Today's Articles (22/9/2025)
How modern life makes us sick – and what to do about it (The Guardian)
Put simply, we evolved in a very different environment from the one in which we now find ourselves. As a result, our brains, bodies and instincts are poorly matched to their surroundings.
At the same time, anthropologists estimate that human genetics and anatomy have remained largely unchanged for about 100,000 years. Back then, we lived in small nomadic hunter-gatherer tribes, only developing agriculture about 10,000 years ago and civilisations 5,000 years ago.
Genetic adaptations (which can take tens of thousands of years) could hardly be expected to keep up with the move to cities, let alone technological and cultural shifts, which can have dramatic impacts within a single lifetime.
The instinct to binge on foods rich in salt, fat and sugar kept people alive for most of human history, when the next meal was never guaranteed. Now we live in a world where calories are cheap, and where scientists devote whole careers to making foods “hyperpalatable” – which is to say far more appealing than any food found in nature.
Hunter-gatherer life involved constant companionship, hands-on work that was immediately rewarding (such as finding food or building shelter), and communities rich with tradition, ritual and spiritual meaning. Modern technology now makes most of these things optional, rather than essential. As a consequence many of us are living a life disconnected from others, lacking in fulfilling work and devoid of meaning.
I am suggesting that there is a powerful explanation for many of our current physical and mental difficulties, and it’s that the world has developed in ways our biology hasn’t been able to keep up with. If you don’t take this into account as you look at your own life, instead expecting yourself to perform like some kind of highly optimised machine, you open the door to profound self-criticism and resentment. The frustration of not being able to lose weight, the emptiness of the job you were always told to want, the loneliness of modern cities – these can all feel like individual failures.
From Nazi Germany to Trump’s America: why strongmen rely on women at home (The Guardian)
Namely, if a woman is financially dependent on a husband, she is free from the burden of paid employment and can devote herself fully to domestic life, rather than splitting her time between job and home. The crushing pressure on women to both work and do most of the housework – as well as the public health crisis of parental burnout – make these arguments seductive.
But womanosphere content tends to gloss over complex material realities; for instance, the conditions that made single-breadwinner households more viable in the 1950s no longer exist.
The hypocrisy is evident: womanosphere creators often espouse the wisdom of removing oneself from “the sphere of market-mediated labor while, in fact, monetizing their content”, says Sophie Lewis, feminist theorist and author of the recent book Enemy Feminisms: Terfs, Policewomen, and Girlbosses Against Liberation.
“What fascisms old and new have in common is they tend to look to women to fill in the gaps that the state misses,” says historian Diana Garvin.
Mussolini’s fascist Italy engineered an image of modernization, economic growth and agricultural plenty from the 1920s to the 40s. But after Mussolini alienated trade partners, Italy’s reliance on domestic products contributed to food shortages so severe Italians did not have enough wheat to make pasta. In her 2022 book Feeding Fascism: The Politics of Women’s Food Work, Garvin writes that the state’s propagandist narrative of domestic bliss concealed systemic reliance on women’s unpaid labor in the home; mothers were expected to absorb food shortages through their own ingenuity and hard work.
Italian lifestyle magazines such as La Cucina Italiana worked to launder the food scarcity resulting from Mussolini’s poor governance into a source of individual pride, sharing pictures of little girls who grew prize vegetables and offering recipes using leftover rice. The government wanted women to cover for its failures, and “be happy about it”, says Garvin.
Without adequate and accessible medical care, food and education, mothers can end up becoming de facto home teachers, farmers and medics. Trad influencers gloss this unjust workload as a homage to homesteading (and leverage it to market unsubstantiated remedies) instead of calling it what it is: picking up the state’s slack. Cuts to education seem less threatening when you are convinced your role is to homeschool your children; a less safe, more expensive food supply seems less problematic when you believe everyone should be growing their own produce and making everything from scratch; defunding the Center for Disease Control does not seem so bad when you have been conditioned to distrust vaccines and believe you can cure a child’s measles with “herbal remedies or old food medicine”.
Mussolini’s government also “really wanted to get women out of middle-class jobs so that they could open up those spaces for men, because there had been real employment problems”, says Garvin.