Into the Woods – Watching a bewildering world from the middle of nowhere

The 2025-2026 flu and Covid vaccines (updated below)

The “check in” kiosk at a CVS MinuteClinic, where no staff was visible for up to half an hour at a time.

It took some effort this year to get the new Covid vaccine. I needed to get that taken care of this week, because starting next week I’ll be on five different airline flights through four different airports, not to mention several train trips in Scotland.

The friction, of course, is caused by the Robert Kennedy Jr.’s deranged tampering with the American health care system. The situation varies from state to state. Here in North Carolina, most people get vaccines at pharmacies, particularly CVS. However, a state regulation does not allow pharmacists to do vaccinations unless the vaccine has been approved by the federal Advisory Committee on Vaccine Practices (ACIP). Back in June Kennedy dismissed all seventeen members of that committee and has been appointing his own goons to the committee. The committee doesn’t even meet until September 18. Who knows what it will do?

I had to do some asking around to figure out how to get the vaccine before the ACIP meeting. The solution turned out to be CVS MinuteClinics. The MinuteClinics have nurse practitioners, and nurse practitioners are not affected by North Carolina’s limitations on what pharmacists can do. I had to wait an hour to get the shot. There weren’t all that many people waiting. But the MinuteClinic was grossly understaffed.

Stories in the media were absolutely no help in figuring out the situation in North Carolina. I found out about the MinuteClinic solution through a Facebook group for the Democratic Party. Is this an indicator of how even accurate information will become politicized as the fascists push propaganda and call everything else fake news?

I was able to get the flu shot at a pharmacy last week because the flu vaccine is not being held up by the ACIP meeting. My Humana Medicare Advantage insurance paid for both vaccines.

All of a sudden, getting vaccines (and figuring out whether insurance will pay) has become an obstacle course, a political statement, and an act of resistance. Republicans are politicizing the health-care system, putting politicians in charge of public health while marginalizing medical people.

We can only hope that we don’t have a pandemic while know-nothings are running the government. If know-nothing people who like know-nothing governments want to exercise their freedom to die of preventable diseases, fine and good riddance. But they’re going to make things as hard as possible for the rest of us.

Update:

The Washington Post does a somewhat better job of describing the Covid-vaccine limbo we’re in: Virginia makes it easier to access covid vaccines as virus cases rise. The story adds a fact I wasn’t aware of that puts even more blame on Kennedy. He delayed the ACIP meeting.

Traditional values??

From my morning walk: a happy goat

David Brooks

Show me a conservative intellectual and I will show you someone who is insufferably morally smug, with blind spots half a galaxy wide.

I do give David Brooks credit for halfway recognizing that everything he has flacked for for many years has gone to the devil. Still, he identifies as a conservative, and periodically he writes a piece intended to sustain his moral smugness and to flatter conservatives and conservatism.

His column in the New York Times this morning is a masterpiece of self-deception: Why I Am Not a Liberal. Brooks writes: “As a society, we are pretty good at transferring money to the poor, but we’re not very good at nurturing the human capital they would need to get out of poverty.”

It is conservatism, he would have us believe, that knows how to nurture this human capital. Then he shoots himself right between the eyes by citing a study on how Swedish culture protects people of Swedish descent from poverty, even though Sweden is always at or near the top of the list of the world’s most liberal countries.

Because of his blind spot, it doesn’t occur to Brooks to ask himself who conservatives throw money at: the rich and the super-rich. Did the trillions of dollars redistributed upward, and the creation of hundreds of American billionaires, make the rich virtuous? Is it more virtuous to throw money at the rich than at poor people who can barely afford to feed their children?

I have a fantasy of running into Brooks in an airport restaurant while he’s having his $78 hamburger. “You’re a pretty nice man,” I’d say to him. “But you’re an idiot.”

Ken is in the New York Times again

Ken has an article in the Aug. 30 New York Times, The Era of the American Lawn Is Over. On his Substack page, he also has a short video showing his wee front and back gardens near Edinburgh.

The price of silver

One often hears it said that people who grew up during the Great Depression remain frugal for the rest of their lives. Those of us who remember the stagflation of the 1970s and early 1980s will never forget it. I’m convinced that I can smell a financial calamity well before it happens, because of the irrational exuberance and the obvious unsustainability. That unsustainability never unwinds gradually. It always comes crashing down.

