The run up to February 14 is a good time for selling certain products. And alongside the jewellery and flowers, advertisers also try to sell us something broader: a notion of what we should consider romantic.
This might involve an idyllic and perfectly filmed holiday destination, or the casting of a glamorous Hollywood star to represent a particular perfume. For research has shown that advertising can shape our expectations of what love should look like – from the perfect partner to the things we should buy for them.
It’s become a familiar tactic for all kinds of advertising. And it fits with an idea explored by the French literary theorist Roland Barthes in his 1957 collection of essays, Mythologies: that if a message is repeated enough, it becomes true.
Advertisers seem to have embraced this notion, and we see the same kind of messages repeated year after year, telling potential customers what they should aspire to – and invest in – to achieve their best and most romanticised ideals.
Whether those ideals are realistic or not is not the goal here. Advertising generates money for brands by creating a commercially driven view of what love should look like.
There are various techniques available to advertisers to shape those expectations. Emotional appeals, for example, try to evoke feelings of passion and desire.
Google did this effectively in a simple video which tells a love story through the medium of an online search tool.
“Social proof” is a different advertising approach which involves relaying a specific message about what consumers can achieve if they turn to a particular brand. You too can be happy if you drink coffee with your new partner at a local branch of McDonalds for example.
This kind of marketing is designed to appeal to people’s need for social validation. It is advertising which implies that using certain products will lead to a fulfilling romantic life, and that your partner will really love you if you buy them a Toblerone this Valentine’s Day.
“Targeted marketing” is a method which focuses on creating personalised campaigns for specific audiences. This strategy has become more common as we spend more time online, providing big tech with plenty of data about our likes and dislikes.
And with online dating still growing in popularity, targeted marketing is applied through apps like Tinder and Hinge, which are able to provide valuable insights into users’ preferences, enabling advertisers to tailor their messages to specific demographics.
Match up
Marketing can also apply pressure to consumers to purchase gifts or experiences as a way of demonstrating affection. This could be anything from a box of chocolates to an engagement ring.
And who came up with the idea that one of those rings should cost the proposer the equivalent of two months’ salary? It was the jewellery company, De Beers.
In fact, it was only after the company’s 1947 advertising campaign with the slogan “A diamond is forever”, that diamond rings became an engagement tradition at all.
But depictions of diamonds and perfect lifestyles can lead to feelings of inadequacy or low self-esteem when people compare themselves to idealised portrayals in the media. Research suggests that how we process these romantic ideals is affected by our own attachment styles – the patterns of bonding that we learn as children and carry into our adult relationships.
Feelings of inadequacy have also inspired alternative Valentine’s Day celebrations. For instance, an Indian chocolate bar created a campaign to “destroy Valentine’s Day” using the assumption that as soon as uncles join a trend, such as celebrating February 14th, it becomes instantly unfashionable – and Generation Z runs for the hills.
Another harmful effect of advertising romance is how young people’s perception of relationships is shaped by the media promoting unrealistic lifestyles, body shapes and beauty standards. These kinds of branded messages are being delivered to romantic consumers of all ages as the battle for their money and time continues.
Advertisers want you to buy their products. And to make this happen, they also want you to buy into fabricated expectations of romantic love – through repetition, strategy and a familiar date in February.
Carl W. Jones does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Source: The Conversation – Canada – By DaLissa Alzner, Registered Psychotherapist, Adjunct faculty in the Department of Applied Psychology, Adler University
A healthy relationship is one where you feel comfortable being your authentic self.(Shutterstock)
Many people spend much of their lives searching for what is arguably one of the most subjective of human experiences — true love. From popular movies, TV shows and dating apps to a cultural focus on finding “the one,” the phenomenon of love is inescapable. Our preoccupation with social connectedness is biologically connected to our desire for human connection.
But how do we establish connections across all our relationships that positively contribute to our well-being? Identifying the characteristics of a healthy relationship and being mindful of red flags is a reasonable place to start.
Love is often one of those things that you just know when you feel it. While it is difficult to define love as an explicit experience or construct, there are certain guides we can use to understand what makes a loving relationship.
What makes a healthy relationship?
If you believe that friends are the family we choose, then you have been fortunate to experience a meaningful friendship that positively contributes to a reality where you feel appreciated, valued and have a sense of belonging.
This experience of connection can be defined as compassionate love — originally coined as a component of the Two-Factor Theory of Love, which suggests love is comprised of two main categories. The first is passionate love, which is the intense longing for someone that may end in sexual connection or rejection. The second is compassionate love, which is associated with friendship, companionship and affection.
Being your authentic self means aligning your actions and behaviours with your core values and beliefs. This allows you to engage in self-discovery and thrive in every environment or relationship you find yourself in.
This alignment fosters a sense of congruence between your internal self and external expressions, allowing you to interact with others genuinely. Engaging with others authentically allows you to navigate social interactions with integrity and fosters deeper, more meaningful relationships.
What does love look like?
While love can be a difficult thing to define, there are some ways that we can sense when it is present, and when it isn’t.
Celebrating differences: Embracing the authenticity and differences of friends, siblings and partners fosters appreciation. This can reduce criticism, unrealistic expectations and dissatisfaction in relationships. Forcing change may work briefly, but it often leads to resentment and unhappiness.
Putting in the work: The grass is greener where you water it. Whether it’s a 25-year or five-month partnership, relationships require effort and co-operation. Working through individual differences to achieve a common goal is crucial in relationships. Siblings may need to overlook disagreements, while friends should meet regularly.
Leaning into language: When extending a gesture or token of appreciation, consider how it will be received by your partner — not by you. For instance, if you enjoy going out for dessert, but the other person prefers staying at home, you might initially think to take them out for dessert. However, to ensure the gesture is meaningful, present it in a way that aligns with their preferences and how they receive affection.
Diffusion:Acceptance and commitment therapy encourages people to create psychological and emotional space when conflict arises. This makes space for them to process conflict objectively, while also de-personalizing the interaction, contributing to emotional regulation and an ability to respond intentionally. The ability to develop and facilitate this skill is a vital tool for emotional regulation across relationships and circumstances.
To curate healthy and meaningful relationships, be intentional about nurturing connection, authenticity and mutual respect. (Shutterstock)
Signs love may not be present
Our need to belong and form meaningful connections drives our desire for companionship. When these efforts fail or relationships break, it is painful. Yet, there are some potential signs that can indicate when love is no longer present in a relationship.
Lack of communication and avoiding conflict: Poor communication and avoiding conflict can harm relationships. Research shows that not communicating leads to misunderstandings, emotional withdrawal and unresolved issues. Avoiding conflict can result in internalizing emotions, passive-aggressive behaviour and tension. In friendships, poor communication can cause feelings of being unheard or undervalued. Studies indicate that healthy friendships rely on open communication and respectful conflict resolution.
In family relationships, dysfunctional communication often contributes to division and resentment. Family therapy research has found that a lack of open communication can contribute to generational misunderstandings, leading to dysfunctional family dynamics.
Within families, particularly between parents and children, the absence of empathy may lead to significant emotional strain. Research has found that if family members fail to offer emotional support or to recognize each other’s needs, it negatively impacts family cohesion and individual well-being.
Controlling or manipulative behavior: Controlling behaviours, like restricting autonomy or manipulating someone into believing they are the problem in every situation, poses a serious threat to the well-being of a relationship. Research has shown that controlling behaviours often reflect insecurity and can contribute to abusive dynamics in relationships.
In friendships, manipulation may present as guilt-tripping, isolating from others or using emotional leverage to get one’s way. Research in this area suggests that healthy friendships involve mutual respect and boundaries, and when manipulation is present, satisfaction and trust is significantly reduced.
In families, controlling behaviours from parents, siblings or other relatives may contribute to a decrease in personal growth. The creation of toxic family dynamics manipulation and control at the hands of family has been found to significantly contribute to damaging effects over time, particularly in the parent-child relationship.
To curate healthy and meaningful relationships, be intentional about nurturing connection, authenticity and mutual respect. By celebrating differences, putting in effort, communicating openly and practising emotional regulation, it is possible to create meaningful relationships that will positively contribute to our well-being.
At the same time, we need to be diligent in recognizing and addressing red flags like poor communication and manipulative behaviours. Doing so allows us to safeguard our emotional health. Start today — reflect on your relationships, embrace authenticity and take the steps necessary to build deeper, more supportive connections that enrich your life.
DaLissa Alzner does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Valentine’s Day is all about the hearts: heart-shaped chocolates, cards, balloons and even pizza. But the heart hasn’t always just been a symbol of romance.
Across cultures and centuries, the heart has been revered as the seat of the soul, a source of supernatural power and a vessel of identity. From ancient Egyptian afterlife beliefs to medieval relics, from necromantic rituals to modern heart transplants, this organ has been at the centre of both scientific curiosity and deep-seated mysticism.
Why has the heart, more than any other organ, been imbued with such deep symbolism and power? While anatomy tells us it is a muscular pump controlled by electrical impulses, history tells a more complex story – one of rituals, relics and even dark magic.
The human heart is a remarkably efficient pump, beating about 100,000 times a day and circulating about 7,500 litres of blood. It is driven by the sinoatrial node, a cluster of pacemaker cells that spontaneously generate electrical impulses independently of the brain.
As this intrinsic electrical system does not rely on direct nervous input but is influenced by it, the heart can continue beating for a short while even when removed from the body – provided it has an adequate supply of oxygen and electrolytes. This uncanny quality only reinforced superstitions that the heart was more than just a muscle and may explain why many early cultures viewed the heart as possessing a life force of its own.
But to present the heart as merely a pump ignores wider influences. The heart functions as an endocrine organ, releasing hormones that regulate blood pressure, fluid balance and cardiovascular health.
The connection between the heart and “love hormones”, such as oxytocin, extends beyond metaphor, as research suggests the heart not only responds to oxytocin but may also play a role in its release.
Oxytocin is primarily produced in the brain by the hypothalamus and released from the pituitary gland, flooding the body during moments of affection, trust and bonding. It is the chemical catalyst behind the deep emotional connections that define human relationships.
The heart is equipped with oxytocin receptors, and studies show that the hormone promotes vasodilation (widening of the blood vessels), reducing blood pressure and improving circulation. Beyond this, oxytocin may protect the heart, helping it repair itself and reducing inflammation after injury, such as during a heart attack.
However, the heart’s function was not always understood. The ancient Greeks believed it was the seat of intelligence, while Aristotle dismissed the brain as a mere “cooling fluid” for the heart’s divine fire.
Galen, a Greek physician, surgeon and philosopher who lived during Roman times, described the heart as the body’s furnace, while William Harvey’s 1628 discovery of circulation reshaped our understanding of this important organ. Even so, its symbolic and mystical significance never fully waned.
The seat of the soul
The ancient Egyptians preserved the heart during mummification, believing it would be weighed by Anubis against the Feather of Truth, the divine measure of justice. Ironically, the brain was discarded as totally useless. An excerpt from the Book of the Dead, an ancient Egyptian funerary text, reads:
O my heart which I had from my mother! which I had from my mother! O my heart of my different ages! Don’t stand up as a witness against me. Do not be opposed to me in the tribunal.
This spell is intended to pacify the heart and assert dominion, ensuring it remains loyal when weighed.
The idea that the heart carried more than just blood persisted into the Renaissance, with scholars debating whether it was the true locus of identity.
“If indeed from the heart alone rise anger or passion, fear, terror, and sadness; if from it alone spring shame, delight, and joy, why should I say more?” Andreas de Laguna, a Spanish physician wrote in 1535.
Even today, heart transplants fuel questions about whether a transplanted heart carries something of its donor. Some recipients report changes in personality, memories or food preferences, raising speculation about cellular memory. While no definitive scientific basis exists, such cases continue to intrigue.
Heart of darkness
The heart’s power was not only revered, but feared. In folk magic and necromancy, people believed that the hearts of executed criminals retained energy from their violent deaths. Some thought consuming, burning or preserving a heart could grant knowledge or strength.
In Scotland and England, people reportedly boiled the hearts of murderers to prevent their ghosts from haunting the living. Dried hearts were sometimes ground into powders for potions, while in occult traditions, they were burned in rituals to banish spirits or bind enemies.
More disturbing are accounts of unbaptised infants’ hearts in witchcraft traditions. Some sources claim they were used in hexes, flying ointments or dark pacts. While probably exaggerated during witch trials, such stories reflect a deep-rooted belief in the heart as a conduit of power.
The heart has been a vessel of the soul, a source of magic and a point of conflict between science and superstition. While modern medicine has demystified much of its function, its symbolism remains deeply ingrained in human culture.
This Valentine’s Day, as we exchange stylised hearts in celebration of love, we might pause to remember that the power of the heart has been a symbol of life, death and everything in between for millennia.
Michelle Spear does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
A spontaneous memorial of flowers in St Petersburg, Russia, on the day of Alexei Navalny’s death, February 16 2024.Aleksey Dushutin/Shutterstock
This is the best day of the past five months for me … This is my home … I am not afraid of anything and I urge you not to be afraid of anything either.
These were Alexei Navalny’s words after landing at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport on January 17 2021. Russia’s leading opposition figure had spent the past months recovering in Germany from an attempt on his life by the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB). Minutes after making his comments, Navalny was detained at border control. And he would remain behind bars until his death on February 16 2024, in the remote “Polar Wolf” penal colony within the Arctic Circle.
“Why did he return to Russia?” That’s the question I’m asked about Navalny most frequently. Wasn’t it a mistake to return to certain imprisonment, when he could have maintained his opposition to Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, from abroad?
