framework for providing it, including the possibility of insurance reimbursement for treatment.
The opponents argued that pathologizing grief at twelve months imposes an arbitrary timeline on a process that has no natural expiration date. The twelve-month threshold was chosen because the clinical data showed it as a statistically significant inflection point, the point at which the probability of spontaneous recovery drops sharply. But statistical inflection points are not the same as biological boundaries. The griever at month thirteen is not clinically different from the griever at month eleven. The line exists because the diagnostic system requires lines, and the existence of the line communicates something to the broader culture: that grief beyond a year is officially a mental illness. The employer who was already impatient at three days now has clinical validation for the suspicion that the employee who is still struggling at fourteen months has something wrong with them.
The book argues that this entire apparatus, the childhood commands, the workplace policies, the diagnostic thresholds, is part of a single cultural project: the management of grief for the convenience of everyone except the griever. The child is told to stop because the adults are uncomfortable. The employee is expected back at the desk because the organization needs the labor. The patient receives a diagnosis because the clinical system requires categories. None of these interventions exists primarily to serve the person who is grieving. They exist to contain the grief, to keep it within boundaries that allow the surrounding systems to continue operating without interruption.
Meanwhile, the culture has produced a substitute for communal grief that is worse than the absence of communal grief. Social media has made performative mourning the default public response to death. When a public figure dies, the speed with which users post their condolences has become a measure of social attentiveness. The posts follow a formula: a photograph of the deceased, a statement of shock, a brief personal connection however thin, and a closing declaration of love and loss. The formula is so consistent it has been parodied, and the parodies have not slowed it down, because the function of the post is to perform belonging, to demonstrate that you are the kind of person who feels things, who notices when important people die, who participates in the rituals of the digital public square.
Some of the grief is sincere. The rest is performance, and the performance crowds out the reality. When the feeds are flooded with grief posts after a celebrity death, the person who is actually devastated, the person who had a real connection to the deceased and is not performing but drowning, finds their grief indistinguishable from the display. Their signal disappears into the noise. The communal mourning that is supposed to support the bereaved instead competes with them, reducing a specific and irreplaceable loss to one post among thousands, all using the same photographs, the same phrases, the same hashtags.
This is the inversion of what the mother in the Newark cafe was describing. She said you go to the funeral. You show up. You put your name in the book. You sit in the pew. You bring food to the house afterward. The obligation is physical: you move your body to the place where the grief is, and your presence there is the message. Social media offers the simulation of this presence without the physical fact of it. You post. You perform the gesture. You do not move your body anywhere. You do not sit in an uncomfortable chair in a room that smells like flowers and floor polish. You do not look at the face of the bereaved and allow them to see that you came. You post, and the post is seen or not seen, liked or not liked, and it scrolls away, and the next post is about something else, and the grief has been acknowledged in the same medium and at the same depth as a restaurant recommendation.
Kenneth Doka coined the term “disenfranchised grief” to describe losses the culture refuses to recognize. The death of an ex-spouse. The death of a pet. The death of a patient if you are a nurse. The death of a public figure you never met but whose work was woven into the structure of your daily life. These are real losses producing real grief, and the culture’s refusal to recognize them does not dissolve the grief. It isolates the griever, who cannot bring their loss into the social spaces where grief is processed because the spaces will not admit it. The colleague who lost a dog cannot mention it at work. The fan grieving a musician cannot break down at dinner. A nurse whose patient died that morning cannot ask for a day off. The grief has no approved venue, no sanctioned expression, no communal witness. It persists alone.
What the book asks, across all six of its parts and all seventeen of its chapters, is what happens when you add all of this up. The suppression that begins in childhood and hardens along gendered lines. The workplace that contains it in three days. The diagnostic manual that pathologizes it at twelve months. The industry that monetizes it. The digital platform that simulates it. The disenfranchisement of entire categories of loss. What you get is a culture in which millions of people grieve alone, in private, without the communal infrastructure that every human society in history built to distribute the weight of death across many shoulders. The weight did not get lighter because the infrastructure was removed. The shoulders carrying it just got fewer.
The mother in the cafe knew this. She did not use these words. She did not cite the neuroscience or the sociology or the economics. She tapped the table and told her daughter to go to every funeral, and the instruction contained everything: that grief is communal, that the community is constituted by the people who show up, that presence is the oldest technology of mourning and still the most effective, and that the dead have no needs left, and the living have every need there is.
Go to every funeral. The book is available at BolesBooks.com as a free download, and on Amazon in Kindle ($9.99) and paperback ($15.99) editions.
