In the last year or so, health influencers — and a lot of women on social media — have talked up testosterone therapy as a kind of perimenopausal panacea. They promise boundless energy, crisper thinking, better sleep — and, most of all, a roaring libido.

Sounds awfully tempting.

But like a lot of things when it comes to women’s health, these claims are way ahead of the science, contorting it, even, in ways that set women up for disappointment.

“A lot of attention has been on selling things to midlife women, rather than just trying to help them improve their quality of life,” says Jan Shifren, director of the Midlife Women’s Health Center at Massachusetts General Hospital.

Shifren says women routinely come into her office asking about products, including testosterone, purported to have magical benefits with no risk. She gently tries to adjust their expectations. “When you step back, if it sounds too good to be true, it is too good to be true,” she says.

Testosterone is a case in point. Although we tend to associate testosterone with men, women produce it too, albeit at much lower levels that decline as we age. Studies consistently show that raising testosterone levels in postmenopausal women to the upper limit of what is normal for a younger woman (say, someone in her 20s) can slightly improve sexual function. What does that look like? In clinical trials, women had about one additional “satisfying event” over four weeks compared with those taking a placebo, Shifren says.

The reality is that there is currently no FDA-approved testosterone product for women — and the only concrete evidence that testosterone might improve low libido applies to postmenopausal women. Even in that group, the effects are relatively modest.

To be clear, that modest improvement might be meaningful for many older women, and they absolutely should be offered treatment if they seek it. But it’s not the hair-on-fire, life-changing experience that some women are reporting on social media.

“When people say, ‘I want it for energy, I want it for weight loss, I want it to preserve my muscle tone’ — those are not indications for testosterone,” says Monica Christmas, associate medical director of the Menopause Society.

True, pumping up the dosage can give women an almost euphoric high, Christmas says. However, that effect will eventually subside, and to recapture it, they will have to continue increasing the dose. In doing so, they aren’t restoring testosterone levels to where they were in their 20s but rather elevating them to low levels typically seen in men.

That approach also carries risks that experts worry aren’t being sufficiently emphasized to women. Higher doses can cause hair loss (along with hair growth on the face and other areas many women would probably find undesirable), clitoral enlargement, acne and vocal changes that can be permanent. Particularly troubling is that some women are receiving those higher doses via pellets — typically purchased from compounding pharmacies that may or may not be reliable. The pellets are implanted and release the hormone over the course of months, and they can’t be removed if problems arise. There is no long-term data to show whether women taking these high doses might experience health problems down the road.

Meanwhile, the best data we have on safely using testosterone — specifically in low doses that restore physiological levels in women — also underscores the complex nature of our sexual well-being. Two recent studies conducted by Susan Davis, an endocrinologist at Monash University in Australia who has spent decades studying the hormone, underscore the disconnect between how some health influencers talk about testosterone and what it can realistically offer.

By mining data from the Australian Women’s Midlife Years Study, which has enrolled over 5,000 women, Davis found that women’s testosterone levels gradually decline around age 40, reaching a low point in their late 50s before increasing slightly again. Of note, that decline was attributed to age itself and not connected to when a woman went through menopause.

Davis then studied those same women’s sexual well-being over the menopause transition. She found that those who are perimenopausal — meaning they have started to experience things like hot flashes and night sweats and whose menstrual cycle has become less regular — are twice as likely to have a desire dysfunction as premenopausal women. Yet their testosterone levels aren’t wildly different.

Together, the two studies suggest that testosterone levels don’t change much during menopause, but sexual function does, and the change happens early on, Davis explains. That means testosterone decline isn’t the culprit. More telling, though, are the two main commonalities among the women experiencing distress: depression and being partnered.

As expert after expert stressed to me, women’s levels of desire and sexual satisfaction are typically tied to a range of issues — some physical, some mental, and some simply a part of life. They might be experiencing more pain during sex as they age, or, as Davis’ data suggests, they may be depressed or just a bit bored with their partner. Many middle-aged women also struggle to find the time, energy, and privacy for extracurricular activities because they are doing so much caregiving for children and elders while navigating their careers.

Those problems aren’t immutable. Doctors have several treatments they can and should be offering women, whether that’s vaginal estrogen or pelvic floor therapy to help with pain or discomfort, certain antidepressants that are known to have modest effects on libido, or even pills specifically designed to increase desire.