But Navalny’s decision to return didn’t surprise me. I’ve researched and written about him extensively, including co-authoring Navalny: Putin’s Nemesis, Russia’s Future?, the first English-language, book-length account of his life and political activities. Defying the Kremlin by returning was a signature move, reflecting both his obstinacy and bravery. He wanted to make sure his supporters and activists in Russia did not feel abandoned, risking their lives while he lived a cushy life in exile.
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Besides, Navalny wasn’t returning to certain imprisonment. A close ally of his, Vladimir Ashurkov, told me in May 2022 that his “incarceration in Russia was not a certainty. It was a probability, a scenario – but it wasn’t like he was walking into a certain long-term prison term.”
Also, Navalny hadn’t chosen to leave Russia in the first place. He was unconscious when taken by plane from Omsk to Berlin for treatment following his poisoning with the nerve agent Novichok in August 2020. Navalny had been consistent in saying he was a Russian politician who needed to remain in Russia to be effective.
In a subsequent interview, conducted in a forest on the outskirts of the German capital as he slowly recovered, Navalny said: “In people’s minds, if you leave the country, that means you’ve surrendered.”
Video: ACF.
Outrage, detention and death
Two days after Navalny’s final return to Russia, the Anti-Corruption Foundation (ACF) – the organisation he established in 2011 – published its biggest ever investigation. The YouTube video exploring “Putin’s palace” on the Black Sea coast achieved an extraordinary 100 million views within ten days. By the start of February 2021, polling suggested it had been watched by more than a quarter of all adults in Russia.
Outrage at Navalny’s detention, combined with this Putin investigation, got people on to the streets. On January 23 2021, 160,000 people turned out across Russia in events that did not have prior approval from the authorities. More than 40% of the participants said they were taking part in a protest for the first time.
But the Russian authorities were determined to also make it their last time. Law enforcement mounted an awesome display of strength, detaining protesters and sometimes beating them. The number of participants at protests on January 31 and February 2 declined sharply as a result.
Between Navalny’s return to Russia in January 2021 and his death in February 2024, aged 47, he faced criminal case after criminal case, adding years and years to his time in prison and increasing the severity of his detention. By the time of his death, he was in the harshest type of prison in the Russian penitentiary system – a “special regime” colony – and was frequently sent to a punishment cell.
The obvious intent was to demoralise Navalny, his team and supporters – making an example of him to spread fear among anyone else who might consider mounting a challenge to the Kremlin. But Navalny fought back, as described in his posthumously published memoir, Patriot. He made legal challenges against his jailers. He went on hunger strike. And he formed a union for his fellow prisoners.
He also used his court appearances to make clear his political views, including following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, declaring: “I am against this war. I consider it immoral, fratricidal, and criminal.”
Navalny’s final public appearance was via video link. He was in good spirits, with his trademark optimism and humour still on display. Tongue firmly in cheek, he asked the judge for financial help:
Your Honour, I will send you my personal account number so that you can use your huge salary as a federal judge to ‘warm up’ my personal account, because I am running out of money.
Navalny died the following day. According to the prison authorities, he collapsed after a short walk and lost consciousness. Although the Russian authorities claimed he had died of natural causes, documents published in September 2024 by The Insider – a Russia-focused, Latvia-based independent investigative website – suggest Navalny may have been poisoned.
A mourner adds her tribute to Alexei Navalny’s grave in Moscow after his burial on March 1 2024. Aleksey Dushutin/Shutterstock
Whether or not Putin directly ordered his death, Russia’s president bears responsibility – for leading a system that tried to assassinate Navalny in August 2020, and for allowing his imprisonment following Navalny’s return to Russia in conditions designed to crush him.
Commenting in March 2024, Putin stated that, just days before Navalny’s death, he had agreed for his most vocal opponent to be included in a prisoner swap – on condition the opposition figure never returned to Russia. “But, unfortunately,” Putin added, “what happened, happened.”
‘No one will forget’
Putin is afraid of Alexei, even after he killed him.
Yulia Navalnaya, Navalny’s wife, wrote these words on January 10 2025 after reading a curious letter. His mother, Lyudmila Navalnaya, had written to Rosfinmonitoring – a Russian state body – with a request for her son’s name to be removed from their list of “extremists and terrorists” now he was no longer alive.
The official response was straight from Kafka. Navalny’s name could not be removed as it had been added following the initiation of a criminal case against him. Even though he was dead, Rosfinmonitoring had not been informed about a termination of the case “in accordance with the procedure established by law”, so his name would have to remain.
This appears to be yet another instance of the Russian state exercising cruelty behind the veil of bureaucratic legality – such as when the prison authorities initially refused to release Navalny’s body to his mother after his death.
“Putin is doing this to scare you,” Yulia continued. “He wants you to be afraid to even mention Alexei, and gradually to forget his name. But no one will forget.”
Alexei Navalny and his wife, Yulia Navalnaya, at a protest rally in Moscow, May 2012. Dmitry Laudin/Shutterstock
Today, Navalny’s family and team continue his work outside of Russia – and are fighting to keep his name alive back home. But the odds are against them. Polling suggests the share of Russians who say they know nothing about Navalny or his activities roughly doubled to 30% between his return in January 2021 and his death three years later.
Navalny fought against an autocratic system – and paid the price with his life. Given the very real fears Russians may have of voicing support for a man still labelled an extremist by the Putin regime, it’s not easy to assess what people there really think of him and his legacy. But we will also never know how popular Navalny would have been in the “normal” political system he fought for.
What made Navalny the force he was?
Navalny didn’t mean for the humble yellow rubber duck to become such a potent symbol of resistance.
In March 2017, the ACF published its latest investigation into elite corruption, this time focusing on then-prime minister (and former president), Dmitry Medvedev. Navalny’s team members had become masters of producing slick videos that enabled their message to reach a broad audience. A week after posting, the film had racked up over 7 million views on YouTube – an extraordinary number at that time.
The film included shocking details of Medvedev’s alleged avarice, including yachts and luxury properties. In the centre of a large pond in one of these properties was a duck house, footage of which was captured by the ACF using a drone.
Video: ACF.
Such luxuries jarred with many people’s view of Medvedev as being a bit different to Putin and his cronies. As Navalny wrote in his memoir, Medvedev had previously seemed “harmless and incongruous”. (At the time, Medvedev’s spokeswoman said it was “pointless” to comment on the ACF investigation, suggesting the report was a “propaganda attack from an opposition figure and a convict”.)
But people were angry, and the report triggered mass street protests across Russia. They carried yellow ducks and trainers, a second unintended symbol from the film given Medvedev’s penchant for them.
Another reason why so many people came out to protest on March 26 2017 was the organising work carried out by Navalny’s movement.
The previous December, Navalny had announced his intention to run in the 2018 presidential election. As part of the campaign, he and his team created a network of regional headquarters to bring together supporters and train activists across Russia. Although the authorities had rejected Navalny’s efforts to register an official political party, this regional network functioned in much the same way, gathering like-minded people in support of an electoral candidate. And this infrastructure helped get people out on the streets.
The Kremlin saw this as a clear threat. According to a December 2020 investigation by Bellingcat, CNN, Der Spiegel and The Insider, the FSB assassination squad implicated in the Novichok poisoning of Navalny had started trailing him in January 2017 – one month after he announced his run for the presidency.
At the protests against Medvedev, the authorities’ growing intolerance of Navalny was also on display – he was detained, fined and sentenced to 15 days’ imprisonment.
The Medvedev investigation was far from the beginning of Navalny’s story as a thorn in the Kremlin’s side. But this episode brings together all of the elements that made Navalny the force he was: anti-corruption activism, protest mobilisation, attempts to run as a “normal” politician in a system rigged against him, and savvy use of social media to raise his profile in all of these domains.
Courting controversy
In Patriot, Navalny writes that he always “felt sure a broad coalition was needed to fight Putin”. Yet over the years, his attempts to form that coalition led to some of the most controversial points of his political career.
In a 2007 video, Navalny referred to himself as a “certified nationalist”, advocating for the deportation of illegal immigrants, albeit without using violence and distancing himself from neo-Nazism. In the video, he says: “We have the right to be Russians in Russia, and we’ll defend that right.”
Although alienating some, Navalny was attempting to present a more acceptable face of nationalism, and he hoped to build a bridge between nationalists and liberals in taking on the Kremlin’s burgeoning authoritarianism.
But the prominence of nationalism in Navalny’s political identity varied markedly over time, probably reflecting his shifting estimations of which platform could attract the largest support within Russia. By the time of his thwarted run in the 2018 presidential election, nationalist talking points were all but absent from his rhetoric.
However, some of these former comments and positions continue to influence how people view him. For example, following Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, Navalny tried to take a pragmatic stance. While acknowledging Russia’s flouting of international law, he said that Crimea was “now part of the Russian Federation” and would “never become part of Ukraine in the foreseeable future”.
Many Ukrainians take this as clear evidence that Navalny was a Russian imperialist. Though he later revised his position, saying Crimea should be returned to Ukraine, some saw this as too little, too late. But others were willing to look past the more controversial parts of his biography, recognising that Navalny represented the most effective domestic challenge to Putin.
Another key attempt to build a broad political coalition was Navalny’s Smart Voting initiative. This was a tactical voting project in which Navalny’s team encouraged voters to back the individual thought best-placed to defeat the ruling United Russia candidate, regardless of the challenger’s ideological position.
The project wasn’t met with universal approval. Some opposition figures and voters baulked at, or flatly refused to consider, the idea of voting for people whose ideological positions they found repugnant – or whom they viewed as being “fake” opposition figures, entirely in bed with the authorities. (This makes clear that Navalny was never the leader of the political opposition in Russia; he was, rather, the leading figure of a fractious constellation of individuals and groups.)
But others relished the opportunity to make rigged elections work in their favour. And there is evidence that Smart Voting did sometimes work, including in the September 2020 regional and local elections, for which Navalny had been campaigning when he was poisoned with Novichok.
In an astonishing moment captured on film during his recovery in Germany, Navalny speaks to an alleged member of the FSB squad sent to kill him. Pretending to be the aide to a senior FSB official, Navalny finds out that the nerve agent had been placed in his underpants.
How do Russians feel about Navalny now?
It’s like a member of the family has died.
This is what one Russian friend told me after hearing of Navalny’s death a year ago. Soon afterwards, the Levada Center – an independent Russian polling organisation – conducted a nationally representative survey to gauge the public’s reaction to the news.
The poll found that Navalny’s death was the second-most mentioned event by Russian people that month, after the capture of the Ukrainian city of Avdiivka by Russian troops. But when asked how they felt about his death, 69% of respondents said they had “no particular feelings” either way – while only 17% said they felt “sympathy” or “pity”.
And that broadly fits with Navalny’s approval ratings in Russia. After his poisoning in 2020, 20% of Russians said they approved of his activities – but this was down to 11% by February 2024.
Video: BBC.
Of course, these numbers must be taken for what they are: polling in an authoritarian state regarding a figure vilified and imprisoned by the regime, during a time of war and amid draconian restrictions on free speech. To what extent the drop in support for Navalny was real, rather than reflecting the increased fear people had in voicing their approval for an anti-regime figure, is hard to say with certainty.
When asked why they liked Navalny, 31% of those who approved of his activities said he spoke “the truth”, “honestly” or “directly”. For those who did not approve of his activities, 22% said he was “paid by the west”, “represented” the west’s interests, that he was a “foreign agent”, a “traitor” or a “puppet”.
The Kremlin had long tried to discredit Navalny as a western-backed traitor. After Navalny’s 2020 poisoning, Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, said that “experts from the United States’ Central Intelligence Agency are working with him”. The Russian state claimed that, rather than a patriot exposing official malfeasance with a view to strengthening his country, Navalny was a CIA stooge intent on destroying Russia.
Peskov provided no evidence to back up this claim – and the official propaganda wasn’t believed by all. Thousands of Russians defied the authorities by coming out to pay their respects at Navalny’s funeral on March 1 2024. Many, if not all, knew this was a significant risk. Police employed video footage to track down members of the funeral crowd, including by using facial recognition technology.
The first person to be detained was a Muscovite the police claimed they heard shouting “Glory to the heroes!” – a traditional Ukrainian response to the declaration “Glory to Ukraine!”, but this time referencing Navalny. She spent a night in a police station before being fined for “displaying a banned symbol”.
Putin always avoided mentioning Navalny’s name in public while he was alive – instead referring to him as “this gentleman”, “the character you mentioned”, or the “Berlin patient”. (The only recorded instance of Putin using Navalny’s name in public when he was alive was in 2013.)
However, having been re-elected president in 2024 and with Navalny dead, Putin finally broke his long-held practice, saying: “As for Navalny, yes he passed away – this is always a sad event.” It was as if the death of his nemesis diminished the potency of his name – and the challenge that Navalny had long presented to Putin.
Nobody can become another Navalny
Someone else will rise up and take my place. I haven’t done anything unique or difficult. Anyone could do what I’ve done.
So wrote Navalny in the memoir published after his death. But that hasn’t happened: no Navalny 2.0 has yet emerged. And it’s no real surprise. The Kremlin has taken clear steps to ensure nobody can become another Navalny within Russia.
In 2021, the authorities made a clear decision to destroy Navalny’s organisations within Russia, including the ACF and his regional network. Without the organisational infrastructure and legal ability to function in Russia, no figure has been able to take his place directly.
More broadly, the fate of Navalny and his movement has had a chilling effect on the opposition landscape. So too have other steps taken by the authorities.