On January 17, 1980, silver reached a high of $49.95 per ounce. Two months later, the Hunt brothers (who were trying to corner the silver market) missed a margin call, and the price of silver fell to $10.80 per ounce.

This morning, as I write, silver is priced at $41.46 per ounce, having risen by around $10 an ounce in the past few months. If you have some silver, that’s nice. But it is not a good economic indicator. Irrational exuberance continues in the stock market, but many warning signs are flashing in the bond market and in gold and currency markets.

As I see it, there is a calamity in our near future. Irrational exuberance tends to last much longer than a rational person can understand. When bubbles will burst is impossible to predict.

The August jobs report was just released. “U.S. labor markets stalled this summer,” writes the New York Times. Yet the stock market is up, apparently because the weakening labor market means that the Fed will reduce interest rates. We should ask ourselves: Who benefits more from low interest rates than from a healthy economy? (Hint: people who play with other people’s money — the people who always cause financial crises.)

To my lights, it’s time to fasten our seatbelts and prepare for turbulence. A financial crisis is never good, even when governments are wise and rational in managing it. But we Americans are now passengers in a ship of fools and con men, who, given choices, will always choose the worst, then double down.

Originally published September 5, 1957. Charlotte, North Carolina. Photo by Douglas Martin, the Charlotte News, via Wikimedia Commons. This photo was selected as the 1957 World Press Photo of the Year. Click here for high resolution.

The deplorables, an anniversary

The photo above was first published 68 years ago today. We must never forget who the deplorables are, what they are, what their values are, and what they are capable of. The photo is of Dorothy Counts, taunted by white students at Harry P. Harding High School.

John Buchan

John Buchan (right) and Roy Tash looking through the viewfinder of an Akeley camera. Source: Library and Archive of Canada, c. 1937.

Discovering just one new extraordinarily good writer a year is a wonderful thing, though all my bookselves are full, and, once again, teetering stacks of unshelved books are forming on the table beside my bed. Last year that writer was C.J. Sansom and his series of seven Shardlake novels. This year it is John Buchan.

Though connoisseurs of spy novels always include Buchan on their lists, I am not a connoisseur of spy novels. (If I am a connoisseur of anything, it’s novels that are not set in the here and now.) It was ChatGPT that made me aware of Buchan after I asked for book recommendations. That particular ChatGPT discussion was about how writers who came out of Oxford tend to have a rare confidence with the English language. They’re elite and they know it, thus they have no need to show off or — heaven forbid — experiment with language. Thus they write in the plain, lucid, transparent Anglo-Saxon that is, in my opinion anyway, the best kind of language for storytelling in English.

Many of Buchan’s novels are more than a hundred years old. But the writing is entirely modern. This puzzled me until I realized that plain Anglo-Saxon English changes very little from century to century. Whereas florid writing styles that draw heavily on the Latin side of English go out of fashion quickly. This, I suspect, is the main reason why hardly anybody reads Sir Walter Scott anymore (more on Sir Walter Scott below). Scott loved the Scots language and records it faithfully. But ironically Scott’s English is so wordy, congestive, and archaic that it demands too much of today’s readers.

Buchan is best known for The Thirty-Nine Steps, which Alfred Hitchcock made into a movie in 1935. After I read The Thirty-Nine Steps, I rented the movie for $2.99 and couldn’t finish watching it. It was just too primitive. Plus Hitchcock fiddled with the story to dumb it down. Hitchcock wanted to make a movie of Greenmantle, but I read that Hitchcock and Buchan’s heirs couldn’t agree on a price for the rights.

But forget Hitchcock. Moviemaking technology in Hitchcock’s time was too primitive to match the vividness that comes through in Buchan’s storytelling. After Greenmantle, I will read Witch Wood, which some readers say is Buchan’s masterpiece.

Sir Walter Scott

Buchan was a prolific writer, and not just of fiction. He wrote a biography of Sir Walter Scott that was published in 1932. On eBay I bought an American edition of that biography that also was published in 1932. It will be a nice reference book to have. The definitive biography of Sir Walter Scott, by John Gibson Lockhart, was published in seven volumes in 1837 and 1838. Those books would be almost impossible to find outside of university libraries, and as far as I know the Lockhart biography has never been digitized.

