The Guardian's weekend roundup of essential reads features tributes to feminist icon Gloria Steinem, an inside look at a cryonics facility, a project on Arctic ecosystem adaptation, the debate over slime mould intelligence, and a therapist's perspective on men and grief.
Gloria Steinem's legacy remembered by writers
Tributes have been flooding in for Gloria Steinem, the groundbreaking US feminist campaigner who died last week. The journalist, writer and activist fought tirelessly against domestic violence, female genital mutilation and the pornography industry and for women's reproductive rights. Her death has raised questions over what the feminist movement will be without her.
Leading contemporary writers reflect on her legacy. Rebecca Solnit writes: “Some of the hot takes I’m now seeing on Steinem, and the women’s movement she was at the heart of, act as reminders that a lot of people have no idea of what women’s lives were like before second-wave feminism.”
A notable quote from the tributes: “Steinem, the silence-breaker. The truth-teller who had inspired millions of women around the world to find our voices and use them.”
Cryonics: the science and mysticism of a limitless life
For a cost of A$200,000, individuals can now be suspended upside down in liquid nitrogen at -196C in the hope of being reanimated in the future. Catie McLeod trekked to a small town in regional Australia to be the first journalist inside the facility selling the dream of immortality.
People who opt for cryogenic freezing undergo an eight-hour process as soon as they die, with their corpse pumped with “antifreeze-like embalming chemicals” to prevent damage to the body and its cellular structure. However, scientists are not convinced it is possible to revive someone's consciousness. Associate Prof Saffron Bryant, a cryopreservation expert, considers this question to fall into the realm of mysticism, rather than science.
Outrunning extinction in the Arctic
Can an entire ecosystem evolve fast enough to adapt to the climate crisis? While scientists have long thought that adaptation is a “survival of the fittest” race to outrun extinction, a first-of-its-kind project in the streams of the Arctic posits that a more communal approach could be the ecological answer to climate resilience.
Linda Deegan, a senior scientist at Woodwell climate research center in Massachusetts, says the climate emergency is upending the order of life. But Deegan also believes if species can evolutionarily band together, those connections will help them not only survive, but prosper.
Slime moulds and the debate about intelligence
In 2010, a group of scientists proved that a brainless organism, called a slime mould, could reproduce the route map of greater Tokyo railway system. It even gave hints on how to improve the design. Scientists have since been battling over whether simple life forms such as these should be considered intelligent.
A slime mould can appear to be just a small cell, capable only of feeding and reproducing. But it's impossible to watch a slime mould without sensing some deliberation at play. In another famous experiment, the organism found the shortest route through a maze in search of food.
Toshiyuki Nakagaki, a scientist, betrays a sense of wonder while discussing the slime mould's “intelligence”, a word that biologists invoke carefully. Others have since justified the use of the word, as well as other fraught ones such as “learning” and “memory”, in describing it. This poses a mystery: how is this cell without even a semblance of a brain, capable of decision-making, memory, and processing of information?
Turning towards grief in men's therapy
Most men go to therapy looking for answers, whether to work on their anger or break out of a prison of isolation. But psychotherapist Matthew Willner writes that most of his clients leave with nothing to show for their hours in the chair but grief. So why, if they are looking for happiness, do they leave feeling so empty?
Finding the root cause of your own unhappiness can be a tricky nut to crack when you don't know what caused your declining mental health. If you can't name the event that brought you to therapy in the first place, it can go unresolved. Rather than trying to fight what brought them in the door, Willner encourages the men he works with to “get curious” about their own feelings. Men often find themselves lonely and unhappy, he writes, but turning inwards toward their own sadness may allow them to feel less controlled by it.