Russia has become markedly more repressive since the start of its war on Ukraine. The human rights NGO First Department looked into the number of cases relating to “treason”, “espionage” and “confidential cooperation with a foreign state” since Russia introduced the current version of its criminal code in 1997. Of the more than 1,000 cases, 792 – the vast majority – were initiated following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
Russian law enforcement has also used nebulous anti-extremism and anti-terrorism legislation to crack down on dissenting voices. Three of Navalny’s lawyers were sentenced in January 2025 for participating in an “extremist organisation”, as the ACF was designated by a Moscow court in June 2021. The Russian legislature has also passed a barrage of legislation relating to so-called “foreign agents”, to tarnish the work of those the regime regards as foreign-backed “fifth columnists”.
Mass street protests are largely a thing of the past in Russia. Restrictions were placed on public gatherings during the COVID pandemic – but these rules were applied selectively, with opposition individuals and groups being targeted. And opportunities for collective action were further reduced following the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Freedom of speech has also come under assault. Article 29, point five of the Russian constitution states: “Censorship shall be prohibited.” But in September 2024, Kremlin spokesperson Peskov said: “In the state of war that we are in, restrictions are justified, and censorship is justified.”
Legislation passed very soon after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine made it illegal to comment on the Russian military’s activities truthfully – and even to call the war a war.
YouTube – the platform so central to Navalny’s ability to spread his message – has been targeted. Without banning it outright – perhaps afraid of the public backlash this might cause – the Russian state media regulator, Roskomnadzor, has slowed down internet traffic to the site within Russia. The result has been a move of users to other websites supporting video content, including VKontakte – a Russian social media platform.
In short, conditions in Russia are very different now compared to when Navalny first emerged. The relative freedom of the 2000s and 2010s gave him the space to challenge the corruption and authoritarianism of an evolving system headed by Putin. But this space has shrunk over time, to the point where no room remains for a figure like him within Russia.
In 2019, Navalny told Ivan Zhdanov, who is now director of the ACF: “We changed the regime, but not in the way we wanted.” So, did Navalny and his team push the Kremlin to become more authoritarian – making it not only intolerant of him but also any possible successor?
There may be some truth in this. And yet, the drastic steps taken by the regime following the start of the war on Ukraine suggest there were other, even more significant factors that have laid bare the violent nature of Putin’s personal autocracy – and the president’s disdain for dissenters.
Plenty for Russians to be angry about
How can we win the war when dedushka [grandpa] is a moron?
In June 2023, Evgeny Prigozhin – a long-time associate of Putin and head of the private military Wagner Group – staged an armed rebellion, marching his forces on the Russian capital. This was not a full-blown political movement against Putin. But the target of Prigozhin’s invective against Russia’s military leadership had become increasingly blurry, testing the taboo of direct criticism of the president – who is sometimes referred to, disparagingly, as “grandpa” in Russia.
And Prigozhin paid the price. In August 2023, he was killed when the private jet he was flying in crashed after an explosion on board. Afterwards, Putin referred to Prigozhin as a “talented person” who “made serious mistakes in life”.
In the west, opposition to the Kremlin is often associated with more liberal figures like Navalny. Yet the most consequential domestic challenge to Putin’s rule came from a very different part of the ideological spectrum – a figure in Prigozhin leading a segment of Russian society that wanted the Kremlin to prosecute its war on Ukraine even more aggressively.
Video: BBC.
Today, there is plenty for Russians to be angry about, and Putin knows it. He recently acknowledged an “overheating of the economy”. This has resulted in high inflation, in part due to all the resources being channelled into supporting the war effort. Such cost-of-living concerns weigh more heavily than the war on the minds of most Russians.
A favourite talking point of the Kremlin is how Putin imposed order in Russia following the “wild 1990s” – characterised by economic turbulence and symbolised by then-president Boris Yeltsin’s public drunkenness. Many Russians attribute the stability and rise in living standards they experienced in the 2000s with Putin’s rule – and thank him for it by providing support for his continued leadership.
The current economic problems are an acute worry for the Kremlin because they jeopardise this basic social contract struck with the Russian people. In fact, one way the Kremlin tried to discredit Navalny was by comparing him with Yeltsin, suggesting he posed the same threats as a failed reformer. In his memoir, Navalny concedes that “few things get under my skin more”.
Although originally a fan of Yeltsin, Navalny became an ardent critic. His argument was that Yeltsin and those around him squandered the opportunity to make Russia a “normal” European country.
Navalny also wanted Russians to feel entitled to more. Rather than be content with their relative living standards compared with the early post-Soviet period, he encouraged them to imagine the level of wealth citizens could enjoy based on Russia’s extraordinary resources – but with the rule of law, less corruption, and real democratic processes.
‘Think of other possible Russias’
When looking at forms of criticism and dissent in Russia today, we need to distinguish between anti-war, anti-government, and anti-Putin activities.
Despite the risk of harsh consequences, there are daily forms of anti-war resistance, including arson attacks on military enlistment offices. Some are orchestrated from Ukraine, with Russians blackmailed into acting. But other cases are likely to be forms of domestic resistance.
Criticism of the government is still sometimes possible, largely because Russia has a “dual executive” system, consisting of a prime minister and presidency. This allows the much more powerful presidency to deflect blame to the government when things go wrong.
There are nominal opposition parties in Russia – sometimes referred to as the “systemic opposition”, because they are loyal to the Kremlin and therefore tolerated by the system. Within the State Duma, these parties often criticise particular government ministries for apparent failings. But they rarely, if ever, now dare criticise Putin directly.
Nothing anywhere close to the challenge presented by Navalny appears on the horizon in Russia – at either end of the political spectrum. But the presence of clear popular grievances, and the existence of organisations (albeit not Navalny’s) that could channel this anger should the Kremlin’s grip loosen, mean we cannot write off all opposition in Russia.
Navalny’s wife, Yulia, has vowed to continue her husband’s work. And his team in exile maintain focus on elite corruption in Russia, now from their base in Vilnius, Lithuania. The ACF’s most recent investigation is on Igor Sechin, CEO of the oil company Rosneft.
But some have argued this work is no longer as relevant as it was. Sam Greene, professor in Russian politics at King’s College London, captured this doubt in a recent Substack post:
[T]here is a palpable sense that these sorts of investigations may not be relevant to as many people as they used to be, given everything that has transpired since the mid-2010s, when they were the bread and butter of the Anti-Corruption Foundation. Some … have gone as far as to suggest that they have become effectively meaningless … and thus that Team Navalny should move on.
Navalny’s team are understandably irritated by suggestions they’re no longer as effective as they once were. But it’s important to note that this criticism has often been sharpest within Russia’s liberal opposition. The ACF has been rocked, for example, by recent accusations from Maxim Katz, one such liberal opposition figure, that the organisation helped “launder the reputations” of two former bank owners. In their response, posted on YouTube, the ACF referred to Katz’s accusations as “lies” – but this continued squabbling has left some Russians feeling “disillusioned and unrepresented”.
So, what will Navalny’s long-term legacy be? Patriot includes a revealing section on Mikhail Gorbachev – the last leader of the Soviet Union, whom Navalny describes as “unpopular in Russia, and also in our family”. He continues:
Usually, when you tell foreigners this, they are very surprised, because Gorbachev is thought of as the person who gave Eastern Europe back its freedom and thanks to whom Germany was reunited. Of course, that is true … but within Russia and the USSR he was not particularly liked.
At the moment, there is a similar split in perceptions of Navalny. Internationally, he was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, awarded the Sakharov Prize by the European Parliament, and a documentary about him won an Oscar.
But there are also those outside of Russia who remain critical: “Navalny’s life has brought no benefit to the Ukrainian victory; instead, he has caused considerable harm,” wrote one Ukrainian academic. “He fuelled the illusion in the west that democracy in Russia is possible.”
Trailer for the Oscar-winning documentary Navalny.
Inside Russia, according to Levada Center polling shortly after his death, 53% of Russians thought Navalny played “no special role” in the history of the country, while 19% said he played a “rather negative” role. Revealingly, when commenting on Navalny’s death, one man in Moscow told RFE/RL’s Russian Service: “I think that everyone who is against Russia is guilty, even if they are right.”
But, for a small minority in Russia, Navalny will go down as a messiah-like figure who miraculously cheated death in 2020, then made the ultimate sacrifice in his battle of good and evil with the Kremlin. This view may have been reinforced by Navalny’s increasing openness about his Christian faith.
Ultimately, Navalny’s long-term status in Russia will depend on the nature of the political system after Putin has gone. Since it seems likely that authoritarianism will outlast Putin, a more favourable official story about Navalny is unlikely to emerge any time soon. However, how any post-Putin regime tries to make sense of Navalny’s legacy will tell us a lot about that regime.
While he was alive, Navalny stood for the freer Russia in which he had emerged as a leading opposition figure – and also what he called the “Beautiful Russia of the Future”. Perhaps, after his death, his lasting legacy in Russia remains the ability for some to think – if only in private – of other possible Russias.
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Ben Noble has previously received funding from the British Academy and the Leverhulme Trust. He is an Associate Fellow of Chatham House.
In the opening scene of Love, Actually, Hugh Grant’s character says how, whenever he gets gloomy with the state of the world, he thinks about the arrivals gate at Heathrow airport. The reason is on screen: we see couples kissing, old friends embracing, children smiling and laughing as they jump into the arms of their parents.
Airports are great places to really understand the importance of physical affection – hugging, kissing, cuddling, holding hands, or even just touching. But physical affection is ubiquitous in everyday life, too – and with good reason. Science shows that non-sexual physical affection produces more than just moments of joy – it also benefits our mental and physical health.
Physical affection is one of the most direct and important ways that people communicate intimacy in their romantic relationships. And it seems to occur in romantic relationships all over the world, despite cross-cultural differences in ideas of love and romance.
People in romantic relationships report more intimate physical affection than singletons. They’re also more comfortable allowing their partners to touch more of their bodies than strangers or friends. For example, most people are comfortable being touched on their thighs and abdomen by their partner, but not by other people.
Even how we touch our partners is different to how we touch other people. When participants in one study were asked to stroke their partner, a friend, a stranger, or an artificial arm, they did so more slowly with their partner. Slower strokes may may be experienced as more pleasant and erotic than quicker strokes. Even just thinking about physical affection from a partner evokes pleasant and erotic sensations.
There is now strong evidence showing that physical contact is associated with better physical and mental health. One review of “touch interventions” – think massage – in 212 studies involving more than 13,000 participants found that physical touch benefited everything from sleep patterns to blood pressure to fatigue. Touch interventions were especially helpful in reducing pain, depression and anxiety.
Couple’s therapy
Before you rush off to book yourself a massage, you should know that much of the evidence suggests the strongest benefits come from physical affection with romantic partners. Several studies have found that, in couples, physical affection is associated with a range of physiological effects, including lower blood pressure and better immune responses.
In couples, physical affection is also associated with better psychological wellbeing. One study found that couples who sleep-touched – cuddling shortly before or after sleep – felt happier and calmer in the morning, which meant they were more likely to enjoy the company of their partners.
Physical affection – including kissing and affection after sex – is also associated with greater relationship and sexual satisfaction, and better ratings of one’s relationship overall, which in turn contribute to better psychological wellbeing. And even when conflicts do occur, hugging seems to reduce levels of negative mood in couples.
Cuddle up, because there’s more. Receiving physical affection from a partner makes us feel psychologically stronger. One study found that women showed less activation in parts of the brain that respond to threat when holding their husband’s hand. Even just imagining touch from a partner can increase one’s willingness to take on challenging tasks.
Another way to look at this is to examine what happens when we lose physical affection. Studies have shown that “touch deprivation” – the absence of touch – is associated with greater symptoms of depression and anxiety. Indeed, the loss of affection from others during the pandemic hit many people hard. Among couples, a lack of physical affection is associated with lower relationship satisfaction, stress, and feelings of loneliness.
There are several ways in which physical affection provides these benefits. Affectionate touch is known to activate reward centres of the brain, which boosts our mood and promotes feelings of wellbeing. Touch also stimulates the release of oxytocin, which can strengthen social bonds and increase feelings of trust between individuals. It’s for these reasons that oxytocin is sometimes called the “cuddle chemical”.
Physical affection also reduces levels of the stress hormone cortisol and reduces perceived pain, which suppress physiological stress systems. One study found that a ten-minute neck-and-shoulder massage from one’s partner helped lower cortisol responses, helping to regulate levels of stress.
Psychologically, physical affection in romantic relationships is an important way to keep our emotions under control. Touching one’s partner in a caring manner helps to improve their mood and makes them feel loved, secure, and safe. As feelings of connection, trust, and belonging are strengthened through non-sexual physical signs of affection, negative effect is reduced and psychological well-being is improved.
However, not everyone likes to be touched, even if it is by their romantic partners. Some people are “touch avoidant” – and some people may actually be apprehensive about being touched. For instance, people with avoidant attachment styles – characterised by a discomfort with emotional closeness – often have very negative views about cuddling and are more hesitant to touch their partners. Conversely, people with anxious attachment styles – characterised by a fear of abandonment – may desire more touch than they receive.
But when couples have similar touch preferences, it can lead to greater attraction, closeness, and commitment to one another. And if you’re looking for a fun way to incorporate non-sexual physical affection into your relationships, consider home massage. One study found that couples who took turns massaging each other at home felt a deeper connection with each other, and felt more relaxed and less stressed.
Viren Swami does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
European defence ministers left their meeting in Brussels on February 12 in shock after the new US secretary of defence, Pete Hegseth, told them they could no longer rely on the US to guarantee their security.
Hegseth said he was there “to directly and unambiguously express that stark strategic realities prevent the United States of America from being primarily focused on the security of Europe”.
He also insisted that European countries provide the “overwhelming” share of funding for Ukraine in the future. The US has been the biggest source of military aid to Ukraine, with its weapons, equipment and financial assistance crucial in helping Kyiv resist the Russian invasion.
