James' World 2

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It sounds like a joke: poppy seeds infused with opioids.

Indeed, it was a plotline on the sitcom Seinfeld. But for some, it has been a tragedy.

People have died after drinking tea brewed from unwashed poppy seeds.

And after eating lemon poppy seed bread or an everything bagel, mothers reportedly have been separated from newborns because the women failed drug tests.

Poppy seeds come from the plant that produces opium and from which narcotics such as morphine and codeine are derived. During harvesting and processing, the seeds can become coated with the opium fluid.

Members of the House and Senate have proposed legislation “to prohibit the distribution and sale of contaminated poppy seeds in order to prevent harm, addiction, and further deaths from morphine-contaminated poppy seeds.” The bill was one of several on the agenda for a Sept. 10 House hearing.

The day before the hearing, The Marshall Project and Reveal reported on a woman who ate a salad with poppy seed dressing before giving birth, tested positive at the hospital for opiates, was reported to child welfare, and saw her baby taken into protective custody. Almost two weeks passed before she was allowed to bring her baby home, the story said.

“It’s not an urban legend: Eating poppy seeds can cause diners to test positive for codeine on a urinalysis,” the Defense Department warned military personnel in 2023.

The U.S. Anti-Doping Agency long ago issued a similar warning to athletes.

The Center for Science in the Public Interest, a watchdog group, petitioned the FDA in 2021 to limit the opiate content of poppy seeds. In May, after more than three years with no response, it sued the agency to force action.

“So far the FDA has been negligent in protecting consumers,” said Steve Hacala, whose son died after consuming poppy seed tea and who has joined forces with CSPI.

The lawsuit was put on hold in July, after the FDA said it would respond to the group’s petition by the end of February 2025.

The FDA did not answer questions for this article. The agency generally does not comment on litigation, spokesperson Courtney Rhodes said.

A 2021 study co-authored by CSPI personnel found more than 100 reports to poison control centers between 2000 and 2018 resulting from intentional abuse or misuse of poppy seeds, said CSPI scientist Eva Greenthal, one of the study’s authors.

Only rarely would baked goods or other food items containing washed poppy seeds trigger positive drug tests, doctors who have studied the issue said.

It’s “exquisitely doubtful” that the “relatively trivial” amount of morphine in an everything bagel or the like would cause anyone harm, said Irving Haber, a doctor who has written about poppy seeds, specializes in pain medicine, and signed the CSPI petition to the FDA.

On the other hand, tea made from large quantities of unwashed poppy seeds could lead to addiction and overdose, doctors said. The risks are heightened if the person drinking the brew is also consuming other opioids, such as prescription pain relievers.

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It’s almost impossible to know what to say to someone in the throes of grief. We all want to say something comforting. Very few of us know what that is.

I’ve learned this the hard way. My beloved husband of 23 years died at the end of July, two years after being diagnosed with stage IV pancreatic cancer. Since then, I’ve seen friends and neighbors struggle for the right words, and I’ve been surprised by how even the kindest questions can set me off.

There’s no one right answer, of course. What is helpful for me may not work for someone else, and words that I find off-putting may be the perfect balm for another person. Still, trading notes with a few grieving people, including my own children, I’ve found some helpful do’s and five unexpected don’ts.

No. 1: ‘How are you?’

You’d be surprised how loaded this basic question can feel. A caring friend wants to know how you’re doing. What could possibly be wrong with that?

The problem, my kids and I realized, is that it’s a near-impossible question to answer. Our feelings of grief change by the hour, sometimes by the minute, so there’s no answer that will stand the test of time. Do you mean, how am I this very second?  I can answer that, but my answer might change a second later.  Do you mean, how are we coping in life?  The answer is, we don’t know yet.

We find it easier to answer less overarching questions, such as, how was college drop-off? How was the first day of school? How was dinner last night? Specific questions are less challenging than existential ones.

No. 2: ‘How can I help?’

I’ve had to dig deep to figure out why this generous question from well-meaning friends doesn’t sit right. I think it’s because it puts the onus on the griever to help the helper. The helper wants to figure something out – but those of us who are grieving are in no position to help. We often can’t articulate, and might not even know, what we want or need.