Buchan was born in Scotland. He was Governor General of Canada from 1935 until his death in 1940. On December 7, 1923, Buchan was the speaker at the annual dinner of the Edinburgh Sir Walter Scott Club. The text of his talk is available on line. Buchan and I seem to agree on something I have often said about Scott’s novels — that though Scott was fascinated with kings and queens and the famous figures of Scottish history, Scott is at his best when the story involves Scottish peasants. From Buchan’s talk:

My last example is Sir Walter’s treatment of his Scottish peasants. His kinship to the soil was so close that in their portraiture he never fumbles. They are not figures of a stage Arcadia, they are not gargoyles mouthing a grotesque dialect, they are the central and imperishable Scot, the Scot of Dunbar and Henryson and the Ballads, as much as the Scot of Burns and Galt and Stevenson. He gives us every variety of peasant life – the sordid, as in the conclaves of Mrs Mailsetter and Mrs Heukbane; the meanly humorous, as in Andrew Fairservice; the greatly humorous, as in Meg Dods; the austere in Davie Deans; the heroic in Bessie McClure. It is this last aspect that I want you to note. Because he made his plain folk so robustly alive, because his comprehension was so complete, he could raise them at the great moment to the heroic without straining our belief in them. No professed prophet of democracy ever did so much for the plain man as this Tory Border laird. Others might make the peasant a pathetic or a humorous or a lovable figure, but Scott could make him also sublime, without departing from the strictest faithfulness in portraying him; nay, it is because of his strict faithfulness that he achieves sublimity where others only produce melodrama. We are familiar enough with laudations of lowly virtue, but they are apt to be a little patronising in tone; the writers are inclined to enter “the huts where poor men lie” with the condescension of a district visitor. Scott is quite incapable of patronage or condescension; he exalts his characters at the fitting moment because he knows the capacity for greatness in ordinary Human nature. It is to his peasants that he gives nearly all the most moving speeches in the novels. It is not a princess or a great lady who lays down the profoundest laws of conduct; it is Jeanie Deans. It is not the kings and captains who most eloquently preach love of country, but Edie Ochiltree, the beggar, who has no belongings but a blue gown and a wallet; and it is the same Edie who, in the famous scene of the storm, speaks words which, while wholly and exquisitely in character, are yet part of the world’s poetry.

⬆︎ Click here for high-resolution version.

⬆︎ The first page of Greenmantle. Click here for high-resolution version.

Beans for breakfast?

A modest version of a Scottish breakfast: Barley scone, beans, fake bacon, grilled tomatoes, fried egg

It’s less than a month until my trip to Scotland, and that got me looking forward to those enormous and irresistible Scottish breakfasts. How did it come to pass, I wondered, how beans are served for breakfast (to tourists, anyway) in both England and Scotland? I even have had breakfast beans in a hotel on Connaught Place in Delhi, which made me wonder if the idea came from India.

Nope. According to ChatGPT, breakfast beans came from America.

The H.J. Heinz Co., said the AI, started shipping its tinned Boston baked beans to Britain as early 1895. “By the 1920s,” AI wrote, “Heinz had adapted the recipe for British tastes, making it less sweet and more tomato-forward. These beans were cheap, easy to store, and didn’t require cooking from scratch, which made them popular in working-class homes — and eventually a fixture in the full English breakfast after WWII.” Breakfast beans arrived in Wales and Scotland a bit later, AI said — the 1960s-70s.

When I was making the breakfast in the photo, I tried to figure out the minimum number of pans required — (two). In a commercial kitchen, I’m sure, those big British breakfasts are cooked on a griddle. That made me realize than an electric griddle would be a nice thing to have, if I had a place to store it.

Democrats always get blamed for what fascists do

If I made a short list of the biggest lies ever told, one of them would be that there are two sides to every story. But there are not two sides to fascism — not two truthful sides, anyway. But that’s not how the mainstream media play it. We have a word for it — “both-sidesism.” It’s an ugly cousin of radical centrism, and it’s a foolish and deadly way of describing a world that has wicked people in it. Both-sidesism requires that lies have to be treated as though they’re true, or at least might be true, or at least that some people think they’re true.

There is a huge industry that blames Democrats for what Republicans do. For example, how many times have we heard that “Democrats abandoned the working class.” But Democrats didn’t abandon the working class. Republicans won over the working class with propaganda and con men that appeal to the deplorables’ ignorance, their racism, their gullibility, their awful religion, and their meanness.

