Linking the Malawian Diaspora to the Development of Malawi”
Malawi
Malawi (/məˈlɔːwi,məˈlɑːwi/; Chichewa pronunciation:[maláβi]; Tumbuka: Malaŵi), officially the Republic of Malawi and formerly known as Nyasaland, is a landlocked country in Southeastern Africa. It is bordered by Zambia to the west, Tanzania to the north and northeast, and Mozambique to the east, south and southwest. Malawi spans over 118,484 km2 (45,747 sq mi) and has an estimated population of 19,431,566 (as of January 2021). Malawi’s capital and largest city is Lilongwe. Its second-largest is Blantyre, its third-largest is Mzuzu and its fourth-largest is its former capital, Zomba.
Lupenga Mphande during praise poetry field research in South Africa, June 2002. Credit: Allan Coleman via Lupenga Mphande
In 1969, 18-year-old Lupenga Mphande was arrested for the first time in Malawi.
As an active protester against oppressive governments in Malawi and South Africa, Mphande would not find himself in a cell for the last time. In fact, he completed his bachelor’s program at the University of Malawi between protests and jail time.
“It was a commute between prison and the classroom, which is not a pleasant thing to do,” Mphande said.
Beyond active protesting, Mphande was generally vocal about his thoughts, often facing backlash for sharing his opinions in student magazines and newspapers at his university, speaking to a British journalist and founding the Malawi Writers’ group in 1969.
Mphande said the group was a forum for young writers to exchange their literary works and offer critiques.
“It inevitably strayed into political discussions, and when the police caught wind of that, that was another area that used to get me into trouble,” Mphande said.
Despite pushback from the law, Mphande persisted and continued to speak up for what he believed in. As he continued his activism in England and the United States, he said he developed a passion for education and teaching people about the social and political issues in the world around them.
In his 78 years, Mphande has lived and learned in Africa, Great Britain and the United States, all while fighting for social justice along the way through direct action and literary works, before becoming the director of the African Languages Program at Ohio State in 1989 — a position he held for 36 years.
Today, Mphande said he sees parallels between his past in South Africa and the United States’ current political administration, which is currently cutting diversity, equity and inclusion programs nationwide. In addition, he said he has concerns about the nation’s current relationship with South Africa.
Mphande was born in Malawi, a country in southeastern Africa, in 1947. From 1964-94, the country was under the rule of then-President Hastings Banda, who Mphande described as a dictator.
Banda’s time as president was also during South Africa’s apartheid. It was around this time a young Mphande began protesting against both his country’s dictator and apartheid in the South.
Banda became president in 1966, during which he ruled over a one-party system. In 1971, Banda declared himself “president for life,” according to the Associated Press. During the three decades he governed Malawi, Banda maintained “open and formal ties with apartheid-ruled South Africa and Israel,” while “thousands of political opponents were killed, tortured, jailed without trial or hounded into exile” under his rule.
This was also when Mphande’s arrests began, which continued through his time completing a bachelor’s program in English literature and history of international relations.
“I was viewed as an enemy, because [Banda] was one of the very few African leaders who agreed with the apartheid system,” Mphande said.
Mphande went on to study in England, where he got his master’s degree in applied linguistics at the University of Lancaster in 1979. However, Mphande still fought against apartheid from across the pond by connecting with exiled South African activists who had fled to Britain.
In 1983, Mphande returned to Malawi, where Banda was cracking down on protesters. Then, as Mphande tried to leave the country, he was involved in a car crash, which he personally suspects wasn’t an accident.
The accident caused the death of one of his colleagues and left Mphande himself with broken knees and ribs.
“I had to leave the country on a stretcher,” Mphande said.
In 1985, he came to the United States, determined to earn a Ph.D. in applied linguistics at the University of Texas. There, he discovered the United States had its own share of racial disparities.
During that time, Mphande said he saw the way citizens in Africa and the United States alike can be controlled or misled by a lack of education.
“The oppressive, colonizing powers took advantage of people who were ignorant, so that they could easily sell their distorted philosophies to try and convince Africans that they are inherently inferior,” he said.
Mphande said he wanted to teach people more about global politics and culture, which is what led him to become an educator.
Mphande came to Ohio State in 1989, where he found a Black Studies Department with the potential to grow.
Mphande helped to develop courses within the department that focused on Africa. He said he believes in the importance of teaching African history and languages, and when he first began, Swahili was the only African language available at Ohio State. Now, he’s helped add seven more, including Hausa, Shona, Somali, Swahili, Twi, Yoruba and Zulu.
“When I came here, the only course I could identify at Ohio State that directly related to Africa was a course in geography, so nothing about the people and culture,” Mphande said. “I was interested in having much more robust studies that would include African countries.”
Simone Drake, vice chair of the African American and African Studies Department and professor of English, said Mphande changed the way Black studies was taught, bringing together the history of Black people from African countries and the United States.
“Sometimes, there’s sort of a divide between African American studies and African studies,” Drake said. “[Mphande] seemed really invested in bridging that divide.”
Mphane has also worked to expand the university’s study abroad programs to include South Africa and Zuluand, now working as the director of the study abroad programs to Southern Africa.
Dawn Chisebe, a previous student of Mphande’s and professor of African studies at Ohio Wesleyan University, said Mphande’s work through study abroad programs empowers students’ education and gives them opportunities to expand their worldview — something she said she experienced when she met the first president of Zambia, Kenneth Kaunda, with Mphande.
“When [students] are learning from him, they’re learning from someone who is a primary source,” Chisebe said. “He lives and breathes what he teaches.”
In the early 1990s, Mphande spoke out against the disproportionate number of Black soldiers being sent to Iraq, for which he suffered backlash — even being called racist himself.
The Gulf War began in 1990, in which United States troops fought against Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, according to the Naval History and Heritage Command website. Mphande held panels with other professors at New Salem Baptist Church discussing their thoughts on the war and the role of Black soldiers. In 1991, a story about one of these panels was published in The Lantern. Additionally, a letter which called Mphande and two other professors, Professor Horace Newsum and Professor William Nelson, racists, was published in a subsequent edition.
In 1992, as one of the first Black families to move into a Hilliard, Ohio, neighborhood, Mphande’s home was set on fire by white supremacists. In 1996, his car was vandalized with racial slurs and references to hate groups.
Throughout this time, Mphande wrote poetry. He said he started writing in high school, but eventually published four volumes of his work since 1998.
Mphande has also won various literary and arts awards and been featured in multiple poetry collections, textbooks and journals, including The Kenyon Review.
“I write a lot about issues that have to do with the sanctity of life, preservation of the environment, social interactions [and] the fact that everything is interrelated,” Mphande said.
His background in political activism, education, travel and art has given Mphande a unique perspective on modern politics, he said.
“In Zulu, Africa, we have a saying that says ‘I am because we are,’” Mphande said. “In other words, a human being is not an island. You exist because others exist. So, you have always got to be mindful of others, because you have a common destiny.”
Chisebe said Mphande is a true interdisciplinary scholar, and she encourages her own students to seek him out for guidance, which she said he still offers her to this day.
“He is a linguist, a poet, a literary scholar, a historian and someone who has always fought for what is good and just in the world,” Chisbe said.
Drake said Mphande’s global political activism is part of what makes him a distinct and exemplary educator and activist.
“He has been a professor who has been committed to community-engaged work, which is something that you don’t have to do as a professor,” Drake said. “It’s a choice.”
Reflecting on present-day activism on Ohio State’s campus, Mphande said he remembers the feeling of being a young protester. He said students and young people are idealistic and dream about the future in a way that makes protesting and activism particularly effective.
“That’s what is behind most of the young protesters — an expression of what they want tomorrow,” said Mphande. “A student means an idealist. They have their dreams, which is what the idealism is.”
When it comes to today’s political landscape, Mphande said he connects his past activism against the War in Iraq to current rollbacks on DEI.
“The decision to send those people to war should be as broadly based as possible, which means it has to be inclusive,” Mphande said. “This team that is making decisions, should it not be diversified and include all faces of society?”
Mphande said he is also concerned about lasting political and race-relation issues within the United States and Africa. Mphande said the lingering effects of South African apartheid mean there are still wealth and land disparities between white and Black citizens in South Africa.
