A new therapy for Ukraine’s scarred soldiers: ketamine - The Economist (Full Access)   

IHOR KHOLODILO should probably not have survived to tell his tale. The military psychologist and medic was evacuating comrades in early 2023 when his jeep was hit by a Russian tank shell. He suffered injuries to his eyes and heart, and was left barely able to communicate. Operations saved his heart and vision. But doctors were unable to correct his slur and stammer. He tried all kinds of radical therapies, but nothing helped. Then came a chance meeting with Vladislav Matrenitsky, a pioneer of psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy, who posed an unexpected question. Would he try ketamine?

Mr Kholodilo decided to give it a go, not expecting much. But the results were astonishing. After one session under the sedative his stammer all but disappeared. Another five and he was almost back to normal. Gone were the introversion, the nightmares and the fears about daily life. Ketamine therapy was not comfortable or easy, he says, but it allowed him to resolve the trauma that caused his symptoms: “I returned to what you could call life…I felt light, just blessed.”

Ketamine has been legal in Ukraine as a treatment for mental illness since 2017. The use of psychedelics to treat anxiety and depression has a much longer history, and was explored in America in the 1950s-60s. After the hippie movement the treatment fell out of political favour. For a while, psychedelics were equated with serious narcotics like heroin. But in many countries, in the past decade or so they have experienced a renaissance.

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Ron DeSantis has some lessons for America’s politicians - The Economist (Full Access)   

“God looked down on his planned paradise and said, ‘I need a caretaker’—so God gave us Trump.” Thus intones the narrator of a video Donald Trump shared on his social-media platform, Truth Social, earlier this month. Amid the huffing and puffing, a mischievous, even puncturing note can also be heard: Mr Trump, as God’s chosen agent, will not only “fight the Marxists” but also pause to “eat supper”. After taming the “cantankerous” World Economic Forum, the gravelly voice deadpans, Mr Trump might “come home hungry” yet he will wait “until the First Lady is done with lunch with friends—then tell the ladies to be sure and come back real soon”.

Mr Trump was aggrandising himself, but he was also once again making fun of poor beleaguered Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida, aka, to Mr Trump, “Ron DeSanctus”, aka “DeSaster”, aka “Tiny D”. More than a year ago, Tiny D’s—ahem, Mr DeSantis’s—wife, Casey DeSantis, tweeted a video in which another thunderous male voice also described God looking down on “his planned paradise”. In that instance, God chose to create “a fighter”. Noble black-and-white images of Mr DeSantis illustrated baritone blather about defending what is “right and just”, without the slightest hint of irony. Solemn as it was, Mr DeSantis’s video was far sillier than the one Mr Trump celebrated.

But Mr DeSantis was riding high back then, before he challenged Mr Trump for the Republican nomination. Just days after that tweet, as Republicans across the country struggled in midterm elections, Mr DeSantis was re-elected by 19 points. The New York Post proclaimed him “DeFuture”: he had Mr Trump’s policy aims but not his baggage, his forcefulness but not his fecklessness, his killer ways but not his loser record. He was a college athlete, a navy veteran, a former prosecutor and congressman as well as a serving governor. And he was just 44, with a media-savvy wife and three children. He looked like a winner. On paper.

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Britain has seen an alarming rise in poetry sales - The Economist (Full Access)   

Donna Ashworth, a British poet, loves words. You can tell because on her website she calls herself “Donna Ashworth—Author and lover of words”, doubtless to distinguish herself from all those other authors who don’t like words. But Ms Ashworth loves so much more than words, for, as she says, “what are we here to do, if not love?” So she also loves our “magical” planet and being kind and wrinkles and the child within us all and putting meaningful things in italics.

It goes without saying that she loves motherly love. A mother’s love for her son is “like a beautiful black-hole”, which is not a line to run past an astronomer. Or a Freudian. She loves hope (“It is the light”), ageing and stretch marks (for they are “by Mother Nature’s paintbrush”). The overall effect feels less like poetry than as though ChatGPT has been asked to produce inspirational fridge magnets.

But people love her back. Ms Ashworth’s writing is, as one fan says, “like a warm hug”, which is not something anyone ever said of Philip Larkin, a misanthropic English poet. Then again, people do not buy Larkin in their droves. In early January “Wild Hope”, the latest of Ms Ashworth’s eight books of poetry, reached number seven on the Amazon bestsellers list. It is one of a handful of books behind a rise in British poetry sales: 2023 was the highest since records began. Which is to say, still very low (at a little under £15m, or $19.1m). Britain may occasionally produce very good poets but Britons are not much interested in them, and they certainly don’t pay to read them.

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The Houthis have survived worse than America’s and Britain’s strikes - The Economist (Full Access)   

THE HOUTHIS have an ambitious slogan: it includes “death to America, death to Israel”. For decades, that was aspirational. The group was largely limited to fighting its fellow Yemenis and its neighbours on the Arabian peninsula. Yet since October, what was once a scrappy insurgency in desolate northern Yemen has managed to put itself in conflict with both the Middle East’s strongest power and the world’s superpower.

Early on January 12th American and British warplanes bombed dozens of targets in Yemen. More allied strikes could take place. President Joe Biden said: “I will not hesitate to direct further measures.” The strikes followed almost two months of Houthi attacks on commercial shipping in the Red Sea. The group says these are a show of solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza, and that it is only targeting ships with links to Israel (it has also fired missiles at southern Israel). In practice, though, the attacks have been random, seeming to target any vessel that happens to be within range, including American and British warships. Most of the world’s leading container-shipping companies are now avoiding the Red Sea.

Last month America stood up a multinational coalition to secure the waterway, and on January 3rd the coalition gave the Houthis a “final warning”. They responded hours later by detonating a naval drone a few miles away from commercial vessels and American warships, following that up a week later with a barrage against an American carrier group and a British destroyer.

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