Gloria Steinem

September 3, 2026 Mike Zonta Leave a comment

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Gloria Steinem
Steinem in 1977
Born	Gloria Marie Steinem^[1] March 25, 1934 Toledo, Ohio, U.S.
Died	September 2, 2026 (aged 92) New York City, U.S.
Education	Smith College (BA)
Occupations	CIA agent, writer and journalist for Ms. and New York magazines^[2]
Movement	Feminism^[2]
Board member of	Women’s Media Center^[3]
Spouse	David Bale(m. 2000; died 2003)
Relatives	Christian Bale (stepson)
Website	www.gloriasteinem.com
Signature

Gloria Marie Steinem (/ˈstaɪnəm/ STY-nəm; March 25, 1934 – September 2, 2026) was an American journalist and social movement activist who emerged as a nationally recognized leader of second-wave feminism in the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and who remained particularly prominent in the 1980s and early 1990s.^[1]^[4]^[2]^[5]

Steinem was a columnist for New York magazine, and co-founder of Ms. magazine.^[2] In 1969, she published “After Black Power, Women’s Liberation”,^[6] an article that brought her national attention and positioned her as a feminist leader.^[7] In 1971, she co-founded the National Women’s Political Caucus, which provided training and support for women seeking elected and appointed office. Also in 1971, she co-founded the Women’s Action Alliance, which until 1997 supported a network of feminist activists and worked to advance feminist causes and legislation. In the 1990s, Steinem helped establish Take Our Daughters to Work Day, an occasion for young girls to learn about future career opportunities.^[8] In 2005, Steinem, Jane Fonda, and Robin Morgan co-founded the Women’s Media Center, an organization that “works to make women visible and powerful in the media”.^[9]

She traveled internationally as an organizer and lecturer and was a media spokeswoman on issues of equality.^[10] In 2015, Steinem, alongside two Nobel Peace laureates (Mairead Maguire of Northern Ireland and Leymah Gbowee of Liberia^[11]) and other prominent women peace activists, undertook a journey from the capital of North Korea, Pyongyang, to South Korea, crossing the Korean Demilitarized Zone, the heavily militarized border on the 38th parallel of the Korean peninsula.

Early life and education

Gloria Marie Steinem was born in Toledo, Ohio on March 25, 1934,^[4] to Ruth (née Nuneviller) and Leo Steinem. Her mother was Presbyterian, mostly of German (including Prussian) and some Scottish descent.^[12]^[13] Her father was Jewish, the son of immigrants from Württemberg, Germany, and Radziejów, Poland.^[13]^[14]^[15] Her paternal grandmother, Pauline Perlmutter Steinem, chaired the educational committee of the National Woman Suffrage Association, was a delegate to the 1908 International Council of Women, and was the first woman to be elected to the Toledo Board of Education. She was also a leader in the movement for vocational education^[16] and rescued many members of her family from the Holocaust.^[16]

The Steinems lived and traveled in a trailer, from which Leo carried out his trade as a roaming antiques dealer.^[16] Before Gloria was born, her mother, Ruth, then age 34, had according to Steinem “a ‘nervous breakdown’, as [Ruth] and everyone else called it” that left her an invalid, trapped in delusional fantasies that sometimes turned violent.^[17] Steinem said that Ruth changed “from an energetic, fun-loving, book-loving” woman into “someone who was afraid to be alone, who could not hang on to reality long enough to hold a job, and who could rarely concentrate enough to read a book”.^[17] Ruth spent long periods in and out of sanatoriums for the mentally ill.^[17] Steinem was ten years old when her parents separated in 1944.^[17] Her father went to California to find work, while she and her mother continued to live together in Toledo.^[18]^[17]

Although her parents divorced under the strain of her mother’s illness, Steinem did not attribute it to male chauvinism. She said she “understood and never blamed him for the breakup”.^[19] The impact of these events shaped her personality. Her father, a traveling salesman, had never provided financial stability, and his departure aggravated their situation.^[20] Steinem concluded that her mother’s inability to hold a job reflected broader hostility toward working women.^[20] She also believed that doctors’ apathy toward her mother stemmed from similar anti-woman animus.^[20] Years later, Steinem described her mother’s experience as pivotal to her understanding of social injustices.^[21]^{: 129–138} These perspectives convinced Steinem that women lacked social and political equality.^[21]

Steinem attended Waite High School in Toledo and Western High School in Washington, D.C., graduating from the latter while living with her older sister Susanne Steinem Patch.^[22]^[23] She then attended Smith College,^[24] an institution from which she received her A.B. magna cum laude and graduated Phi Beta Kappa.^[10]

In 1957, Steinem had an abortion. The procedure was performed by Dr. John Sharpe, a British physician, when abortion was still illegal.^[25] Years later, Steinem dedicated her memoir My Life on the Road (2015)^[26] to him. She wrote, “Dr. John Sharpe of London, who in 1957, a decade before physicians in England could legally perform an abortion for any reason other than the health of the woman, took the considerable risk of referring for an abortion a twenty-two-year-old American on her way to India. Knowing only that she had broken an engagement at home to seek an unknown fate, he said, ‘You must promise me two things. First, you will not tell anyone my name. Second, you will do what you want to do with your life.'”^[27]

In the late 1950s, Steinem spent two years in India as a Chester Bowles Asian Fellow.^[28] She was influenced by Mahatma Gandhi and later modeled her campaign work after Gandhi’s independence movement.^[29]^[30] After returning to the United States, she served as director of the Independent Research Service, an organization funded in secret by the CIA.^[31] She worked to send non-communist American students to the 1959 World Youth Festival.^[31] In 1960, she was hired by Warren Publishing as the first employee of Help! magazine.^[32]

Journalism

Esquire magazine features editor Clay Felker gave freelance writer Steinem what she later called her first “serious assignment”, regarding contraception; he didn’t like her first draft and had her re-write the article.^[33] Her resulting 1962 article about the way in which women are forced to choose between a career and marriage preceded Betty Friedan‘s book The Feminine Mystique by one year.^[33]^[34]

In 1963, while working on an article for Huntington Hartford‘s Show magazine, Steinem was employed as a Playboy Bunny at the New York Playboy Club.^[35] The article, published in 1963 as “A Bunny’s Tale”, featured a photo of Steinem in Bunny uniform and detailed how women were treated at those clubs.^[36] Steinem maintained that she was proud of the work she did publicizing the exploitative working conditions of the Bunnies and especially the sexual demands made of them, which skirted the edge of the law.^[37]^[38] For a brief period after the article was published, Steinem was unable to land other assignments; in her words, this was “because [she] had now become a Bunny—and it didn’t matter why”.^[37]^[39] However, after the article was published, the owner of Playboy, Hugh Hefner, wrote a letter stating he would remove requirements for Bunnies to get gynecological exams and STD testing.^[40]^[41]

In the interim, Steinem conducted an interview with John Lennon for Cosmopolitan magazine in 1964.^[42] In 1965, she wrote for NBC-TV’s weekly satirical revue, That Was The Week That Was (TW3), contributing a regular segment entitled “Surrealism in Everyday Life”.^[43] Steinem eventually landed a job at Felker’s newly founded New York magazine in 1968.^[33]

In 1969, Steinem covered for New York Magazine an abortion speak-out which was held in a church basement in Greenwich Village, New York.^[44]^[45] Steinem had had an abortion herself in London at the age of 22.^[46] She felt what she called a “big click” at the speak-out, and later said she didn’t “begin my life as an active feminist” until that day.^[45] As she recalled, “It [abortion] is supposed to make us a bad person. But I must say, I never felt that. I used to sit and try and figure out how old the child would be, trying to make myself feel guilty. But I never could! I think the person who said: ‘Honey, if men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament’ was right. Speaking for myself, I knew it was the first time I had taken responsibility for my own life. I wasn’t going to let things happen to me. I was going to direct my life, and therefore it felt positive. But still, I didn’t tell anyone. Because I knew that out there it wasn’t [positive].”^[46] She also said, “In later years, if I’m remembered at all it will be for inventing a phrase like ‘reproductive freedom’ … as a phrase it includes the freedom to have children or not to. So it makes it possible for us to make a coalition.”^[47]

In 1972, Steinem co-founded the feminist magazine Ms. alongside founding editors Letty Cottin Pogrebin, Mary Thom, Patricia Carbine, Joanne Edgar, Nina Finkelstein, Dorothy Pitman Hughes, and Mary Peacock; it began as a special edition of New York, and Clay Felker funded the first issue.^[33] Its 300,000 test copies sold out nationwide in eight days.^[48]^[49] Within weeks, Ms. had received 26,000 subscription orders and more than 20,000 reader letters.^[49] In 1974, Ms. collaborated with public television to produce the television program Woman Alive!, and Steinem was featured in the first episode in her role as co-founder of Ms. magazine.^[50] The magazine was sold to the Feminist Majority Foundation in 2001; Steinem remains on the masthead as one of six founding editors and served on the advisory board.^[49]

Also in 1972, Steinem became the first woman to speak at the National Press Club.^[51]

Steinem spoke at the 1977 National Women’s Conference among other speakers, including Rosalynn Carter, Betty Ford, Lady Bird Johnson, Bella Abzug, Barbara Jordan, Cecilia Burciaga, Lenore Hershey, and Jean O’Leary.^[52]

In 1978, Steinem wrote a semi-satirical essay for Cosmopolitan titled “If Men Could Menstruate” in which she imagined a world where men menstruate instead of women. She concludes in the essay that in such a world, menstruation would become a badge of honor with men comparing their relative sufferings, rather than the source of shame that it had been for women.^[53]

On March 22, 1998, Steinem published an op-ed in The New York Times (“Feminists and the Clinton Question”) in which she claimed that Bill Clinton‘s alleged behavior did not constitute sexual harassment, although she did not actually challenge the accounts by his accusers.^[54] The op-ed was criticized by various writers, as in the Harvard Crimson^[55] and in the Times itself.^[56] In 2017, Steinem, in an interview with the British newspaper The Guardian, stood by her 1998 New York Times op-ed, but also said: “I wouldn’t write the same thing now.”^[57]