President Donald Trump and South African-born Elon Musk oppose the South African government’s efforts to decrease this land disparity, calling it “racist” and “hateful” to the white “ethnic minority” in the Feb. 7 executive order “Addressing Egregious Actions of The Republic of South Africa.”
Mphande said he believes this attitude is a display of white supremacy, as it’s a way to keep Black South Africans oppressed and continue the apartheid that was supposed to have ended long ago.
“Apartheid ended on the books, but in practice, you still have this separation of white city and Black ghetto,” Mphande said.
Though Mphande sees these glaring issues within the current political landscape, he doesn’t feel completely discouraged, as he said he recognizes the power of protest and revolution.
“Dreams should be about improvement, about having a better tomorrow — that this ought to work tomorrow,” Mphande said. “[Students] are the ones at the height of it. You are making decisions now, but that’s what you want. So, what decisions are you going to make for us?”
In a November 2024 Pan-African Parliament meeting in Midrand, a guest from the Afro-Caribbean diaspora asked a simple but profound question to the continental MPs: “Why is Pan-Africanism declining?”
The question should have elicited vigorous debate but, like so many vital critical issues, it barely got any attention from the delegates.
Pan-Africanism has a long history. The yearning for freedom and human dignity inspired abolitionism, nationalism and the creation of nation states. But postcolonial African states have not, by and large, succeeded in nurturing accountable and effective institutions as well as vibrant civic life in each territory, and among countries, to give substance to the spirit of Pan-Africanism.
Pan-Africanism is in decline as that delegate noted, but the question is: Why? Before offering an analysis of how it came to this state, it is useful to provide its brief history.
The first rumblings of Pan-Africanism emerged in the Americas during the era of slavery when Africans from many regions on the continent were forcibly cast together under the most inhuman system of oppression the world has ever known. Whether they were from west, central, south, north or east Africa, their common subjugation created a new identity which gradually evolved to African-American or Afro-Caribbean.
Struggling against slavery and its dehumanisation became the soul of the Black Abolitionist’s movement and their white allies. This collective identity formation has endured and inspired many other subjugated peoples in the Americas, such as the women’s movement.
Further, after the abolition of slavery, religious elements of the African American population saw colonialism as the continuation of slavery in another guise. Some came to preach in Africa as they thought the church could be a force for liberation.
The second iteration of Pan-Africanism evolved with the struggle for liberation in Africa and the Caribbean. This involved mutual support among the liberation movements in various colonies and regions with the primary goal of gaining political independence. Nkrumah’s (Ghana) and Nasir’s (Egypt) advocacy for African liberation and unity were exemplar cases.
Third, once the majority of countries in the continent became independent, the stage was set for the formalisation of Pan-Africanism. This led to the creation of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) in 1963. The OAU was most successful in supporting the liberation movements in southern Africa. Nevertheless, internal division between post-colonial blocks in the OAU, such as Francophone and Anglophone, remained.
Fourth, the demise of apartheid South Africa in 1994 closed the curtain on the liberation agenda. The ambitious new Republic of South Africa, under the leadership of President Nelson Mandela and his deputy, Thabo Mbeki, tried to energise the OAU.
Mandela and Mbeki genuinely spoke for Africa and made attempts to rejuvenate the continental organisation with the support of others. Consequently, the OAU was renamed the African Union (AU) in a continental meeting in Durban, South Africa, in 2002. The aim was to advance African integration as well as give the continent a greater muscle in international affairs.
Over time, a number of AU institutions were established, such as the African Court of Human and People’s Rights (1998); the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (2001); the AU Commission (2002); the African Peace and Security Council (2002); and the Pan-African Parliament (2004).
A mismatch between the rhetoric and reality of the AU
The formal institutional structure of the OAU/AU has been in place for over 60 years. Despite such longevity, Pan-Africanism has not evolved significantly beyond formalities.
For Pan-Africanism to flourish, three things must be in place: 1) Common institutions that methodically and steadily gain legitimacy by effectively solving some of the strategic regional and continental problems; 2) A growing progressive and cohesive civic identity within each nation state; and 3) A rising continental civic identity anchored on the successful operations of the AU institutions.
But significant advances have not been made in these vital areas. Among the major problems on the continent has been the prevalence of unaccountable and corrupt regimes in most parts of the continent for decades. Such regimes fuel communal strife which undermines trust among populations and between them and states.
Moreover, corrupt practices in the public and private sectors in many countries have been so normalised such that ordinary people are relegated as subjects rather than citizens.
These national political cultures impede the transformation of the spirit of liberation into civic bonds in each country. Examples of countries suffering from such maladies include Nigeria, Egypt, Zimbabwe, Central African Republic, Cameroon, Kenya, DRC, Malawi, Congo, Angola, Ethiopia. Eritrea, Chad, Sudan, Gabon, South Sudan, Liberia, Libya, Somalia, etc.
Without vibrant civic culture in most countries, it is inconceivable to develop substantive civic ties across national borders. The sentiments of the liberation days are still alive in many parts of the continent, although waning, but few shared political bonds have been created and nurtured across borders to facilitate shared regional or continental civic agendas.
Because of the dearth of substantive civic bonds across national boundaries, two factors have hobbled the AU’s capacity to give real substance to Pan-Africanism.
First, the AU has become the annual club of mostly unaccountable leaders where deliberations rarely ever positively advance the freedoms of ordinary people or their material wellbeing.
Second, the unfocused and unrealistically expansive bureaucratic agenda of the AU makes it dependent on the financial generosity of non-Africans. For instance, continentally generated resources cover only 32% of the AU budget while 65% originates from outside.
The AU’s need for substantial budgetary support from outside to finance its agenda means that it does not have financial autonomy to chart an Afrocentric developmental agenda. A clear example of this weakness is the AU’s inability to silence the guns in countries such as Sudan, South Sudan, Somalia, Ethiopia, DRC, etc, and prevent the ill effects of foreign agendas as was the case in Libya, where Nato ignored the AU plea, deposed Gaddafi, and instigated a civil war.
The Pan-African spirit lives on, but…
A Somali proverb best captures the Pan-African conundrum: “Hal xaaraani nirig xalaala ma dhasho.” This literally means that an illegitimate she-camel cannot give birth to a legitimate offspring.
The implication of the proverb is that corrupt, authoritarian, incompetent and sectarian leaders cannot inspire the progressive revolution which Pan-Africanism requires. Political and economic mismanagement in the nation states, with a few exceptions, is not a good recipe for continental advancement.
Thus, the dearth of rich and vibrant civic political culture in most African countries, and national political leaders bereft of trust, cannot inspire and build continental institutions that can rejuvenate substantive Pan-Africanism.
There is little doubt that the spirit of Pan-Africanism lives among our people, but it will require a new cohort of leaders as well as purposely organised civic movements to alter our Pan-Africanist fortunes. DM
Two elderly residents of Sardinia, a certified Blue Zone. Photo: Claudine Doury/Agence VU’/Redux
It is exceptionally hard to know how long long-lived animals endure. For the vast majority of species there are no growth rings to count, no blood tests to perform, no methods beyond marking time. The way scientists assess the longevity of wild animals is to tag them, go away, and hope to see them again. We know albatrosses live long lives because a 38-year-old ornithologist put a ring on a bird and caught her again when he was 84. Once, a termite queen lived in the laboratory for 21 years; no one can say whether this is typical in the wild or particular to this singular, persistent insect. How long tortoises live is unclear. We know bowhead whales live past 100 because in 2007 a whale was caught with harpoon points lodged in its shoulder bone, weapons not used in well over a century.
Our recordkeeping is more sophisticated when turned on ourselves; the average life expectancy of an Australian human male is solidly 81. In 2016, Saul Newman was a clean-shaven 31-year-old working in a sterile glass box in Canberra, Australia, part of a lab where geneticists probed the internal mysteries of wheat. Saul Newman loves plants. “Broccolini was invented in the ’80s by the Sakata Seed Corporation,” he once said to me. “Isn’t that wonderful?” One day a friend from his Ph.D. cohort sent him a paper in Nature called “Evidence for a limit to human lifespan,” thinking he might be interested in the subject. What interested Newman about this paper, as he made his way, increasingly exasperated, through pages of arguments for a maximum lifespan of about 115 years for humans, was how extraordinarily bad it was. “A horror show,” he called it. “They’ve done everything wrong,” he said to a colleague, astonished that such work could appear in a journal as prestigious as Nature. When he ran the data independently, he got a wildly different result.
