Redwood City-based Revolution Medicines — the developer of the newly approved cancer medication Rasonque — lists UCSF professor Kevan Shokat among its co-founders.Courtesy Revolution Medicines
UCSF researchers are celebrating the approval by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration of a groundbreaking new drug — the research roots of which can be traced back to the university — to treat pancreatic cancer.
Daraxonrasib — also known by the brand name Rasonque — is a pill-based drug treatment for metastatic pancreatic cancer that presents a new option for patients with advanced forms of the disease. It targets a protein called RAS, which is found in 90% of patients with pancreatic cancer and drives tumor growth.
The drug is in some ways a “RAS inhibitor,” said Dr. Andrew Ko, a specialist in digestive cancers who has long been researching the protein and ran the clinical trial in partnership with Revolution Medicines, which developed the drug.
Kevan Shokat, one of the co-founders of the Redwood City-based biotech company, is a professor of cellular and molecular pharmacology at UCSF.
Last week’s approval is a milestone years in the making.
“The biology — in terms of this RAS molecule, understanding how it functions, understanding the different aspects of its structure — has been ongoing for the past 10 to 20 years,” Ko said. “This has long been called the holy grail in terms of trying to develop drugs that target this mutation because it’s so common, because it’s what drives the pancreatic cancer to grow and survive.”
Pancreatic cancer is one of the most lethal cancers, with a five-year survival rate of 13%, according to the American Cancer Society. About 67,000 new cases are diagnosed every year, and it’s often detected late, according to the FDA’s announcement last week.
The clinical trial for Rasonque, which involved 500 adults, took place at multiple clinics, including UCSF. It found that the drug improved patients’ median overall survival time to 13.2 months, compared with 6.7 months for standard chemotherapy.
The typical treatment up until this point has been traditional chemotherapy, which uses strong, intense drugs that can have serious side effects, including fatigue, hair loss, nausea, numbness and tingling, and suppression of the immune system, while only providing “moderate efficacy,” Ko said.
“This is a completely different drug,” he said of Rasonque. “This drug compared to traditional chemotherapy really significantly improved survival for patients … this will be huge for our patient population.”
To qualify for the new drug, patients must have already tried chemotherapy or not be eligible for combined chemotherapies — but the FDA’s language on those restrictions is “liberal,” Ko said.
“You may see the drug even being used as a frontline treatment for patients with a new diagnosis of metastatic pancreatic cancer,” he said.
The drug could also potentially be applied to other types of cancers that also have the RAS protein mutation, although to lower degrees than pancreatic cancer, such as lung cancer, colon cancer, and bile-duct cancer. Those types of applications are being studied at UCSF and elsewhere, Ko said.
The typical treatment for pancreatic cancer has been traditional chemotherapy, which uses strong, intense drugs that can have serious side effects.Gerry Broome/Associated Press file
Ko said it’s a little premature to say that this drug treatment should become the “gold standard,” Ko said, but it opens up possibilities to shift cancer patients away from the harsher intravenous drugs used for chemotherapy.
“That would be a wholesale shift if that happens,” he said.
Patients could have more agency by taking the pill at home, instead of having to go into a facility to receive chemotherapy, Ko said.
“I don’t want to imply it’s totally benign,” he said of the drug — which does have side effects that include nausea and edema — but it still could “hearken a wholesale transformation in how we treat patients.”
The drug might have other possibilities as well, including use at earlier stages in patients who have operable cancers, and to prevent recurrence of the cancer in patients who have undergone surgery.
The drug does have a hefty price tag, as reported Monday by The New York Times — about $480,000 a year, or $663 per dose, which Ko said has become common with molecularly targeted therapies in recent years.
“It’s a bigger issue in terms of our health system and how these drugs are priced,” he said. “You absolutely can make an argument that it’s super expensive and that contributes to why our health-care costs are what they are.”
But he said that even with the high cost, it’s likely to be covered by Medicare, and he said he anticipates that other insurers will follow suit.
Because chemotherapy also includes the cost of intravenous time and other factors, comparing the two would be “apples and oranges,” Ko said.
Autocracy wasn’t inevitable in early civilizations — many were more egalitarian. But when riches were there to monopolize, strongmen and inequalities emerged.
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Why are some societies ruled by autocrats — powerful people who make all the decisions with barely, if any, checks and balances — while in others, the governed actually have a say?
If you ask an archaeologist, historian or political scientist, this is how the story traditionally goes: People used to move around in small groups to hunt and gather, making decisions more or less collectively. Then they invented agriculture, which tied them to particular patches of land, and allowed some of them to store and hoard resources. This inevitably led to inequality in wealth and power.
This inequality grew as populations expanded and some villages became cities that were so populous they needed strong leaders to maintain order among many. And that was the state of the world until the ancient Greeks devised a new approach called “democracy.”
CREDIT: JAMES PROVOST (CC BY-ND)
Archaeologist Gary Feinman
Field Museum, Chicago
Democracy waned during the Middle Ages, then regained momentum centuries later, again in Europe, the story goes. From there, it slowly but steadily spread to other regions, giving autocrats a run for their money.
It’s a tidy tale, but a vast oversimplification, says archaeologist Gary Feinman of the Field Museum in Chicago. His own research shows that autocratic governments are not inevitable when populations grow larger — a variety of societies around the globe throughout history have done things differently.
What’s more, these less autocratically organized societies were neither limited to, nor more common, in Europe, but were found around the world, from Teotihuacan in Mexico to Mohenjo-daro in Pakistan.
