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| Century Eggs Decoded: Scientists Map the 36-Day Chemistry That Builds Their Sign |
| Posted on Thursday, September 24 @ 00:04:14 PDT (12 reads) | |
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Few foods provoke as much fascination and revulsion as the century egg, the chinese delicacy in which fresh duck eggs are transformed by an alkaline bath into amber, jelly-like orbs with a pungent, complex aroma. Now a team of chinese and irish researchers has tracked, molecule by molecule, exactly how that signature smell develops over a 36-day pickling cycle, revealing a choreographed sequence of protein breakdown, lipid oxidation, and maillard chemistry that unfolds differently in the egg white and the yolk. The work, published in food chemistry: x, offers the most detailed spatiotemporal map yet of flavor formation in preserved eggs and could help manufacturers fine-tune the process to eliminate off-notes and standardize quality.
the research team, led by xiaoqian chen of beijing technology and business university together with colleagues including maurice o’sullivan of university college cork, immersed fresh duck eggs in a pickling solution containing 4.5 percent sodium hydroxide, 4.0 percent sodium chloride, and 0.4 percent copper sulfate at 25 degrees celsius. Over 36 days, they sampled the eggs at seven time points, carefully separating white and yolk, and subjected each compartment to an arsenal of analytical techniques: gas chromatography coupled to mass spectrometry (gc–ms), gas chromatography–ion mobility spectrometry (gc-ims), an electronic nose with ten metal oxide sensors, liquid chromatography–mass spectrometry metabolomics, and a trained human sensory panel scoring six odor attributes.
the first thing the team documented was the dramatic chemical shift that sets everything else in motion. Egg white ph surged from 9.78 to 11.43 within just six days, driven by rapid alkali penetration through osmotic pressure, before easing slightly in later stages, possibly because copper ions block pores and limit further alkali diffusion. The yolk, shielded by the surrounding white, lagged behind: its ph climbed more slowly from 6.40 to 10.28 over 18 days and then leveled off as a dense protein gel network formed, restricting alkali movement. This ph gradient is the engine of the entire transformation, because strongly alkaline conditions unfold proteins, expose reactive side chains, and accelerate both hydrolysis and oxidation.
protein degradation indeed followed the ph curve closely. Egg white protein content dropped sharply from 18.58 to 12.94 milligrams per milliliter in the early phase, while yolk proteins declined steadily throughout, indicating that yolk lipoproteins were being dismantled under the alkaline assault. Protein oxidation, measured as carbonyl content, rose continuously in both compartments, with egg white consistently more oxidized than yolk, peaking at 1.15 nanomoles per milligram of protein at day 24. Lipid oxidation told a different story: confined almost entirely to the yolk, whose unsaturated fatty acids make it the fat-rich heart of the egg, thiobarbituric acid reactive substances increased nearly thirteenfold, with the bulk of that rise, from 0.15 to 1.68 milligrams per kilogram, occurring within the first 24 days before the reaction plateaued.
against this backdrop of molecular upheaval, the volatile aroma compounds emerged in distinct waves. In egg white, gc-ims detected 56 volatile compounds and gc–ms found 61, spanning aldehydes, ketones, alcohols, esters, furans, and nitrogen-containing species. The early pickling phase was dominated by ketones and furans, but as the weeks passed, alcohols and nitrogen-containing compounds steadily accumulated and became the dominant contributors. Mid-stage samples acquired fruity and floral notes from esters such as ethyl acetate, while late-stage egg white was characterized by cumulative aldehydes, ketones, and pyrazines, the roasted, nutty heterocycles born of maillard chemistry. Electronic nose data confirmed this staged evolution, with principal component analysis showing early samples clearly separated from one another while day-30 and day-36 samples converged, signaling that egg white aroma stabilizes near the end of pickling.
to pinpoint which of these compounds actually matter to the human nose, the researchers calculated odor activity values, the ratio of each compound’s concentration to its odor threshold. Only 16 volatiles in egg white crossed the oav threshold of 1, and just three combined high oavs with high statistical importance in the discriminant models: nonanal, which lends waxy, citrus-like notes; phenethyl alcohol, a rose-scented product of phenylalanine degradation that appears only after day 24; and above all 1-octen-3-ol, the mushroom-smelling alcohol derived from linoleic and arachidonic acid oxidation, whose oav of 1302 made it the single greatest contributor to egg white aroma. Sensory panelists corroborated the chemistry: fishy notes faded over time, ammonia intensity rose to dominate by day 36, and the overall character shifted from fresh to mature and pickled.
the yolk, as the team expected, was a far richer and more complicated story. Gc-ims identified 77 volatile compounds in yolk and gc–ms found 86, including 23 aldehydes, 19 ketones, and 14 alcohols. Because yolk lipids fuel extensive oxidation, yolk samples produced stronger electronic nose signals than white throughout the process. Aldehydes such as hexanal, which reached the highest measured concentration at 308 nanograms per gram, along with nonanal, octanal, and a suite of unsaturated alkenals, delivered green, fatty, and fruity aromas. Ketones like 1-octen-3-one, with an extraordinarily low odor threshold of 0.003 nanograms per gram, added herbal and mushroom nuances, while esters from active esterification contributed fruity top notes. Sulfur- and nitrogen-containing compounds, including thiazoles, dimethyl sulfide, and various pyrazines, arose from sulfur amino acid degradation and maillard reactions, imparting the sulfurous, roasted, meaty character that defines a ripe preserved egg yolk.
in total, 39 yolk volatiles exceeded their odor thresholds, and 23 were flagged as key aroma compounds on day 36, ten of them aldehydes. The trained panel rated yolk higher than white on ammonia, fatty, rotten egg, and salted egg attributes, consistent with its heavier load of lipid oxidation products and sulfur compounds. The researchers are careful to note the limits of their semi-quantitative approach: concentrations were estimated with a single internal standard, and odor thresholds drawn from the literature may vary with the food matrix, so the key compound lists should be viewed as strong candidates rather than definitive verdicts, pending confirmation by gas chromatography-olfactometry and aroma recombination experiments.
perhaps the most forward-looking part of the study is its attempt to connect the volatile end products to their non-volatile precursors. Untargeted metabolomics identified 144 non-volatile compounds in egg white and 539 in yolk, dominated by lipids, amino acids, and their derivatives. Correlation network analysis revealed striking associations: in yolk, 17 non-volatile metabolites correlated strongly with 15 aroma compounds, with glycerophospholipids, particularly phosphatidylcholine and phosphatidylethanolamine species, most tightly linked to aldehyde formation. The data suggest a plausible pathway in which alkali-driven phospholipid hydrolysis releases unsaturated fatty acids that oxidize into hydroperoxides and then fragment into aldehydes, ketones, and alcohols, while amino acids released from protein degradation feed strecker degradation and maillard reactions that generate pyrazines and strecker aldehydes. The authors emphasize that these are correlations, not proven causation, and that isotope-labeling experiments will be needed to confirm the routes.
for a product with two thousand years of history and roughly 40 percent of china’s duck egg harvest devoted to it, preserved eggs have remained surprisingly opaque at the molecular level. This study shows that the critical window is the first 24 days, when ph shifts, protein degradation, and lipid oxidation do most of the work that determines final flavor, and that white and yolk follow fundamentally different aromatic trajectories, the white shaped by a handful of potent compounds and the yolk by a dense, layered chorus of oxidation and maillard products. By defining which molecules matter and when they appear, the researchers have given the industry a mechanistic and analytical foundation for steering flavor deliberately, whether the goal is taming the ammonia bite, amplifying the savory depth, or ensuring that every batch of century eggs tastes exactly as tradition demands.
subject of research: aroma compound formation in preserved eggs during alkaline pickling
article title: spatiotemporal evolution of aroma compounds in egg white and yolk of preserved eggs during pickling
article references: chen, x., Yue, z., Li, y., Yang, w., Li, s., Ma, x., O’sullivan, m., Zeng, h., & Wang, y. (2026). Spatiotemporal evolution of aroma compounds in egg white and yolk of preserved eggs during pickling. Food chemistry: x, 39, article 104483. Https://doi.Org/10.1016/j.Fochx.2026.104483
image credits: ai generated
doi: 10.1016/j.Fochx.2026.104483
keywords: preserved eggs, century eggs, pidan, aroma compounds, lipid oxidation, maillard reaction, gc-ms, gc-ims, metabolomics, flavor chemistry, duck eggs, pickling
cite scienmag news
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bethany barker. (September 24, 2026). Century eggs decoded: scientists map the 36-day chemistry that builds their signature aroma. Scienmag. Https://scienmag.Com/century-eggs-decoded-scientists-map-the-36-day-chemistry-that-builds-their-signature-aroma/
bethany barker. “Century eggs decoded: scientists map the 36-day chemistry that builds their signature aroma.” Scienmag, 24 september 2026, https://scienmag.Com/century-eggs-decoded-scientists-map-the-36-day-chemistry-that-builds-their-signature-aroma/. Accessed 24 september 2026.
bethany barker. “Century eggs decoded: scientists map the 36-day chemistry that builds their signature aroma.” Scienmag. September 24, 2026. Https://scienmag.Com/century-eggs-decoded-scientists-map-the-36-day-chemistry-that-builds-their-signature-aroma/
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tags: alkaline pickling processanalytical techniques in food sciencearoma compoundscentury egg chemistrycentury eggsduck eggsegg white and yolk chemical differencesflavor chemistryflavor development in preserved eggsflavor molecules in century eggsgc-imsgc–mslipid oxidationlipid oxidation in food preservationmaillard reactionmaillard reaction in egg processingmetabolomicsoff-notes elimination in century eggspicklingpidanpreserved eggsprotein breakdown in pickled eggsspatiotemporal flavor mappingstandardizing century egg quality |
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| Case Keenum - Bears likely QB this week - was all but retired but found the love |
| Posted on Thursday, September 24 @ 00:04:14 PDT (10 reads) | |
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Chicago — chicago bears third-string quarterback case keenum probably has heard himself called “journeyman” a few times as a 15th-year veteran who’s on his eighth team.
“emergency qb”? Sure, most sundays.
but “baller”?
“he’s a prolific college quarterback,” bears coach ben johnson said wednesday of the former houston cougar, still the fbs career leader in passing yards (19,217) and co-leader in touchdown passes (155). “He’s got numerous records that still stand.