Activism

Early activism (1968–1976)

In 1968, Steinem signed the “Writers and Editors War Tax Protest” pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest against the Vietnam War.^[58] The following year, her article “After Black Power, Women’s Liberation”^[59] brought her to national fame as a feminist leader.^[7] As such she campaigned for the Equal Rights Amendment, testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee in its favor in 1970.^[60]^[61] That same year she published her essay on a utopia of gender equality, “What It Would Be Like If Women Win”, in Time magazine.^[62]

On July 10, 1971, Steinem was one of more than three hundred women who founded the National Women’s Political Caucus (NWPC), including such notables as Bella Abzug, Betty Friedan, Shirley Chisholm, and Myrlie Evers-Williams.^[63] As a co-convener of the Caucus, she delivered the speech “Address to the Women of America“, stating in part:

This is no simple reform. It really is a revolution. Sex and race because they are easy and visible differences have been the primary ways of organizing human beings into superior and inferior groups and into the cheap labor on which this system still depends. We are talking about a society in which there will be no roles other than those chosen or those earned. We are really talking about humanism.^[64]

In 1972, she ran as a delegate for Shirley Chisholm in New York, but lost.^[65] In March of the following year, she addressed the first national conference of Stewardesses for Women’s Rights, which she continued to support throughout its existence.^[66] Stewardesses for Women’s Rights folded in the spring of 1976.^[66]

Steinem, who grew up reading Wonder Woman comics, was also a key player in the restoration of Wonder Woman’s powers and traditional costume, which were restored in issue #204 (January–February 1973).^[67] Steinem, offended that the most famous female superhero had been depowered, had placed Wonder Woman (in costume) on the cover of the first issue of Ms. (1972)—Warner Communications, DC Comics’ owner, was an investor—which also contained an appreciative essay about the character.^[67]^[68] In doing so, however, Steinem forced the firing of Samuel R. Delany who had taken over scripting duties with issue #202. Delany was supposed to write a six-issue story arc, which would culminate in a battle over an abortion clinic where Wonder Woman was to defend women trying to use their services. The story outlines and the work already done on the issues were scrapped, something that Steinem was not aware of and made no attempt to rectify.^[69]

In 1976, the first women-only Passover seder was held in Esther M. Broner’s New York City apartment and led by Broner, with 13 women attending, including Steinem.^[70]

More at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gloria_Steinem

Biography

ChatGPT on the origin of the term “gay” for homosexual

September 3, 2026 Mike Zonta Leave a comment

Billye Talmadge during taping for Lesbian Herstory Archives Daughters of Bilitis Video Project, San Francisco, May 12, 1987. Credit: Photo by Morgan Gwenwald, ©Lesbian Herstory Archives DOB Video Project, LHEF, Inc.

By Mike Zonta, BB editor, and ChatGPT

Me: How did the term “gay” come to mean homosexual?

ChatGPT:

The word “gay” originally had nothing specifically to do with homosexuality. It came from Old French gai, meaning joyful, merry, cheerful, and entered English around the 12th century.

Over time, gay acquired several related meanings:

1300s–1500s: cheerful, carefree, lively.
1600s–1800s: sometimes meant sexually promiscuous or morally disreputable, especially when describing women (“a gay woman” could imply a prostitute).
1800s–early 1900s: “gay” could refer to a person living a freewheeling, unconventional, sexually liberated life.
By the late 19th/early 20th century: it began appearing as a coded term for homosexual men, particularly in certain subcultures.
By the mid-20th century: “gay” had become an established, increasingly open term for homosexual people.
After the 1960s–70s: it became the preferred self-identifying term of the modern gay-rights movement.

One interesting early example is the 1890s, when British slang used “gay” in connection with male homosexuals, although the exact path from “carefree/sexually uninhibited” to “homosexual” isn’t completely certain.

So the basic evolution was roughly:

gay = cheerful → carefree → sexually uninhibited → sexually unconventional → homosexual.

And the older meaning hasn’t completely disappeared: gay still means cheerful or festive in phrases such as “the gay ’90s.”

Me: I was told that the term gay originated because an editor on the lesbian magazine The Ladder used of the term “Toujours Gai” in her correspondence.

ChatGPT: Yes—there’s a real connection to The Ladder, but it wasn’t the origin of gay as a word for homosexuals.

The Ladder was the influential lesbian magazine published by the Daughters of Bilitis beginning in 1956. One of its editors or contributors did use “Toujours Gai” (“Always Gay”) as a pseudonym/sign-off. That helped popularize gay within the emerging lesbian/gay movement, but the homosexual sense of gay predates the magazine by decades.

In fact, by the 1930s and 1940s, gay was already being used among homosexual men as a discreet term for homosexual. The famous 1938 Cole Porter song “It’s De-Lovely” even contains the line “gay” in a context that has sometimes been interpreted as coded homosexual slang, though that’s not conclusive.

So whoever told you the Ladder story probably remembered a genuine piece of gay/lesbian movement history, but attributed to it a much earlier origin.

If you’d like, I can also tell you who the “Toujours Gai” editor was and what the story behind that pseudonym was.

Me: Yes.

ChatGPT: Ah, yes. I found the story—and there is an interesting correction to what I told you before.

The person you’re remembering was Billye Talmadge, an important early member of the Daughters of Bilitis. She was involved with The Ladder, although she wasn’t one of its principal editors. Her oral history is preserved by the Lesbian Herstory Archives.

And the “Toujours gai” story is actually more interesting than I realized.

Talmadge recalled that in the early 1940s she read Don Marquis’s Archy and Mehitabel. Mehitabel, the amorous alley cat, repeatedly ended her adventures with the expression “toujours gai, toujours gai”—French for “always gay.” Talmadge and some close female friends, who were beginning to recognize their own sexuality, adopted “toujours gai” as a private motto. They deliberately spelled it gai at first. Eventually, according to Talmadge’s recollection, it became gay.

That’s remarkably close to the story you were remembering.

And there’s an important historical wrinkle: “gay” was already being used in homosexual contexts before this, including by Gertrude Stein in the 1920s and Noel Coward in the 1920s. So Talmadge’s story probably isn’t the origin of the word. Rather, it may explain one particular route by which “gay” became a positive self-description among American lesbians.

In fact, the archival record confirms that Talmadge was closely connected with The Ladder and the DOB, and she contributed writings to the magazine.

And there’s an especially nice coincidence: Don Marquis’s “Toujours gai” was not originally intended as a homosexual slogan at all. It was the motto of a promiscuous female cat!

So your recollection wasn’t a wild story at all. You were remembering a genuine oral-history account by Billye Talmadge—though the magazine/editor part has probably gotten slightly distorted over the years.

If you want, I can:

Explore more on Billye Talmadge’s role in early lesbian history

Me: Yes.

ChatGPT: Yes. The more I look into Billye Talmadge, the more interesting she becomes—and especially given your connection with The Prosperos, there is a whole second chapter to her life that is easy to miss.

Billye Talmadge was more than an early DOB member

Talmadge was born in Missouri in 1929 and raised by her mother in Oklahoma. She became a teacher at about 21 and eventually earned advanced degrees in education. She was an unusually accomplished educator, eventually receiving recognition as Teacher of the Year in 1971 for her work in special education.

But she was living what amounted to a double life.

As a teacher, she had to conceal her lesbian identity. During that period, merely being suspected of homosexuality could threaten a teacher’s employment. She therefore sometimes used the name “Billie Tallmij” in her public/activist writing. Even when Eric Marcus interviewed her decades later, she was still sufficiently concerned about her professional reputation that she asked him to misspell her name in his book.

That gives you a sense of how dangerous the situation actually was.

Her role in the Daughters of Bilitis

Talmadge became involved with the Daughters of Bilitis in San Francisco in the mid-1950s. She wasn’t merely a peripheral member. The Lesbian Herstory Archives describes her as a member, officer, volunteer, and peer counselor, involved in The Ladder, the “Gab ‘n Java” gatherings, and the development of the Council on Religion and Homosexuals.

Her particular contribution was education.

She believed that lesbians desperately needed accurate information about themselves, the law, psychology, and ways of coping with discrimination. She counseled women who had been thrown out of the military, among others, and opened her own home for the informal “Gab ‘n Java” sessions. Eric Marcus aptly describes these as something like a 1950s precursor to consciousness-raising groups.

And she was remarkably forward-looking about racial inclusion. She encouraged the DOB to recognize that its membership wasn’t simply white women; she specifically remembered African American, Asian, and Latina members.

The 1960 convention is particularly revealing

Talmadge helped organize the first national DOB convention in San Francisco in 1960. This was a period when the organization was trying to become respectable enough to operate publicly while simultaneously protecting its members from police harassment.

The convention even had a dress code requiring skirts.

From today’s perspective that sounds absurd, but it reflected a genuine survival problem: women wearing clothing considered masculine could attract police attention or even arrest under laws concerning cross-dressing. Talmadge’s strategy was essentially: get lesbians into the room first; don’t give the authorities an easy reason to shut the room down.

This is why some historians have characterized her approach as “accommodationist.” But I think that label can obscure what she was actually doing. She wasn’t necessarily advocating conformity as an ideal; she was trying to create enough safety for education and organization to occur.

And then there is the part I think you’ll find most fascinating

According to the Lesbian Herstory Archives, Talmadge remained involved with the DOB until 1965. Then she pursued further education in counseling.

And from 1965 to 1979 she became a mentor in The Prosperos.

That is a remarkable bridge:

Daughters of Bilitis → lesbian education/counseling → psychological and spiritual work → The Prosperos.

