According to the latest World Happiness Report, my country of Finland has the happiest people on Earth, a designation it has held for six consecutive years. 

Since 2002, the World Happiness Report has tabulated the relative happiness of people around the globe, using statistical analysis to take into account factors such as gross domestic product per capita, social support, life expectancy, freedom to make one’s own life choices, generosity of the general population and perceptions of the level of corruption in the society.

Like other Nordic countries, Finland has well-functioning and democratic institutions that provide their citizens with extensive benefits and security. The citizens of our countries trust our institutions. Incidentally, among the other Nordic countries, Denmark was in 2nd place; Iceland was 4th; Norway was 6th.

Of course, each country has a unique history and has charted a singular path to its present level of national contentment – or lack thereof. Finland and other Nordic countries don’t have the deep class divides and economic inequality experienced by some other countries. In addition, political scientist Ronald Inglehart offered the following explanation: “our countries constitute the leading example of successful modernization, maximizing prosperity, social solidarity, and political and personal freedom.”

How does the Nordic system lead to overall national happiness? Let me use my own experience as an example.

My father was a construction worker and my mother worked in a factory. Thanks to an exemplary education system, I was able to earn a doctorate practically for free. My two daughters had access to one of the world’s finest educations – also practically free of cost.

Day care fees are subsidized for all families in Finland. Before going to school, my girls were able to attend a wonderful, highly professional public day care at an extremely reasonable cost, which allowed me, a single mom, to work. Then there is the issue of medical expenses – a huge financial hardship for many. One of my daughters has had a chronic skeletal disease since she was a young child, and medical treatment lasted more than a decade. The bulk of the expenses were taken care of by the public health system. Our taxpayer-funded universal health care is high in quality, but without piles of confusing paperwork or huge bills borne by the patient.

All this is part of our welfare state, which the Nordic countries are famous for. I realize that “welfare” is a dirty word for many in the United States and other parts of the world. But several studies confirm that a generous state welfare system has a tremendously positive impact on life satisfaction. 

Some in the US have said they want less government involvement, not more, and criticize Finland’s government for having too much say about the particulars of individuals’ lives. While US companies struggle to administer health plans and find educated workers, Nordic governments provide high-quality public services for all citizens and give everyone quality education so that employers have no shortage of qualified job applicants.

Survival at the most basic, existential level is at the heart of happiness, more money doesn’t necessarily create greater happiness, and might do just the opposite. One often overlooked, but important ingredient that makes a huge difference in terms of increasing a nation’s sense of contentment, is the level of income disparity within the society. A country with relatively small income differences generally has fewer disgruntled people – perhaps it’s because there’s less of a need to try to “keep up with the Joneses.”

In a country like mine, where there are no as great extremes of wealth or poverty as in the US, the opportunity to be disenchanted with your lot in life is greatly diminished. And those unfortunate enough to fall below the poverty line in Finland know that there is a network of welfare services and public aid to help them back on their feet.

Of course, all of this social spending comes at a cost and taxes on an average worker are considerably higher than the taxes paid in the US. We have one of the world’s highest tax rates. According to data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the average single worker in Finland faced a net average tax rate of 30.8% in 2021, compared with the OECD average of 24.6%. That’s higher than most other countries, but it’s the price that we have decided to pay as a society to have quality schools, low-cost public infrastructure, public health care and the like.

Here in the Nordic countries we have realized that the secret of happiness is found in a kind of egalitarianism and trust in our institutions. It leads to a societal cohesiveness – and happiness – that money just can’t buy.

                           Opinion by Marja Heinonen, 3/29/2023

Days before Prince Harry’s memoir, “Spare,” was officially released on January 10, scandalous details from the book made headlines across the world: Harry’s description of a physical fight with his brother Prince William, which resulted in a broken necklace.

Unsurprisingly, these headlines don’t capture the whole story. “Spare” is a sad read about a man who is clearly hurt and damaged. A man who, by accident of birth and through tragedy, has never had complete control over his own life.

The memoir’s central narrative is that, despite being born into immense privilege, Prince Harry is a victim too. From a young age, he remembers knowing that he existed just in case anything happened to William. As a child, he came to believe that he was there to provide organ donations should the heir to the throne require them.

As he grew up, he was harassed by the same tabloids that hounded his late mother, Princess Diana. He talks about how they branded him the “naughty Prince,” “Prince thicko” or made him out to be a drug addict. 

Now that Harry’s relationship with his family and the British press has deteriorated, the adjectives that are often used to describe him are even less flattering: soft, fragile, thin-skinned, spoiled and spiteful.

The racist and misogynistic media coverage that Harry’s wife Meghan Markle has experienced is well-documented. But what is discussed less often is how Harry’s own masculinity is leveraged against him. In fact, the gendered expectations of Harry’s behavior are a key driver of much of the vitriol he has received.

Prince Harry comes from a long line of military men who took pride in adopting a stiff upper lip attitude and getting on with the job, complaining is considered feminine and weak. Harry has alluded to this himself by making a distinction between “Institutional Harry” and “Husband Harry” – the latter of whom is more emotional.