“he’s been a baller from the day he was born, from what i can tell. He’s got that way about him. He’s got a knack. His teammates gravitate to him. That’s a good starting point for a quarterback.”
for at least one week, it looks like keenum will be “the man” at halas hall.
caleb williams is week to week with a hamstring injury and didn’t practice wednesday, and primary backup tyson bagent is in the concussion protocol and wasn’t present at halas hall.
so in all likelihood, the 38-year-old keenum will start against the philadelphia eagles on “monday night football.”
when johnson’s “baller” comment was brought up to keenum, he tucked his head and stifled a laugh.
“i wish i had something (to say) about him,” he said. “I appreciate it, man.
“i’ve been around a lot of great coaches in my lifetime, my dad being my first one. I see just about every coach i’ve ever had as kind of like a father figure. Now, we’re a little closer to brothers than we are father. But that respect i have for great coaches, man, you want to run through a brick wall for the man.
“if i get a chance to have that guy in my ear, golly, he’s going to go down as probably the best play caller, play designer, coach, all the above when it’s all said and done.”
keenum credited johnson with restoring his passion for football and extending his career.
before keenum met johnson, he had called it a career. Then he had a conversation with the first-time head coach and signed with the bears in april 2025.
“man, i’m the biggest ben johnson fan,” he said. “I’m here right now because of him. I was retired, and he called me two years ago, basically.
“in my own head, i had prepared to be ready, but there weren’t a lot of phone calls coming. He called. We were supposed to meet for like 15 minutes and wound up talking for 2 1/2 hours. I was like, ok, i want to do it. I want to do it with this guy.
“it’s been such a pleasure. I found the love of football again working with him.”
keenum hasn’t appeared in a regular-season game since dec. 24, 2023, when he directed the houston texans offense in a 36-22 loss to the cleveland browns. It was the second of two consecutive starts, his only appearances that season.
during training camp this summer, left tackle theo benedet played a lot of reps with keenum on the second unit.
“it’s always exciting to see one of us get that start and shine for us,” benedet said. “But in the other aspect, case is still a very good quarterback. We see it every day and we’re excited to just watch him play and operate.
“it’s something a little different than caleb, a veteran presence back there. So it should be cool.”
keenum has two training camps in johnson’s system under his belt.
“i’ve called a lot of practices for him, unscripted practices,” johnson said. “I’ve called a lot of preseason games for him. He’s at the point of his career where he’s like another coach in a lot of ways. He’s seen a ton. He knows what good football looks like. He knows what a healthy locker room looks like and he’s a key part of what we do.”
johnson added that he’s “not concerned at all” if keenum is pressed into duty in a prime-time matchup against a team that made the playoffs the last five seasons and has started 2-0.
considering the three-year layoff from regular-season action, is keenum still capable of feeling jitters at 38?
“i tell you what, i love the feeling of being nervous,” he said. “I do get nervous and it’s not a scared nervous. It’s an excited nervous because i know i’m prepared, i’m confident in my preparation and what i’ve done. I’m confident in my teammates, i’m confident in their preparation, i’m confident in the game plan and what my coaches have put together.
“if you’re not feeling something — everybody feels it differently. I feel little butterflies, but it’s because i care. I love this game, i love this team and this texas boy, i love chicago, i really do.”
keenum said if it weren’t for football, he’d be chasing that edge elsewhere.
“if i wasn’t nervous, i’m going to do something else like, i don’t know, jump out of airplanes or bungee jump, try to get it some other way,” he said. “I love this game and i tell that to kids all the time. I get nervous and i’m 38 years old.”
©2026 chicago tribune. Visit chicagotribune.Com. Distributed by tribune content agency, llc. |
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| Fear, Faith and Duty: How Tanzanian Frontline Health Workers Endured COVID-19 |
| Posted on Thursday, September 24 @ 00:04:14 PDT (10 reads) | |
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When covid-19 swept across the world in 2020, much of the global attention focused on wealthy hospitals in europe and north america. Far less was heard from the health workers who held the line in low- and middle-income countries, often with thinner staffing, scarcer equipment, and less institutional support. A new qualitative study published in bmc psychology now offers a detailed, ground-level account of what frontline health care workers in northern tanzania went through while caring for covid-19 patients and their relatives, and how they managed to keep going when fear, stigma and exhaustion threatened to overwhelm them.
the research team, led by lisbeth mhando of kcmc university in moshi, together with colleagues from the university of copenhagen, kcmc university and jimma university, interviewed health workers at kilimanjaro christian medical centre, a zonal referral hospital serving a wide region of northern tanzania. The study used a qualitative exploratory descriptive design, a method well suited to capturing the texture and complexity of lived experience that numerical surveys often miss. Participants were purposively selected from hospital departments that had been directly involved in covid-19 care, meaning that every voice in the study came from someone who had stood on the pandemic’s front line. Rather than asking workers to fill in standardized questionnaires, the researchers conducted qualitative interviews in which participants gave retrospective accounts of their experiences during the pandemic. These accounts were then analyzed thematically, a systematic process in which researchers code the interview material and group recurring ideas into broader themes.
four key themes emerged from the analysis: the initial response to the covid-19 pandemic, the psychological impact of the disease, the impact of covid-19 on professionalism, and the coping strategies that health workers employed during the crisis. Together, these themes trace an arc from the confusion and dread of the pandemic’s arrival, through the grinding psychological toll of sustained emergency work, to the ways in which workers found, or sometimes failed to find, the strength to continue. The findings, the authors conclude, highlight the need for psychological support, effective communication, adequate training and sufficient resources for frontline health care workers before, during and after pandemics.
the psychological dimension of the findings is perhaps the most sobering. Frontline health care workers experienced fear, stress and stigma tied to the risk of infection, the demands of their work, and their interactions with their own families and communities. This triad of pressures is well documented in pandemic research from other settings, but the tanzanian study shows how it played out in a specific east african context. Fear of infection was not an abstract worry; it was a daily calculation about exposure on the ward and the possibility of carrying the virus home. Stigma added a social layer to that fear, as workers described strained interactions within their families and communities, where being a health worker during the pandemic could mark a person as a potential carrier of disease. The result was a double burden: workers faced the dangers of the ward by day and the anxieties of social rejection outside it.
that burden did not remain purely psychological. The study found that it seeped into professional behavior, with participants reporting thoughts of quitting, absenteeism, and avoidance of covid-19 duties. These are not minor details. Absenteeism and avoidance in a referral hospital during a pandemic translate directly into thinner coverage for critically ill patients and heavier loads for the colleagues who remain. Thoughts of quitting point to a longer-term risk: that the pandemic may have pushed experienced clinicians toward the exits of a health system that could ill afford to lose them. The authors frame these professional challenges as part of the pandemic’s impact on professionalism, a reminder that workforce morale and patient safety are inseparable. A health worker who is terrified, stigmatized and exhausted cannot deliver the same standard of care as one who is supported, informed and rested.
against this backdrop, the coping strategies that participants described take on real significance. The study found that these strategies varied widely and included acceptance, faith, family support, rest, and, notably, the use of recreational substances. The range itself is instructive. Acceptance, a psychological process of acknowledging what cannot be changed, helped some workers make peace with the risks of their job. Faith, which occupies a central place in many tanzanian communities, provided a framework of meaning and comfort. Family support buffered the isolation and stigma that workers felt outside the hospital. Rest, where it could be found, offered physical recovery. The mention of recreational substances, however, signals a coping strategy with a darker edge, one that may provide short-term relief but carries its own risks for health and professional conduct. The authors’ inclusion of this finding reflects the honesty of the qualitative method: workers described what they actually did, not what they thought they should have done.
what makes the study methodologically interesting is its retrospective design. By asking workers to look back on their pandemic experiences, the researchers captured accounts that have been filtered through time, which can bring perspective and coherence that in-the-moment accounts lack. At the same time, retrospective accounts are shaped by memory and by everything that has happened since. The thematic analysis, in which the interview transcripts were systematically coded and the recurring patterns grouped into the four central themes, is the mechanism that turns individual recollections into a structured picture of collective experience. Purposive sampling, meanwhile, ensured that the participants were not a random cross-section of hospital staff but specifically those whose departments had been directly involved in covid-19 care, sharpening the study’s focus on the true front line.
the study was funded by the danish international development agency under the sccopet project, formally titled strengthening the capacity of covid-19 disease surveillance, diagnostics, vaccination programs and promoting mental health of frontline healthcare workers. The funders had no role in the design of the study, the data collection, the analysis or the manuscript writing, an arrangement that strengthens the independence of the findings. Ethical approval was granted by the institutional review boards of kilimanjaro medical university college, now kcmc university, and the national institute for medical research of tanzania, and written informed consent was obtained from all participants. The research was conducted in accordance with the declaration of helsinki, and the authors declare no competing interests. The article was published open access on 23 september 2026, making the full account freely available to researchers, policymakers and health workers everywhere.
the authors’ conclusions reach beyond the pandemic that prompted the study. They argue that the experiences of infection prevention, resilience and the rapidly changing demands of covid-19 highlight the importance of preparedness for future public health emergencies. In practice, that means building systems of psychological support that exist before a crisis begins, not after burnout has already taken hold. It means communicating clearly and honestly with health workers so that uncertainty does not breed rumor and panic. It means training staff in infection prevention and the clinical management of emerging diseases, and it means supplying the resources, from personal protective equipment to adequate staffing, that make safe care possible. The tanzanian findings suggest that when these supports are missing, the costs appear in predictable places: in fear and stigma, in thoughts of quitting and absenteeism, and in coping strategies that range from the constructive to the harmful.
for a global audience, the study is a corrective to a narrative that has often centered the pandemic’s health workforce story in high-income countries. The frontline health care workers of a zonal hospital in northern tanzania faced the same fundamental pressures as their counterparts in new york, milan or delhi: fear of infection, the weight of critical illness, the strain on families, and the erosion of professional reserves. But they faced them in a health system with fewer buffers, and their coping strategies, from faith to family to acceptance, reflect both the strengths and the strains of that context. As health systems worldwide take stock of the pandemic and prepare for the next one, the voices gathered in this study make a clear argument: protecting the mental health and professional integrity of frontline health care workers is not a luxury to be addressed after the emergency passes, but a core component of emergency preparedness itself. The workers who staff the front lines in the next crisis will bring the same humanity, the same fears and the same need for support that this tanzanian study has documented so carefully.