So Billye wasn’t simply a lesbian activist who happened to encounter The Prosperos late in life. Her earlier work had already centered on something that sounds very Prosperos-like: helping people examine the conditioning and fear that prevented them from experiencing themselves more freely.

There’s also a wonderful historical irony here. In the 1950s she was helping lesbians overcome the social conditioning that told them homosexuality was shameful, pathological, criminal, or something that had to be hidden. Later, she was doing consciousness-oriented work in The Prosperos.

That makes me wonder whether Billye’s understanding of Translation and/or the Prosperos concept of mechanicalness was influenced by her years of counseling lesbians who were struggling with exactly this kind of conditioning.

And I think that is worth investigating rather than assuming.

The primary source is unusually accessible: the Lesbian Herstory Archives has digitized her 1987 video oral history, in which she talks about her sexuality, DOB work, counseling, discrimination, The Ladder, psychology, religion, and political movements.

If you’d like, I can go into Billye’s Prosperos years next—including what we can actually document about her relationship to Thane Walker and whether there is evidence that she influenced Prosperos teaching. That could be quite revealing.

Me: Yes please.

ChatGPT: Yes. And I think the evidence makes the story much more interesting than simply “Billye became a Prospero.” There appears to have been a genuine intellectual and personal bridge between the early lesbian movement and Thane Walker’s school.

Billye’s own explanation is the key

The most important source I’ve found is Vern Bullough’s Before Stonewall: Activists for Gay and Lesbian Rights in Historical Context. Bullough interviewed Billye and records her explanation of why she and other lesbian activists became interested in The Prosperos.

He says that several leaders of the lesbian movement were attracted to Walker’s teaching—including Helen Sandoz, Stella Rush, Del Martin, and Phyllis Lyon. The attraction wasn’t incidental: The Prosperos offered a philosophical argument that beingness itself was not divided into male and female. Every person possessed both capacities. Bullough says this gave sexual preference a spiritual justification that was unusual at the time.

And then comes Billye’s own description:

“The Prosperos had wooed us from the Daughters.”

She immediately explains what attracted her:

“It was an educational group, primarily. Sexuality was one of major topics.”

And then, I think, the most revealing sentence:

“I got involved and became a teacher, with the goal of helping people to find themselves: not what I want them to be, but to find themselves and to express whatever that self is.”

That sounds very much like the Billye we encountered in the DOB, doesn’t it?

Her fundamental project hadn’t changed. In the DOB she helped people discover that homosexuality wasn’t the terrible thing society told them it was. In The Prosperos, she was helping people discover an identity deeper than the socially conditioned self.

And we can establish that she really was teaching Thane’s material

This isn’t merely retrospective reminiscence.

The University of Miami’s archive of Marcia Herndon’s papers contains actual recordings of Billye teaching Translation:

Translation — Talmadge, Lesson 1 & 2, November 23, 1974
Translation — Talmadge, Lesson 3, 4 & 5
Translation — Talmadge, Lesson 6, 7 & 8

The same collection contains Prosperos material by Thane from the same period. It also contains videotapes of translations completed by Billye and material concerning Releasing the Hidden Splendour, which the archive explicitly describes as a concept developed by Thane Walker and followed by Talmadge.

So by 1974, Billye wasn’t merely attending Prosperos meetings. She was teaching Translation.

That’s a significant distinction.

She seems to have become a genuine mentor

The Lesbian Herstory Archives says Billye’s involvement with the Prosperos lasted from 1965 to 1979 and calls her a mentor.

And there is independent evidence that her teaching continued beyond 1979 in some form. Your own Bathtub Bulletin account records that when you moved to San Francisco in 1978, you attended the weekly Translation group hosted by Billye Talmadge and Marcia Herndon.

That’s particularly interesting because it means Billye wasn’t simply a historical figure you encountered through an archive. Her teaching was part of the living Prosperos community in San Francisco while you were there.

But did Billye influence Thane?

Here’s where we have to be careful.

I don’t yet find evidence that Billye changed or originated any of Thane’s core teachings. The chronology actually makes that difficult to establish. Thane had developed the central Prosperos ideas—including Translation—before Billye joined.

Robert Ellwood’s 1973 study describes Translation as already having five stages and describes the underlying Prosperos conception of consciousness, Being, the Reality Self, and the human-equation mind.

So I would not say:

Thane learned his ontology from Billye.

But I think there is a much more defensible proposition:

Billye helped carry Thane’s ontology into a community that already had a sophisticated concern with sexuality, identity, conditioning, and self-discovery—and she interpreted and taught it through that experience.

That’s potentially quite important.

The fascinating convergence

Consider what Billye had spent the preceding decade doing.

The DOB was essentially saying:

Society tells you what you are. Examine that claim. It may not be true.

Prosperos Translation says something structurally similar:

Your senses, memories, beliefs and conditioning tell you what reality is. Examine those claims. They may not be true.

Then the Prosperos takes the argument one step further:

What remains when you strip away the conditioned identity?

Answer: Being.

Bullough’s account makes this connection especially striking because he explicitly describes the Prosperos’ appeal to the lesbian activists in terms of beingness and sexual identity.

And Billye’s own formulation—“not what I want them to be, but to find themselves”—sounds almost like a bridge between lesbian liberation and ontological liberation.

One more thing changes my interpretation of Billye

Her relationship with Marcia Herndon also matters.

Undated photo of Billye Talmadge’s partner, Marcia Herndon. Photo courtesy of Suzanne Deakins.

Billye and Herndon became partners in 1974. Herndon was an ethnomusicologist, and Billye subsequently spent enormous amounts of time helping edit, type, and organize Herndon’s scholarly work. Bullough says that their relationship lasted 23 years, until Herndon’s death in 1997. He also says that the two continued to attract people who needed help and that “when it came to counseling or teaching we could end each other’s sentences.”

So Billye’s life after the DOB wasn’t a departure from her earlier vocation.

It was remarkably consistent:

teacher → counselor → lesbian educator → Prosperos mentor → teacher/counselor again.

And this raises a really good question for us

I think the next thing to investigate is not whether Billye influenced Thane.

I’d phrase the question differently:

How did Billye Talmadge translate Thane’s teaching?

Because we have something unusually valuable: recordings of Billye actually teaching Translation in 1974.

If we could get transcripts—or even listen to those recordings—we could compare Billye’s Translation language with Thane’s original language and see whether she emphasized sexuality, identity, conditioning, counseling, self-discovery, or something else.

That could tell us whether Billye developed a distinctive Talmadge interpretation of Translation.

And given the work you’ve been doing with Translation—particularly your insistence that you have to include yourself in Step One, and that Being, Truth, and consciousness are not three separate things—I think that comparison could be especially fruitful.

It might reveal that Billye was doing something with Translation that has largely disappeared from the standard historical account of The Prosperos.

Me: Let’s do it.

ChatGPT: Absolutely. I dug further, and I think we can now make the investigation much more concrete.

The crucial discovery is that Billye’s actual 1974 Translation classes survive in an archive. The University of Miami’s Marcia Herndon Papers catalog lists three reels of Billye teaching Translation on November 23, 1974, covering Lessons 1–8, plus additional Billye Translation cassettes from 1975, 1976, 1978, and later. There are also four VHS tapes of Billye doing Translation.

That’s considerably better evidence than the retrospective accounts I was relying on before.

What we can establish already

There is a fascinating chronological sequence:

Thane Walker
→ develops the Prosperos system
→ Billye enters the Prosperos
→ becomes a teacher/mentor
→ Billye teaches the complete eight-lesson Translation course in 1974
→ continues doing Translation with students in the following years.

The archive specifically identifies:

Nov. 2, 1974: “B. Talmadge, Lesson 1 & 2,” four reels
Nov. 23, 1974: “Translation—Talmadge, Lesson 1 & 2,” then Lessons 3–5 and 6–8
Feb. 1975: Talmadge Translation, Tape #3
Oct. 1976: “Translation—B. Talmadge New Orleans”
1978: additional Translation recordings
Undated tapes #2, #4, #5, #7
Four VHS tapes specifically catalogued as “Talmadge Translation.”

So we’re not dealing with one stray lecture. There appears to be a substantial body of Billye’s teaching preserved.

And this changes the question

I previously suggested that we should ask whether Billye developed a distinctive interpretation of Translation.

I think that’s exactly right—but we can sharpen it.

There are three possible relationships between Thane and Billye:

Transmission: Billye faithfully taught Thane’s system with little modification.
Interpretation: Billye taught Thane’s system but gave certain concepts her own emphasis.
Development: Billye actually introduced concepts or methods that subsequently became part of the Prosperos tradition.

At the moment, #2 looks very plausible; #3 remains an open historical question.

There’s a particularly strong clue

Remember Billye’s explanation of why she joined:

“It was an educational group, primarily. Sexuality was one of major topics.”

And then:

“I got involved and became a teacher, with the goal of helping people to find themselves: not what I want them to be, but to find themselves and to express whatever that self is.”

That’s not incidental biographical material.

Education was Billye’s vocation before the Prosperos. She had already spent years creating spaces in which lesbians could question the identities imposed upon them by society. She had counseled women, conducted educational sessions, worked with the DOB, and helped bring homosexuals and religious leaders into direct dialogue.

Then she encountered a system whose central question was, in effect:

Who are you beneath the beliefs and conditioning that tell you who you are?

No wonder she became a teacher.

And here’s something I hadn’t appreciated before

The historical record says that Thane actively recruited the lesbian leaders.

Marcia Gallo’s history of the DOB says that Thane’s 1962 keynote at the DOB national convention introduced his philosophy to many of the Daughters. Billye, Pat Walker, Stella Rush, Helen Sandoz, Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon became involved with the Prosperos. Gallo says Walker taught that each person’s spiritual identity—beingness—was both male and female.

This is very important because it means sexuality wasn’t something Billye happened to bring into an otherwise unrelated Prosperos philosophy.