Scientists would later describe Newman and his work to me in the following ways: “totally inappropriate,” “just plain offensive,” “misleading,” and “potentially libelous.” He was not even a demographer, his future enemies would delight in telling me, but a “crop scientist.” This last part was true. Newman’s grasp of graph theory and interpretable machine learning made him ideally suited to understand gene-environment interactions in wheat. He was thus unaware that he had stumbled into the most bitter feud in academic demography, between S. Jay Olshansky, a Chicago-based biodemographer who believes there is a natural limit to human life, and the late James Vaupel, who led the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Germany until 2017 and believed life to be potentially limitless. In Olshansky’s telling, Vaupel would misrepresent Olshansky’s work at conferences, Olshansky would publicly correct him, and Vaupel would shout at him before a collective hundreds of people over decades.
Olshansky was not a co-author of the paper Newman found fault with, but he was a reviewer; the paper tracked with his ideas about limited lifespans. Newman published a response to the paper. Many scientists, in fact, published responses to this paper, which had become notorious. “They just shoveled data into their computer like you’d shovel food into a cow,” was the response from Jim Vaupel. In 2018, Vaupel and his colleagues published a competing paper called “The plateau of human mortality,” arguing that after age 105, death rates plateaued, which implied that people could live for far longer. Newman read the paper written in opposition to the paper he had called a “horror show.” He found this paper equally bad. The authors chose a seemingly arbitrary age range for their analysis. When Newman tested every other age range — he found 861 possibilities — none came back with a publishable result. “A remarkable coincidence,” Newman called it in his acid response. The first instance had at least looked like incompetence; this seemed like something else.
Newman had no strong feelings about limits to human life, but he was passionate about proper statistical practice. By now, he was involved. He was immersed. It wasn’t obsession, he insists; it was the vexing sense that “someone was wrong on the internet,” “like a nail poking up that you just haven’t hammered down.” His marriage to the mother of his two young children was failing. In his free time, he sought out stories of the longest-lived people in history, and it seemed to him that, inevitably, these people turned out to be frauds.
He admired the elderly con artists — good for them — but not the evidentiary standards on which their stories were based. There was Shigechiyo Izumi, thought to be the oldest man alive, Guinness validated, though it seems that he was impersonating his brother. There was Venezuelan Juan Vicente Pérez Mora, also Guinness approved, thought to have lived until the age of 114, though he had no documentation until the age of 54. When he analyzed U.N. data, Newman found that Western Sahara, a region without a functional government, ranked at the top of the longevity hierarchy, along with Malawi, one of the poorest countries in the world. Rather than ask whether this might be due to poor recordkeeping, it seemed to Newman, demographers turned to surprising theories about the longevity of Black people. In a 2020 paper titled “Why are supercentenarians so frequently found in French Overseas Departments?” French demographer Jacques Vallin sought to explain the data in Martinique and Guadeloupe. His answer: Owing to “the high fertility of Black people,” the island was largely populated with those benefiting from “the tremendous health selection effect of slavery.” In a master’s thesis written by Robert Young, who runs a database of supercentenarians (those 110 and older) frequently referenced in peer-reviewed studies and relied upon by Guinness World Records, Newman found a different theory: African Americans may have skin that is “less wrinkled and thicker than” white skin, which “protects their internal organs.” “There is even a saying in the black community,” Young adds. “Black don’t crack.”
“It is not that racist ideas and largely fake data are present in the literature,” Newman would later write, “although these are extremely serious problems, but that such issues are met by a resounding absence of criticism or action.”
Newman was already convinced he had happened upon a thoroughly corrupt field of study when he came upon something called “blue zones.” Blue zones were supposedly places where people lived exceptionally long lives, places like Okinawa, Japan; Ikaria, Greece; and a handful of villages in Sardinia. It was Newman’s contention that these were simply areas with high rates of error or fraud; people were given to lie about being old, and demographers were given to believe them. He included an assault on the concept of blue zones in a paper on larger issues in demography, called it “Supercentenarians and the oldest-old are concentrated into regions with no birth certificates and short lifespans,” and sent it out to journals in 2019.
Newman had not had trouble publishing in the past, but in this instance he fielded rejection after rejection. He reasoned that he was trying to publish a paper attacking the field of demography in demography journals refereed by academic demographers, which was like “trying to tell the yeti-hunting society that yetis did not exist.” Feeling defeated, he posted the paper on the preprint server bioRxiv and linked to it on Twitter, where he had only a couple hundred followers, possibly because a typical tweet of his read “Adding dynamic rate of change vectors to expression levels? Pretty cool.” The post got seven retweets.
In 2021, Newman interviewed for a new job at the Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science at the University of Oxford, a quantitative-demography center that focuses on creative uses for extant data. The center put out an open call for researchers and got what associate professor of data science and informatics Charles Rahal, who was on the hiring committee, called “a very, very large” number of applications. The pool, said Rahal, was “extraordinary … unbelievably strong and highly diverse.” Newman was hired, in part, on the rigor of his training: He was not just a statistician but one with training in genetic analysis, which is particularly complex.
Newman arrived during the height of COVID. He was locked out of Australia, where his children were, and spoke, in Oxford, only to the doorman of his building. His paper remained unpublished, and he was profoundly depressed. It seemed to him that he had made an incredible discovery — an entire academic subfield built on bad data! — but no one would listen. He grew his hair out into a messy red mane, his beard bushy and his mustache a symmetrical circus-strongman curl. When he traveled to Portugal, the first person he encountered offered him cocaine. “This is hilarious,” he thought, warming to the new look.
Newman saw that his engagement with the world of old-age demography, in particular the rejection by gatekeepers from that world, was making him deeply unhappy. Online, he was called arrogant and attention seeking; Robert Young, of the thicker-skin hypothesis, called him uninformed. Newman’s paper was not particularly subtle in its attacks on other scientists, but he didn’t seem to like where the animosity led. “The most aggressive thing I ever heard anyone say in plant science,” he told me, “was I need to agree to disagree with you.” In any case, his paper had been rejected a dozen times; what was the point? He would move on. He was concerned about the encroaching war with Russia, and what it would do to the price of wheat, and the starvation that would result. He went to a protest against the war and there saw a woman he had met once before, a 40-year-old Ph.D. student from Russia named Elena Racheva. She was surprised about how emotional he was about the wheat. A few months later, Racheva began working in the sociology department at Oxford. She saw Newman in the office. “I’m from a culture where you are supposed to be very blunt,” Racheva told me in her thick Russian accent. “You’re supposed to unload everything that you feel and think now. I know that it’s not the way to behave here, and I try to adjust my personality toward rules of etiquette in the U.K. If someone asked, How are things, you would just answer, Fine. And so we met next to the coffee machine. I asked, So how are things? And he said, You know what? My brother was diagnosed with a tumor.”
Elena and Saul moved in together. Newman spoke rapturously of rice; a man had figured out how to increase the lifespan of rice eight times over, wasn’t it wonderful? They bought some fish and, thinking they were not long for this world, named them Fíli and Kíli, after two dwarves who die in The Hobbit. When Newman spoke of the statistical horrors of demography, it was something he had given up long ago. He didn’t want to think about numerical dates; he wanted to think about actual dates. In 2008, researchers found a 2,000-year-old date seed under Herod’s fortress in Israel. They planted it. It grew. “There’s a little thing that’s alive in there,” he told me, his eyes alight, “like a little spaceship.”
The problem is this: A century is a very long while in which to keep time. Age exaggeration, writes Steven Austad, a professor of biology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham,“is a universal form of vanity among aged humans. An 85-year-old man is just another codger, but a 130-year-old man … is a celebrity, a guru of longevity whose advice on successful living is broadcast far and wide.” Birth records did not become universal in the U.S. until the 1940s. When records are cleaned up, centenarians vanish, as 94 percent of American centenarians did after the 1970 Census. When literacy increases, the number of centenarians falls. Sweden, thought to have the best records in the world, has a reasonable number of centenarians: just under 28 per 100,000. U.N. statistics put Puerto Rico at an incredible 78 centenarians per 100,000; in 2010, owing to widespread fraud, the territory declared all birth certificates null and void.