Feinman described his archaeological perspective on long-term political change in a 2023 overview in the Annual Review of Anthropology and, with colleagues, tested those ideas in subsequent research, published in PNAS and Science Advances. He spoke with Knowable Magazine about the factors that foster autocracy or more inclusive forms of governance.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Which archaeological sites have you worked at, and how have they affected your outlook?
I’ve spent most of my academic research career doing archaeological fieldwork in Mexico and China. I started out in Mesoamerica, in Mexico, and that’s my principal area. I’ve done work at several scales, from regional surveys to intensive site excavations, including many houses.
When people started to work in Mesoamerica with a goal beyond finding artifacts to fill museum cases, they made the assumption, which wasn’t terrible at the time, that Mesoamerican civilizations would be characterized by top-down, coercive, despotic governance and political control of the economy — in other words, that the state directed what people produced, monopolized key resources and tightly controlled the distribution of goods.
That’s what I learned as a student in the 1970s.
But as I excavated houses, we often found that in almost every house we excavated, people made something for exchange — tools or pottery, for example. And they used things that they didn’t make and that may not even have been made at the settlement where those were situated.
So if everybody made goods for exchange, it would have been very hard, if not impossible, for a central authority to control the economy. We also didn’t find any storehouses that would have allowed the leaders to accumulate and hoard resources.
The idea that the state controlled the economy to empower a despotic ruler didn’t fit the data.
As we began to compile data on pre-Hispanic Mesoamerica across space and time, we found that the nature of rulership, the organization of cities, almost anything we looked at, was variable. It wasn’t just this one mode with one all-powerful king like the Classic Maya along the Usumacinta River had.
K’inich Janaab Pakal, new king of the Maya city-state of Palenque (located in current-day Mexico), receives a feathered war headdress from his mother at his accession to rule in July 615. Such autocratic rulers of the Classic Maya period were exalted, residing in large palaces and buried in elaborate tombs.CREDIT: M. DE WALDECK / MONUMENTS ANCIENS DU MEXIQUE: PALENQUÉ ET AUTRES RUINES DE L’ANCIENNE CIVILISATION DU MEXIQUE 1866
The Classic Maya glorified their rulers, they had very elaborate burials and fancy palaces much bigger than any other house. That fits the top-down model.
But when you look at a place like Teotihuacan near Mexico City or Monte Albán, near Oaxaca City, they don’t fit that, neither in the economic or political realm.Instead of opulent tombs and monuments glorifying a single ruler, Teotihuacan features open plazas for public assembly, murals depicting processions of masked officials rather than named kings, and temples with wide tops designed to hold groups rather than a single ruler or priest.
That was unexpected, as a lot of Western social scientists thought that, with the exception of Greece and Rome, all pre-modern societies were autocratic and that’s the way it was until the Enlightenment, when people became more rational.
In China, we surveyed in eastern Shandong province, which was the last area to be incorporated into the empire of China’s first emperor, Qin Shi Huang, who first unified the country and is buried in the famous tomb of the terracotta warriors. Again, traditional theory would expect that in the aftermath of this incorporation, the area would show hardship and less well-being.
But in fact, the historical and archaeological data show that the area boomed after its incorporation into the empire, which remained unified for several centuries under the subsequent Han Dynasty. Population numbers went up dramatically across the region, new settlements were established, better transport infrastructure led to more integration as areas were more connected to each other and exchanges of all kinds became easier. This was not a despotic regime sucking everything out of areas that had been conquered.
So again, this idea that pre-modern systems of governance were always highly autocratic turned out to not fit the data. Over time, the information we collected raised all of these issues. That ultimately led to the 2023 Annual Review paper, which summarizes how these ideas that have been at the core of Western social science for around 500 years became entrenched. That paper is an effort to chart a new way.
I have since been a contributor to two large studies with two different teams testing those ideas.
Can you tell us about those studies?
The first one, published in 2025 in the journal PNAS, explored the relationship between inequality and demographic and political scale by looking at the difference between the largest and smallest houses at over a thousand archaeological sites. The second one, which I led and was reported March 2026 in Science Advances, looked at the relationship between the nature of governance and scale across 40 archaeological and historic contexts.
The assumption has long been that throughout most of history the concentration of power and inequality both increase with population size, because people lacked the wherewithal to get things done without top-down, coercive leadership. These two studies showed that population size matters but is not deterministic. In both studies, it only explained around a quarter of the variability in equality or degree of autocracy.
The remains of the city of Mohenjo-daro in current-day Pakistan, constructed around 2,500 BCE by the Indus Valley civilization, reveal buildings more or less equal in size, an indication of a relatively egalitarian society. Many also had access to a water supply and sewage system.CREDIT: SHOZIB ALI BROHI / SHUTTERSTOCK
In addition, in our data we see evidence for democratic practices in other parts of the world than ancient Greece and republican Rome at roughly the same time, or maybe even slightly earlier. These two civilizations may have had the biggest influence on modern society, which is a function of how records were kept and stored and transmitted over time, and we don’t mean to diminish the importance of those places. But they’re not unique as people have presumed. And it’s certainly not true that every place else was organized autocratically.
Finally, we show that everything did not change with farming. This is a very entrenched argument: the idea that with farming and sedentary life, everything changed rapidly, and that then we were on an inevitable course of increasing scale, increasing concentration of power, and so on. Our data don’t support that. It’s not that agriculture wasn’t a key innovation. It was, and it did have long-term impacts. But they weren’t always immediate or the same.