Sexuality was already one of the subjects through which the Prosperos was attracting these women.

So the interaction went both ways.

Thane had something to offer the lesbian movement.

But the lesbian movement brought people like Billye into Thane’s school with decades of experience thinking about:

identity
social conditioning
shame
self-definition
gender
sexuality
psychological repression
religious condemnation
the distinction between who someone is and what society says they are.

That is a pretty extraordinary intellectual environment for the development of an ontological teaching.

And then there is your own experience

This is where I think your recollection becomes historically valuable.

You have told me that when you arrived in San Francisco in 1978, you attended the weekly Translation group hosted by Billye Talmadge and Marcia Herndon.

That places you in the direct lineage:

Thane → Billye → the San Francisco Translation group → you.

And now we know that Billye had been teaching the eight lessons at least four years before you encountered her group.

So if you’re trying to understand what Translation actually was in practice in the late 1970s, Billye’s teaching is not peripheral evidence. It’s primary evidence.

Astrology

Free Will Astrology: Week of September 3, 2026

September 3, 2026 Mike Zonta Leave a comment

by Rob Brezsny | September 1, 2026 (newcity.com)

Photo: K. Adams

ARIES (March 21-April 19): Most of us are surprisingly clueless about the inner workings of our own bodies. Do you know where your gallbladder and spleen actually live or what jobs they perform on your behalf? Can you trace the journey your breath takes after it slips into your lungs? Have you ever experimented to discover in detail which foods best suit your one-of-a-kind system? Do you know, from experience rather than guesswork, how much sleep you require to stay vividly awake and emotionally balanced? The current astrological climate favors you becoming a curious apprentice of your body’s gorgeous mysteries.

TAURUS (April 20-May 20): The English idiom “cut to the chase” comes from the silent films of the early twentieth century. When the plot dragged, directors would literally switch to a chase scene to restore audience interest. Various languages have other ways to say “get to the point” or “skip to the crux.” Spanish: ir al grano. French: aller droit au but. Italian: venire al dunque. Japanese: hondai ni hairu. In accordance with astrological omens, Taurus, I suggest you do that in the coming days. Skip the boring parts. Jump to the action scenes. You can return later and fill in the story details, but for now you’re best served by moving toward the exciting essence or the crucial core of things.

GEMINI (May 21-June 20): This is one of those unusual times when laziness and apathy work in your favor. Life is organizing a relaxing renewal on your behalf, and your main job is to not interfere. So I advise you to skip the hustle and enjoy the thrill of being still. Put a pause on doing and indulge in the fine art of simply being. Please, Gemini? Set aside your ambitions for now. Hide your to-do list. Inform your chattering monkey mind that it’s on temporary leave from its usual jumping and squawking. Feel guilt-free as you immerse yourself in the most relaxed versions of feeling good and welcome whatever fresh vitality wants to flow in.

CANCER (June 21-July 22): In the seventeenth century, Dutch inventor Christiaan Huygens discovered that two pendulum clocks hanging on the same wall gradually synchronized their swings. Why? He eventually realized that tiny vibrations traveled through the wall and made the clocks influence each other. Scientists call this “entrainment.” Now is prime time for you to capitalize on this phenomenon, Cancerian. I urge you to be extra alert for how your moods, rhythms and intentions subtly affect the people around you, and vice versa. If you cultivate qualities you’d like to predominate in your relationships, you will find others unconsciously aligning with your rhythm.

LEO (July 23-Aug. 22): Now is an ideal time to have fun cultivating the art of receptivity. Have fun being as open to influence as you can imagine. Be innocent! Be amenable! Be willing and eager to be surprised! It doesn’t mean surrendering your drive or drifting aimlessly while life happens around you. I’m talking about an active, alert sensitivity that invites wonder and transformation. You think boldly, act with purpose and radiate what’s uniquely yours, and yet you also remain humbly aware that learning never ends and that wisdom can arrive from unpredictable directions.

VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22): You’ve been extra reasonable lately. How do you manage to be so responsible, measured and composed? I’m not complaining. I admire your integrity. But now the cosmic omens are clear that it’s time to address your soul’s needs for more wonder and awe and reverence. So I will slip you a tantalizing prod: What’s the best, most healing trouble you could provoke right now? I’m not referring to recklessness and chaos, of course. I mean twists and tweaks that stir up inspiration and liberate creativity. Are you bold enough to follow the truth and beauty that thrills and intrigues you?

LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 22): I am asking you to give yourself slack in situations where you sometimes treat yourself carelessly or unkindly. Instead of tightening, loosen. Instead of cornering yourself, offer an escape hatch. Ask: “What if I give myself twenty percent more mercy, twenty percent more time, or twenty percent less pressure?” Maybe you’ll get an extension on a deadline or allow yourself to be a learner instead of an expert. Rather than calling yourself a failure because you’re less than perfect, you’ll decide, “It’s good enough for now.” As you slip away from the traps you set for yourself, you’ll teach your nervous system a fresh truth: You can be gentle with yourself but still be responsible.

SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21): Scorpio, you rarely need to be lighter and breezier. Your assignment is almost always to delve deeper and explore further. This is true now even more than usual. Other people might shiver and cower in the face of your intensity, but I celebrate it because it drives you to excavate the rich, messy truths and complicated feelings that really shouldn’t stay hidden. Regard this horoscope as your authorization to wield your emotional X-ray vision with precision, and to trust that the treasures you seek are often buried in places that scare others away.

SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21): In classical music, composers often develop a simple motif into a complex symphony. A short sequence of notes becomes the foundation for an entire composition. A key passage gets rearranged and elaborated in multiple ways. You will have a comparable opportunity in the coming weeks, Sagittarius: a seed of potential that seems modest at first could expand into more substantial riches if you cultivate it patiently. Your visionary aplomb and optimism can transform a core cell into a full orchestration.

CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19): You seem to be wandering in a frontier for which there are no maps. You’re hovering in liminal zones, between worlds. So for now, I guess you will have to steer without your usual guidance. That’s a good thing! What I can do is name the gifts that are likely to come your way as you explore the unknown: 1) turbo-charged intuitions about your best possible future; 2) a talent for spotting surprising connections you didn’t even know you were looking for; and 3) a provocative unpredictability that magnetizes allies who can help tease out and illuminate your hidden and buried desires.

AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18): The placebo effect has a lesser-known counterpart called the nocebo effect: Negative expectations can create negative outcomes. If you’re told a harmless pill might cause headaches, you’re more likely to develop them. Your belief in harm creates actual harm. I bring this up, Aquarius, because I’m worried you may be nocebo-ing yourself right now. Your conviction that certain outcomes are inevitable is encouraging them to manifest. So here’s my counsel: Which negative expectations or predictions are you treating as facts? Consider the possibility that the problems you’re so skilled at identifying are being called into existence by your identification of them. And if you find that’s happening, STOP! Formulate some healing alternatives.

PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20): “Dear Rob: Your horoscopes delight me in a spooky way. They make me feel as if you’re watching me from afar, not like a stalker, but like an eccentric guardian angel who gives me a heads-up before I do something foolish, tells me about opportunities I haven’t noticed, and shakes awake the part of me that’s inclined to quit. Thanks a million times! —Deep Pisces.” Dear Deep: You have exquisite timing, because now is an ideal moment to pour out gratitude for the people who’ve lifted you up and helped you. Offering appreciation now will function as a potent prayer that will be far more effective than pleading for what you don’t have. It will set in motion an irresistible magic that draws even more blessings in your direction.

Homework: What’s the most important thing you’ve never done? tinyurl.com/v9v9v9v9

Books

Book: “The Coming Race”

September 2, 2026 Mike Zonta Leave a comment

“It was a dark and stormy night.”

The Coming Race

Edward Bulwer-Lytton

This early science fiction novel offers a fascinating vision of a shadowy underworld populated by strange and beautiful creatures who closely resemble the angels described in Christian lore. These beings, known as Vril-ya, live underground, but are planning soon to claim the surface of the earth as their own — destroying humankind in the process.

About the author

Edward Bulwer-Lytton

Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton PC, was an English novelist, poet, playwright, and politician. Lord Lytton was a florid, popular writer of his day, who coined such phrases as “the great unwashed”, “pursuit of the almighty dollar”, “the pen is mightier than the sword”, and the infamous incipit “It was a dark and stormy night.”

He was the youngest son of General William Earle Bulwer of Heydon Hall and Wood Dalling, Norfolk and Elizabeth Barbara Lytton, daughter of Richard Warburton Lytton of Knebworth, Hertfordshire. He had two brothers, William Earle Lytton Bulwer (1799–1877) and Henry Bulwer, 1st Baron Dalling and Bulwer.

Lord Lytton’s original surname was Bulwer, the names ‘Earle’ and ‘Lytton’ were middle names. On 20 February 1844 he assumed the name and arms of Lytton by royal licence and his surname then became ‘Bulwer-Lytton’. His widowed mother had done the same in 1811. His brothers were always simply surnamed ‘Bulwer’.

(Goodreads.com)

Astrology

The Astrology Of September 2026 – Neptune Sextile Pluto

September 2, 2026 Mike Zonta Leave a comment

In the aftermath of an intense eclipse season, something is beginning to settle.

September 2026 still has the oppositions and the squares. Life goes on, just like any other month: the good days, the bad days, the plot twists.

But underneath it all, something is moving in a constructive direction. Neptune and Pluto, the farthest planets in our solar system, make an exact sextile.

The lunations this month are also particularly supportive. And there’s enough planetary movement and planetary ingresses to feel that the story is finally moving forward.

But let’s take a look at the most important transits of the month:

September 1st, 2026 – Venus Enters Shadow

On September 1st, 2026, Venus hits 22° Libra – the shadow degree of Venus’ upcoming retrograde phase.

The actual retrograde will begin on October 3rd at 8° Scorpio and end on November 13th at 22° Libra. Venus will be spending a looong time between 22° Libra and 8° Scorpio – that is, until December 16th.