With surprising regularity, people simply forget how old they are. They lie about their ages to collect pensions and to avoid military drafts. If you are a Japanese mother who loses a child in wartime conditions, you may not want to walk a full day to register your next child; you may simply transfer the old registration to the living newborn. In 2010, Tokyo welfare officials wanted to congratulate Sogen Kato, the city’s oldest man, on his 111th birthday. Family members said he had “become a living Buddha” and turned them away, but authorities eventually forced their way in to find Kato in his pajamas, mummified in his own bed, perhaps 30 years dead. His daughter and granddaughter were charged with pension fraud. Authorities in Japan, where the current official number of centenarians is an impressive 76.5 per 100,000, thought it might be a good time to check on Tokyo’s oldest woman; her daughter hadn’t seen her in 30 years. “Over 230,000 Japanese centenarians,” Newman writes, “were discovered to be missing, imaginary, clerical errors, or dead — an error rate of 82 percent in data then considered among the best in the world.” Jeanne Calment, who most demographers consider the oldest person on record, died in 1997 at 122, but this is controversial; some people think her daughter was impersonating her. “Come on,” Newman told me. “She burned her personal effects.”
In the late ’90s, Belgian demographer Michel Poulain heard a presentation on the concentration of the oldest old in a few villages in Sardinia. All the demographers in the room, he said, were skeptical; so many supposed Shangri-las had turned on nothing more than credulous scientists. “It’s impossible,” a colleague in Rome told him. It was too mountainous; there would be no records. “I was convinced before going there,” Poulain told me, that “I will find quickly the reason why the ages are false.” He arrived in Sardinia on January 20, 2000; there was a snowstorm, and in one of the villages that night a celebration for four alleged centenarians. “I say, Wow, I will not go in there to congratulate them and then to say after them they are false, okay? That would be very bad. So I decide to run to the municipality to see if some documents at least exist.” They did, to his surprise, exist; they were readable and sequential, written in a loping careful script in broad, thin books he pulled from a high shelf while two officials, seated at desks, watched. There was an annual book for births, and one for deaths, and another for marriages. The date of death was marked in both the death register and in the margin of the birth register. If these records were consistent, he was satisfied, though never, he said, certain. (“You have a positive feeling, but you leave the door open.”) If there was an inconsistency, he turned for help to baptismal records at a nearby church. With Gianni Pes, the researcher who had initially told him about Sardinia, Poulain would construct a genealogical tree of the entire village, piece by piece. He visited with 40 claimed centenarians. “Most of the time I take their hand,” he said, “and there is a lot of energy that transfer between us. This is for me the most important moment. I am able to sit nearby a centenarian to take their hand just to feel their intense flame inside.”
Every time they validated a centenarian, his team marked a blue dot on a map; places with a high concentration of dots became blue zones. (“You will ask me why is it blue,” he said, a question I did not have. “It’s just because I like the blue color. There’s nothing else than this.”) Sardinia was especially surprising because, while women centenarians usually outnumber men four-to-one, here their numbers were roughly the same. He found among the villages’ centenarians one error; Damiana Sette had her age listed as 110, but she was “only 107”; her older sister had died at age 2, and the records had gotten mixed up. He would return to Sardinia, he said, 50 times, becoming so intimate with the documentation in these particular villages that municipal authorities would call him, in Belgium, when they had a question.
All of the scientists and demographers I spoke to for this story who believed there was something to the concept of blue zones believed it because they trusted Michel Poulain. “If Michel gives it his blessing, then that means that these ages have been validated reliably, and you don’t have to worry about it,” Olshansky told me. “He basically wrote the book on how to validate extreme ages,” said Austad, who advises skepticism in believing whatever age your local zoo claims for its eldest tortoise (“The chelonian chain of custody always goes murky”) and has a pet parrot named Hector he thinks may be 72. “He’s been an extreme skeptic all along. And so the fact that he would validate those things suggests to me that they’re really solid because he questions everything.”
In 2004, when Poulain was 57, he was approached by a 44-year-old journalist-explorer named Dan Buettner. Buettner was a three-time Guinness World Record–setting long-distance biker. He was an educational entrepreneur. He had energy, and ambition, and, most important, money — an overall budget of $250,000 from National Geographic. Thus began one of the most complex entanglements of Poulain’s life. With Poulain as a source, Buettner published a cover story, “The Secrets of Living Longer,” in National Geographic in 2005, against an image of an 84-year-old Okinawan man doing a headstand on the beach. In 2006, with tens of thousands in National Geographic Explorer grants, Buettner came to Poulain with a new idea: They could use the money to verify more blue zones beyond Okinawa (which had been verified by a Japanese researcher in the ’70s) and Sardinia. Buettner, Poulain, Pes, and their team ventured to Costa Rica and Ikaria together. There were so few centenarians in the blue zones they visited that it was possible, with Buettner’s money, to do what Poulain considered a thorough investigation of every one.
The National Geographic article and the 2008 book that followed — (“A must-read if you want to stay young!” according to Dr. Mehmet Oz) — described the lives of centenarians and active elderly as Buettner saw them. He identified four blue zones: Okinawa, small areas within Sardinia and Costa Rica, and the Adventist community of Loma Linda, California, which did not actually meet Poulain’s criteria for a blue zone but was included on the theory that Americans would care more about having an American blue zone than about maintaining methodological consistency.
Poulain had his ideas about why the blue zones were producing so many centenarians; the key to long life, he told me, was “to live and to love.” Buettner had a similar perspective, and he wanted to sell it. He developed a succinct series of rules he called the “Power Nine” with advice like “avoid meat” (Plant Slant); “relieve stress” (Downshift); “engage in low-intensity physical activity, such as gardening” (Move Naturally); and “participate in a spiritual community” (Belong). His claims referenced work by scientists who reinforced the view that a simpler, more bucolic existence led to longevity; he leaned heavily, for instance, on the work of Craig and Bradley Willcox, authors of The Okinawa Program, who claimed that Okinawans’ devotion to imo, a Japanese sweet potato, accounted for their unmatched ability to stay alive.
Few storytellers have so successfully translated academic work into pop-science stardom. Eat plants, exercise, be social: We love to learn what we already know. Anderson Cooper covered it, as did Oprah. It was the kind of story you could fit in a headline, the kind of story you could transform into a TED Talk, which Buettner obviously would. Diane Sawyer, Walter Cronkite, and Barbara Walters appeared in the acknowledgments. A cookbook followed, a book framed as a “four-week challenge,” a book on happiness. By 2008, Buettner, founder of Blue Zones LLC, was dating supermodel Cheryl Tiegs. “Longevity equals pickleball plus sex,” he told GQ, adding that he had just biked home from dinner with Ryan Seacrest. Today, Dan Buettner is a tall, slim, tanned white man, graying naturally and well in the manner of someone you’d expect to see wearing a performance fleece in the Denver airport. If you were not previously familiar with his empire, you will now notice it everywhere. While writing this article, I lived in Los Angeles, adjacent to the beach city of Redondo, which has contracted with Blue Zones LLC to become a Blue Zones–certified municipality, and I fled the L.A. fires for Palm Springs, a city that had just committed $180,000 for a similar Blue Zones project. I moved to Los Angeles from Iowa City, which had been Blue Zones certified but got tired of paying for it. Post-fire, I returned to Los Angeles and stocked up at the Silver Lake Whole Foods, where I came upon a $7.59 Blue Zones Kitchen Sesame Ginger Bowl “crafted for longevity,” a ginger bowl I regret to say I was not eating when I came across the four-part Buettner-hosted Netflix series, Live to 100: Secrets of the Blue Zones. Prior to any of that, I got an email from my health-care provider, UCLA Health, advising that if I “want to live longer,” I “take a closer look at blue zones,” health-care advice that, I think it’s fair to say, I have taken.
