"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Thai Basil Sauce Noodles with Jammy Eggs.md\"> Thai Basil Sauce Noodles with Jammy Eggs </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Why Indian universities are ditching English-only education.md\"> Why Indian universities are ditching English-only education </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Create multiple websites from one Obsidian vault.md\"> Create multiple websites from one Obsidian vault </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/How Telegram Became the Anti-Facebook.md\"> How Telegram Became the Anti-Facebook </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/XXX-Files Who Torched the Pornhub Palace.md\"> XXX-Files Who Torched the Pornhub Palace </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/The 1918 flu didn’t end in 1918. Here’s what its third year can teach us..md\"> The 1918 flu didn’t end in 1918. Here’s what its third year can teach us. </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/The Hollywood Reporter.md\"> The Hollywood Reporter </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Chinese Philosophy Inhabiting the Ineffable Dao Medium.md\"> Chinese Philosophy Inhabiting the Ineffable Dao Medium </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Could COVID-19 And Alzheimer's Overlaps Point Towards A Solution For Both Diseases.md\"> Could COVID-19 And Alzheimer's Overlaps Point Towards A Solution For Both Diseases </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Are Today's Portraitists Better Than the Old Masters — Evolve Artist.md\"> Are Today's Portraitists Better Than the Old Masters — Evolve Artist </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/How the enigmatic Nefertiti came to be locked away in Germany Aeon Essays.md\"> How the enigmatic Nefertiti came to be locked away in Germany Aeon Essays </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Lovemaking for longevity a recipe from Tokyo’s imperial archives Aeon Essays.md\"> Lovemaking for longevity a recipe from Tokyo’s imperial archives Aeon Essays </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Society has a trust problem. More censorship will only make it worse..md\"> Society has a trust problem. More censorship will only make it worse. </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Imagine Scythia’s fierce warrior women, the real Amazons Aeon Essays.md\"> Imagine Scythia’s fierce warrior women, the real Amazons Aeon Essays </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Midlife isn't a crisis, but sleep, stress and happiness feel a little different after 35 – or whenever middle age actually begins.md\"> Midlife isn't a crisis, but sleep, stress and happiness feel a little different after 35 – or whenever middle age actually begins </a>",
@ -2684,23 +2758,23 @@
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Javanka in Exile.md\"> Javanka in Exile </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Step-by-step How to grow a company culture.md\"> Step-by-step How to grow a company culture </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/GitHub - postalserverpostal ✉️ A fully featured open source mail delivery platform for incoming & outgoing e-mail.md\"> GitHub - postalserverpostal ✉️ A fully featured open source mail delivery platform for incoming & outgoing e-mail </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/GitHub - stefanprodandockprom Docker hosts and containers monitoring with Prometheus, Grafana, cAdvisor, NodeExporter and AlertManager.md\"> GitHub - stefanprodandockprom Docker hosts and containers monitoring with Prometheus, Grafana, cAdvisor, NodeExporter and AlertManager </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Why Epicureanism, not Stoicism, is the philosophy we need now.md\"> Why Epicureanism, not Stoicism, is the philosophy we need now </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/How to sync Obsidian Notes on iOS.md\"> How to sync Obsidian Notes on iOS </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Using Fail2ban to protect exposed services arvind.io.md\"> Using Fail2ban to protect exposed services arvind.io </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/GitHub - RunaCapitalawesome-oss-alternatives Awesome list of open-source startup alternatives to well-known SaaS products 🚀.md\"> GitHub - RunaCapitalawesome-oss-alternatives Awesome list of open-source startup alternatives to well-known SaaS products 🚀 </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Désert rural. La grande ruée vers les maisons italiennes à 1 euro.md\"> Désert rural. La grande ruée vers les maisons italiennes à 1 euro </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/En Bretagne, les responsables politiques redoutent l’émergence d’une « Breizh Riviera ».md\"> En Bretagne, les responsables politiques redoutent l’émergence d’une « Breizh Riviera » </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"Poul ak Nwa.md\"> Poul ak Nwa </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/GitHub - stefanprodandockprom Docker hosts and containers monitoring with Prometheus, Grafana, cAdvisor, NodeExporter and AlertManager.md\"> GitHub - stefanprodandockprom Docker hosts and containers monitoring with Prometheus, Grafana, cAdvisor, NodeExporter and AlertManager </a>"
],
"Renamed":[
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/Why Indian universities are ditching English-only education.md\"> Why Indian universities are ditching English-only education </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.04 IT/Create multiple websites from one Obsidian vault.md\"> Create multiple websites from one Obsidian vault </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/Create multiple websites from one Obsidian vault.md\"> Create multiple websites from one Obsidian vault </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/XXX-Files Who Torched the Pornhub Palace.md\"> XXX-Files Who Torched the Pornhub Palace </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/The 1918 flu didn’t end in 1918. Here’s what its third year can teach us..md\"> The 1918 flu didn’t end in 1918. Here’s what its third year can teach us. </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/Chinese Philosophy Inhabiting the Ineffable Dao Medium.md\"> Chinese Philosophy Inhabiting the Ineffable Dao Medium </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/Could COVID-19 And Alzheimer's Overlaps Point Towards A Solution For Both Diseases.md\"> Could COVID-19 And Alzheimer's Overlaps Point Towards A Solution For Both Diseases </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/Are Today's Portraitists Better Than the Old Masters — Evolve Artist.md\"> Are Today's Portraitists Better Than the Old Masters — Evolve Artist </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/How the enigmatic Nefertiti came to be locked away in Germany Aeon Essays.md\"> How the enigmatic Nefertiti came to be locked away in Germany Aeon Essays </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/Lovemaking for longevity a recipe from Tokyo’s imperial archives Aeon Essays.md\"> Lovemaking for longevity a recipe from Tokyo’s imperial archives Aeon Essays </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"03.03 Food & Wine/Churros with Bittersweet Chocolate Sauce.md\"> Churros with Bittersweet Chocolate Sauce </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/Society has a trust problem. More censorship will only make it worse..md\"> Society has a trust problem. More censorship will only make it worse. </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/Imagine Scythia’s fierce warrior women, the real Amazons Aeon Essays.md\"> Imagine Scythia’s fierce warrior women, the real Amazons Aeon Essays </a>",
@ -2737,23 +2811,14 @@
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"01.01 Life Orga/@Personal projects.md\"> @Personal projects </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"01.01 Life Orga/@Lifestyle.md\"> @Lifestyle </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"01.01 Life Orga/@Life Admin.md\"> @Life Admin </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"01.01 Life Orga/@Finances.md\"> @Finances </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"01.01 Life Orga/@Family.md\"> @Family </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"01.01 Life Orga/@@Life Organisation.md\"> @@Life Organisation </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"01.01 Life Orga/En Bretagne, les responsables politiques redoutent l’émergence d’une « Breizh Riviera ».md\"> En Bretagne, les responsables politiques redoutent l’émergence d’une « Breizh Riviera » </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"01.01 Life Orga/Désert rural. La grande ruée vers les maisons italiennes à 1 euro.md\"> Désert rural. La grande ruée vers les maisons italiennes à 1 euro </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"03.03 Food & Wine/Poul ak Nwa.md\"> Poul ak Nwa </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"03.03 Food & Wine/Braised Short Ribs w Curry Leaves.md\"> Braised Short Ribs w Curry Leaves </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/Why Indian universities are ditching English-only education.md\"> Why Indian universities are ditching English-only education </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/How Telegram Became the Anti-Facebook.md\"> How Telegram Became the Anti-Facebook </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/XXX-Files Who Torched the Pornhub Palace.md\"> XXX-Files Who Torched the Pornhub Palace </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/XXX-Files Who Torched the Pornhub Palace.md\"> XXX-Files Who Torched the Pornhub Palace </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/Imagine Scythia’s fierce warrior women, the real Amazons Aeon Essays.md\"> Imagine Scythia’s fierce warrior women, the real Amazons Aeon Essays </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/Midlife isn't a crisis, but sleep, stress and happiness feel a little different after 35 – or whenever middle age actually begins.md\"> Midlife isn't a crisis, but sleep, stress and happiness feel a little different after 35 – or whenever middle age actually begins </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/Society has a trust problem. More censorship will only make it worse..md\"> Society has a trust problem. More censorship will only make it worse. </a>"
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/Society has a trust problem. More censorship will only make it worse..md\"> Society has a trust problem. More censorship will only make it worse. </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/How the enigmatic Nefertiti came to be locked away in Germany Aeon Essays.md\"> How the enigmatic Nefertiti came to be locked away in Germany Aeon Essays </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/Lovemaking for longevity a recipe from Tokyo’s imperial archives Aeon Essays.md\"> Lovemaking for longevity a recipe from Tokyo’s imperial archives Aeon Essays </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/How the enigmatic Nefertiti came to be locked away in Germany Aeon Essays.md\"> How the enigmatic Nefertiti came to be locked away in Germany Aeon Essays </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/Lovemaking for longevity a recipe from Tokyo’s imperial archives Aeon Essays.md\"> Lovemaking for longevity a recipe from Tokyo’s imperial archives Aeon Essays </a>"
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/How Telegram Became the Anti-Facebook.md\"> How Telegram Became the Anti-Facebook </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.05 Media/Mountain Men & Holy Wars.md\"> Mountain Men & Holy Wars </a>"
],
"Linked":[
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Thai Basil Sauce Noodles with Jammy Eggs.md\"> Thai Basil Sauce Noodles with Jammy Eggs </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/Why Indian universities are ditching English-only education.md\"> Why Indian universities are ditching English-only education </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.04 IT/Create multiple websites from one Obsidian vault.md\"> Create multiple websites from one Obsidian vault </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/The 1918 flu didn’t end in 1918. Here’s what its third year can teach us..md\"> The 1918 flu didn’t end in 1918. Here’s what its third year can teach us. </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/Chinese Philosophy Inhabiting the Ineffable Dao Medium.md\"> Chinese Philosophy Inhabiting the Ineffable Dao Medium </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Could COVID-19 And Alzheimer's Overlaps Point Towards A Solution For Both Diseases.md\"> Could COVID-19 And Alzheimer's Overlaps Point Towards A Solution For Both Diseases </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/Are Today's Portraitists Better Than the Old Masters — Evolve Artist.md\"> Are Today's Portraitists Better Than the Old Masters — Evolve Artist </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/Lovemaking for longevity a recipe from Tokyo’s imperial archives Aeon Essays.md\"> Lovemaking for longevity a recipe from Tokyo’s imperial archives Aeon Essays </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/How the enigmatic Nefertiti came to be locked away in Germany Aeon Essays.md\"> How the enigmatic Nefertiti came to be locked away in Germany Aeon Essays </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Churros with Bittersweet Chocolate Sauce.md\"> Churros with Bittersweet Chocolate Sauce </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/Society has a trust problem. More censorship will only make it worse..md\"> Society has a trust problem. More censorship will only make it worse. </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/Midlife isn't a crisis, but sleep, stress and happiness feel a little different after 35 – or whenever middle age actually begins.md\"> Midlife isn't a crisis, but sleep, stress and happiness feel a little different after 35 – or whenever middle age actually begins </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.05 Media/Mountain Men & Holy Wars.md\"> Mountain Men & Holy Wars </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/« Quand tu arrives ici, tu te dis que rien n’est cher » les Parisiens s’entichent de Marseille.md\"> « Quand tu arrives ici, tu te dis que rien n’est cher » les Parisiens s’entichent de Marseille </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.05 Media/Kids for Cash.md\"> Kids for Cash </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Rolling Stone.md\"> Rolling Stone </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/Javanka in Exile.md\"> Javanka in Exile </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/How the NYPD Cracked the Michael K. Williams Overdose Case.md\"> How the NYPD Cracked the Michael K. Williams Overdose Case </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.06 Professional/Step-by-step How to grow a company culture.md\"> Step-by-step How to grow a company culture </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.04 IT/GitHub - postalserverpostal ✉️ A fully featured open source mail delivery platform for incoming & outgoing e-mail.md\"> GitHub - postalserverpostal ✉️ A fully featured open source mail delivery platform for incoming & outgoing e-mail </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.04 IT/GitHub - stefanprodandockprom Docker hosts and containers monitoring with Prometheus, Grafana, cAdvisor, NodeExporter and AlertManager.md\"> GitHub - stefanprodandockprom Docker hosts and containers monitoring with Prometheus, Grafana, cAdvisor, NodeExporter and AlertManager </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/Why Epicureanism, not Stoicism, is the philosophy we need now.md\"> Why Epicureanism, not Stoicism, is the philosophy we need now </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.04 IT/GitHub - RunaCapitalawesome-oss-alternatives Awesome list of open-source startup alternatives to well-known SaaS products 🚀.md\"> GitHub - RunaCapitalawesome-oss-alternatives Awesome list of open-source startup alternatives to well-known SaaS products 🚀 </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.04 IT/Using Fail2ban to protect exposed services arvind.io.md\"> Using Fail2ban to protect exposed services arvind.io </a>"
"description":"An Obsidian plugin to paste data from Microsoft Excel, Google Sheets, Apple Numbers and LibreOffice Calc as Markdown tables in Obsidian editor.",
"author":"Ganessh Kumar R P <rpganesshkumar@gmail.com>",
[GitHub - dbarenholz/obsidian-wordle: Play Wordle in Obsidian.](https://github.com/dbarenholz/obsidian-wordle)
[GitHub - liammagee/obsidian-topic-linking: An Obsidian plugin for finding and linking topics in a vault.](https://github.com/liammagee/obsidian-topic-linking)
[GitHub - ckRobinson/multi-column_markdown: A plugin for the Obsidian markdown note application, adding functionality to render markdown documents with multiple columns of text.](https://github.com/ckRobinson/multi-column_markdown)
Photo by Isa Zapata, food styling by Kat Boystova, prop styling by Allie Wist
For people within the Taiwanese diaspora in the United States, the scent of Thai basil is a reminder of the pungent and spicy basil you’ll find everywhere in Taiwan. The Taiwanese variety is quite hard to find in the States, but the more readily available Thai basil, which you can find at Asian supermarkets, is a good substitute. You can make these noodles with sweet basil if you can’t find Thai, but it will lack the same punch of grassy, spicy flavor.
Quick-frying the basil-garlic purée with rice wine brings out the fragrance of the herb and mellows the sharpest notes of raw garlic without completely muting them. The result is a savory, aromatic, licorice-scented green sauce that clings perfectly to wide noodles.
This topping combination is inspired by the traditional noodle stands you see everywhere in Taiwan. With crunchy fried garlic or shallots, mung bean sprouts, garlic chives, and an egg on top, this is a complete meal in a bowl that’s easy to execute on weeknights.
All products featured on Bon Appétit are independently selected by our editors. However, when you buy something through the retail links below, we earn an affiliate commission.
Ingredients
-----------
4
large eggs (optional)
1
head of garlic, peeled
3
cups Thai basil
¾
cup vegetable oil, divided
¼
cup michiu tou or other rice wine
1
tsp. sugar
1
tsp. Diamond Crystal or ½ tsp. Morton kosher salt, plus more
4
garlic chives, cut into ½" pieces
2
cups mung bean sprouts
4
servings dried wide sliced noodles (such as Hsin Tung Yang; about 8 oz.)
Store-bought fried garlic and chili crisp (for serving)
Preparation
-----------
### Step 1
If using eggs, bring a large pot of water to a boil over medium-high heat. Using a slotted spoon, carefully lower eggs into water one at a time. Cook 6½ minutes, adjusting heat to maintain a gentle boil. Transfer eggs to a bowl of ice water with slotted spoon; reserve pot with boiling water. Let eggs sit until just slightly warm, about 2 minutes.
### Step 2
Gently crack eggs all over and peel, starting from the wider end, which contains the air pocket. Slice in half and set aside for serving.
### Step 3
Blend raw garlic, Thai basil, and ½ cup oil in a blender or food processor until a smooth paste forms.
### Step 4
Heat remaining ¼ cup oil in a large skillet over medium. Carefully scrape in Thai basil purée and add wine, sugar, and 1 tsp. Diamond Crystal or ½ tsp. Morton kosher salt. Cook, stirring, until fragrant, about 1 minute. Remove from heat and season with more salt if needed.
### Step 5
Return reserved pot of water to a boil. Cook garlic chives and bean sprouts until chives are bright green and sprouts start to turn translucent, about 1 minute. Using slotted spoon, transfer to a small bowl.
### Step 6
Cook noodles in same pot until al dente, about 5 minutes. Drain noodles and transfer to pan with sauce. Using tongs, toss noodles to coat.
### Step 7
Divide noodles among bowls. Top with bean sprouts, garlic chives, fried garlic, and reserved eggs (if using) and drizzle with chili crisp.
How would you rate Thai Basil Sauce Noodles with Jammy Eggs?
Reviews (1)
[Back to TopTriangle](https://www.bonappetit.com/#main-content)
* This recipe is fantastic. For not much effort, you end up with a meal that tastes like it was made at a restaurant. We made it as is except for frying the egg sunny side up instead of boiling. I would emphasize that having thai basil is key to this dish and it wouldn't be nearly as great with sweet basil. We found thai basil at 99 ranch, labeled as just regular basil. Highly recommend this recipe!
# Are Today's Portraitists Better Than the Old Masters? — Evolve Artist
Who's better, today's portraitists or the Old Masters?
Master portraitist Kevin Murphy honors the Old Masters and applauds the contemporary realistic portrait painters and artists of the 21st Century who have taken on the legacy that the old masters left behind.