#bolesBooks #celebration #cremation #culture #davidBoles #funeral #grief #grieving #history #limits #midwest #timeOff #treatment -
Cry Later: The Culture That Taught You Not to Grieve
The commands arrive early. They arrive in childhood, in the voices of parents and teachers and coaches and older relatives, and they are delivered with the same authority as instructions about traffic and hot stoves. Cry later. Hold it in. Do not show your emotions. Do not embarrass us. Be strong. Be brave. Be a man. There will be time for that later. Not here. Not now. Not in front of people.
These are grief suppressors. They are issued so routinely and across so many contexts that they have acquired the appearance of common sense. They are not common sense. They are commands to override a biological response that the body is producing for a reason. When a child is told not to cry at a funeral, the child is being told to suppress a neurochemical cascade that is already in progress. The cortisol is elevated, the amygdala has fired, and the body is doing what millions of years of evolution designed it to do when it registers the absence of an attachment figure. The command does not eliminate the response. It drives it underground, where it persists in forms the child cannot name and the adults will not recognize as grief when it resurfaces months or years later as insomnia, stomach pain, an inability to concentrate, a persistent anxiety with no identifiable source.
I have written a book about this. It is called “Go to Every Funeral: How Grief Defines the Living,” and it is published by David Boles Books Writing and Publishing, and the title comes from something I overheard in a cafe in Newark, New Jersey, about twenty-five years ago. A mother told her college-age daughter to go to every funeral, even if she did not want to, even if she did not know the dead person, because funerals are for the living and absence is remembered. I carried those six words for a quarter of a century, through the deaths of my grandmother, my grandfather, my mother, my mentor, two friends, and a cat who sat on my desk for fifteen years, and the book is the result of trying to understand why those words were true and why nobody else had ever said them to me.
The book covers a lot of ground: the neuroscience of grief, the mourning practices of elephants and crows, the history of funerals from the domestic parlor to the corporate funeral home, the economics of death as a market, the global range of mourning from the Torajan highlands to the jazz funerals of New Orleans. But the section I want to talk about here is Part Five, which is about permission. Specifically, about who gets to grieve and who gets told to stop.
The suppression commands are not distributed equally. They fall with particular weight on men, on children, on employees, and on anyone whose grief is judged to be inconvenient by the people around them. Boys are told not to cry with a frequency and an intensity that girls are not, and the instruction begins early enough that by adolescence many boys have internalized it so completely that they experience the suppression as personality rather than training. They do not cry because they are “not the kind of person who cries.” The self-description obscures the years of conditioning that produced it.
The consequences are visible in the data. Men die by suicide at rates roughly four times higher than women in the United States. They are less likely to seek mental health treatment, more likely to self-medicate with alcohol, more likely to convert emotional distress into physical aggression. These are not biological inevitabilities. They are the downstream effects of a culture that tells half its population to suppress the emotional responses the other half is permitted to express. The man who cannot cry at his father’s funeral because he was told, at age six, that men do not cry is not displaying strength. He is displaying the result of a training program that disconnected him from his own grief response, and the disconnection does not eliminate the grief. It makes the grief dangerous, because grief that cannot be expressed as grief will be expressed as something else.
The workplace runs on the same logic. The standard bereavement leave in the United States is three days for the death of an immediate family member. Three days. The body has not even begun to metabolize the cortisol surge in three days. The cognitive map has not begun to update. The neurological process of revising the brain’s internal model of the world, recognizing at the cellular level that the dead person is absent from every context in which they were expected, has barely started. And the employer expects you back at your desk, functioning, participating in meetings about quarterly targets while the fact that your mother is dead has not yet reached the parts of your brain that govern concentration.
Some companies offer five days. Some offer none. Some distinguish between the death of a spouse and the death of a parent and the death of a sibling, granting fewer days as the relationship moves outward from the nuclear center, as though the grief for a brother can be mathematically demonstrated to require less processing time than the grief for a child. The taxonomy of bereavement leave is a document written by human resources departments, and it tells the employee, in the plainest possible terms, how long their grief is permitted to inconvenience the organization.
Then there is the clinical manual. In 2022, prolonged grief disorder was added to the DSM-5-TR, giving clinicians a formal diagnostic category for grief that persists at debilitating intensity beyond twelve months. The addition was controversial among grief researchers, and the controversy is worth understanding, because it reveals how the medical establishment processes the same impulse that drives the workplace policy and the childhood command: the impulse to draw a line, to say that grief is acceptable on this side and pathological on the other, and to give the line the authority of science.
The proponents of the diagnosis argued that a subset of bereaved people, estimated at roughly ten percent, experience grief that does not follow the typical trajectory. The pain does not diminish over time. Functioning does not return. The preoccupation with the dead person remains so intense that it dominates waking life months and years after the death. These people need clinical help, and the diagnosis gives clinicians a framework for providing it, including the possibility of insurance reimbursement for treatment.