And, yes, testosterone is an option, too, but women need to remember that the only proof of efficacy is in women who are postmenopausal. On that front, US regulators could make it a lot easier for women to safely use testosterone if they approved a dosage meant for them — for example, by approving a product for low libido. Instead, women are relegated to compounders or forced to adapt high-dose products intended for men.

Given the complexity of our sexual health, it’s probably helpful to stop hoping there will be a single magic pill or potion that can transport us back to our more carefree younger years. That wishful thinking is understandable (and completely relatable). But it can only lead to disappointment and might even cause us to self-experiment in ways that could cause harm.

Lisa Jarvis is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering biotech, health care and the pharmaceutical industry. Previously, she was executive editor of Chemical & Engineering News.

‘Original Sin …’

The blame for America’s current troubles lies squarely with the Democratic establishment. Donald Trump’s re-election was always unlikely given his low approval ratings and divisive style. The Democratic establishment turned it into a certainty by: (1) running an aged and obviously ailing candidate (2) using its power over the press, almost a Democratic fief in the U.S., to close reporting on this obvious problem and (3) picking a second-rate vice president on the grounds that she ticked the right diversity boxes.

Different bits of the Democratic establishment were responsible for different bits of this disaster. The Biden family, particularly Jill Biden, together with Biden’s long-time consiglieri, bears responsibility for the first. The Democratic party-media complex bears responsibility for the second. And the party’s increasingly woke rank-and-file bears responsibility for the third.

“Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover Up, and His Disastrous Decision to Run Again,” by CNN’s Jake Tapper and Axios’s Alex Thompson, tells the inside story of Biden’s doomed re-election bid and Harris’s disastrous aftermath in toe-curling detail. The authors demonstrate that Biden’s catastrophic debate performance did not drop from a clear blue sky. The president’s close advisors conspired to keep information about his deteriorating faculties, both mental and physical, from the public — and to some extent from Biden himself. How they imagined this doddering figure could have functioned as president in 2028 is hard to fathom.

‘Entitled: The Rise and Fall of the House of York’

The British equivalent of the Biden scandal was the Prince Andrew affair. Both involved public figures who were incapable of seeing themselves as the public saw them. Both turned on dramatic encounters with reality — Biden’s debate with Trump in June 2024 and Prince Andrew’s interview with Emily Maitlis in November 2019. And both inadvertently make the case that we need a new establishment. One difference is that Joe Biden still retains his name while Prince Andrew the Duke of York has now been downgraded into Andrew Mountbatten Windsor.

In “Entitled: The Rise and Fall of the House of York,” Andrew Lownie, a literary agent and historian, provides us with hundreds of tidbits, big, small but always nauseating, of the Yorks’ appalling behavior, with his ex-wife Sarah Ferguson coming off almost as badly as her former husband and long-time housemate. The most disturbing revelations concern Windsor’s relations with Jeffrey Epstein that led to his downfall. Both Windsor and Ferguson continued to associate with Epstein long after he was convicted of pedophilia. But there are also hundreds of details about the pair’s money-grubbing and high-living ways, some of them what the British tabloids call “marmalade droppers.”

Both spent the past 50 years turning their royal titles and connections into cash, with no scheme too tawdry and no associates too dodgy. Ferguson was spendthrift to a pathological degree. Reading this book is rather like working your way through a box of Quality Street chocolates — you can’t resist gobbling down the next mouth-watering morsel, but you end up feeling thoroughly sick.

‘Buckley: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America’

Sam Tanenhaus’s “Buckley: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America” is a long book but a thoroughly enjoyable one. Buckley is a big and varied enough subject to justify all the detail, a man who lived many lives rolled up in one: a conservative intellectual and a liberal society dandy, a professional writer and a world-class yachtsman, a champion debater and author of best-selling thrillers; and a one-time CIA agent to boot. There was never a dull moment in either his life or this book.

Buckley did as much as any single figure to forge the modern conservative movement — to take that whirlwind of rage at the liberal establishment that swelled in provincial America, the sunbelt and the suburbs and turn it into a coherent movement capable of shaping presidencies. He was the first U.S. conservative to identify the university — particularly his own university, Yale — as the headquarters of the liberal establishment. He was also the first to see that the various factions of the conservative movement — traditionalism, anti-Communism and free-market thinking — could be fused into one. The great work of the magazine that he founded in 1955, the National Review, was arranging and policing this fusion.