The company Dan Buettner founded, Blue Zones LLC, has expanded beyond books and documentaries to pantry items and green tea from Okinawa. Photo: Photographs: Alexander Tamargo/Getty Images (Buettner); Courtesy of the vendors (Remaining)
In the years that followed, Poulain’s relations with Buettner became strained. For one thing, Buettner had trademarked the term Poulain coined without even mentioning it to him, such that Blue Zones is reserved for the company. (“It was my blue pen,” Poulain said sadly.) Poulain, now a white-bearded 77-year-old, maintains his own blue-zones website, which identifies itself, pointedly, as a “scientific research website by Michel Poulain” and has precisely nothing to sell you. “This is fully outside of my vision,” he said when I asked him about Blue Zones–branded canned soup. “Fully. Fully outside.” He tolerated the expansion of the Blue Zones empire for ten years, until Chanel released Blue Serum, a lotion purporting to include “ingredients native to Blue Zones,” and Buettner wanted to sue. Buettner’s lawyer asked Poulain to testify. “No!” he said. “Impossible! Impossible!” Poulain said he was not part of the Netflix documentary; he didn’t even know which blue zones were mentioned. “I just saw that I was not involved. That is something a bit amazing? But okay, let’s forget this.”
In 2023, Newman, having given up on his paper, was surprised to hear from the editor of an epidemiology journal who wanted to publish it with revisions. Newman told Racheva he would revise the paper and then “never return to the topic, never in my life.” He spent a month working on it, a month, Racheva recalled, in which he was “very unhappy … he’s really emotional about this.” He appended a supplement that involved accusations of racism and called out the field of demography for refusing to acknowledge data that was obviously ludicrous. After it, too, was rejected, he told Racheva he was done.
A few months after that, Newman was on his bike in spitting rain when he answered a phone call from a Cambridge professor. Newman had a new job, researching mortality at the University College London, but retained a desk at Oxford and continued to live there. His paper, still unpublished, was up for a prize called the Ig Nobel, awarded by an MIT-affiliated magazine called Annals of Improbable Research and intended to highlight amusing academic work. The professor asked if Newman wished to be taken out of consideration, presumably because some academics might find the award embarrassing. He did not want to be taken out of consideration; Newman revels in absurdity. (“The list of people who have claimed to be the pope is fantastic,” he said to me once on a video call from Jaipur; his hair flowered madly over a stretchy headband like a bunch of broccoli.) Eventually, it became clear that Saul was not only under consideration; he had won.
He flew to MIT. He wore a suit with a colorful Tetris print and a conical party hat over his voluminous hair. He read, onstage, a poem:
I was working away in my little lab,
Undisturbed by bunkum and woo,
When I was told the way not to get old
Was the Blue Zones lifestyle breakthrough …
But the secrets fell over like a lover in clover
When I checked the government books.
The blue zones are poor, the records no more,
The hundred-year-olds are all crooks!
After the Ig Nobel Awards, journalists began calling Saul Newman so often he was having trouble responding: The Guardian, the New York Times, NPR. He did a month of media, night and day, and he was a great interview: concise and specific and winsomely exasperated.
In the many versions of his paper, Newman finds that the alleged blue zones in Sardinia, Okinawa, and Ikaria are, in their respective countries, notable for their poverty, low incomes, and bad health. Other supposed hot spots had a suspiciously low percentage of 90-somethings. They are poor areas in high-welfare states, an incentive to fraud. “Every proposed BZ displays patterns,” he writes, “that suggest a dominant role of error, fraud, and (to phrase it generously) researcher degrees of freedom in explaining the distribution of extreme-age records.” On Okinawa he is particularly savage. Citing national data, Newman contends that the prefecture has the highest murder rate per capita, highest unemployment, second-lowest median income, highest percentage of older people on welfare, highest per capita intake of KFC, highest BMI, lowest per capita consumption of Japanese sweet potatoes, and, as a legacy of American occupation, averages 14 cans of SPAM annually per person. “All nine claimed drivers of extreme longevity,” writes Newman, “are assessable through data measured by the government of Japan. The ‘power nine’ claims are directly contradicted in every single case, usually through population-representative surveys of hundreds of thousands of people, with levels of inaccuracy that border on farce”:
The older residents of Okinawa are not filled with purpose, or ikigai, at remarkable rates: Over-65 Okinawans have the fourth-highest suicide rate in Japan. Older Okinawans do not “grow gardens”: They self-report the lowest rate of gardening in the country, beating only the apartment-dominated Tokyo and Osaka megacities. Okinawans do not eat “Meat … only five times per month” in three-to-four-ounce servings, which would total 5.1 to 6.8 kilograms a year: They consume well over 40 kilograms of meat a year without including seafood. Nor do Okinawans overwhelmingly “belong to some faith-based community”: They are 93.4 percent atheist, the most irreligious population in Japan, ranking third to last in the country for religious attendance.
During the firebombing of Okinawa in WWII, a majority of family records were lost and afterward reissued by representatives of an American occupation government that neither spoke the language nor used the same calendar, events Newman refers to, in the archest of academic language, as “the enrichment of regular error-generating processes.”
Michel Poulain wouldn’t even read Newman’s paper because it wasn’t peer-reviewed. (“I refuse! I refuse because I will not lose my time. Have you seen this video where he receives the prize? It’s crazy! Really crazy!”) He was the blue-zones guy, not the Blue Zones guy, and yet his work, now under attack, had been leashed to Buettner’s “Power Nine.” But it was Buettner who couldn’t stop thinking about it. He felt the press coverage was malpractice; couldn’t journalists see that the paper was hackwork from a crop scientist, whereas his books referenced credentialed experts in their respective fields? He knew data could be unreliable; this was why he had turned to Poulain. Newman was using data that did not correspond precisely to the blue zones themselves, which were not official jurisdictions. “The real story here,” he told me, “is the sad state of science journalism.” He sent a letter from himself, the Willcox brothers, and other demographers and scientists attesting to the legitimacy of the blue zones. He sent comments from Jay Olshansky, who had been asked to review Newman’s paper and rejected it “as it was loaded with unsupported assertions that bordered on libelous.” He hoped I had time to talk to Michel Poulain, and Bradley Willcox, and other scientists who would speak to the validity of his claims, and in fact did, notwithstanding their thoughts on Buettner himself. His usual method in encountering criticism was to reach out, make a call, forge a connection. But he had already reached out to Newman in 2019, when the preprint first appeared.
“I actually like your pluck and your statistical prowess,” he wrote in an email to which neither man can remember whether Newman responded. “Instead of focusing on a decade-plus-old process, how about we team up to take advantage of more robust data and updated techniques to evolve the definition of blue zones? I’ve been commissioned by National Geographic to identify a sixth blue zone. We could discuss a new definition so we could do a good job — we could actually travel there and do the verification together.”
When I asked to meet him in mid-to-late February, Buettner came back immediately with a list of choices: I could come with him to see his family in Minnesota, somehow get to a talk he was giving in Bangkok, watch him testify alongside Senator Kirsten Gillibrand in D.C., visit him at home in Miami Beach, or come, within 48 hours, to a Wisconsin-based event called “Frosty Friday,” wherein he and a dozen friends play a hockey-adjacent game called broomball, go for a midnight ski, carve a hole in a frozen lake, and jump into it. As nice as Miami Beach sounded, professional duty entailed Frosty Friday, and so I dug out a parka, flew to Minnesota, and drove out to his remote vacation home just as a snowstorm descended. “You’re a brave girl,” Buettner said when he opened the door. (Longevity people were always calling me “girl,” or saying things like “You wouldn’t understand, since you’re in your 20s,” which, every time, I appreciated.)
The lake house, an ostentatiously gilded, insistently masculine retreat, with ornate doors, spindly chandeliers, and a carving of mountain-scaling bucks above the stone fireplace, was never Buettner’s style. What was Buettner’s style was offering the original owner, who was in some kind of legal trouble, more than a million below the asking price. “I lowballed him,” he said more than once. Now it is the site of Buettner’s happiest days: surrounded by his adult kids and, on Frosty Friday at least, his friends, mild middle-aged Minnesota men who excel at concisely explaining themselves. A guy who ran an indie-music venue had recently fallen through the ice of a local lake while riding his electric bicycle across it. A hotel scion squeezing lime after lime into a copper canister of mezcal casually dropped that he had once been on the Olympic team for the canoe slalom. “Ever heard of Earth Day?” one man said. “That’s me.”
