Five Great Reads: Gloria Steinem, men’s therapy, and slime moulds

Good morning, and welcome to your weekly roundup of the best stories from across the Guardian. Are you interested in living for ever? Maybe you just want to be a bit happier, or spend your time making the lives of others better? You could dedicate your life to saving the planet or contemplating the meaning of intelligence.

Either way, you can find some of the answers to life’s big questions in the reads below.

Enjoy.

1. What Gloria Steinem meant to feminist writers

Tributes have been flooding in for Gloria Steinem, the groundbreaking US feminist campaigner who died last week. The journalist, writer and activist fought tirelessly against domestic violence, female genital mutilation and the pornography industry and for women’s reproductive rights. Her death has already raised questions over what the feminist movement will be without her. But here leading contemporary writers reflect on her legacy.

How she made women’s lives better: As Rebecca Solnit writes: “Some of the hot takes I’m seeing now on Steinem, and the women’s movement she was at the heart of, act as reminders that a lot of people have no idea of what women’s lives were like before second-wave feminism.”

Notable quote: “Steinem, the silence-breaker. The truth-teller who had inspired millions of women around the world to find our voices and use them.”

How long will it take to read: Six minutes.

Further reading: Gloria Steinem is remembered by readers, celebrated by authors, actors and musicians and her life is beautifully detailed in this podcast.

2. The science and mysticism of a limitless life

Hoping for a longer or potentially limitless life? For the small cost of A$200,000, you can now be suspended upside down in liquid nitrogen at -196C in the hope of being reanimated in the future. Catie McLeod trekked out to a small town in regional Australia to be the first journalist inside the facility selling the dream of immortality.

They’re basically big Thermos bottles: To prevent damage to the body and its cellular structure, people who opt to be cryogenically frozen undergo an eight-hour process as soon as they die. Their corpse is pumped with “antifreeze-like embalming chemicals”.

Not everyone is a believer: Scientists are not convinced it is possible to revive someone’s consciousness, even if the freezing process preserves and protects the body. Associate Prof Saffron Bryant, a cryopreservation expert, considers this question to fall into the realm of mysticism, rather than science.

How long will it take to read: About four minutes.

Further reading: Take it on faith, or find another way to lay yourself to rest.

3. Outrunning extinction

Can an entire ecosystem evolve fast enough to adapt to the climate crisis? While scientists have long thought that adaptation is a “survival of the fittest” race to outrun extinction, a first-of-its-kind project in the streams of the Arctic posits that a more communal approach could be the ecological answer to climate resilience.

‘Things won’t completely fall apart’: The climate emergency and global heating is upending the order of life, according to Linda Deegan, a senior scientist at Woodwell climate research center in Massachusetts. But Deegan also believes if species can evolutionarily band together, those connections will help them not only survive, but prosper.

How long will it take to read: Charles Darwin reportedly spent five weeks exploring the Galápagos Islands developing his theory of evolution. But you can read this article in just over four minutes.

Further reading: Why not take a look at the place that never freezes – and, separately, having lived through the ice age, can the mighty musk ox survive the heat?

4. Slime moulds and the debate about intelligence

In 2010 a group of scientists embarked on a somewhat unusual – but now famous – experiment in which they proved that a brainless organism, called a slime mould, could reproduce the route map of greater Tokyo railway system. It even gave hints on how to improve the design. Understandably, scientists have since been battling over whether simple life forms such as these should be considered intelligent.

Dunce or deliberate? A slime mould can appear to be just a small cell, capable only of feeding and reproducing. But it’s impossible to watch a slime mould – apparently – without sensing some deliberation at play. In another famous experiment, the organism found the shortest route through a maze in search of food.

A mystery: Toshiyuki Nakagaki, a scientist, betrays a sense of wonder while discussing the slime mould’s “intelligence”, a word that biologists invoke carefully. Others have since justified the use of the word, as well as other fraught ones such as “learning” and “memory”, in describing it. Which poses a mystery: how is this cell without even a semblance of a brain, capable of it all – the decision-making, the memory, the processing of information?

How long will it take to read: A slimy 12 and three-quarter minutes.

Further reading: ‘I have an understanding housemate’: the student who makes videos of fungus on faeces.

5. Turning towards grief

Most men go to therapy looking for answers. Maybe they want to work on their anger, or break out of a prison of isolation? But the psychotherapist Matthew Willner writes that most of his clients leave with nothing to show for their hours in the chair but grief. So why, if they are looking for happiness, do they leave feeling so empty?

Being told to ‘talk to someone; or that ‘it’s OK to cry’ can feel ridiculous: Finding the root cause of your own unhappiness can be a tricky nut to crack when you don’t know what caused your declining mental health. And if you can’t name the event that brought you to therapy in the first place, it can go unresolved.

The war with your own feelings: Rather than trying to fight what brought them in the door, Willner encourages the men he works with to “get curious” about their own feelings. Men often find themselves lonely and unhappy, he writes, but turning inwards toward their own sadness may allow them to feel less controlled by it.

How long will it take to read: Two and a half minutes.

Further reading: Eight reasons why men don’t go to therapy, and why men find it hard to make friends.

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