The A2 coastal road, County Down. Approximately 16:40 British Summer Time. One Land Rover leads. Two four-tonne lorries follow in a loose tactical column, carrying men of 3 Platoon, A Company, 2nd Battalion Parachute Regiment — an administrative run from Ballykinler Barracks south toward their company base near the border town of Newry. The battalion had started its 20-month Northern Ireland tour in July 1979, under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Colin Thomson. Seven weeks in. Standard soft-skinned vehicles. No armor. The kind of road movement that happened, in one form or another, every day somewhere in South Armagh. The A2 at Narrow Water follows the northern bank of Carlingford Lough at this point. Water on the left, close enough to touch from the road verge. On the opposite shore — roughly 200 yards away — County Louth, Republic of Ireland. The Cooley Peninsula: dense deciduous woodland running hard down to the waterline, the treeline dark against an August afternoon sky. Close enough across the water to see individual trunks. Close enough, if you were positioned in those trees with binoculars, to track a specific vehicle moving along the opposite shore, note the moment a specific lorry drew level with a specific parked trailer, and know with certainty that the geometry was right. South Armagh had been called Bandit Country by the British government since the mid-1970s, and the name had earned its accuracy through a decade of IRA ambushes, culvert bombs, and sniper fire that had made it the highest-threat area for IRA roadside bomb attacks in Northern Ireland. The roads had been killing grounds for so long that British Army planners had restrictions on this specific stretch — convoys were sometimes declared out of bounds, rerouted inland, the pattern varied deliberately to reduce predictability. On August 27, 3 Platoon took the A2 anyway. The logic of pattern disruption can turn on itself — the inland route becomes the expected route when the coastal road has been avoided too many times in succession. Near the walls of Narrow Water Castle, a medieval stone structure close to the water’s edge, a flatbed trailer sat in a lay-by on the right-hand verge. It was loaded with bales of straw. Trailers appeared in that lay-by regularly. Photographs taken of the location in the days before the attack confirmed they were a normal fixture — agricultural vehicles, farm equipment, the ordinary visual noise of a rural border road. Nothing to slow for. Nothing to query on a radio net. Nothing to note in a patrol log. The rear four-tonne lorry drew level with the trailer.Historical Notes examines the 1979 ambush in South Armagh, detailing the tactical and strategic failures that shaped the conflict. The analysis explores how the Sout
Walter Isaacson went from a kid in New Orleans who didn’t yet know writing was a job to authoring the definitive biographies of Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, Albert Einstein, and Benjamin Franklin. In this conversation with Harvard Dean David Deming, the acclaimed biographer argues that the most innovative people are often difficult, with a more complicated relationship to empathy than the word suggests; that “We hold these truths to be self-evident” is not a factual description of America, but a promise the country has spent 250 years trying to keep; and that artificial intelligence will revolutionize education, but can never replace human reporting and emotion. Along the way: Walker Percy’s advice to be a storyteller, the time Albert Einstein was rejected from college, why Elon Musk believes empathy is sometimes just vanity, Michael Sandel’s “skyboxification” of America, and why he forces all his Tulane students to use three different AI models. Walter Isaacson is the bestselling author of biographies of Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, Leonardo da Vinci, Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein, and Jennifer Doudna. His latest book is The Greatest Sentence Ever Written (Simon & Schuster, 2025). He is the Leonard A. Lauder University Professor of History at Tulane University, and has been chairman and CEO of CNN, editor of Time, and head of the Aspen Institute. A native of New Orleans, he came to Harvard in 1970, concentrated in History and Literature, and later studied at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. Subscribe to The Context Window with David Deming: https://thecontextwindowpodcast.subst… CHAPTERS 0:00:00 Cold open 0:00:08 Introduction 0:01:30 Two kinds of Louisianans 0:02:35 How biography fell out of favor 0:04:25 Fingerprints on history 0:06:40 Is empathy a weakness? 0:08:35 Two kinds of genius 0:10:20 Staying objective 0:12:35 Would they have gotten into Harvard? 0:14:50 The greatest sentence ever written 0:16:05 A forcing mechanism 0:16:55 What are we getting wrong now? 0:21:35 Sacred to self-evident 0:24:20 The pursuit of happiness 0:26:35 The commons 0:29:00 Out of balance? 0:31:15 What would Franklin do? 0:33:35 Why his students must use AI 0:35:00 Boswell & Company 0:37:20 Don’t eat the seed corn 0:40:05 When intelligence is abundant 0:43:40 The cradle of liberty 0:45:15 Loving the country at 250 MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE
Sir Alex Younger, the longest-serving head of MI6, died in June 2026, aged 62. He spent 30 years at MI6, Britain’s foreign intelligence service, with six of those as its boss. Few people better understood what intelligence services are capable of—and what can erode them. Shashank Joshi, The Economist’s defence editor, spoke to Sir Alex in March 2026, in one of his final interviews before the former spy chief’s death. They discussed America’s place in the world and the nature of modern spycraft, the conflict with Iran and the health of Iran’s regime and reflected on Sir Alex’s long and distinguished career in British intelligence.