[](https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/437394)
_Aristotle with a Bust of Homer_ by Rembrandt, is one of the revered old masters of portrait art.
[](https://www.williambouguereau.org/young-shepherdess/)
The Young Shepherdess by The Young Shepherdess - William-Adolphe Bougereau, painted in 1855.
[](https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/12127)
_Madame X_ by the renown portraitist John Singer Sargent.
[](https://artofdarkness.co/post/138844658060/daniel-sprick-ketsia-in-profile)
_Ketsia in Profile_ by contemporary portraitist Daniel Sprick.
We asked Master Portraitist and Evolve Founder Kevin Murphy, “Who is your favorite portrait artist and why?” Here’s what he had to say:
"I don't have a favorite. There are so many great portrait painters out there. And not just old masters, but even today.
I would make the assertion that the portrait painters of today are better than the old masters. They may not agree. Because we're not inventing it."
_Self Portrait_ by Nelson Shanks.
[](https://www.mutualart.com/Artwork/Beauties-on-Promenade/072D55AA1A7CC74E)
_Beauties on Promenade_ by Chen Yifei.
A portrait of the Grand Master Sardone by Evolve Artist Founder and master portraitist Kevin Murphy
"The old masters did all the hard work and heavy lifting. We stand on their shoulders. But the level of skill and the level to which this craft has been elevated by the current generation is just dizzying. And to be part of that crowd is humbling."
[](https://www.stevenassael.com/workshop-info)
A painting from Steven Assael's workshop.
[](https://rickberrystudio.com/gallery/2012-2016/)
_Prove It_ by Rick Berry.
[](https://www.copronason.com/adamm/pages/x_From%20the%20Depths%2068x422.html)
_From the Depths_ by Adam Miller.
[](https://www.artrenewal.org/14thARCSalon/Artwork/ByCategory/33369)
_Pegasus Befriends the Muses_ by Julie Bell.
[](https://paulshipperstudio.com/star-wars-the-last-jedi/)
_Star Wars The Last Jedi_ by Paul Shipper.
"I think that there are so many great artists, and they're not even necessarily realists. They're in all genres including science fiction artists or doing book covers and movie posters. And they look real. They don't even look like photographs. They look absolutely real."
[](https://www.rupertalexander.com/gallery/)
_Naomi Alexander_ by Rupert Alexander.
[](https://www.npg.org.uk/whatson/bp2016/exhibition/exhibitors-entries/laura-in-black.php)
_Laura in Black_ by Joshua La Rock.
[](https://www.davidkassan.com/paint)
_Audrey_ by David Kassan.
[](https://www.lipking.com/workszoom/2606071/autumn-sky)
_Autumn Sky_ by Jeremy Lipking.
[](https://dorianvallejo.com/shop-all/bubble-print)
_Bubble_ by Dorian Vallejo.
"In every corner of this industry, any place where pros are painting faces, the quality of the work is just unbelievable. Yes, we have technology on our side, but the people who are going back and tackling this stuff in a traditional way, they've elevated this craft to a whole new level."
[](https://www.alexvenezia.com/selected-works/2018/10/25/weary-memory-19x30in-oil-on-panel)
_Weary Memory_ by Alex Venezia.
[](https://www.artsy.net/artwork/serge-marshennikov-waves-1)
_Waves_ by Serge Marshennikov.
[](https://arthive.com/es/artists/83574~Roberto_ferri/works/582398~Narciso)
Narcissus by Roberto Ferri.
**Which artists have inspired you to paint like the great masters?**
Conclusion
----------
There’s your master's take on portrait artists new and old. This is the last post from our Master's Guide to Painting Better Portraits series. Read the previous posts in the series at these links below:
Master's Guide #1: [Where to Start a Portrait](https://evolveartist.com/blog/masters-guide-where-to-start-a-portrait/)
Master's Guide #2: [Simplicity in Portrait Painting](https://evolveartist.com/blog/how-to-simplify-portrait-painting/)
Master's Guide #3: [How to Build Confidence in Portrait Painting](https://evolveartist.com/blog/how-to-build-confidence-in-portrait-painting/)
Master's Guide #4: [How to Capture the Likeness of a Face](https://evolveartist.com/blog/how-to-capture-the-likeness-of-a-face/)
Master's Guide #5: [The Quickest Way to Improve Your Portrait Painting Skills](https://evolveartist.com/blog/improve-your-portrait-painting-skills/)
Master's Guide #6: [How to Price Portrait Paintings](https://evolveartist.com/blog/how-to-price-portrait-paintings/)
Master's Guide #7: [How to Sell Your Portraits](https://evolveartist.com/blog/how-to-sell-your-portraits-and-get-commissions/)
If you found this post insightful and you want to get more content like this, then check us out on [YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/c/evolveartist) and follow us on [Instagram](http://www.instagram.com/evolveartist).
“Walking on a Path in Spring” by Ma Yuan (c. 1160–1225CE). \[The poetic colophon written by emperor Ningzong reads: _“The wildflowers dance when brushed by my sleeves. Reclusive birds make no sound as they shun the presence of people.”\]_ Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Welcome to Part 12 in this series! If you’ve missed the earlier entries of the series you can check them out here:
# Could COVID-19 And Alzheimer's Overlaps Point Towards A Solution For Both Diseases?
The medical community has suggested that calling [Omicron “mild”](https://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/is-calling-omicron-mild-misleading/) is folly considering the reach of this most contagious COVID-19 variant, which continues to [hospitalize the unvaccinated](https://www.rivm.nl/en/news/unvaccinated-covid-19-patients-in-hospital-nearly-20-years-younger-than-vaccinated-patients) and move easily among the vaccinated. A leading concern is that surviving COVID infection is only half the battle for some people who can be left with debilitating symptoms, including brain damage that shares [similarities with Alzheimer’s](https://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/could-covid19-increase-dementia-risk-in-the-future/). While it’s hard to find a silver lining to the pandemic cloud, that we are learning new insights into “[brain fog](https://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/brain-fog-is-afflicting-a-surprising-amount-of-people-after-covid19/)” brings some hope for the improved management of not just long COVID but Alzheimer’s, too.
A recent study published in the[Journal of the Alzheimer’s Association](https://alz-journals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/alz.12556) found that patients with COVID-19 and associated neurological symptoms had raised levels of seven markers of brain damage, and that these were higher– in the short term– than those seen in patients with confirmed Alzheimer’s disease.
“Traumatic brain injury, which is also associated with increases in these biomarkers, does not mean that a patient will develop Alzheimer’s disease or related dementias later on, but does increase the risk of it,” said senior author Dr Thomas M. Wisniewski, director of the Center for Cognitive Neurology at NYU Langone, in a [statement](https://nyulangone.org/news/blood-markers-brain-damage-are-higher-over-short-term-patients-who-have-covid-19-people-who-have-alzheimers-disease). “Whether that kind of relationship exists in those who survive severe COVID-19 is a question we urgently need to answer with ongoing monitoring of these patients.”
The connection is perhaps unsurprising in the context that cognitive symptoms reported with long COVID are similar to those of Alzheimer’s disease, including losing train of thought, difficulty grasping words, [brain fog](https://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/covid19-brain-fog-may-be-caused-by-bone-marrow-cells-invading-the-brain/), [memory loss](https://www.iflscience.com/brain/covid19-reduces-grey-matter-in-the-brain-beforeandafter-scans-reveal/), and personality changes.
High levels of [beta-amyloid proteins](https://www.iflscience.com/Could%20COVID-19%20And%20Alzheimer's%20Overlaps%20Point%20Towards%20A%20Solution%20For%20Both%20Diseases) could be one explanation for this, as these are known to build up in people who have Alzheimer’s disease. In the above mentioned study, these proteins were found to be raised among COVID-19 patients with neurological symptoms compared to other infected people without (for technical reasons, it wasn’t possible to compare these concentrations to the participants with Alzheimer’s disease).
However, where this theory might fall down is in the result of several Alzheimer’s drug trials for medications that were thought to clear the brain of beta-amyloid proteins that found clearing them did little to improve [patients’ symptom profiles](https://www.biospace.com/article/a-long-line-of-failures-roche-drops-alzheimer-s-drug-trials/).
An alternative theory looks to inflammation in the brain as a possible cause of neurodegeneration, something that can be triggered by viruses, bacteria, or fungi. This approach would tie in with the finding that many COVID-19 patients were struck by something called a cytokine storm, a condition in which the immune system battles infections but essentially goes overboard and begins attacking tissues that don’t contain pathogens.
This kind of autoimmune response has the potential to attack brain cells causing short-term neurological symptoms and possibly increasing future risk of developing a neurological disorder. We need only look to another of Earth’s deadly pandemics for insight here, as the Spanish Flu saw [over a million people](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7393211/) who survived the infection go on to develop post-encephalitic Parkinson’s disease, a harrowing condition depicted in the movie _[Awakenings](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7exeVt7CaE4)_ (a great watch but one for which tissues are a **necessity**).
While the frustrating truth is that finding out [if COVID-19 will lead to future cases of Alzheimer’s](https://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/could-covid19-increase-dementia-risk-in-the-future/) is a matter of watchful waiting (at least for now), the more we learn about the overlap of these two diseases, the greater opportunities we have for interrupting the processes that lead to neurodegeneration.
# How the enigmatic Nefertiti came to be locked away in Germany | Aeon Essays
Almost 3,400 years ago, the sculptor Thutmose said goodbye to the extensive compound – a warren of workshops, courtyards and living accommodation for artists and apprentices – that had been both his home and his workplace for more than a decade. He had once managed a highly prestigious business, creating many of the stone images of the royal family that decorated Egypt’s newest royal city, Amarna. But now King Akhenaten was dead and his young successor, Tutankhamen, had decided to relocate the royal court back to Thebes. On the verge of becoming a ghost city, Amarna no longer had any need for royal statues, so Thutmose – the king’s chief of works, and entirely dependent on royal patronage – had no choice but to seek employment elsewhere. Packing his goods and chattels, he sailed away, abandoning objects that he did not want or could not move. Among this heap of castoffs was an uninscribed bust of a woman whose distinctive tall, flat-topped crown identified her as Akhenaten’s consort: Nefertiti.
Akhenaten, who reigned _c_1352-1336 BCE, had been a remarkable king. For almost 1,000 years, Egypt’s monarchs worshipped the multiple gods of the long-established pantheon. Turning his back on this tradition, Akhenaten had dedicated his life – and the lives of his family and followers – to the service of an ancient solar deity known simply as ‘the Aten’. Akhenaten’s god was a genderless, faceless disk that hung in the sky emitting powerful rays: when depicted in two-dimensional art, these long, thin rays end in tiny human hands that allow the Aten to offer the ankh, symbol of life, to the royal family. Akhenaten’s Aten represented the power of the Sun, or the light of the Sun, and, because the Aten was also associated with ideas of divine kingship, admitted the possibility that the king himself might be a living god to be worshipped by his people. Inspired by the Aten, Akhenaten founded a city on virgin land, halfway between the traditional capital cities of Thebes (in southern Egypt) and Memphis (in northern Egypt), where his god could be worshipped without interference from any pre-existing cult or priesthood. Akhet-Aten (literally ‘Horizon of the Aten’) is today better known as Amarna.
In 1714, the French Jesuit priest Claude Sicard became the first European to record details of a visit to the ruined city of Amarna. From that time onwards, there were sporadic Western visitors and occasional archaeological missions until, in 1907, the French-run Egyptian Antiquities Service granted the Berlin philanthropist James Simon, founder of the German Oriental Society (Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft, or DOG), permission to survey and excavate the site. The work was to be done by a team of archaeologists led by the German Egyptologist Ludwig Borchardt. A local workforce would do the actual digging.
In December 1912, the team was working in the Thutmose compound, recovering high-quality sculpted pieces, sculptors’ tools, stone chips, gypsum plaster artefacts and flakes of gold foil that confirmed the presence of a sculptor’s workshop. On 6 December, they discovered a collection of more than 50 artefacts made from limestone, quartzite and gypsum plaster, stored in the ruins of Thutmose’s own luxurious villa. These included the Nefertiti bust, a similar but badly damaged bust of Akhenaten, several unfinished stone sculptures, and a unique collection of plaster heads.
Amarna had been a city filled with carved and painted images of the royal family: the king, his consort Nefertiti and their six daughters. These images were not merely decorative. In the absence of the now-banned traditional gods, they served as a focus of worship for the Amarna elite who were forbidden to communicate directly with the Aten. Prominent citizens furnished their homes and gardens with statues of the king and queen, or with scenes depicting the royal family going about their daily business beneath the Aten’s rays. These images were a conspicuous means of demonstrating loyalty to the regime.
Ancient Egypt’s most talented sculptors – those given access to first-class resources – were employed by kings and temples. They worked to official rules of composition and presentation, and their completed art was placed in specific locations to fulfil particular functions. This lack of freedom of expression has led to the suggestion that they should, perhaps, be classified as craftsmen rather than artists. However, all high-ranking artists carried an additional, priestly responsibility that gave Thutmose an important role in supporting Akhenaten’s theology. The Egyptian word for sculptor literally means ‘the one who makes live’, and the sculptor was recognised as having a quasi-divine ability to release the shape hidden inside a featureless stone block, and in so doing create a latent form capable of sustaining life. Ritually activated, any sculpture could become a substitute body to house the soul of its deceased subject, should the mummy of the deceased be destroyed.
The belief that the soul might need to live in a statue made the bust an unpopular art form: no one wanted to run the risk of spending eternity trapped inside a bodiless head. Why, then, did Thutmose depict Nefertiti and Akhenaten this way? The presence of finished shoulders, the absence of tenons for attachment, the integral crowns and the smooth bases that allow the busts to stand firm, all allow us to be confident that each is indeed a complete artefact. These are not heads that have broken off larger statues, and nor are they body-parts intended for insertion into a composite statue.
Most likely, the busts were created to be used as studio models. By providing his workers with approved images and colour-schemes to copy, Thutmose could be confident that all the Nefertitis and Akhenatens leaving his workshop would look alike, and that all would be acceptable to the king. At the same time, the two busts could serve as objects of worship for both Thutmose and his workers. This would explain why, unlike other works completed by Thutmose and his team, the Akhenaten and Nefertiti busts never went on public display.
Some have wrongly assumed that she must have had white skin and therefore must been a foreign-born queen
The Nefertiti bust is the only substantially completed and undamaged sculpture recovered from Thutmose’s compound. Standing 48 cm tall and weighing 20 kg, it was carved from limestone, coated with a plaster ‘skin’, and painted in bright colours. It shows the upper part of the queen (head, neck and an area extending from the clavicle to just above the breasts); her head is topped by a tall crown and a colourful floral collar encircles her neck. Her crown is painted dark blue and encircled by a multicoloured ribbon (a snake, now missing, once reared over her forehead). Two more colourful ribbons hang from the nape of her neck. Beneath the crown, Nefertiti’s head is hairless, giving her an almost contemporary look. Her eye sockets are symmetrical, and rimmed with black kohl. The right eye is created from a ball of black-coloured wax placed in the white-painted eye-socket and covered with a thin rock-crystal lens engraved with the outline of the iris. The left eye socket was empty when the bust was discovered, and it seems likely that the lens fell out prior to excavation. An examination of the socket has revealed no obvious trace of glue, but scratch marks on the lower lid could have been caused when an inlay was inserted.
Her smooth gypsum plaster ‘skin’, just 1-2 mm thick over her face, allowed the ancient artist to model the muscles and tendons in Nefertiti’s neck, to add creases under her eyes and around her mouth, and to emphasise her cheekbones. This realism was then enhanced by the skilful use of pigments to create a pink-brown skin tone, deeper red-brown lips, and dark eyebrows. We cannot accept this colour scheme literally. Egyptian art followed colour conventions that decreed that most elite men would be depicted with a red-brown skin and most elite women with a paler, yellow-white skin. This was not intended to be an accurate reflection of daily life, but simply a means of allowing the viewer to make an easy distinction between males and females. We have no idea of Nefertiti’s actual skin tone and yet, influenced by the bust, some observers have wrongly assumed that she must have had white skin and therefore must been a foreign-born queen. Others have equally wrongly assumed that the bust must be a crude modern fake, either because it does not have dark skin, or simply because it is painted. We have become so accustomed to seeing Egyptian sculpture stripped of its original vibrant colour and the once-hidden stone exposed, that Nefertiti can appear modern rather than ancient.
Most observers, irrespective of age, gender, race or culture, agree that the Nefertiti bust represents a beautiful woman. This may in part be due to expectation – Nefertiti has been promoted as a beautiful woman for so long that we automatically see her as such – but it is also a natural response to the unusual symmetry of her face. However, just as we should not accept the skin-tone of the bust as being true-to-life, so we should not accept the bust as an accurate portrait of Nefertiti herself. Egyptian royal art was not primarily intended to be portraiture: it was the name and regalia rather than the likeness that allowed the observer to identify the subject.
Akhenaten’s determination that his people should access the Aten via images of his family has left us with more 2D and 3D representations of Nefertiti than of any other Egyptian queen, and these allow us to see that her face and body are represented in different ways at different times and, presumably, by different artists throughout the Amarna Period. Generally speaking, earlier representations of Nefertiti are more angular and exaggerated, with a thin body and prominent jaw that mirrors Akhenaten’s own, while later representations appear more natural, with emphasised cheek bones, rounded cheeks and straighter lips. We can no more assume that Nefertiti looked like her bust than we can assume that she looked like any of her other representations. All that we can safely say is that this is the image of Nefertiti that Akhenaten wished to promote.