“Are you an ice-fishing enthusiast?” I asked a man carving a hole in the lake with a long saw.
“No,” he said, “I’m a sauna enthusiast.” He founded something called Longevity Financial Partners. He was wearing three layers, but they were all unbuttoned; his chest was exposed to the cold.
“More people will turn 65 this year than ever have in the history of the country,” he said, drawing the saw back and forth against the ice.
Buettner had sold Blue Zones LLC to a nonprofit called Adventist Health in 2020. I would spend months confused about why he was so troubled by Saul Newman, a researcher with what amounted to a popular blog post about a company Dan Buettner no longer owned. Buettner had traveled the world, scaled mountains, and come home with a tale for which Americans were incredibly, enduringly receptive. His Netflix documentary had recently won an Emmy. He was living what was by all appearances a fantastically prosperous life in a walkable urban environment. Saul Newman was a guy in a library arguing about statistics. The contrast didn’t seem to matter. “I feel like,” Buettner told me, “did you ever read The Trial, by Franz Kafka? I feel like that guy. I’m being accused of something I never did, and it’s kind of ruining me, and it’s not fair. It hurts my soul.”
Before I landed at the lake house, I knew that Dan Buettner had three world records for long-distance biking. What I did not understand until February was that Buettner had not broken these records; he had established them. He had written to The Guinness Book of World Records and pitched a record. “I wanted to bike, and I couldn’t afford it,” he said. “I asked them what they thought of a bike ride from Minnesota to Argentina. And they said, ‘Well, that’s a nice idea, but we’d be more likely to consider it if you start, say, in the Arctic Ocean.’ ” He wrote 880 letters soliciting equipment. He wanted a Casio watch, but it was Rolex that responded, so he wore it on his 305-day, 15,536-mile trek from Alaska to Argentina. Thus began a series of grueling rides across continents in a time before GPS. On his trip across Siberia, he and his team forded freezing rivers holding their bikes overhead and trudged through so much mud their legs pruned like fingers in the bath. Riding on dirt paths was like “sitting on a jackhammer” for 15 hours straight; at the end of the day, their hands were shaking so hard they could barely hold forks to eat whatever local food they had acquired: buckwheat, raw pig fat. In the Sahara Desert, the team biked against a dust storm, got themselves lost, and simply sat for 24 hours, assuming they would die.
On Frosty Friday, Buettner was cooking for everyone in the kitchen. “It’s all bullshit,” he was telling me, referring to pretty much everything trending in longevity at the moment: metformin, rapamycin, integrating your 18-year-old son’s body fluids, biohacking writ large.
“It sells people false hope. You have to follow the incentives. Nobody makes money off of encouraging people to find authentic friends and connecting with them. Nobody makes money out of you finding a sense of purpose.” If this was a strange thing to say in the kitchen of a $1.4 million Wisconsin lake house where Buettner escapes when weary of life in his $5.5 million waterfront Miami Beach condo, both undoubtedly paid for by Buettner’s series of books arguing, in part, for social connection, I was increasingly convinced that Buettner was living the principles on which his fortune was based. He was mixing a giant pot of minestrone (No. 5: Plant Slant). He was hosting a dozen friends (No. 9: Right Tribe). He had a purpose (No. 2: Purpose), and that purpose was defending his life’s work against a single man trying to undermine it. Blue zones, Buettner told me, “withstood 20 years of scrutiny until the academic equivalent of Krusty the Clown won a satirical award.”
Someone had placed a ladder in the hole in the ice. The men played a hale round of broomball (No. 1: Move Naturally) under a full moon as the temperature dropped to ten degrees; some wiped out. “You feel like you’re watching the movie Cocoon right now?” Buettner’s 38-year-old son asked, sweeping past older men to make a goal. Brooms snapped in half. After a few rounds, the men disappeared into a sauna and emerged, one by one, in a way that did not seem entirely free of social pressure, to rip off their clothes and dip their swimsuited bodies into the hole the man from Longevity Financial Partners had carved into the ice. Buettner showed up shirtless wearing a neon-green beanie that read FROSTY FRIDAY 2024. His shadow stretched long on the lake. He stepped out of his sneakers, walked barefoot on the ice, descended the ladder, and moaned as his shoulders dipped out of sight. As I left, the broomball court was dusted over, erased. The hole remained dark and waiting.
The last time Jay Olshansky saw his old rival, Jim Vaupel, they were at a conference in Washington. Olshansky walked up to the man who had screamed at him in public. “Look, Jim,” Olshansky said. “I’m glad you’ve been around all these years.” He said it half-jokingly, but he meant it. “It’s given me an opportunity to publish a large number of articles correcting all of your mistakes.” Vaupel smiled. “Same here,” he said.
In January, Newman mentioned that he had an opinion piece coming out in the New York Times, a fact I would forget about until Dan Buettner sent me an email titled “Fake News?” responding point by point to Newman’s arguments and comparing himself to Blake Lively. The strongest argument against Newman’s paper is this: Newman attempts to discredit all of old-age demography by highlighting its worst, most credulous actors, without distinguishing between what almost everyone else would consider high- and low-quality data. The blue zones, he writes, “should be considered in the context of other diverse and incongruous patterns observed in extreme old-age studies.” Should they? The paper focuses largely on suspect data regarding supercentenarians, but neither Blue Zones nor blue zones hinge on supercentenarians. On Okinawa, Buettner and Bradley and Craig Willcox, the co-authors of Okinawa Program, argue that Newman is using contemporary aggregate data about an increasingly unhealthy society to cast doubt on the narrow demographic of the oldest old, who they say remain healthy. (Newman counters that Japanese data from 1975 shows that the cohort of over-75-year-olds was already the unhealthiest in Japan.) Bradley Willcox adds that he has published statistical analyses showing that the rates of oldest old on Okinawan islands where records were not bombed are the same as those that were. Even Poulain, though, isn’t quite sure about Okinawa’s numbers; they’re so high, and he has not independently verified them, which would be both prohibitively expensive and, to his mind, rude.
I wasn’t convinced of the scientific value of knowing about a handful of very old men in Sardinia, but I was increasingly convinced that it was inaccurate to conflate Michel Poulain with people who had simply never bothered to check official records. At his dining-room table in Oxford, I asked Newman if any level of document verification would satisfy him. “No,” he said. “Because there is a whole history …” He trailed off. People have paper; the papers are wrong. “This has happened before, again, and again, and again, and again,” he said. Records can be perfectly consistent, he said, as with Shigechiyo Izumi, who was thought to be impersonating his brother, and be false. Only an accurate biological test, a technology that does not yet exist, would suffice.
After receiving the call but before the award ceremony, Newman got a call from MIT Press. Oh God, he thought. Now I have to write a book. He wanted to call it Morbid; MIT Press wasn’t so sure. He had been experiencing the roller coaster of elation and desperation familiar to authors everywhere. It was Racheva’s position that the manuscript contained too many anecdotes about the corpses of old people hidden in freezers.
“No more than five ladies in the freezer per chapter,” she said.
“Are there really multiple stories of people hidden in freezers?” I asked.
“Heaps!” Newman said.
In the next room, against expectation, Kíli was still alive. Newman wrote part of his book here, in a little cottage that looks like many other cottages in the Marston area of Oxford, on a narrow street with a corner grocery and a Scout hall with a painted sign that read, ominously given our subject, BE PREPARED.
Newman has the magnetic quality of someone keeping at bay a great sadness. He expresses a radical and all-encompassing skepticism; every closed door he cracks slightly open. I mentioned, in passing, the caveman diet; he pointed out that we knew about cavemen owing to preservation bias; people who may have lived in other environments are lost to the historical record. I mentioned Olshansky’s theory that we are meant to live between 30 and 60 years and everything beyond that is “manufactured time” gifted us by medicine and modernity; Newman said we didn’t really have any idea how long hunter-gatherers lived; it’s difficult to date bones, and the tribes that survive are not representative. It was incredible to him how little progress had been made in the field of longevity, how much of it was noise and how little signal.