I think those are the key points: We are finding evidence that does not conform to very longstanding and entrenched views, not just in archaeology, but across the social sciences.
Could we still say that things like farming and increased population created opportunities for autocrats, even if they didn’t make autocracy inevitable?
I think an increase in scale definitely creates opportunities for autocrats, and I think agriculture creates the opportunity for increases in scale because it increases productivity.
But what comes out of our research, which I think is very important, is that the concentration of power mainly comes from how resources are channeled into political institutions.
When a state must collect a lot of its tax by taking a little bit from many farmers or tradespeople, it’s probably going to be more democratically organized. We call these “internal resources.” Under such conditions, autocracy would be hard to achieve: People can vote with their feet by moving away, so you have to make them want to contribute.
But when resources and technologies can be monopolized, whether they be control of trade routes or war booty or mines or plantations and slavery, that’s when you find autocracy. We refer to these as “external resources.”
With monopolized external resources, you don’t have to depend on getting a little bit from many people. By having a relatively channeled or controlled resource,you just pay a small number of people to help you protect that resource. You don’t have to exploit your citizens, you can more or less ignore your citizens.
To clarify, slave estates and even feudal estates, in our terminology, are external resources. The people who work there have little or no freedom. Autocrats want to escape having to pay for labor. If through time, they can capture that labor, they can turn small-scale farming, which is an internal resource for which they depend on their citizens, into an external resource they control themselves. That’s an autocratic strategy, to exploit people who lack citizenship status.
As for the free citizens, I think a misconception in a lot of prior literature was that autocrats tend to terrorize and exploit citizens. From my perspective, it’s more typical for autocratic parties to ignore their citizens, because they don’t need taxes from them. They don’t really want to see them harmed, because they may be useful at some point, and they may still contribute some resources. But they can sort of ignore them.
You’ve explained that you quantified inequality by looking at the difference between the largest and smallest houses. But how do you quantify even more abstract concepts like autocracy or inclusiveness?
This is where working with a team was important. For the research published in Science Advances, our first get-together was mostly about designing a protocol that a dozen people who were experts on various places and periods felt could work to compare the degree of autocracy across all these different cases. We decided on two key dimensions. First: How much power is concentrated in a very small number of individuals? Second: How much opportunity do everyday people have to communicate with each other and express their views and opinions? Our challenge was to measure those two dimensions, concentration of power and inclusiveness, using the kinds of information we have from archaeological and historical sources.
We devised a suite of 27 “proxies,” things we could measure or reconstruct that provided information on key features of governance. Are decisions made in an impregnable fortress or a wide-open council house? Does the state’s art glorify a single ruler, or does it focus on gods, nature and the community? Are there large, accessible public plazas where citizens can gather, or is the architecture highly restrictive? And then we collected as many of those proxies as we could find across 31 localities from around the world, several of which had multiple discrete time blocks for a total of 40 cases. These were then integrated and summed to give every entity a placement on an autocracy index we developed.
This gave us a basis to examine the causes and consequences of the observed variability in autocracy. We have so many proxies that even if somebody quibbles over one, that’s not going to affect the overall results all that much.
What does a more equal society look like in the archaeological record? Can you give me an example?
Many societies were initially interpreted to have been autocracies, because of things like the monumentality of the buildings. It was assumed that places like Teotihuacan must have been autocratically organized because they built these giant pyramids. Why would people ever build those pyramids unless they were forced to by an autocrat?
But it turned out that Teotihuacan was pretty collectively organized, lacking evidence for a singular ruler. In addition, the pyramids had wide enough tops for at least10 or 12 people to meet, whereas the Classic Maya temples in places like Tikal have space for only one or two, maybe three people at the top, suggesting they were led by a single leader.
Some people still thought there must be a king’s burial at Teotihuacan. So over the last decade or so, archaeologists have made tunnels under the three biggest pyramids in Teotihuacan, looking for the ruler’s burial.
And what have they found? Offerings, sometimes sacrificial victims, but no king. This is very different from the key Maya temples and pyramids, which often were temples that served as the funerary mausoleum for a Maya king. There’s none of that at Teotihuacan.
Then if you look at the layout of the city, Teotihuacan is laid out with wide thoroughfares and big plazas. People could get together. It’s more inclusive. That’s not the case in Classic Maya cities.
The Avenue of the Dead in Teotihuacan, Mexico, is an example of a large central space that was accessible to the public, a place for people to meet, trade and exchange information. In more autocratic societies, such spaces would often be walled off and reserved for the powerful elites.CREDIT: GARY FEINMAN
In the art of Teotihuacan, murals have been preserved and generally show the most important people. They’re usually in a group, there’s not one single king. They’re not named. And they’re often part of processions. And in various scenes, the supernatural beings or the important figures are giving out water or seeds or other goods to the people.
The Classic Maya, on the other hand, often depicted their kings stepping on a captive or collecting goods from others, taking rather than giving. This indicates that murals can portray a ruler in their likely role.
What might explain the differences between these two civilizations?
In the case of the Classic Maya, the trade routes along the Usumacinta River were hugely important. They traded cacao. They traded jade. They traded obsidian. They traded cloth and feathers. These goods were both consumed and exchanged. The control of that trade, an external resource that could be controlled by the ruling elites, was very important to the Classic Maya lords and their transactional relations with other lords.
Whereas in Teotihuacan, I think the principal financing came from labor taxes, perhaps some sort of tax on farmers and small-scale craft production. So the government was much more internally financed, from what we can tell — we don’t have written records. We don’t have any evidence that the control of long-distance trade in the Teotihuacan case was directed by the government. Crafts were produced in residential places all over the site, not just in the pyramids.