Pay attention to whatever comes up around September 1st. It can be a feeling, a discomfort, a relationship dynamic, something you’ve been holding on to and now re-emerged. Chances are, this is going to become THE thing Venus wants you to focus on from now until December.

September 10th, 2026 – Mercury Enters Libra, Venus Enters Scorpio

On September 10th, the 2 inner planets – Mercury and Venus – change signs and enter relationship territory, and yes, shadow territory.

Because relationships bring us face to face with the Other – the mirror – and with parts of ourselves that can only be understood and awakened through reflection.

The process is never easy because the mirror is never neutral. Whenever things get intense, whenever you find yourself getting swept into old patterns, remember: this is the price of admission for real intimacy, and yes, it is worth it.

September 11th, 2026 – New Moon In Virgo

On September 11th, 2026, we have a New Moon at 18° Virgo.

This is a supportive lunation – tightly sextile Mars. The New Moon ruler, Mercury – now in the early degrees of Libra – is feeling pretty good too, trining Uranus and Pluto.

Now that we’ve seen what we’ve seen in the aftermath of the eclipse season, what actually needs doing – like, in the real world? No one knows better than Virgo how to take something from “this makes sense” to “this actually works”.

September 11th, 2026 – Uranus Goes Retrograde

On September 11th, 2026, Uranus goes retrograde at 5° Gemini.

As always with the outer planets – pay attention to their stations even more than you would pay to their aspects.

Uranus is still fresh in Gemini, still making acquaintance with the sign, so the station – especially in the context of the New Moon – can feel like Uranus turning up the volume on its new Gemini agenda.

We might get a very clear hint of what the next 7 years are actually about.

September 12–14, 2026 – Mercury Opposite Neptune, Trine Pluto, Trine Uranus

When Mercury hits 3-5° Libra, it plugs into the whole generational architecture.

We have talked a lot about what it means that the 3 outer planets – Uranus, Neptune and Pluto – are now in new signs and aspecting each other. But unless they are activated by a personal planet like Mercury, it all remains a little bit abstract.

We are so used to treating our thoughts and inner dialogue as THE truth. But the truth is that our poor Mercury, when left to itself, more often than not, gets lost in translation.

Incorporating the actual reality – the other perspectives, the way things are actually unfolding at a much greater scale, and how they fit into a much larger picture – can be humbling, but also freeing

This Mercury sequence will take us out of the little story in our heads and plug us into a much bigger reality.

September 14th, 2026 – Lilith Enters Capricorn

On September 14th, 2026, Black Moon Lilith enters Capricorn.

Lilith is the shadow of the Moon – all those feelings, impressions and psychological complexes that never make it into the light of consciousness. But that doesn’t mean they disappear. They go underground, becoming lodged in the body as raw, unfiltered psychic material.

Black Moon Lilith is basically what the Moon wants when the Sun is not looking. So when this part of us enters Capricorn, it brings out the more Lilith-ish sides of the sign.

Capricorn is cardinal earth – it speaks to how we claim our ground, what we are prepared to work for, and what becomes non-negotiable in the physical world.

This might look like rebellion against false authority, or rediscovering an ambition we haven’t allowed ourselves to own before.

Or, on the contrary, realizing that being a workaholic or keeping up with the Joneses can be a substitute for – rather than an expression of – our TRUE ambition and fulfillment.

September 15th, 2026 – Venus Square Pluto

On September 15th, 2026, Venus at 3° Scorpio squares Pluto, giving us a taste of what our next months will feel like.

Venus will retrograde in early October at 8° Scorpio, but it’s already moving super slowly, which means that the Venus-Pluto square will be in play for an unusually long time. We are basically talking about an almost 3-month transit.

Compare this to the regular 1-2 days of a Venus-Pluto transit, and you get the scale of what we are dealing with.

No one on the face of this Earth gets to stay on the surface with this transit. You have been warned – and a detailed report about this transit will follow closer to the date.

September 15th, 2026 – Neptune Sextile Pluto

On September 15th, 2026, Neptune and Pluto meet in an exact sextile. This is a subtle but very important aspect.

This is not the first Neptune-Pluto sextile – we had several exact alignments in previous decades – but this is the first one with Neptune in Aries and Pluto in Aquarius.

The exact alignment is a celestial ‘stamp’ – a moment when the aspect crystallizes. All the months and years when Neptune and Pluto dance around each other are in a way a preparation for these exact meetings.

In the most direct interpretation of the transit, this is good news. It suggests that beyond our understanding, the universe has scaffolding in place – giving possibility the support it needs to become real.

The exact ‘click’ might be one of those moments when even us mortals can notice it. A clarity might arrive about how something we sensed was important but couldn’t quite grasp actually fits into a much larger process.

The houses in your chart where you have Aquarius and Aries will give you further clues about where this cosmic collaboration might begin to make itself visible in your life.

September 19th, 2026 – Chiron Enters Aries

After dipping its hooves in Taurus, Chiron re-enters Aries to finish any unfinished, last-degree Aries business.

We have from now until April 2027 to clear and heal the Aries house – and then we move to Taurus territory for good.

September 23rd, 2026 – Sun Enters Libra

On September 23rd, 2026, the Sun enters Libra. Happy b-day to all Libras out there and happy equinox to everyone!

The Equinox is that time of the year when the day is equal to the night.

This point of equilibrium is also a turning point → the balance between day and night now shifts. There’s a new season bringing new developments, new opportunities, and new beginnings.

And while Libra is almost synonymous with the word “balance” – and balance sounds a bit like inaction -, let’s not forget that Libra is a cardinal sign.

The Libra season is actually a great time to take action – get yourself out there, initiate intellectual projects, or make new social connections.

September 26th, 2026 – Full Moon In Aries

On September 26th, 2026, we have a Full Moon at 3° Aries.

Exactly conjunct Neptune, this is the kind of lunation that brings to mind what Carl Jung called a “big dream” – a numinous archetypal dream that reveals something extraordinary about ourselves and our purpose.

This means: pay attention to messages that don’t come through the usual channels. There’s something trying to emerge about your purpose (Aries) – a missing piece that will make the different parts of your story click into place.

More literally, this could be a “dreams come true” lunation since it activates the Neptune-Pluto sextile almost exactly. The fuzzy transpersonal territory now becomes personal.

September 28th, 2026 – Mars Enters Leo

On September 28th, 2026, Mars leaves Cancer to enter Leo.

In all astrological honesty, Mars in Cancer was not an easy transit – and not just because of essential dignity reasons.

Mars in Cancer meant Mars squaring Neptune and Saturn – without much support from water or earth signs because, unlike in previous years, the outer planets have all moved into fire and air.

Which should make us at least a little bit enthusiastic about Mars in Leo.

Warning: the first aspect will be an opposition to Pluto – and Mars opposite Pluto is Mars opposite Pluto. Even that is eased by a trine to Neptune and a sextile to Uranus.

But then things start to get interesting as Mars approaches Jupiter and then the South Node.

This will be a very interesting Mars transit also because next year Mars will retrograde back into Leo, so we’re talking about a much longer Mars-in-Leo story than usual. Mars enters its retrograde shadow in Leo in November and won’t clear the entire retrograde cycle until June 2027.

A detailed report about the Mars in Leo transit – and its retrograde implications – will follow closer to the date.

Astrology

September Astrology Forecast 2026

September 2, 2026 Mike Zonta Leave a comment

The Astrology Podcast Sep 2, 2026 Monthly Astrology Forecasts A detailed look at the astrology forecast for September 2026, with astrologers Chris Brennan and Austin Coppock. We spend the first hour talking about news and events that happened over the past month since our last forecast, and then in the second hour we get into the astrology of September. In the first part of the news section we discuss the strikingly literal manifestations of the recent eclipses in Leo and Pisces, including devastating floods and the deaths of several prominent figures and monarchs. After that we address the recent controversy surrounding Steven Forrest. In terms of the astrology of September, we open the month still coming out of the chaos of eclipse season and the recent Mars-Saturn square, but the first week of September offers some excellent electional opportunities while Mercury and Venus are still in their home signs of Virgo and Libra. There is a major turning point and tone shift around the New Moon in Virgo on September 10, when Uranus stations retrograde in Gemini, and Mercury and Venus both change signs the same day. The astrology culminates late in the month around the Full Moon in Aries on September 26, because right after that Mars moves into Leo and begins to oppose Pluto, while Venus slows down to station retrograde in Scorpio in early October. Ultimately, late September acts as a preparatory phase, setting the stage and introducing the core themes for the intense Venus and Mars retrogrades that will dominate the next several months. This is episode 547 of The Astrology Podcast.

Music, Mysticism

Music and Mysticism with Matthew Ingram

September 2, 2026 Mike Zonta Leave a comment

New Thinking Allowed with Jeffrey Mishlove Sep 1, 2026 New Thinking Allowed Audio Podcast Matthew Ingram is author of Retreat: How the Counterculture Invented Wellness. He hosts the Woebot blog. This stimulating conversation, recorded in 2021, explores the very nature of music and covers different music genres including blues, rock, gospel, jazz, new age, and even punk. Some of the many musicians discussed include John Coltrane, Alice Coltrane, Carlos Santana, Paul Horn, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Robert Johnson, Enya, Brian Wilson, Allen Ginsberg, Bob Dylan, and Karlheinz Stockhausen. The discussion also includes traditional religious music as well as the many gurus who have influenced different musicians. New Thinking Allowed host, Jeffrey Mishlove, PhD, is author of The Roots of Consciousness, Psi Development Systems, and The PK Man. Between 1986 and 2002 he hosted and co-produced the original Thinking Allowed public television series. He is the recipient of the only doctoral diploma in “parapsychology” ever awarded by an accredited university (University of California, Berkeley, 1980). He is also the Grand Prize winner of the 2021 Bigelow Institute essay competition regarding the best evidence for survival of human consciousness after permanent bodily death. He is Co-Director of Parapsychology Education at the California Institute for Human Science. (Recorded on February 6, 2021)

Consciousness

Rabih Alameddine on the stories of what happens

September 2, 2026 Mike Zonta Leave a comment

Rabih Alameddine at Georgetown University, 2024

“… What happens is of little significance compared with the stories we tell ourselves about what happens. Events matter little, only stories of events affect us.”