Here’s something that worked really well: neighbors who, without asking, dropped off a tray of lasagna or cookies or flowers or fill-in-the-blank. They didn’t ring the doorbell. They didn’t call to find out if we liked lasagna or if we’d be home. They simply left something on the doorstep. One helpful friend showed up at my house and immediately rolled up her sleeves and started doing my sink full of dishes. She didn’t ask. She just dived in. to open the fridge and figure out breakfast for the kids and me, I watched a delivery truck back into our driveway.  Out came bags of bagels, platters of cream cheese, smoked salmon, fresh fruit, and a carton of hot coffee sent by my colleagues. That morning, I did not have the forethought to say, “You know, I could really go for a bagel and coffee right now,” but it turns out that’s exactly what we needed.

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Ethel Kennedy, who lost her husband, Robert F. Kennedy, and brother-in-law, President John F. Kennedy, to assassins’ bullets, and who channeled her grief into raising her 11 children and pursuing a lifetime of public service, died Thursday. She was 96.

Kennedy died from complications from a stroke she suffered last week, former Rep. Joe Kennedy III, D-Mass., a grandson, said in a statement posted on X.

“It is with our hearts full of love that we announce the passing of our amazing grandmother, Ethel Kennedy,” the former congressman said.

Joe Kennedy wrote that his grandmother “was a devout Catholic and a daily communicant.”

“We are comforted in knowing she is reunited with the love of her life, our father, Robert F. Kennedy,” he wrote.

“Along with a lifetime’s work in social justice and human rights, our mother leaves behind nine children, 34 grandchildren, and 24 great-grandchildren, along with numerous nieces and nephews, all of whom love her dearly.”

Kennedy died six weeks after her third child, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., ended his presidential campaign and outraged his Democratic family by endorsing former President Donald Trump.

Born Ethel Skakel on April 11, 1928, in Chicago, Kennedy’s life was marked by tragedy even before Sirhan Sirhan made her a widow in 1968 by gunning down her husband while he was running for president.

Kennedy’s parents, coal magnate George Skakel and Ann Brannack Skakel, were killed in a 1955 plane crash.

Kennedy met her future husband in 1945 at a ski resort in Quebec. At the time, he was dating her older sister, Patricia, according to an official biography at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum.

Five years later, “Bobby and Ethel” were married, and their first child, Kathleen, was born on July 4, 1951.

By 1956, the young couple was living with their growing family in the sprawling Virginia mansion they bought from JFK. Meanwhile, Robert F. Kennedy’s public profile was on the rise as chief counsel to the Senate Select Committee. 

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Ethel Kennedy, widow of Robert F. Kennedy, on Capitol Hill in Washington on June 5, 2018. J. Scott Applewhite / AP file

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Vice President Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign operation crossed the $1 billion fundraising threshold in September, two months after she took over as the Democratic Party’s standard-bearer, according to two people familiar with the numbers.

The figure includes money raised by the campaign committee itself and by a campaign-affiliated joint fundraising committee that also collects cash for the Democratic National Committee and state parties.

The staggering pace suggests Harris has been able to sustain enthusiasm among donors, large and small, as the campaign enters the stretch run before the Nov. 5 election. But it comes amid a historic onslaught of outside spending from super PACs and other groups that has the Harris campaign concerned — particularly about direct mail, in which Republicans have opened a steep advantage in recent months, and on the ground, with groups like Elon Musk’s super PAC and others working to turn out voters for former President Donald Trump.

Meanwhile, public polling shows a finely balanced contest, with little separating Harris and Trump in the key swing states that will ultimately decide the election — and a sliver of swing voters still waiting to decide based on something they see in the last four weeks.

Presidential campaigns tend to take in more money as an election nears, but a clip of roughly half a billion dollars a month is unheard of. Biden’s campaign raised a little more than $1 billion for the entire 2020 election cycle, which included a competitive primary campaign, and affiliated outside groups chipped in another $580 million, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

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Democrats’ presidential fundraising took off when Kamala Harris jumped into the race in place of Joe Biden in July. Geoff Robins / AFP – Getty Images file

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I’m fond of saying that the cosmos is like a clock, with many objects and events undergoing cycles that can be measured and understood. Our calendars and clocks, after all, really are based on astronomical processes, such as the turning of Earth and its orbit around the sun.