This reproduction of a mural from the Tepantitla complex in Teotihuacan, Mexico, shows a supernatural figure distributing water and a priest distributing seeds, suggesting a different attitude in its ruling class compared with civilizations in which rulers were depicted receiving goods or being served.CREDIT: THOMAS ALETO / FLICKR
I’m sure many people would classify taxes as quite autocratic.
I think the idea that paying tax is essentially exploitative is another misconception. By paying tax, you might get some services that help you live better. Paying tax may allow a democratic government the opportunity to create goods and services, which may allow the citizens to produce more, or trade more, or raise more kids because they can have a better life.
In the pre-modern world, there was a lot of mobility. People could move around. So if you’re depending on a tax base of farmers or small-scale craft people, you want to bring those people close to you so you can tax the wealth they produce.
A lot of what we see in the historical record is not necessarily direct redistribution of wealth. Governments gave back by creating wide streets, big open spaces where people can get together and systems to bring water to people, as well as of course by organizing defense. All of these are ways that governments can work with people to improve the lives of everyday citizens.
We’ve also found that in more democratic societies, ritual tends to be participatory — things like collective dancing, processions, feasting — all aimed at engendering trust, cohesion and cooperation. In a lot of cases, prosperity and growth emerge from a win-win situation: If you have a functioning government that collects taxes, but uses them to improve people’s lives, society may be bit more hierarchical, but well-being will benefit.
That being said, you always have tension, and things change over time. There are always people trying to get more for themselves, or to avoid having to share. That can undermine the system. Whether you read about republican Rome, the Weimar Republic or the United States today, democratic systems can be undermined, generally through the concentration of wealth, which often fosters a concentration of power.
In Monte Albán in Mexico, the region where I’ve worked, after more than a thousand years of being one of the longest-lasting collectively organized cities that we know, we start seeing statues glorifying rulers and evidence that these rulers inherited their position, which is not evident early on. So even there, there was some sort of breakdown, and then the whole city collapsed. It’s pretty hard to maintain democracies. They are particularly fragile, because in many ways they’re more complex.
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Is this why they often develop very complex administrations too — something taxpayers love to complain about?
Yes. We can see this complexity in Monte Albán and Teotihuacan, which had lots of public buildings that could have had a bureaucratic function — they’re not residences. Such a multitude of public buildings other than palaces is an indicator of more bureaucratic activity.
Of course, you can pervert bureaucracies into more nepotistic, transactional systems. But I think you need bureaucracy in a democracy because, again, you have to collect taxes, and also you need certain kinds of labor to build infrastructure, provide security and organize society.
Bureaucracy can also be a check on centralized power. I think a mistake that came out of early social science was that people looked at ancient Asian societies and assumed that because they had big bureaucracies, they must have been dynasties, very centralized and very unequal.
In reality, the elaborate bureaucratic system in ancient China frequently checked the rulers to some degree. Bureaucrats had to take a test to get in, so it was quite meritocratic. And they had certain loyalties to their hometowns, so they didn’t always agree among themselves. So collectively, they had somewhat different interests than the ruler did, and defended them.
If you look at the most democratic times of the United States, say the time of Franklin D. Roosevelt, our bureaucracy back then was very effective, which led to increasing standards of living for the general population. A lot of our ideas are based on these mythic notions that government doesn’t work for the people. But I think it depends on the kind of government.
Are there other impressive or inspiring examples of collective or democratic governance in corners of the world and eras where most people do not expect them?
There are a number of examples from North America — the Iroquois, the Zuni, Chaco Canyon. They were relatively small, but they were certainly large enough that higher degrees of inequality could have been sustained. Yet they were collectively governed and had lower degrees of inequality, with different communities sharing power. Some people argue that some of these Native American practices of governance may have influenced the early founders of the United States too.
I hope our work helps people realize that the past does have a lot of lessons. As the saying goes, the past doesn’t repeat, but it rhymes. The old frameworks — claiming the world was always autocratic and becomes ever more so as societies grow — make the past seem remote and the present and future immune to change. But if more inclusive kinds of governance have been there all along, then all of a sudden, those lessons from history become much more relevant.
Hopefully, people in policy will be able to incorporate some of this new thinking into how they address today’s problems.
Tim Vernimmen is a freelance science writer, which is a notoriously poor strategy for monopolizing wealth.
A 2014 study published in the The Journal of Sexual Medicine reported that men under 5 feet 9 inches had a higher weekly frequency of sexual intercourse compared to their taller counterparts. As a 5-foot-5-inch man, I was heartened to read about this study. Before we delve into the different sexual experiences of shorter vs taller males, we need to look at the changing sexual trends that are impacting everyone.
News Flash: While I was writing this article, Dolly Parton died. She was one of my heroes. I loved her, her music, and what she gave to the world. In a world of conflict, blame, and shame, Dolly was a beacon of hope. I will have more to share in future articles, but here I will say that I didn’t love her just because she was short. Certainly, being a short woman has different challenges than being a short man.
What stands out to me about Dolly Parton was that she absolutely knew who she was, believed in herself, and expressed herself in ways that we can all learn from — Her lifelong connection to her roots, her long-term successful marriage, her inspirational songs and music, her love of children, and her belief in the goodness of everyone. She will be missed, but her legacy will live forever.
I have been helping men, women, and couples improve their sex and love lives for more than fifty years. In the last five years, I have seen a disturbing trend. Men and women of all ages are having less sex, and many males are giving up on partnered sex all together and turning to pornography and AI companions. What is going on?