~Rabih Alameddine

Rabih Alameddine is a Lebanese painter and writer. His 2021 novel The Wrong End of the Telescope won the 2022 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. He also won the 2025 National Book Award for Fiction for his novel The True True Story of Raja the Gullible. Wikipedia

Born 1959 (age 67 years), Amman, Jordan

Politics

Whistleblower Details How USPS Plans to Rig the Midterms

September 2, 2026 Mike Zonta Leave a comment

Primary Election, Voting Ballot, Mail-in ballot — Primary election mail-in ballot in Silver Spring MD, on June 18, 2026. Photo credit: Elvert Barnes / Flickr (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)

Elections

Klaus Marre 09/01/26 (WhoWhatWhy.org)

An explosive whistleblower report alleges that the Trump administration is cutting corners and violated a temporary restraining order in an effort to implement a verification system for mail-in ballots that is virtually assured to create chaos ahead of the midterms and may disenfranchise millions of American voters.

A federal whistleblower is alleging that the administration ignored a temporary restraining order that prevented it from proceeding with its scheme to prevent eligible Americans from voting by mail, and that the United States Postal Service (USPS) is rushing to complete a shoddy and untested verification system that could result in the disenfranchisement of millions of voters by denying them the right to cast their ballot by mail.

According to Whistleblower Aid, a legal organization that helps whistleblowers in the public and private sectors expose governmental and corporate wrongdoing, the individual who came forward has “direct knowledge of potentially catastrophic problems” related to this system, and acted to “flag a foreseeable catastrophic disruption to our coming nationwide elections based on the reckless pursuit of readying a new, insufficiently tested, poorly planned mail-in ballot screening system.”

The group approached Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), the ranking member of the Senate Homeland Security Committee’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, with the whistleblower’s account on Sunday.

It is included in a letter that the lawmaker sent to Postmaster General David Steiner on Tuesday morning to get answers to questions about the ballot verification system and whether USPS ignored a judge’s order barring the postal service from working on it.

According to the whistleblower, the administration’s plan is to put it in place as early as today, but doing so would have disastrous consequences.

“The apparently sloppy and rushed manner in which the Federal Ballot Mail Portal and supporting IT systems are being built poses significant risk,” the whistleblower report states. “Potentially millions of American voters may not receive their mail-in ballot this election cycle in a timely manner, or at all.”

One of the main problems with the way the system is designed, according to the whistleblower, is that it features a “zero percent failure rate” with regard to reading the unique barcodes on envelopes containing the ballots sent to voters as well as the completed ballots they are sending back.

“As presently designed, if even one bar code on one single ballot in a bulk-mailing of 10,000 ballots fails to properly scan during the verification process, the entire batch is rejected and sent back to the state — effectively stopping the ballots from being mailed to voters,” the whistleblower report states.

The problems with such a system, even one that wasn’t rushed and haphazardly designed, should be apparent to anybody who has ever tried to use a self-checkout to buy their groceries.

Of course, in light of Donald Trump’s war on mail-in ballots, potentially preventing tens of millions of Americans from voting by mail may be a feature of the new system and not a bug.

While the whistleblower alleges that the system is to be completed as early as today, it is unclear how USPS could roll it out without being in blatant violation of a temporary restraining order that prevents the administration from implementing a final rule governing how it plans to handle ballots ahead of the midterm election in November.

In his letter, Blumenthal is asking Steiner to reconsider.

“Despite [the problems the whistleblower detailed], the Trump Administration appears intent on USPS moving forward with its flawed plans, no matter the chaos they may create,” Blumenthal wrote. “We urge you to abandon this ill-conceived, unconscionable plan and ensure that all Americans can exercise their constitutional right to vote, including by mail, without interference by USPS.”

However, it seems virtually unthinkable that the Trump administration would put an end to a scheme that is central to any hopes Republicans have to keep control of Congress.

The president, obsessed with his loss to Joe Biden in 2020, has long blamed mail-in ballots for a defeat he fails to acknowledge to this day by falsely claiming that the election was “stolen” from him and that millions of ballots were fraudulently cast.

Again, there is zero evidence that any of that happened, but election denialism and false allegations of “voter fraud” have become canon in the GOP.

In light of Trump’s dismal approval ratings, it is extremely likely that Democrats will win at least one chamber of Congress and exert the kind of oversight that Republicans have refused to exercise.

For example, when it comes to USPS’s efforts to unconstitutionally give the federal government a say in how the states administer elections.

Klaus MarreKlaus Marre, a former congressional reporter, is a senior editor for US politics at WhoWhatWhy. He writes regularly here, and you can also follow him on Bluesky and Substack.

Death

Bryan Johnson’s Blueprint for a 150-Year Life: Is It Worth It?

September 2, 2026 Mike Zonta Leave a comment

The tech mogul is trying to design the blueprint for defying death.

Aug. 13, 2026 (NYTimes.com)

By Ross Douthat

Produced by Sophia Alvarez Boyd

Mr. Douthat is a columnist and the host of the “Interesting Times” podcast.

Was it cooler to take psilocybin

Video: https://www.nytimes.com/video/opinion/100000011079554/an-8-pm-bedtime-oxygen-chambers-blood-tests-galore-what-would-you-do-for-a-longer-life.html?smid=url-share

The tech mogul Bryan Johnson is trying to design the blueprint for defying death. Credit…The New York Times

For my final episode as host of “Interesting Times,” I wanted a fitting finale — a conversation that encapsulates the ambition of this show: examining how seemingly radical ideas are steadily entering the mainstream of American politics, technology and culture. Few ideas are as radical as the hope of dramatic life extension and the quest to live forever.

My guest today thinks he can outrun death. After selling his tech company for hundreds of millions of dollars and experiencing a profound religious crisis, Bryan Johnson has turned his own body into the ultimate science project, centered on an explicit mission: Don’t Die.

But why does Johnson want to live forever, and what lessons can his algorithmically driven lifestyle bring to the rest of us?

It’s been an honor hosting this podcast and navigating these strange waters with you. “Interesting Times” will be back with new episodes and new hosts in the fall.

An 8 P.M. Bedtime, Oxygen Chambers, Blood Tests Galore: What Would You Do for a Longer Life?

The tech mogul Bryan Johnson is trying to design the blueprint for defying death.

Below is an edited transcript of an episode of “Interesting Times.” We recommend listening to it in its original form for the full effect. You can do so using the player above or on the NYTimes app, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.

Ross Douthat: Bryan Johnson, welcome to “Interesting Times.”

Bryan Johnson: I’m glad to be here. Thank you for having me.

Douthat: I’m very glad to have you. You have the dubious distinction, or maybe the extreme honor, of being the guest for my last episode as host of this show.

And I think this conversation, I’m hoping, is a fitting finale because one thing we’ve been trying to do on “Interesting Times” is to explore how I think what seemed to a lot of people like strange and radical ideas have been entering more into the mainstream of American politics, culture and technology, and so on.

One of those radical ideas that has come up more than once in this show’s run is the hope of dramatic life extension.

Douthat: It’s part of the pitch for artificial intelligence’s potential benefits, and it is now your life’s work. It’s very explicitly: Don’t Die. And you have made yourself a personal guinea pig, in fact, for all kinds of potentially life-extending treatments, and even taking what some, though certainly not me, might call a T.M.I. approach to everything that’s happening with your own body.

You’re an internet character. There’s some mockery out there, maybe, but I take you to be extremely sincere about this. And so I just wanted to start with your motivation.

Why do you, Bryan Johnson, want to fight and maybe abolish death?

Johnson: I was building my brain interface company a couple of years back. I was working with this esteemed professor, and we were trying to define intelligence.

He had a definition that I thought was really interesting, which is that intelligence is to know what to do next. And right now, in this moment, it’s a tectonic shift in terms of: What will become of the human race? What will become of each of us, individually? What do we aspire to?

Those are the questions I’m really trying to tackle. In this moment, as we remap our imagination as a species, what do we do next?

My conclusion is we are now at peak human knowledge. Also we’re potentially at peak ignorance with what A.I. will unleash.

There’s never been a time when there’s been a stronger juxtaposition between what we know and what we may not know. And in all that contemplation, I say the only thing I can truly trust in this moment is: I don’t want to die right now.

So this is not about immortality. It’s not about trying to live a million years. It’s to say the one thing I can say with certainty is: I don’t want to die right now. And I think that’s true for almost everybody.

Douthat: I want to get into some of the philosophical ramifications of this view, but can we talk biographically for a minute?

I think most people would say: Of course, I don’t want to die. But there’s a difference between having that sense or sensibility and taking the study and remaking of the human body — or your own body, in this case — as a mission.

What was going on in your life when you decided that this should be your mission?

Johnson: It goes back to when I was 21 years old. I returned from working as a missionary in Ecuador. I had lived in mud huts, on dirt floors, and I understood the depths of poverty. I was struck by the opulence of the United States and the conditions where I was in Ecuador.

In that moment, I said: I don’t know what I want to do with my life other than I want to do something useful for mankind.

And so I said: I’ll become an entrepreneur. I’ll make a whole bunch of money by age 30. Then, with money, I’ll do something interesting — a very common thing people hear.

So I did that. I sold my company, Braintree Venmo, for $800 million. I made a few hundred million dollars. And at that point, it was: OK, now I’ve done that. What do I do?

The irony was I was absolutely broken. I had burned myself out. I was raising three young kids. I was separating from my religion. I was chronically depressed. I was getting a divorce. And I just sold my company and lost my identity as a professional.

