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If you want to understand longevity, forget laboratories. Look instead to the world's Blue Zones, pockets from Japan to Sardinia where people routinely live past 100. Researchers found longevity wasn't the result of extreme workouts or strict diets, but environments that made healthy choices automatic. In Okinawa, elders practice ikigai, a daily sense of purpose. They form lifelong social circles called moai that protect against loneliness, a risk factor for mortality as dangerous as smoking. In the mountains of Sardinia, men drink Cannonau wine rich in antioxidants, walk steep hills daily, and remain integrated into family life well into their nineties.

The science behind these habits is becoming clearer. Centenarians worldwide tend to eat mostly plant-based diets rich in legumes, whole grains, and vegetables, which reduce inflammation and support metabolic health. By tradition, many follow forms of time-restricted eating, giving their bodies long nightly fasting windows that improve cellular repair. Surprisingly, almost none engage in formal exercise. Instead, they rely on incidental movement: herding goats, tending gardens, kneading bread dough, or walking to neighbors' homes. Studies of mitochondrial function and muscle decline suggest these frequent, low-intensity activities may preserve health far longer than occasional intense workouts.

The most surprising finding is psychological, not biological. Centenarians share attitudes that protect them as much as any diet. They stay optimistic without being naïve, maintain strong social ties, and cultivate routines that anchor their days. In Nicoya, Costa Rica, elders call this ‘plan de vida,’ a life plan that gives meaning to aging. Many also experience lower chronic stress because their lives preserve rituals of rest such as afternoon pauses, early bedtimes, and slow communal meals. The people inside these ‘Blue Zones’ teach us that living to 100 isn't about fighting time, it's about building a life where time moves with you rather than against you.

While Hell had long been imagined, Italian poet Dante Alighieri was the first to give it an architect's precision. In the early 1300s, Dante mapped the underworld into nine descending circles, each one darker and more corrupt than the last. Inferno, the first part of his poem ‘The Divine Comedy’, depicts a landscape that mirrors every human failure. Together with his guide, the Roman poet Virgil, Dante journeys through each circle which punishes a specific human failing such as lust and greed, etched into scenes so precise they read like eyewitness accounts. Exiled from his city and stripped of power, Dante used the poem to deliver political revenge in the most permanent way possible. He placed his real-life rivals and corrupt clerics deep inside his Hell, immortalizing some who were still alive when he wrote the verses.

Dante made revolutionary choices that extended far beyond the poem's terrifying content. He boldly wrote the Inferno in the Florentine dialect rather than the universally accepted Latin. By crafting a work of such profound scope and fame in this local vernacular, he single-handedly ensured that this dialect would eventually become the basis for the modern Italian language. The poem's structure is also deeply mathematical. The entire Divine Comedy is precisely organized around the number three, symbolizing the Holy Trinity. It has three parts and a total of 100 cantos (with thirty-three in each section), all unified by terza rima, a three-line rhyme scheme Dante created. This strict mathematical precision was meant to reflect the perfect, orderly nature of God's universe.

The influence of Inferno is truly extraordinary. It immediately inspired works like Botticelli's illustrated maps of Hell and shaped the imagination of later literary giants from Milton to T.S. Eliot. The poem’s reach even extends to the cosmos as NASA named features on Pluto after Dante’s work, including the Cocytus Sulci mountain range, a direct reference to the frozen ninth circle where Lucifer resides. Dante’s Hell is a moral landscape where every step downward reflects a choice made in life. Seven centuries later, his guided tour of the underworld still feels uncomfortably familiar, reminding us that the worst places are built not by demons but by human failure.

The story of the SAS begins in a landscape so vast and hostile it looked like the edge of the world. In the North African desert of 1941, a young and restless officer named David Stirling realised the war had reached a deadlock. British forces were being battered by the Afrika Korps and supply lines were fragile. Stirling understood that the Allies needed a new strategy where they could strike the enemy covertly, so he created a unit with a name designed to deceive, ‘L Detachment, Special Air Service Brigade’ a phantom airborne force masking a real desert raiding team. His men bolted machine guns onto jeeps, navigated by stars, and drove straight into Axis airfields where rows of aircraft sat unguarded. Their motto, ‘Who Dares Wins,’ became doctrine. The SAS went on to destroy over 400 enemy planes and rewrite the rules of modern warfare.

When the war left North Africa, the SAS went with it. They parachuted into Sicily ahead of the Allied invasion, sabotaging roads and sowing chaos behind enemy lines. In France, they disrupted German communications and tied down entire battalions hunting for ghosts. Jungles, mountains and cities, each demanded something different and the regiment adapted. The six-month selection process to join the group is designed to break people. Candidates navigate alone through the harsh terrain of Welsh mountain ranges, then move to the jungles of Brunei or Belize where heat, humidity, and isolation test endurance in new ways. In the final phase, candidates are hunted, captured, and interrogated to see if they'll break under pressure.

The success of Stirling's experiment reshaped militaries across the world and the SAS's methods became the blueprint for modern special operations. Britain soon expanded sister units like the Special Boat Service, while foreign forces studied the regiment closely. America's Delta Force was built in its image, and today everything from Australia's SASR to France's GIGN carries traces of its doctrine. The regiment's later missions showed that a handful of specialists could change the course of battles and even global politics. Storming the Iranian Embassy in London in 1980, countering insurgents in Northern Ireland, tracking war criminals in the Balkans, capturing high-value targets in Afghanistan and Iraq. Eight decades on, the SAS remains what Stirling intended. A small force with an outsized impact, proving again and again that boldness, skill, and surprise can do what armies cannot.

If you’re looking for a new show to watch, this drama chronicling the origins of the SAS gets our editor’s stamp of approval!

We hope you enjoyed today’s edition. Thank you to everyone reading, sharing, and helping A Little Wiser reach new people every week.

Until next time…. - A Little Wiser Team

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