Dr. Debra Soh is a neuroscientist who specializes in human sexuality. She has written an important new book, SEXtinction: The Decline of Sex and the Future of Intimacy. “Society has never been more sexualized,” says Dr. Soh, “yet we are having less sex than ever before. In 2016, a study published in the academic journal Archives of Sexual Behavior found that young people were having less sex than their preceding generations.”
The study went on to say, “Millennials (born from 1980 to 1994 in their early twenties at the time) were more likely than previous generations at the same age to report no sexual partners since turning eighteen. The results were expected to continue for the Millennials’ successors, Generation Z (or ‘Zoomers,’ born from 1995 to 2012).”
This sweeping global trend is affecting both sexes and all age cohorts but is especially pronounced among Millennials and Generation Z, with roughly one in three men and one in five women reporting they haven’t had sex in the past year.”
“Considering that young men have, on average a higher sex drive and greater sociosexuality (that is, enjoyment of casual sex) than women, their decline in sexual activity is the opposite of what one might expect,” says Dr. Soh.
The Two Turbines of Change Impacting the Dynamic Between the Sexes Today
In Sextinction, Dr. Soh describes two important factors driving the changes we are seeing in today’s sexual relationships:
Men are losing the social and economic characteristics that make them attractive partners to women.
Women are excelling along these very same vectors.
Hypergamy (aka, marrying up) states that women, on average, look for financial resources and status in a potential mate and will trade up to acquire the best partner they can find. From an evolutionary perspective, this makes sense since pregnancy is riskier for females than it is for males. “Evolutionarily speaking,” says Dr. Soh, “Procreating with a mate who couldn’t protect and provide was dangerous. In most cases, it meant that neither you nor your children could expect to live for long.”
Through the ages, women typically look for partners who are at least as successful as they are. Men generally seek partners based on youth and physical attractiveness, which are indicators of high fertility and likely reproductive success. But times, they are a changing, as Bob Dylan reminds us, in his iconic anthem. Some of the changes noted by Dr. Soh are the following:
Starting in adolescence, girls are more likely than boys to complete high school and continue to higher education.
For the past four decades, more women than men have graduated with bachelor’s degrees.
Since the mid-2000s, women have earned the majority of doctoral degrees.
In a few years, two women will graduate university for every man.
Women account for over half (50.7 percent) of the college-educated US labor force.
“Bluntly put,” says Dr. Soh, “if men are unemployed or make less money than the women they are interested in, they will have a hard time attracting a partner.”
We are living within a system that rewards the few at the expense of the many. The rich get richer and the rest fall further behind. An increasing number of men are experiencing “deaths of despair” and many have given up finding work that pays a livable income.
In the words of Gloria Steinem, women are becoming the men they wanted to marry. This is why more women are turning away from marriage and more men are feeling increasingly hopeless. Many come to believe the 1970s bumper sticker: A Woman Needs a Man Like a Fish Needs a Bicycle.
Or they ascribe to the more recent “Three Sixes” Rule. Dr. Soh says it describes aman who“is six feet or taller, has six-figure salary, and possesses a six-inch manhood. (In some cases, this rule will also require a potential mate to have a six-pack of abdominal muscles.”
It’s not surprising that so many men feel they will never measure up. Statistically speaking:
The average penis length is about five inches.
Only 17 percent of men make over $100,000 annually.
And less than 15 percent of men in the U.S. are six feet tall.
The loneliness epidemic is getting worse:
The average person today has fewer friends than in previous decades.
More than 25 percent of adults live alone, nearly 20 percent are neither married nor cohabitating with a partner.
According to the American Psychiatric Association, 10 percent of adults report feeling lonely every day.
Why Short Men Have More Sex and Make Better Partners
Growing up I was always the shortest boy in my class. My mother and father were short, but my mother said I had tall uncles and I would get my growth spurt soon. I just had to be patient. I will be eight-three years old in December and I’m still waiting. I lied about my height when I said I was a five-feet-five-inch man. I have lost an inch over the years, which happens to older people.
The good news is that my wife, Carlin, just turned eight-eight. The even better news is that she has lost four inches and now I’m finally taller than her, even without the big hat. Here’s a picture of us a few years ago at the Willits Kinetic Carnivale.
As you can see, I attracted the most beautiful, sexy, and desirable woman I could imagine. And yes, from the time we met, fell in love, and married in 1980, everyone told her they couldn’t believe she was 42. “You look so much younger.” They said the same thing when she was 52, 62, 72, 82, and I’m sure they will say the same thing when she’s 92.
Taller men have always been putting the moves on her since we first met. They were sure if given the opportunity she would dump the short guy (me) for a more manly man (like themselves.) But there are a few things I have learned over the years:
Knowing yourself and accepting who you are gives you a unique advantage in life. When you’re short, you’re short. You can stop trying to live up to other people’s expectations of desirability. I called it Quiet Confidence in an article I wrote, “The Hidden Secret of Becoming a Sexually Successful Male.”
When we accept ourselves the way we are, we gain confidence that allows us to be successful in work and in love. That’s real sex appeal.
Short men are sexy, even when Hollywood movie moguls make you believe they are taller: Al Pacino (5’7″), Tom Cruise (5’7″), TheBig Bang Theory’s Johnny Galecki (5’5’’), Dustin Hoffman (5’4¾”).
And we shouldn’t forget the only movie star, Elijah Wood (5’5’’), who had to be digitally enhanced to look shorter to play his part as Frodo the courageous Hobbit.
