At the end of the day, we are all diggers. Stamped with different labels: Gold-diggers, Knowledge-diggers, Fame-diggers, Love-diggers, Morality-diggers, Beauty-diggers, Sensuality-diggers. The question is: What are you digging for?
Women do not have a fight-or-flight response to stress the way men do. They have a tend-and-befriend response, and it is driven by a completely different hormone. A 2000 paper in Psychological Review argued that the stress response described in every textbook was studied almost exclusively in men, and that women evolved a different strategy.
The paper was written by Shelley Taylor at UCLA and became one of the most cited papers in stress research. She pointed out that the fight-or-flight model was built on studies of male animals and male humans, and that when researchers finally tested women, the pattern did not hold. Under stress, women were more likely to care for their children (tend) and seek out other women (befriend) than to fight or run.
The hormone behind it is oxytocin. Both men and women release oxytocin under stress, but in men, testosterone dampens its calming effects. In women, estrogen amplifies them. The result is that stress pushes women toward connection and men toward confrontation, and both responses evolved because they worked: a mother alone with a child cannot fight a predator or outrun one, but a group of mothers can.
The paper changed how researchers think about female friendship. The bond between women is not a social nicety. It is a survival mechanism built into the endocrine system, and the women who formed the strongest social bonds under stress were the ones most likely to survive long enough to pass the trait on.
Every woman who has called her best friend after the worst day of her life was running a programme that is older than language. The phone call is the tend-and-befriend response, and the relief she felt when someone picked up was oxytocin doing its job. https://t.co/D7rxumUYla
I am no longer certain about what’s behind the opinions of a substantial portion of people on what’s happening. Is it ignorance? Misinformation? Stupidity? Or sheer malice?
I think we reached a point where opinions on the current state of affairs are no longer political disputes. They are moral stances. It is not a debate, it is a confession of character.
Will April 8th get the same "never forget" energy as October 7th, or does the world’s moral compass only spin for certain people? Selective outrage is just quiet complicity.
@richimedhurst One letter he wrote to his combatants was so eloquent that it became a popular war-song among Lebanese (Muslims and Christians alike). It is even sung by a Christian known as the “voice of war”. The song is Ahibaii (arabic for my beloved ones) - Julia Boutros
How can we expect from nations that hold intellectual debates over obvious matters, such as what defines a man/woman, to maintain the moral clarity needed to distinguish the victim from the guilty?
Seeing Western oil prices rise feels like a long-overdue reality check. People can ignore foreign intervention when they have no skin in the game, but it’s harder to overlook once the consequences finally hit their own pockets.
This man created one of the most luxurious brands—but no one talks about him.
With a $3.1 BILLION turnover in 2024, Ralph Lauren, Hugo Boss, and Burberry envy their success.
Here's the forgotten story of how a father's ultimatum created a billion-dollar empire: 🧵
Today, we are witnessing the creation of atrocity propaganda in real-time.
What is atrocity propaganda, and how has it been used to win support for war? A thread:
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"Why are we only applauding masculinity in women and villainizing it in men?
And why are we only applauding femininity in men and debasing it in women?"
- Evangeline Lilly
“All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.”
—Susan Sontag
If only we come to realize how much the identities we hold so dear to our hearts are mostly assigned by a random interplay between time and place rather than our own deliberate thinking.