Some other objects keep a calendar, too, but maybe they don’t check their watch often enough. They run late.

That seems to be the case for the star system T Coronae Borealis, or T Cor Bor for short. Every 80 years or so it dramatically brightens, going from obscurity to one of the 200 brightest stars in the sky in just a matter of hours. That cadence makes each of its flare-ups truly a “once-in-a-lifetime” event. The last time it did this was in 1946, so you might expect that it won’t again until 2026, two years from now. This particular object started showing signs of an impending blowout more than a year ago, however, so astronomers updated their own appointment books for it.

And then nothing—at least, not yet. It’ll blow, of that we’re certain, but it may not do so for another year. Or it could go tonight.

T Cor Bor is a binary star, or two stars that orbit each other. One, usually the brighter of the two, is a red giant, a star that is a little more massive than the sun and at the end of its life. Complicated processes in the star’s core cause the outer layers to swell up and cool. It becomes far more luminous as it grows—emitting much more light—but the cooler gas of its expanding outer layers turns the star red. It’s estimated to be about 75 times wider than the sun, making it more than 100 million kilometers in diameter—big enough that if it was swapped out for our own star, it would stretch nearly to the orbit of Venus.

The other star is far more dead. It, too, started off much like the sun and went through a red giant phase. Over time it blew off its outer layers, revealing the white-hot core—a white dwarf. Only the size of Earth but with more mass than the sun, it’s extremely hot and dense, yet its small stature makes it much fainter than its swollen companion.

Despite its Lilliputian nature, the density of the white dwarf gives it immense gravity. The two stars are so close together, separated by only about 75 million kilometers, that the white dwarf can physically pull material away from the red giant. This puts T Cor Bor in a second stellar category: it’s not just a binary star system but also a symbiotic one.

The red giant’s siphoned-off material moves toward the white dwarf but cannot simply plunge onto it. Because the two stars orbit each other, the infalling material has angular momentum, the tendency of a rotating object to continue rotating. As it moves toward the smaller star, it speeds up that sideways motion, just like water accelerates as it streams down a bathtub drain. This material forms a flattened disk around the white dwarf called an accretion disk. Matter—mostly hydrogen—then falls onto the white dwarf’s surface from the disk’s inner edge.

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At the heart of scientific questions about the origins of humanity lie questions of human nature. Are Homo sapiens intrinsically lovers or fighters, predators or prey, lucky survivors, or inevitable conquerors?

The friendlier answers to those queries keep coming, seen in a spate of genetic findings and some recent fossil discoveries. They also underline how tough life was for our prehistoric ancestors. Despite the eight billion people on Earth today, and counting, just surviving was winning for most of humanity’s history.

Not everyone did. Only 200,000 years ago, our ancestors lived on a planet teeming with varied human relatives: Neandertals lived in Europe and the Middle East. Denisovans, known today only from bone fragments, teeth, and DNA, dwelled across Asia and perhaps even in the Pacific. “Hobbits,” or Homo floresiensis, a diminutive species, lived in Indonesia, as another short-statured species, called Homo luzonensis, did in the Philippines. Even Homo erectus, the grandparent of early human species, was still running around as recently as 112,000 years ago.

Now they are all gone. Except in our genes. Denisovans interbred with Neandertals, and both mated with modern humans. Genes from “an unknown hominin in Africa” also mark modern humans’ genomes. The initial discovery of these admixtures, starting in 2010, shook up the once-conventional “Out of Africa” picture of human origins, which saw a small, singular group of human ancestors developing language and then replacing all others worldwide within the last 100,000 years.

Instead, the emerging picture of our origins is less of a family tree, and more of a tangled shrub, one whose winding branches wove distinct human groups together into today’s broader human population. People today largely derive from interbreeding between modern-looking humans in Africa and the disparate human populations littering the wider world. Those African expatriates themselves first arose from scattered, intermittently admixtured populations found across that continent.