Even though I had $300 million in my bank account, it didn’t matter — I was absolutely broken as a person. So I had to rebuild myself.

I set out to ask all the basic questions: Who am I? What do I care about? What do I want to do?

Then I read this book called “Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea.” I learned about the history of zero, how it has disrupted everything in history — physics and math and art and religion and philosophy — and I wondered: What is the zero in this moment? What is the thing that is hiding in plain sight that is so obvious but that no one is doing?

I thought about that question for several years, and then I did a second thought experiment that really did it for me. I imagined being present in the year 2500. There I am, conversing with whoever that is — human or A.I., or some combination of human and A.I. They’re reflecting on the early 21st century, and they say: We’re so grateful for Homo sapiens that existed in the 21st century because they did blank.

In a few hundred years, they will compress our century into two or three or four sentences. So I thought that compression ——

Douthat: Most of them will be about podcasting, I’m confident.

Johnson: [Laughs.] Unquestionably.

I thought they’d say two things. One is that’s when Homo sapiens gave birth to superintelligence, and that’s when they figured out they’d no longer die.

And I thought: That’s it. That’s the moment where it flips, where humans go from the inevitability of death to: Don’t Die. And that’s going to become my purpose for existence.

Douthat: You were a missionary. You were a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, right?

Johnson: That’s right.

Douthat: Why did you lose your religious faith?

Johnson: I read a book called “Rough Stone Rolling.”

Douthat: Oh, yeah. A biography of Joseph Smith.

Johnson: That’s right. And I learned about the history of the church. When you’re raised in the church, you’re given a version of events that are obviously very favorable to the church’s disposition. Then when you learn the true history, you need to square with the new reality.

Like all things, humans are messy. History is messy. Once I started learning more, I thought: I just can’t quite make sense of this. And so, in my mid-20s, I read that book, and it just broke for me.

I still stayed in the religion because I was married to someone who was in there, my children were in the religion, my entire family was. It took me a while to get out, but, yeah, my faith broke in my mid-20s.

Douthat: Did it make you an atheist or just a non-Mormon?

Johnson: A non-Mormon.

Douthat: Just for my guidance, what’s your current position on God?

Johnson: [Laughs.] I’m excitingly undecided.

Douthat: OK. Good. We’ll see where we end up at the end of the conversation.

Let’s talk about what you actually decided to do once you realized that this was going to be the hinge of the 21st century.

Your project is called Project Blueprint. Blueprints show you how something should be built or structured. What are you trying to show with this project, with the work that you undertake?

Johnson: After that thought experiment of the 25th century, it was clear to me that we basically needed to build a new philosophy, a new value system, new ethics, new morals, new incentive systems.

My co-founder and I, Kate Tolo, decided to make this a project, and we said: We will make my body the philosophy.

If you look throughout time, the first story ever written was Gilgamesh, a story basically about life and death and eternal life. Over the centuries, there have been different archetypes that represent the grappling of the human race with the questions: What does it mean to live and die? And is there an afterlife?

A new archetype needs to exist that represents the quest to try to continue existence in this physical body through the means of science and technology, and there wasn’t an archetype that filled that role.

What we designed is, first, from a scientific perspective, I’m a cluster of trillions of cells, so we’re going to measure every one of those cells, as possible, including doing blood draws and imaging and measuring my body every way possible. Then we’re going to use scientific evidence and say: How do we either slow down my speed of aging and/or reverse it?

Basically, we have done a robust scientific project. We are performance artists trying to convey a new philosophy. Bryan Johnson is the first Don’t Die Homo sapien prototype — the first Homo sapien that tried to incorporate that.

Douthat: But by “archetype,” you mean a positive archetype? Immortality is associated with anyone from Dracula to Dorian Gray, let’s say. So you’re trying to make yourself an admirable archetype, right? Someone who people look at and say: This is not a bargain with the devil or something where I’m going to have a portrait that ages while I stay young. This is something that I would want to identify with.

Johnson: Not necessarily.

Douthat: OK.

Johnson: I am willing to shave off good and bad, desirable and undesirable. People make these connections all the time: It’s Dorian Gray, it’s Dracula, it’s Prometheus.

Basically, I say yes to all of it. The play here is that this is a fun game for everyone. You have people who are watching me, wanting to learn from me. You have people who want me to fail, and they want to laugh. You have this whole mixture ——

Douthat: [Laughs.] People betting against you. Yep.

Johnson: Yeah. There’s an intense interest in me failing. And you know what? That’s great. I support their viewpoints. I understand their viewpoints. I think irony is in their favor.

But I think the value is that it’s a group conversation and a group journey. For those who hate me, those who love me, it’s all the same.

Douthat: How is your cause advanced through the haters?

Johnson: Whether it’s love or hate, it’s raw energy.

Douthat: OK. Tell me about the process then for listeners and viewers who are not fully familiar with the Bryan Johnson experience. In a typical day, what are you doing to defeat death?

Johnson: OK. I’ll give a couple of quick examples. I went to bed at 8 p.m., on the dot, and I’m extremely precise about my sleep because it’s the No. 1 thing I focus on. I’ve built my entire life around sleep.

Last night I nearly got five hours of restorative sleep. My resting heart rate was 40 beats per minute. My heart rate variability, H.R.V., was 13 percent higher. So my body got full restoration to clean out the garbage and to rebuild my body.

I woke up at 4 a.m. In the first hour, I get light in my eyes right when I wake up to say: Hey, body, I’m waking up. I then eat breakfast, which is protein powder. It’s hemp and pea protein, berries, nuts, seeds, extra virgin olive oil.

I then work out for an hour. I’m currently training to dunk a basketball. I then do 20 minutes of sauna. I then do some intermittent hypoxia and/or hyperoxia training, and then I have my first meal of the day.

Every single day, I do some version of that.

Douthat: The powder doesn’t count as a meal?

Johnson: [Laughs.] It does. I guess that’s my first real meal. You’re right.

Douthat: OK.

Johnson: By the way, every calorie fights for its life. I have extremely precise nutrition — every calorie gets in there. And that’s how my entire life is built.

So I’m doing this with you now. I’ve got some doctor appointments later this afternoon. I’ll do more measurements. But my entire life is regimented structure. This gives rise to people saying I live in a cage. That’s partially true. Also I’m a living experiment.

I’ll give you some quick examples for those who are unfamiliar. We try to measure everything. For example, I’m 48 years old, but my left ear is age 64 based upon some hearing loss I had as a kid listening to music too loud and shooting guns. So I’ve gotten hearing aids to try to correct for the deficiencies.

We aged the gums in my mouth — what’s the recession, etc.? Some data sets are very robust, some are emergent. We just take whatever data we have.

Douthat: My lower gums are ancient. I won’t show them to you.

Johnson: Do you know the measurement?

Douthat: No, no. I just can see them in the mirror, and they’ve clearly aged more rapidly than the rest of my mouth. This is just a rough estimate based on trips to the bathroom.

Johnson: [Laughs.] Yeah.

We spent several months rejuvenating my gums because I have bruxism, which means I grind my teeth at night. I did that for about 20 years before I had a dentist saying: Hey, this is a problem. You need a mouth guard of this type.

The grinding caused my gums to recede and my pocket depth to increase. So we did a bunch of therapies where we restored my gums to roughly early 20s age. My left ear, we’ve made zero progress.

Sometimes you find a deficiency like where you’re older than your chronological age, and you can do something about it. Sometimes you can’t do anything about it. That’s why it matters so much to measure. You’re trying to find the oldest, highest-risk part of your body that creates the highest risk of all-cause mortality.

Douthat: You mentioned superintelligence earlier. You’ve sort of undertaken this project over a period where A.I. has become the focus of so much hope and fear and interest about measurement and analysis and everything else.

How are you using A.I. right now?

Johnson: This project would be stalled without A.I. We’ve acquired 1.5 billion data points. It’s impossible for any doctor to keep that in their memory, so we have built an A.I. system where we ingest all my data — my genome and my proteome — and every measurement we do, all my wearables. You name it, we do it.

Then we’re trying to make sense of it. The A.I. has been phenomenal in terms of identifying patterns we can’t pick up through manual processes.

The idea behind what I’m trying to do is: Cars drive themselves. Software now writes itself, to a certain degree. The next is health. Health is going to write itself, which means if I can measure my body and feed data to A.I., A.I. will know better what to do than me or my doctors.

I’m building my autonomous self. I’m building a self-driving body so it just automatically takes care of itself more robustly than I can.

Douthat: OK, but just to push on that analogy for a minute, as you describe your day, your body is not just taking care of itself while you go about your daily business. Your daily business is this project, and you are a wealthy entrepreneur, and — we’ll get into this in a minute — you’re also making money from this project. This is your business, so it’s not a passive thing where you’ve just trained your body to drive itself the way that a Waymo might drive you around San Francisco.

What’s the takeaway for someone who works a 9-to-5 job, during which maybe they can eat the protein powder or something, but otherwise, they’re not going to be dunking a basketball at 2 p.m. Pacific?

Johnson: [Laughs.] Yeah. So two things on this. One is there are some parts of the project that are autonomous. For example, the bed I sleep in automatically adjusts temperature according to my body. It changes my temperature profile about 32 times per night, making sure I stay in deep sleep and REM sleep and I avoid wake events.

So yes, there are some advanced features where I get real-time data, real-time measurement and real-time adjustment. But you’re right that I’m basically in analog world. As much as I want A.I. to run my life, I have to physically take those actions. I have to buy food.

I totally agree with you, and we’re trying to ——

Douthat: I mean, you can get DoorDash.

Johnson: [Laughs.] Yeah.

Douthat: I’m also interested, watching you, because I spent a certain period of my own life treating myself as a guinea pig. I had a very severe chronic illness that had basically totally ruined my life for a period of a couple of years. Let’s just say there was insufficient medical data on how you would ideally treat it.