The opponents argued that pathologizing grief at twelve months imposes an arbitrary timeline on a process that has no natural expiration date. The twelve-month threshold was chosen because the clinical data showed it as a statistically significant inflection point, the point at which the probability of spontaneous recovery drops sharply. But statistical inflection points are not the same as biological boundaries. The griever at month thirteen is not clinically different from the griever at month eleven. The line exists because the diagnostic system requires lines, and the existence of the line communicates something to the broader culture: that grief beyond a year is officially a mental illness. The employer who was already impatient at three days now has clinical validation for the suspicion that the employee who is still struggling at fourteen months has something wrong with them.
The book argues that this entire apparatus, the childhood commands, the workplace policies, the diagnostic thresholds, is part of a single cultural project: the management of grief for the convenience of everyone except the griever. The child is told to stop because the adults are uncomfortable. The employee is expected back at the desk because the organization needs the labor. The patient receives a diagnosis because the clinical system requires categories. None of these interventions exists primarily to serve the person who is grieving. They exist to contain the grief, to keep it within boundaries that allow the surrounding systems to continue operating without interruption.
Meanwhile, the culture has produced a substitute for communal grief that is worse than the absence of communal grief. Social media has made performative mourning the default public response to death. When a public figure dies, the speed with which users post their condolences has become a measure of social attentiveness. The posts follow a formula: a photograph of the deceased, a statement of shock, a brief personal connection however thin, and a closing declaration of love and loss. The formula is so consistent it has been parodied, and the parodies have not slowed it down, because the function of the post is to perform belonging, to demonstrate that you are the kind of person who feels things, who notices when important people die, who participates in the rituals of the digital public square.
Some of the grief is sincere. The rest is performance, and the performance crowds out the reality. When the feeds are flooded with grief posts after a celebrity death, the person who is actually devastated, the person who had a real connection to the deceased and is not performing but drowning, finds their grief indistinguishable from the display. Their signal disappears into the noise. The communal mourning that is supposed to support the bereaved instead competes with them, reducing a specific and irreplaceable loss to one post among thousands, all using the same photographs, the same phrases, the same hashtags.
This is the inversion of what the mother in the Newark cafe was describing. She said you go to the funeral. You show up. You put your name in the book. You sit in the pew. You bring food to the house afterward. The obligation is physical: you move your body to the place where the grief is, and your presence there is the message. Social media offers the simulation of this presence without the physical fact of it. You post. You perform the gesture. You do not move your body anywhere. You do not sit in an uncomfortable chair in a room that smells like flowers and floor polish. You do not look at the face of the bereaved and allow them to see that you came. You post, and the post is seen or not seen, liked or not liked, and it scrolls away, and the next post is about something else, and the grief has been acknowledged in the same medium and at the same depth as a restaurant recommendation.
Kenneth Doka coined the term “disenfranchised grief” to describe losses the culture refuses to recognize. The death of an ex-spouse. The death of a pet. The death of a patient if you are a nurse. The death of a public figure you never met but whose work was woven into the structure of your daily life. These are real losses producing real grief, and the culture’s refusal to recognize them does not dissolve the grief. It isolates the griever, who cannot bring their loss into the social spaces where grief is processed because the spaces will not admit it. The colleague who lost a dog cannot mention it at work. The fan grieving a musician cannot break down at dinner. A nurse whose patient died that morning cannot ask for a day off. The grief has no approved venue, no sanctioned expression, no communal witness. It persists alone.
What the book asks, across all six of its parts and all seventeen of its chapters, is what happens when you add all of this up. The suppression that begins in childhood and hardens along gendered lines. The workplace that contains it in three days. The diagnostic manual that pathologizes it at twelve months. The industry that monetizes it. The digital platform that simulates it. The disenfranchisement of entire categories of loss. What you get is a culture in which millions of people grieve alone, in private, without the communal infrastructure that every human society in history built to distribute the weight of death across many shoulders. The weight did not get lighter because the infrastructure was removed. The shoulders carrying it just got fewer.
The mother in the cafe knew this. She did not use these words. She did not cite the neuroscience or the sociology or the economics. She tapped the table and told her daughter to go to every funeral, and the instruction contained everything: that grief is communal, that the community is constituted by the people who show up, that presence is the oldest technology of mourning and still the most effective, and that the dead have no needs left, and the living have every need there is.
Go to every funeral. The book is available at BolesBooks.com as a free download, and on Amazon in Kindle ($9.99) and paperback ($15.99) editions.
