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'Time of the Child' is a marvelous blend of despair and redemption

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'Time of the Child' is a marvelous blend of despair and redemption

A village “on the western edge of a wet nowhere” populated by men who drink too much and women who smile too little. Throw in cows, an addled priest, an abandoned baby and a thick cloud cover of shame and you have the elements for a quintessential Irish story.

So quintessential, in fact, I’ve held off reading Niall Williams for a long time, despite hearing raves about his work. My skepticism, it turns out, was misplaced. I’ve just emerged from a Niall Williams binge with a belated appreciation for his writing, which invests specificity and life in characters and places easily reduced to clichés.

Time of the Child is Williams’ latest novel, a companion piece, rather than a sequel to, his 2019 novel, This Is Happiness. Both books are set in the rural village of Faha — a town in the far west of Ireland whose inhabitants, we’re told, possess “the translucent flesh that came from living in an absolute humidity.”

Time of the Child takes place in the weeks leading up to Christmas 1962 and opens — and closes — on a set piece of Mass at the parish church, where most of the village gathers. In between lies a story that feels, at once, realistic in its rough and comic everyday unfolding and mythic in its riffs on the grand themes of despair and spiritual redemption.

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Jack Troy is the town doctor and central character here. He’s a melancholy contained man who, we’re told, “carrie[s] himself in a manner that [the townspeople of] Faha might have summarized as Not like us.” Dr. Troy lost his wife and then the older woman he unexpectedly fell in love with, who’s now also dead. Keeping house for him is his 29-year-old daughter, Ronnie, the eldest of three sisters; the one who remained at home.

Ronnie, too, is a semi-enigma to the townspeople: Our narrator tells us that “Added to [her] reserve was not only the screened lives of all women in the parish at the time, but the marginal natures of all writers, for Ronnie Troy’s closest companion was her notebook.”

Dr. Troy has become haunted by despair and by a particularly heartrending question: “Why does no one love my daughter?” The answer, he fears, is his own glowering presence that may have repelled one especially promising suitor.

Inspired by what we’re told is a “mixed fuel of … brandy … [and] a parent’s fear of the unmade world after them,” Dr. Troy, uncharacteristically, resolves on a bizarre scheme to make things right. As the saying goes: “Man plans, God laughs.”

Instead of unfolding the Troy family narrative chronologically, Williams layers it on top of other simultaneous storylines, all of which are graced with language as bracing as salt spray from the chill Atlantic. We follow, for instance, the wanderings of Jude Quinlan, a 12 year old “on the rope-bridge between man and boy.”

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Jude’s father drinks and gambles and his mother, Mamie, possesses “the anxious look of one married to an instability.” Listen to how Williams moves fluidly from the mundane to the wider lens of the numinous in these snippets from an extended passage where Jude helps to unload a van full of Christmas toys for the town fair:

There were toy soldiers, kits for flying gliders, … skittles in a net, balls, bats. … dolls of one expression but many dresses, …

For Jude, carrying everything from the van … was as close has he would get to handling any of these things. He had no resentment or bitterness . Rather, from nearness to the marvelous something rubbed off on him …

The other thing, the one that only occurred to him years later when he would recall what happened that day, was that what he was carrying out of the van that December morning was his childhood.

For those who believe in such phenomena, Jude will be the instrument for bringing a miracle — a Christmas miracle complete with a baby and a virginal mother, no less — into this story. The other miracle here is a literary one: Time of the Child itself, which gives readers that singular experience of nearness to the marvelous.

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Stay away from Dr. Google, and other lessons learned about hypochondria

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Stay away from Dr. Google, and other lessons learned about hypochondria

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If you’ve ever Googled a list of health symptoms — and become convinced you have a serious illness and are doomed — you might be suffering from hypochondria. Author Caroline Crampton wrote A Body Made of Glass: A Cultural History of Hypochondria, because she’s pretty sure she has it.

“It’s a fear that can’t be substantiated by any medical tests you might do,” Crampton says of hypochondria, which is now known medically as illness anxiety disorder. “The definition that I like, and that I use, comes from the Oxford English Dictionary. And it runs, ‘a mental condition characterized by the persistent and unwarranted belief or fear that one has a serious illness.’”

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Crampton developed excessive health anxiety after being treated for blood cancer in her teens. Though the cancer went into remission, it returned a year later. She has since undergone several therapies for her health anxiety.