subject of research: experiences and coping strategies of frontline health care workers during the covid-19 pandemic in northern tanzania
article title: “experiences, impacts, and coping strategies during covid-19: a qualitative study of frontline health care workers in a zonal hospital in northern tanzania”
article references: “experiences, impacts, and coping strategies during covid-19: a qualitative study of frontline health care workers in a zonal hospital in northern tanzania”. (N.D.). Https://doi.Org/10.1186/s40359-026-05671-3
image credits: ai generated
doi: 10.1186/s40359-026-05671-3
keywords: covid-19, frontline health care workers, qualitative research, mental health, coping strategies, tanzania, occupational stress, stigma, pandemic preparedness, bmc psychology, psychological impact, health workforce
cite scienmag news
glenn wilkins. (September 24, 2026). Fear, faith and duty: how tanzanian frontline health workers endured covid-19. Scienmag. Https://scienmag.Com/fear-faith-and-duty-how-tanzanian-frontline-health-workers-endured-covid-19/
glenn wilkins. Fear, faith and duty: how tanzanian frontline health workers endured covid-19. Scienmag, 24 september 2026, https://scienmag.Com/fear-faith-and-duty-how-tanzanian-frontline-health-workers-endured-covid-19/. Accessed 24 september 2026.
glenn wilkins. Fear, faith and duty: how tanzanian frontline health workers endured covid-19. Scienmag. September 24, 2026. Https://scienmag.Com/fear-faith-and-duty-how-tanzanian-frontline-health-workers-endured-covid-19/ |
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| Male Choice and Female Same-Sex Attraction: An Evolutionary Debate |
| Posted on Thursday, September 24 @ 00:04:14 PDT (10 reads) | |
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A quiet but fierce dispute has erupted in the pages of archives of sexual behavior, one of the flagship journals of sexuality research, over a question that sits at the intersection of evolutionary theory, human mating, and the origins of female same-sex attraction. The trigger is a letter to the editor by menelaos apostolou of the university of nicosia, published in september 2026, in which he responds directly to a critique by tomasz wilczkowski that challenged the so-called male choice hypothesis. The exchange is more than an academic spat. It touches on how evolutionary psychologists explain traits that appear, at first glance, to carry direct reproductive costs, and on how evidence from surveys, physiology, genetics, and cross-cultural anthropology should be weighed when those lines of evidence appear to conflict.
the male choice hypothesis, developed by apostolou and colleagues in a series of papers beginning in 2017, proposes that female same-sex attraction persists in populations because men find some degree of same-sex attraction in women appealing, and because such women may be more willing to engage in same-sex behavior that satisfies male partners. In this framework, male preference functions as a selective force: if men preferentially choose women with certain patterns of sexual flexibility, and if this preference translates into higher mating success or relationship stability for those women, then genes and developmental pathways associated with female same-sex attraction could be maintained by positive selection rather than eliminated by its reproductive costs. The hypothesis sits within a broader program of research by apostolou on sexual selection under parental choice, which argues that for much of human evolutionary history parents, rather than prospective mates themselves, exercised substantial control over mating decisions.
wilczkowski’s 2026 target article, titled male choice hypothesis: shortcomings, inconsistencies, and proposed alternatives, argued that the evidential foundations of this account are weaker than its proponents suggest. According to the structure of the debate, the critique pressed on multiple fronts: that the survey findings showing male approval of female same-sex attraction are modest in magnitude and vulnerable to methodological artifacts; that male preference in a modern, largely weird sample does not establish an ancestral selective pressure; and that the hypothesis sits awkwardly alongside the substantial body of evidence indicating that exclusive or predominant female homosexuality is associated with reduced reproductive output. When a trait demonstrably lowers the number of offspring produced, the argument goes, a preference-based benefit must be strong and consistent enough to offset that cost, something wilczkowski contended the existing data do not demonstrate.
apostolou’s response takes up that challenge by reassembling the evidence base and contesting the interpretation of several key datasets. A central empirical pillar of the male choice program is work using nationally representative and convenience samples showing that a substantial proportion of men report that a partner’s same-sex attraction would not deter them, and that many men find the prospect of a female partner engaging in same-sex behavior appealing. Follow-up cross-cultural work by apostolou and wang extended these findings beyond western samples, an important move because evolutionary hypotheses ultimately rest on claims about ancestral and species-wide selection pressures rather than the idiosyncrasies of contemporary college students. From this perspective, the presence of the preference across disparate cultural settings is precisely the kind of pattern one would expect if male choice had played a genuine selective role.
the reply also engages with the physiological and psychometric literature on female sexual response. Studies of sexual arousal, including work by chivers and colleagues and more recent research on genital and subjective arousal patterns, have repeatedly found that women’s arousal is less category-specific than men’s, responding to a broader range of sexual stimuli. For proponents of male choice, this nonspecificity is consistent with a capacity for sexual fluidity that male preference could have shaped. Apostolou’s broader account of female same-sex attraction as relatively fluid, weakly canalized, and responsive to social context draws on behavioral-genetic findings from twin studies in sweden and elsewhere, which indicate modest heritability for same-sex sexual behavior alongside substantial environmental influence, and on longitudinal cohort research showing that women’s sexual identity and attraction shift over time more often than men’s. The massive genome-wide association study published in science in 2019 reinforced the picture of a highly polygenic, non-deterministic architecture for same-sex sexual behavior, leaving room for accounts in which developmental plasticity interacts with social selection.
against this, the critique and the reply must both confront the reproductive cost data directly. Apostolou’s own 2022 analysis of two nationally representative u.S. Samples documented a direct reproductive cost associated with same-sex attraction, meaning that women reporting such attraction had fewer children on average. This is a crucial technical point in the dispute: the male choice hypothesis does not deny the cost, it argues that the cost was historically offset by fitness benefits flowing from male preference, such as greater access to mates, improved partner retention, or cooperative alliances with other women that enhanced survival and resource acquisition. Evaluating this balancing act requires reconstructing ancestral mating markets, and it is here that the parental choice framework does much of the work. If parents historically controlled whom daughters married, as evidence from historical societies and hunter-gatherer marriage practices suggests, then women’s own preferences were under weaker sexual selection, and traits that made a woman more acceptable to the men who influenced mating decisions could plausibly spread.
methodological disagreements run through the exchange as well. The response addresses concerns about survey design, including the treatment of midpoint responses on likert scales, an issue with a technical literature of its own, and about the gap between stated preferences and actual mating behavior. Critics of preference-based selection arguments note that what men say they find appealing in hypothetical scenarios may bear little relation to the mate choices they make, and that self-reported attraction measures diverge to a degree from genital measures of arousal, as meta-analytic work by chivers and colleagues has shown. Defenders counter that preference measures, when replicated across cultures and supplemented by behavioral proxies such as pornography consumption patterns and reported willingness to satisfy partners, collectively point in the same direction, and that the absence of any single perfect measure is not grounds for discarding convergent evidence. The dispute thus becomes a case study in how evolutionary behavioral scientists adjudicate between competing bodies of imperfect evidence.
the stakes of the debate extend beyond a single hypothesis. Any account of female same-sex attraction must square three robust empirical regularities: the trait is partially heritable but not strongly genetically determined; it is more fluid and less category-specific in women than in men; and predominant homosexuality carries measurable reproductive costs. The male choice hypothesis is one of several positive-selection proposals in the literature, alongside kanazawa’s arguments about female sexual fluidity arising from generalized arousal mechanisms and diamond’s work situating same-gender sexuality within a broader framework of fluidity and diverse forms of sexual diversity. Alternative accounts, including weak negative selection, where mildly deleterious variants persist because selection against them is too weak to eliminate them quickly, and byproduct explanations, in which same-sex attraction emerges as a side effect of selection acting on other traits, remain live competitors, and wilczkowski’s article is explicitly framed as proposing alternatives to male choice rather than merely attacking it.
what the exchange ultimately illustrates is the current state of evolutionary hypotheses about human sexuality: rich in explanatory ambition, but constrained by the difficulty of testing claims about ancestral selection with modern data. Apostolou’s letter argues that the accumulated evidence, from male preference surveys across cultures, from the psychophysiology of female arousal, from behavioral genetics, and from anthropological records of parental control over mating, does not come close to refuting the male choice hypothesis, and that rejecting it requires a higher standard of disproof than wilczkowski applies. Whether the hypothesis survives this scrutiny will depend on future work that can quantify how large a preference-based fitness benefit would need to be, measure male preference with methods that map onto actual ancestral mate choice, and test the predicted patterns in populations and datasets not yet examined. For now, the journal’s correspondence pages have become the arena where one of the more provocative ideas in evolutionary psychology is being stress-tested in public, and readers of sexual science are witnessing how a contested hypothesis earns, or loses, its place in the literature one rebuttal at a time.
subject of research: evolutionary explanations of female same-sex attraction and the male choice hypothesis debate
article title: does the evidence refute the male choice hypothesis? A response to wilczkowski (2026)
article references: apostolou, m. (2026). Does the evidence refute the male choice hypothesis? A response to wilczkowski (2026). Archives of sexual behavior. Https://doi.Org/10.1007/s10508-026-03635-7
image credits: ai generated
doi: 10.1007/s10508-026-03635-7
keywords: male choice hypothesis, female same-sex attraction, evolutionary psychology, sexual selection, sexual fluidity, apostolou, wilczkowski, archives of sexual behavior, parental choice, reproductive cost, mate preference, behavioral genetics
cite scienmag news
gavin prescott. (September 24, 2026). Male choice and female same-sex attraction: an evolutionary debate rekindled. Scienmag. Https://scienmag.Com/male-choice-and-female-same-sex-attraction-an-evolutionary-debate-rekindled/
gavin prescott. Male choice and female same-sex attraction: an evolutionary debate rekindled. Scienmag, 24 september 2026, https://scienmag.Com/male-choice-and-female-same-sex-attraction-an-evolutionary-debate-rekindled/. Accessed 24 september 2026.