The moment someone dares to point this out, the propaganda and con men have a ready answer: See there! You call them ignorant, racist, gullible, and mean but you claim you didn’t abandon them! No wonder they don’t like you! This is thought to be a real clincher of an argument that really owns and bedazzles the libs.

This so-called clincher of an argument also belongs on a short list of the biggest lies ever told. That lie is that educated elites are the real cause of fascism and that the deplorables are really just wonderful, wonderful people, if only we understood them. As for educated elites, as much blame gets heaped on liberals for failures to stand in the way of fascism as on fascists for their fascism. But if the deplorables saw fit to hand both houses of Congress, and the White House, to Republicans, just what magic wands do we expect Democrats to use to exert control, especially since fascists have packed the courts? Gavin Newsom of California is finally getting some traction with ridicule and plain talk.

Those who blame liberals for fascism apparently think that there exists some political strategy in which the deplorables can be won back from fascism with flattery, sweet talk, and “understanding.” That is nonsense. We have passed the tipping point. The only solution is to remind the deplorables that there are more civilized people in the world than there are deplorables, and that civilized people have a bigger stick, once they decide to use it. If the deplorables want a war, then ask them whose side half the American people (the smarter half), plus Europe, Canada, and Mexico would be on. Gavin Newsom and Beto O’Rourke are now, at last, being heard above the noise of both-sidesism.

One of most beautiful things we’ve seen lately was seven European leaders — five of them heads of state — descending on Washington to let Trump know where some lines will be drawn. The American media pretended not to understand, because it would feel oh so very harsh to have to explain to the American people that they now live in a rogue country that the world is preparing to deal with. That visit was a warning.

Trump and company know that this is their last chance. They’re going to go for full-on fascism that no law and no election can depose, counting on never being held accountable, free to loot and to dominate. They don’t have the cards to do that. Someone should remind them of Nuremberg.

Summer is winding down

A spicebush swallowtail butterfly was kind enough to pose for me on a Mexican sunflower. Click here for high-resolution version.

After a hot and humid month, Hurricane Erin moved up the East Coast, followed by weather than feels like early fall, with nighttime lows in the 60s and even 50s.

What a relief.

Writing that manipulates and exploits readers

Above: An anecdotal lede, a method of infantilizing readers that was developed back in the 1980s.

It’s not just clickbait headlines that try to manipulate our attention. Web sites also measure how long readers stay on a page, as part of their “engagement” bean-counting. Thus writers and editors are under pressure from bean counters to withhold the key point (if any) of an article for as long as possible, to keep you on the page.

How often does this happen to you?: A clickbait headline promises something interesting. You click, and you keep reading. But you never seem to reach whatever interesting thing it was the clickbait headline promised.

Once upon a time, in a now-lost galaxy far away, there was the belief that writing served the reader. An important factor in serving the reader was not to waste the reader’s time. The inverted pyramid was the rule — the key facts, or one’s main point, came first. The details followed.

The concept of starting a piece with a trivial detail (the anecdotal lede) would have been incomprehensible, if anyone had thought of it. When someone did think of it, I think the idea came from the teaching of “creative writing,” and the notion that techniques used in fiction could somehow improve the writing in, say, newspapers. It was a horrible idea, and I’m convinced that it frustrated readers and drove them away, rather than delighting readers and sucking them in, as it claimed to do.

Consider the anecdotal lede in the photo above. What is the story about? Thirty-four words in, you have no idea — nor will you, until maybe the fourth or fifth paragraph. Did the writing delight you? I didn’t think so. Rather, the lede infantilizes you by supposing that you need to be babied with some “telling details” to “pull you into” the story. In my years as a newspaper copy editor, I called hogwash on this a thousand times. Nobody listened.

In that now-lost galaxy, the reader’s attention belonged to the reader. There was no attempt to hijack and control the reader’s attention. You didn’t baby the reader. But it was inevitable that, once it became possible to monitor, measure, and monetize everything that readers do, readers would be abused and exploited. The kind of writing that exploited readers in the online world quickly migrated to the world of print, where reader behavior cannot be monitored, but you get babied and manipulated just the same.

This battle is lost. There is no going back. But standards, once set, continue to exist, even if hardly anyone honors them anymore.