Crampton says hypochondria can manifest as illness anxiety and/or somatic symptoms. In the former, patients suffer from excessive hypervigilance and anxiety around potential health problems. Somatic symptom disorder, meanwhile, includes anxiety, but “adds this extra thing of phantom symptoms,” she says.

Of course, sometimes symptoms really do point to an underlying physiological problem and need medical treatment. Crampton says she doesn’t hesitate to have a doctor check out symptoms that she’s worrying over. Because of her serious medical history, she says doctors usually treat her concerns with respect. But says she knows that many people have experienced doctors disbelieving them or writing off their concerns as merely anxiety, “only to have a serious diagnosis later on that could have been caught much earlier.”

Caroline Crampton is the author of A Body Made of Glass: A Cultural History of Hypochondria.

Caroline Crampton is the author of A Body Made of Glass: A Cultural History of Hypochondria.

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Jamie Drew/Harper Collins

The Internet can stoke hypochondria by offering access to seemingly limitless information about health conditions, but Crampton notes that the condition predates the information age. In fact, her book takes it’s title from “glass delusion,” a centuries-old psychological disorder in which people — including the French King Charles VI — suddenly think their bodies are made of glass.

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“I don’t think the glass delusion is hypochondria,” she says. “But the more I became fascinated by [glass delusion] and researched it, the more I began to think that it was a very good image or metaphor for what it feels like to have hypochondria, because the sufferers from the glass delusion were absolutely obsessed with the idea that they were breakable and fragile.”

Interview highlights

A Body Made of Glass

A Body Made of Glass

Harper Collins


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Harper Collins

On how the Internet can stoke “cyberchondria”

I try and restrict myself. I don’t not look at the Internet in relation to my health, but I limit myself only to reputable sources, in particular here in the U.K., the NHS website has a very, very wide ranging catalog of illnesses and connects all the symptoms together and will allow you to click through and see how things relate to each other. So that’s my first port of call. I look at the NHS website, I know it’s evidence-backed and I know it will tell me: “If you think you have this, please go to the doctor,” and so on. And yeah, there is a shortlist of others that I take the same approach to. What I try not to do — I would say I never do it — is just type symptoms into Google … with no sort of guardrails at all because that’s where I can easily find myself falling down a spiral and getting into a really bad place mentally.

On being care-seeking vs. care-avoidant

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People fall into either care-seeking or care-avoidant. People tend to be very polarized. I’m definitely care-seeking. I think whether it’s helpful or not often depends on the type of doctor that you see. I’ve seen some incredibly helpful doctors and I’ve seen some incredibly unhelpful ones. So in some ways it feels a bit like the luck of the draw. You never know quite what you’re going to get. But I think I would always encourage people to seek medical help if they have a reason to do so, if that makes sense. I, on balance, feel it’s always better to go than not go.

I do my best to take medical personnel at face value, if that makes sense. And I try and do this test in my mind of: If it’s serious enough for me to worry about, then it’s serious enough for me to go to the doctor. And if it’s serious enough again, I’ll go to the doctor again. … I’m there in good faith. I try and assume that the doctor or the medical professional is there in good faith, too. And if they’re not, I will just go back and ask for a second opinion.

On how medical professionals have reacted to her illness anxiety

Almost all of the time I find myself taken very seriously. Sometimes a little voice in my head says, “maybe too seriously.” Maybe occasionally I could benefit from being told, “It’s nothing to worry about. You can go home.” I think because of my serious medical history and the fact that my medical file is like half a foot wide, I feel like every single little thing that I even vaguely mentioned gets tested, which is in some ways an incredibly fortunate thing to happen.

On the relationship between hypochondria and PTSD

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I spoke to some people when I was working on the book … such as someone who was a twin, and her twin had had some quite serious childhood illnesses that required them to be hospitalized. She, the other twin, had been completely healthy. But watching her twin go through that … as an adult surfaced for her as hypochondria. Other people who had a very close friend pass away young from a serious condition. And then after … that trauma, they had then developed anxiety about their health, having previously never suffered from it before. So it feels like an idea that checks out to me that you might respond to a really traumatic event by developing the anxiety that something similar might be going to happen to you in the future.

On cognitive behavioral therapy treatment and hypochondria

CBT was really helpful for the small day-to-day problems such as Googling your symptoms and reading health-related stuff on the Internet, or watching too much wellness things on Instagram, or spending too long checking on your moles, that kind of thing. That can be really helpful in changing those kinds of daily behaviors. So the exercise is mostly just not doing them for long periods of time and having to record every time you felt the impulse to do it and how you were feeling at the time. So that it was very helpful to be able to associate, I’m feeling anxious about this work thing I’ve got coming up, I seem to be checking WebMD a lot more than I normally would. Maybe those things are related. So it was very helpful for things like that.