gavin prescott. Male choice and female same-sex attraction: an evolutionary debate rekindled. Scienmag. September 24, 2026. Https://scienmag.Com/male-choice-and-female-same-sex-attraction-an-evolutionary-debate-rekindled/ |
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| Horatio C. Wood: The Philadelphia Polymath Who Founded American Neurology |
| Posted on Thursday, September 24 @ 00:04:14 PDT (10 reads) | |
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Few figures in the history of american medicine straddled as many disciplines as horatio curtis wood, the philadelphia physician whose career stretched from the battlefields of the civil war era to the founding decades of academic neurology. A new historical profile published in the journal of neurology by lazaros c. Triarhou of the aristotelian university of thessaloniki revisits wood’s life and legacy as part of the journal’s long-running pioneers in neurology series, offering readers a chance to reconsider a man who helped define what it meant to be a professor of nervous diseases in the united states. Wood, who lived from 1841 to 1920, occupies a singular place in the institutional history of the field: he was the first professor and chair of neurology at the university of pennsylvania, holding that chair from 1871 to 1900, a period when neurology was only beginning to separate itself from general medicine and psychiatry on american shores.
wood’s early life unfolded in a philadelphia that was rapidly becoming the scientific capital of the united states. Born in 1841, he came of age at a time when american medicine was still largely an apprenticeship trade, taught at the bedside rather than in the laboratory. Yet wood’s generation would transform that landscape, importing the experimental methods of european physiology and pharmacology and building the first university departments devoted to the scientific study of disease. Wood himself would later recount these formative years in his reminiscences of an american pioneer in experimental medicine, delivered before the college of physicians of philadelphia in 1920, near the end of his life. That memoir remains one of the most valuable first-hand accounts of what it took to establish experimental medicine in nineteenth-century america, and it anchors much of the modern scholarship on his career, including the biographical memoir prepared for the national academy of sciences by george b. Roth in 1959.
the scale of wood’s ambitions becomes clearer when one considers the breadth of his appointments. In an era when most physicians confined themselves to a single specialty, wood held professorships in nervous diseases, in pharmacology and therapeutics, and in general medicine, moving fluidly among fields that today would be considered separate careers. This versatility reflected both his temperament and the state of nineteenth-century science, in which the boundaries between physiology, pharmacology, and clinical medicine were still porous. His work in pharmacology contributed to the emerging science of drug action, while his clinical teaching brought rigorous diagnostic methods to the study of disorders of the nervous system. The university of pennsylvania’s departmental archives, which trace the history of its neurology chair from 1871 onward, credit wood with establishing the institution’s first professorship and chair of neurology, a milestone documented in the broader scholarly literature on early american professorships in neurology by christopher goetz and e.J. Pappert.
wood’s most enduring contribution to the neurological literature came in 1887 with the publication of nervous diseases and their diagnosis, a treatise issued by the j. B. Lippincott company of philadelphia. The book’s subtitle reveals its ambitions: a treatment of the phenomena produced by diseases of the nervous system, with especial reference to the recognition of their causes. At a time when american practitioners relied heavily on european texts, wood’s treatise represented an effort to systematize neurological diagnosis for an american audience, organizing clinical phenomena according to the underlying lesions and etiologies that produced them. The work placed emphasis on the logical pathway from observed symptoms to anatomical and causal explanations, a mode of reasoning that would become the backbone of clinical neurology as the specialty matured in the twentieth century. Modern historians of movement disorders continue to cite wood’s clinical descriptions; his observations are referenced in the literature on meige syndrome, the adult-onset cranial dystonia characterized by blepharospasm and orofacial movements, as scholars such as mark s. Ledoux and later pandey and sharma have traced in the pages of parkinsonism and related disorders and the journal of the neurological sciences.
wood’s career also intersected with the professional organization that would come to define american neurology. He was a member of the american neurological association, founded in 1875, and his name appears in the association’s semi-centennial volume of 1924, where isaac abrahamson and t.H. Weisenburg compiled the biographical records of past and present members along with the association’s military history. That membership placed wood among the small cohort of physicians who, in the closing decades of the nineteenth century, worked to give neurology an institutional identity in the united states, complete with its own societies, journals, and academic chairs. The goetz and pappert survey of early american professorships in neurology, published in annals of neurology in 1996, situates wood’s pennsylvania chair within this wider movement, in which a handful of universities competed to formalize the teaching of nervous diseases.
beyond his scientific work, wood left an unexpected mark on the history of american art. He was the subject of a portrait by thomas eakins, the great philadelphia realist painter whose unsparing depictions of surgeons and scientists documented the medical world of his city. Eakins painted several members of the philadelphia medical establishment, and his portrait of wood is discussed in the bulletin of the detroit institute of arts, which holds the work. The painting captures the convergence of art and medicine that characterized gilded age philadelphia, a city where the pennsylvania academy of the fine arts and the college of physicians drew from the same social world. For historians, such portraits serve as visual documents of the professional self-image that physicians like wood cultivated: sober, exacting, and unmistakably modern.
the retrospective on wood also invites reflection on how the discipline he helped found has changed. When wood took up his chair in 1871, neurology lacked the electrophysiological, imaging, and molecular tools that define the field today. Diagnosis rested on careful history-taking and physical examination, on the correlation of clinical signs with post-mortem findings, and on the classification of syndromes that could be recognized at the bedside. Wood’s 1887 treatise embodies that approach, and its emphasis on the recognition of causes anticipates the etiological thinking that drives contemporary neurology, even as the technologies of investigation have been transformed beyond anything a nineteenth-century practitioner could have imagined. The continuity, historians argue, lies less in the instruments than in the intellectual discipline of localizing and explaining disease.
wood’s longevity itself is notable. He lived to 1920, long enough to see neurology acquire laboratory foundations, to witness the rise of bacteriology and the transformation of pharmacology into an experimental science, and to record his memories of the pioneering era in the memoir delivered to the college of physicians of philadelphia. Published in the third series of the college’s transactions, the reminiscences run to more than sixty pages and are now freely accessible through the internet archive, allowing a new generation of readers to hear the voice of a man who helped build american experimental medicine from the ground up. The document is prized not only for its factual content but for its window into the culture of nineteenth-century philadelphia science, its rivalries, its institutions, and its sense of possibility.
triarhou’s profile, received by the journal in august 2026 and published on 23 september 2026 in volume 273 of the journal of neurology, draws on these primary and secondary sources to restore wood to the prominence he once held. The piece forms part of a series that has documented the lives of the founders of neuroscience across europe and the americas, and it situates wood alongside the other figures whose names are attached to the discipline’s early chairs and societies. The author, who works at the interface of psychology, brain science, and the history of neuroscience, has made a career of such biographical reconstructions, and the wood article follows the series’ format of combining archival evidence with an assessment of the subject’s scientific contributions.
for modern readers, the story of horatio c. Wood is a reminder that the institutions of medicine are not timeless but were built, chair by chair and treatise by treatise, by individuals with the energy to imagine them. The first professor of neurology at penn, the author of a foundational american text on nervous diseases, a pharmacologist, a physician, and a sitter for thomas eakins, wood embodied an era when a single career could span the whole of medical science. His portrait now hangs in the detroit institute of arts; his memoir survives online; his treatise is cited in the histories of dystonia; and his chair, established in 1871, continues as part of one of the leading neurology departments in the united states. Few pioneers leave so many traces across so many fields, and the new profile in the journal of neurology ensures that this philadelphia polymath will not be forgotten by the specialty he helped to create.
subject of research: historical profile of horatio c. Wood, pioneer of american neurology
article title: horatio c. Wood (1841–1920)
article references: triarhou, l. C. (2026). Horatio c. Wood (1841–1920). Journal of neurology, 273(10), article 615. Https://doi.Org/10.1007/s00415-026-14129-w
image credits: ai generated
doi: 10.1007/s00415-026-14129-w
keywords: horatio c. Wood, neurology history, university of pennsylvania, journal of neurology, pioneers in neurology, nervous diseases, pharmacology, thomas eakins, american neurological association, medical history, meige syndrome, philadelphia
cite scienmag news
cassandra pierce. (September 24, 2026). Horatio c. Wood: the philadelphia polymath who founded american neurology. Scienmag. Https://scienmag.Com/horatio-c-wood-the-philadelphia-polymath-who-founded-american-neurology/
cassandra pierce. Horatio c. Wood: the philadelphia polymath who founded american neurology. Scienmag, 24 september 2026, https://scienmag.Com/horatio-c-wood-the-philadelphia-polymath-who-founded-american-neurology/. Accessed 24 september 2026.
cassandra pierce. Horatio c. Wood: the philadelphia polymath who founded american neurology. Scienmag. September 24, 2026. Https://scienmag.Com/horatio-c-wood-the-philadelphia-polymath-who-founded-american-neurology/ |
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| The Coddling of the American Mind: How Overprotective Parenting Led to Fragility |
| Posted on Thursday, September 24 @ 00:04:14 PDT (10 reads) | |
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Jonathan haidt and greg lukianoff explain how good intentions and bad ideas have made young people super-fragile—and how to make things better.
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reason is the planets leading source of news, politics, and culture from a libertarian perspective. Go to reason.Com for a point of view you wont get from legacy media and old left-right opinion magazines.
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in 2015, psychology professor jonathan haidt and free-speech activist greg lukianoff published the coddling of the american mind in the atlantic. It argued that speech codes, trigger warnings, and safe spaces on college campuses are disastrous for education—and mental health. It quickly became the most-read article in the history of the magazine.
now theyve expanded it into a new book with the same title.
lukianoff, a lawyer by training, heads fire, the foundation for individual rights in education, which fights for free speech on campus. Haidt teaches at new york university and is a co-founder of let grow, the free-range parenting advocacy organization, and heterodox academy, which promotes intellectual diversity among faculty.
reasons nick gillespie sat down with them to talk about why they believe that, as their books subtitle puts it, good intentions and bad ideas about the supposed fragility of young people is setting up a generation for failure.
edited by alexis garcia. Intro by todd krainin. Camera by jim epstein and kevin alexander.
photo credits: gage skidmore/flickr, picture-alliance/dpa/newscom |
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| Novig Promo Code OREGON: New $25 MLB bonus; Packers vs. Falcons TNF odds update |
| Posted on Thursday, September 24 @ 00:04:14 PDT (10 reads) | |
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The novig promo code oregon has been announced, and its $25 bonus is live on a $10 deposit. New users registering with the novig promo code oregon deposit $10 and receive $25 in trade credits—$35 in total trading funds—ahead of a late west coast first pitch between the angels and athletics at 9:40 p.M. Et tonight and falcons vs. Packers on thursday night football.
novig is a us prediction market exchange where users trade event contracts on game outcomes rather than betting against a house, and the novig promo code oregon is the first novig code oregonlive.Com has carried. It is verified and active as of wednesday, september 23, 2026, and it is one of a group of new novig promo codes announced this week across the advance local network—the full set is listed below.
novig promo code oregon: the bonus in brief (sept. 23)
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the packers are a 70% favorite on novig, with $360,037 traded on the moneyline and $436,245 on the spread, but the 5.5-point line is a coin flip that tilts slightly toward atlanta at 52%, and the 43.5 total leans under at 54%. Alternate spreads at 4.5 and 6.5 are listed for both teams.