When you don’t need to aspire to the tall ideal women are initially looking for, you can enjoy getting to know a woman without having to impress her.
Being short helps us remember that the magic of getting what we want in the world has more to do with how we respond to the realities of life, than the realities themselves.
We know that love, passion, friendship, and intimacy, can develop slowly and can be savored like fine wine.
As some forgotten sage once said: “Be who you is, because if you be who you ain’t, you ain’t who you is.” ‘Nuff said.
You can learn more about my work by visiting me at www.MenAlive.com
Best Wishes,
Jed Diamond
Founder and VHS (Visionary Healer Scholar) of MenAlive
Me: For Translators, Plato’s cave is like the sense testimony. Discuss.
ChatGPT: Yes. I think that is a very fruitful way for a Translator to look at Plato’s Cave. In fact, the Cave can almost be read as a dramatization of what a Sense Testimony does.
The Cave as Sense Testimony
In Plato’s Republic, the prisoners see shadows on a wall and take those shadows to be reality. They don’t merely see the shadows; they interpret them as what is real.
That is remarkably close to the structure of Sense Testimony:
Sense Testimony is what appears to consciousness to be true.
The important distinction is between what is perceived and what is actually so.
The prisoner says, in effect:
“This is reality.”
The Translator asks:
“Is that what is actually so?”
That is the beginning of Translation.
The Cave isn’t simply “false information”
What’s particularly interesting is that the prisoners aren’t necessarily lying or deliberately deceived. They are reporting their experience.
The shadows really are appearing on the wall.
Their error is that they have confused the appearance with the reality that produces the appearance.
And that gives us a very useful formulation:
Sense Testimony is not necessarily false as an observation; it is false when the appearance is mistaken for the Truth of Being.
That’s a subtle but important distinction.
For example:
“Fame is the measure of one’s significance in the world.”
The world really does measure people by fame. People really do receive attention, status, money, and influence because they are famous.
So the testimony describes something that appears to be so in the world of the senses.
But the Translator asks whether fame actually measures Being.
That’s analogous to the prisoner asking whether the shadow is actually the thing itself.
The Cave and Step 2
I think there is an even deeper connection to the Translation process.
Your Statement of Being establishes an Absolute:
Truth is all that is.
Then comes the Sense Testimony.
The Sense Testimony is essentially the shadow on the wall.
It says:
“This is what reality is.”
Translation then turns our attention away from the shadow and toward what must be True if Truth is all that is.
So we might diagram the process:
Statement of Being ↓ Sense Testimony — the shadow ↓ Word Tracking — examining the meaning of the shadow ↓ Argument — questioning whether the shadow can be Truth ↓ Summing Up ↓ Absolute — turning toward what is actually so
The Cave therefore provides an extraordinarily good metaphor for Translation.
But there’s an important difference
I wouldn’t say that the senses themselves are the problem.
That’s where I think a Prosperos Translation can go beyond a simplistic reading of Plato.
The senses are reporting appearances within consciousness. The mistake occurs when consciousness identifies the appearance as the whole of reality.
In your language:
The shadow is an appearance in consciousness; it is not outside Truth.
Since Truth is all that is, even the shadow must ultimately be included in Truth.
So the Translation isn’t:
“The shadow is unreal, therefore reject the world.”
Rather:
“The shadow is an appearance. What is its relationship to Truth?”
That’s a much more sophisticated question.
The Cave and your recent testimony
This connects beautifully with the testimony you just gave me:
“Misinformation can lead to false beliefs which can lead to manifestation according to those beliefs. All beliefs are false.”
The prisoners of the Cave have received a kind of misinformation—but more importantly, they have constructed a belief system around appearances.
They see shadows.
They develop expectations about the shadows.
They name the shadows.
They predict what shadow will appear next.
Eventually, their entire conception of reality is organized around them.
That is very much what can happen with Sense Testimony.
And then the experience seems to confirm the belief.
This is why your statement “All beliefs are false” becomes especially interesting. The prisoner doesn’t need to find a better belief about the shadows. The prisoner needs to discover that the shadows were never the ultimate reality in the first place.
And perhaps this is the most important point for a Translator
The person leaving the Cave doesn’t merely acquire new information.
He undergoes a change in consciousness.
He sees differently.
And that is why I think the Cave fits Translation so well.
Translation is not replacing one shadow with another shadow.
It is the movement from:
“This appearance is Truth.”
to:
“What is True regardless of the appearance?”
And finally, perhaps:
Truth is not what consciousness believes about what it sees. Truth is the Being in which seeing, believing, and appearing occur.
That last step brings Plato’s Cave very close to the Statement of Being you’ve been developing.
Linguistic relativity asserts that language influences worldview or cognition. One form of linguistic relativity, linguistic determinism, regards peoples’ languages as determining and influencing the scope of cultural perceptions of their surrounding world.[1]
Various colloquialisms refer to linguistic relativism: the Whorf hypothesis; the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis (/səˌpɪər ˈhwɔːrf/sə-PEER WHORF); the Whorf–Sapir hypothesis; and Whorfianism.
The hypothesis is disputed, with many different variations throughout its history.[2][3] The strong hypothesis of linguistic relativity, now referred to as linguistic determinism, is that language determines thought and that linguistic categories limit and restrict cognitive categories. This was a claim by some earlier linguists pre-World War II;[4] since then it has fallen out of acceptance by contemporary linguists.[5][need quotation to verify][6] Nevertheless, research has produced positive empirical evidence supporting a weaker version of linguistic relativity:[4][5] that a language’s structures influence a speaker’s perceptions, without strictly limiting or obstructing them.