#bolesBooks #celebration #cremation #culture #davidBoles #funeral #grief #grieving #history #limits #midwest #timeOff #treatment -
Article source: @nature.com
Published: 17 November 2025
'Long COVID trajectories in the prospectively followed #RECOVER-Adult US cohort' #LongCOVID
Tanayott Thaweethai et al,
Links:
https://recovercovid.org/long-covid
https://hms.harvard.edu/departments/department-medicine
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-65239-4#Sec3 -
Article source: @nature.com
Published: 17 November 2025
'Long COVID trajectories in the prospectively followed #RECOVER-Adult US cohort' #LongCOVID
Tanayott Thaweethai et al,
Links:
https://recovercovid.org/long-covid
https://hms.harvard.edu/departments/department-medicine
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-65239-4#Sec3 -
Article source: @nature.com
Published: 17 November 2025
'Long COVID trajectories in the prospectively followed #RECOVER-Adult US cohort' #LongCOVID
Tanayott Thaweethai et al,
Links:
https://recovercovid.org/long-covid
https://hms.harvard.edu/departments/department-medicine
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-65239-4#Sec3 -
Article source: @nature.com
Published: 17 November 2025
'Long COVID trajectories in the prospectively followed #RECOVER-Adult US cohort' #LongCOVID
Tanayott Thaweethai et al,
Links:
https://recovercovid.org/long-covid
https://hms.harvard.edu/departments/department-medicine
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-65239-4#Sec3 -
Article source: @nature.com
Published: 17 November 2025
'Long COVID trajectories in the prospectively followed #RECOVER-Adult US cohort' #LongCOVID
Tanayott Thaweethai et al,
Links:
https://recovercovid.org/long-covid
https://hms.harvard.edu/departments/department-medicine
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-65239-4#Sec3 -
Wywiad z Alizą Marcus
Publikujemy polskie tłumaczenie wywiadu z Alizą Marcus. Jest ona wybitną komentatorką spraw kurdyjskich mieszkającą w Waszyngtonie. Jej nowa książka, Resurgence and Revolution: The PKK and the Kurdish Fight in Turkey and Syria, niedawno opublikowana przez New York University Press, analizuje trajektorię grupy od pojmania Abdullaha Öcalana w 1999 roku, przez upadek reżimu Baszara al-Assada w Syrii, aż po decyzję PKK (Partii Pracujących Kurdystanu) o zakończeniu wojny […]https://kurdystan.fediblog.pl/kurdystan/wywiad-z-aliza-marcus/
-
Wywiad z Alizą Marcus
Publikujemy polskie tłumaczenie wywiadu z Alizą Marcus. Jest ona wybitną komentatorką spraw kurdyjskich mieszkającą w Waszyngtonie. Jej nowa książka, Resurgence and Revolution: The PKK and the Kurdish Fight in Turkey and Syria, niedawno opublikowana przez New York University Press, analizuje trajektorię grupy od pojmania Abdullaha Öcalana w 1999 roku, przez upadek reżimu Baszara al-Assada w Syrii, aż po decyzję PKK (Partii Pracujących Kurdystanu) o zakończeniu wojny […]https://kurdystan.fediblog.pl/kurdystan/wywiad-z-aliza-marcus/
-
Wywiad z Alizą Marcus
Publikujemy polskie tłumaczenie wywiadu z Alizą Marcus. Jest ona wybitną komentatorką spraw kurdyjskich mieszkającą w Waszyngtonie. Jej nowa książka, Resurgence and Revolution: The PKK and the Kurdish Fight in Turkey and Syria, niedawno opublikowana przez New York University Press, analizuje trajektorię grupy od pojmania Abdullaha Öcalana w 1999 roku, przez upadek reżimu Baszara al-Assada w Syrii, aż po decyzję PKK (Partii Pracujących Kurdystanu) o zakończeniu wojny […]https://kurdystan.fediblog.pl/kurdystan/wywiad-z-aliza-marcus/
-
Wywiad z Alizą Marcus
Publikujemy polskie tłumaczenie wywiadu z Alizą Marcus. Jest ona wybitną komentatorką spraw kurdyjskich mieszkającą w Waszyngtonie. Jej nowa książka, Resurgence and Revolution: The PKK and the Kurdish Fight in Turkey and Syria, niedawno opublikowana przez New York University Press, analizuje trajektorię grupy od pojmania Abdullaha Öcalana w 1999 roku, przez upadek reżimu Baszara al-Assada w Syrii, aż po decyzję PKK (Partii Pracujących Kurdystanu) o zakończeniu wojny […]https://kurdystan.fediblog.pl/kurdystan/wywiad-z-aliza-marcus/