👋Hello there friends, I hope your October has been going well so far.
In a comment on the Chernobyl post I wrote last week, one of my readers suggested the HBO documentary "Chernobyl." I thought it was fantastic after watching it. If you haven't seen it yet, I highly recommend it.
On to The Dose
⏪Quick week recap
Liz Truss resigns as UK prime minister after 44 days in office
A hacker who stole two unreleased songs from Ed Sheeran and sold them on the dark web has been jailed for 18 months.
English premier league club, Aston Villa sack their coach, Steven Gerrard after 11 months in charge.
A Ugandan court has sentenced an ivory trader to life in prison - the longest sentence for such crimes in the country's history.
TikTok to increase the minimum age requirement for livestreaming from 16 to 18 beginning on Nov. 23, and it will soon allow users to target adult audiences with stream content.
Indian vaccine maker Serum Institute of India (SII) has said it had to dump 100 million doses of their COVID-19 vaccine after they expired.
Sex assault lawsuit against actor Kevin Spacey dismissed
Elon Musk plans to cut 75% of Twitter staff if he takes over company
☕The revolutionary power of coffee
👍This article about how coffee fueled revolutions and revolutionary ideas was fantastic.
🌿Before we begin, it is important to note that coffee plants originated in Kefa, Ethiopia, and were transported to southern Arabia and planted in the 15th century.
It is said that coffee houses began in the Ottoman Empire. Well…if you are unfamiliar with the empire, here you go.
The Ottoman Empire was created by Turkish tribes in Anatolia (Asia Minor) and grew to be one of the most powerful states in the world during the 15th and 16th centuries. The Ottoman period spanned more than 600 years and came to an end only in 1922, when it was replaced by the Turkish Republic and various successor states in southeastern Europe and the Middle East.
“Since liquor and bars were off-limits to most practicing Muslims, coffeehouses provided an alternative place to gather, socialize and share ideas. Coffee’s affordability and egalitarian structure—anyone could come in and order a cup—eroded centuries of social norms. Not everyone was pleased by this change.”
🚨Sultan Murad IV declared coffee consumption a capital offense in 1633. Murad IV's brother and uncle were assassinated by janissaries, infantry units known to frequent cafes. The sultan was so intent on apprehending coffee drinkers that he allegedly disguised himself as a commoner and prowled Istanbul, decapitating offenders with his hundred-pound broadsword.
To prevent the gathering of dissidents, Ottoman sultans issued and rescinded coffeehouse bans well into the 18th century. However, by that time, coffeehouses had spread throughout Europe, terrifying kings.
📰Rulers would forbid gathering in coffee shops because it lead to spread of “fake news”.
On June 12, 1672, Charles II issued a proclamation to “Restrain the Spreading of False News, and Licentious Talking of Matters of State and Government,” which read in part: “men have assumed to themselves a liberty, not only in Coffee-houses, but in other Places and Meetings, both public and private, to censure and defame the proceedings of State by speaking evil of things they understand not.”
🧠The very type of open discussion that Charles II feared appeared to be beneficial to learning.
“In Oxford, locals had begun calling coffee houses “penny universities” because for the cost of a cup of coffee, you could gain access to intellectual discussions and, critically, sober debate. At a time when beer was often a safer drinking option than water, this was no small thing.”
🍻On September 13, 1777, Frederick the Great of Germany was so opposed to coffee that he attempted to outlaw it entirely in favor of beer.
America: After the Boston Tea Party, when drinking tea became unfashionable, coffee was seen as a patriotic drink in the colonies.
🧠It is therefore thought that coffeehouses facilitated a meeting of minds that inspired new waves of thought.
😲Interestingly, coffee was such an ingrained part of society in Saudi Arabia that failing to supply your wife with coffee was grounds for divorce.
👩Role of women in Ancient Rome
Women in ancient Rome played many roles, whether free or enslaved: empress, priestess, goddess, shop owner, midwife, prostitute, daughter, wife, and mother. However, as this article highlights, they had no public voice.
“As in many cultures, women’s value in ancient Rome was defined almost solely in relation to their fathers and husbands; the majority were married off by their mid teens. No Roman woman could vote, play a direct role in political or military affairs or otherwise play an official part in how the republic and, later, the empire was run.”
We learn how ancient Roman men perceived them by how they wrote about them. Others described them as “highly intelligent” and “careful housewives” while others described them more scathingly.
Perhaps Roman satirist Juvenal offered the most scathing opinions in his famously misogynistic Sixth Satire, written in the second century A.D. Among his complaints: Women shirked any risky but worthwhile enterprise. They were prone to promiscuity, and most annoying when they dared to flaunt intellectual opinions. And heaven help the man whose mother-in-law has a pulse: “All chance of domestic harmony is lost while your wife’s mother is living.”
👨👩👦The ideal Roman woman, according to Rome's written and unwritten legal and social code, was a matron who spun her own cloth, oversaw her family's affairs, provided her husband with children, food, and a well-run household, and displayed appropriate modesty. Females who defied this stereotype frequently became outcasts.
“For much of ancient Roman history, women didn’t even have the right to their own name, almost always taking a feminine version of her father’s family name. So, Gaius Julius or Marcus Terentius would have daughters named, respectively, Julia and Terentia.”
💡Despite having extremely limited public lives, a group of savvy ancient Roman women—all from the elite class—carved out pockets of influence for themselves alongside their menfolk. Examples are Cornelia (daughter of famed Roman general Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus) and Faustina the Younger.
⚠️The more powerful a woman was, the more likely she was to face male retaliation.
In spite of the male prism through which we know these women, their humanity and diversity emerge. As the centuries passed, women in ancient Rome increasingly emerged from the long shadow cast both by their male society and the self-sacrificing female ideals.
😲Some of you might have already seen this in real life but…oh my!
🤔Is that Noah’s ark on the top of Mount Ararat?
😲Did you know?
The average person spends about 26 years sleeping in their life which equates to 9,490 days or 227,760 hours.
Surprisingly, we also spend 7 years trying to get to sleep. That’s 33 years or 12,045 days spent in bed!
💡Quote of the week
We decide what we will make of each and every situation. We decide whether we’ll break or whether we’ll resist. We decide whether we’ll assent or reject. No one can force us to give up or to believe something that is untrue (such as, that a situation is absolutely hopeless or impossible to improve). Our perceptions are the thing that we’re in complete control of.
From ‘The Obstacle is the Way’ by Ryan Holiday
That is it for today.
✨Send anything interesting you come across this week my way! I enjoy discovering new things to read through my newsletter subscribers.
Have a great week,
Dennis