Scott Ritter joins the show today to discuss how the US is losing the Iran War and with more US soldiers being targeted and US military bases being destroyed across the Middle East how the Iran War is quickly escalating to a dangerous trap that the United States can not win. Want the truth about the Iran War? Today’s segment is the easiest piece of media to understand the entire Iran conflict in under 10 minutes
00:00 – Why the US Lost the Iran War 01:40 – Can the US Open The Strait of Hormuz? 02:18 – Can the US Take Kharg Island? 03:19 – Trump Can’t Afford an Economic Crisis 04:22 – The US Doesn’t Have Military Solution to Iran 05:05 – Why the US Will Use Hybrid Diplomacy 06:00 – There is No Long Term Solution for USA 07:02 – Why Gulf Nations Will Leave the USA 08:02 – Why Iran Will Never Give Up 09:00 – How Badly Does the US Want to Lose This War?
Enhorabuena to Spain for their World Cup victory yesterday over Argentina! Today, we’re explaining why UK Prime Ministers can’t seem to hold the job for long. Plus:
“Cockroaches” take to the streets of New Delhi
A new front opens in the Iran war
Hairy legs run into trouble in Japan
Thanks for reading,
– The Daily Crew
Another prime minister arrived at Downing Street today. Andy Burnham became the United Kingdom’s seventh leader in just ten years.
Burnham takes office after his predecessor, fellow Labour politician Keir Starmer, was ousted after barely two years in office. In his first speech, Burnham pledged to act as a “circuit breaker” for a political and economic system that, he says, has been heading in the wrong direction since the 1980s.
It is an ambitious promise. Recent history suggests the UK’s biggest political challenge isn’t just fixing the country – it’s staying in office long enough to try.
As our Graphic Truth shows, prime ministers used to stay in office far longer than they do today. Between 1979 and 2010 – a span of 31 years – the UK had only four leaders: Conservatives Margaret Thatcher and John Major, followed by Labour’s Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. Since then, turnover has accelerated dramatically. Over the last four years alone, the UK has had five prime ministers: Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, Rishi Sunak, Starmer, and now, Burnham. Larry, a cat who has lived at Downing Street since 2011, has proved more enduring than the politicians who have come and gone.
Why has the revolving door of prime ministers spun so quickly?
Brexit is the first and most obvious reason. The 2016 vote to leave the European Union consumed British politics for years, crowding out debate over deeper structural problems. Theresa May inherited the task after David Cameron resigned and spent much of her premiership trying to secure parliamentary approval for a post-Brexit deal to manage the divorce from the European Union. May ultimately failed, and served a little over three years in office.
The second factor is economic stagnation. Britain has never fully recovered from the global financial crisis. Disposable incomes have stagnated while the cost-of-living crisis has deepened public frustration with leadership.