Hegseth’s comments are in keeping with the stance of the US president, Donald Trump, on the Nato transatlantic military alliance. Trump sees Nato as an excessive financial burden on the US and has repeatedly called on its members to increase their defence spending.
But Hegseth’s remarks could also be seen as a sign of America’s waning commitment to the terms of Nato’s founding treaty. Signed in 1949 by the US, Canada and several western European nations, Article 5 of the treaty requires member states to defend each other in the event of an armed attack.
The US has the largest military – and the biggest stockpile of nuclear weapons – in Nato. So, on the face of it, efforts to recast the alliance appear a drastic shift in Europe’s security landscape in the post-cold war era.
However, those familiar with the political sentiment around Nato and the defence of Europe in the US will see that this move follows in the footsteps of what others have sought to do – starting from the very end of the cold war.
Changing over time
In 1991, following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Nato was under considerable pressure to change for the new world order. A rising China was not yet on the minds of many in Washington, but the feeling was that the financial commitments the US had made to defend western Europe during the cold war could not continue.
The so-called “peace dividend”, a slogan popularised by former US president George H.W. Bush and former UK prime minister Margaret Thatcher, allowed nearly all Nato states to reduce their military spending at this time.
In 1992, almost as soon as European Nato countries were shrinking their forces and moving away from mass armies to professional soldiering, the alliance became actively engaged in maintaining a no-fly zone over Yugoslavia.
A new Nato was becoming apparent. It was transitioning from being a collective defence organisation to one of collective security, where conflicts were managed on Nato’s borders.
This collective security arrangement worked well to keep the alliance together until 2001, when the administration of George W. Bush entered the White House and involved the US in wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Following the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the US, Nato invoked Article 5 and returned to the principle of collective defence.
Many European countries, including the new, smaller Nato states like Estonia and Latvia, sent troops to Iraq and Afghanistan. The persistent justification I heard in the Baltic states was “we need to be there when the US needs us so that they will be there when we need them”.
Yet in 2011, before the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were over, the administration of Barack Obama introduced a foreign policy strategy known as the “pivot to Asia”. The implication was that the US would shift its attention from primarily the western hemisphere to China.
By this point, China had become the second-largest economy in the world and was rapidly developing its military. The reaction to this US policy shift in European capitals was one of shock and disappointment. They saw it as the US deciding that its own security did not sit in Europe like it had since 1945.
Then, in 2014, Russia invaded Crimea and the Donbas in eastern Ukraine. The pivot to Asia looked like it had stalled. But US interest and investment in European defence continued to decline, with American military bases across Europe closed down. The first Trump administration continued the pattern set by Obama.
President Joe Biden, who entered office in 2021, used Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 to show European leaders that the US still saw its own security in Europe and that it would stand beside Ukraine.
But the US continued to insist that European countries invest in their own defence. The UK, Poland and France have all committed to increase their defence spending over recent years – though spending by European Nato states as a whole continued to fall.
There has been a long-held belief in the US that Europe is “freeriding” on American power. While the US saw its own security in Europe, this freeriding was allowed to continue.
But as the perspective of the US has changed, with the focus now on countering China, it has been keen to suggest that European defence should increasingly become the job of Europe itself.
Nato will not go out with a bang. It is much more likely to gradually disappear with a whimper. After all, who did Trump meet on his second day in office? Not Nato but the Quad: an alliance between Australia, India, Japan and the US in the Indo-Pacific.
David J. Galbreath has received research funding from the UKRI.
Source: The Conversation – UK – By David Hastings Dunn, Professor of International Politics in the Department of Political Science and International Studies, University of Birmingham
Donald Trump likes to portray himself as the great deal maker. Typically, his idea of the “Art of the Deal” had tended to involve outlandishly bullish opening demands – whether that’s on tariffs or trade deals – before settling on more moderate, but still exacting conditions. This context makes what happened when the US president spoke with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin about Ukraine so remarkable.
The very fact that Trump spoke with Putin at all was a diplomatic gift to the pariah state and its leader. For three years Russia has been diplomatically isolated by most western leaders, many of whom have called for Putin to face war crimes charges (there is currently an ICC arrest warrant out for Putin for the alleged illegal transfer of children from, Ukraine to Russia).
Indeed, the fact that Trump spoke with Putin and only then called the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, to inform him of their conversation indicates the subordination of Ukraine’s role in the talks.
Trumpeting the call as “highly productive” on his TruthSocial website, Trump wrote that the two leaders had spoken about the “strengths of our respective nations, and the great benefit that we will someday have in working together”. He said they had arranged to visit each other’s nations. In fact, the two will initially meet in Saudi Arabia – where Putin would not be arrested under the ICC’s warrant.
At the same time, Trump’s new defense secretary spelled out to a meeting of European defence officials the administration’s position on some of the key issues. It was clear that several of Ukraine’s “red lines” had already fallen by the wayside as far as the US is concerned.
Hegseth said that returning to Ukraine’s pre-2014 borders is “an unrealistic objective” and an “illusionary goal” and that any deal must be based on “a realistic assessment of the battlefield.”
Likewise Ukraine’s future Nato membership – something the US committed to support in the 2008 Budapest Declaration, was also a non-starter. And he said the US would not onlynot join any international force deployed to ensure Ukrainian security, but that if such a force were constituted it would not be a Nato operation. As such, he said, it would not be covered by the alliance’s article 5 pledge for collective security. This effectively dooms this initiative to failure.
As important as what was announced by the Trump administration on this subject, was what was omitted. Trump has never condemned Putin for his illegal invasion of Ukraine. And there has been no mention in his social media posts that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was a violation of international law. Or the inviolability of Ukraine’s borders or the issue of Russian reparations for the material and human damage inflicted on Ukraine.
Russia celebrates
Russia, meanwhile, is cock-a-hoop. Kremlin spokesman Dmitri Peskov reported that Putin talked about Moscow’s demands, telling Trump of “the need to eliminate the root causes of the conflict”. This suggests that while Ukraine’s red lines are going to be ignored by the US, Russia will continue to insist on its maximalist demands that the Russians intend to take in their approach to the negotiation.
In addition to the concessions that Hegseth indicated the Trump administration has already decided to go along with, Russia is also likely to press for the demilitarisation of Ukraine. It will demand control, not just of the territory that it occupies, but of the remainder of the Ukrainian provinces that Putin has already declared to be “Russian”: Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson, in the south and east of Ukraine.
Both the Russian stock market and the ruble rose sharply on the US announcement of the talks, and the government-controlled press in Russian could hardly hide their glee, reporting that: “Russia is ready for talks. But on its terms”.
European leaders shocked
The pace and scale of US concessions on Ukraine seen to have caught the US’s European Nato allies off guard. Like Ukraine itself, they have been sidelined by Trump’s decision to seek direct negotiations with Putin. The UK’s defence secretary, John Healey, issued a statement appealing that “that there can be no negotiation about Ukraine without Ukraine and Ukraine’s voice must be at the heart of any talks”.
German foreign minister, Anna Baerbock, meanwhile, said the call had come out of the blue without any consultation with Europe: “This is the way the Trump administration operates,” she said, adding: “This is not how others do foreign policy, but this is now the reality.” Baerbock said a deal must not be imposed on Ukraine and that Europe should be involved in negotiations: “This is about European peace. That’s why we Europeans must be involved.”
The French foreign ministry put out a statement saying that: “Ukraine and Europe must be part of any negotiations. Ukraine should be provided with strong security guarantees.”
Other commentators have been less diplomatic. Michael McFaul, who served as US ambassador to Russia under Barack Obama, took to X to question Trump’s tactics: “Diplomacy 101: Don’t give anything without getting something in return. Don’t negotiate in public. Don’t negotiate about Ukraine’s future without first coordinating your position with Ukrainians.”
We’ll know more about what – if any – agency Volodymyr Zelensky and his diplomats have in the future of their country after US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, and vice-president, JD Vance, meet with Zelensky at the Munich Security Conference on February 14-16.
But for the present at least, it appears that negotiations will be less about pressuring Putin to bring a just end to the war he started, than forcing Ukraine to give in to the Russian leader’s demands.
David Hastings Dunn has previously received funding from the ESRC, the Gerda Henkel Foundation, the Open Democracy Foundation and has previously been both a NATO and a Fulbright Fellow.
Source: The Conversation – UK – By Daniel Alge, Senior Lecturer in Criminology & Criminal Justice, Brunel University of London
Lucy Letby was convicted in two trials in 2023 and 2024 of murdering seven babies and attempting to murder six others in her care at the Countess of Chester hospital in north-west England between 2015 and 2016.
She is currently serving 15 whole life sentences for the murders. But the case has been called into question as a result of growing concerns about the expert evidence presented at her trial. Will she get a retrial? Here’s what happens next.
In the context of usually cautious expert opinion, the press conference held on February 4 2025 was extraordinary. An international panel of medical experts investigating the medical evidence against Lucy Letby concluded that there were alternative explanations for each of the deaths. They said they found no evidence of deliberate harm, and believe Letby did not murder any babies.
The panel’s chair, Dr Shoo Lee, is a retired neonatal care expert. His 1989 paper on air embolisms was heavily relied on by the prosecution in the Letby trial and appeals. However, Lee has previously said that his research was misinterpreted at trial. At the press conference he said, “we did not find any murders. In all cases, death or injury were due to natural causes or just bad medical care.”
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The panel’s findings put the case in uncharted territory, given Letby’s very recent convictions and the continuing public inquiry into the case.
The public inquiry – the Thirlwall Inquiry into events at the Countess of Chester hospital – will operate based on the assumption, following her convictions, that Letby is guilty. Letby’s barrister has called for the inquiry to be halted pending the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) review of her case.
Despite the findings of the expert panel, Letby’s release or even a retrial is by no means imminent, let alone guaranteed. Letby has already had two applications for leave to appeal refused. The grounds of appeal were related to what her defence argued were errors in judicial decision making during the trial, rather than the medical evidence. Nonetheless, this means that the CCRC is the only route left open to Letby to challenge her convictions.
Letby’s defence team confirmed that a preliminary application has been made to the CCRC, with a full submission to follow. The CCRC investigates potential miscarriages of justice in England, Wales and Northern Ireland.
The commission is expected to treat Letby’s case as a priority given the public interest. But it is still likely to take at least a year to review the considerable evidence before a referral back to the Court of Appeal could even be considered.
What evidence will be considered?
The CCRC aims to complete cases within 12 months of receiving the application. But the organisation has recently come under criticism over how it handled the case of Andrew Malkinson, who was wrongly jailed for 17 years for a crime he did not commit.
When the CCRC considers the full application, they have the power to refer the case back to the Court of Appeal. In order to do so, the commission requires new evidence or other relevant factors which would support a fresh appeal.
The findings of the medical panel will be part of the defence submission. The CCRC will decide, with other factors, whether they constitute fresh grounds for an appeal. It is particularly compelling that the prosecution case relied on Dr Lee’s research, and yet it is in part his expertise that has become a crucial element of the defence.
To send the case back for appeal, the CCRC would also need to conclude that there was a “real possibility” of the conviction being overturned.
It is important to remember that the case against Letby included statistical and circumstantial evidence as well as medical opinion. However, what are alleged to be numerous fallacies in the statistical evidence have been highlighted. And circumstantial evidence is just that – circumstantial. Letby was convicted on the medical evidence.
The evidence given as part of the Thirlwall Inquiry will be within the remit of the CCRC too. Although the inquiry has not yet formally concluded, all oral testimony has taken place. As would be expected given the inquiry’s terms of reference, much of the evidence heard has been less favourable to Letby.
The CCRC also has the power under the Criminal Appeals Act 1995 to instruct its own expert witnesses and interview previous and potential new witnesses.
If the CCRC ultimately decides to refer the case to the Court of Appeal, it will be treated like any other appeal. It could result either in the conviction being quashed and Letby going free, or a retrial.
A retrial would follow if the appeal judges believed that a retrial met the criteria set out in the Criminal Appeal Act 1968 and was in the interests of justice. The likelihood of this outcome depends on the strength of the medical evidence presented to the CCRC and the Court of Appeal.
As the Thirlwall Inquiry and the CCRC application are separate processes, is it technically not essential that the inquiry concludes before the CCRC makes a decision. Closing submissions to the inquiry are scheduled for March 2025, with the report expected later in the year. This should fit within the expected timeframe of the CCRC taking at least a year to consider the application.
A further complicating factor is Lee’s assertion that the Countess of Chester hospital provided such bad care that it would have been “shut down” in his home country of Canada. This will no doubt lead to legal claims against the NHS trust, particularly if Letby is exonerated and culpability for avoidable deaths is sought elsewhere.
Some, including Lee, have gone so far as to suggest the new evidence is so compelling that Letby should be released on house arrest pending the CCRC review. This would be highly unusual, and for the time being, Letby remains imprisoned as one of the worst child serial killers in modern British history.
Daniel Alge does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
We’ve all experienced it: you’re in the middle of a conversation, searching for a word, a name, or a title, and… nothing. You know you know it–you can almost feel it–but it just won’t come. This phenomenon, known as having a word “on the tip of the tongue,” is both fascinating and frustrating. But what exactly is happening in the brain during these moments? Scientists have explored this question, uncovering some intriguing insights.
When a word is “on the tip of the tongue,” multiple regions of the brain spring into action, working to locate the missing term. Imagine a group of people frantically searching a library for a specific book. Similarly, the brain mobilizes specific areas to assist in this search. Three regions, in particular, play key roles: the anterior cingulate cortex, the prefrontal cortex and the insula.