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view and trade full novig odds for angels vs. Athletics and thursday night football.
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restrictions & requirements apply. Not available in all states. 21+. Event contract trading involves risk & is not appropriate for all. Consider if it’s appropriate for you in light of financial circumstances. See novig.Com/terms for information. |
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| Concerto Köln |
| Posted on Thursday, September 24 @ 00:04:14 PDT (10 reads) | |
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Taxi driver: where to?
passenger: carnegie hall, please. [Car honks]
[tires screech]
[sirens]
[music]
box office: okay, here are your tickets. Enjoy the show.
usher: your tickets, please. Follow me.
[background chatter]
[music]
jeff spurgeon: in new york city, there are lots of ways to get to carnegie hall. A subway, a taxi, a walk down 57th street. Youve just found another way to get to americas most famous home for classical music. Welcome to carnegie hall live, the broadcast series that gives you a front row seat to concerts by some of the greatest artists in the world. You hear the performances exactly as they happen. You are part of the audience sharing the experience of music-making at carnegie hall. Im jeff spurgeon, backstage with john schaefer.
john schaefer: we are backstage at zankel hall, which is carnegies mid-sized venue. A subterranean space that is the perfect size for the intimacy of baroque music brought to us by the concerto köln, an ensemble that, as their name suggests, is based in the german city of cologne. While they have a pretty wide repertoire, actually their bread and butter is the music of people like bach, handel, telemann, and vivaldi. Youll hear all of them, plus some lesser-known baroque composers, giuseppe sammartini and the mysterious mrs philarmonica. Well tell you more about both of them in just a bit.
jeff spurgeon: carnegie hall live is supported by viking, committed to exploring the world in comfort, offering small ship experiences with a shore excursion included in every port, and programs designed for cultural enrichment. More at viking.Com
john schaefer: concerto köln was formed in europe, in germany, 41 years ago. They specialize in music from the 18th and 19th centuries, but they have a surprisingly broad repertoire that includes turkish music, contemporary music, and even wagner operas. They have an extensive recording catalog. They perform in festivals throughout europe and here in the states.
jeff spurgeon: one of the cellists in the ensemble is hannah freienstein. She talked with us earlier today and told us more about the growing legacy of concerto köln.
hannah freienstein: i think the ensemble really shaped history in a form because it has shaped the idea of people what they think about early music and historical informed practice. I think it still does. Its evolving. The mission is to keep tradition going, but every tradition is just as good as how many changes you place to the tradition. To keep the core, but to have it modern still.
jeff spurgeon: now, in both halves of this concert, were going to hear selections by georg philipp telemann, chosen from a grouping of his works put together by a german musicologist in the 1950s. Through this series of musical movements, telemann will take us on a trip around various parts of europe, showing off the musical characteristics of a number of cultures and regions. Its an idea of travel that is the theme of tonights concert.
hannah freienstein: actually, the whole night is like a road trip through europe. Its something that the aristocrats back then did. It was called grand tour. They would go especially from england to all the parts of europe, which we do now too. We start off with telemann. Theres klingende geographie. Its about different countries. We hear french elegance, we hear england very groovy. In the second part of the program, we even go to turkey, and we listen to what people in that time experienced the world like. We can do a whole trip to europe without the jet lag, of course.
john schaefer: that again, concerto köln cellist hannah freienstein. I love the idea of england being groovy back in the 1620s. [Laughs]
jeff spurgeon: yes, i noticed that too.
john schaefer: 1720s, i guess. Concerto köln will start us off with some of the so-called klingende geographie, the musical geography that was put together in the 1950s out of bits and pieces of his other works. Well get to hear melodic and harmonic and rhythmic features from parts of europe that include spain, england, scotland, and ireland, france, and a couple of parts of telemanns native germany.
jeff spurgeon: then we have a work in the first half by a composer who is known to us only as mrs philarmonica. Hannah freienstein told us a little bit more about this enigma of a composer.
hannah freienstein: mystery woman. Mystery woman is-- we dont know who she was. I found her pieces in the british library. Its two sets of trio sonatas. We play it today as a concerto grosso. We know it must have been a woman. It must have been published around 1715. We can hear in the music she must have read corelli. She was probably well educated. This is one of the questions, like who gets to be part of musical history and who doesnt. Why is she forgotten for 300 years? Now theres people playing her music, but she was forgotten for 300 years.
jeff spurgeon: music of mrs philarmonica. Her name, of course, means lover of melody in greek. Well also have in this concert a violin concerto by bach featuring soloist shunske sato, with whom well speak at intermission about his demanding work with concerto köln. Just as john was talking to you at one point, we have the members of the ensemble on two sides of the stage, backstage. You can hear them a little bit in the background. They waved bye-bye to the other people on the other side of the stage. I guess theyre going out together, and then theyll reunite on the stage in just a minute.
john schaefer: around the harpsichord, which has pride of place in the center of zankel hall stage. Some of the members of concerto köln now out on stage. It is a conductorless ensemble, and theyre going to perform some of this musical confection put together in 1959 out of pre existing works by telemann under the title klingende geographie, musical geography. From carnegie hall live.
[silence]
[music - telemann: selections from klingende geographie]
[applause]
jeff spurgeon: from carnegie hall live, concerto köln with violinist shunske sato and recorder player max volbers, and a suite of music by georg philipp telemann.
john schaefer: musical geography, the name of that piece. Up next, a work by the anonymous composer we know only as mrs philarmonica. The set of six sonatas. Well hear the sonata number six, the last of them. This composer, clearly influenced by the italian music of the day, but probably from london herself.
jeff spurgeon: we dont know who she was. In fact, its even possibly suspected she might have been a man pretending to be a woman in order to capitalize on the notoriety of the idea, but this was long before any music was published in woman by a composer whose name we knew.
john schaefer: its also possible that it genuinely was a woman.
jeff spurgeon: oh, certainly.
john schaefer: she would have had to have been educated, cultured, and in no position to besmirch the family name with anything as uncouth as writing music. [Laughs]
jeff spurgeon: writing music. Good heavens, what a shame. That would have necessitated her anonymity. Heres her music now.
[music - mrs philarmonica: sonata sesta in g major (arr. For string orchestra)]
[applause]
jeff spurgeon: a sonata by mrs philarmonica, as this anonymous composer from the early 18th century in london was known. One of her six known sonatas. Now its time for bach from concerto köln.
john schaefer: slightly less mysterious figure. Of course, theres always the great mystery of how did one man compose all of this wonderful music. The piece well hear is a violin concerto in d minor featuring violinist shunske sato. Its a reconstruction of a bach concerto. He most likely wrote this for the violin, but that original version didnt survive. What we had instead was a harpsichord arrangement of the piece from 1738. The most likely reason that it didnt survive, what do you think?
jeff spurgeon: it was just too hard. Its too hard. Lets play it on something else.
[music - j. S. Bach: violin concerto in d minor, bwv 1052r]
[applause]
john schaefer: that is music by bach, the violin concerto in d minor played live on stage at carnegies zankel hall by concerto köln and the violinist shunske sato, who clearly knows his way around the fiddle. A concerto rather that in his own day, bach thought was unplayable on the violin and so he wrote out a version for harpsichord instead. Thats the version thats come down to us, but we have recovered the violin original through that harpsichord version. That is the work that we hear pretty commonly these days.
jeff spurgeon: yes, but still, its a workout for a violinist and a wonderful test of technique. This is an interesting ensemble because their techniques are very specific. They are trying to play this music in as far as scholarship can allow us to understand, in the same way that it was played in the time when it was written by these composers. Well talk with shunske sato a little bit about that shortly.
john schaefer: yes, and probably worth mentioning when we talk about performance practice, that most of the members of concerto köln play standing.
jeff spurgeon: yes, thats right. The cellists really make the good choice early in life, but they dont realize it until later that theyve done a smart thing by using an instrument that you pretty much have to sit down in order to play, unless you want to hang it around your neck, which has been done a time or two, but its usually, usually a seated spot. Yes, it does make the music more alive. That was a brisk and not aggressive but full-throated reading of that bach concerto came out very assertively.
john schaefer: youre listening to carnegie hall live. We are at zankel hall. This music really comes alive in a somewhat smaller place like this, and we still have a second half to get to that will bring us some more music by telemann as we continue the theme of musical traveling. Speaking of traveling, carnegie hall live is supported by viking, dedicated to creating travel experiences for the thinking person with programs designed for cultural enrichment on board and onshore. More at viking.Com.
jeff spurgeon: this is classical new york, wqxr, 105.9 fm and hd newark, 90.3 fm wqxw ossining, and wnyc fm hd2 new york. Backstage at carnegies zankel hall, im jeff spurgeon. John schaefers here, and in the back, youre hearing, i think a few of the members of concerto köln reflecting on the first half of this program. Out on stage, you can hear some instruments being moved, and chairs, and things to configure things for the second part of this concert.
it is a 15-person ensemble, 16 if we count our featured recorder player tonight. That gives you a sense of the size of the ensemble thats on stage. Im happy to say that were able to talk at intermission with one of them now. Shunske sato, welcome to the carnegie hall live microphone. Congratulations on that performance of the bach in the first half of this concert. You were born in tokyo, but you came to the united states at age 4, and then you actually were here in new york for a while.
shunske sato: i was going to juilliard pre-college on a weekly basis. Yes, always a little bit of nostalgia sets in when i go through lincoln tunnel. I know thats not the emotion that one associates with-
john schaefer: no, no.
shunske sato: -specifically.
john schaefer: not for native new yorkers.
shunske sato: no, no, no. Once every so often, it brings that up, i think.
john schaefer: we were just talking about the theme of travel thats woven through this program.
shunske sato: thats right.
john schaefer: youve done a lot. Japan, then the states, now you live in the netherlands.
shunske sato: netherlands.