On her new appreciation for her body

Until my diagnosis when I was 17, I very much thought of myself as a brain in a jar. I thought the only part of me that would ever produce any value was in my mind and that [my] body was just the way I moved the mind around the world. It would never do anything remarkable. Since going through all the treatment as difficult and traumatic as it was at times, I did come out of it with this incredible appreciation for the myriad complexities of the human body. …

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Sometimes I feel a bit like if you go into a really incredible building, like a cathedral or a civic hall and you have this feeling of awe that while, wow, someone conceived of this design and then it was built and now I can stand inside it, I sometimes feel that a sense of awe, a bit like that, thinking of my own body, strange as that sounds, I kind of look at it. Wow, look at what it’s doing. I’m not even thinking about this. I’m not making it do any of this. Look how magnificent it is. So it has given me this slightly cheesy appreciation for what the human body can do and made me a little bit more interested.

Sam Briger and Thea Chaloner produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Carmel Wroth adapted it for the web.

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The people growing their own toilet paper

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The people growing their own toilet paper
Robin Greenfield The leaves of the plant used for toilet paper next to a mint leaf (Credit: Robin Greenfield)Robin Greenfield

One million trees worldwide are cut down each year to make toilet paper. Is it more sustainable to grow your own?

In Meru, a town in eastern Kenya, a lush, leafy plant sways over the landscape. Benjamin Mutembei, a Meru resident, is growing the Plectranthus barbatus plant – not for food, but to use as toilet paper. He started growing the plant in 1985. “I learned about it from my grandfather and have been using it ever since. It’s soft and has a nice smell,” he says.

Plectranthus barbatus is a leafy plant that can grow up to 2m (6.6ft) tall. Its leaves are roughly the size of an industrial toilet paper square and emit a minty, lemony fragrance. Covered in tiny hairs, the leaves have a soft texture. This plant thrives in warm tropical temperatures and partial sunlight and is widely grown across Africa, where it is sometimes used to demarcate property boundaries.

Mutembei is growing the Plectranthus barbatus plant to use as toilet roll in Meru, Kenya (Credit: BBC)

Mutembei is growing the Plectranthus barbatus plant to use as toilet roll in Meru, Kenya (Credit: BBC)

“This has been an African tissue for a long time, and everyone in my household uses the plant. I only buy modern toilet rolls when the leaves have all been plucked,” Mutembei says.

The Plectranthus barbatus plant has provided Mutembei with a cost-effective alternative to purchasing toilet paper in Kenya. Like many commodities, the price of toilet paper has risen across Africa, largely due to the high cost of imported raw materials, such as wood pulp, which is essential for the production of toilet roll. Raw material costs now make up 75-80% of the final cost of tissue products in Kenya, according to the Kenya Association of Manufacturers.

Toilet paper made from virgin wood pulp currently dominates the global industry. “Typical toilet paper is made of 70-80% short fibre hardwood and 20-30% long fibre hardwood,” says Ronalds Gonzalez, a professor in the Department of Forest Biomaterials at North Carolina State University.

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Martin Odhiambo, a herbalist at the National Museum of Kenya who specialises in traditional plants, thinks the solution to the environmental impact of cutting trees for toilet paper may already be here.

Plectranthus barbatus is the African toilet paper. Many young people nowadays are unaware of this plant, but it has the potential to be an environmentally friendly alternative to toilet paper,” he says.

There is no official data on exactly how many people use the plant as toilet paper in Kenya; however, it is widely grown in various parts of Africa and continues to be used in many rural areas where it is easily accessible, says Odhiambo.

Plectranthus barbatus grows to its full height in 1-2 months from a cutting and the cutting itself costs around 50 Kenyan shillings ($0.37).

“The leaves are similar in size to an industrial toilet paper square, making them suitable for use in modern flush toilets or for composting in latrines,” says Odhiambo.

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Visitors from across Kenya attend Odhiambo’s lectures on the uses of Plectranthus barbatus and buy cuttings from his botanical garden at the National Museum of Kenya in Nairobi.

“My class has grown to over 600 participants. People are enthusiastic about learning how to use the plant and often ask for cuttings and seedlings to take back to their towns,” he says.