Previous biographers of Buckley have emphasized the way that he purified the conservative movement by driving out the cranks. Tanenhaus, a former editor of the New York Times Book Review, tells a more nuanced story: that Buckley always had a weakness for extremists, particularly extreme anti-Communists such as Joseph McCarthy and extreme Catholics such as his brother-in-law Brent Bozell, and therefore bears some of the responsibility for injecting ethnonationalism and theocracy into the conservative mix. The Buckley revolution may have come to fruition not in the Reagan presidency, as many conservative intellectuals have fondly argued, but in the Trump presidency.

‘Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future’

America’s political turmoil, by turns colorful, hilarious and dispiriting, contrasts sharply with China’s disciplined march forward. Every year China seems to rack up new successes: more PhDs, more scientific publications, more nuclear warheads, better and cheaper electric cars. The contrast is partly explained by the fact that America has a free press, while China’s press is a party-boosting megaphone (though America’s free press failed us until it was too late in reporting on Biden’s failing health). But it is also explained by their different approaches to government.

In “Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future,” Dan Wang, of Stanford’s Hoover institution, presents a gripping analysis of the difference between the two countries. China is an engineering state that sets itself firm goals and pursues them with dogged energy. The most visible signs of this engineering mindset are the physical miracles that you can encounter wherever you go across the country: spanking new airports and railway stations, high-speed trains that can carry you at 500 kilometers an hour, skyscrapers that disappear into the sky, all of which add up to a rising standard of living for regular Chinese people.

America is a society not just of laws but of lawyers. Its universities mass-produce lawyers with the same careless abandon that its car companies once mass-produced cars — more are always rolling down the production line. And the American political system, with its division of powers, multiple levels and multiple veto points, provides these lawyers with endless opportunities to throw spanners in the works.

Wang argues that each society would be better off if it learned from the other: China if it put more emphasis on individual rights, as encoded in law, and America if it kept lawyers on a tighter leash and got into the habit of building again. I suspect that neither thing will happen. The Chinese will extend their engineering mindset to social problems while America’s political polarization will further warp the legal system. Wang’s vision is nevertheless a comforting fantasy.

‘The Last Titans: Churchill and De Gaulle’

One of the many peculiarities of our age is that it is an age of strong men without great men. Trump is a weak man pretending to be a strong man: hence his limitless appetite for approval, even from dubious bodies such as FIFA, which awarded him its “Peace Prize” in lieu of the better-known Nobel Peace Prize, and his ever-shifting policy positions. Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping may qualify as strong men, if only because of their capacity for brutality, but they are far from great men: Putin, in particular, has trapped his country in a dead end of corruption and war-making.

“The Last Titans: Churchill and De Gaulle,” by Richard Vinen, is a wonderful read because it focuses on two men who were everything today’s leaders are not: strong men who used their strength for good. Vinen, a professor of history at King’s College, London, demonstrates that Churchill and de Gaulle could hardly have been more different: Churchill was garrulous and attention-seeking while de Gaulle was given to long silences. De Gaulle spent months in his provincial home without speaking to anybody but his own family whereas Churchill was always surrounded by admirers, not to say sycophants even when he was trying to get away from it all in his country house, Chartwell,

But both men embodied everything that was best in their countries — and deliberately so. They prepared for power by soaking themselves in their countries’ history and literature. And when the moment came, they bent history in the direction of progress. Without Churchill, the West might have collapsed in 1940 and Germany overrun Europe. Without de Gaulle, France might have become a backwater. Reading this book leaves one optimistic and depressed at the same time: optimistic because it demonstrates that great men can change the direction of history, and depressed because we seem to have lost the ability to produce such giants.

Adrian Wooldridge is the global business columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. A former writer at the Economist, he is author of “The Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World.”

 

By JESSICA DAMIANO, Associated Press

No doubt you’ve seen your share of hollies this month — in wreaths and boughs or perhaps on holiday cards and catalog covers. But are they growing in your garden?