The third is the political missteps by specific prime ministers. Johnson was undone by the fallout from COVID-19 and the “Partygate” scandal, in which gatherings at Downing Street appeared to violate the very social distancing rule he’d asked citizens to follow. Truss lasted just 45 days after her unfunded tax-cutting plans triggered turmoil in financial markets. Starmer was undone in part by controversy surrounding his former ambassador’s relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, along with internal party divisions, and an inability to articulate a compelling economic vision.
But Burnham may have one advantage his predecessor lacked. As a former mayor of Greater Manchester, known for his man-of-the-people communication style, Burnham “is a better retail politician,” Mujtaba Rahman, Eurasia Group’s managing director for Europe, recently told GZERO. “He is better at engaging and communicating with the electorate in a way most politicians aren’t,” Rahman said.
Burnham acknowledged the scale of the challenge in his first speech.
“I am acutely conscious that I am the sixth person in the last 10 years to walk up this street, the seventh prime minister since 2016, making this a moment for reflection and new resolution,” Burnham said. “It requires my generation of politicians to raise our game and rise to the new challenge.”
High-frequency midlife television consumption drives long-term frontal lobe atrophy and elevated white matter hyperintensities, while intellectually stimulating occupational sitting operates as a structural neuroprotective shield. Credit: Neuroscience News
Heavy TV Watching Systematically Shrinks Your Brain
Summary: By analyzing data from the historic Atherosclerosis Risk in Communities (ARIC) study, the team discovered that adults who watched television “very often” during midlife later manifested significant tissue loss in areas tied to memory, executive logic, and vision. The study unmasked a stark contrast: sitting down for mentally engaging, occupational work actually showed protective, brain-boosting associations, proving that not all sitting is created equal.
Key Facts
Accelerated Cortical Atrophy Unmasked: When compared directly against cohorts who reported “never or seldom” watching television, individuals who consumed TV “very often” during midlife exhibited widespread, severe structural differences. High-frequency viewers showed significantly smaller frontal lobes (governing executive logic and decision-making) and occipital lobes (managing visual processing grid matrices).
Early Alzheimer’s Biomarkers Located: The structural MRIs unmasked a localized reduction in gray matter volumes within deep temporal and limbic regions that represent the primary, foundational areas vulnerable to early-stage Alzheimer’s disease progression.
Elevated White Matter Hyperintensities (WMH):High television consumption correlated with a significant spike in white matter hyperintensity volumes. WMHs serve as an acute radiological indicator of cerebral small blood vessel disease, signaling structural damage to the brain’s internal wiring insulation that elevates the long-term risk of ischemic strokes, age-related cognitive decline, and clinical dementia.
The Sedentary Paradox Confirmed:Strikingly, the pure physical inactivity of sitting down was not the driving force behind this neural decay. When the team evaluated occupational sitting (individuals sitting at a desk for their daily jobs), they observed the exact opposite footprint. High-frequency workplace sitters possessed larger frontal and occipital lobes alongside highly reduced white matter damage, indicating superior structural brain health. The authors attribute this to the mentally stimulating, problem-solving demands of professional office work.
Acute Male Vulnerability:When the neuroimaging datasets were mathematically parsed by biological sex, the researchers exposed an asymmetrical vulnerability profile: the vast majority of the observed structural brain changes, both the destructive atrophy from passive television consumption and the protective benefits of active occupational sitting, were predominantly clustered within male participants.
Shifting Public Health Protocols:“For years we’ve focused on how much people sit. Our findings suggest we should also pay attention to what they’re doing while they’re sitting,” emphasizes senior investigator Dr. David Raichlen. This structural validation paves the way for a major update to modern medicine: future clinical guidance will transition from simply telling patients to “walk more” toward actively prescribing the reduction of passive screen time in favor of cognitively engaging sitting activities like reading, writing, or strategic puzzles.
Methodological Nuances:The authors note that the 20-year retrospective analysis relied on self-reported midlife television habits, which can introduce personal estimation errors. Additionally, because the baseline ARIC window in 1987 lacked access to widespread, high-resolution MRI, future studies will deploy modern longitudinal tracking using structural scans at year zero to definitively confirm step-by-step gray matter changes over time.