The potential of the plant is also being explored in other countries.

Robin Greenfield Robin grows over 100 Plectranthus barbatus at his nursery in Florida (Credit: Robin Greenfield)Robin Greenfield

Robin grows over 100 Plectranthus barbatus at his nursery in Florida (Credit: Robin Greenfield)

Robin Greenfield, an environmental activist who runs a non-profit advocating for sustainable living in Florida in the US, has been using the leaves of Plectranthus barbatus for five years.

Greenfield runs a “grow your own toilet paper” initiative and cultivates over 100 Plectranthus barbatus plants at his Florida nursery. He shares cuttings for free or for voluntary donations, encouraging people to grow their own toilet paper. So far, he says he has distributed cuttings to hundreds of people.

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“There are many people who associate using the toilet paper plant with poverty,” says Greenfield, though he points out that industrial toilet paper is ultimately made from plants too.

Robin Greenfield Greenfield runs a "grow your own toilet paper" initiative in Florida (Credit: Robin Greenfield)Robin Greenfield

Greenfield runs a “grow your own toilet paper” initiative in Florida (Credit: Robin Greenfield)

Greenfield says he’s had positive feedback from people who have used the plant. “For anybody who feels a little hesitant to try this plant, I would say to drop your worries about what people think about you. And simply by saying, ‘I’m going to be me, and that might mean wiping my butt with some really soft leaves that I grow,’” he says.

But how realistic is it that this plant might become more widely used?

Large-scale production has not yet been explored. Instead companies such as WEPA, one of Europe’s largest toilet paper manufacturers, are reducing the environmental impact of conventional toilet paper in other ways. WEPA has developed a new method using recycled cardboard to produce toilet paper, which does not involve bleaching the fibres, a spokesperson says.

The toilet paper plant, meanwhile, is expected to have a “minimal” impact on the industry, says a WEPA spokesperson.

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One drawback is that wastewater and disposal systems, especially in Europe, aren’t designed to handle this type of paper, as only soluble items can be flushed through the system, the spokesperson says.

Greenfield says that’s where compost toilets come in. “I use a compost toilet. The leaves go back to the earth and produce soil, which can then support food growth. It’s a closed-loop system, and I think using these leaves could lead us to a conversation about the environmental benefits of composting.”

Applequist suggests that growing the plant in a controlled environment, within a designated area, and monitoring its growth to limit expansion into the existing ecosystem could help mitigate environmental risks.

Perhaps the biggest challenge to going mainstream, though, remains public acceptance. But from his plant nursery in Nairobi, Odhiambo remains hopeful.

“I know some people see using leaves as toilet paper as a step backward, but understanding the benefits of this plant, I believe it could become the next green alternative,” says Odhiambo. “I’ve been growing it in my nursery and sharing it with communities across Kenya, and people have been amazed by its convenience. If we keep an open mind and continue promoting this plant, we could eventually mass produce it for widespread use.”

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This content was created with funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

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Pope Francis goes electric in new eco-friendly popemobile

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Pope Francis goes electric in new eco-friendly popemobile

Pope Francis (right) looks on as he’s presented a new fully electric popemobile at the Vatican on Wednesday.

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Pope Francis is going electric for the 2025 Jubilee processional, after being gifted an electric G-Class Mercedes-Benz popemobile by the automaker’s chief executive this week.

“We are moving towards zero emissions and are launching many electric products,” Ola Källenius told the Vatican. “This year we launched the electric G-Class.”

Källenius said the white, luxury convertible was specifically designed “paying attention to all the Holy Father’s needs.”

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Francis has been using a wheelchair publicly since 2022 after a number of health issues.

Mercedes-Benz, which has been behind the popemobile since 1930, said it hopes the convertible “will provide the Holy Father with the comfort he needs for his travels.”

The “one-of-a-kind” pope transit vehicle comes equipped with finishes including a retractable roof and a rotating seat for Francis to greet audiences.

The popemobile is an iconic piece of Vatican imagery.

The car’s conversion to electric comes as the pope has repeatedly urged people worldwide to accept the science of climate change and work to protect the environment.

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The Vatican says it plans to convert all of its vehicles to emission-free options by 2030.

Catholic Jubilees are celebrated every 25 years and are “precious times for taking stock of our lives, both as individuals and as communities,” Francis has said.

The 2025 Jubilee begins on Dec. 24 with the Opening of the Holy Door of Saint Peter’s Basilica, and runs through Jan. 6.

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