Even if we disregard Newman’s warnings about statistical chicanery, there remains the question of whether longevity hot spots have anything to tell us about longevity itself. The Blue Zones books are an upsetting read for anyone attuned to the distinction between correlation and causation. Why, one might ask, have we decided that the root of Okinawan longevity is the sweet potato rather than the pork? The soy rather than the prewar starvation? “It’s not even anecdotal evidence,” Australian researcher Sarah Pasfield-Neofitou remarks on her podcast, Blue Zones: Revisited, which she made entirely because her family kept asking her to watch Buettner on Netflix. “The evidence doesn’t even come from the anecdotes.”
“For me,” Nir Barzilai, the director of the Institute for Aging Research at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, said, “this is genetics.” “Maybe some” people reach 100 “by just being good,” but most of the centenarians he has studied “are actually not good. Fifty percent of them are smoking. Fifty percent obese … Only 50 percent do even walking, moderate exercise. And yet they get to be 100.” (Barzilai, says Bradley Willcox, “doesn’t get it.”)
Around the time Newman got the Ig Nobel, Buettner did what he did every time someone criticized Blue Zones: He asked the academics to respond. He emailed Poulain “five or six times,” according to the demographer, who refused. He emailed Jay Olshansky. “Dan, this isn’t my fight,” Olshansky said. Bradley Willcox did respond, and Gianni Pes, and Robert Young. The letter was posted on the Blue Zones site. To get to it, one clicked a link: “Response to Recent Misinformation About Blue Zones.” To get to the link, one had to read past the Blue Zones landing page, past two different profit-seeking ventures (“transform your life” and “transform your community”), to “our research.” That took you to a page labeled “Blue Zones Institute,” though the “Institute” appeared to be a list of research from other sources. It was easy to get distracted, as I was, by a quiz; upon answering a series of questions I was told I could expect to live 90.6 years but could add 6.3 more years “with a few simple changes.” In fact, I could start by pressing “add 6.3 years,” which I did, upon which I landed on a directive to “Improve Your Attitude,” which linked directly to a Mayo Clinic page: “10 Tips to Tame Your Temper.” The question of whether one had to be deeply, irretrievably lost to consult the Mayo Clinic’s “10 Tips to Tame Your Temper” in pursuit of six years of life was an open one, but nothing about this journey cleared the cloud of suspicion Newman cast upon the project.
The response to Newman did not take. Media could always say, Questions raised. Why was everyone so interested? “Because,” Buettner said, with the air of someone who would know, “it’s a good story.” It is a good story, a story you could fit in a headline such as “Do People in ‘Blue Zones’ Actually Live Longer?” (New York Times) or “The Longevity Hot Spots That Weren’t” (The New Republic), a story you could transform into a TED Talk, which he probably would. Bradley Willcox professed to be amazed at all the press over “a paper that’s like written by a high-school kid,” but he also had a theory: Perhaps the “profit-based” way in which Blue Zones was positioned had people feeling they’d been “sold a bill of goods.” “Dan is about Dan,” Willcox, whom I called at Buettner’s behest, told me. He “created this whole program based on our work without including us. If you’re making money off the scientists’ back, why don’t you have some kind of foundation to give back? Why not have a research foundation to study longevity or something?”
At the lake house, when we were talking about his deep past, his world records, Dan Buettner’s knee was bothering him, and I asked him about it. He said it was fine, and went silent for a long moment. It was as if he had suddenly realized why we were both there. “I had these people who trusted me on doing this work,” he said. He took off his glasses and placed his thumb and forefinger on the bridge of his nose. He apologized. He had not been sleeping. He was overwhelmed. “I don’t know why — this has been really stressful,” he said. “I never do that. I don’t know why I’m doing this.”
A friend walked into the kitchen, got a drink from the fridge, and walked back out. “And nobody pays attention to the work. One guy who has no expertise is trying to grab attention and now has it. And now because he’s got all this attention, it just keeps propagating and nobody stops to really say, ‘Look at the work that we really did.’ And it was hard. And it took years. And I try to be honest, and now people think I’m lying.”
Later the hotel scion was telling me about all the social events Buettner had organized: charitable galas, European bike trips for men Buettner considered interesting. Here was one side of never failing to ask for precisely what it is you want: a stack of freshly printed FROSTY FRIDAY 2025 shirts. A night with friends you’d persuaded into your space, while others, in their hesitation, watched the snow alone. It was striking to see what someone could build, socially and financially, on the very American idea that truth-telling and moneymaking were not in tension, and how earnest attachment to this idea was, in the end, a kind of vulnerability to depressive realists asking irritating questions. Buettner hadn’t lied; he had simply chosen, again and again, to believe the science easiest to sell.
When I last spoke to Michel Poulain, he was very busy. He had an interview coming up with El País and another with a London-based publication. He had no doubt who had triggered this new interest in the original research. “So the main conclusion,” he told me, beaming, “is that this Saul Newman, with his story, is promoting my work!”
In January, Newman and I walked around the damp courtyards of Oxford. We ducked into the Percy Bysshe Shelley Memorial, where a marble sculpture of the poet, hair splayed as if just drowned on the beach, stood behind a metal grate. Shelley, I realized only later, had been expelled from Oxford for his atheism. Newman was talking about how old Oxford was. We stood there marveling at its antiquity, how long this ground had played host to the fraught search for knowledge. “It’s been here for 775 years,” he said and then stopped himself. “Well, that’s when they started writing things down.”
We’ll have the First Quarter Moon in 3 days on Thursday the 6th of March of 2025 at 8:32 am
On this day in Women’s History….
On March 3, 1913,
The National Woman Suffrage Parade took place on March 3, 1913 in Washington, DC. It was a civil rights demonstration that demanded the right to vote for women. The parade was extravagant and drew over 5,000 women from across the country
Walk into an unassuming church near the intersection of Colfax Avenue and Havana Street, just east of the Denver/Aurora line on any given Sunday. Depending on what time you arrive, you might hear singing in Nepalese, or preaching in Burmese.
The Village Exchange Center, formerly St. Matthew’s Lutheran Church, is home to four congregations that meet there on Sundays for the past decade in the heart of Aurora’s immigrant and refugee community.
Small communities of Nepalese, African-American, Congolese, and Kachin worshippers gather throughout the day – two in the morning, two in the afternoon – most of them just a few dozen strong.
And though sometimes only five or 10 people show up for service, those who do animate many church-like moments. Universally recognized words like “Amen,” and “Hallelujah!” are heard throughout the day. Likewise the swaying-while-singing moves, and a little call-and-response. There’s the blissed-out, closed-eyed faces, the restless, playful children – moments that cross the language barrier and feature the same sacred moments of reverence found in worship anywhere.
And it’s especially needed now, according to Pastor Marcel Narucki, co-founder and director of Multi-Faith Services at the Village Exchange Center. He was pastor of the former church until eight years ago, and is still involved, meeting with pastors of the congregations, from whom he charges a nominal monthly fee.
“The worship time together is very powerful for building their community and cohesion and connection in many ways . . . because as refugee churches, they’re facing so much more to culturally survive,” he said.
Kevin J. Beaty/DenveriteAurora’s Village Exchange Center. Feb. 9, 2025.
Living Worship Nepali Church
The first one to unlock the doors on Sundays is Pastor Habil Rasaily, who leads Living Worship Nepali Church starting at about 9 a.m. Although clearly a foreigner based on his accented English, the pastor was enthusiastic to welcome two new faces that looked very different from the usual attendees – who are generally not very tall, with Asian features and straight, dark hair.
To welcome two visitors, one Black and 5’10,” the other MENASA and at least 6’3”, both with curly hair, he translated introductions. The response of the congregation – through waves, smiles, hands on hearts, and eye contact across the language barrier – said: You are welcome among us.
Eli Imadali for Colorado PublicA congregation member reads the Bible during a Nepalese Christian church service at the Village Exchange Center in Aurora, Colo., on Sunday, Feb. 2, 2025.
Eli Imadali for Colorado PublicCongregation members sing and worship as youth pastor James Rasaily, center with guitar, leads them in song during a Nepalese Christian church service at the Village Exchange Center in Aurora, Colo., on Sunday, Feb. 2, 2025.
The pastor had clearly taken on some of the Western flavor in his fashions; he wore a corduroy suit, a purple V-neck sweater and cowboy boots. His session was rich with singing and preaching, with plenty of English words mixed in.