john schaefer: you work with this german-based ensemble. Travel is pretty much what you do, isnt it?
shunske sato: thats right, yeah. Also, i lived in france and germany for a number of years as well, to study.
john schaefer: yes. Before we get too far from the bach, whose cadenza did you play in that third movement?
shunske sato: yes. In fact, the cadenza is written. Its one of bach-- obviously, he must have improvised when the piece was fresh and then came up with a version. I dont know, im hypothesizing here. Maybe he came up with a particularly satisfying one. Although that being said, in both movements, actually, there are big bits that descend, lets say, into chords. He doesnt write out notes anymore, but just pure chords. What you do with them, its basically anyones guess, but--
jeff spurgeon: you have some cadenza direction from bach, but you also then can take it in the direction you want?
shunske sato: as far as cadenzas go, this one is very prescribed, i think. For example, the mozart violin concertos, you literally get nothing. You get a dot. With bach, you get at least half a cadenza. Yes, he was very considerate.
john schaefer: how did you find the world of period performance? How did you find this particular world? I dont know that anybody says, when i grow up, i want to play period performance, baroque literature.
shunske sato: its interesting. I think, actually, that what you just said is happening more and more in my time. Im only 41ish, but certainly it was not yet part of-- as far as i could see from my perspective, part of the regular upbringing. Precisely because of that, actually, because it was exotic, because it was a little bit far from me. I always did kind of. I dont know. If i think about it now, i wasnt really sure, to be honest, what drew me specifically. I just knew that it sounded different, it sounded great, it sounded energetic, and i didnt think much of it.
then, when i went to europe when i was 19, then the doors started opening up a lot because you could go to basically any violin shop, for example, and pick up a baroque violin, see a gamba, try out baroque oboes, and go to concerts, obviously, and then take master classes. Its a lot closer. Anyway, there was also for me another kind of way in, and that was, namely, historical recordings. Old recordings, pre-war, beginning of the last century, the really sizzling surface noise kind of recordings from chrysler and what have you.
also for the same reasons, a little bit kind of, thats the sound that i dont hear around me. What is it? Also, what fascinated me and also in those recordings, which are arguably more recent than the music that we just played, they felt free most of the time to depart from the text, to change the rhythm, really personalize it. In a way, so i came at it from two angles, as it were, from the really early stuff that i really wanted to get to know, but also this childhood fascination for early recordings.
john schaefer: jeff and i have been, during the first half, fascinated by some of the instruments behind you on stage. Michael freimuth is playing a lute with two necks.
shunske sato: yes.
john schaefer: kinnon church is playing what we thought was a double bass, but it has frets. Its either a member of the viol family or violone. Can you enlighten us?
shunske sato: sure. To start with the double bass, kinnons double bass, i think putting on frets was actually quite standard. Indeed, as you pointed out, it does have a-- yes, suspiciously close, at least appearance-wise--
john schaefer: its a bass in disguise.
shunske sato: in disguise a little bit. Also, just from the terminology, you see violone basso, and you basically get very little specifics beyond that. Also, from what i understand, is that if you have frets, you basically have a clearer sound, in fact, which, in the lower end of the frequency, is very helpful.
john schaefer: the lute?
shunske sato: the lute-- its an interesting, and i think-- im certainly not the most qualified person to talk about it, but they kept on adding strings. Basically, they had the basic lute with one neck, and they thought, well, why not add a few more strings, lower ones, to get more lower pitches? You needed more string length for this. They added the second neck. It is truly frankenstein instruments that they-- which also tells you how creative they were. They took basically an existing thing, they just patched on something else, and they created something new.
john schaefer: almost 300 years before jimmy page and led zeppelin.
shunske sato: yes, exactly. Yes, yes, absolutely.
jeff spurgeon: shunske, thank you so much for spending time, but you need to rest because youve got a couple other things coming up in the second half, but thank you. Its such a pleasure to talk to you.
shunske sato: most welcome. Its my pleasure.
jeff spurgeon: shunske sato, who is a member of concerto köln, and you heard him as a soloist in the bach concerto just before intermission. Hell be back in the second half of this program along with the rest of concerto köln and their special guest recorder player, max volbers.
john schaefer: that second half will feature works by telemann, handel, vivaldi, and giuseppe sammartini. Now, earlier in this concert, we heard a work by the anonymous composer known to us only as mrs philarmonica. By the way, im not mispronouncing that there is no h. Its just philarmonica.
jeff spurgeon: also, its one word. Phil is not the first name of the husband, just to be clear.
john schaefer: we thought going back to 1715, where this apparently female composer wanted to have her work published and had to do so with this pseudonym, we thought it might be fun to take a quick trip through women composers over the centuries.
jeff spurgeon: if we want to go back to the beginning of the record, almost as far as we can go, we find ourselves in the company of hildegard von bingen, german composer. She was a nun, she was a healer, a writer, a scientist, an amazing human being. She had visions at a young age. Her family sent her to a nunnery. She took her vows when she was 15 and eventually became prioress of the nunnery. Here is just a sample of one of her musical works, ordo virtutum. This is o nos peregrine sumus performed by the ensemble called sequentia.
[music - sequentia: o nos peregrine sumus]
john schaefer: music here from the 12th-century german composer and abbess hildegard von bingen, from the ordo virtutum, the play of the virtues, which some might say was the first ever western opera. You heard an excerpt sung by the group known as sequentia, conducted by benjamin bagby. Our next composer on this tour through the history of women in classical composition is italys barbara strozzi. Barbara strozzi was born in venice in 1619 into a society filled with writers, and artists, and all kinds of creative people.
strozzi herself made her reputation as a singer, and then as a composer, she published eight collections of songs and is sometimes credited with inventing the cantata. Her music found its way throughout europe. Here is a sample. This is che si può fare performed by the parels ensemble.
[music - parels ensemble: che si può fare]
jeff spurgeon: the melody by barbara strozzi. Now, as we make a quick survey during this intermission of this concerto köln concert, were sampling some great women composers through history. How about fanny mendelssohn? Born in 1805, german composer, pianist, wrote more than 450 compositions in her lifetime. Lots of piano music, some chamber works, more than 250 lieder.
most of her music was unpublished during her lifetime. Though she was acknowledged to be talented, there just wasnt a place for a woman composer in her society in her time. She was somewhat discouraged from making too much of this music business. She and her brother were very close. Fanny died in her early 40s in felix within six months of her. This is one of her songs without words, performed by pianist matthias kirschnereit.
[music - matthias kirschnereit: songs without words]
john schaefer: a little bit of music by fanny mendelssohn. Like her brother felix, she wrote a number of songs without words. Thats one of them. Our next composer is from america. Florence price was born in little rock, arkansas, in 1887. In 1933, she became the first black woman to have a composition performed by a major american orchestra. When the chicago symphony premiered her symphony in e minor, she wrote more than 300 works, and her symphonies-- now, as you may know, third movements of symphonies in the european tradition would be like a minuet, a scherzo, a trio, a dance form. The third movement of her symphonies was usually a juba dance, hambone being another word for that dance form in african american form. Here is the juba dance from that symphony no. 1.
[music - florence price: juba dance]
jeff spurgeon: some of the music of florence price. The juba dance from her symphony no. 1. Our final composer in this sampling of female composers through history is caroline shaw, the only living composer on our list tonight. A violinist and a singer. Shes won the pulitzer prize, four grammys. She has an honorary doctorate from yale. Shes written for renee fleming and yo yo ma and for the los angeles and new york philharmonic orchestras as well. Here is a little bit of her music. Some of the music that she wrote for the ken burns public television special about leonardo da vinci. A performance here by the attacca quartet and s? Percussion.
[music - the attacca quartet and s? Percussion: leonardo da vinci]
john schaefer: a little bit of music from caroline shaw. Youll hear a lot more of her music at carnegie hall next season when she takes her position as the debs composers chair here at carnegie hall. We are nearing the end of intermission. Were at carnegies zankel hall for this performance by concerto köln. There are four more works scheduled in the second half, more music by telemann, handel, and vivaldi. Well start the second half with a flute concerto by the italian composer giuseppe sammartini. Jeff, we mentioned earlier when talking about mrs philarmonica that there was certainly the influence of italian music in london in the 17th century.
jeff spurgeon: oh, it certainly was a flavor, and it was really all through europe. Weve heard that in this concert as well. The influence of italian style, but also french sensibilities and forms, and certainly a respect for the german ideas of counterpoint and structure. This work were about to hear by sammartini is a work by a fellow who certainly knew how to make music this way. He was a great woodwind player. Were going to hear the young recorder player max volbers as the soloist in this recorder concerto by giuseppe sammartini, performed with concerto köln from carnegie hall live.
[music - concerto köln ft max volbers: recorder concerto in f by sammartini]
[applause]
jeff spurgeon: recorder virtuoso max volbers featured in that concerto by giuseppe sammartini performed for you by concerto köln from carnegie hall live. Backstage, im jeff spurgeon with john schaefer. I love a recorder. I do. To hear a dance like that is just such a thrill.
john schaefer: i might have heard one or two recorder players not up to that level in my lifetime.
jeff spurgeon: pretty amazing.
john schaefer: yes, that was pretty great. Max volbers playing the recorder concerto in f by sammartini, italian composer who spent much of his career in london, actually. Now we continue travels with telemann. The concerto köln opened this concert with excerpts from this 20th-century suite called klingende geographie, musical geography. Now heres more from carnegie hall live.
[music - concerto köln: klingende geographie]
[applause]
jeff spurgeon: concerto köln with music of telemann. That last work, a clear reflection of the sound of the janissary bands that were an exotic sound in europe in the 18th century and 17th, a little bit too, clearly imitated in that particular work. Now, on this concert from carnegie hall live, we turn to a work by handel.
john schaefer: a concerto grosso in f major, op. 6, no. 9. Just as that telemann piece was taken from bits and pieces of various telemann works, this concerto grosso includes excerpts from an organ concerto, a couple of opera excerpts, and some music written specially for the occasion. Handel, like sammartini and corelli and others before him, made his way to london, where this piece would have had its premiere. Here is the concerto köln performing the concerto grosso by handel on stage at zankel hall. Well have a little bit of tuning for a moment first, and then this performance. [Chuckles]
jeff spurgeon: tuning is a very important part of early music performances.
john schaefer: lots of old strings out there. Concerto köln is an ensemble that has a wide repertoire. As we mentioned earlier, they know their way around contemporary music, but this really is what theyre known for. Here is the handel concerto grosso in f.