At the time of Borchardt’s excavation, non-Egyptian archaeological missions were entitled to claim and export half the artefacts, or ‘finds’, recovered during each season’s excavation. Sharing of the finds was closely monitored by Egypt’s Antiquities Service, with an official ‘division of finds’ designed to ensure that no items of great archaeological or commercial value left the country. Today, the division is recognised as a bad system that broke up groups of artefacts, turned scientific excavations into treasure hunts, and perpetuated the idea that the proper home for an ancient Egyptian artefact is a foreign museum. In 1913, however, the division was seen as a fair reward for those who invested their money in excavating Egypt. (Today, it is illegal to export antiquities from Egypt.)
On 20 January 1913, the French Egyptologist Gustave Lefebvre, the antiquities inspector for Middle Egypt, agreed to the division of the Amarna finds. Borchardt had listed his discoveries, splitting them into two find lists of equal value. One was headed by a small carved scene showing Akhenaten, Nefertiti and their family sitting beneath the rays of the Aten. The other was headed by the Nefertiti bust. Inexplicably, Lefebvre selected the scene for the Cairo Museum, so ownership of the Nefertiti bust, and all the other artefacts on that list, fell to the aforementioned James Simon, official holder of the Amarna concession. On 7 July 1920, Simon donated his entire collection to the Neues Museum in Berlin, transferring ownership of the Nefertiti bust to the State of Prussia.
To many, Lefebvre’s failure to select the Nefertiti bust for Egypt is so inexplicable that it cannot have simply been the result of indifference or incompetence. Claims that Borchardt abducted Nefertiti have been so rife that even in Germany many accept that the bust was stolen. While the more sensational claims against Borchardt – that he smuggled the bust out of Egypt in a basket of fruit, for example – can be dismissed, it is clear that he did nothing to help Lefebvre make the right decision.
It is particularly striking that the official division protocol listed Nefertiti as a ‘bust in painted plaster of a princess of the royal family’. It is not clear who created this description, but it contains two obvious errors. It is odd that Nefertiti is listed as a princess rather than a queen, given that she is wearing her trademark crown, though the distinction between Nefertiti and one of her daughters would have meant less in 1913 than it does today (Akhenaten’s mother, Tiy, was then regarded as the dominant Amarna female). The fact that the bust is described as being made of plaster is more significant. The outer layer of the bust is indeed plaster, but its core is limestone. Is this a simple mistake, or is it possible that the piece was deliberately misdescribed? After all, Lefebvre had agreed in advance that all the _plaster_ heads recovered from the Thutmose workshop should go to Germany.
He asked for the return of the bust on the grounds that there had obviously been a mistake
In April 1924, the Nefertiti bust went on permanent display in the newly opened Amarna Courtyard at the Neues Museum. The general public, whose interest in ancient Egypt had been stimulated by the discovery in 1922 of Tutankhamun’s near-intact tomb in the Valley of the Kings, flocked to the museum in ever-increasing numbers. Nefertiti was a beautiful enigma. She fitted perfectly with the colourful, geometric style that was starting to represent Western postwar opulence and glamour (in 1925, this would be named the Art Deco style). Yet she was the creation of a sculptor who had lived and died in Africa, thousands of years ago. Germany, a land so recently stripped of its royalty, acquired a new queen to admire.
While some travelled to Berlin to see her, others were able to find Nefertiti closer to home. The Neues Museum had commissioned the sculptor Tina Haim-Wentscher to make an exact copy of the Nefertiti bust, and this had been used as the model for a series of replicas sold to museums and private collections worldwide. Many of the high-quality Nefertiti replicas displayed in museums today are painted plaster-casts taken from Haim- Wentscher’s sculpture. Other replicas, slightly different in appearance particularly with regard to their treatment of the eyes, are based on later models created either freehand or, more recently, from laser scans. While Tutankhamen remained frustratingly invisible, sealed in his nest of coffins in the Valley of the Kings, replica Nefertitis travelled the Western world. She existed, simultaneously, across innumerable museum galleries.
Soon after Germany had somehow managed to acquire a great Egyptian treasure, Pierre Lacau, the head of the Egyptian Antiquities Service and a French veteran of the First World War, took action. While acknowledging that Borchardt had met all legal requirements relating to the division, he nevertheless asked for the return of the bust on the grounds that there had obviously been a mistake. The museum was not prepared to cooperate and so, in 1925, Lacau withdrew Borchardt’s permission to excavate until Germany either returned the bust or agreed to arbitration. When Borchardt retired as director of the DOG, there was a sense that a deal might now be possible. Lacau travelled to Berlin to negotiate with the museum.
Initially, he suggested a straightforward swap: the bust for the painted stela (the small carved scene) plus a few objects of lesser value. But the Neues Museum was not happy with this suggestion. Berlin already owned a carved stela depicting the royal family, and it didn’t need another. It was then proposed that Berlin should receive two statues of acknowledged artistic and historical merit: a life-sized statue of the Old Kingdom high priest Ranefer and a seated statue of the New Kingdom architect and priest Amenhotep, son of Hapu. Egyptologists were agreed that this was a reasonable exchange but public opinion, roused by the press and enthralled by the queen, quashed the deal.
‘The colourful queen’ was moved first to the vault of the Prussian bank and then to a bunker near the Berlin zoo
As the former owner of the bust, Simon was happy to make his own views on the matter clear. On 28 June 1930, he published an open letter addressed to the Prussian minister of culture, reminding him that the museum’s directors had promised that the bust would be returned to Egypt should the authorities ever request it. As a businessman, he felt that this promise should be honoured. An exchange for items of equal worth would be a sensible solution that would save face, and would allow the DOG to continue its valuable excavation work. His letter was ignored.
In October 1933, Hermann Göring, Minister President of Prussia, agreed to give back the Nefertiti bust to King Fuad, to commemorate the anniversary of the king’s accession to the Egyptian throne. Hitler, however, disagreed and personally intervened to block Nefertiti’s return. The Amarna artefacts remained on display until August 1939, when Berlin’s museums were forced to close with the coming of war. The collections were packed up and transferred to secure locations. This was to prove a wise precaution. All the buildings on Museum Island suffered war damage; more than a third of the Neues Museum was destroyed. The bust, stored in a crate labelled ‘the colourful queen’, was moved first to the vault of the Prussian governmental bank and then to a bunker near the Berlin zoo. Shortly before the Red Army took Berlin in 1945, the bust was hidden alongside Germany’s gold and currency reserves in a salt mine in Thuringia. Five months later, the Allied forces captured the mine, and the bust passed to the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives branch of the Allied armies.
In 1946, in order to show the German people that the bust had survived the war unscathed, the US Army put Nefertiti on public display in Wiesbaden. That same year saw a request for the repatriation of the bust, addressed by the Egyptian government to the Allied Control Commission in Germany and reminding them that the return of the bust had previously been agreed, only to be thwarted by Hitler. Now that Hitler was dead, surely there was no reason not to right this historic wrong?
But this request was refused on the grounds that the commission had authority to repatriate only objects looted during the war. As Nefertiti had arrived in Berlin in 1913, this was a long-standing legal matter between the Egyptians and the Germans, and in the meantime Nefertiti should return to her prewar home. However, there was a further problem: by now, Berlin had become a divided city, and the Neues Museum lay in the communist-controlled eastern sector. In 1956, the bust was sent to West Berlin where Nefertiti was exhibited first in the Dahlem Museum and then in the Egyptian Museum. Not unexpectedly, the German Democratic Republic tried to claim the bust on the grounds that the Neues Museum was located in East Berlin. They were unsuccessful.
Following the reunification of Germany, the Nefertiti bust returned to the Neues Museum, home of Berlin’s Egyptian Museum and Papyrus Collection. There have been repeated requests for its return to Egypt. In 1984, for example, the ‘Nefertiti Wants To Go Home’ movement suggested that the bust be displayed alternately in Cairo and Berlin, while in 2005 Egypt appealed to UNESCO to resolve the dispute – but the German authorities have stood firm. Egypt’s Ministry of Antiquities (a successor to the Antiquities Service) continues to press for the return of the bust, to no avail. Nefertiti remains on display in Berlin.
On Oct. 1, 2000, _[Jackass](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/t/jackass/)_ debuted on MTV with a shot of [Johnny Knoxville](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/t/johnny-knoxville-0/) being fired out of a cannon to the now-familiar strums of “Corona” by Minutemen — and the world would never be the same.
Born out of skate-culture shock videos, _Jackass_ featured a lovable gang of ne’er-do-wells — including clown-college grad [Steve-O](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/t/steve-o-1/), thong-loving exhibitionist Chris Pontius and occasional Oompa Loompa impersonator Jason “Wee Man” Acuña — performing a three-ring circus of _Candid Camera_\-style pranks, gag-inducing dares and flat-out lunatic stunts. Something about its bum-fights-meets-_Three Stooges_ energy instantly clicked with MTV audiences, giving the network its highest ratings in history (2.4 million among 12-to-34-year-olds) while sending lawmakers like Sen. Joe Lieberman into apoplectic fits. Knoxville pulled the plug on the show after just three seasons and 25 episodes, but corporate sibling Paramount Studios found a way to keep the money-minting franchise alive in the form of three feature films: 2002’s _Jackass: The Movie_ (which grossed $80 million worldwide); 2006’s _Jackass Number Two_ ($85 million); and 2010’s _Jackass 3D_ ($172 million).
Along the way, there has been sadness and tragedy: In 2011, _Jackass_ performer Ryan Dunn, 34, and production assistant Zachary Hartwell, 29, died in a drunk-driving accident with Dunn behind the wheel. Dunn’s childhood friend and co-star Bam Margera has struggled with alcoholism and in January 2021 said on the _Knockin’ Doorz Down_ podcast that Paramount would not allow him to perform in future _Jackass_ films. (Earlier this year, Margera was served with a three-year restraining order from _Jackass_ co-creator Jeff Tremaine; Margera has responded by suing the _Jackass_ creators and Paramount for wrongful termination. The topic of Margera remains off-limits pending litigation.) But the show goes on. On Feb. 4, the fourth film in the _Jackass_ saga, _Jackass Forever_, premieres under the strangest set of circumstances yet: exclusively in theaters during the third year of a global pandemic. Will the boys’ legions of die-hard fans brave omicron to cheer on their favorite antiheroes getting slapped at full force in the testicles with a flip-flop? The answer remains to be seen.
But first, the founding fathers — Knoxville, 50; Steve-O, 47; Pontius, 47; Acuña, 48; and Tremaine, 55 — convened with _THR_ for an aptly outrageous retelling of the story of _Jackass_.
**STEVE-O** It all started with skateboarding. And in the 1980s, the skateboard industry was really at the mercy of the approval of mothers. So all the skateboard videos that came out in the early 1980s were very careful to be sugar-coated, not scare off Mom. Like they wouldn’t show very violent falls off of skateboards. But then came this guy named Steve Rocco, and he said, “Fuck that. We’re not going to kiss Mom’s ass anymore.” And he made the first video to properly embrace skateboarding being criminal and reckless and it was gnarly: _The Rubbish Heap_.
What’s notable about that video is that it was the first video project of Spike Jonze, who at the time was a photographer for Steve Rocco’s skateboarding company. Back then, Steve Rocco was like the Bill Gates of the skateboarding industry. He had this conglomeration of companies, and he was just a fucking madman. And he would run these ads to promote his companies that were just out of control. And one of them for his company called World Industries was a photo of a little kid with a gun in his mouth. And it said, “World Industries: Kill yourself.”
The two biggest skateboarding magazines, _Thrasher_ and _TransWorld_, both sent his ad back. They said, “There’s no way we’re going to print this.” So Steve Rocco said, “Oh, you don’t like my ad? Then fuck you. I’m not going to run any more ads in either of your magazines. And I’m going to start my own magazine.” And that’s how _Big Brother_ started. The only purpose for _Big Brother_ was to be a forum for filth that would never be allowed on the pages of _Thrasher_ or _TransWorld_.
**JOHNNY KNOXVILLE** I didn’t know any of this when we started shooting _Jackass_. I didn’t know this was our history.
**CHRIS PONTIUS** _Big Brother_ attracted all the misfits in skateboarding. Steve-O, for example, lived in New Mexico at the time. \[_Jackass_ producer\] Dimitry \[Elyashkevich\] worked for _Big Brother_. Me and Jason \[“Wee-Man”\] were skateboarders in California.
**JEFF TREMAINE** We hired Jason just to put \[_Big Brother_\] subscriptions in bags and take them to the post office. \[Tremaine was editor-in-chief of the magazine.\]
**PONTIUS** I got interviewed in _Big Brother_, like a skateboarding interview. And then when my interview came out, it kind of ruffled some feathers. \[Pontius appeared fully nude in the spread, swinging his penis around for something he called “the whirlybird.”\] I’ve always been free my whole life to say anything I want. And the guy who interviewed me, Thomas Campbell, told me I should probably call up Jeff and get to know them because I should probably work for them.
**TREMAINE** We were much more about big personalities than we were about great skateboarding. And we put out a video in 1995 that had lot of crazy shit in it, plus some skateboarding, and that did really well.
**STEVE-O** In 1997, I was living in New Mexico and _Big Brother_ came through Albuquerque, where I lived. They would go on tours with skateboard companies. In this case, it was DuFFS shoes. I was just so in love with _Big Brother_ that I made it my mission to track them down. And I found them at a skate park, and I went up to Dimitry and basically said, “I don’t care if you guys like me or like what I’m just telling you right now, I’m going to get fucking gnarly tonight and I’m going to be in _Big Brother_ magazine.” And I ended up in the hospital that night with second-degree burns on half my face.
**TREMAINE** Tell what happened.
**STEVE-O** I was working with this pro skateboarder. I was like, “OK, this is going to be great. I’m going to spray hair spray all in my hair and light my head on fire, and that’s the torch. And you’re going to have a mouthful of rubbing alcohol, and you’re the fire-breather. So you’ll use my head as the torch, but I’ll have my own mouth full of alcohol, then I’m going to stick my hand into the fireball that you blow. So then everything’s on fire, and then I’m going to do a backflip and simultaneously breathe fire.”
But the thing was that the skateboarder blew the fireball point-blank into my face, so my entire head was on fire from the shoulders up. And my best thinking in that moment was, “I better hurry up and do this fire-breathing backflip.” So I do the fire-breathing backflip, and I come up short and my face is just fucking burning. I ended up with all the skin on my face rolled up like a joint in my hand. It was a pretty gnarly situation. But I got my article. It was a little sidebar called “The Burning Boy Festival.”
I had just applied to \[Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey\] Clown College. And I would wake up and have to peel my pillow off. Then I got called from the Clown College that I’d been accepted. And I thought, “Am I even going to be able to go?” But I just have crazy healing powers. I healed up in time, and I was in Clown College when the magazine came out. It was actually the first issue of _Big Brother_ to be published by Larry Flynt. At the end of the little article, it said, “Steve-O just got into Clown College. Way to go, Steve.” And they got a kick out of the fact that I was in Clown College. I became a recurring character in the magazine.
“In between \[movies\] two and three, I was doing drugs and trying to become a rapper. I’ve always had hustle,
but at times I’ve hustled in the wrong direction.” Photographed by Beth Saravo
**PONTIUS** The first time they shot with Steve-O in Florida, we met him for 10 minutes, and Jeff was like, “Let’s lose him.” Before we even shot anything. They were driving through red lights and stuff, but they couldn’t lose him. He was just dying to perform.
**TREMAINE** Thank God we couldn’t lose him.
**KNOXVILLE** His personality wasn’t as refined as it is now.
**STEVE-O** These guys pushed the boundaries to such absurd extremes. Every issue of _Big Brother_ had a different theme. One of the covers was a professional skateboarder holding a pitchfork dressed up as Satan with horns, like doing a kick-flip over a stack of burning Bibles.
**KNOXVILLE** Issue 666.
**STEVE-O** What actually got Larry Flynt interested in owning _Big Brother_ was the Kids Issue. They were featuring the youngest skateboarders in the industry. And on the cover of that issue was an 8-year-old Ryan Sheckler, who now is probably 32 or something like that. … _Big Brother_ had flown under the radar for years at that point, actually having, like, fairly graphic nudity in the magazine.
**PONTIUS** I was nude and in _Big Brother_ before I was even 18.
**STEVE-O** And this is a magazine that was targeted toward kids. But when the Kids Issue came out, there was outrage on a national level. It was on the news.
**PONTIUS** Another controversy with _Big Brother_ was, when Larry Flynt owned it, something went wrong in the subscription department, and the people that got one of his magazines called _Taboo_ received _Big Brother_, and _Big Brother_ subscribers received _Taboo_. So all these moms were furious. “They’re sending my kids porn!”
**KNOXVILLE** And all the perverts were upset they got _Big Brother_.
**TREMAINE** So we were starting work on the second video, and that’s when I met Knoxville. He was trying to write articles for us.
**KNOXVILLE** The first one was the self-defense equipment article.
**TREMAINE** He was going to test out all the self-defense equipment on himself.
**STEVE-O** Knoxville’s story is basically if you take the Bad Company song “Shooting Star” and switch “guitar” with “video camera.” Graduated high school, he is 18 years old. He says to his mom, “I’m going out to be a big star.” And 18-year-old Knoxville moves to L.A., and he is trying be an actor. And he’s having some success in television commercials. But years are going by, and he really wants to make his mark. And he’s starting to approach 30 years old. And he says, “I’m sick and tired of fucking waiting to be picked at an audition. I’m going to fucking force people to recognize me.” So he pitched this self-defense thing. He pitched it to every media outlet.