Of the 30 or so who came out, some were dressed in salwar kameez, others were holding up their hands to show how moved they were by the music and the words. One woman showed up with a white man.
At one point, two men on stage stopped singing and began blowing into musical instruments which are called shofars in some cultures, long twisty horns of rams. Like bugles, they don’t give the opportunity for the person playing it to select notes; instead, playing them added to the overall ambient sound and got a few people on their feet, singing along to music that reminded them, undoubtedly, of home.
Blow the Trumpet Ministries
A few hours later, Pastor Kevin Rawlins got his sermon going under the banner of Blow the Trumpet Ministries, held in the same room – sparsely decorated with a bit of stained glass behind the stage, where a drum set was set up that could be used by each group.
The sanctuary, with mainly blank walls, also had dozens of chairs in the front, as well as collapsible stadium seating in the back of the room.
The extra seats weren’t needed for the gathering, which that day topped off at 10 people. Among them were his wife/co-pastor, daughter and niece, all there for the Village Exchange Center’s only English-speaking service.
Eli Imadali for Colorado PublicKevin and Lynne Rawlins of Blow the Trumpet Ministries pose for a portrait after their church service at the Village Exchange Center in Aurora, Colo., on Sunday, Feb. 2, 2025.
That morning, Lynne Rawlins preached a sermon about spiritual understanding, connecting her message to the recent plane crash that resulted in dozens of bodies being found in the Potomac River in Washington, D.C.
“The Bible written 2,000 years ago is talking about today … and planes fall out the sky – it’s enough to make you go. . .” she said, making a surprised face. “But when you have faith in God it transcends everything else because you go, you know what? I have eternal life with Christ … so even if I come to this end, I know I will be with God.”
Kevin Rawlins said that when not ministering at the center, Blow The Trumpet ministers to people with special needs and learning disabilities, sometimes taking the word to drug infested communities without judgment.
The on-site session that day wrapped up in the early afternoon, then, like the other congregations, the group left the building, which locked up automatically.
And a few hours later, the space transformed again – without any real physical changes – into another church and its worshippers.
Colorado Kachin Baptist Church
At about 3 pm, Pastor James Naw Bawk unlocked the doors and about a half-dozen people walked in, most of them in jeans and sneakers, one with his hair two-toned, black in the back and golden-orange up front.
They were there to hear the pastor lead Colorado Kachin Baptist Church for a handful of mainly young people, some refugees, who come from Kachin, the northernmost state in the country of Myanmar, formerly known as Burma; which shares a border with China and has a population of about 55 million.
As the voices and energy took up the room, the common experiences of church could again be felt despite the language barrier. Initially, the pastor, dressed in mainly western clothes with a hat traditional to Myanmar, was officiating. Then, using tablets and other technology, another man then took the lead, ministering to people who, wrapped up in the spiritual moment they were having, seemed not to notice that the space itself was both large and impersonal, given the small size of the group.
Kevin J. Beaty/DenveritePastor James Bawk preaches during the Colorado Kachin Baptist Church’s weekly meeting in Aurora’s Village Exchange Center. Feb. 9, 2025.
A lack of aesthetic attention in multi-faith spaces is common, according to an article, “Global Phenomenon of Multifaith Worship Spaces,” in the online magazine of the Center for Architecture. It was based on the fieldwork of a student pursuing a master’s in architecture, who received a grant in 2018 to do a deep dive into the architecture of multi-faith spaces, funded in part by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs.
Among the findings: “Although what exactly imparts a sense of spirituality in a space is subjective to each individual, it is nonetheless clear when no effort has been made by the designer or administrator to nurture an aesthetic of contemplation and solemnity. Sadly, this aesthetic neglect is the case in most multifaith worship spaces. Since many of these sites are created with limited funding by non-designers, aesthetics are often the last thing to be considered. Even well-funded spaces are often left intentionally bland to maintain denominational neutrality.”
Several congregations personalized the space by bringing their own banners to drape over the lectern. They took them down when they left, which kept the space from taking on any particular religion’s style of decor. This is not unusual, according to the article, which states: “In the majority of multifaith worship spaces, there is no designer involved; they are furnished by a facility administrator, usually as an afterthought.”
Kevin J. Beaty/DenveriteNeng (left to right), Ja and Du Howa sing as the Colorado Kachin Baptist Church begins its weekly meeting in Aurora’s Village Exchange Center. Feb. 9, 2025.
Kevin J. Beaty/DenveriteThe Colorado Kachin Baptist Church begins its weekly meeting with music, in Aurora’s Village Exchange Center. Feb. 9, 2025.
The article describes multi-faith worship spaces as a global phenomenon that began to crop up in the 1950s, noting their existence in New York, Boston, London, Manchester, Zurich and Berlin.
The article points out two main types: the Multifaith Chamber, which, like the Village Exchange Center, consists of “a central gathering space shared by different faith groups;” it is described as more common, more adaptable and less expensive. The other style is the Multifaith Complex, which “allocates separate prayer rooms for each faith so they need not share spaces with other groups,” according to the report.
The sharing of spaces seemed not to be a problem at the Village Exchange Center, because the schedule allowed ample time before one service ended and the next began – usually about a half hour during which the building was unoccupied very briefly.
8th CEPAC Pentecostal Church of Colorado
The day capped off at about 5 pm, when the final group filled up the parking lot across the street and filed inside. Senior Pastor Enock Mahangaiko Hawazi heads 8th CEPAC Pentecostal Church of Colorado, which he said was modeled to be similar to the one he pastored in the Democratic Republic of Congo before coming to the US. It lasted from about 5:30 until 8 pm, the longest of the sessions, and had the largest congregation.
That’s because usually, it’s attended both by relocated DRC nationals, as well as Malawian students from DU, who usually arrive by shuttle and have their own choir, he said.
Kevin J. Beaty/DenveritePastor Enock Hawazi Mangaiko preaches during 8th CEPAC Pentecostal Church of Colorado’s weekly church service, modeled after a congregation he led in the Democratic Republic of Congo, in Aurora’s Village Exchange Center. Feb. 9, 2025.
This congregation had about a dozen small children, some better than others at sitting still. Once or twice, as the gathering got underway, a newborn baby could be heard clucking and cooing, being held on the lap of its mother, one of the pastor’s daughters, three of whom attended the service.
While some women had traditional clothing often worn in the DRC – printed fabric dresses with matching headraps – one woman had a red and white outfit on. She was the only woman drummer of the day, sitting on stage behind a drum set while children and adults sang in unison. That day the sermon was about love and acts of service.
Kevin J. Beaty/DenveritePastor Enock Hawazi Mangaiko kicks off the 8th CEPAC Pentecostal Church of Colorado’s weekly service in Aurora’s Village Exchange Center. Feb. 9, 2025.
Kevin J. Beaty/DenveriteKids sing onstage during the 8th CEPAC Pentecostal Church of Colorado’s service at Aurora’s Village Exchange Center. Feb. 9, 2025.
Pastor Narucki, who meets with leaders of the congregations quarterly, said he usually doesn’t attend their services so they can have the space and privacy to worship.
He created the opportunity for the four congregations to meet at the Village Exchange Center a decade ago, while pastoring St. Matthew’s Lutheran Church. Noticing that the church’s membership was dwindling, he came up with a way to maximize usage of the space: he opened it up for use by the congregations.
After two years, the Lutheran church stopped meeting due to low attendance, but the four small communities of worshippers continued to show up and worship at different times throughout each Sunday.
Pastor Narucki changed the tax status of the church to become the non-profit Village Exchange Center, the subject of a local student’s thesis, which is also home to other community-oriented services such as a farm and a food bank, in the heart of a part of Aurora where many immigrants and refugees live.
He mentioned that with the new Trump administration – which called for a raid of some apartment complexes in Aurora in early February – and its aversion to immigrants, the churches ministering to immigrants and refugees are more necessary now than ever. “We don’t know how things are ultimately going to play out, but we’re all kind of being alert and concerned,” he said.
“The safe expression of being together, that is a source of identity for communities, and of resiliency,” he said. “And I think that’s especially needed and critical for this period we are in.”