Outside of the royal institution, there has been a cultural shift towards encouraging men to talk about their feelings and mental health. “Spare” takes us through Prince’s process of doing just that. And  after examining some of the ways growing up in the royal institution damaged him, with the help of a therapist, it seems like he prefers “Husband Harry” to “Institutional Harry”.

The tension between the Prince’s two personas is really a microcosm of a wider cultural clash between different versions of masculinity. In the so-called “culture war” that the Sussexes have found themselves embroiled in, millennial masculinity has become a key battleground.

A number of conservative politicians and commentators have coalesced around the idea that today’s young men are no longer, as they might put it, “real men.” And to those self-appointed saviors of “real” masculinity, feminists like Markle are the primary enemy. But hostility is also reserved for so-called “beta” males (as opposed to ‘alpha male’ – the dominant male animal in a particular group) who don’t subscribe to their view.

In “Spare,” Harry recalls seeing a cartoon in one of Britain’s newspapers, which portrayed him on a dog leash that his wife was holding. He describes this as “textbook” misogyny, which blamed a woman for decisions he had made. But it was also a classic example because it sought to emasculate him for refusing to participate in the oppression of women – a key tactic used to uphold misogyny.

On the eve of the release of “Spare,” the royal institution appeared to feed into this narrative by briefing journalists that Prince Harry has been “kidnapped by the cult of psychotherapy.” In this framing, a man presenting himself as a victim, or damaged in any way, is equated with weakness and narcissism.

As is common, most people will form their opinion based on the snippets of the memoir that media outlets or social media users have curated for them, not by reading the entire memoir. But beyond everything, “Spare” is a story about a man of immense privilege who is at least trying to do better – even if that means going against the institutions and societal conventions which have previously benefited him.

Yes, this book is occasionally contradictory, out-of-touch and features plenty of toe-curling details I would have been much happier not knowing. And yes, a break from hearing about the Sussexes would be very welcome. But I can’t shake the feeling that, for his loudest detractors, this is bigger than Prince Harry. His most virulent critics feel threatened and betrayed by the version of modern masculinity he represents – one that, like the Prince himself, is trying to break free from its past.

                                Opinion by Louis Staples, CNN, 1/13/2023

What if doctors could just print a kidney, using cells from the patient, instead of having to find a donor match and hope the patient’s body doesn’t reject the transplanted kidney?

The soonest that could happen is in a decade, thanks to 3D organ bioprinting, said Jennifer Lewis, a professor at Harvard University’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering. Organ bioprinting is the use of 3D-printing technologies to assemble multiple cell types, growth factors and biomaterials in a layer-by-layer fashion to produce bioartificial organs that ideally imitate their natural counterparts.

This type of regenerative medicine is in the development stage, and the driving force behind this innovation is real human need. In the United States, there are 106,800 men, women and children on the national organ transplant waiting list as of March 8, 2023, according to the Health Resources & Services Administration. However, living donors provide only around 6,000 organs per year on average, and there are about 8,000 deceased donors annually who each provide 3.5 organs on average.

To begin the process of bioprinting an organ, doctors typically start with a patient’s own cells. They take a small needle biopsy of an organ or do a minimally invasive surgical procedure that removes a small piece of tissue, “less than half the size of a postage stamp,” Dr. Anthony Atala, director of the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine said. “By taking this small piece of tissue, we are able to tease cells apart and we grow and expand the cells outside the body.”

This growth happens inside a sterile incubator or bioreactor, a pressurized stainless steel vessel that helps the cells stay fed with nutrients – called “media” – the doctors feed them every 24 hours, since cells have their own metabolism. Each cell type has a different media, and the incubator or bioreactor acts as an oven-like device mimicking the internal temperature and oxygenation of the human body.

“Then we mix it with this gel, which is like glue,” Atala said. “Every organ in your body has the cells and the glue that holds it together. This glue is Atala’s nickname for bioink, doctors load each bioink – depending on how many cell types they’re wanting to print – into a printing chamber, using a printhead and nozzle to extrude an ink and build the material up layer by layer. Creating tissue with personalized properties is enabled by printers being programmed with a patient’s imaging data from X-rays or scans.

“With a color printer you have several different cartridges, and each cartridge is printing a different color, and you come up with your final color,” Atala added. Bioprinting is the same; you’re just using cells instead of traditional inks. The printing process typically lasts several hours. The time from the biopsy to the implantation is about 4-6 weeks.

The ultimate challenge is “getting the organs to actually function as they should,” so accomplishing that “is the holy grail,” said Lewis. “Just like if you were to harvest an organ from a donor, you have to immediately get that organ into a bioreactor and start perfusing it or the cells die,” she added. To perfuse an organ is to supply it with fluid, usually blood or a blood substitute, by circulating it through blood vessels or other channels.