**KNOXVILLE** My then-girlfriend got pregnant, and I was like, “I’ve got to do something quick.” And this was my best guess. Like try to make something happen for myself and our family. I pitched it to Howard Stern and some magazines. And Stern thought I was crazy. Some magazines wanted it, but they didn’t want to support me because I didn’t have any money. So I needed a bulletproof vest, I needed to buy pepper spray, the stun gun, the Taser gun.
“_SNL_ was going to give me, like, five minutes each week to do what I do, but that would just be me. And I couldn’t do both.” Photographed by Beth Saravo
**STEVE-O** He says, “I want to mace myself with red pepper spray. I want to get stunned by a 50,000-volt Taser gun. And then I want put on a bulletproof vest and shoot myself with a .38-caliber handgun. I just need the bulletproof vest, and it’s like $5,000.” Nobody would have anything to do with it, except Tremaine.
**KNOXVILLE** Mom gave me $300 for Christmas that year. And I found the cheapest bulletproof vest they had on the market. Nowhere close to $5,000. Tremaine bought the stun gun, the pepper spray and the Taser. But my mom, unbeknownst to her, bought the bulletproof vest.
**TREMAINE** How much did we end up paying for that?
**KNOXVILLE** You guys paid a lot better than _Bikini_ magazine. They gave me 10 cents a word. You guys gave us, like, 50 cents a word.
**TREMAINE** When Knoxville did the self-defense thing, I convinced him he needed to film it because we were starting work on the second video. And then we started getting cold feet about the bulletproof vest. That was so scary to me, especially because he got the cheapest one on the market. Luckily, at that point, Larry Flynt had bought the magazine. So I also gave him a big stack of porn magazines, at least four or five inches thick, that went under the bulletproof vest.
**KNOXVILLE** At one point I’m standing there with the gun in my hand, trying to shoot myself, and all the porn magazines fall out.
**STEVE-O** Knoxville thought that it would be safer to have somebody else shoot him from 12 feet away. But nobody was willing to do that because they didn’t want to be the one who killed him. So he’s in the footage, turning the gun on himself, and he’s saying, “Man, I wish somebody would shoot me.”
**TREMAINE** I don’t think Johnny did it on purpose, but there’s one bullet in the chamber.
**STEVE-O** So it’s like, “Click.”
**TREMAINE** Everyone’s getting more stressed. Every time he clicks it, the cameraman is like, “Come on, dude. Let’s just go home.”
**STEVE-O** And it finally goes.
**KNOXVILLE** It’s like someone took a shovel and hit you in the chest as hard as they could.
**STEVE-O** The gun went flying out of your hand, like 12 feet toward the camera. And I think that took a lot of heat off the impact.
**KNOXVILLE** Thank God I’ve got limp wrists.
**TREMAINE** The footage came back so compelling. We edited it together, and it was like, “Holy shit, this was incredible.” And we put that in the second video.
**STEVE-O** There were VHS tapes which were distributed in mom-and-pop skate shops. By the time the third one came out \[in 1999\], these _Big Brother_ videos were a cult thing. So then Jeff Tremaine reaches out to Spike Jonze, and he is like, “Hey dude, there’s something about these videos that people are really fucking loving, but I just don’t think they care about the skateboarding.”
**TREMAINE** I went to high school with Spike, and I worked with him on _Big Brother_ and _Freestyle_ magazine before that. So after that second video came out, I had a light-bulb moment where I’m like, “Man, we can make a TV show out of this.”
**KNOXVILLE** You and I called Spike together.
**TREMAINE** Spike fully knew what we were up to and totally agreed.
**STEVE-O** To make our \[reel\], they just used the _Big Brother_ videos and subtracted the skateboarding. We took it to HBO first.
**KNOXVILLE** Oh man, that went terrible.
**TREMAINE** Our plan was to just let Spike do the talking. He was the only legit one that everyone was interested in anyway. \[Jonze, then a successful music video director for bands like Beastie Boys and Daft Punk, had released his first feature, 1999’s _Being John Malkovich_.\] So we showed it with these two women, I don’t even remember their names.
**TREMAINE** They were offended and just disgusted by what we had just shown them. And I went, “Oh well, fuck, man. Good thing I didn’t quit _Big Brother_ yet.” And our second pitch was at MTV — and it was the exact opposite. We showed them the sizzle tape, and they were just dying laughing. And they wanted it right away.
**KNOXVILLE** _SNL_ wanted me to be on the show. They were going to give me, like, five minutes each week to do what I do, but that would just be me. And I couldn’t do both. Our show was about to go. So I kind of bet on us as opposed to on myself. I was really flattered that Lorne Michaels asked me to have lunch with him at the Polo Lounge, but I said, “No, I’m going to do this instead.”
**STEVE-O** Within two weeks, it was officially the highest ratings MTV had ever had, outside of VMAs or anything. It shattered all their records and presumably with less of a budget than they were used to. And they were running reruns at 5 p.m. It was crazy. By the time the second season was underway, maybe a few weeks in, little kids were showing up in hospitals all over the place. Because they were inspired to be doing stunts on their own. And this scared the shit out of MTV. Then Joe Lieberman was lobbying against MTV. There wasn’t ever an actual big lawsuit, but there was just the fear of one, and MTV was in this position of, “Well, fuck, this is our biggest profit margin we’ve ever had, but there’s all this liability.” So their reaction was to start not approving shit for us to film.
**TREMAINE** The MTV solution to keep us safe was to assign an OSHA representative to follow us around and shoot with us. We had shot this bit called “The Vomelet.” That was so funny.
**KNOXVILLE** It was raining in Florida. So we didn’t have anything to shoot.
**STEVE-O** So \[_Jackass_ performer Dave England\] eats all the ingredients of an omelet and then barfs it into a frying pan and then feeds it to me.
**TREMAINE** So we film that great bit, and it was fucking hilarious, and then MTV sees it, and they’re like, “Well, it doesn’t show that it was cooked at a temperature of 160 degrees.” I’m like, “What do you fucking mean? It’s an omelet. It was fine.”
From left: _Jackass_ stars Steve-O, Jason “Wee Man” Acuña, Chris Pontius and Johnny Knoxville were photographed Jan. 11at Electric Pony Studios in Los Angeles. Photographed by Beth Saravo
**PONTIUS** They said it could spread “blood-borne pathogens.” I remember that was the big phrase.
**KNOXVILLE** And we had to wear hazmat suits, too.
**TREMAINE** Although that was funny, the fact that we had to redo it, it lost a lot of the spontaneity. OSHA is designed to keep factory workers safe. We’re trying to do a show where we’re getting hurt. It just didn’t make sense to have OSHA working with us.
**STEVE-O** So Knoxville quit. He said, “Hey, I’m not going to do a watered-down version of _Jackass_.” And when we, all the supporting castmembers, learned of this, we were like, “Um … what do you mean, Knoxville? What are you talking about?!”
**KNOXVILLE** In an interview with my hometown newspaper, I said, “I quit.” And then everyone learned of it. MTV was upset, obviously. Understandably. So there’s a lot of back-and-forth between our agents and attorneys and MTV. Because technically we were still under contract. What’s going to happen? And I think Jeff and Spike came to me and said, “Why don’t we do a movie version?”
2002’s _Jackass: The Movie._ Paramount/Courtesy Everett Collection
**TREMAINE** In the middle of us making this second season, the guy who ran MTV Films, David Gale, came over to me. He’s like, “You can make a movie out of this.” And I’m like, “I don’t even know how to make a TV show.” But when Knoxville quit, David popped up and said, “Why don’t you guys make a movie?” Spike had thought that could work. I didn’t believe. It didn’t seem like it was possible to turn this stupid little TV show into a movie, but we agreed we’d give it a try.
**KNOXVILLE** I was against the movie because in my head I was like, “What, are we going to act? Is this a scripted thing?” They’re like, “No. It’s just like a naughtier version of what we do.” I’m like, “That’s a good idea.”
**TREMAINE** It didn’t make sense until it became “Just do the TV show, but do it on a crazier level.”
**KNOXVILLE** For the first movie, they insured per bit. They didn’t insure the whole movie. So, some bits were cost-prohibitive to do. There was one bit we wanted to do with Pontius dressed as the devil in a Pentecostal church handling snakes. And that was going to be, like, $5 million to insure. Our first entire movie cost $6 million. But after that, the movies were insured like a regular film.
**TREMAINE** On the first movie, Paramount wanted us to make it, but it was a negative pickup. They didn’t fully put their name on it.
**STEVE-O** They shuttled the money through a ghost company. If anybody died, they wouldn’t even be affiliated it with it. And then, once we were done, they “found out about it” and bought it.
**KNOXVILLE** That said, Paramount’s been a great partner all these years.
Johnny Knoxville (left), Jeff Tremaine and Steve-O at L.A.’s _Jackass 3D_ premiere in 2010.
**TREMAINE** Sherry Lansing was the head of Paramount when we did the first movie, and she pulled me aside, and I didn’t even know anything about her or how to make a movie. And she’s like, “Just make sure it’s crazier than anything you do on TV.”
**KNOXVILLE** She was great. She really supported us when some people at the studio saw the first cut and didn’t want any part of it.
**STEVE-O** I remember the first creative meeting we had — it was the very beginning of 2002. We went into this new office, and Tremaine says, “All right, it’s not a TV show anymore. Now it’s a movie and it’s rated R. So don’t fucking give us any half-ass ideas. Think big.” And I remember I was indignant. Like, “Oh, like I would present you a half-ass idea. Come on.” And my immediate first thought, I said, “Oh, yeah? How about if I get a tattoo of myself on myself and it’s bigger than myself?” Because the face of my back is substantially bigger than my actual face. That one never became a trend. But getting “YOUR NAME” tattooed on my butt cheek so I could tell people, “I have your name tattooed on my butt cheek” became a trend. There’s thousands of people out there with “YOUR NAME” on their butt cheek. I see them all the time. When the last bit in the first movie was being shot, putting a toy car up your butt, I backed out of it because my dad was just so disappointed in the idea. I explained the idea to him and the way my dad said, “Oh, no.” I heard it in his voice and I couldn’t do it.
**JASON ACUÑA** Ryan Dunn did it. He backed it right in. He was good in that one.
**PONTIUS** We’re not afraid to have fun. Especially at that time, people were really afraid of anything they’d be called gay for, and there are people who put gay people in the same category as child molesters and perverts. And we never bought into that. We just wanted to have fun and push our own envelopes and shock ourselves and make ourselves laugh. Before _Jackass_ even premiered, we were filming something where I was Rollerblading on the promenade at Hermosa Beach with a jockstrap on. And people actually wanted to beat me up for that. Like yelling names at me. Once it came out on TV, they would all be wanting to get my autograph and bro down with me, those same people that wanted to beat me up.
**STEVE-O** Looking back on this whole history, this unbelievable legacy and this franchise, I really feel so much gratitude and such a sense of pride in how I view the franchise as wholesome. And I know that’s counterintuitive to think of _Jackass_ as wholesome, but it’s the spirit of it. It’s so warm, like there’s nothing hateful, there’s nothing negative. We give each other and ourselves a hard time, but we can handle it, and we love it. And just the spirit of it is so positive. I’m really proud and grateful for that.
**KNOXVILLE** “Everything I wrote was true. Because I believed in what I saw.” — Jack Kerouac, _On the Road._
**PONTIUS** I think _Jackass_ came out when the world needed it. And it brought that underground skateboard, silly culture to the world. I think a lot of people gravitated toward it because it reminded them of having fun with their friends growing up. More than the stunts and everything, it reminds a lot of people of hanging out with their friends and having fun. I think the characters on it are things that appeal the most. It wasn’t planned out to have a little guy and a fat guy and a naked guy …
**ACUÑA** And a clown guy. It just all meshed together.
**STEVE-O** Knoxville was determined to go out on top, and he declared that _Jackass_ was finished after the first movie. And then Chris and I got to work on our homoerotic nature show, _Wildboyz_. Knoxville joined us for a while. We were on this trip in Russia at this counterterrorism training camp. Knoxville says, “Have the dog bite me and shoot me with the 9mm gun while the dog’s biting me.” And Tremaine says to Knoxville, “Hey, whoa, let’s not do this for MTV2. If you have that in you, let’s make another movie.” And Knoxville had it in him. And that was _Number Two_.
**KNOXVILLE** _Number Two_ was everyone on their worst behavior.
**PONTIUS** _Number Two_ was amazing.
**KNOXVILLE** Everyone was out of control onscreen and off.
**PONTIUS** It was awesome.
**STEVE-O** _Number Two_ was the masterpiece in my view. In between one and two, we were doing _Wildboyz_. In between \[movies\] two and three, I was doing drugs and trying to become a rapper. I’ve always had hustle, but at times I’ve hustled in the wrong direction. After _Number Two_, Knoxville once again declared that the franchise was over. I had my downward spiral and subsequent time in rehab. I was still living in a halfway house, newly sober, when I found out that these guys were talking about potentially doing a third movie.
**TREMAINE** Me and Spike and Knoxville went out to dinner at the Chateau Marmont, and we discussed whether or not we were going to make a third movie \[_Jackass 3D_\]. We all agreed at that point to make the third movie at this dinner. And as we were walking out, we’re walking down to Sunset Boulevard, and Knoxville pulled out a huge dinner plate that he had stolen from the Chateau Marmont, this really thick dinner plate, and he smashed it over Spike’s head.
**KNOXVILLE** It powdered over his head.
**TREMAINE** There was blood running down his head, and we’re like, “Holy shit.” And that just sort of cemented like, “All right. I guess we’re doing this.” For _Jackass 3D_, we were actually shooting it in 3D versus converting it to 3D. So we had these big cameras that weren’t mobile, so everything was kind of happening in front of them.
**STEVE-O** And the production got big. It started out just like a shoestring and a handheld video camera. Now there’s semi trucks and all these trailers.
In a scene from _Jackass Forever_, Ehren McGhehey (seated left) and Compston “Darkshark” Wilson each attempt to blow a spider into the other man’s face. Courtesy of Paramount Pictures
**KNOXVILLE** The first movie was a punk show. _Jackass Forever_ is like a Rolling Stones concert.
**PONTIUS** Plus the challenges of filming with COVID going on and somehow not stopping it.
**KNOXVILLE** Filming a very dangerous movie in the safest way possible. “Don’t cough on the bull.”
**STEVE-O** And with all the #MeToo stuff so fresh in everybody’s consciousness. And then we bring on this girl …
**TREMAINE** Rachel Wolfson. Knoxville followed her on Instagram. She’s just a hilarious stand-up comedian. So we brought her out, and she fit right in.
**STEVE-O** And now we’ve got the human resources giving us the seminar about sexual harassment. And then after that, we walk in front of the cameras, and everyone’s just got their dicks out.
**PONTIUS** They’re like, “Unless you’re shooting, you can’t have your penises out.”
**KNOXVILLE** After one, we said we weren’t going to make another. After two, we said the same. So I don’t know about a fifth. We may, we may not.
**TREMAINE** I wouldn’t be surprised if we never made another one. And I also wouldn’t be surprised if we did.
**KNOXVILLE** You go into each one accepting whatever happens. But _Jackass Forever_ features by far my gnarliest bull hit. I spent the rest of the weekend in the hospital with a broken wrist, broken rib, concussion and brain hemorrhage. It took a little while to recover from that. So whatever the future holds, this is probably my last time with a bull because you can only take so many chances before something forever happens. After the brain hemorrhages and everything, the doctors were like, “You can’t have any more concussions.”
**STEVE-O** You don’t have to be a doctor to know that.
_Interview edited for length and clarity._
_This story first appeared in the Jan. 26 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. [Click here to subscribe.](https://subscribe.hollywoodreporter.com/sub/?p=THR&f=saleb&s=IH1402HR20)_
# Lovemaking for longevity: a recipe from Tokyo’s imperial archives | Aeon Essays
For more than 1,000 years, the Imperial Family of Japan and its physicians have preserved a treasure of oriental medicine: the complete 30 scrolls of the _Ishinhō_, or the ‘heart of medical prescription’. This compendium was derived from sources in India, China, Korea and elsewhere, though many of the original documents have since been lost or destroyed. In 2012, I found myself in the Imperial Archives in the Tokyo Palace examining the precious scrolls.
I was delighted to discover a holistic approach: not only did I find herbal remedies, and nutrition and lifestyle aids, but also, in Scroll 28, instructions for the creation and preservation of _jingqi_ (the life force), with a focus on sexual energy. These prescriptions, which originated at least 2,000 years ago in East Asia, were almost the opposite of Western ideas, since they required the achievement of orgasm without the loss of semen.
The idea dates to the 10th century, during the Heian period, a golden age for Japanese poetry and literature. The poet Sei Shōnagon (_c_966-_c_1025) wrote _The__Pillow Book_, while Murasaki Shikibu (_c_978-_c_1014), a fellow lady-in-waiting at the Imperial Court, wrote one of the world’s first and greatest novels, _The Tale of Genji_, relating the adventurous romantic life of a prince. All these works and more reveal the natural approach to sexual relations common in ancient Japan. Such naturalness was also a feature of ancient China, evident from the tomb excavation at Mawangdui in Hunan Province, revealing texts on the art of love, dating from around 200 BCE. A poem in those texts, _The Union of Yin and Yang_, may be the first sex manual the world has preserved. Throughout these works, colourful metaphors describe the unhurried and careful approach to the joys of sexual intercourse. The emphasis was on exceedingly slow and gentle movements, beginning with caressing what seem to be the mysterious energy meridians within the body.