I would argue that, in the long term, these new methods of reader exploitation are self-defeating because they drive readers away. There are a great many publications that once were respected but that are now clickbait factories that are failing but that crank out clickbait in their desperation to survive — the New Republic, Slate, Popular Mechanics. On average, people spend far less time on Facebook than they used to. People caught on to how they were being manipulated by Facebook, and they didn’t like it.

Even if video “reels” are the new attention sinks, and even if artificial intelligence convinces a great many young people that they no longer need to learn to write because AI will do it for them, nevertheless somebody has to learn to write, even if reading and writing become something done only by a high-information elite. Artificial intelligence can recycle the writing of humans, but it will never produce anything original until it can explore, experience, and move around in the world using senses and powers of its own.

We’ve all seen the articles about how children don’t read for fun anymore, and how even elite college students balk if asked to read an entire book. I have no idea what, if anything, can be done about that.

But I do feel very strongly that, even if reading well and writing well are to become elite activities for only a few, these elite readers and writers must not allow bean counters and the sorry crews who work for them to wipe out the high standards that once applied.

One can at least speak for such standards and keep them alive among those who still care. Meanwhile, my guess is that standards of writing and editing will get even worse, not least because so few of today’s young people will ever learn how to write.

Protein bombs for the protein wars

On July 27, the New York Times had a very nice piece on protein and fitness — The Protein Bar Arms Race. Specifically it’s about a new entry in the market for protein bars — David bars. These bars have 28 grams of protein at the price of only 150 calories.

It happens that I was on a diet for about three months. I’m also trying to gain some muscle. To do both at the same time is difficult, especially at my age. The only hope is in keeping carbs and calories down while keeping protein up, plus resistance training and a creatine supplement. These are my doctor’s orders, actually. Because I’m healthy and can have a long “health span” if I behave myself, he says that gradual loss of muscle mass over the years is what’s most likely to put me out of commission someday if I don’t head it off. Walking is not enough, he said (but keep walking). Resistance training is essential. He prescribes 30 minutes of resistance training three times a week. He practices what he preaches. He’s as lean as a whippet and as fit as fiddle.

I used to think that resistance training always involves gyms and machines. But I’m learning that, these days, more and more people are doing their resistance training at home using inexpensive hand weights and a video routine. There are many of those on YouTube. A good video routine will keep you moving, as though you’re doing circuit training. So it’s good for your aerobic fitness as well as your muscles. My weakness is staying with it. I’ll try.

The David bars are pretty pricey. They can be ordered from Amazon, though they’re shipped directly from David’s. I’ve tried only the fudge brownie flavor so far, and they’re quite good.

Beto is right

Beto O’Rourke probably is an underdog for the Democratic Party’s 2028 nomination for president. But, as of now, he would be my first choice. I wish this video would go viral. It’s Beto speaking at the Netroots Nation meeting in New Orleans on August 8, 2025. He is not afraid to use the word fascist (which is the right word). He says that, if we are to avoid fascism in America, regaining some power in the 2026 midterm elections is our only hope.

The video in the link is 23 minutes long. All of it is worth watching.

Words that are never the right word

One of my favorite Mark Twain quotes is: “The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter. ’Tis the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.”

What might he have said about the wrong word? I’d say that the wrong word is something like a train wreck. It screeches, lights the page on fire, and everything comes to a stop.

Years ago I started a list of words that a good writer would never use. Among them:

alacrity
celerity
myriad
plethora
cacophony
akimbo
acrid
stentorian
erstwhile
comprise
staccato
pulchritude
mellifluous
sanguine
lugubrious
vicissitude
recondite
effulgent

Most of these are show-off words. Bad writers think that such words make them sound smart or something.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve looked up alacrity and celerity. Useless words just don’t stick in my memory. I finally was able to remember what alacrity means because it’s related to an Italian word used in music, allegro. As for celerity, I finally figured out that it’s related to the word accelerate, so that will help me remember that one.

Most of these useless words have Latin or Greek roots, though akimbo comes from Old Norse. The proper language of fiction is plain old Anglo-Saxon. That’s one of the many reasons I love Tolkien’s writing so much. He wrote in Anglo-Saxon English, rarely resorted to words borrowed from French, and, as a philologist, he always used the right word. Imagine alacrity at Bilbo’s birthday party, or celerity in running from orcs.

Thesauruses have a purpose, but mostly, I think, they’re abused. Sometimes, when writing, one knows that there is a lightning word for what one wants to say, but the word refuses to come to mind. A thesaurus can help find it.