Neandertals’ genes illuminate the extent of this intermingling. Rather than waging a war of extermination, modern humans and Neandertals co-existed for at least 10,000 years in Europe and Asia some 50,000 years ago. Or maybe even earlier, with evidence hinting that Homo sapiens lived in Greece 210,000 years ago, then ceded Europe to Neandertals. Genetic studies suggest this gene-swapping peaked twice, at about 200,000 years ago and again 50,000 years ago. Even some of the bacteria in our mouths, ponder that, appear to have a Neandertal origin. Because of that early mixing, Neandertals themselves averaged 2.5 to 3.7 percent Homo sapiens DNA, a contribution that confused the family tree later.

The demise of the Neandertals, who vanish from the fossil record after 40,000 years ago, instead appears more a matter of demographics. In a 2021 survey, the paleoanthropological field largely agreed that Neandertals’ small population size led to their disappearance. A Science report this summer backs this up. For that study, Princeton University researchers looked at recurrent gene flow between humans and Neandertals over the last 200,000 years. They found 20 percent fewer Neandertals were running about than expected. There just weren’t that many of them. They interbred and melted away into the larger populations of modern humans arriving from Africa.

Neandertal numbers also took a hit as their larger prey—woolly mammoths, bison, and woolly rhinoceros—dwindled during the Ice Ages. A September report of a 100,000-year-old Neandertal from France nicknamed “Thorin” suggests our cousins were less likely to migrate than modern humans, leaving them vulnerable to climate and landscape changes. Thorin descended from a population genetically isolated for tens of thousands of years, despite living near other Neandertals, ones who appear to have later mated with modern humans.

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An Unquiet Mind, by Kay Redfield Jamison

Dr. Jamison, a professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, details her experience living with bipolar disorder, or manic-depressive illness, as the condition was known when this memoir was first published in 1995.

She also describes the long “war” she waged against herself by intermittently resisting medication. “It is such an honest report of the struggle to stay in therapy and continue with treatment when the highs of bipolar are so compelling,” said Alexis Tomarken, a therapist in New York City.

Harriet Lerner, a psychotherapist in Lawrence, Kan. and author of “The Dance of Anger: A Woman’s Guide to Changing the Patterns of Intimate Relationships,” said that she often recommends this book to patients with bipolar disorder, but not “when they’re in a fragile or dysregulated state,” since reading the book can be an emotional experience.

Just Kids, by Patti Smith

In this title, the winner of the 2010 National Book Award for nonfiction, Ms. Smith reflects on making her way as a poet, performer and visual artist in New York City in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Broke, unsettled by the political violence of the time and navigating fluid relationships, she occasionally tipped into despair. But she shared a dedication to art with the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe that steadied and fueled her.

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Monica Garwood

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Among the plastic in your house might be an orange-colored hard laundry detergent bottle and a squeezable clear ketchup bottle. Come recycling day, you might put them on the curb in a blue bin or bag, expecting they will become something new.

But here’s the problem: those two plastic bottles cannot be recycled together because they are different colors, different plastic types, and made from different chemicals. Unlike an old aluminum can that can be recycled into a new aluminum can, plastics are fundamentally not designed to be recycled.

Yet the idea that plastics are just as recyclable as aluminum is a pervasive misconception because the plastics and petrochemical industries have been drilling it into our brains for nearly half a century. This long con has allowed these industries to make billions of dollars with zero accountability—until recently, when California attorney general Rob Bonta announced that the state of California was suing ExxonMobil for environmental damage and recycling lies.

This is a historic moment in the fight against plastic pollution, a crisis that has been created by companies that have known recycling was not possible for most plastics. While others have filed important suits against consumer brand companies for their pollution, like New York attorney general Letitia James’ lawsuit against PepsiCo, Bonta’s suit is the first to target a company for lying about plastic recycling’s efficacy.

Exxon, one of the largest oil and gas companies in the world, was an obvious company to focus on. Americans typically associate the company with gas stations, but Exxon also makes the polymers—the chains of repeating chemical pieces—that become plastic bottles, cups, utensils, takeout containers, and other packaging for U.S. consumer goods. It considers the manufacturing of plastic components a “core” part of its business and, according to Bonta’s lawsuit, sees 80 percent of the company’s growth potential as “dependent on single-use plastics applications.”

Think about that: while you’re stressing about what to put in the recycling bin, companies like Exxon are on a mission to find new ways to pump unnecessary plastic into the world.