[music - concerto köln: concerto grosso in f major, op. 6, no. 9]
[applause]
john schaefer: handels concerto grosso in f major, op. 6, no. 9, played live at zankel hall by the ensemble known as concerto köln. This carnegie hall live broadcast has one final piece, and its a musical firework from vivaldi, a version of his concerto in a minor for two violins that will feature both of our soloists, shunske sato on violin and max volbers playing the recorder. Concerto köln cellist, hannah freienstein, says this is a great concert ending because its a flashy closer for everybody, but especially the two soloists.
hannah freienstein: italian showing off in the best way possible and looking whos the better one. Originally, for two violins, we do it with violin and flute. I think the two boys are having great fun up there on the stage. We too.
john schaefer: concerto köln.
[music - concerto köln: concerto in a minor for two violins] [applause]
jeff spurgeon: well, they certainly know how to finish a concert, dont they? Concerto köln, violinist shunske sato, and the recorder player max volbers. Theyre bringing you that concerto for two violins, at least as antonio vivaldi wrote it, but one of the violins switched out for max volbers recorder. In this broadcast, concert by concerto köln from carnegie hall live. All the musicians on their feet. Most of them were, actually, except the cellist and the harpsichordist, but now all standing to receive the appreciation of this audience at carnegies zankel hall. Backstage, im jeff spurgeon, alongside john schaefer.
john schaefer: it turns out a couple of the pieces on the program tonight have been kind of reworking.
jeff spurgeon: you bet.
john schaefer: the bach violin concerto, reworked from a harpsichord version of what was originally a violin concerto by bach, and now this version of vivaldis concerto for two violins, with one violin and a recorder. Vivaldi didnt stand on ceremony. If you could get the job done, get the job done. Violin, flute, recorder, all interchangeable, lute, mandolin, guitar, if you could get your way through these--
jeff spurgeon: rolling pin, whatever you happen to have lying around, vivaldi could write a concerto with that instrument. Well, exceptionally exciting playing from max volbers in this particular concerto that we just heard. Now, back on stage are shunske sato and max volbers, with the members of concerto köln.
john schaefer: this is an ensemble, jeff, that we mentioned this earlier, they dont have a conductor.
jeff spurgeon: thats right.
john schaefer: theres a lot of visual cueing happening between them. The two soloists have had to be de facto conductors while theyre on stage. They are still on stage and thumbing through their scores.
jeff spurgeon: conferring with one another. It looks like well have an encore.
max volbers: thank you so much for being with us here tonight. You know that early music is always about doing research and finding things. We just found a piece by johann sebastian bach, a very special arrangement. Maybe you might know this one. Lets see. [Laughter]
[music - max volbers, shunske sato, and concerto köln: bach violin concerto in e major]
[applause and cheers]
john schaefer: thats music by bach in an arrangement by max volbers, who you heard playing the recorder. Thats the third and final movement of the bach violin concerto in e major in which max has rearranged the, or reassigned the solo part and split it up between his instrument and the violin. Sharing the plaudits and the music with shunske sato and concerto köln, an encore performance on stage at zankel hall here at carnegie.
jeff spurgeon: an ensemble of 16 players that youve heard tonight from the stage of zankel hall, 15 of them mentioned in the program. Volbers is something of a guest artist. As john mentioned, this is a conductorless ensemble, and all of the performances and all of what theyve created here has been a collaborative effort among all the musicians, offering suggestions and sharing their thoughts. Thats how good tight chamber groups work.
john schaefer: there it was, something very collegial i felt-
jeff spurgeon: oh, very much so.
john schaefer: -about this arrangement. Its like, im not going to arrange this just for my instrument. No, ill share it with you. Its originally for your instrument. Well do 50/50. Yes, they seem to really be enjoying themselves. Im sure the audience, as much as theyre enjoying the music, it adds something to see musicians beaming the way shunske sato and max volbers are as they come back out on stage one more time, another bow for this zankel hall audience. Again, the subterranean mid-size hall here at carnegie. Just the perfect setting for this sort of ensemble and the intimacy and the exuberance of baroque music. No one has left the stage yet, so it looks like we are not done with music from concerto köln.
max volbers: clearly, you surprised us. Thank you so much.
[music - max volbers, shunske sato, and concerto köln: niedersachsen]
[applause]
jeff spurgeon: niedersachsen, a piece of music by georg philipp telemann, which is actually a genuine encore in this concert, for they played this movement in the first half of the program. Violinist shunske sato and recorder player max volbers, and the ensemble concerto köln, with a second encore in this concert that has had a travel theme in it because of all these works of telemann, who did really appreciate the idea of assigning geographical locations or ethnic ideas to his music, most of which are completely lost on us today.
nonetheless, they have been an excuse for concerto köln to create this program that has brought a lot of these traveling ideas and shared the admixture of styles that was happening in europe in the 18th century. The italian form, the fast, slow, fast concerto idea that vivaldi kind of set up and the world ran with, the german love of counterpoint, the richness of harmony, and the dance forms that are so often reflected in french titles in these suites.
lots of cultural admixture from telemann, who really got around in his time. Concerto köln gets around, too. In fact, the recorder player has found his way to our microphones now. Its a delight to welcome you, max volbers, to the carnegie hall microphone and congratulate you on a great performance.
max volbers: thank you so much.
jeff spurgeon: this was an amazing pleasure to hear you. How long have you guys worked together, you and shunske and concerto köln? Because you all have a wonderful rapport on stage.
max volbers: well, thank you so much. Actually, this is just my second project with shunske.
jeff spurgeon: like we said, its a brand new experience for you.
john schaefer: [laughs]
max volbers: yes. Ive been working with concerto köln since 2022, i think. We have done many projects, and its always a great pleasure. Its an ensemble with a great flexibility and an ensemble where every voice counts, if you know what i mean. Also, rehearsing is a very fun and intense process because everybody gives his ideas, and so everyones ideas come together and form something unique.
jeff spurgeon: it looks like you had as much fun tonight, too, backstage and on stage as well.
max volbers: yes, we had. We also had a fun tour, actually. This was the fourth concert already, and we have grown to a very good team, i think.
jeff spurgeon: thats great.
john schaefer: weve been saying all evening that you play the recorder, but nobody plays the recorder. Unlike everybody else in the group, you have to bring a whole bag of instruments with you.
max volbers: thats true. Its a family of instruments comparable to the viola da gamba, for example, where you also would have to carry around, like five or six instruments. Today i was playing, i think, eight or so. I didnt count. As a recorder player, youre pretty used to that, like switching between instruments, even between the movements.
john schaefer: even between movements of the same piece, because theyre keyed, theyre set to different keys.
max volbers: yes. Especially when you play a transcription. Like just now in the vivaldi concerto, i switched to a different instrument, to a lower instrument in the middle movement.
john schaefer: you also play the harpsichord.
max volbers: yes, but not today.
john schaefer: no, no. Is that an unusual thing for early music?
max volbers: i would say it was a usual thing in the, lets say, 17th, 18th century. In the baroque era, that was a very common thing, that the musicians were multi-instrumentalists. This is something that i enjoy very much because the baroque music works from the bass. If you also play a bass instrument, you have a different understanding of the music.
john schaefer: now youre a young guy. How did you get into this old music in the first place?
max volbers: i think that would be my first recorder teachers fault. Hi to brigitte.
jeff spurgeon: you were not a flutist.
max volbers: sorry?
jeff spurgeon: you never played the flute, the transverse flute?
max volbers: no.
jeff spurgeon: you started with a recorder and stayed with that?
max volbers: yes. Like so many kids, but i was very lucky to have a very, very good teacher from the beginning, and so i just never stopped. Thats how it happened.
jeff spurgeon: do you perform on harpsichord as well, or is it a sort of a rehearsal instrument?
max volbers: yes, sometimes. When i conduct from the instrument, i do that with the harpsichord usually. I also sometimes have programs where i do both, which is something i enjoy a lot. Today was just playing the recorder.
jeff spurgeon: you have to keep up two sets of chops, though.
max volbers: yes.
jeff spurgeon: youre busy a lot, just to stay in shape.
max volbers: true.
john schaefer: i have a final question. What is the lingua franca? What is the language that you all speak in concerto köln?
max volbers: usually, we speak german, but in this project, we are speaking a lot of english because we had a jump in and we had to find somebody with an american passport due to visa reasons. We found wonderful alyssa. We spoke english with the group.
john schaefer: well, of course, out on stage, music is the international language, and you all spoke it quite beautifully and eloquently tonight.
max volbers: thank you so much. Thanks for having us.
john schaefer: thank you.
jeff spurgeon: wonderful to have you. Thank you so much. Thats going to wrap up this broadcast of carnegie hall live, with our thanks to clive gillinson and the staff of carnegie hall.
john schaefer: wqxrs team includes engineers george wellington, duke marcos, bill siegmund, noriko okabe, and kelvin grant. Our production team: eileen delahunty, laura boyman, nicole nelson, and christine herskovits. Im john schaefer.
jeff spurgeon: im jeff spurgeon. Carnegie hall live is supported by viking, committed to exploring the world in comfort, offering small ship experiences with a shore excursion included in every port and programs designed for cultural enrichment. More at viking.Com. Carnegie hall live is a co-production of carnegie hall and wqxr in new york.