What a perfect setting for the great compendium itself, written by the Japanese court physician Tamba Yasuyori in 984. It was in Scroll 28 of Tamba’s masterpiece that the classic Chinese narrative is revealed through the teachings of three women said to have advised the mythical Yellow Emperor on his longevity exercises. When I was able to revisit the scrolls again in 2018, together with leading members of the modern medical establishment in Japan, I could identify for my medical colleagues the prominent red marks over the names of the three women. One of them, whose name I translate as the ‘original woman’ (_Su-Nu_), a kind of Chinese Eve, uses one of the oldest of the intimacy poems, from around 200 CE:
‘The Classic of Su Nu’, with rhythmic translation and Chinese pronunciation
Each line in the poem could be interpreted either as individual intimate acts or as acts with different partners, as would be the case for monarchs with multiple wives and consorts. In this translation, I have attempted to reproduce the four-character rhythm of the original. Each line, and its response, contains four Chinese characters, each pronounced as a single syllable, making eight syllables in the two lines together. The much older Mawangdui poem, _The Union of Yin and Yang_, is also a character poem of this type, but it uses three characters instead of four. Repetitive rhythm was important in the transmission of texts, such as sutras and poems, when writing materials were scarce, and monks and poets had to memorise long texts. That was also true in the 10th century. The rare paper on which the scrolls are written is extremely fragile, and the original version is now a national treasure kept in the National Museum in Tokyo.
Of course, this poem, like many other ancient Chinese poems on the arts of love, needs metaphorical interpretation. Words such as ‘immortal’ do not carry the same meaning as when is used in Western religions. The aim of the poem is to encourage the general improvement of health and longevity.
The deeper truth of the poem is that everything is interrelated. This is precisely what modern science finds using the associations between genes and disease. Most genes contribute to most diseases. Some modern scientists using genome sequencing go so far as to formulate the omnigenic theory, which is the theory that _all_ genes contribute in some way or other to health and disease states. It works the other way round, too. Gene expression is also controlled by epigenetic states – when the external environment tunes genes up or down. We do not have [‘selfish’ genes](https://aeon.co/essays/dead-or-alive-an-expert-roundtable-on-the-selfish-gene). The selfishness or kindness comes from our integrated selves, not from biomolecules such as DNA. Even scientists today use [metaphor](https://aeon.co/essays/why-the-selfish-genes-metaphor-remains-a-powerful-thinking-tool) to express what they mean.
The scrolls, all written in Classical Chinese, require great skill to translate into modern Japanese. This has been the life work of Sachiko Maki, who laboured for more than 40 years to produce the complete modern Japanese translation in a series of 34 volumes. A gift from the herbal remedy company Tsumura ensured that Oxford is now one of the few universities in the world to possess not only Sachiko’s translations but also a complete facsimile of the calligraphic scrolls. The translation into modern Japanese is important. Very little of the _Ishinhō_ has been translated into English. What the Japanese version reveals is that Tamba was greatly influenced by Buddhism in his choice of what to preserve of the ancient Chinese texts. All animal products and all potential toxic metals were excluded. The only remedies are herbal, nutritional or sexual.
In fact, these medical prescriptions have long posed a translation challenge beyond just the metaphorical: they are sexually explicit, but their translators were originally late 19th- and early 20th-century Europeans with Victorian sensibilities to match. In fact, the Dutch sinologist and diplomat Robert Hans van Gulik even went so far as to translate them into Latin in 1961 in order to restrict access to their texts, as well as to their accompanying erotic prints from the Ming dynasty, to academic scholars only – if a library did not agree to this, van Gulik refused to provide them with a copy.
As a pioneer in modern systems biology and its multilevel view of organisms, I immediately appreciated the traditional Asian view that parts of the human body should not be viewed in isolation but rather as part of a whole – an integrated communicative system. Tamba clearly documented this philosophy in an unbroken line of physicians from himself all the way back to the 3rd century BCE.
It was at a chance meeting at a New Year’s brunch with Oxford academics in 2016 that I began discussing the scrolls, and specifically Scroll 28, with the entrepreneur Leslie Kenny.
Kenny was working with the scientists Katja Simon and Ghada Alsaleh from the University of Oxford on a compound called spermidine – named for its presence in semen, where it was originally discovered. Unusually, she also had experience as a sexologist in China, and was familiar with the ancient Taoist practices and beliefs around sexual arousal, intimacy and their health benefits. She also knew of Oxford research demonstrating that spermidine triggered autophagy, the body’s inbuilt ability to renew and recycle cells, the foundation of life – and a youthful life – itself. So important is autophagy that Ohsumi Yoshinori, a Japanese scientist, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2016 for discovering its mechanism of action.
Kenny wondered aloud whether the reason for arousal but non-ejaculation was so that the man would resorb his own spermidine and thereby benefit from a boost in cellular autophagy and the resulting beneficial biological effects. I too had wondered about the possible benefits of resorbing sperm to male health.
In order to test our theory, we needed to define what ageing was and then prove that the instructions of Scroll 28 led to halting it.
One of the most frequently cited scientific research studies on this topic was published in 2013 in the premier biology journal, _Cell_. The [paper](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3836174/) – by the Spanish biochemist Carlos López-Otín and his colleagues in Madrid, Cologne, London and Paris – hypothesised nine hallmarks of ageing, and posited it was possible to halt the ageing process. Rather than simply treating the symptoms of cardiovascular disease, Alzheimer’s and cancer, among other diseases of ageing, López-Otín said, one might be able to halt the onset of ageing itself.
If spermidine prevents dysfunction in our mitochondria, then it may protect human longevity as well
One of the potential agents he mentioned was spermidine. Because spermidine triggered autophagy, it was able to prevent many of these hallmarks of ageing. But spermidine did more than that – it also protected mitochondrial DNA.
Mitochondria are the energy powerhouses of cells. It was the American biologist Lynn Margulis who first championed the theory that mitochondria were once independent microbes that joined other cells through the process of symbiogenesis to form the complex organisms we see around us today. More recently, a host of new studies [reveal](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-56133-3) that spermidine guards against ageing of mitochondria. If spermidine prevents dysfunction in our mitochondria, the basis of cellular energy, then it stands to reason that it may protect human longevity as well.
And protecting mitochondria is just the start. Scientists have recently [discovered](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32467649/) that spermidine can prevent an additional four negative hallmarks of ageing: epigenetic changes that damage gene expression; impaired maintenance of proteins; impaired production of stem cells; and disruption of intercellular communication. Emerging research suggests it may also inhibit cellular senescence.
In fact, the only other compound found to prevent six of these negative markers was a drug called rapamycin – produced by a bacterium discovered on Easter Island (also known as Rapa Nui) – which unfortunately causes immunosuppression. Spermidine has no known side-effects.
That left another hallmark of ageing – erosion of telomeres, the tips that protect the ends of chromosomes from damage. Might telomeres themselves somehow be protected by the ‘lovemaking for longevity’ recipe?
Elizabeth Blackburn, another winner of a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, and professor emerita at the Salk Institute for Biological Sciences in California, discovered the power of telomeres along with an enzyme called telomerase that can lengthen those telomeres, thus extending life. Her [book](https://www.grandcentralpublishing.com/titles/dr-elizabeth-blackburn/the-telomere-effect/9781455587971/) _The Telomere Effect_ (2017), co-written with the health psychologist Elissa Epel at the University of California, San Francisco, showed that meditation could cause the body to produce more telomerase, thus promoting longevity. Other evidence showed that mothers who had been stressed during pregnancy gave birth to babies with shorter telomeres. Epel and her colleagues did a further [study](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28411413/) in 2017 showing that couples who were sexually intimate also benefited from longer telomeres, though the team could not explain a mechanism of action, other than possible release of oxytocin, a hormone similar to that released by breastfeeding mothers and their babies.
Kenny wondered whether the synchronisation of heartrate, breath and gaze between two lovers as described in the _Ishinhō_ was the mechanism of action. Indeed, there was no such telomerase benefit in the control group of couples who described themselves as ‘happily married’ but who hadn’t recently been sexually intimate. Whatever the mechanism of action behind the telomerase production, it was clear that the two lovers needed to intentionally come together and physically join as one in order to receive the longevity benefit.
But if spermidine and telomerase could together hold back nearly all the markers of ageing, what was the purpose of the rest of the longevity prescription in the translated scrolls? In particular, I was intrigued by the curious Taoist fascination with human saliva. In fact, the ancient Taoists would even perform ceremonies in which cups of saliva were exchanged to enhance health.
As a scientist and historian, I’ve spent a great deal of time poring over the work of Charles Darwin, reconciling it with current scientific discoveries and making sure that Darwin’s legacy and intent is properly communicated to future generations of scientists. Darwin was a slow and thorough thinker. He integrated many processes into his work on evolution, _On__the Origin of Species_ (1859), and in several other books. Contrary to what many evolutionary biologists think today, Darwin realised that our bodies must communicate with their germ cells – sperm and eggs. One of my own recent conclusions is that modern science has discovered the tiny components involved in that communication; today, we call them extracellular vesicles or exosomes.
We also know that saliva contains exosomes. Originally [discovered](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/0006291X8391776X?via%3Dihub) in 1983, exosomes were at first discarded by scientists who regarded them as extracellular rubbish. However, as more experiments were conducted, particularly with stem cells, it became clear that stem-cell therapies worked better when delivered together with exosomes. Taking these experiments one step further, it appeared that exosomes were actually more valuable than the stem cells themselves. Those exosomes have been proved to communicate with the germ cells.
I wondered whether the instructions for longevity in Scroll 28 meant that the body’s meridians or energetic channels – so fundamental to traditional Eastern medicine – were activated by the gentle touch of the intertwined couple. If the exosomes contained in the saliva exchanged when kissing followed those meridians, they might act as signposts to the omnipresent very small stem cells in the blood, telling them where to go to repair tissue but also changing cell receptors themselves. Could the mysterious meridians be some function of the exosomes?
Was it possible that the ancient Taoists had found a way not only to hold back the hands of time by intentionally activating production of spermidine and telomerase, but that the exchange of exosomes and activation of energetic meridian channels could also restore the emperor’s youth?
I think it might be. As a medical scientist, I have long been fascinated by nature’s ability to create its own pharmacopoeia, and know that the human body’s own internal pharmacy does this too by constantly sensing and assessing its internal and external state, and striving to continually stay in balance or homeostasis. The evolution of plants over hundreds of millions of years has certainly created the chemical combinations that work, whether to the advantage of organisms that eat them, or sometimes to their disadvantage when the mix is toxic. Herbal remedies exploit this evolutionary success of plants over millions of years.
Consummation should occur only three times out of 10, and only with a woman when wishing to conceive a child
I suspect that the trafficking of extracellular vesicles between all parts of the body may also be involved in another crucial feature of the ancient Chinese scrolls, since the emphasis on foreplay was on exceedingly slow and gentle movements, beginning with caressing of what seem to be the mysterious energy meridians within the body. Incidentally, those should not be confused with the channels, nerves and blood vessels familiar to Western medicine. My guess is that the caressing and massaging may trigger a release of vesicles across many areas of the body. Could this correspond to the notion of the meridian? Many scientists dismiss this concept from Chinese medicine, but not everything that exists can be visualised easily, as we well know from modern particle physics.
Breath, gaze and heartrate between lovers become synchronised during foreplay until actual coitus occurs, but it would be harmful for the man to consummate the love act at this point. The text of _Su Nu_ suggests that consummation should occur only three times out of 10, and only with a woman when wishing to conceive a child. All other uses of a man’s precious bodily fluids – in this case, semen – would be viewed as exhausting the man’s body, ageing it prematurely. Whereas a woman and her _yin_ energy were greatly strengthened by reaching climax, this was to be avoided at all costs by the man, whose _yang_ energy would be robbed.
So crucial was this aspect that the physician sages gave detailed instructions on how a man could avoid ejaculation, while still reaching orgasm. Once a man mastered this life-enhancing technique, he would be capable of multiple orgasms just like a woman, and enjoy a long and healthy life.
That is especially true of the texts excavated in the early 1970s from the 2,200-year-old aristocratic tombs at the Mawangdui site in China. The remarkable poem _The Union of Yin and Yang_ was found on a set of bamboo slips. The metaphors are different from the poem of the original woman in the _Ishinhō_, but the message is essentially the same. Cultivating the gentle arts of the bedroom is the secret of longevity. Tamba’s Scroll 28 therefore accurately portrays the culture of ancient China:
‘The Union of Yin and Yang’ (合陰陽) from the Mawangdui (馬王堆) tomb excavations in China. The poem’s text was inscribed on bamboo slips. This picture shows three slips (or shaded columns) from scans from the Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford, together with standard Chinese transcription and translation by the sinologue Donald Harper. Read from right to left
It makes sense that this ancient knowledge was preserved by the Japanese. Unlike China, where literature was often lost or burnt as one dynasty succeeded another, the Imperial line in Japan survived for more than 1,000 years. This may also be the reason why sexually explicit texts continued to be highly valued. Some 4,500 poems survive in the _Manyōshū_ collection from the Nara era (710-794 CE), many of them written by women openly expressing sexual longing. The Heian era (794-1185) continued this tradition, where again women poets, such as Ono no Komachi and Izumi Shikibu, flourished, while the _Ukiyo_ (meaning ‘floating world’ or pleasure-seeking) tradition continued until the 19th century. By contrast, China became prudish following its transition to a strong neo-Confucian ethic during the 12th century. Indeed, Ye De Hui, the first Chinese scholar to rediscover the _Ishinhō_ scrolls, especially Scroll 28, in Japan in 1903 was denounced by his fellow Chinese literary scholars. Furthermore, in the otherwise exhaustive and magisterial work of Fung Yu Lan, _A History of Chinese Philosophy_, written in the 1930s, the Taoist ideas on sexual relations are conspicuous by their complete absence. References to ‘love’ use the neutral character, _Ren_, meaning benevolence in the filial sense.
Tamba Yasuyori’s 1,000-year-old _Ishinhō_ is already a national treasure. It deserves to be a world treasure, or a treasured ‘Memory of the World’, as the UNESCO category puts it. As the world slowly emerges from the COVID-19 pandemic of the past two years and its disastrous effects on intimacy, we will need to rediscover how important close personal relationships are. We need to recover the will to live that inspired the longevity prescriptions of the _Ishinhō_. Then we can truly sing the greatest love poem of the medieval Western world, the _sestina_ of the 12th-century Provençal troubadour Arnaut Daniel:
> _Qu’en paradis, n’aura doble joi m’arma_
> (‘In paradise, my heart’s joy will be doubled’)
As the 20th-century French sinologist Marcel Granet put it, sex for the ancient Chinese was ‘far more sacred than for us’. It can be so once again for us too.
# The 1918 flu didn’t end in 1918. Here’s what its third year can teach us.
In New York City in 1920 — nearly two years into a deadly influenza pandemic that would claim at least 50 million lives worldwide — the new year began on a bright note.
“Best Health Report for City in 53 Years,” boasted a headline in the New York Times on Jan. 4, 1920, after New York had survived three devastating waves of the flu virus. The nation as a whole, which would ultimately lose 675,000 people to the disease, believed that the end might finally be in sight.
Within a few weeks, however, those optimistic headlines began to change. Before the end of the month, New York City would experience a surge in influenza cases. Chicago and other urban centers reported the same.
Residents should prepare themselves for an “[influenza return,](https://www.nytimes.com/1920/01/17/archives/copeland-predicts-influenza-return-health-chief-says-disease-is-not.html?searchResultPosition=2)” New York City health commissioner Royal S. Copeland warned. He predicted that the virus variant responsible for the surge would be milder and that those who had fallen ill the previous year would be immune. He was wrong, at least in part: While many places worldwide did not see a fourth wave of the great influenza pandemic, several metropolises — including New York City, Chicago and Detroit — had another deadly season in store.
As [the coronavirus pandemic](https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/national/coronavirus-us-cases-deaths/?itid=lk_inline_manual_10) creeps into its third year, and the death toll in the United States reaches [900,000](https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/02/05/covid-biden-vaccines-900000-deaths/?itid=lk_inline_manual_10), the 1918 influenza pandemic can offer some insight into how this chapter of history might draw to a close. But an “ending,” when it comes to viruses such as these, is a misleading word. Eventually, experts say, the novel coronavirus is likely to transition from a deadly and disruptive pathogen to a milder, more seasonal nuisance.
In the meantime, though, the country’s experience a century ago suggests that we could be in for a lot more pain — especially if we let our guard down.
[The 1918 flu](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/retropolis/wp/2018/01/27/the-flu-can-kill-tens-of-millions-of-people-in-1918-thats-exactly-what-it-did/?itid=lk_inline_manual_13) lasted far beyond 1918. Two years after it began, just as officials such as Copeland were declaring victory and cities were easing restrictions, a fourth wave hit parts of the country, bringing punishing caseloads that pushed some hospitals to the brink of collapse and left many more Americans dead.
The virus did not seem so menacing when it began: The first wave in the spring of 1918 was relatively mild. But it returned with a vengeance in the fall, probably having mutated. That second wave burned through patients around the world. Street cars were converted into hearses, and [priests collected bodies](https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2020/09/01/1918-flu-pandemic-end/?itid=lk_inline_manual_16) with horse-drawn carriages.