The composition of most plastic makes it an inherently unrecyclable material. More than 16,000 chemicals are used to make different plastics to give the material qualities like color and flexibility, with different types of plastic using different combinations of these additives. The small amount of plastic that is actually recyclable (primarily No. 1 and No. 2, PET and HDPE) is delivered to a facility where the plastic is shredded and ground. Unlike paper, which can be turned into new paper products several times, recycled plastic typically becomes plastic lumber or clothing—which then can no longer be recycled and does not biodegrade.

That’s why less than 6 percent of plastics are recycled in the U.S. and why it’s deceptive that Exxon and others have spent millions over decades on public relations campaigns that falsely promote plastic recycling’s ability to manage all of the mess.

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Dear, How to Do It,

Last night, I was having sex with my husband and he grabbed both my hands and pinned them to the bed above my head with his hands. Really vanilla position, but it was fantastic and intimate in the moment, then within seconds my right shoulder shuddered and started spasming. He could tell something was wrong, he unpinned both my hands, and we were able to finish, but it wasn’t as enjoyable. Have you heard of this happening before? If so is there a way to deal with it? I can’t see myself having a face-to-face discussion with a chiropractor about this.

—Can’t Pin Me Down

Dear, Can’t Pin Me Down,

Yes, not only have I heard of body parts reacting poorly to being suddenly pinned down in an extreme way, but I’ve experienced it myself. If you want to see a chiropractor, I mean, it’s your body, but I’d suggest a physical therapist first. As for having a face-to-face discussion, if you’re really too embarrassed to tell the full story of what happened, you can simply say you laid on your shoulder funny with your arm up. Ideally, you briefly explain the whole truth (my partner pressed my arm into the bed with it lifted above my head) but if shame is going to prevent you from getting care then go with the workaround.

That said, thinking back on appointments I’ve had with these kinds of professionals, they really just want to know what hurts and walk you through some tests to determine what’s going on—there’s no need for the gory details of how it started hurting.

Dear, How to Do It,

I’m a man (47) married to my wife (47 F) for 20 years and before that we dated for three years. She is the love of my life and the only person I have ever slept with. For many years, our sex life was great. She had a higher sex drive than I did, and we would have sex two to three times a week. She would be the person to initiate it many times when we first started our relationship and be frustrated with me if I didn’t want to have sex with her. At that time, I would say I was comfortable with one to two times a week. We were not into exploring many things (she doesn’t like toys) but she always made me feel like I was doing a great job and caring for her needs.

When we decided to try to have kids, our sex was even more fun because we were doing it with a purpose now. After our first son was born about 11 years ago things understandably slowed down a little, but after a few months, we reached a frequency I was comfortable with. We were having sex about one to two times a week, and we had a second child a couple of years later. After that, we started to have less sex or the one time a week only happened if I initiated and expressed some frustration that I missed intimacy with her a lot. We talked a little, and mostly she was very tired and exhausted after a long day at work and the kids. I was tired too but didn’t want to miss the chance to kiss and hug her.

In the last three years, I have started getting resentful because I have tried to talk to her and express my feelings while trying to reassure I care about her too. We are having even less sex. We can easily go a month without having sex. I recently asked her and she told me that it now hurts her sometimes and for the most part, she doesn’t have interest anymore. After this last conversation, I’m feeling pretty devastated because I miss more intimacy with her and of course, I don’t want her to feel like I’m forcing her. I don’t want her to feel pressured to have sex with me.

I told her I was open to anything she wanted to do that could include touching and passionate kisses, and that I actually miss any form of intimacy with her. She can be very stubborn and told me that it was my fault that I could not control my desire (for her). We are old now and women slow down when they get older and men don’t. Just seeing her naked in the shower makes me just want to jump in the shower with her. What can I do to show her how much I miss her touch? I don’t want to think about going without it. We are getting older but I want to get older with her and be a sexually active older couple. I know I probably need to see a therapist for this but I’m also not comfortable talking to anyone about this yet. And I don’t want to feel I’m an asshole because I’m putting this pressure on her.

—Not Done in Bed Yet

Dear, Not Done in Bed Yet,

You’re not entirely correct when you say that “women slow down when they get older and men don’t.” This may possibly be true as a broad generalization, but we’ve heard from women over the years who are much older than your wife and frustrated that their husbands have no interest in keeping up sexually with them.