There are hundreds of holly species and hybrids hailing from China, Japan, South America, Europe and North Africa, and more than a dozen are native to the continental U.S.

Lore holds that ancient pagans fashioned the evergreen’s branches into wearable crowns and believed that displaying it indoors would repel evil spirits and hasten the return of spring. Later, hollies were adapted by early Christians, their evergreen nature symbolic of eternal life.

Although the plants can promise neither, their red berries and deep-green foliage, which mirror the traditional colors of the season, are beautiful year-round garden staples. And their berries provide an important winter food source for birds and wildlife, although most are considered toxic to humans.

This image provided by the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center shows a native Yaupon Holly (Ilex vomitoria) branch bearing a profusion of berries at the Ladybird Johnson Wildflower Center in Austin, Texas on Jan. 20, 2003. (Joseph A. Marcus/Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center via AP)

The best time to plant hollies is in early spring, after the last hard freeze (if applicable) but before the heat of summer sets in. Be sure to water regularly during the plant’s first year in your garden, when its roots are working establish themselves.

With very few exceptions, hollies are dioecious, which means plants are either male or female, and in order for the female to produce berries, there must be a male growing nearby. One male can effectively pollinate about 10 female plants growing within 50 feet, sometimes more.

Plant tags don’t always note if a dioecious plant is male or female, but the variety name can help. “China Girl” is female, and to get fruit, you’ll need “China Boy.” It’s not always obvious, though; for example, “Greenleaf” is also female. If you’re unsure, ask nursery staff.

Here are four favorites to consider (and one you might want to avoid):

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Yaupon Holly (Ilex vomitoria)

This long-living species naturally occurs along the United State’s southern Atlantic coast and across the Southeast and Southwest. Choose dwarf, weeping or upright varieties to grow trees, shrubs or pruned hedgerows. Hardy in USDA horticultural zones 7-9, the unfussy natives are tolerant of both sun and shade, and thrive in any soil type and pH, as long as it is moist and well-draining.

American Holly (Ilex opaca)

Native along the entire East Coast and west to Missouri and Texas, this slow-growing, pyramidical holly can reach 25-60 feet tall at maturity. Also known as Christmas holly, the spiny-leaved plants are hardy in zones 5-9, tolerating both sun and shade but requiring acidic, moist, well-draining sandy or loamy soil.

Blue holly (Ilex x meserveae)

Also called Meserve holly, this generally well-behaved European hybrid has blue-green spiny leaves and grows 2-8 feet tall and 6-8 feet wide, and larger in some climates. Suitable for zones 5-7 (possibly 8), the shrubby plants should be planted in full sun to part shade in well-draining, moist, acidic soil.

Winterberry holly (Ilex verticillata)

Unlike the other species on this list, verticillata is a deciduous, not evergreen, plant that loses its foliage in autumn. But don’t discount its winter interest! In fact, the absence of leaves while fruiting is one of its best features, allowing its profusion of red-orange berries to take center stage on bare, thin branches.

Native to the eastern U.S. and Canada, this slow grower tops out at 3-8 feet. Plant it in zones 3-9, in sun to shade and in well-draining, moist, acidic soil.

English or common holly (Ilex aquifolium)

Native to Europe, West Asia and North Africa, English holly is spreading into wild areas and choking out native vegetation from Vancouver to the Pacific Northwest and into California.

Ironically, the qualities that made it a desirable landscape plant when it was introduced to the U.S. in the 1800s — it’s tough as nails, long-lived, evergreen and quick-spreading — are what have led to its categorization as an invasive plant in those parts of the country and a “weed of concern” in many others.

Avoid its use in problematic regions and proceed with caution in others.

The moment Mike Dibble realized that he was a long way from his boyhood home in South Minneapolis was when he found himself under a bridge in Leningrad, selling American blue jeans on the then-Soviet black market.

It was about this time of year, 1973 was becoming 1974, and Dibble was among nearly two dozen boys — most of them Minnesotans — who traveled to what was then the Soviet Union to represent the United States in what was, unofficially, the first World Junior tournament.

That fact may lead to some numbers confusion in the coming week or so as what is billed as the 50th World Juniors comes to St. Paul and Minneapolis.