It’s pure abuse, though, when someone uses a thesaurus to find an uncommon word with the idea that it’s lazy to use the common word, as though all synonyms are equal. For example, not wanting to describe a shirt as green, the word verdant is lifted from a thesaurus. A variant of this I call “silly synonyms.” In my years as a newspaper copy editor, I tried to break reporters of it, but I never succeeded. That’s the idea that, having referred to a dog, the second reference must be canine, or blaze after fire. How many times have I complained, pencil in my hand, “It’s always dog, dog, dog, damn it.” The words canine and blaze are two of the best marks of a hack that I can think of.

This is on my mind because, with the help of an AI, I’ve been trying to discover authors that are new to me that I might like. Googling for book lists hasn’t worked well for me. Working with the AI’s suggestions, I’ve downloaded many Kindle samples. I fling most of the samples, because it’s apparent that the writing is poor or that the writer is just cranking stuff out. I recently read Ken Follett’s The Evening and the Morning and realized that Follett is a crank-it-out author. I strongly suspect that some of these popular writers have ghost writers who help them crank it out. For example, I suspect that S.J. Parris tried to capitalize on the popularity of C.J. Sansom. But Parris is lazy writer who is just cranking it out.

It seems that the older I get, the harder it is to find fiction that I like. Maybe that’s not surprising. There’s only so much good stuff, and after decades of reading I’ve already read a big chunk of it.

C.J. Sansom

I never thought I’d find another postwar novelist whom I like as much as I like Winston Graham (the Poldark novels). But I now put C.J. Sansom in that category, and, as with Winston Graham, I’ve read almost everything he wrote.

In only a few months last year, I read all seven of Sansom’s Shardlake novels. (I wrote about the first novel in that series, Dissolution, here.

There are many things that Winston Graham and C.J. Sansom have in common. For one, they were both superb writers, writers who see writing as only a transparent vehicle for story, as opposed to inflicting upon us some contrived notion of “style.” Their characters are complex, with rich (if conflicted) inner lives. The relationships between the characters are similarly rich and complex. In the Shardlake novels, even Shardlake’s horse has a personality and perhaps an inner life. The plots are superb. The settings become part of the story (Cornwall in the Poldark novels, England from the channel to York in the Shardlake novels). Sansom was a trained historian. His Shardlake novels make the reader feel immersed — hungry, cold, nervous — in Henry VIII’s Tudor England.

Sansom’s Dominion is set in the early 1950s. It’s an alternate history in which Lord Halifax (who wanted appeasement with Germany), rather than Winston Churchill, succeeded Neville Chamberlain as prime minister. Instead of going to war with Germany, this alternative Britain forms a lopsided alliance with Germany in which Britain steadily descends into fascism. Churchill is still there. But he is a leader of the resistance, hunted by the government as a traitor, and goes into hiding.

Dominion was published in 2012. Barack Obama, you will recall, was elected president of the U.S. in 2008 and won a second term in 2012. The United States was not flirting with fascism in 2012. In Britain, David Cameron was prime minister from 2010 until 2016. Though a liberal like me would find many faults with Cameron as prime minister, it’s safe to say that the U.K. was not flirting with fascism at the time any more than the U.S. was. Thus Dominion doesn’t seem to have been written as some kind of warning, like 1984. Rather, Sansom was interested, I think, in what might have happened in 1940 if the proponents of appeasement with Hitler had stayed in power.

Sansom was well aware that there are always fascists among us. This novel really ought to make a comeback — or be made into a movie — because it totally nails the rise of Donald Trump and what fascists do as soon as they get the power to do it. It’s very disturbing reading, really. There were a couple of moments when I had to put the book down for a while and recalibrate my grip on reality, because what happens in the book tracks so closely with what is happening in the U.S. today.

I have only one complaint about the novel. It’s that the denouement was too short, ending as soon as the plot is wrapped up. Many good books need a longish denouement. When we bond with characters, we need a little time to say goodbye to the characters and see them content with what they struggled so hard to gain. I have no idea why Sansom got this wrong in Dominion. Maybe he underestimated just how real and how lovable his characters really are.

The Orch-OR theory: Where does it stand today?

Roger Penrose, Oxford mathematician and physicist, in 2011. Penrose will be 94 years old in August. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

First, a note on how I use AI

My writing is always my own. I never use AI as a writing tool. When I use AI for research, I will always say so. Occasionally, as with this post, I may post, or quote from, a report written by an AI. When I do that, I will attribute the report appropriately and say which particular AI wrote the report.