You say you’re open to anything and miss any form of intimacy, but the only specifics you mention are pretty far toward the sexual end of the sexual-sensual continuum. So, before you approach your wife again, do some real introspection about whether you actually mean it when you say you’d be happy with nonsexual intimacy like hugs and kisses that lead to nothing more. My gut says you’re lying to yourself because you know that demanding sex from your wife is not a Good Guy™ thing to do, but putting aside your concern with being “good” can help you be honest, and that honesty is likely to resonate better with your wife than what you’ve written here, which is contradictory.

The best way to avoid feeling like an asshole for pressuring your partner is to, well, not pressure your partner. You say you want to have sex when it’s comfortable for both you and your wife. She’s told you sex often hurts her, and that she’s not interested. It seems like you’re hoping something will magically change on her end, and that isn’t the case. You might consider asking your wife whether she’s interested in ways to reduce or prevent the pain she feels. If she’s open to that idea, research experts and options yourself. I want to do some expectation management here though—the state of women’s reproductive health is pretty dismal, so there may not actually be a solution out there that works for her, or it may take a very long time to find one.

You’re correct, a therapist can help you sort through a lot of the things I’ve pointed out today and all the other struggles you might’ve left out of your letter. If you can get comfortable with the idea, it wouldn’t hurt to seek out a sex-positive therapist.

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Photo illustration by Slate. Photo by Getty Images Plus.

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For most of the 20th century, each successive decade added about three extra years to people’s average lifespan in developed countries. For a person born at the turn of the 21st century, these incremental gains meant that they could, on average, live 30 years longer than someone born in 1900, allowing them to make it to their 80th birthday.

This phenomenon, referred to as radical life extension, was gifted to humanity by advances in various medical technologies and public health measures. Many scientists and lay people alike assumed that the trend would continue and that human lifespans would increase at the same clip indefinitely. Others, however, predicted that humans would hit a natural ceiling, with average lifespans of the world’s longest-lived countries plateauing well before 100.

New research on this hotly debated question now suggests that humanity has, in fact, reached an upper limit of longevity. Despite ongoing medical advances designed to extend life, the findings indicate that people in the most long-lived countries have experienced a deceleration in the rate of improvement of average life expectancy over the past three decades.

This is because aging—a series of poorly understood biological processes whose effects include frailty, dementia, heart disease and sensory impairments—has so far eluded efforts to slow it down, says S. Jay Olshansky, a professor of public health at the University of Illinois at Chicago and lead author of the new study, which was published in Nature Aging. “Our bodies don’t operate well when you push them beyond their warranty period.”

“As people live longer, it’s like playing a game of Whac-a-Mole,” he adds. “Each mole represents a different disease, and the longer people live, the more moles come up and the faster they come up.”

Olshansky became convinced of the immutability of the aging problem in 1990, when he published a paper in Science that predicted that our gains in life expectancy must slow down, even if advances in medicine accelerate. He concluded then that it was “highly unlikely” that humanity would exceed an average life expectancy of 85 years.

The paper met with widespread pushback, he says, because “there’s vested interest in this narrative of continued gains in life expectancy.”

Olshansky was convinced he was right, though. So he decided to “be a patient scientist,” he says, and retest his hypothesis once the real-world data came in. It took 34 years, but the wait has now paid off with “a definitive yes” in support of his original findings, he adds.

Olshansky and his colleagues took a straightforward approach: they examined observed changes in death rates and life expectancies from 1990 to 2019 in the world’s eight longest-lived countries—Japan, South Korea, Australia, France, Italy, Switzerland, Sweden, and Spain—plus the U.S. and Hong Kong. They found that improvement in life expectancy decelerated in almost all of these places, and that it actually declined in the U.S.

South Korea and Hong Kong were exceptions. They underwent recent accelerated improvements in survival, a phenomenon the researchers suspect has to do with the fact that both places concentrated their large increases in life expectancy only recently, in the past 25 years, Olshansky says. Even so, in Hong Kong—whose population is the world’s longest-lived—the researchers found that just 12.8 percent of female children and 4.4 percent of male children born in 2019 are expected to reach 100 years old.

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