So I treated myself, to use the language of studies, as an N of 1. I was just trying things — things that people had recommended, things that had some science behind them. But this was an all-consuming process at a lot of times.

First of all, I was always treating it as a provisional thing to get me back to health. That was sort of how I understood it. In the end, it got me there — or close enough to there — so that I no longer live like that.

Second, I didn’t imagine that the things I was doing were going to be generalizable. If other people had the same illness, I would give them advice and compare notes and so on, but it just seemed so clear that whatever was going on in my own body was very, very idiosyncratic.

When I look at what you’re doing, I’m curious about two things. First, this is an open-ended thing. There’s no point where you’re like: OK, now I can relax and stop trying all these things.

Because you’re not trying to attain health. You’re trying not to die, and that’s an ongoing process.

Second, I really don’t completely understand how you think you can reasonably generalize from, again, one body, one set of measurements and monitoring and so on, to a wider population. Scientific studies are not based on one person’s experience.

You can take either one of those questions — or you can react in any way to that you want.

Johnson: You can think of this in the idea that capitalism means you learn how to make money. You learn the skill sets of how to make money. People do that in a variety of ways, but you’re choosing: I’m going to choose to devote 10 hours of my day to make money. Or: I’m going to choose to spend blank hours of my day trying not to die.

It’s really the exact same thing, and people don’t quite understand that. Right now we know how much coffee costs, and we know what it means when the bank account balance gets below $100. But we have no accounting ledger for life and death.

You don’t know what it costs you to stay up all night. You don’t know what it costs you to be 40 pounds overweight. You can look at some rough data tables, but we don’t have an accounting system. You don’t see your bank account balance change that frequently.

What I’m trying to do is be a prototype, an archetype, to say: There’s a new way of thinking and a new way of being that has this. The way I try to compress this for people is I say: Look, I understand health is complicated. Your life is complicated. Everything you have going on, it’s stressful.

And so I try to say: Focus on one thing. That is your resting heart rate before bed. If somebody focuses on that single biomarker, it helps them wrestle the bad cultural habits we have as a society, which means we go to bed way too late, inconsistently. We have our screens on our faces up until bedtime. We eat way too late. We have snacks.

That one thing really wrestles the majority of bad habits, and once a person can wrestle their sleep, then all of these positive things happen. So I do try to say: Of course I’m the outlier, but I can simplify this into basics.

Douthat: So you’re doing 100 things, and you’re saying that the person who watches you can do two of those things?

Johnson: That’s right.

Douthat: But you’re also selling products, right?

Johnson: That’s right.

Douthat: What do you sell?

Johnson: Everything I put into my body, I make available so other people can do if they choose.

Douthat: And is everything you’re putting into your body chosen based on some kind of scientific research or background?

Johnson: Exactly. Yeah.

Douthat: OK. So you’re basically selling products. You’re not saying: I, Bryan Johnson, have run studies on these things.

But you’re saying: I, Bryan Johnson, have looked at studies on these things, and they’ve persuaded me that I should be willing to ingest them.

Johnson: Exactly. And I need to be very clear: I am not doing this to make money.

I started this project, and I needed this ——

Douthat: Can I raise an eyebrow at that? And have one note of skepticism?

Johnson: Please. You can raise two if you like.

Douthat: OK. But really, you’re not trying to make money?

Johnson: Absolutely not. My premise is: I already have plenty of money. I don’t need any more money. And, in fact, if I wanted to make money, there are probably 10 to 20 businesses I would start way before this one.

The business that I’m in sucks. Low margin, pain in the [expletive], terrible logistics. It is not the business I would build. And sometimes I really regret having done it. My life would be so much simpler by not having to spend time on this business.

But basically, whether you believe me or not, I’m genuinely trying to do people a favor in doing this.

Douthat: Do you pull products? Are you constantly pulling things in and out, taking things for a while and saying: Oh, that didn’t have any effect on the biomarker, and so I’ll stop taking it? What are you adding and subtracting?

Johnson: Mostly therapies. When you measure the body, and you say: OK, the biological age is blank. Can you reverse it? Then what therapies can you do?

And so we went down the list of the best therapies with the best evidence of showing age reversal, and we’ve done those. We did a hyperbaric oxygen therapy. We’ve done sauna. We did I.H.H.T.

Douthat: What’s the best? Again, let’s say I’m the person who says: Bryan, I can only do one thing out of your list of therapies. I’m a busy man. I’ve got a lot of kids. I have a podcast. I’m changing jobs. What do I do?

Johnson: Sauna. I would do dry sauna — that’s not wet, not infrared. Dry sauna between 175 degrees Fahrenheit and 212 degrees Fahrenheit for 20 minutes. And I’d do it about four to five times per week.

For you, because you’re a man, I would suggest you put ice on your boys, because otherwise it has negative effects on your fertility. So be sure they’re cold.

Douthat: I have five children. Honestly, Bryan, I’m not superworried about that specific issue.

What about reversal? You talked about the idea that you’re looking for things that actually reverse the age of an organ or a part of your body. What’s something that you’ve done that you think has the most promise for that?

Johnson: We’ve seen several. Hyperbaric oxygen therapy was one of the most efficacious therapies we’ve ever done. The difficulty is that you need to be in this chamber for 90 minutes for 60 sessions in 90 days, so it’s a huge time commitment.

Douthat: That’s a commitment.

Johnson: It’s a huge one. It’s just not practical for people to do it. But we saw benefits in skin health, telomeres, microbiome, brain. We saw it across the board.

Douthat: Again, in any of these cases, you’re one person. Are you assuming that somewhere in your fan base there are people who are saying: Oh, this is really interesting that Bryan Johnson got these results. We’re going to set up a big controlled trial based on this?

Johnson: Yes.

Douthat: Again, to take this beyond your own experience, you need that kind of thing, right?

Johnson: Absolutely, yeah. I’ll give you an example where that has bridged. We did an experiment looking at psilocybin. People think about psilocybin either as an ancient medicine ceremony, or recently, for trials looking at PTSD and anxiety and things like that. We asked the question: Is psilocybin a longevity medicine?

We did the most quantified psychedelic psilocybin experience in history. We measured 250 biomarkers, and one of the things we found was there was this unique metabolic reset of my blood glucose. That was not in the literature before.

So in that sense, yes, there are several groups now who have petitioned, trying to get funding for a rigorous study to look at psilocybin more robustly as a longevity therapy. It would be a very big shift in how people think about this.

So we’ve had several wins like that, of reframing different topics in what we do. And again, it doesn’t answer it definitively, but it points in the direction of: Is this worthy of a study?

Douthat: Aspirationally, based on your knowledge right now, without some further dramatic breakthrough — just to put yourself in the hands of your haters for a minute — how many years of your life do you think you’re getting through this kind of regimen?

Johnson: Yeah, let’s actually amplify their argument and say the better argument for them is I’m shortening my life. Not only am I not doing myself good — let’s say I’m actually doing myself harm by intermingling with my body.

And you know what? I’m open to the criticism. Maybe that’s true. Maybe it’s better to just let my body do its thing without meddling.

We measure things as best we can. We try to look at all the data, and we say: How is my body doing? We look at hundreds of markers every month trying to say: Is it good or bad? But, ultimately, we don’t know.

So I think it’s really an open-ended question. This is early, early stages of science.

Douthat: I guess what I’m driving at is there’s a best-case scenario, where you do everything right, and the end result is you’re healthier in your 80s than you otherwise would be, and you avoid some disease you otherwise would get, and in the end, you get an extra one to seven years of life. And that’s a win for you and for everyone who ever watched you on a video.

But that’s not defeating death. That’s not: Don’t Die. Whereas actually defeating or, more realistically, postponing death, some people would say, is going to come from some big breakthrough that has nothing to do with the protein powder you take or anything. And everything that you do is going to look sort of like dieting advice before Ozempic.

What do you make of that argument? Does your work actually connect to the people who want to add not one to three but 50 to 75 years to human life spans?

Johnson: Yeah. I’m under no illusion that we don’t have the longevity drug that just makes death go away. But health is forgotten until it’s the only thing that matters.

I think your case is a good example that when you do have something wrong with you, it wrecks your life. And when you choose to do things that put you at risk of your life being wrecked, that’s bad.

Continue reading →

Early life and education

Journalism

Activism

Early activism (1968–1976)

Billye Talmadge was more than an early DOB member

Her role in the Daughters of Bilitis

The 1960 convention is particularly revealing

And then there is the part I think you’ll find most fascinating

Billye’s own explanation is the key

And we can establish that she really was teaching Thane’s material

She seems to have become a genuine mentor

But did Billye influence Thane?

The fascinating convergence

One more thing changes my interpretation of Billye

And this raises a really good question for us

What we can establish already

And this changes the question

There’s a particularly strong clue

And here’s something I hadn’t appreciated before

And then there is your own experience

The Coming Race

About the author

September 1st, 2026 – Venus Enters Shadow

September 10th, 2026 – Mercury Enters Libra, Venus Enters Scorpio

September 11th, 2026 – New Moon In Virgo

September 11th, 2026 – Uranus Goes Retrograde

September 12–14, 2026 – Mercury Opposite Neptune, Trine Pluto, Trine Uranus

September 14th, 2026 – Lilith Enters Capricorn

September 15th, 2026 – Venus Square Pluto

September 15th, 2026 – Neptune Sextile Pluto

September 19th, 2026 – Chiron Enters Aries

September 23rd, 2026 – Sun Enters Libra

September 26th, 2026 – Full Moon In Aries

September 28th, 2026 – Mars Enters Leo

“… What happens is of little significance compared with the stories we tell ourselves about what happens. Events matter little, only stories of events affect us.”

An 8 P.M. Bedtime, Oxygen Chambers, Blood Tests Galore: What Would You Do for a Longer Life?

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