[02:15:06] [end of audio]
copyright © 2026 new york public radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.Wqxr.Org for further information.
new york public radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of new york public radio’s programming is the audio record. |
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| Texas executes KerSean Ramey for triple murder during cocaine quest |
| Posted on Thursday, September 24 @ 00:04:14 PDT (10 reads) | |
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He killed 3 people during quest for cocaine. Texas just executed him
a jury convicted kersean ramey of capital murder in the 2005 shooting deaths of three of his neighbors, including an 18-year-old just getting started in life. His attorneys say his trial was unfair.
amanda lee myers
texas has executed the second of two men who carried out a merciless triple murder more than 20 years ago in a small texas city on the gulf coast.
the state executed kersean ramey, 41, by lethal injection on wednesday, sept. 23, making him the sixth inmate put to death in the state this year and the 28th in the u.S. He was pronounced dead at 6:34 p.M. Ct.
a jury convicted ramey of capital murder in the 2005 shooting deaths of three of his neighbors, including an 18-year-old woman just getting started in life. Rameys execution comes a week after texas executed the other man convicted of the triple murder, lejames norman.
rameys attorneys have argued for years that executing him is unjust and that he never got a fair trial because of racial bias. Prosecutors were able to eliminate any black people from being on the jury, which found ramey guilty after an hour of deliberations and took just 15 minutes to discuss whether he should be sentenced to death, according to court records.
the texas court of criminal appeals rejected those arguments this week, finding that ramey failed to show that he deserved a reprieve.
meanwhile the sister of the 18-year-old murder victim in the case told usa today that just wants her loved one to be remembered for more than just the way she died.
she was a daughter, a sister, a friend, and someone deeply loved, tabatha hastings said. Her life mattered before it ever became part of a court case, and it still matters today.
heres what else you need to know about the case and who peacock was.
what happened tragic night of triple murder?
on aug. 24, 2005, ker’sean ramey and lejames norman were looking to score some cocaine and decided to rob their neighbor, 38-year-old celso lopez. Ramey and norman forced their way into lopezs home and held him at gunpoint as they looked for drugs they never found, according to court records. At some point norman shot lopez, though he claimed it was an accident.
lopez’s roommates, 18-year-old tiffani peacock and 24-year-old sam roberts, walked in on the scene. The two had been dating.
“norman forced peacock to her knees and shot her in the head,” court records say. Roberts tried to flee but both norman and ramey shot him. Ramey shot all three victims several more times to make sure they were dead, court records say.
“it was an execution,” prosecutor eli garza said during rameys 2007 trial, according to an archived story in the victoria advocate.
both norman and ramey were convicted of the murders and sentenced to death. Texas executed norman by lethal injection on sept. 16, one week before rameys execution.
attorneys detail alleged jury bias in case
rameys attorneys have been focusing their arguments for a reprieve on the fact that his jury consisted of 11 white people and one latino, even though there were many potential black jurors. The states wrangling is responsible for the elimination of at least nine black jurors during the month-long process ahead of the 2006 trial, according to court records.
at one point, prosecutors asked one potential black juror named cheryl steadham-scott about whether she thought various famous black people were guilty or innocent of crimes for which they had been charged, court records say.
an appellate court rejected arguments that the jury selection process was biased, crediting the states reason for eliminating steadham-scott. Prosecutors said they struck her from the jury because of her inconclusive opinions on the death penalty and not her identity as an african–american,” court records say.
rameys conviction was based largely on testimony, including from norman, since no dna evidence linked him to the crime scene and a firearm examiner was unable to determine whether bullets recovered from the victims matched the suspected murder weapons, court records say.
who was tiffani peacock?
at just 18 years old, peacock was on the cusp of starting college and dreamed of trying out for american idol, hastings told usa today.
her whole life was still ahead of her, hastings said. “We always believed she would have done incredibly well if she had gotten that chance.
the sisters loved going to dance halls, listening to their favorite songs and singing karaoke together. Hastings still remembers so many little things that peacock would do to show her love.
she would iron my clothes, help me fix my hair, hastings said. Those small memories mean so much now because they show how caring she was and the kind of sister she was to me.
peacock also cared deeply about animals and was so good with them, that her family called her an animal whisperer, hastings said.
when her sister was killed, hastings said that peacock had just graduated from high school and was planning to attend a nearby community college in the fall, and then work her way toward texas a&m to become a veterinarian.
the executions of her sisters killers have dredged up old wounds and memories. She said that she believes in accountability and justice for peacocks murder but that she doesnt view an execution as something to celebrate.
hastings chose not to be among the witnesses to either execution and instead has focused on honoring her sisters life.
what i hope people remember is not simply how tiffani died, but how she lived and who she was, hastings said. We believe her life had purpose, that she was deeply loved by god, and that one day we will see her again.
usa today was unable to reach family members of the other two victims.
when is the next execution?
the next execution in the u.S. Is that of christa pike in tennessee for the prolonged and brutal murder of her romantic rival, 19-year-old colleen slemmer, in 1995. Shes set to be executed by lethal injection on sept. 30.
only 18 women have been executed in the u.S. In the last 50 years, and pike would be the first woman put to death in tennessee in more than 200 years.
her attorneys have been aggressively trying to win her a reprieve, arguing in part that at just 18 at the time of the crime, pike was too young to merit the death penalty, and that because she is a survivor of multiple rapes throughout her childhood, the process of being strapped down and injected with a lethal drug amounts to unconstitutional torture.
the state maintains that the death sentence is just and that pike must be held to account for her crime, which made national headlines for its brutality.
pike is the only woman on tennessees death row, and just one of 45 nationwide.
amanda lee myers is a senior crime and courts reporter who covers the death penalty, cold cases and breaking news for usa today. Follow her on x at @amandaleeusat |
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| He killed 3 people during quest for cocaine. Texas just executed him |
| Posted on Thursday, September 24 @ 00:04:14 PDT (10 reads) | |
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Texas has executed the second of two men who carried out a merciless triple murder more than 20 years ago in a small texas city on the gulf coast.
the state executed kersean ramey, 41, by lethal injection on wednesday, sept. 23, making him the sixth inmate put to death in the state this year and the 28th in the u.S. He was pronounced dead at 6:34 p.M. Ct.
a jury convicted ramey of capital murder in the 2005 shooting deaths of three of his neighbors, including an 18-year-old woman just getting started in life . Rameys execution comes a week after texas executed the other man convicted of the triple murder, lejames norman.
advertisement advertisement advertisement advertisement rameys attorneys have argued for years that executing him is unjust and that he never got a fair trial because of racial bias. Prosecutors were able to eliminate any black people from being on the jury, which found ramey guilty after an hour of deliberations and took just 15 minutes to discuss whether he should be sentenced to death, according to court records.
ker’sean ramey is pictured. The texas court of criminal appeals rejected those arguments this week, finding that ramey failed to show that he deserved a reprieve.
meanwhile the sister of the 18-year-old murder victim in the case told usa today that just wants her loved one to be remembered for more than just the way she died.
she was a daughter, a sister, a friend, and someone deeply loved, tabatha hastings said. Her life mattered before it ever became part of a court case, and it still matters today.
advertisement advertisement heres what else you need to know about the case and who peacock was.
tiffani peacock is pictured. What happened tragic night of triple murder? On aug. 24, 2005, kersean ramey and lejames norman were looking to score some cocaine and decided to rob their neighbor, 38-year-old celso lopez. Ramey and norman forced their way into lopezs home and held him at gunpoint as they looked for drugs they never found, according to court records. At some point norman shot lopez, though he claimed it was an accident.
lopezs roommates, 18-year-old tiffani peacock and 24-year-old sam roberts, walked in on the scene. The two had been dating.
norman forced peacock to her knees and shot her in the head, court records say. Roberts tried to flee but both norman and ramey shot him. Ramey shot all three victims several more times to make sure they were dead, court records say.
advertisement advertisement it was an execution, prosecutor eli garza said during rameys 2007 trial, according to an archived story in the victoria advocate.
both norman and ramey were convicted of the murders and sentenced to death. Texas executed norman by lethal injection on sept. 16, one week before rameys execution.
attorneys detail alleged jury bias in case rameys attorneys have been focusing their arguments for a reprieve on the fact that his jury consisted of 11 white people and one latino, even though there were many potential black jurors. The states wrangling is responsible for the elimination of at least nine black jurors during the month-long process ahead of the 2006 trial, according to court records.
at one point, prosecutors asked one potential black juror named cheryl steadham-scott about whether she thought various famous black people were guilty or innocent of crimes for which they had been charged, court records say.
advertisement advertisement an appellate court rejected arguments that the jury selection process was biased, crediting the states reason for eliminating steadham-scott. Prosecutors said they struck her from the jury because of her inconclusive opinions on the death penalty and not her identity as an african–american, court records say.
rameys conviction was based largely on testimony, including from norman, since no dna evidence linked him to the crime scene and a firearm examiner was unable to determine whether bullets recovered from the victims matched the suspected murder weapons, court records say.
who was tiffani peacock? At just 18 years old, peacock was on the cusp of starting college and dreamed of trying out for american idol, hastings told usa today.
her whole life was still ahead of her, hastings said. We always believed she would have done incredibly well if she had gotten that chance.
advertisement advertisement the sisters loved going to dance halls, listening to their favorite songs and singing karaoke together. Hastings still remembers so many little things that peacock would do to show her love.
she would iron my clothes, help me fix my hair, hastings said. Those small memories mean so much now because they show how caring she was and the kind of sister she was to me.
peacock also cared deeply about animals and was so good with them, that her family called her an animal whisperer, hastings said.
tiffani peacock is pictured. When her sister was killed, hastings said that peacock had just graduated from high school and was planning to attend a nearby community college in the fall, and then work her way toward texas a&m to become a veterinarian.
advertisement advertisement the executions of her sisters killers have dredged up old wounds and memories. She said that she believes in accountability and justice for peacocks murder but that she doesnt view an execution as something to celebrate.
hastings chose not to be among the witnesses to either execution and instead has focused on honoring her sisters life.
what i hope people remember is not simply how tiffani died, but how she lived and who she was, hastings said. We believe her life had purpose, that she was deeply loved by god, and that one day we will see her again.
usa today was unable to reach family members of the other two victims.
when is the next execution? The next execution in the u.S. Is that of christa pike in tennessee for the prolonged and brutal murder of her romantic rival, 19-year-old colleen slemmer, in 1995. Shes set to be executed by lethal injection on sept. 30.
advertisement advertisement only 18 women have been executed in the u.S. In the last 50 years, and pike would be the first woman put to death in tennessee in more than 200 years.
her attorneys have been aggressively trying to win her a reprieve, arguing in part that at just 18 at the time of the crime, pike was too young to merit the death penalty, and that because she is a survivor of multiple rapes throughout her childhood, the process of being strapped down and injected with a lethal drug amounts to unconstitutional torture.
the state maintains that the death sentence is just and that pike must be held to account for her crime, which made national headlines for its brutality.
pike is the only woman on tennessees death row, and just one of 45 nationwide.
advertisement advertisement life as a woman on americas death row: the worst of both worlds
amanda lee myers is a senior crime and courts reporter who covers the death penalty, cold cases and breaking news for usa today. Follow her on x at @amandaleeusat
this article originally appeared on usa today: he killed 3 people during quest for cocaine. Texas just executed him |
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