What is Orch-OR, and why does it matter?

What kind of universe do we live in? Is it cold and mechanical? Purely material? Or is there something spooky, even magical and caring, about the universe?

This is a scientific question now, though in the past it was a religious or philosophical question. Philosophy is helpful and can discipline our thinking, though ultimately philosophy cannot provide the answers that only science can provide. As for religion, it might have been useful to the ancients. But for us today, two-thousand-year-old ideas about the nature of the cosmos are primitive, useless, and misleading.

People often assume that scientists are all materialists. That is not the case. The development of quantum physics during the 20th Century did much damage to a material, mechanical view of the universe. Many scientists saw cracks in the doors of physics through which spooks could enter. It became hard to deny that there is something immaterial about the cosmos — though scientists could not make sense of it: Erwin Schrödinger, Wolfgang Pauli, Arthur Eddington, Albert Einstein, Eugene Wigner, Roger Penrose, David Bohm, Max Tegmark.

Rooting for the spooks

It was Albert Einstein who first used the word “spooky.” He described quantum entanglement as “spooky action at a distance.” This troubled him greatly, though he had to recognize it. His guess was that there must be “hidden variables.” Many physicists have gone looking for such hidden variables, but whether they exist remains unproven.

So: Is the cosmos cold and indifferent, morally irresponsible, devoid of meaning, completely uncaring about good and evil and suffering? Or is the cosmos more than that?

Roger Penrose is almost certainly the Einstein of our time. Here is what Penrose had to say, as quoted in the Wikipedia article on Penrose:

“I’m not a believer myself. I don’t believe in established religions of any kind. … I think I would say that the universe has a purpose, it’s not somehow just there by chance … some people, I think, take the view that the universe is just there and it runs along — it’s a bit like it just sort of computes, and we happen somehow by accident to find ourselves in this thing. But I don’t think that’s a very fruitful or helpful way of looking at the universe, I think that there is something much deeper about it.”

Consciousness

The open door for spooks was just a crack for most of the 20th Century. Roger Penrose’s theory of consciousness throws the door wide open. ChatGPT 4.1 describes Penrose’s view of the nature of consciousness thus: “In this framework, the universe is not dead matter plus consciousness emerging later, but rather, proto-conscious events are woven into the very fabric of physical reality, occurring wherever quantum collapses happen.”

The standard theory of consciousness today is that consciousness is an electrical phenomenon that happens in the neurons of the brain. There is no proof of that! Rather, it’s a materialist theory and assumes that it couldn’t be anything else, that consciousness somehow just emerges in a neural network that is complex enough.

Penrose thinks otherwise. Penrose, in collaboration with the anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff, thinks that consciousness is a quantum, rather than an electrical, phenomenon — that is, our brains are like quantum computers. The Penrose-Hameroff theory proposed thirty years ago that consciousness is generated by quantum effects in the tiny microtubules that provide structure to neurons. They call the theory Orch-OR (orchestrated objective reduction). During the past thirty years, many scientists have tried to shoot down the theory. None have succeeded. In fact I think it is fair to say that recent findings have tended to support, rather than weaken, the Orch-OR theory.

For assessing the spookiness of Orch-OR, it’s important to keep in mind that the theory doesn’t just propose that a human mind is a very fine, but isolated, quantum computer. Because of quantum entanglement — spooky action at a distance — Orch-OR also opens the door to the possibility that human consciousness can somehow connect with the larger cosmos. Yes, of course — religions and philosophies have long proposed such a thing. Orch-OR has proposed an actual mechanism that can be scientifically investigated.

For years I have tried to keep up with the ongoing research into the validity (or lack of validity) of the Orch-OR theory. I have found that an AI can be a huge help with this. I used the “agent” function of ChatGPT 4.1 to generate the report below. If you’re interested in this subject, you may find the links at the end of the report interesting and more accessible than the difficult science involved in investigating the Orch-OR theory.

Research on the Penrose–Hameroff “Orch‑OR” Theory of Consciousness (Updated July 2025, ChatGPT 4.1 agent.)

