Charles Dickens fought his depression by walking through London at night. One October he set out at 2 in the morning and walked 30 miles, all the way to his country home in Kent. In 1860 he wrote about why it worked. It took psychology another 150 years to catch up.
Dickens called his bad spells "spectres." They came back every time he started a new novel and sometimes hung on for months. His mood would fall apart, his sleep would collapse, and the only thing that pulled him out was walking.
He explained his method in an essay called "Night Walks," published on July 21, 1860 in his weekly magazine All the Year Round. He had tried fighting his insomnia from bed and lost. So he changed the plan. The fix, he wrote, was "getting up directly after lying down, and going out, and coming home tired at sunrise." A worried mind cannot fix itself by worrying more in bed. You have to get up and move.
Most nights he walked 12 to 20 miles. A friend called it "violent walking." Dickens wrote that on these walks his wandering self had "many miles upon miles of streets in which it could, and did, have its own solitary way."
Today, walking is one of the most powerful tools doctors have against depression. In 2012 a team of researchers pulled together eight high-quality studies of walking as a depression treatment. The effect was as strong as the antidepressants doctors actually prescribe.
The biggest test came from Duke University. The SMILE study took 202 adults with serious depression and split them into four groups: supervised exercise, home exercise, the drug Zoloft, or a placebo pill. After 16 weeks, the people who exercised did just as well as the people on Zoloft. A 2024 review of 75 studies covering 8,636 patients confirmed it. Walking should be one of the first things doctors try.
The reason is the thing Dickens stumbled onto in the dark. Depression runs on rumination, the looping bad thoughts that grind people down during the worst stretches. In 2015 Stanford researchers scanned people's brains before and after a 90-minute walk in a quiet park. The walkers had less activity in a part of the brain called the subgenual prefrontal cortex. That spot, deep behind your forehead, is the brain's worry loop. After the walk, the worry loop got quieter. The walkers said they felt less stuck inside their own heads. The brain scans agreed.
A walking body shuts up a noisy mind. The street takes attention, the walking rhythm fills the head, and the dark spells lose their grip. Dickens called the streets his cure because they gave his brain somewhere else to be. The science 150 years later says he had it right. Depression hates a brain that is moving.
Halide Edip Adıvar’ın aynı adlı romanından uyarlanan ve Mehmet Dinler tarafından sinemaya aktarılan 1967 yapımı "Sinekli Bakkal" filminde, Ediz Hun’un canlandırdığı Peregrini karakterinin İspanya’da bir kilisede olduğu sahneler aslında Beyoğlu’ndaki Sent Antuan Kilisesi'nde çekilmiştir. Muhtemelen dönemin kısıtlı imkanları ve yüksek yurt dışı maliyetleri nedeniyle tercih edilen İstiklal Caddesi’ndeki bu tarihi kilise; Neo-Gotik mimarisi ve kendine has dokusuyla, yönetmen Mehmet Dinler'in İstanbul’un kalbinde aradığı "yurt dışı" havasını başarıyla kurmasını sağlamıştır.
The reason everything seems so fake is because the working-class has been squeezed out of the music business, journalism, TV and movie production.
Some interesting introspection from Rick Beato.
Why Only Rich Kids Make It In Music Today
Today is the 30th anniversary of the release of the RATM album EVIL EMPIRE. Recorded in a tiny rehearsal room in Hollywood it was our first #1 album and went on to sell 3 million copies. The CD booklet featured a “Rage Reading List” to accompany the sonic assault. Fave songs/books?
Classical music and metal fans have surprisingly similar personalities, based on a study of 36,000 people across 60+ countries
Both have the same basic motivation: to hear something dramatic/theatrical, and a shared ‘love of the grandiose’
Happy Birthday, Elias Koteas.
One of the most underrated actors of his generation, Some Kind of Wonderful, Fallen, Zodiac, The Prophecy… he’s always outstanding. He's incredible in The Thin Red Line. Standing out amongst this cast takes real skill. This is spectacular.
Strange Days (1995) is a brutal, immersive vision of the future that still feels ahead of its time. Ralph Fiennes is electric, and Angela Bassett owns every frame she’s in. One of the great underseen sci-fi films of the ’90s.
The famous final scene of 'The Long Good Friday' (1980) was the first scene to be shot. Director John MacKenzie, who was driving, told Bob Hoskins the story and events of the movie to come and filmed Hoskins's reactions. Cinematographer Phil Meheux sat between the driver and passenger seat with a one thousand foot magazine attached to the camera and filmed continuously until it ran out.
As there was no room to properly light Hoskins in the interior of the car, Mehuex used a fifty watt light bulb (plugged into the cigarette lighter) placed on the end of the camera's matte box.
Even though it appears that Pierce Brosnan (In his first movie role) and Bob Hoskins share a car, neither actor was present when the other was captured in close-up (they each worked on a separate night), so Brosnan and Hoskins never did get to work with one another throughout the shoot.
(Source - IMDb)