Although common, the term Sapir–Whorf hypothesis is sometimes considered a misnomer for several reasons. Edward Sapir (1884–1939) and Benjamin Lee Whorf (1897–1941) never stated their ideas in terms of a hypothesis. The distinction between a weak and a strong version of this hypothesis is also a later development; Sapir and Whorf never used such a dichotomy, although often their writings and their opinions of this relativity principle expressed it in stronger or weaker terms.[7][8]
The principle of linguistic relativity and the relationship between language and thought has also received attention in varying academic fields, including philosophy, psychology and anthropology. It has also influenced works of fiction and the invention of constructed languages.
History
The idea was first expressed explicitly by 19th-century thinkers such as Wilhelm von Humboldt and Johann Gottfried Herder, who considered language as the expression of the spirit of a nation. Members of the early 20th-century school of American anthropology including Franz Boas and Edward Sapir also approved versions of the idea to a certain extent, including in a 1928 meeting of the Linguistic Society of America,[9][10] but Sapir, in particular, wrote more often against than in favor of anything like linguistic determinism. Sapir’s student, Benjamin Lee Whorf, came to be considered as the primary proponent as a result of his published observations of how he perceived linguistic differences to have consequences for human cognition and behavior. Harry Hoijer, another of Sapir’s students, introduced the term “Sapir–Whorf hypothesis”,[11] even though the two scholars never formally advanced any such hypothesis.[12] A strong version of relativist theory was developed from the late 1920s by the German linguist Leo Weisgerber. Whorf’s principle of linguistic relativity was reformulated as a testable hypothesis by Roger Brown and Eric Lenneberg who performed experiments designed to determine whether color perception varies between speakers of languages that classified colors differently.
As the emphasis of the universal nature of human language and cognition developed during the 1960s, the idea of linguistic relativity became disfavored among linguists. From the late 1980s, a new school of linguistic relativity scholars has examined the effects of differences in linguistic categorization on cognition, finding broad support for non-deterministic versions of the hypothesis in experimental contexts.[13][14] Some effects of linguistic relativity have been shown in several semantic domains, although they are generally weak. Currently, a nuanced opinion of linguistic relativity is espoused by most linguists holding that language influences certain kinds of cognitive processes in non-trivial ways, but that other processes are better considered as developing from connectionist factors.
Ancient philosophy to the Enlightenment
The idea that language and thought are intertwined is ancient. In his dialogue Cratylus, Plato explores the idea that conceptions of reality, such as Heraclitean flux, are embedded in language. But Plato argued against sophist thinkers such as Gorgias of Leontini, who claimed that the physical world cannot be experienced except through language; this made the question of truth dependent on aesthetic preferences or functional consequences. Plato may have held instead that the world consisted of eternal ideas and that language should represent these ideas as accurately as possible.[15] Nevertheless, Plato’s Seventh Letter claims that ultimate truth is inexpressible in words.
Following Plato, St. Augustine, for example, argued that language was merely like labels applied to concepts existing already. This opinion remained prevalent throughout the Middle Ages.[16]Roger Bacon had the opinion that language was but a veil covering eternal truths, hiding them from human experience. For Immanuel Kant, language was but one of several methods used by humans to experience the world.
German Romantic philosophers
During the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the idea of the existence of different national characters, or Volksgeister, of different ethnic groups was a major motivator for the German romantics school and the beginning ideologies of ethnic nationalism.[17]
Johann Georg Hamann
Johann Georg Hamann is often suggested to be the first among the actual German Romantics to discuss the concept of the “genius” of a language.[18][19] In his “Essay Concerning an Academic Question”, Hamann suggests that a people’s language affects their worldview:
The lineaments of their language will thus correspond to the direction of their mentality.[20]
Herder worked alongside Hamann to establish the idea of whether or not language had a human/rational or a divine origin.[21] Herder added the emotional component of the hypothesis and Humboldt then took this information and applied it to various languages to expand on the hypothesis.
In 1820, Wilhelm von Humboldt associated the study of language with the national romanticist program by proposing that language is the fabric of thought. Thoughts are produced as a kind of internal dialog using the same grammar as the thinker’s native language.[22] This opinion was part of a greater idea in which the assumptions of an ethnic nation, their “Weltanschauung“, was considered as being represented by the grammar of their language. Von Humboldt argued that languages with an inflectionalmorphological type, such as German, English and the other Indo-European languages, were the most perfect languages and that accordingly this explained the dominance of their speakers with respect to the speakers of less perfect languages. Wilhelm von Humboldt declared in 1820:
The diversity of languages is not a diversity of signs and sounds but a diversity of views of the world.[22]
In Humboldt’s humanistic understanding of linguistics, each language creates the individual’s worldview in its particular way through its lexical and grammatical categories, conceptual organization, and syntactic models.[23]
“Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it. Do not believe in anything simply because it is spoken and rumored by many. Do not believe in anything simply because it is found written in your religious books. Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders. Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many generations. But after observation and analysis, when you find that anything agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it.”