Background and Goals of the Theory

The orchestrated objective reduction (Orch‑OR) model, developed by Roger Penrose and Stuart Hameroff, posits that consciousness arises from quantum processes within microtubules (MTs) inside neurons. The theory proposes:

Quantum states in microtubules enable non-algorithmic computation, fundamental to conscious experience.
“Objective reduction” (OR) occurs when a quantum superposition reaches a critical threshold, governed by gravitational effects (as per Penrose’s interpretation of quantum mechanics).

Recent Supporting Research (2023–2025)

Microtubule Quantum Superradiance & Excitons:
- Babcock et al. 2024 (Quantum Brain Dynamics): Demonstrated that microtubules can support collective quantum states (superradiant excitonic states) theoretically, with room-temperature persistence in simulated systems.
- Oblinski et al. 2023 (Electronic Energy Migration in Microtubules): Experimental results show energy migration over ~6.6 nm in microtubules, reduced by anesthetics. This suggests microtubule quantum effects are sensitive to anesthetics, aligning with predictions of Orch‑OR.
Entanglement in the Brain:
- Kerskens & Perez, 2022 (Phys.org coverage): MRI experiments reported non-classical “entanglement-like” correlations in human brains. The results are provocative but have been questioned due to interpretational ambiguity.
- Saxena et al., 2020–2023: Experiments with isolated microtubules show scale-free resonance and long-range correlations. These suggest that microtubules may act as “fractal antennas,” supporting information integration.
Myelin Quantum Effects:
- Grigoryan et al. 2024 (arXiv): Predicted generation of entangled biphoton states in the myelin sheath. Not yet confirmed in vivo.
Superradiant UV Emission:
- Celardo et al., 2019–2024: Theoretical work on collective photon emission (“superradiance”) from tryptophan in microtubules, and observed long-lived room-temperature delayed luminescence, but direct link to consciousness is still debated.

Major Criticisms and Falsification Efforts

Decoherence Objection:
- Tegmark (2000), Reimers et al. (2009), McKemmish et al. (2009): Calculated that any quantum state in microtubules should decohere (lose quantum character) in femtoseconds—far too fast for neural timescales or consciousness.
- Penrose & Hameroff response: Argue that ordered water, tubulin geometry, and shielding effects can prolong coherence, and that certain experiments (superradiance, delayed luminescence) hint at greater stability than previously believed.
Collapse Model Experiments:
- Diósi–Penrose (DP) collapse tests (Carless et al. 2021–2023): Underground experiments seeking “spontaneous radiation” predicted by objective reduction. No positive signals detected yet; does not strictly falsify Orch‑OR but narrows parameter space.
- McQueen (2023): Critiques that many “collapse” experiments do not target Orch‑OR’s core biological mechanisms, and Penrose himself has noted most such tests are not definitive.
Failure to Replicate & Biological Plausibility:
- Some key experiments on microtubule resonance and delayed luminescence have not yet been widely replicated. Others find evidence of energy transfer, but not quantum computation.
- McKemmish et al. (2009): Argue there is no known mechanism to “protect” microtubules from environmental decoherence within neurons.
Lack of Unique Predictions: Many neuroscientists and philosophers remain skeptical, arguing that Orch‑OR’s predictions are not unique or distinguishable from other neural theories of consciousness.

Penrose & Hameroff’s Responses

They emphasize new evidence for quantum effects in biological systems (photosynthesis, avian magnetoreception, possibly microtubules) has eroded old “impossibility” claims.
Point to experiments showing that anesthetics disrupt microtubule energy transfer, not just synaptic activity, supporting a microtubule-based substrate for consciousness.
Welcome further “collapse” experiments and assert that any conclusive falsification would require demonstrating the impossibility of quantum computation in microtubules at physiological conditions.

Trajectory and Current Assessment

Supporting Evidence Trajectory:
- There is growing experimental evidence of nontrivial quantum phenomena in microtubules (superradiance, energy transfer, delayed luminescence), though not yet direct evidence of quantum computation or OR events in vivo.
- Entanglement-like effects in brains and myelin remain controversial, with interpretation and replication still pending.
- Recent preprints (Mavromatos et al., 2025) propose microtubules as “QED cavities” with high-Q quantum states, but these are still theoretical.
Falsification Trajectory:
- No clear-cut experiment has yet falsified Orch‑OR; most challenges concern decoherence timescales and lack of unique empirical predictions.
- Some collapse models are now strongly constrained by negative results, but Penrose and Hameroff maintain their version is not ruled out.