“They’re advertising it as the 50th anniversary of the World Junior tournament,” said Dibble. “I said, ‘No, it’s the 52nd.’ ”

To be clear, 2026 marks the 50th anniversary of the tournament that is officially sanctioned by the International Ice Hockey Federation. But in 1973, fresh off coaching Team USA to a silver medal at the Winter Olympics in Sapporo, Japan, a year earlier, former Gophers standout Murray Williamson worked together with his many contacts in international hockey to put together a team for the first tournament to pit the world’s best under-20 men against one another.

Rather than the formal tryout process involving the best players from coast to coast that we see today, Williamson put together a squad from the players that he knew best. All 19 players who traveled to Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) in Russia were Minnesotans. Most of them were playing junior hockey in the Twin Cities for teams like the St. Paul Vulcans and Minneapolis Junior Stars at the time.

And the rumors of a possible world tournament kept at least one local player from jumping to college too early.

“One of the reasons I played a second year of juniors was there were rumors that there was going to be a World Junior team where we were going to be able to travel to Leningrad to play in a tournament,” said Mark Lambert, now 71 and retired, living in West St. Paul. “That really sparked my enthusiasm. So, totally excited and very happy for the opportunity.”

After getting passports and visas, the players found themselves to be popular among the Russian kids because they had candy they would toss out the windows of the team bus. A few even got a taste of the black market that flourished long before the Berlin Wall came down.

“We had to get a passport, a visa. How exciting,” said Dibble, who played prep hockey at Minneapolis Southwest, then was a goalie for Wisconsin. “Back then there was no social media, but we knew you could bring blue jeans and trade from them underneath the bridge. Dan Bonk and myself brought jeans and we traded at midnight underneath the bridge in Leningrad. I got the Russian mink hat. Still have it. It was fantastic.”

On the ice, the trade-offs were more lopsided. The Americans won just one game, and lost 11-1 to Sweden, 9-1 to host Russia.

“We got blown out for sure by the Russians, and maybe somebody else, but very respectable against the Canadians, and that’s who I was really measuring our team against was the Canadian juniors,” said Lambert, who played prep hockey at St. Paul Mechanic Arts, then won a NCAA title with the Gophers.

“I didn’t know anything about European hockey, but I knew that the Canadian juniors fed our NHL league, and I knew that for us kids who wanted to someday maybe play pro hockey, we had to compete against those people. I thought we were on an even basis with them.”

They fell 5-4 to the Canadians in the only North American scuffle of the six-team tournament.

In the Americans’ finale, they faced Czechoslovakia and won 3-2 on the strength of a 50-plus save performance by Dibble, who would go on to win the 1977 NCAA title with the Badgers.

“The Russian crowd was chanting, ‘Dee-Bull, Dee-Bull,’ because they didn’t like the Czechs,” he recalled with a smile.

Of the Team USA players that year, at least four went on to play in the NHL, including former North Stars fan favorite Gary Sargent from Bemidji and Paul Holmgren from St. Paul, who spent the bulk of his career with the Philadelphia Flyers.

Williamson died in September at age 91, and of the 19 players that went to Leningrad, six of them have passed on. But with the World Juniors coming back to the Twin Cities this year, Dibble and Dave Heitz — also a goalie from Minneapolis who was a long-time NHL scout — worked to get as many of the 1974 players as they could contact back together.

In mid-December they gathered at Shamrock’s in St. Paul to share stories and show off some of their saved newspaper clippings, rosters and other memorabilia from not only their international hockey experience, but from the early days of junior hockey in Minnesota.

“Everybody that said they were coming showed up today, except for one,” Dibble said. “And they’re excited. We just should have done it 20 years ago when more of these guys were alive.”

The American team looking to three-peat as gold medalists at Grand Casino Arena — the tournament starts Friday — is Minnesota-heavy, to be sure, with seven players from the state among the 25 on the final roster. But there are also seven from Illinois, four from Michigan, two from Massachusetts, and one each from California, New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Missouri.

That’s a far slap shot from 1974, when a bunch of kids from all across Minnesota took on the world for the first time.

“I know the kids now come from high schools all over, but there is a lot of tradition in St. Paul hockey, especially in the ‘70s, and the ’60s,” Lambert said. “St. Paul’s even knocked some really good hockey players out for the Olympic teams and the Gophers and even the colleges across the WCHA.”

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