New Thinking Allowed with Jeffrey Mishlove Sep 6, 2026 New Thinking Allowed Audio Podcast Emile Alexandrov is an assistant professor of philosophy, formerly at the University of Tyumen in Russia, and currently a visiting scholar at Waseda University in Tokyo. He is author of The Other Platonist Beginning and Metaphysics and Ineffable. Emile explores the romance of metaphysics as the love of the idea, tracing its rigorous tradition from Aristotle’s unmoved mover and primacy of thinking through Plato’s forms and the allegory of the cave. He examines Neoplatonic developments with Plotinus, Iamblichus, and Proclus, highlighting the ineffable, nondiscursive insight, ritual, and the tension between reason and mystery across history. Alexandrov connects this lineage to later thinkers including Aquinas, Kant, and Schopenhauer, and considers the role of parapsychology in renewing first-principles inquiry beyond purely discursive limits. 00:00:00 Introduction 00:07:30 Aristotle and the unmoved mover 00:15:00 Presocratics and poetic immediacy 00:22:40 Plato’s allegory of the cave 00:30:20 Plotinus and the ineffable one 00:38:00 Proclus and theurgy 00:45:40 Logos will and Aquinas 00:53:20 Schopenhauer and first principles 01:01:00 Kant reason and parapsychology 01:05:00 Conclusion 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 Friday, August 7th, 2026)
Aletheia (ἀλήθεια) translates directly from ancient Greek as “truth,” but its literal root meaning is “unconcealment” or “that which is brought out into the open.” [1, 2]
Meaning and Etymology
The Root: The word combines the prefix a- (meaning “not” or “un-“) with lethe (meaning “forgetting,” “concealment,” or the river of oblivion). [1, 2]
Unhidden Reality: Rather than just a factual statement, aletheia describes reality as it is revealed when the veil of illusion or forgetfulness is removed. [1, 2]
Mythology: In ancient Greek tradition, Aletheia was personified as the goddess of truth and sincerity. [1]
Would you like to explore how Martin Heidegger used the concept of aletheia, or its use in New Testament Greek?
Me: Heidegger
Google AI: For the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, aletheia is the central concept of his entire philosophy of truth, which he famously defined as “unconcealment” (German: Unverborgenheit).
He argued that Western philosophy lost its way by treating truth merely as a logical correctness or a matching of facts, rather than an experiential revealing of reality.
Heidegger’s Core Ideas on Aletheia
The Critique of Correctness: Heidegger argued that modern philosophy views truth as propositional correctness (e.g., the sentence “the sky is blue” is true because it matches the sky). He believed this misses a deeper point: for a sentence to match reality, reality must first show itself to us.
Truth as a Process: To him, aletheia is not a stagnant fact, but a dynamic, historical event where things step out of hiddenness into the light.
The “Clearing” (Lichtung): He used the metaphor of a forest clearing. Just as a clearing lets light in so trees can be seen, aletheia is the open space that allows things to appear to human consciousness.
The Interplay of Hiding and Revealing: Heidegger noted that whenever something is revealed, something else is hidden. For example, focusing intensely on the atomic structure of wood hides its utility as a table. Therefore, truth always coexists with untruth or concealment.
Why It Matters to His Philosophy
Heidegger believed that by forgetting aletheia and treating truth like a math problem, modern humanity began viewing the world as just a collection of objects to be calculated, measured, and exploited. Rediscovering aletheia was his way of trying to restore a deeper, more meaningful relationship with existence.
The Sacred Speaks Sep 9, 2025 The Sacred Speaks What does it mean to think impossibly? How do paranormal events, mystical visions, and encounters with the unknown reshape our understanding of what it means to be human? In this episode, host Dr. John W. Price sits down with Dr. Jeffrey Kripal — J. Newton Rayzor Professor of Philosophy and Religious Thought at Rice University, and one of today’s most daring scholars of religion — to explore the borders between the possible and the impossible. Together, they trace the line where scholarship meets the mystical, where imagination bends into healing, and where our deepest worldviews determine what we are even able to see. From UFOs and near-death experiences to William Blake, dual-aspect monism, and the future of spirituality, this is a wide-ranging conversation about living at the edges of reality. Be sure to check out Jeff’s latest book, How to Think Impossibly: About Souls, UFOs, Time, Belief, and Everything Else. Key Takeaways Embracing the impossible expands not just our knowledge, but our capacity for awe, healing, and transformation. Worldviews — personal and cultural — filter what counts as “real,” shaping how we encounter extraordinary experiences. Paranormal phenomena aren’t just curiosities; they are symbolic invitations into deeper practice and meaning. Thinking impossibly is less about belief and more about orientation — a way of living that opens us to mystery. Dialogue at the borderlands of science, religion, and imagination may hold the key to the future of spirituality. In This Episode (00:00) Introduction & Guest Bio (01:59) Housekeeping & Announcements (05:13) The Origins of “Thinking Impossibly” (09:52) Stories of the Impossible (13:16) The Role of Worldviews (16:34) Religion, Science, and the Paranormal (22:14) Healing, Suffering, and Transformation (28:32) The Power of Story & Magic (35:12) Teaching the Impossible (42:39) The Future of Spirituality (46:06) Closing Reflections & Resources Connect: Jeffrey: https://jeffreyjkripal.com John: https://www.drjohnwprice.com
“Telepathy means pathos at a distance. It means entanglement at a distance. It doesn’t mean you’re playing the lottery or you’re watching a football game or something. It’s this deep emotional bonding.”
“I don’t think it’s about computers becoming conscious and taking over the world and killing us. That’s materialism, by the way.”
–Jeff Kripal
Johnathan Bi Mar 7, 2026 An interview with Jeff Kripal on Nietzsche and mysticism Subscribe to my newsletter if you want content updates, invitations to events, and to support my work: https://www.johnathanbi.com/ Transcript: https://www.johnathanbi.com/p/transcr… Companion lectures and interviews:
The Sacred Speaks