The anterior cingulate cortex and the prefrontal cortex are part of a network responsible for cognitive control and perform complementary roles when a word is elusive. The anterior cingulate cortex acts like a supervisor, signaling that there’s a conflict: “I know this word, but I can’t retrieve it!” Meanwhile, the prefrontal cortex evaluates and verifies the information that surfaces during the search, ensuring that what is retrieved matches what you’re looking for. The insula, a deeper and less visible brain region, contributes to phonological retrieval–helping access the sounds that make up words.
Using tools like functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), researchers have observed how these brain areas work together during such moments. It’s as if these regions collaborate like colleagues tackling a tough problem, pooling their efforts to find the missing word.
Interestingly, this frustrating experience becomes more frequent as we age. Studies show that parts of the brain involved in word retrieval–particularly the anterior cingulate cortex and the insula–tend to atrophy over time. This means they lose some efficiency, like a once-pristine library becoming disorganised, with misplaced books and poorly labelled shelves. As a result, retrieving a “book” or, in this case, a word, becomes more challenging.
For example, research has shown that in older adults, the insula is less active during word retrieval attempts. This diminished activity impairs the ability to assemble the phonological elements of words, making “tip-of-the-tongue” moments more common. The more affected the insula becomes with age, the harder it is to recover words that are otherwise familiar.
Despite its increased frequency with ageing, the “tip-of-the-tongue” phenomenon is entirely normal. It highlights the complexity of the brain, showing that even seemingly simple tasks–such as finding a word–rely on the coordinated action of many regions.
Moreover, there are ways to mitigate the effects of ageing on word retrieval. One strategy involves building what scientists call cognitive reserve–a protective factor bolstered by intellectual, physical and social activities. This reserve helps optimise brain health and cognitive ageing, making word-finding easier even as we grow older.
The next time a word is on the tip of your tongue, remember that your brain is hard at work trying to retrieve it. Partial information–such as certain sounds or related words–might surface first, encouraging you to keep searching. If the word doesn’t come to you right away, take a break and try again later with a clear mind. These moments are a testament to the brain’s complexity and remarkable efficiency.
Frédéric Bernard ne travaille pas, ne conseille pas, ne possède pas de parts, ne reçoit pas de fonds d’une organisation qui pourrait tirer profit de cet article, et n’a déclaré aucune autre affiliation que son organisme de recherche.
I grew up in San Gabriel Valley — also referred to as SGV or the 626. SGV is an ethnoburb — an ethnic enclave — that grew out of the 1970s, with its own economy and ecosystem that includes banks, grocery stores, hair salons and restaurants.
Since many early Asian immigrants to this country were barred from accessing white institutions, working together to build and protect this ethnic ecosystem was a matter of survival and necessity.
Wei Li, a Chinese American geographer, first proposed the term “ethnoburb” to describe the hybridity of ethnic enclaves and middle-class suburbs: suburban ethnic clusters of people and businesses.
The ethnoburb demonstrates that we can create our own power and belonging — without learning English, without participating in white institutions, and Americanizing. It is a communal endeavour, one that requires everybody’s imagination and care.
The ‘Chinese Beverly Hills’
Fuelled by foreign capital, ethnoburb immigrants redefined the entire landscape of the suburb and instigated an economic boom. The growth of Chinese American banking institutions, along with the political and economic factors that prompted the migration of wealthy ethnic Chinese from Taiwan and Hong Kong, played an important role in facilitating the Chinese economic growth in Monterey Park, a city in San Gabriel Valley.
With their resources, Chinese immigrants bought homes and started businesses with distinct Chinese and Vietnamese language signs to cater to fellow Asian transplants. Valley Boulevard, which runs through 10 cities in San Gabriel Valley, became home to Asian-owned malls, commercial plazas, office complexes, shops, hotels and industrial plants, often with trilingual signage in Chinese, Vietnamese and English.
By the 1980s, Monterey Park was known as “the first suburban Chinatown,” converting San Gabriel Valley from predominantly white suburbs into an Asian-majority ecosystem with a conspicuous and diverse first-generation, unassimilated immigrant presence.
Bypassing urban Chinatowns for the suburbs
The ethnoburb troubles the American construction of the suburbs as static sites of whiteness and socioeconomic mobility.
The majority of new immigrants, especially those with resources, bypassed urban ethnic enclaves like Chinatown that previously served as immigrant gateway cities and settled immediately into suburbs instead.
Zhou also says the direct insertion of new Asian immigrants into traditionally white middle-class suburbs offends the conventional understanding of immigration and assimilation. Ethnoburb immigrants were non-white, didn’t always speak English, made considerably less effort to acculturate into whiteness, and many of them were already educated and affluent. They broke the bounds of the American imagination of an immigrant.
In addition to higher levels of education and incomes, many ethnoburb immigrants also possessed expansive and transnational social networks that shaped their reluctance to acculturate. They did not need to learn English or go through the ethnic enclave to reach a middle-class dream of financial stability.
The ethnoburb was not a “staging ground” for somewhere better or whiter. The ethnoburb was the final desired destination.
In actuality, contrary to popular conceptions, the ethnoburb was not apolitical or insular at all. It was and remains a site of resistance against the confining, white imagination of suburbia. With the emergence of Monterey Park as an Asian ethnoburb, questions over group identity, spatial boundaries, and the character of Monterey Park became politicized.
White hostility in an ‘all-American’ city
Nativist white residents were at the forefront of erecting boundaries of belonging that stigmatized first-generation immigrants. In addition to Asian businesses changing the esthetic and cultural identity of Monterey Park, Asian immigrants took on local politics. This direct insertion of unassimilated Asian immigrants into traditionally white suburbs and its institutions troubled conventional American understandings of who an immigrant is, the norms they should follow, and how they should behave.
Lily Lee Chen’s official portrait as mayor of Monterey Park, California, 1983. The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens.
On Nov. 8, 1983, Lily Lee Chen, a first-generation immigrant from Taiwan, was inaugurated in Monterey Park as the first Chinese American mayor in the nation. Chen was relatable, charismatic, and not assimilated. The Los Angeles Times described Chen’s speech as “accented with pauses and grammatical errors, characteristic of someone speaking in their second language.”
In another Times article from 1985, Chen told the reporter that she enjoyed dressing in bright reds and jade greens, despite being told by her consultant to look more subdued because her bright colours made her appear “aggressive.” During her campaign, she was met with fierce resistance from white residents, who commonly took down her neighbourhood campaign signs.
As a response, Chen worked tirelessly on voter engagement among Asian Americans and Latinos, publishing multilingual voter handbooks, registering voters, and building relationships with ethnic communities, including working with Cesar Chavez to support the Latinos in Southern California.
The same year as Chen’s election, Monterey Park’s five-member city council became multiethnic, with two Mexican Americans, one Filipino American, one Chinese American, and one white council member.
As Monterey Park became touted as a “successful suburban melting pot” by journalists and even won an “All-American City” award in 1985 for its civic engagement and racial diversity, white flight accelerated and resentment festered among the minority of white residents.
The large influx and increasing influence of Chinese immigrants over a short period of time caused racial tension to build, with mounting struggles over cultural differences, language barriers, and explicit mistrust of immigrants. Chinese businesses, political candidates, religious institutions, and entrepreneurs became racialized targets of nativist animus.
A particularly contentious conflict emerged over the proliferation of business signs in languages other than English. In 1986, white hostility among the remaining white residents swept the council members of colour out of office, and replaced them with three long-established white residents, who promptly launched an anti-immigrant, “English-only” campaign attacking the proliferation of business signage in Chinese.
A scene from the 2010 play by Annette Lee about the English only movement from the 80s. 17-year-old Scarlett Wong, an ‘all-American teenager’ struggles with her neighbors who don’t speak English. Angry Asian Man/Annette Lee
The “English-only” movement in Monterey Park reflects the struggle to control the identity and narrative of a built environment. It represents the tension between America’s idea of how immigrants should assimilate, and how ethnoburb immigrants instead created their own unassimilable institutions and communities.
Frank Arcuri, one of the Monterey Park residents and community activists who started the “English-only” petition campaign, insisted, “Immigrants are welcome here, but they must realize that English is the language we use in America… They must realize they are making a negative impact on our city. They must adapt to our ways. They must use our language and respect our culture.”
The nativist, inflammatory rhetoric Arcuri employed to speak about immigrants is as American as apple pie, comparable to replacement theory touted by white nationalist conspiracists today.
The English-only conflict illustrates the deeper, ideological tensions behind an increasingly diverse and polyglot constituency, composed of politically active immigrants, and nostalgic white residents desperately (and at times violently) clinging on to institutional power and a homogeneous past.
Asian immigrants defied assimilation theories
Traditionally, sociologists of immigration and assimilation theorists believed that all immigrant groups would eventually assimilate and integrate into white Protestant American institutions, culture, and society. They argued that doing so would be in the best interests of immigrants. They were also all white scholars. For the most part, what they theorized was true for European immigrants.
However, Asian immigrants in the ethnoburb remained proudly unassimilable and trans-national. While the ethnoburb was their final destination, they maintained diasporic ties. Many with socioeconomic privilege shuttled back and forth to their home countries.
It is our diasporic connections to our motherlands and our ethnic communities, not necessarily our assimilation into whiteness, that help us thrive in the U.S.
Bianca Mabute-Louie is affiliated with Asian Texans for Justice.
Has a romantic partner, or someone you had a crush on, ever hurt your feelings? You’re far from alone. Very few people can boast a 100% success rate when it comes to attracting love interests. And even for those who have more “hits” than “misses”, no partner is capable of always being attentive to our needs, leading to conflicts, disappointments and breakups.
Given the ubiquity of romantic rejection, why is it often so challenging to respond in adaptive rather than destructive ways?
Humans are social creatures. Millennia of relying on our family and broader social communities for survival means that we have evolved complex psychological monitoring systems to track whether we are safely connected with others – or at risk of being pushed out of groups.
The evolutionary importance of social connection with others is so significant that some researchers have gone so far as to argue that people have a fundamental need for acceptance through positive and satisfying relationships.
If you’ve recently been rejected by someone you had feelings for, or a partner has ended your relationship, these psychology-backed tips will help you to move on.
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Why does rejection hurt so much?
In many societies, romantic relationships typically offer the strongest forms of connection – and consequently opportunities for rejection. From being rebuffed or ghosted by prospective partners, to having your emotional needs ignored in your relationship, through to recurring conflicts, breakups and divorces, romantic rejection can manifest at all stages of romantic life.
These moments of rejection amplify our need to belong. They motivate us to respond in a way that restores of feelings of safety and connection because they shine a spotlight on the psychological risks of being cast out and left vulnerable.
While romantic rejection is always unpleasant, not everyone notices or reacts to rejection in the same way.
People who are higher in rejection sensitivity more actively monitor for signs of rejection from their loved ones. This hypersensitivity often backfires, leading them to over-anticipate rejection and prevent others from behaving in ways that would provide reassurance.
Consider, for example, that you find out a group of friends met for coffee and didn’t invite you. It is natural to feel slighted even if this was not their intention. People lower in rejection sensitivity are more likely to conclude that the harm was unintentional, and focus instead on the positives. Perhaps, suggest that “it looks like you had a great time, I’d love to join next time”.
People higher in rejection sensitivity are more likely to conclude that the exclusion was not only intentional, but indicative that the friend group is harbouring some kind of resentment. These assumptions can lead to withdrawal. Instead of opening the door for an invite in the future or reassurance that their presence was missed, they close it behind them.
People who are sensitive to rejection are more likley to interpret friends getting coffee without them as a slight. Annika Knight/Dupe, CC BY-SA
This preoccupation with protecting the self from rejection often contributes to self-fulfilling prophecies. For example, people with lower self esteem often over-anticipate rejection from others. Consequently, they are more likely to believe that a potential romantic partner is disinterested.
This assumption of disinterest prevents them from even attempting to initiate a relationship with the object of their affection. Their potential partner may misinterpret reticence as disinterest, or may never even realise the door for connection was open, thus guaranteeing a “rejection”.
The only way to break this cycle is by trying to connect, rather than hoping or assuming the other person will always make the first move.
By contrast, people with high self esteem are less preoccupied with avoiding rejection and are therefore more likely to continue to see loved ones through rose-tinted glasses, even after experiencing rejection.
How to cope with romantic rejection
Being more sensitive to the warning signs of rejection does not mean that someone is immune to its sting. Experiencing rejection leads most people to feel worse about themselves and others. This can lead to aggressive and selfish actions.
Research has even shown that some people are more likely to say that being sexually coercive against a partner is permissible if they have been reminded about time they had been recently hurt by a close other. Therefore, in a cruel twist of fate, these hurt people often hurt others, thereby reducing the likelihood of reconnection.
So, how can you find more adaptive ways of coping with rejection? An important first step is self-reflection. People with low self-esteem or an insecure attachment style (people who have less positive self-regard and expect others to have poor regard for them as well) are more likely to be rejection sensitive. Ask yourself if this might describe you.
Spend time reflecting on your self esteem and attachment style to understand how you cope with rejection. Rawpixel.com/Shutterstock
Recognising that this is something you struggle with can help you be mindful in how you respond to experiences. Even people particularly sensitive to rejection benefit from being nonjudgmental about their inner experiences, and are less likely to report negative feelings following rejection.
Another strategy you can work on is constructive, rather than destructive, approaches to communication. Because rejection makes us feel defensive, it can lead us to express ourselves in overly negative and indirect ways. Try to avoid focusing on your love interest’s intent.
In a relationship, focus on how a transgression made you feel and what it would take to make it up to you now, and in the future. These sorts of positive, yet direct, approaches are more productive and increase the likelihood that your partners will be responsive to your needs in the future.