Source: USC
“Turn off that TV, it’ll rot your brain!” has been a household refrain for decades. While “rot” might be too strong a term, researchers are finding that the overall sentiment could have some merit.
A study published recently in Alzheimer’s and Dementia: Journal of the Alzheimer’s Association revealed that those who reported watching TV “very often” in midlife later exhibited reduced volume in areas of the brain associated with memory, smaller frontal and occipital lobes, and areas of damage in the brain’s white matter that are associated with aging, stroke risk, cognitive decline and dementia.
“For years we’ve focused on how much people sit. Our findings suggest we should also pay attention to what they’re doing while they’re sitting,” says David Raichlen, professor of biological sciences and anthropology at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences and a senior author of the study.
The findings weren’t just due to TV viewing’s sedentary nature. The study found that other types of sedentary activities did not have the same associations, indicating that what one does while sitting may matter much more than previously thought.
Watching changes
The researchers analyzed data from about 1,700 adults, average age 53, who enrolled in the Atherosclerosis Risk in Communities (ARIC) Study between 1987 and 1989. ARIC is a long-running study of the U.S. population designed to investigate cardiovascular and brain health.
Participants were asked how frequently, on a scale ranging from “never/seldom” to “very often,” they watched television during their leisure time and how much of their workday they spent sitting.
More than two decades later, participants underwent brain MRI. Compared with people who reported “never” or “seldom” watching TV, those who watched TV “very often” showed widespread structural differences across the brain.
The researchers found smaller volumes in areas associated with early signs of Alzheimer’s disease and more white matter hyperintensity volumes, an indicator of cerebral small blood vessel disease associated with cognitive decline and dementia. These participants also had smaller occipital and frontal lobes, regions associated with visual processing and executive functioning.
Differences persisted even when the researchers controlled for factors such as physical activity, diabetes, body mass index, smoking, and alcohol use.
Of note, the researchers relied on self-reported data for TV consumption, which can be less precise than timed tracking. Study participants also did not undergo a baseline MRI. Future research could begin with a baseline MRI to more concretely demonstrate changes over time.
Not all sitting is made the same
Strikingly, the sedentary element of TV watching didn’t appear to be the main driver for these changes.
Those who reported high amounts of sitting at work actually had larger frontal and occipital lobes, as well as reduced white matter hyperintensity volumes, indicating better brain health than among those who sit to watch TV. This could be due to the intellectually stimulating nature of many sit-down jobs, say the study authors.
Men appeared to be particularly vulnerable to these changes. When the MRI scans were separated by sex, researchers found that most of the changes to the brain, both from TV watching and occupational sitting, were seen in men.
Such findings indicate there is still more research to be done on this complex topic. However, we might eventually see a different approach to health guidance around sedentary activities. Rather than just directing their patients to move more, for example, physicians might recommend they reduce television time and add cognitively engaging activities for when they do sit.
“We frequently encourage the public not to spend too much time sitting down, but experts may want to expand that recommendation to encompass the activities done while sitting, since those seems to have distinct impacts on brain health,” says study corresponding author Natan Feter, postdoctoral scholar in the Human and Evolutionary Biology program at USC Dornsife.
About this study
In addition to Raichlen and Feter, study authors include Anamika Nanda, Mark Lai, Rand Wilcox and Sarah Hourihan of USC Dornsife; Daniel Aslan of Harvard University; Jayne Feter of Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul; M. Katherine Sayre of University of California Santa Barbara; Pradyumna Bharadwaj, Madeline Ally, Hyun Son, Yann Klimentidis, Amit Arora and Gene Alexander of the University of Arizona; Silvio Maltagliati of USC Dornsife and Université Bretagne Sud.
Funding: This research was supported by National Institutes of Health grants P30AG072980, P30AG019610, R56AG067200, R01AG064587, and R01AG072445 and funding from the state of Arizona, the Arizona Department of Health Services and the McKnight Brain Research Foundation.
Key Questions Answered:
Q: If both activities involve sitting completely still for hours, why does watching TV damage the brain while working at a desk protects it?