Depending on the organ’s complexity, there is sometimes a need to mature the tissue further in a bioreactor, Lewis said. “There’s just a number of plumbing issues and challenges that have to be done in order to make that printed organ actually function like a human organ would in the body. And honestly, this has not been fully solved yet.”

Atala and Lewis are conservative in their estimates about the number of years remaining before fully functioning bioprinted organs can be implanted into humans.

“The field’s moving fast, I think we’re talking about a decade plus, even with all of the tremendous progress that’s been made,” Lewis said. “I learned long ago never to predict because you’ll always be wrong,” Atala said. “There’s so many factors in terms of manufacturing and the US Food and Drug Administration regulation. At the end of the day, our interest, of course, is to make sure the technologies are safe for the patient above all.”

Whenever bioprinting organs becomes an available option, affordability for patients and their caregivers shouldn’t be an issue. They’ll be “accessible for sure,” Atala said. “The costs associated with organ failures are very high. Just to keep one patient on dialysis is over a quarter of a million dollars per year. So, it’s a lot cheaper to create an organ that you can implant into the patient”.

The average kidney transplant cost was $442,500 in 2020, according to research published by the American Society of Nephrology, by the way.

                                 Kristen Rogers, CNN, 3/10/2023

In a letter to his wife in March 1901, pioneering French painter Claude Monet lamented the bad weather that prevented him from working, as well as another conspicuous impediment to his creativity.

“Everything is as good as dead, no train, no smoke, no boat, nothing to excite the inspiration a little,” he wrote.

Monet, now celebrated as a founder of Impressionism, was in London during one of three trips he took to the city between 1899 and 1901, which yielded over 100 paintings. His reference to smoke – which would have come abundantly from the steam engines of boats and trains – as a potential creative spark seems to support a theory long held by some art historians about what was behind the distinctive dreamy haze in Monet’s work. Now a recent study by climate scientists has found new evidence to confirm it.

“I work on air pollution and while seeing Turner, Whistler and Monet paintings at Tate Museum in London and Musée d’Orsay in Paris, I noticed stylistic transformations in their works,” said Anna Lea Albright, a postdoctoral researcher at Sorbonne University in Paris.

“The contours of their paintings became hazier, the palette appeared whiter and the style changed from more figurative to more impressionistic: Those changes accord with physical expectations of how air pollution influences light,” she added.

The team looked at over 100 paintings by Monet and British painter Joseph Mallord William Turner, who was active before Monet, with the goal of finding an empirical basis to the hypothesis that the paintings capture increasingly polluted skies during the Industrial Revolution. The focus was on these two artists because they prolifically painted landscapes and cityscapes, often with repeated motifs, according to the study authors.

In the period covered by the paintings, 1796 to 1901, a huge amount of coal was mined to support industrial manufacturing and steam engines. Britain alone went from producing 2.9 million tons of coal per year in 1700 to 275 million tons by 1900, leading to visible air pollution that caused widespread health problems. The soot from the coal created a thick, dark fog, and the number of foggy days in London rose threefold between 1850 and 1890, from 25 to 75 per year, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research.

“In general, air pollution makes objects appear hazier, makes it harder to identify their edges, and gives the scene a whiter tint, because pollution reflects visible light of all wavelengths,” Albright said. The team looked for these two metrics, edge strength and whiteness, in the paintings – by converting them into mathematical representations based on brightness – and then compared the results with independent estimates of historical air pollution. “We found that there was a surprisingly good match,” Albright said.

The paintings chronicle the historical changes in the atmospheric environment, according to the researchers. The connection goes beyond artistic evolution and style, they note, because London and Paris, where Turner and Monet were respectively based, industrialized at different times and at different rates, which is reflected in the works.

Jonathan Ribner, a professor of European art at Boston University, was among the first art historians to suggest a connection between the two artists’ work and pollution. “When I saw the study, I was delighted because it really suggests a vindication of what I had been writing about almost two decades ago, which was that air pollution is a significant contextual factor for some 19th century paintings,” Ribner said.

“Turner and Monet are both artists who had to go to places to see certain conditions,” he added. “There was this phenomenon of fog tourism, where French visitors like Monet went to London deliberately to see the fog, because they loved the atmospheric effects. He didn’t like it when the fog was so thick that he just couldn’t see anything, but he hated it when there was no fog and it was blue skies, because it didn’t look like London. Apparently he destroyed some of those canvases with a clear sky.”

However, art critic Sebastian Smee has lambasted the study, saying that it confuses “internal creative choices with external stimuli.” He argued that increased pollution can’t be used to explain the artists’ stylistic evolution, and that some of their works are “mythological,” rather than a picture of objective reality.

Regarding that point of view, Albright said it best: “What I think is really wonderful about these works is that Monet creates beautiful atmospheric effects from something as ugly and dirty as smoke and soot,” she added. “He and Turner, they don’t turn away from the pollution, but they were able to transform these negative environmental changes into a source of creative inspiration.”

                                Jacopo Prisco, CNN Style, 3/23/2023