It is not necessary to run away from rejection. It is an important social cue that can motivate you towards self-improvement and connection with others. The people who can fully embrace the potential benefits the comes from connecting with others, in spite of any potential risks, are more likely to reap the rewards.
Veronica Lamarche has received funding from the ESRC, the British Academy, and the Royal Society.
Valentine’s Day is all about the hearts: heart-shaped chocolates, cards, balloons and even pizza. But the heart hasn’t always just been a symbol of romance.
Across cultures and centuries, the heart has been revered as the seat of the soul, a source of supernatural power and a vessel of identity. From ancient Egyptian afterlife beliefs to medieval relics, from necromantic rituals to modern heart transplants, this organ has been at the centre of both scientific curiosity and deep-seated mysticism.
Why has the heart, more than any other organ, been imbued with such deep symbolism and power? While anatomy tells us it is a muscular pump controlled by electrical impulses, history tells a more complex story – one of rituals, relics and even dark magic.
The human heart is a remarkably efficient pump, beating about 100,000 times a day and circulating about 7,500 litres of blood. It is driven by the sinoatrial node, a cluster of pacemaker cells that spontaneously generate electrical impulses independently of the brain.
As this intrinsic electrical system does not rely on direct nervous input but is influenced by it, the heart can continue beating for a short while even when removed from the body – provided it has an adequate supply of oxygen and electrolytes. This uncanny quality only reinforced superstitions that the heart was more than just a muscle and may explain why many early cultures viewed the heart as possessing a life force of its own.
But to present the heart as merely a pump ignores wider influences. The heart functions as an endocrine organ, releasing hormones that regulate blood pressure, fluid balance and cardiovascular health.
The connection between the heart and “love hormones”, such as oxytocin, extends beyond metaphor, as research suggests the heart not only responds to oxytocin but may also play a role in its release.
Oxytocin is primarily produced in the brain by the hypothalamus and released from the pituitary gland, flooding the body during moments of affection, trust and bonding. It is the chemical catalyst behind the deep emotional connections that define human relationships.
The heart is equipped with oxytocin receptors, and studies show that the hormone promotes vasodilation (widening of the blood vessels), reducing blood pressure and improving circulation. Beyond this, oxytocin may protect the heart, helping it repair itself and reducing inflammation after injury, such as during a heart attack.
However, the heart’s function was not always understood. The ancient Greeks believed it was the seat of intelligence, while Aristotle dismissed the brain as a mere “cooling fluid” for the heart’s divine fire.
Galen, a Greek physician, surgeon and philosopher who lived during Roman times, described the heart as the body’s furnace, while William Harvey’s 1628 discovery of circulation reshaped our understanding of this important organ. Even so, its symbolic and mystical significance never fully waned.
The seat of the soul
The ancient Egyptians preserved the heart during mummification, believing it would be weighed by Anubis against the Feather of Truth, the divine measure of justice. Ironically, the brain was discarded as totally useless. An excerpt from the Book of the Dead, an ancient Egyptian funerary text, reads:
O my heart which I had from my mother! which I had from my mother! O my heart of my different ages! Don’t stand up as a witness against me. Do not be opposed to me in the tribunal.
This spell is intended to pacify the heart and assert dominion, ensuring it remains loyal when weighed.
The idea that the heart carried more than just blood persisted into the Renaissance, with scholars debating whether it was the true locus of identity.
“If indeed from the heart alone rise anger or passion, fear, terror, and sadness; if from it alone spring shame, delight, and joy, why should I say more?” Andreas de Laguna, a Spanish physician wrote in 1535.
Even today, heart transplants fuel questions about whether a transplanted heart carries something of its donor. Some recipients report changes in personality, memories or food preferences, raising speculation about cellular memory. While no definitive scientific basis exists, such cases continue to intrigue.
Heart of darkness
The heart’s power was not only revered, but feared. In folk magic and necromancy, people believed that the hearts of executed criminals retained energy from their violent deaths. Some thought consuming, burning or preserving a heart could grant knowledge or strength.
In Scotland and England, people reportedly boiled the hearts of murderers to prevent their ghosts from haunting the living. Dried hearts were sometimes ground into powders for potions, while in occult traditions, they were burned in rituals to banish spirits or bind enemies.
More disturbing are accounts of unbaptised infants’ hearts in witchcraft traditions. Some sources claim they were used in hexes, flying ointments or dark pacts. While probably exaggerated during witch trials, such stories reflect a deep-rooted belief in the heart as a conduit of power.
The heart has been a vessel of the soul, a source of magic and a point of conflict between science and superstition. While modern medicine has demystified much of its function, its symbolism remains deeply ingrained in human culture.
This Valentine’s Day, as we exchange stylised hearts in celebration of love, we might pause to remember that the power of the heart has been a symbol of life, death and everything in between for millennia.
Michelle Spear does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
For many of us, the run-up to Valentine’s Day is spent seeking out the least cringe-worthy card in the shop to gift to our significant other, and show them how we really feel. But, unfortunately, Hallmark rhymes rarely mine the depths of love and desire.
So, if you’re looking for the perfect words for your loved one this year, why not share one of these poems, which attempt to express the wonder and complexities of romantic love.
If you make a list of love poems, you’re obliged to include a Shakespearean sonnet, so I’ll start with a lesser known one, Sonnet 106.
In the poem, the bard compares the beauty of his lover to ancient poems that described beautiful knights and ladies. He declares that these older writers must have been prophets to know his lover’s true beauty. In fact, his lover is even more beautiful than these descriptions because the poets “had not skill enough your worth to sing”.
Here, Shakespeare addresses a problem that has plagued love poets throughout the ages: how to write of the love and beauty they feel and see when words may never match up.
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2. From the Irish by Ian Duhig (1997)
British-Irish poet, Ian Duhig confronts the same problem as Shakespeare in From the Irish. It is a poem that thinks as much about language as it does about love, but resolves in a sincere but frustrated attempt to tell his lover how he feels.
In trying to be precise in his use of language, he ends up telling his lover that their face “is like a slice of half-boiled turnip”.
This attempt to compare his lover’s face to the moon is not an insult, but instead part of his serious attempt to, as he says, “love you properly, according to Dinneen”.
3. Heart to Heart by Rita Dove (2004)
Rita Dove’s Heart to Heart likewise contemplates the relationship between love and language. In the poem, Dove, the former US poet laureate dismisses the clichéd ways in which we talk about the heart:
It doesn’t melt
or turn over,
break or harden.
The poet cannot tell her lover from “the bottom of it / how I feel” but gives it to them all the same.
Rita Dove reads her poem Heart to Heart.
4. He Seemed to Me Equal to the Gods by Sappho (translated by Anne Carson in 2002)
Closely aligned to the theme of romantic love is that of desire, and across the centuries poets have written about the torture of yearning. The Greek poet Sappho knew this even 2,600 years ago. Women are the objects of desire in her erotic poetry.
This poem, translated by the Canadian poet, Anne Carson, finds the poet watching her lover, which, says Sappho, “puts the heart in my chest on wings” but also renders her speechless. She describes the intensity and agony of desire:
fire is racing under skin
and in eyes no sight and drumming
fills ears.
These lines are a surviving fragment of a larger, lost poem, so what the poet might have “dared” at the end remains a mystery.
5. His Mistress Going to Bed by John Donne (circa 1590)
Perhaps more daring is John Donne’s His Mistress Going to Bed. Donne, an English poet who began writing in the 16th century, is considered one of the great love poets.
His Mistress Going to Bed is his attempt at seduction, undressing his lover across the poem’s lines: “Now off with those shoes, and then safely tread / In this love’s hallow’d temple, this soft bed.” The sexual act is seen as one of union: “As souls unbodied, bodies uncloth’d must be, / To taste whole joys.”
So prepared is the poet, we discover by the poem’s end, that he is already naked and ready to go to bed with his love.
6. Poem II by Adrienne Rich (1978)
As partnerships evolve, the initial intensity of sexual passion morphs into a more everyday, although no less exciting kind of love.
Poem II from Adrienne Rich’s sequence Twenty-One Love Poems describes the poet waking in her lover’s bed following a dream. She tenderly writes: “You’ve kissed my hair / to wake me.”
Adrienne Rich (right) with Audre Lorde (left) and Meridel Lesueur in 1980. K. Kendall/flickr, CC BY
The poem is a warm and intimate portrait of the love between two women, with Rich declaring:
I laugh and fall dreaming again
or the desire to show you to everyone I love,
to move openly together.
In this, the poet acknowledges the ease and depth of her love but also makes subtle reference to the lack of acceptance of homosexual relationships in the 1970s, when the poems were first published.
7. An Amish Rug by Michael Longley (1991)
Michael Longley, the Irish poet who passed away in January, presents a similarly private scene of an established relationship in his poem, An Amish Rug.
Describing the handmade rug he gifts to his wife, the poet contrasts the simplicity of the Amish lifestyle with its vivid woven colours.
If hung on the wall, the rug will become a stained-glass “cathedral window”. Or, it may be placed on the floor so that “whenever we undress for sleep or love / We shall step over it as over a flowerbed”.
There’s a Valentine’s gift to live up to.
8. The Orange by Wendy Cope (1992)
Wendy Cope’s The Orange almost unexpectedly turn into a love poem, as the poet describes the increasing “peace and contentment” that comes from sharing a “huge orange” with her colleagues. This, she says, “made me so happy, / As ordinary things often do”.
The Orange by Wendy Cope.
Its description of a lovely but ordinary day ends with the affirming line “I love you. I’m glad I exist,” revealing that profound reflections can come from small moments.
Ellen Howley does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Finding out you and your partner are expecting a baby throws many discussions that might have once been hypothetical into stark relief. This certainly may be the case if your partner speaks another language beyond the one spoken where you live and that the two of you communicate in.
“I’d like to bring the baby up to speak my language”, they say, and suddenly what seemed a wonderful idea – a bilingual child – might throw up panicked visions of being left out of private jokes and conversations at the dinner table. But growing up with two or more languages can be hugely beneficial for children, and there’s plenty you can do to help out and get involved.
When children acquire a minority language – a language other than the dominant language or languages in the place they live – spoken by one or both parents, they have the key to that culture. It offers the possibility of a deep relationship with extended family and others they might otherwise not be able to talk to at all. You really want to do everything in your power to support your partner and your child in this venture.
Learning something of your partner’s language will effectively solve your problem. You may be able to join a class to learn the language or even just use a language app such as Duolingo to get a head start on vocabulary and basic phrases. This becomes more challenging if the language in question is not a standard variety or is a language not spoken by many people.
If a parent is proficient in a lower-status and higher-status variety of a language – such as Cypriot Greek and standard Greek, or colloquial Singapore English and standard English – it may be tempting to want the child to learn the high-status variety. But the lower-status variety might be the one that the child will need to be able to visit family and feel like an insider. The higher-status variety can be added later if and when your child needs or wants it.
Even if you’re learning a non-standard language, and it takes time to achieve proficiency, you can learn a lot of useful language along with your baby. You just need to understand the gist of a conversation to be able to join in in your own language, and honestly, most conversations with a baby are not difficult to follow.
Even minimal effort towards learning to understand the language is worthwhile for the goodwill it encompasses. Just accepting that your partner will use another language with your child is really enough.
Family language policy
If your partner is speaking their language most of the time with your child, you don’t need to aspire to do that. Your job is to speak the other language.
Together you, your partner and your child will develop a family language policy about who speaks which language to whom. A popular approach is one-person-one-language: you speak your language to your child, your partner speaks theirs to them, and as parents you communicate in any available language, usually what you spoke together before you became parents.
This leads to dinner-table conversations with two or more languages, but children manage this easily. A major advantage of each parent mostly sticking to one language is that it is easier to get into the habit of using the languages, particularly a minority language that might not have had a place in your life as a couple before your baby was born.
The family linguistic repertoire can be said to be partially shared, with your child as the winner of the jackpot, developing skills in at least a couple of the languages spoken by their parents.
Learning the language spoken by extended family will help children build a relationship with them. Drazen Zigic/Shutterstock
Welcoming your partner’s language into your home means that you are preparing the ground for them and their extended family to support your child’s language development.
Grandparents are a powerful resource, especially if they have limited proficiency in the majority language – the language most commonly spoken where you live. They are often very motivated to help your child develop proficiency in their language so that they can have a relationship with them.
Your partner will face challenges, particularly as the child gets older and has more opportunity to hear and use the majority language with other children. It is likely that the child will at some point answer your partner in the majority language. Help them both to persevere with using the minority language.
Encourage your partner and child to make trips without you to environments where the minority language is spoken. You can help your partner create a linguistic landscape in your home: put up alphabet posters, and get books and children’s TV shows and films in their language.
Don’t worry about the majority language – your child has you and the surrounding community to support their majority language development. There is zero risk that your child will end up monolingual in the minority language if they have the opportunity to use the majority language with you and outside the home. Together, you and your partner can give your baby the gift of bilingualism.
Una Cunningham does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
A London court has found Sam Kerr not guilty of the racially aggravated harassment of Metropolitan Police officer Stephen Lovell.
As captain of the Australian women’s national soccer team, Kerr was widely condemned when news broke she had used a “racial slur” against an officer during an altercation.
The high-profile incident sparked debate across the globe.
Initially, former Australian soccer player Craig Foster criticised Kerr’s behaviour before retracting it and publicly apologising to her.
Meanwhile, politicians and academics argued her comments did not amount to racism given the power dynamics at play: not only is Kerr of Indian descent, but official inquiries have found the Metropolitan Police to be institutionally racist.
Kerr has maintained she and her partner – United States’ women’s national team player Kristie Mewis – believed they were being kidnapped by a cab driver.
He refused to let them out of the cab after Kerr vomited, taking them to Twickenham police station instead of their destination.