During the second wave alone, more Americans were killed by the flu than died in the First World War, the Second World War, the Korean War and the Vietnam War combined.
The flu pandemic seemed to affect young people in particular, for reasons that historians and scientists are still debating. When the first recorded cases arrived, World War I was raging, and the cramped conditions of the trenches meant that the virus could pass rapidly from soldier to soldier, and the conditions in field hospitals often hastened the spread. Other experts have suggested that people in their 20s and 30s were less likely to have prior immunity to similar flu viruses.
Regardless, the virus alone lowered life expectancy in the United States by more than 12 years. As many as 10 percent of all young adults living through the time of the flu pandemic may have died of it, according to historian John M. Barry in his book [“The Great Influenza.”](https://www.amazon.com/Great-Influenza-Deadliest-Pandemic-History/dp/0143036491)
By the winter of 1919-1920, Americans were weary of the limitations on daily life. Nearly all of the public health restrictions — such as [mask-wearing](https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2020/05/06/mask-protests-flu-san-francisco-coronavirus/?itid=lk_inline_manual_23), social distancing and the closure of schools and churches — had been lifted. A hasty return to public gatherings led to an increase in case numbers. Politicians either blamed people’s carelessness for the reemergence of the virus or [downplayed the seriousness of it](https://healthblog.uofmhealth.org/wellness-prevention/people-gave-up-on-flu-pandemic-measures-a-century-ago-when-they-tired-of-them).
The fourth wave was not front-page news in the way that prior spikes had been. The coverage was often relegated to small paragraphs deep inside newspapers, reporting thousands of new cases on a weekly or even daily basis. By February 1920, there was an epidemic in a [state prison in New Jersey](https://www.nytimes.com/1920/01/24/archives/influenza-epidemic-at-prison.html?searchResultPosition=4), and some courts were forced to halt proceedings because of illness.
One physician wrote a letter to the editor in the New York Times in the winter of 1920, begging people to avoid “[needless exposure to influenza](https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1920/02/09/97720720.html?pageNumber=8)” through unnecessary social contact. The doctor warned that anyone who visited someone who was ill was then “capable of spreading the disease to any number of others who might have escaped, thereby putting an extra drain upon the already overburdened hospitals, nurses, and doctors.”
In this excerpt from a 2010 documentary, Americans share what it was like to live through the 1918 flu pandemic, which killed an estimated 50 million worldwide. (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services)
But if the fourth wave failed to generate the kinds of headlines and fear of its predecessors, it wasn’t for a lack of lethality. In New York City, more people died in the period from December 1919 to April 1920 than in the first and third waves, according to a research paper on [influenza mortality in the city](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4082668/). Detroit, St. Louis and Minneapolis also experienced significant fourth waves, and severe “[excess mortality](https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/10.2105/AJPH.2020.305969)” was reported in many counties in Michigan because of the flu.
Local governments’ public health interventions actually may have contributed to the fourth wave by limiting the virus’s spread in prior waves. Letting the virus run rampant, however, would not have been advisable either, said Wan Yang, an assistant professor of epidemiology at Columbia University and an author of the paper on New York City influenza mortality. “More infection could also lead to more mutation, so that could generate a new virus variant that can then erode your prior immunity, so it’s an interplay depending on how the virus is going to evolve, which is really unpredictable,” Yang said.
Influenza viruses and [coronavirus](https://www.washingtonpost.com/coronavirus/?itid=lk_inline_manual_33)es are genetically different, so it’s not possible to make a one-to-one comparison with the 1918 pandemic. Yang noted that the novel coronavirus appears to mutate far faster than the 1918 influenza virus. Management of the current pandemic also has benefited from many scientific developments that were not available a century ago, including more-sanitary hospital conditions, better access to clean water, and — perhaps what is most notable — a vaccine.
Still, we can get a glimpse into our future by looking at the past. The 1918 flu virus, after lingering in a deadly form for more than two years, eventually grew milder. Now it is “part of every seasonal flu we have,” said Ann Reid, the executive director of the National Center for Science Education, who helped sequence the genome of the 1918 influenza virus in the 1990s. Her research found that some genetic aspects of the 1918 virus continued to be present in new outbreaks, including pandemics in 1957 and 1968. People with immunity to the 1918 virus were therefore likely to have some protection from its genetic cousins.
“Eventually, everyone in the world will have some base level of immunity to this coronavirus, so even when it mutates into a new strain, people won’t be entirely vulnerable to it,” Reid said.
The best we can hope for with the current pandemic is an evolution that is similar to the flu virus’s. “I think it’s going to stay,” Yang said of the novel coronavirus. “I don’t think elimination is feasible or even realistic at this point. Hopefully we can live more peacefully with this virus.”
As the world enters a third year of the coronavirus pandemic, people wonder when and how it will end. History offers important lessons. (Joy Yi/The Washington Post)
# Why Indian universities are ditching English-only education
Giriraj Bagla, a Ph.D. scholar at the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay (IIT-B), has loved mathematics since grade school. In 2010, he cracked the Joint Entrance Exam (JEE) — one of [the toughest entrance tests](https://restofworld.org/2020/india-engineering-degree/) in the world — on his first attempt. He was ranked 863rd out of roughly a million students who took the test, an impressive performance. But on joining the chemical engineering course at IIT-B, he was in for an unexpected ordeal: the course was taught entirely in English.
For Bagla, who grew up speaking and studying in Hindi, the complex mathematics equations he had to solve for the course weren’t hard. But he struggled with simple words like “circle,” “velocity,” and “displacement.” His textbooks, courses, and lectures were available only in English — a language that had been alien to him until then. He found himself struggling to understand what was being taught in class.
He took refuge in numbers and equations. Bagla told _Rest of World_ that during his freshman year, “mathematics was the only subject I could understand.” But soon his grades started dropping. “I \[had been\] a school topper. But I could not perform well… because of this communication gap,” said Bagla, who now speaks English much more confidently, if not flawlessly.
Of the [10 million](https://ncert.nic.in/pdf/programmes/7thSurvey%20Reports/Mediaof_intruction.pdf) students who take high school finals in India every year, 65% come from non-[English medium schools](http://www.education.ox.ac.uk/our-research/research-groups/language-cognition-development/emi/). However, higher education in the country, especially in STEM subjects, is currently almost entirely English based. For students, learning in a language that’s unfamiliar adds an additional challenge that may be insurmountable for some, leading [thousands](https://theprint.in/india/education/2400-students-dropped-out-of-iits-in-2-years-nearly-half-were-sc-st-obc/268626/) to drop out of premium institutes every year. The language barrier is more severe among [marginalized communities](https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/parliament-proceedings-60-of-dropouts-at-7-iits-from-reserved-categories/article35752730.ece) where the dropout rates can go as high as 60%.
In response, India is seeing a surge in “mother tongue” education, with courses now being taught in Hindi, Marathi, Tamil, and other non-English languages. In 2021, 1,230 seats in state-approved engineering schools were allocated for study in native languages. The growing demand for accessing digital services in local languages forced the state to allocate money for the creation of a [National Language Translation Mission](https://indianexpress.com/article/education/education-budget-2021-national-language-translation-mission-100-new-sainik-schools-nep-implementations/) last year, with the sole focus of expediting local-language translation. India’s apex body for technical education, All India Council for Technical Education, has [bolstered efforts](https://www.livemint.com/education/news/after-iits-defer-it-aicte-opens-up-engineering-education-in-regional-languages-11615566696368.html) to translate online courses to eight Indian languages. Edtech giants that previously catered to the elite English-only market are now translating question banks and lectures, to cash in on the demand for non-English-based learning.
“It’s a very bad investment for the country to be leaving 99.9 % of the population behind so that a few people can become CEOs in America,” said Sankrant Sanu, author of the book [_The English Medium Myth_](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28354399-the-english-medium-myth).
Certainly not everyone is on board: [at least one academic](https://theprint.in/india/education/iits-tell-govt-its-difficult-to-offer-degrees-in-regional-language-nits-more-open-to-idea/628570/) has called the recent trend “the beginning of the end” of India’s global technical competence. Academics believe that local-language technical education creates [dissonance with global demand](https://m.economictimes.com/industry/services/education/most-iits-opposed-to-tech-courses-in-indian-languages/articleshow/79726971.cms) and that those students graduating from vernacular medium higher education institutes may struggle to find jobs.
> “In the name of English, we have killed lots of innovation, and now it’s time that people who don’t know English can also excel.”
The trend toward mother tongue education comes from the upper echelons of government. The rise in nationalist politics, starting in the early 2010s, has led [to the promotion](https://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/18/world/asia/narendra-modis-election-sparks-hope-for-sanskrit-in-india.html) of Indian languages, especially Hindi and Sanskrit, an ancient Indian language. The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the ideological fount of the ruling Hindu nationalist government, has been a [strong advocate](https://m.economictimes.com/industry/services/education/most-iits-opposed-to-tech-courses-in-indian-languages/articleshow/79726971.cms) for local language higher education and has been heavily involved in policy discussion. Prime Minister Narendra Modi recently [emphasized](https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/pm-modi-calls-for-focus-on-engineering-education-in-local-languages/article35219742.ece) the need to expand local-language corpora and dole out engineering degrees in regional languages.
This tension between monolingualism and multilingualism in post-colonial countries isn’t unique to India. Celebrated Kenyan novelist Ngũgĩ Wa Thiong’o [describes](https://organeyez.co/blog/what-does-it-mean-to-decolonize-your-mind) a similar problem in his country, where schools and universities taught that Kenyan languages were “associated with negative qualities of backwardness, under-development, humiliation and punishment.” In India and Kenya, it’s not uncommon for children going to private schools to be punished for speaking “vernacular languages.”
In his book, Sanu contends that India, unlike its East Asian neighbors, privileges English-only higher education and promotes a language-class separation, “thus creating a glass ceiling for progress for those educated in the native languages.” A child from a village in Japan or China could aspire to be an engineer or doctor without a forced language medium shift. That can’t be said of Indian kids. “I’m not against English,” Sanu told _Rest of World_. “I think it’s a good skill to have. The only problem is when it becomes a barrier to entry, rather than just a skill.”
The UN’s Special Rapporteur on Minority recently [recommended](https://news.un.org/en/story/2020/03/1059241) that quality public education in regional languages, as it reduces dropout rates, creates better learning outcomes, increases self-esteem, and improves levels of fluency both in mother tongue and official languages.
But, a shift toward native language education has unsettled scholars who see this as [undoing years of progress](https://theprint.in/opinion/the-mother-tongue-fanatics-are-keeping-india-a-poor-backward-country/471997/) in a country as diverse and fragmented as India. Per the [recent census](https://censusindia.gov.in/2011Census/Language-2011/Statement-1.pdf), India is home to 270 mother tongues, and a multilingual education model could irrevocably splinter the education system into islands of incoherence, said Geetha M, a pedagogist working on mother tongue education in the Kannada language.
“This idea of mother tongue, at least in the case of India, which is very multilingual, doesn’t really hold enough validity,” Geetha told _Rest of World._ Without a single unifying language, a student moving from one state to another for higher education may be expected to pick technical terms in a completely new language, she said. Geetha, who is a researcher at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, is of the view that [mandatory regional language](https://www.aicte-india.org/sites/default/files/nep2020.pdf) education also denies opportunities for poor students the chance to earn “cultural capital” through English learning and diminishes career prospects. She feels the newest education policy is a failure in taking English to India’s poorest.
The argument in favor of higher education in native languages also overlooks that without the widespread adoption of English, India wouldn’t have been able to compete globally the way it has over the last two decades. India’s success as a software exporter and the rise of the country’s IT industry in the 2000s is widely [attributed to the English advantage](https://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/14/weekinreview/the-world-in-india-a-new-heyday-for-english-the-language.html), which created an outsourcing industry worth over [$190 billion](https://www.moneycontrol.com/news/business/economic-survey-2022-it-bpm-exports-grew-1-93-in-fy21-slowest-in-five-years-8008471.html). Because of these perceived advantages of English-based education, several elite higher education institutes, including the premier IITs — the alma mater of several Indian-American CEOs — have [vehemently opposed](https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/pm-modi-calls-for-focus-on-engineering-education-in-local-languages/article35219742.ece) the introduction of degrees in regional languages, instead, they say that they would offer more support for students to navigate the English language barrier.
Despite simmering tensions, efforts to offer higher education in local languages are gaining traction with both private and state-backed entities.
Professor Ganesh Ramakrishnan of IIT-B has been at the forefront of the effort to improve Indian-language technical corpora through [Project Udaan](https://www.udaanproject.org/), an open-source machine translation software. Using the tool, students and publishers can create high-quality translations of engineering textbooks and contemporary research into Indian languages. The project, which went live in September, aims to publish 500 books in native languages in the engineering curriculum within three years.
“In the name of English, we have killed lots of innovation, and now it’s time that people who don’t know English can also excel,” said Himanshu Sharma, cofounder of [Devnagri](https://devnagri.com/), a translation firm subtitling video lectures into local languages for K–12 students. About 70% of the firm’s revenue in the last year was from the education sector, a direct outcome of the mother tongue push through the new education policy.
Battle-hardened students such as Bagla, who was forced through language medium shift, says that the sooner one shifts to English medium, the better. He has little hope in the system accommodating students like him, and his advice to juniors who aspire to get accepted at premium institutes is: “There is no escaping this. You take time to transition, but ultimately you have to learn English.”
**Shortly before midnight on Sunday,** April 25, 2021, Pornhub co-owner Feras Antoon lay in bed sleeping when his cell phone started blowing up. The ringer, on silent, didn’t wake him.
How, in fact, did he sleep at night, knowing that Pornhub had negatively affected so many people’s lives? He’d been asked that very question two months earlier, while being harangued at a Canadian parliamentary hearing. His response was hardly contrite: “We are very sorry if this has caused any impact on victims.” He went on to say, with an evidently clear conscience, how proud he was “that we built a product that gets 170 million people visiting a day.”
Pornhub, with its undulating ocean of explicit content, is often ranked among the 10 most viewed websites in the world. More Americans use it than use Twitter, Netflix, or Instagram. As a result, in his hometown of Montreal, Antoon is known as “_le Roi de la porno_”—the King of Porn. And the king’s castle, it turned out, was the cause of those frantic late-night calls.
At the time, Antoon had been finalizing construction on a 21-room mega-mansion: 11 bathrooms, nine-car garage, 6,000-square-foot ballroom and sports wing. “I was building the house of my dreams,” the notoriously press-averse Antoon told me in his first interview in more than a decade. “And everything was going great.” Or so it seemed. With people housebound by the pandemic in early 2020, Pornhub saw a surge in smut-surfing numbers: U.S. traffic increased by up to 41.5 percent in the first month of the lockdown. The brand became ubiquitous in popular culture, appearing in gags on late-night comedy shows and the business pages. (Quoth _Fortune:_ “Should Pornhub Buy Tumblr?”)
But then, starting in December, a series of legal and P.R. scandals slammed the company. First, a _New York Times_ exposé accused the firm of knowingly hosting child sex abuse materials (CSAM). Antoon denied the charges: “Any suggestion that we allow or encourage illegal content is completely untrue and defies rational reason, from both a moral and business standpoint,” he told me. Still, Canadian senators and MPs called for a criminal investigation. In the uproar, credit card processors suspended payments on the site. Lawsuits proceeded on several fronts. An internal memo Antoon wrote about the company missing its year-end financial goals was leaked. Suddenly, attention shifted to his big-ass man cave. “As his dream home gets close to completion,” noted the _Daily Mail,_ Antoon “faces a money crunch nightmare. His empire is in danger of crumbling.” On April 22, he placed his château on the market for nearly $16 million.
Three days later, a security guard monitoring surveillance footage at Pornhub parent company MindGeek’s office in Montreal noticed something unusual. The CCTV feed from Antoon’s uninhabited, nearly completed house showed two trespassers on the premises. Adding to the intrigue, the estate was situated right along so-called Mafia Row, a secluded road where at least a few local Cosa Nostra bosses had resided. Why there? “It’s a quiet street with few cars,” he told me; plus, the place was within walking distance from where he grew up. Surely he realized that the strip had ties to organized crime? He declined to answer. He did concede, however, that he now wishes he could erase the mansion from his memory: “I want it forgotten.”
That said, he can’t help recounting how he lay in bed that night, powerless, two miles from the still-unfinished building, asleep at home with his wife and children, as the company’s security officer alerted 911. By the time police showed up, the Pornhub Palace was in flames.
**Antoon finally woke** up when his brother got through on the landline. Driving over, he told me, he kept hoping it would turn out to be something small—maybe just some teenagers messing around. In reality, it took up to 80 firefighters to battle the blaze. Flames soared 150 feet skyward. Neighbors were being evacuated in their pajamas. Arriving at the scene, he recalled, “I was devastated.” The conflagration raged all night. “It took a while to control because it was a big place,” explained Caroline Chèvrefils, a police officer on-site that evening. As her shift ended around 6:30 a.m., the fire department was still extinguishing flare-ups.
Whoever set the fire was a professional: Nobody was injured, the surrounding homes were barely damaged. Antoon’s entire crib, however, was pyro’d. All that remained was charred concrete, twisted metal, and a rusty two-story archway where the front door would have been. To this day, it protrudes from the rubble like a headstone—or some telltale sex toy.
Feras Antoon built his mansion right along Montreal’s so-called
Mafia Row, once home to godfathers and dons.By STÉPHANE GRÉGOIRE/RADIO-CANADA.