A:The secret lies in the stark contrast between active mental processing and passive absorption. Sitting down to do office work, write, or solve problems forces your brain to fire up its frontostriatal networks, the complex command centers that handle decision-making, memory retrieval, and planning. This continuous electrical firing acts like a workout that keeps neural pathways strong and maintains protective blood flow to brain tissue. Watching television, by contrast, is a highly passive activity that requires almost zero active thought or problem-solving. Over hours of daily viewing, this lack of mental stimulation leaves critical networks dark, causing the surrounding brain tissue to gradually waste away from disuse over a 20-year window.
Q: What exactly are “white matter hyperintensities,” and why should someone worry about their expansion?
A: Think of your brain like a massive corporate office building. The gray matter on the outside represents the individual computers, while the white matter on the inside represents the millions of internet cables and wires connecting those computers together. White matter hyperintensities (WMHs) are bright spots that appear on an MRI scan when those internal connection cables start losing their protective plastic coating due to poor local blood flow, a condition known as cerebral small blood vessel disease. When your white matter is heavily damaged, the different regions of your brain lose their ability to talk to each other quickly and cleanly, dramatically increasing your long-term vulnerability to unexpected strokes, age-related memory blocks, and dementia.
Q: Why were men found to be so much more vulnerable to these structural brain changes than women?
A: This asymmetry represents one of the most fascinating findings of the USC Dornsife study. While the exact biological reasons are still being investigated, neuroscientists suspect it may be linked to a combination of sex-specific cardiovascular differences, hormonal protection pathways, or variations in how men and women spend their leisure time. Women’s brains may possess distinct metabolic or estrogen-driven protections that cushion them against the vascular damage caused by passive sitting. Alternatively, the types of television consumed or the secondary habits paired with viewing might vary between sexes. This discovery highlights that future brain health guidelines cannot use a one-size-fits-all model; instead, preventative neurology must tailor recommendations to fit individual sex-based vulnerability matrices.
Editorial Notes:
This article was edited by a Neuroscience News editor.
Journal paper reviewed in full.
Additional context added by our staff.
About this neuroscience and aging research news
Author: James Key Source: USC Contact: James Key – USC Image: The image is credited to Neuroscience News
Associations of distinct sedentary behaviors with cortical, subcortical, and white matter hyperintensity volumes: Evidence from the ARIC study
INTRODUCTION
Longitudinal studies linking sedentary behavior (SB) in different contexts to brain structure and white matter hyperintensity (WMH) volume remain limited.
METHODS
We analyzed data from the Atherosclerosis Risk in Communities (ARIC) study (n = 1,712). Self-reported SB was assessed at visit 1 (1987–1989), with neuroimaging (3T magnetic resonance imaging [MRI]) at visit 5 (2011–2013). Participants were non-demented adults (57% women; 53[5.2] years) who reported frequency of TV watching and occupational sitting. Outcomes included cortical, subcortical, and Alzheimer’s disease–signature regions (ADSR), and total WMH brain volumes.
RESULTS
Frequent TV watching was associated with increased WMH volume and reduced frontal, occipital, and ADSR volumes. Sitting during work, which is more cognitively active, was linked to lower WMH and larger frontal (males only), occipital, and parietal volumes. Results remained consistent when adjusted for physical activity.
DISCUSSION
SB is associated with structural brain and WMH volumes. Cognitively active SB may preserve brain structure and cerebrovascular health.
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Dowries have been illegal in India for more than 60 years. Yet activists say the practice remains deeply embedded in society, and women continue to face abuse and even death when their husbands’ families demand more.
The death of former model and actress Twisha Sharma, whose family alleges she was killed over dowry demands, has reignited a national debate about one of India‘s most persistent forms of gender-based violence.
Sharma’s husband and mother-in-law have denied wrongdoing, and remain in judicial custody while the case is under investigation.
DW spoke with a survivor of alleged dowry abuse, and visited one of India’s longest-running women’s shelters to find out why campaigners say legal reforms have failed to eradicate the practice.
canisgallicus 