There, Mewis broke the cab window in an attempt to get out of the vehicle.
At the station, Kerr reportedly appealed to officers to “understand the emergency that both of us felt”, referencing the 2021 abduction, rape and murder of Sarah Everard by a Metropolitan Police officer.
However, Kerr soon faced an allegation of racism after becoming distressed and antagonistic towards the officers.
Believing they were siding with the cab driver after forming negative preconceptions because of her skin colour, she repeated “you guys are stupid and white, you guys are fucking stupid and white”.
What are the legal ramifications in the UK?
Kerr pleaded not guilty to the offence of intentionally causing harassment, alarm, or distress to another by using threatening, abusive, or insulting words under Section 4A of the Public Order Act 1986, and to the racial aggravation of the offence per the Crime and Disorder Act 1998.
She faced a maximum sentence of two years’ imprisonment and an unlimited fine.
Kerr accepted she used the words “fucking stupid and white”. But it still had to be proven she intended and caused harassment, alarm, or distress to Lovell and that the offence was racially motivated.
Initially, the Crown Prosecution Service concluded there was not enough evidence to charge Kerr.
But after receiving a request from the Metropolitan Police to review the case, and a new statement from Lovell about Kerr’s words making him feel “belittled” and “upset”, they authorised police to charge the athlete.
A jury found her not guilty after a seven-day trial.
Broadly speaking, public order offences criminalise words and behaviour that might breach the peace. Police have significant discretion to use these offences as tools to regulate people’s uses of public space.
In Australia and the UK, police have been shown to use these powers in discriminatory ways.
Kerr has conceded her behaviour was regrettable but the charge against her is difficult to align with the purpose of public order legislation.
What does it mean for Kerr’s soccer career?
It is unclear what this verdict means for Kerr’s career.
Her English club, Chelsea, is anticipating she will return from a long-term knee injury soon.
It is possible the club was kept in the loop about Kerr’s altercation with police from the beginning, as she reportedly threatened to involve its lawyers in the body-cam footage shown at trial.
The club is yet to make a statement about the trial or verdict.
Football Australia is in a different position though, having been blindsided by the news Kerr had been charged by police.
The fact Kerr is the captain of the Matildas, and the sport’s highest-profile marketing asset, adds layers of complexity to Football Australia’s decision-making.
CEO of Football Australia James Johnson declined to weigh in on Kerr’s captaincy until her trial concluded.
It is possible the governing body will impose a sanction, with Kerr falling afoul of clause 2.14 of their national code of conduct and ethics after being charged with a criminal offence.
Kerr could return to the pitch later this month, but has been left out of the Matildas squad for the SheBelieves Cup in the US because of her fitness.
With the AFC Women’s Asian Cup on the horizon, interim Matildas head coach Tom Sermanni no doubt hopes her recovery stays on track.
Meanwhile, Kerr is yet to play under Chelsea manager Sonia Bompastor. She could prove crucial as the club chases an elusive UEFA Women’s Champions League title, but faces competition for her spot.
Megan McElhone does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Hate speech on X was consistently 50% higher for at least eight months after tech billionaire Elon Musk bought the social media platform, new research has found.
The research looked at the prevalence of overt hate speech including a wide range of racist, homophobic and transphobic slurs.
The study, published today in PLOS ONE, was conducted by a team of researchers led by Daniel Hickney from the University of California, Berkeley.
On October 27 2022, Musk officially purchased X (then known as Twitter) for US$44 billion and became its CEO. His takeover was accompanied by promises to reduce hate speech on the platform and tackle bots and other inauthentic accounts.
But after he bought X, Musk made several changes to the platform to reduce content moderation. For example, in November 2022 he fired much of the company’s full time workforce. He also fired outsourced content moderators who tracked abuse on X, despite research showing social medial platforms with high levels of content moderation contain less hate speech.
This new study is the first to show that this wasn’t an anomaly.
Hate speech including homophobic, racist and transphobic slurs was significantly higher on X after Elon Musk bought the platform. The black lines represent standard errors. Hickey et al., 2025 / PLOS One
More than 4 million posts
The study examined 4.7 million English language posts on X from the beginning of 2022 through to June 9 2023. This period includes the ten months before Musk bought X and the eight months afterwards.
The study measured overt hate speech, the meaning of which was clear to anyone who saw it – speech attacking identity groups or using toxic language. It did not measure covert types of hate speech, such as coded language used by some extremist groups to spread hate but plausibly deny doing so.
As well as measuring the amount of hate speech on X, the study also measured how much other users engaged with this material by liking it.
The researchers’ access to X data was cut off during the study due to a policy change by the platform, replacing free access to approved academic researchers with payment options which are generally unaffordable. This significantly hampered their ability to collect sample posts. But they don’t mention whether it affected their results.
A clear increase in hate
The study found “a clear increase” in the average number of posts containing hate speech following Musk’s purchase of X. Specifically, the volume of posts containing hate speech was “consistently” 50% higher after Musk took over X compared to beforehand – a jump from an estimated average of 2,179 to 3,246 posts containing hate speech per week.
Transphobic slurs saw the highest increase, rising from an average of roughly 115 posts per week before Musk’s acquisition to an average of 418 afterwards.
The level of user engagement with posts containing hate speech also increased under Musk’s watch. For example, the weekly rate at which hate speech content was liked by users jumped by 70%.
The researchers say these results suggest either hate speech wasn’t taken down, hateful users became more active, the platform’s algorithm unintentionally promoted hate speech to users who like such content – or a combination of these possibilities.
The study also detected no decrease in the activity of inauthentic accounts on X. In fact, it found a “potential increase” in the number of bot accounts partly based on a large upswing in posts promoting cryptocurrency, which are typically associated with bots.
An important data-driving deep dive
There were a number of limitations to the study. For example, it only measured hate speech posts in English, which accounts for only 31% of posts on the platform.
Even so, the study is an important, data-driven deep dive into the state of X. It shows it is a platform where hate speech is prolific. It also shows Musk has failed to fulfil his earlier promises to address problems on X such as hate speech and bot activity.
As Musk himself said at the White House earlier this week: “Some of the things I say will be incorrect and should be corrected”.
Michael Jensen receives funding from the Australian Research Council, Bayer, and the Australian Department of Defence Science and Technology Group.
Lakes, natural and man-made, provide water, food and habitats for wildlife, as well as supporting local economies. Around the world, though, there’s a growing threat to lakes: toxic bacteria which turn the water green.
This is the same green as you see on stagnant ponds. It’s caused by tiny organisms called cyanobacteria and can be deadly.
Cyanobacteria thrive in warm, sunny lakes and ponds that contain excess nitrogen and phosphorus nutrients derived from fertiliser, manure and sewage. When conditions are right, cyanobacteria multiply rapidly and form smelly green scums on the water’s surface.
Known to science as cyanoHABs (cyanobacterial harmful algal blooms), the scums are harmful to livestock, wildlife, pets, people and aquatic organisms like fish. Toxins make untreated water unsafe to drink, swim in, or even touch. Sometimes they can become suspended in air and be inhaled. The cyanoHABs also harm ecosystems by depleting oxygen, killing off whatever lives in the water, and disrupting food webs and fisheries.
CyanoHABs are a global threat and receive considerable scientific attention in North America and Europe. Blooms are becoming more widespread worldwide because rising temperatures promote cyanobacterial growth and more intense rainfall delivers nutrients from the landscape. Only effective management of nutrients can reverse this trend.
The problem is understudied in Africa’s main lakes, including its largest – Lake Victoria. Past research on cyanoHABs has mostly used microscopy to study the kinds found there, but microscopy cannot differentiate between toxic and non-toxic cyanobacterial cells.
We are on a large project team of scientists who have been studying the socioeconomic and environmental effects of cyanoHABs in the Winam Gulf region of Lake Victoria in south-western Kenya.
Our latest study identified which cyanobacteria were the most abundant in the gulf and which ones were producing the main toxin of concern.
These findings can improve public safety:
local authorities can monitor for specific cyanobacteria and warn residents to stay away when blooms are present
cyanoHAB prevention practices (nutrient reduction, land-use practices) can target the cyanobacteria that cause the problem.
Greening of lakes
Lake Victoria now receives large influxes of nutrients because of growing lakeside populations and land-use changes. Nutrients from agriculture, industry and urbanisation fuel the growth of cyanoHABs.
CyanoHABs occur in many basins in Lake Victoria but are highly concentrated in Kenya’s shallow Winam/Nyanza Gulf. Changing nutrient and temperature conditions can also alter which types of cyanobacteria dominate the gulf and the types and levels of toxins in the water. Lakeside communities that rely on the gulf for drinking water and domestic tasks are at risk of exposure to cyanoHAB toxins.
Past research on cyanoHABs has mostly used the oldest of microbiological techniques — microscopy — to classify the types of cyanobacteria in the gulf. This cannot differentiate between toxic and non-toxic cyanobacterial cells.
Modern genome sequencing technologies can identify genes encoding the production of known and novel toxins and other molecules of interest, such as those with medicinal properties. Genomic data from African Great Lakes is scarce, so the chemical capabilities of bacteria in this region are largely unexplored. But this is beginning to change.
Our latest study adds to a growing number of recent studies our team has carried out in and around Lake Victoria. In this study, our research vessel stopped at over 31 sites to collect scientific samples and data. The samples were later analysed for DNA, the biological “instruction manual” inside every living thing. DNA tells an organism how to grow, function, reproduce, and – in the case of cyanobacteria – make deadly toxins. This analysis produced near-complete genome sequences – that is, the set of all genes in the DNA – for organisms at each sampling site.
Past reports identified Microcystis as the dominant cyanobacteria in the Winam Gulf. Our research, however, found Dolichospermum was the most abundant type in major cyanoHAB events there. This finding might be due to recent environmental changes in the region.
But we linked Microcystis to microcystin. This is a liver-damaging toxin that can kill livestock, wildlife and humans, especially those whose immune system isn’t working well. In Winam Gulf, it’s often more abundant than the health limits set by the WHO.
Our study also found that Microcystis occurs mainly in murkier river mouths where green scums are not visible, making scientific monitoring and public alerts even more important.
Local authorities can now monitor for these cyanobacteria and warn residents to stay away when blooms are present.
The findings also mean that authorities know which cyanobacteria to target in prevention efforts like reducing the amount of phosphorus and other nutrients entering the gulf.
Lastly, our genomic study uncovered over 300 uncharacterised genes that may produce novel cyanobacterial molecules. These molecules could have toxic or therapeutic effects, and provide an opportunity for future investigators to explore.
A model for what is to come
Rapid human population growth and settlement around lakes and their watersheds is leading to high levels nutrients in lakes around the world. This results in excessive growth of algae and aquatic plants. This danger is likely to increase with global warming because warm temperatures promote algal blooms.
Our data provides a foundation for remedying this in Lake Victoria – and possibly discovering beneficial properties in cyanoHABs.
Lauren Hart receives funding from National Institute of Health.
George S Bullerjahn receives funding from the National Science Foundation.
Gregory J. Dick receives funding from the National Science Foundation, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the National Institutes for Health, and the US Geological Survey.
Kefa M. Otiso receives funding from the US National Science Foundation.
Composer and educator Michael Mosoeu Moerane (1904-1980) is probably best known for a few evergreen choral works, including Della and Sylvia, still sung by choirs across South Africa today.
And, of course, for his orchestral piece FatŠe laHeso (My Country). It had the distinction of being recorded by both the British and South African public broadcasters in an era when white minority rule denied even the existence of Black classical musicians.
Apartheid held the identity of Black people in South Africa to be unchangeingly simple, rural and tribal. Sophisticated activities such as orchestral composing were both beyond their capacity and dangerously subversive.
But, as South African author and music scholar Christine Lucia’s biography of Moerane, The Times Do Not Permit, reveals, there was more to Moerane’s work than those few compositions. And a far more nuanced relationship with his oppressive political times. Moerane was vocal against the system, yet secured white university supervision. He was consulted by white ethnomusicologists. Yet still he was stereotyped and confined by apartheid rules.
I am a researcher into South African jazz and other genres and a teacher of writing. (Jazz, incidentally, was a genre that Moerane detested.) From my own work, I recognise many similarities between his story and the lives of jazz musicians I have studied: genteel homes with a piano in the parlour; after-dinner family music hours; the risk of instant dismissal for schoolteachers heard discussing anti-apartheid politics.
I recognise, too, the gaps in his music story that Lucia finds: the questions that scholars did not ask while more people were still alive to answer them.
Her book matters because, at last, it asks and answers those questions. In how it assembles the answers, it helps us to start mapping the undiscovered continent of Black classical music under apartheid.
The book’s nearly 300 pages offer a detailed account of Moerane’s life, based on research and conversations with family and still-living contemporaries.
Lucia takes us through Moerane’s various roles in turn (student, teacher, choralist and more). It also analyses his compositions and their treatment of themes that range from spirituality and tradition to love and loss.
A reader can view Moerane’s life though these different lenses; together they add up to an intricate, multidimensional portrait.
Who was Michael Moerane?
Born in the Eastern Cape province and educated there and in neighbouring Basutoland (today Lesotho), Moerane stitched a music-teaching career together that moved between the two countries.
His own radical Africanist politics, the activism of family members, his marriage across apartheid-defined ethnic barriers (he was Sotho, his wife Xhosa) and the simple fact of being a Black composer exploring unconventional, modernist music meant he was often in the sights of repressive authorities in both countries. Lowering his profile every now and then (a new school, a more obscure place to live) was his best protection.