Did Antoon have any idea who was responsible? “I don’t want to accuse anyone until I know the facts,” he told me. Police insist the case is ongoing. Did they have any hard leads? “There are no more details to reveal,” Chèvrefils told me after confirming that two unidentified suspects were seen breaking and entering.
Everyone had a theory. Some suggested Antoon had set it up to collect the insurance money—an allegation he dismissed. Others were persuaded that the livid father of an underage victim had the place burned down as revenge for homemade MPEGs uploaded onto Pornhub. Still another faction pointed to Q-minded anti-pornography crusaders. Or, given the precision of the firebombing, wasn’t it a signature mob job? Months later, Montreal police issued a bulletin about a citywide arson spree, though there was no mention of the Pornhub blaze.
Whatever the cause, Antoon’s inferno was searingly symbolic. It represented not just bad juju befalling the XXX site, but an overheated, inflammatory political climate in the ongoing war against online porn.
**Before the internet,** portrayals of sex acts were the purview of adult magazines and movies. Today, hard-core sex is instantly accessible on mobile devices, social media feeds, and VR headsets. This shift in carnal consumption has had far-reaching effects, transforming sexual norms, implicating underage viewers—and victims—and creating new forms of cyber-capitalist sex work. Beyond the masses watching porn, many at home also make it—and they make money doing so, through sites like Antoon’s. As society grapples with the implications, Pornhub has found itself at the center of a vitriolic global conversation.
Forty years ago, debates about porn focused on the idea that the sex industry was inherently dehumanizing and rife with abuse. Activist Andrea Dworkin famously argued that porn was detrimental to women, full stop. But not all second-wave feminists agreed. A vocal faction argued for an erotic-positive approach to rejecting sexual repression. The phrase “pornography is violence against women,” wrote Ellen Willis, an influential pro-sex feminist, “was code for the neo-Victorian idea that men want sex and women endure it.”
The argument remains as contentious as it is unresolved. This fall, the _Times_ published an op-ed by Michelle Goldberg—“Why Sex-Positive Feminism Is Falling Out of Fashion”—citing a TikTok-based “Cancel Porn” movement. Then again, _Cosmo_ contended that “As we all know, women enjoy porn just as much as guys do.” In fact, an estimated one third of Pornhub’s users are women. And the current feminist perspective on the porn debate might best be summarized by Oxford philosopher Amia Srinivasan in her new book, _The Right to Sex: Feminism in the 21st Century:_ “If a woman says she enjoys working in porn, or being paid to have sex with men, or engaging in rape fantasies, or wearing stilettos—and even that she doesn’t just enjoy these things but finds them emancipatory, part of her feminist praxis—then we are required, many feminists think, to trust her. This is not merely an epistemic claim: that a woman’s saying something about her own experience gives us strong, if not indefeasible, reason to think it true.” And questions of belief and consent—especially those involving abuse—are where Pornhub’s current troubles began.
The site, founded in 2007, became notorious for allegedly hosting revenge porn, in which nonconsensual intimate material is uploaded by former lovers, almost always men. For years, Pornhub didn’t seem to do much to help victims remove unwanted clips. Take the case of British soccer player Leigh Nicol, who is suing Pornhub over a sex video it shared of her, without permission, stolen by an iCloud hacker. “It ruined my life, it killed my personality, it zapped the happiness out of me,” Nicol stated. “I still bear those scars.”
Survivors like Nicol have now been ensnared in a partisan minefield, many of them inadvertently. She and the 33 other plaintiffs in her class-action lawsuit are being represented by Michael Bowe, former counsel to Donald Trump, who also represented a disgraced Jerry Falwell Jr. in his recent sex scandal. Bowe’s complaint accused Pornhub of being “one of the largest human trafficking ventures in the world.” The company responded by calling him “a soldier of the ultra-right-wing effort to shut down the adult content industry.” It isn’t only the right that has taken up this fight; many prominent liberal voices have chimed in too. But the left, as usual, is divided: Centrists want regulatory oversight; many progressives insist on the importance of heeding the needs of sex workers; they are opposed by, among others, those with sex-worker exclusionary radical politics.
Still, the most vehement anti-porn—and anti-Pornhub—voices are those on the fundamentalist fringe. During the lead-up to the torching of Antoon’s mansion, extremists began doxing Pornhub employees and issuing violent threats online. Shepherding this movement was an outfit called Traffickinghub, an offshoot of the evangelical Christian organization Exodus Cry, which has well-documented anti-LGBTQ+ and antiabortion origins. Both groups have dedicated themselves to abolishing Pornhub, whipping their supporters into a punitive frenzy. “Burn them to the ground!” read a tweet shared on the Traffickinghub founder’s profile four days before the arson attack. Under an image of Antoon’s new house, another follower wrote, “I fucking wish that whole mansion will burn to re-create the hell they must burn in.”
Some sex workers deemed the arson a hate crime. Alana Evans, president of the Adult Performance Artists Guild, classified it—without providing evidence—as “a terrorist attack against our industry” by “anti-porn super-religious people.” A longtime erotic industry advocate, Evans told me she’d been receiving messages from zealots warning that “they were gonna burn my house down like Pornhub.” She maintained that the fire “was the first time we saw such an extreme act of real violence against our community since the days of \[_Hustler_ founder\] Larry Flynt being shot” by a white supremacist in 1978.
“I can’t even count how many comments I saw from people saying to burn the company or my house down,” Antoon said. “For a while, it was easy to dismiss the tweets as just people on the internet talking. Then my house burned down.”
**Antoon, a brawny** tech exec with a trim gray beard, is the Syrian-Canadian CEO of Pornhub’s parent company, MindGeek, which also runs YouPorn, Digital Playground, and numerous other masturbation-oriented brands. MindGeek racked up an estimated $500 million in net revenue in 2020 through ad sales, affiliate marketing, and premium subscriptions; its digital marketing network, TrafficJunky, gets 4.6 billion impressions _per day._
Pornhub features DIY sex tapes, glossily produced skin flicks, and everything in between. Much of the content intentionally blurs the line between reality and illusion. Is it an amateur video—or made to look amateur? Are those legal adults “pretending” to be teenage cheerleaders—or not? The real-world ramifications of conflating fake and fantasy aren’t MindGeek’s biggest concern, though. Most of its executives’ troubles stem from the fact that until late 2020, unverified users could upload content—as they can on typical social media sites.
Yet Pornhub isn’t just any social media site. It’s a vertically integrated multichannel jack stack: endless interconnected web pages showing grids of clickable pornos, searchable by theme, along with links to private “cams” and ways to connect with models, escorts, or like-minded partners. Many other websites have also hosted revenge porn and nonconsensual material, but unlike most of those outlets, whether on or off the dark web, Pornhub has brand-name recognition. The site is free and open to virtually anyone, regardless of age.
One might assume that the portal would stringently ensure that its wares involve consenting, grown-up actors and amateurs. Moreover, the site peddles an almost unimaginable diversity of freaky sex, including acts involving cross-eyed elves, nose worshippers giving nasolingus, and furry cosplayers. (No kink-shaming, please.) But it isn’t all innocuous. Some taglines feature keywords like “demolished” and “annihilate” in conjunction with various orifices. Harsher videos involve performative—or what can appear to be actual—violence.
Over the past year, the company began implementing changes to facilitate content removal—and to prevent illegal material from making it onto the site. In a widely reported purge, the site also restricted access to millions of unverified videos. MindGeek partnered with 40 nonprofits, including the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, so that suspect content could be instantly disabled if a trusted designee deemed it unsafe. Additionally, anyone searching for CSAM on the site started receiving deterrence notifications.
None of that absolved the owners for prior actions or inactions. In fact, according to a lawsuit that was just settled under terms that are confidential, for a number of years the company disseminated a series of videos by a U.S. firm (that MindGeek apparently verified) that depicted criminal assaults and rape. The original purveyor of the videos is now a fugitive; one associate is serving 20 years for conspiracy and sex trafficking.
An online petition to “shut down super-predator site Pornhub and hold the executives behind it accountable” has received more than 2.2 million signatures. It’s clear, though, that even if Pornhub were to go belly-up, revenge porn and CSAM wouldn’t simply vanish. After all, compared to Pornhub’s 13,229 CSAM infractions in 2020, significantly more child porn makes its way to Facebook (an estimated 20.3 million incidents in 2020), Google (546,704 incidents), and Snapchat (144,095 incidents).
**Pornhub’s origin story** is virtually unknown. But it began at Montreal’s Concordia University, which also happens to be my alma mater. Without ever crossing paths with the founders, I completed my undergrad degree in 2004, the same year that Antoon’s brother-in-law Stephane Manos and his business partner Ouissam Youssef graduated from the Faculty of Engineering and Computer Science. While still at school, Manos and Youssef created an online porn company called Brazzers, which focused on high-production-value photos and videos of well-endowed women in, as Antoon later called it, the “MILF niche.”
“Since 2004, Brazzers has been the number one name in original adult entertainment, period,” explains the site, now operated by MindGeek. Current COO David Tassillo, another Concordia engineering grad, told me that the company founders got the name from one of their cousins who had such a heavy Middle Eastern accent that when he’d say _brothers,_ it sounded like _brazzers._
Manos and Youssef dubbed their holding company Mansef, a portmanteau of their last names. They set up an office with Matt Keezer, a fellow student who specialized in search engine optimization. Keezer, who ran a company called Interhub, reportedly bought the Pornhub.com domain name for $2,750 at a Playboy Mansion party. In 2007, the three cohorts launched Pornhub, a site with an immodest assortment of free, browsable sex clips, some pirated, some from Brazzers. Keezer, Youssef, and Manos have since left the company; attempts to reach them for comment went unanswered. But back in 2007, the founders shared several core qualities. They were entrepreneurially minded. They were IT hustlers. And they were members of an unlikely real-world community: They played on the competitive foosball circuit.
By STÉPHANE GRÉGOIRE/RADIO-CANADA.
Foosball isn’t just a popular barroom game; it’s also a sport with leagues and rankings. Keezer was a founder of the Quebec Table Soccer Federation. He and Pornhub’s cofounders “met during some kind of foosball tournament,” Tassillo told me, acknowledging that table soccer “is highly, highly part of the story.”
Soon after its launch, Pornhub expanded to such a degree that it needed some sales management. Onto the payroll came Antoon and Tassillo.
Traffic skyrocketed—but things also went south. In 2009, U.S. Secret Service agents seized $6.4 million that Mansef had wired to its American bank accounts. Court documents claimed the funds were potentially connected to money laundering. Though Mansef denied the charges, a judge forced it to forfeit $2.2 million. The owners raised further suspicion when local media observed a “mysterious private security detail”—tinted-window SUVs—keeping 24/7 watch over their homes.
By 2010, Mansef was sold to a German programmer named Fabian Thylmann for a reported $140 million. Thylmann started buying up competitors such as xTube, Reality Kings, and Webcams.com until 2012, when he was charged with tax evasion. By then, with Keezer, Youssef, and Manos gone, Tassillo and Antoon were running the company. They engineered a management buyout and created MindGeek by joining forces with Bernd Bergmair, a reclusive, tight-lipped Keyser Söze–like flesh magnate believed to hail from the Austrian foothills. Little was publicly known about Bergmair beyond the fact that he owned a popular porn site called RedTube and lived in London with his wife, a Brazilian model. (The ultimate silent partner, Bergmair has never spoken out publicly.)
As the majority owner of MindGeek, Bergmair stayed in the background, effectively shrouding the company in secrecy. MindGeek became “a lot more hidden,” Thylmann said in 2017. “They just went completely under the radar.”
**Pornhub and MindGeek,** though physically based in Montreal, are actually headquartered in the hoary tax haven of Luxembourg, with offices in Cyprus, Romania, London, and L.A. The company’s valuation isn’t clear, but Antoon has been seen driving red-hot Ferraris and banana-yellow Lambos with vanity plates like MRCEO and YALA. “_Yala_ in Arabic means _let’s go,_” Antoon clarified, “indicating getting to work on something quickly, with little patience. Which is me.”
These days it is Pornhub’s detractors who have little patience. The most seismic attack on the company came a year ago—in the form of a Nicholas Kristof _New York Times_ op-ed stating that Pornhub was “infested with rape videos. It monetizes child rapes, revenge pornography” and “children being assaulted.” The article featured a young woman named Serena Fleites who’d gone to extraordinary lengths to have footage of herself—recorded when she was 14—taken down from the website.
Soon, a merry-go-round of lawsuits started being filed on behalf of underage or nonconsenting victims: an Alabama case invoked the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act; a California complaint sought $1 million each for 40 plaintiffs; a Canadian firm demanded $600 million in damages. One suit characterized MindGeek as “a classic criminal enterprise run…just like the Sopranos,” an assertion the company dismissed in a statement as “utterly absurd, completely reckless, and categorically false.” When Pornhub released an app last summer directing museumgoers to classic nude paintings, legal action was threatened by the Louvre and the Uffizi. As one Montreal source put it: “They’re in trouble all over the world.”
Stoking the ire was the ostentation of the CEO’s Mafia Row domain. “It attracted too much attention,” Antoon admitted. “I felt a very negative karma about it. It was supposed to bring joy and I felt it was only bringing negativity, so we decided to sell it.”
The day after the arson, the anti-porn organization Traffickinghub tweeted a photo of Antoon’s castle next to a portrait of Fleites, then living in her car. On top of it all, Canada’s government forced Antoon and Tassillo to testify at an ethics committee hearing.
Laila Mickelwait, the head of Traffickinghub, was also invited to give remarks. She told me, via email: “Feras and David…wrote a personally signed letter to the parliamentary committee attempting to deplatform and silence me, but their sinister tactics didn’t work.” That letter echoes sentiments reflected in another letter sent to the committee by members of the Adult Industry Laborers and Artists Association. “Please stop platforming extremist religious propaganda that harms sex workers,” it requested, calling out Mickelwait, Traffickinghub, and the National Center on Sexual Exploitation (formerly Morality in Media). “Their goal is not to end child sexual assault, or to stop nonconsensual content uploaders, but only to enforce their religious moral beliefs surrounding pornography.” The official hearing, at times, seemed like a circular firing squad.
In front of the panel, Mickelwait focused on Antoon and Tassillo. “What the CEO and the COO do,” she declared, “is try to attack…\[and\] silence advocates who are telling the truth about their site.” She said she’d been “gaslighted” by MindGeek, the same verb some sex workers use to describe her Traffickinghub campaign. “The public is so easily gaslighted by these evangelical groups that want to get rid of porn,” Cherie DeVille told me. A board member of the Adult Performer Advocacy Committee, DeVille ran for the U.S. presidency in 2020 (with Coolio on the ticket) to raise awareness for issues affecting sex workers. In our discussion, she seemed incredulous that Traffickinghub was being granted legitimacy—and that few questioned their stated position as “nonreligious and nonpartisan.”
Traffickinghub and Exodus Cry, to put it plainly, are abolitionist endeavors related to a Kansas City church called the International House of Prayer—a point Melissa Gira Grant explored in her 2020 _New Republic_ investigation into the “Holy War on Pornhub.” Grant methodically outlined connections between Mickelwait, Exodus Cry, and IHOP, exposing how the organizations downplayed their larger aims through a covert “strategy to reframe conservative ideas of sexual purity.”
The new crusaders aim to outlaw the commercial sex industry altogether, regardless of how that might affect sex workers, already a marginalized group. The main outcome of credit card bans on Pornhub—which Mickelwait considers an important victory—was that content creators stopped getting paid. The fallout extended to OnlyFans, the booming subscription-based platform that connects users directly with content creators. In August, OnlyFans threatened to remove all “sexually explicit” content, which would have had a chilling effect on free speech, open expression, and private digital commerce. Under pressure, the company reversed that decision.
At that time, a trafficking survivor named Rose Kalemba, whose underage videos had been previously posted on Pornhub, spoke out about her experiences with Traffickinghub, which she claimed was profiting off victims and treating them as badly as Pornhub did. She called out Mickelwait as being “just one more person who exploited me,” saying that Traffickinghub’s approach made her feel “violated, exploited, used, then discarded.” (Mickelwait told me, “I never directed or tried to influence \[Kalemba’s\] decisions but rather supported her choices and always responded to her requests for assistance.” )
Adult-industry leaders I interviewed insisted that campaigns such as Traffickinghub’s aren’t simply disingenuous but dangerous. “Faith-based anti-trafficking groups, in their zeal to eradicate pornography, have created a climate where violence against sex workers is encouraged,” explained an adult film star and advocate named Ruby. “There are people in this country that would be very happy for it to be a theocracy—and to see me swinging from the end of a rope.”
Antoon saw a direct link between fundamentalists’ exhortations and the fire at his home. “Could the extreme religious groups have incited and encouraged someone to do this? Absolutely,” he argued. “When you use extremist language and QAnon sentiment toward child trafficking, your words are going to attract and mobilize some of the darkest corners of the internet.”
**“It brings back** memories,” said my companion, Pietro Poletti, a retired lieutenant detective with the organized crime unit of the Montreal police force. We’d just turned onto Mafia Row, where Poletti—who spent his career tracking mob-related criminality—used to carry out undercover operations. When I’d contacted him to inquire about how law enforcement might go about investigating the arson case, he agreed to scope out the crime scene with me.
Poletti sported a black Adidas tracksuit and spoke in a low, raspy, Don Corleone voice. He’d become familiar with this neighborhood, he explained, while “following Vito Rizzuto for months.” Rizzuto was the godfather of a Sicilian Canadian syndicate known as the Sixth Family, closely tied to New York’s five families. In a secret NYPD operation, Poletti arrested Rizzuto in 2004 for his role in the 1981 assassination of three made men for the Bonanno family—a slaying reenacted in the film _Donnie Brasco._
Behind the wheel of his Jeep Cherokee, Poletti pointed out how Rizzuto’s backyard was directly connected to Antoon’s. And, as Poletti recounted, it was in that forested area right behind Mafia Row that a hit man aimed a rifle at Rizzuto’s 86-year-old father, Nicolo, and assassinated him in his kitchen.
We came to the ruins. Lacy motes of ash floated over the debris. “No question this was intentional,” he said. “Whoever did it knew what the hell they were doing.” Poletti doubted that Pornhub’s foes—or Antoon himself—arranged the blaze. Instead, he argued, it might well have been a message sent by one or more of Antoon’s neighbors. As Poletti spoke, he couldn’t help noticing how much bigger Antoon’s house was than those around it, how much it encroached on them. He’d built his mansion so close to one particular property that the neighbor “could turn the steak over on Antoon’s barbecue.”
Poletti drove around the corner to observe the half dozen homes on either side of Mafia Row. Antoon’s property dwarfed them all. Poletti then stopped in front of the stately Tudor-style manor that had been Vito Rizzuto’s before his death in 2013. Next door was the kingpin’s sister’s former place; next, the assassinated father’s digs; across the street, a home that had belonged to a capo. Their consigliere had also lived on the block—until he was kidnapped. “They never found the body,” Poletti muttered. The remains of another neighbor _were_ found: Rizzuto’s right-hand man, Giuseppe “Big Joe” LoPresti, wrapped in plastic and left near some train tracks. _His_ son Lorenzo LoPresti (motto: “Money is everything”) was also shot dead. “They’re all cousins,” Poletti said, coming to a magnificent estate at the head of the street, its topiaried courtyard decorated with sculptures of cavorting giraffes, horses, and elephants.
That said, the proximity of Antoon’s property to those of mafiosi did not prove guilt by association. And neither Poletti nor his contacts had evidence of Pornhub’s owners being mob-connected. Tassillo, for his part, told me that the company had never had any dealings, or difficulties, with underworld elements.
**I interviewed Tassillo** at MindGeek’s six-story office building in Montreal, which overlooks an abandoned horse racing track and an orange julep joint. Tassillo, in his mid-40s, emerged wearing a hoodie and jeans, with a five-o’clock shadow. It was noon. His dark hair, slicked back, was just starting to thin out. He had a calm, world-weary demeanor.
Almost none of the company’s 1,000 or so staff members were in the hushed offices; everyone was working from home. Many employees are engineers; others work on editing or moderating content. No video production, he noted, was done in-house. “People expect a super-erotic vibe, but it’s like walking into a bank,” Tassillo said. Indeed, the only indication that the complex housed Pornhub was a scrawl on a chalkboard describing a new MindGeek website: Squirted.com.
Tassillo had never done an interview with a reporter. Antoon said they’d agreed to cooperate after so many years of silence because continuing to avoid the press “could come off as wanting to be dodgy. Now we’re at a place where it’s important to be transparent. I think when you don’t hear people speak on behalf of the company, it’s easy to assume that we’re just ‘shadowy porn guys.’ And that couldn’t be further from the truth.”
Why hadn’t they spoken out before? “We \[just\] always felt the brand, and what people saw on the site, would speak for itself,” Tassillo replied.
Gangbangs and throatpie compilations speaking for themselves? Odd as it seems, that’s part of what had landed them in this mess. A hands-off management approach had allowed users to post whatever they wanted, which inevitably led to a rise in problematic videos—which spoke for themselves. Now, after the ethics hearings, the Canadian government insists it will create a watchdog position to monitor platforms like Pornhub. And ongoing court cases still seek to determine whether the company’s pre-2021 procedures amounted to criminal negligence.
Were Pornhub’s executives preoccupied by the litigation? “As a business owner, obviously it’s on your mind,” Tassillo said. “But as something that is going to destroy the business? No, I’m not worried about that…. I’m not going anywhere. We’ll keep striving toward that goal of becoming even more of that brand.” And how did he define that brand? “The new _Playboy,_” he said. “A responsible brand working in the adult space.” Antoon echoed this view, saying he wanted to create “a household name that destigmatized porn…an adult-entertainment company that operates with equal parts irreverence and professionalism.”
Why had it taken so long to take down and guard against illegal material? Tassillo bristled at my phrasing before insisting, “We felt the need to expedite it based on what was being said,” contending that, even before the _Times_ piece, MindGeek had spent $10 million on “software, human moderators, legal opinions, how to block it, how to stop it.” Today, no one can upload without having their verified identification on file. He said the company wanted to work with regulators and “with anyone looking to make the industry safer and better, anyone that has the same goal as us to eliminate all of this from the internet and outside of the internet—because that’s where it all starts, right?”
Regarding accusations that the company had profited from CSAM, Tassillo and Antoon were adamant that they had always done everything possible to combat it. “There’s zero value” in having it on the site, Tassillo told me. “If my goal is to become that household name that represents adult content and I allow this stuff to be on—I’m shooting myself in the foot. _SNL_ would never feel comfortable making a skit about us.”
**Kristof, who wrote** the _Times_’s Pornhub takedown, left the paper in October and announced an Oregon gubernatorial run. One nagging detail, though, that many of those interviewed for this story brought up, is that in his column he’d neglected to disclose the extremist beliefs of those trying to silence Pornhub. Grant, in _The New Republic,_ characterized this lack of transparency as “journalistic malpractice.” Porn activist DeVille, for her part, questioned how it was possible that the _Times_ had quoted a “hate group”—meaning Traffickinghub—without acknowledging its wider views. (Kristof declined to comment.)
Even so, one undeniable outcome of the Kristof article—and Mickelwait’s campaign, for that matter—is that Pornhub now has improved safeguards and other sites are also reconsidering long-standing practices. In hindsight, it seems astonishing that an industry dealing with such volatile content hadn’t implemented tighter security earlier.
While the internet continues its Wild West resistance to law and order, porn keeps getting ever more mainstream. (When Facebook and Instagram both went down one day last fall, for instance, Pornhub saw a 10.5 percent traffic spike.) Meanwhile, _making_ porn has become America’s “side hustle,” Ruby told me, describing an expanding movement of makers selling their sexuality online. “People figured out that they could just document that part of their lives and earn an extra two or three thousand dollars a month and feed their families.” Pornhub, OnlyFans, and other digital portals played an integral part in that phenomenon.
Toward the end of our meeting, I asked Tassillo what he thought PornHub’s impact has been on the world’s erotic life. “I honestly think it’s been a positive one,” he answered. “We created a platform that allows any content creator to create whatever matters to them. Through that, people \[can\] experiment and see things they might not even know they might be into. I think it’s actually allowed people to be a little more honest about themselves.”
The porn prohibitionists certainly wouldn’t agree. Nor would legislators who continue to draft anti-porn laws. (The porn industry retaliated several months ago by hiring lobbyists in Washington, for the first time ever, to advocate on its behalf.) It won’t be easy to curb content that exploits the underaged, exposes the nonconsenting, or disseminates acts of sexual violence. But perhaps porn purveyors are starting to realize that part of the cost of doing business should involve recognizing their social responsibilities.
How do sex workers themselves see it? “Pornography is a depiction of human sexuality meant to arouse,” Ruby told me. “It’s a mirror of human sexuality. We’re a barometer. When humans get more violent, their porn gets more violent. And when humans get more peaceful, porn does the same. It’s human nature, and it’s a human drive—and it has been since we could paint it on cave walls.”
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This article introduces Obsidian, then shows you how to deploy multiple websites from one [Obsidian](https://obsidian.md/) vault, using a [GitHub](https://github.com/) monorepo and [Netlify](https://www.netlify.com/).
The final result will be a single Obsidian vault, containing personal notes, a public blog, and a public knowledge base.
**The goal:** one central place for all web content, notes, and more - with full control of how different subsections are presented and shared. And everything under version control. **By keeping all your content in one place, you can take advantage of Obsidian's graph view, vault search, and tags, to get a comprehensive picture of how all your writing and projects link together**. Using GitHub and Netlify, you can publish limited sections of your content, as and when you wish to share it.
Prerequisites
-------------
* Some familiarity with git, and with static site generators.
* [GitHub](https://github.com/) and [Netlify](https://www.netlify.com/) accounts (free tier is fine). I recommend creating your GitHub account, then using the **GitHub** option on the [Netlify signup page](https://app.netlify.com/) to create your Netlify account.
* [git](https://git-scm.com/) and [Obsidian](https://obsidian.md/) set up on your machine. The tutorial does not cover this initial setup.
* A text editor, such as [VS Code](https://code.visualstudio.com/).
* You can choose whether to use your preferred static site generator, or the example tools in the tutorial. You can follow the tutorial and see how deploying your sites works without installing anything. However, if you want to use the example setup and customise the sites, you need [Node.js](https://nodejs.org/en/) and [Python](https://www.python.org/) installed. This article was written with Node 14.15 and Python 3.9.
Background
----------
This section gives a brief introduction to Obsidian, and to concepts like vaults and monorepos. If you're already familiar with the tooling and terminology, feel free to skip to the tutorial.
### About Obsidian
[Obsidian](https://obsidian.md/) is a note-taking app with a focus on privacy and flexibility. All your notes live on your machine (or wherever you choose to sync them to). Notes are written in markdown, meaning they can be easily converted to other formats or moved to another app.
The primary purpose of Obsidian is personal note taking. However, there may be times when you wish to share notes. Obsidian offers its own [Publish](https://obsidian.md/publish) addon. Even better, because the notes are in markdown, they can be processed by many static site generators. This means you can use your preferred tooling, customise the presentation, and so on.
Note
Obsidian supports CommonMark and GitHub Flavoured Markdown. However, it makes a few additions, including wikilink-style internal links, a tag format, and LaTeX maths. If you use these features, you'll need to make sure your static site generator can process them properly.
### Terminology and concepts
#### Vault
An Obsidian **vault** is a workspace, or a collection of notes. Within a vault, you can link notes, view note relations in graph view, search all notes, and so on.
#### Markdown
**Markdown** is a lightweight markup language, which provides a simple way to write more than just plain text (allowing you to, for example, add headings, bold, italic and so on). Take a look at this [cheat sheet](https://github.com/adam-p/markdown-here/wiki/Markdown-Cheatsheet) for GitHub Flavoured Markdown to learn more.
#### Monorepo
**Monorepos** are git repositories with multiple sites or apps in one repo. It is more common to have a single git repository per website or app. However, sometimes you may want to combine them into one: perhaps you want your documentation website stored in the same place as your code, for example.
#### Version control, git, GitHub
This tutorial uses **git** and **GitHub**. Git is a type of **version control**. If you're completely new to those terms, I recommend going and learning a little about them before attempting this tutorial (GitHub provide various [guides](https://guides.github.com/)). The tutorial assumes you have git installed and set up.
Briefly, git version control tracks the history of files. GitHub provides a remote repository (a place to store files). Using git and GitHub provides several benefits:
* GitHub acts as a backup for your files.
* If you need to collaborate with others, git provides a way to handle multiple people working on the same files.
* We can hook into deployment tooling (which we'll do later in the tutorial with Netlify), allowing us to automate deploying our websites.
### Considerations when choosing this approach
Choosing to combine Obsidian note taking with a version control system (in a monorepo pattern) and static site generators involves a series of definite choices, as well as some initial effort to set up. Before diving in, here are a few things to consider:
* Are you working alone? If you envisage others collaborating on content, make sure they are comfortable with this tooling.
* Are you _sure_ you're working alone? A monorepo approach means everything is in one GitHub repo. If you want to bring in collaborators on one project, but not share all your notes, you'll have to separate out that project.
* Do you enjoy this tooling? The purpose of Obsidian is personal knowledge management. That means writing stuff down, presumably because it's useful to you. You're more likely to actually use the tooling if you enjoy it. Don't let the tech setup get in the way of the words.
* Do you want distinct Obsidian configurations for different types of content? Obsidian allows you to customise each vault, with plugins and custom styling. You may prefer to use separate vaults, allowing you to have different setups for quick notes versus long-form writing, for instance.
* Do you need Obsidian at all? A lot of the work in this tutorial happens in a text editor outside Obsidian. The [advantages of Obsidian](https://obsidian.md/features) are things like its graph view, search, and tagging. Try out Obsidian and see if you benefit from its features.
Tutorial
--------
### Step one: set up your Obsidian vault and git repo
1. If you haven't already, now's the time to make sure you have all the [prerequisites](https://www.starfallprojects.co.uk/#prerequisites).
2. Create a new empty vault. On the Obsidian launch screen, select **Create**. Call it `multisite-example`.
If you already had a vault open, you can get back to this screen by selecting **Open another vault**:
. 3. Log in to GitHub, and [create a new empty repository](https://docs.github.com/en/github/getting-started-with-github/create-a-repo). Name it `multisite-example`. When choosing the repository visibility, select **Private**. Make sure you create an empty repository - do not create a `README` or `.gitignore`, or add a licence. 4. Open your preferred CLI (command line interface), and navigate to your vault directory:
| | `cd path/to/multisite-example` |
| --- | --- |
5\. Create a new git repository: 6. By default, git uses `main` as the main branch name. If you're using an old repo, it may still be named `master`. Inclusive language is important. Rename it to main: 7. Connect your local git repo to GitHub. You can get the value of `<your-repo>` by going to **Code** tab > **Code** button > **Clone HTTPS** on your new GitHub repo homepage.
| | `git remote add origin <your-repo>` |
| --- | --- |
You now have an empty Obsidian vault, a GitHub repo, and a local git repo with a `.gitignore`, linked to GitHub.
### Step two: add some content
For this tutorial, use the content from my [example repository](https://github.com/StarfallProjects/obsidian-netlify-monorepo).
1. In the [example repository](https://github.com/StarfallProjects/obsidian-netlify-monorepo), select **Code** > **Download ZIP**.
2. Extract the contents of the `.zip` and copy them into your vault.
.
The content comprises:
* Two notes.
* A `blog` directory, which we will publish as a blog website, powered by the [Eleventy](https://www.11ty.dev/) static site generator.
* A `hobby-knowledge-base` directory, which we will publish as a documentation-style website, powered by the [MkDocs](https://www.mkdocs.org/) static site generator, using the [Material](https://squidfunk.github.io/mkdocs-material/getting-started/) theme.
If this is all starting to sound complicated, or like we're using a lot of different tools, don't worry too much. You can use any tool you like to build your sites. I'm using two different static site generators (with different types of content) to demonstrate flexibility of this setup.
Note
Often, you will want to preview your websites on your own machine before publishing. You will also need to configure the sites (for example, adding your own styling). I have included information in the [blog README](https://github.com/StarfallProjects/obsidian-netlify-monorepo/tree/main/blog) and [hobby-knowledge-base README](https://github.com/StarfallProjects/obsidian-netlify-monorepo/tree/main/hobby-knowledge-base) about working with each site.
### Step three: deploy your websites to Netlify
In our example, we want to:
* Keep our standalone notes private.
* Publish `blog` as a blog-style website
* Publish `hobby-knowledge-base` as a documentation-style website.
**For each website you want to create**, do the following:
1. Log in to [Netlify](https://www.netlify.com/).
2. Select **New site from Git**.
3. Select **GitHub**
4. Select your `multisite-example` repo.
5. You should now be on **Site settings for** . Enter the following settings:
| Setting | Value for `blog` | Value for `hobby-knowledge-base` |
The publish directory setting looks odd - when I first saw it, I assumed Netlify would reflect the publish directory in the final URL of the site, forcing you to, for example, host the blog at my-example.com/blog. This is not the case - you get a fully standalone site.
6. Select **Deploy site**. Wait while Netlify builds and deploys the site. Netlify only builds and deploys the specified base directory, and only watches for changes in this directory to trigger rebuilds. You can read more in Netlify's docs: [Build multiple sites from a monorepo](https://docs.netlify.com/configure-builds/common-configurations/monorepos/#build-multiple-sites-from-a-monorepo). Note that although Netlify only builds the base directory, it clones the entire repo on the first build.
7. Netlify automatically generates a placeholder site name and demo URL. Go to **Deploys** to get the URL and preview your site.
You now have two separate websites, deployed from the same GitHub repo and the same Obsidian vault.
Next steps
----------
This tutorial has shown how to deploy a couple of basic example sites to Netlify.
There are a few things you probably want to do before your sites are actually ready:
* Set up [custom domains](https://docs.netlify.com/domains-https/custom-domains/) for each website on Netlify.
* Learn more about [Eleventy](https://www.11ty.dev/) and [MkDocs with Material theme](https://squidfunk.github.io/mkdocs-material/getting-started/), in order to customise your sites. You could also choose a different static site generator - you can find a list of options on [Jamstack - Site Generators](https://jamstack.org/generators/).
And long-term, there are doubtless ways this setup could be improved. A couple of ideas:
* Allow the creation of sites based around linked content, rather than one site per sub-directory.
* Refine visibility and access: at the moment, your choices with this setup are keeping notes private, or sharing to a fully public website. You could add logins to some sites or site sections (perhaps using [Netlify Identity](https://docs.netlify.com/visitor-access/identity/)), which would give finer-grained control of which notes you share.
iOS
3 years ago