There’s real fear in some of his letters that all these moves would mean his written compositions would be lost or scattered. Yet remarkably, through all this, he managed to hold a family together, establish music ensembles and a reputation, and graduate with a music degree from the University of South Africa in 1941, a time when it was almost unknown for Black South Africans to receive a university education outside segregated black colleges. He was supported, through a unique arrangement, by supervision from the all-white Rhodes University College in his home province.
His external examiner, William Henry Bell, said of FatŠe laHeso (Moerane’s examination piece) that he “never had expected such a work to be written in South Africa and less so by a Native”.
Lucia’s account of how Moerane got there, and of the many compositions and long music teaching career that followed, is made even clearer through a rich variety of material. There are geographical, historical and musical road-maps, extracts from his manuscripts, evocative photographs of people and places, and probably the most complete catalogue of Moerane’s works to date.
The catalogue was put together from both archive records and fragments of sheet music surviving in the family piano-stool, where they were stored. It’s a poignant reminder of how much Black South African history is no longer available because of how apartheid repeatedly uprooted people and communities, with little chance to save family memorabilia.
White minority rule didn’t only restrict where Black South Africans could live and work but even how they could learn music. Tuition for Black music students was limited to writing in tonic sol-fa (doh-re-mi) notation. Excluded from the notation used in classical music, composers and performers who would have occupied concert stages were limited to community choirs and brass bands. That was part of Moerane’s story too.
Moerane’s Sylvia is still performed by choirs today.
His life matters because of all this.
A masterful book
The book traces the defiant survival and originality of this important figure and restores him in the country’s history. It adds detail and clarification to what was already known. It corrects confusions about dates and place names. If that were all the book had done, it would already have been a worthwhile contribution.
But Lucia’s way of telling the story adds significantly more. It brings Moerane alive through the texture of human voices and human detail, creating a read that is academic but far from dry. We hear, for example, his children recalling how strict he was during daily piano practice: “You would scramble to get a slot when my father wasn’t at home.”
But more: South African music under apartheid is often shown as the “soundtrack” to history. Or often the history is seen as mere “background” to the music. But Moerane’s music was not a soundtrack to history: it was part of history. His times were not a background to his music, they were an ingredient. Not so much because of the work but because of who he chose to be – and who he could not be.
The title, The Times Do Not Permit, is taken from a 1966 letter written by Moerane to music academic Percival Kirby, in polite response to a request for detailed information about his life:
Please be satisfied with the bare statement that the times do not permit.
That may seem cryptic to anybody who has not felt the iron heel of state repression. For those who have, it’s obvious: the more the authorities know about you, the more power they have over you.
So Lucia’s book allows us to enter a world that is distant from today’s experience and rejoice that such a full life was led and that now we know about it. But it also forces us to mourn the opportunities lost for him – and by earlier scholars looking into his life. How many other Black South African musicians have had their lives and legacies obscured like Michael Mosoeu Moerane’s was?
Gwen Ansell does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
In the middle of Super Bowl LIX, President Donald Trump posted on social media that he was getting rid of the penny. Since the lowly penny in 2024 cost about 3.7 cents to make – meaning the government loses money on every coin – the announcement might seem practical at first glance. But does the president have the power to kill off the penny?
I’m a business schoolprofessor and a longtime advocate for physical money who has written op-eds supporting the penny in The Wall Street Journal and CNN. My forthcoming book, “The Power of Cash,” explores the many advantages of using old-fashioned currency. Yet inflation has slashed the value of the penny by a third in just the past decade, and even I now admit that its time is up.
But eliminating the penny via a social media post isn’t just legally dubious. It could cause more problems than it solves.
The penny problem
Critics see the penny as a shining example of government waste. Last year, the U.S. Mint lost US$85 million making pennies, according to the bureau’s annual report. It also lost about $18 million minting nickels. Now, to be clear, just because the mint didn’t make money on pennies or nickels doesn’t mean it’s losing money overall. In 2024, the mint earned a profit of about $100 million making the country’s pocket change. Still, $85 million is no small sum.
Meanwhile, public opinion on the penny is split. Some surveys show support for it, but it has plenty of opponents. Many of my students cite carrying around “nuisance coins” like the penny as a reason for switching away from using cash.
The good news, for those who dislike the penny, is that the coin is disappearing on its own. The U.S. Mint has made about 5 billion pennies annually throughout the 2020s — down from about 11 billion each year in the 1990s. So far in 2025, it has only made about a quarter of a million pennies.
But is it legal?
Setting aside people’s feelings toward the penny, the problem with the president’s order, I think, is that only Congress can change the type of coins the mint produces.
Now the phrase “to coin money” is vague. To fix that, the United States’ second Congress passed the Coinage Act of 1792, which was signed into law by President George Washington. The act, which lays out how the mint operates and what it produces, says it must produce “Cents – each to be of the value of the one hundredth part of a dollar, and to contain eleven penny-weights of copper.”
Congress can modify this act anytime it wants – and it has. The 1792 act also required the mint to produce “Half Cents – each to be of the value of half a cent.” These coins were eliminated in 1857 by an act of Congress. Similarly, before 1965, many U.S. coins were made out of silver. After a 1965 congressional amendment to the act passed, they were made out of a cheaper composite.
And lawmakers have tried several times to eliminate the penny. In 1989, for example, Arizona Rep. Jim Hayes proposed the Price Rounding Act, which called for cash purchases to be rounded to the nearest nickel. It didn’t pass. More recently, in 2017, Republican Senator John McCain introduced the COINS act, which would have eliminated the minting of pennies. The bill also proposed switching the paper one-dollar bill to a metal coin. It, too, didn’t pass.
What happens if pennies go?
Since Congress has failed to eliminate the penny in the past, Trump is trying to do so via a direct order to the Treasury secretary. However, many of Trump’s actions are being challenged in court. For the sake of argument, let’s assume no one challenges the order to kill off production of the penny.
A big problem remains. Even if the U.S. stopped making pennies, they’d remain legal tender and people would still need them as change. In simple terms, the supply would change, but not the demand.
Past efforts to phase out the penny have tried to deal with this problem by requiring rounding, but Trump’s effort doesn’t do this. I think it’s entirely possible that people opposed to Trump would organize national “Demand your penny in change” days in an attempt to embarrass the president.
The U.S. government loses less than $10 million a month minting pennies. In theory, Congress could pass legislation eliminating the penny and requiring rounding within a month or two. The cost to the government for doing things legally is low. If the penny has to go, let Congress do it the right way.
Jay L. Zagorsky does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Bob Dylan gives his first concert in Israel in 1987 in Tel Aviv, playing with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers.AP Photo/Anat Givon
James Mangold’s film “A Complete Unknown,” nominated for eight Oscars, captures the elusive, enigmatic quality of Bob Dylan in the early 1960s: the years he emerged as a major musical and cultural phenomenon. A scant few years after he came to New York from Minnesota, and legally changed his name from Robert Allen Zimmerman, Dylan transformed American music.
Especially “unknown” and baffling is Dylan’s religious and spiritual identity, one that has undergone many transformations. Mangold’s film avoids these questions, as does his 2005 film “Walk the Line,” a Johnny Cash biopic. The filmmaker – and much of Hollywood in general – must believe religion isn’t good at the box office.
As a music fan and scholar of religion, I have long been interested in artists’ religious backgrounds. Cash’s tumultuous life, like his friend and collaborator Dylan’s, was rich in religious affiliations and commitments.
And both of these musical giants shared a connection with Israel, defying calls to cancel performances there over concern for Palestinian rights – similar to artists’ debates in recent years. Dylan’s, in particular, is difficult to parse and part of his larger spiritual journey – one that’s rambled through Judaism and Christianity and back again.
Bob Zimmerman
The last time Dylan took the stage in Israel was at Tel Aviv’s Ramat Gan Stadium in June 2011. It had been 18 years since his last performance in the country, though he had made many personal visits in the interim.
He was, of course, a household name in Israel, revered by the young as well as the not so young. The audience members that evening, according to the Haaretz reporter who covered the event, were
“overwhelmingly young, overwhelmingly native-born Israelis.”
Surely everyone in attendance knew that Dylan had been born Robert Zimmerman – indeed, that he had a long, complicated relationship with Israel and with Judaism itself.
Bob Dylan, right, and a friend visit the Western Wall in Jerusalem on April 6, 1971. AP Photo
Young Zimmerman grew up in Hibbing, Minnesota, in a home that emphasized Jewish identity, if not its religious rituals. A visiting Orthodox rabbi had prepared him for his bar mitzvah, which took place in May 1954, with 400 guests in attendance. That summer, Zimmerman attended Camp Herzl in Wisconsin, a Jewish camp with a Zionist orientation; he would return there the following summers as well. At Camp Herzl young Bob formed his first musical group, the Jokers.
In his mid-20s, he married Sara Lownds, a Jewish woman with whom he had five children. Dylan made his first private visit to Israel in 1969 and returned regularly in the early 1970s. In May 1971, he celebrated his 30th birthday in Jerusalem; photos of him at the Western Wall appeared in Israeli and American newspapers, fueling speculation that he had “found religion” in the holy city.
In some ways, the young star put distance between himself and his Jewish roots – he was now Dylan, after all, not Zimmerman. But even in these early years, as throughout his career, “Dylanologists” delighted in the biblical allusions in some of his songs – including irreverent ones, at least at first glance.
“Highway 61 Revised,” for example, the title track of a 1965 album, kicks off with the binding of Isaac: a section of the Book of Genesis where God famously tests Abraham with a command – reprieved at the last moment – to kill his beloved child:
Yeah, God said to Abraham, “Kill me a son”
Abe said, “Man, you must be puttin’ me on”
God said, “No”, Abe said, “What?”
Twists and turns
But Dylan confounded both his admirers and his critics, turning abruptly in the late 1970s to evangelical Christianity. After his conversion, Dylan took a course at Vineyard Christian Fellowship in Los Angeles, which emphasized the end-time narratives of the New Testament Book of Revelation.
His years as a born-again Christian resulted in a series of gospel-influenced albums and at least one more visit to Israel during this early ’80s period. In 1987 he gave his first concerts there, kicking off his Temples in Flames world tour alongside Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers.
Within years of embracing Christianity, however, Dylan’s spiritual life yet again confounded his critics and fans, including the more scholarly obsessives known as “Dylanologists.” Born into Judaism, then a born-again evangelical, the rocker now forged ties to Chabad, an ultra-Orthodox Hasidic Jewish movement. Between 1986 and 1991, he made three appearances on the Chabad “To Life” Telethon, an annual fundraiser broadcast from Los Angeles.
Because Dylan was – and is – so private and publicity-shy, it is difficult to know whether such ecumenism represented true spiritual seeking, a political statement or sheer mischief.
Whether he was presenting himself as a born-again Christian, a supporter of Chabad or just a rock and roller, Dylan seemed inextricably connected to Israel in all its complexity. For example, many listeners interpreted the song “Neighborhood Bully” on his 1983 “Infidels” album as a “declaration of full-throated Israel support,” as Haaretz wrote.
Many fans interpret ‘Neighborhood Bully’ as sympathetic to Israel.
The lyrics presented the title character, the “bully,” as an unrepentant, besieged victim: “His enemies say he’s on their land/ They got him outnumbered a million to one/ He got no place to escape to, no place to run.”
‘Dylan lives here’
Dylan performed again in Israel in June 1993, bringing his summer tour to Tel Aviv, Beersheba and Haifa.
It would be nearly two decades before his next public performance in Israel, the 2011 concert at Ramat Gan. By then, performing in Israel had become much more controversial, with artists planning to tour there under scrutiny.
The boycott, divestment and sanctions movement publicly pressured the singer to cancel his Tel Aviv show, appealing to his past support of the American Civil Rights Movement. Activists called on Dylan “not to perform in Israel until it respects Palestinian human rights. A performance in Israel, today, is a vote of support for its policies of oppression, whether you intend for it to be that, or not.”
Ever the enigmatic artist, Dylan did not respond to the BDS appeal, nor did he cancel his concert. The towering pop-music icon did not say why. But many Israelis and Americans read his return as a gesture of support for the Jewish state in the face of widespread criticism.
Tel Aviv welcomed him with open arms, including a television news profile of his life, music and Jewish affiliations. Though he said nothing from the stage during the performance – late-career Dylan is notorious for not addressing the audience between songs – Israeli fans saw the concert as a triumphant homecoming.
“Dylan lives here. He lives in the culture of Israel,” wrote the Haaretz reviewer. “He has influenced Israel for the better more than any other American Jew.”
Since the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war in 2023, international criticism of Israeli policies has become much more strident. Dylan, as cryptic as ever, has neither joined the critics nor identified himself with Israel’s supporters.
Shalom Goldman does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Source: The Conversation – USA – By Stefan Schmitt, Project Lead for International Technical Forensic Services Global Forensic Justice Center, Florida International University
As an expert in forensic anthropology and mass casualties in conflict, I was asked to evaluate what became known as the “Caesar photographs.” What was clear to me then, and is even more so now, is that those photos represented a systematic approach to torturing, killing and disappearing massive numbers of people by the Assad regime.
With Assad now gone, the newly formed government of the Islamist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham has vowed to seek justice for the crimes Syrians suffered under Assad. Doing so will be difficult, even with the civil war in Syria being one of the better monitored conflicts in recent history. Yet it is a task that is imperative for the sake of pursuing justice in a shattered country and reducing the likelihood of violence returning to Syria.
Estimates of those killed since the start of civil conflict in 2011 range anywhere from 100,000 to over 600,000, with civilian deaths accounting for at least 160,000.
Many of these deaths have been at the hands of the Assad regime. But different armed groups, including the al-Nusra Front and Islamic State group, have also been accused of atrocities.
From the perspective of holding perpetrators accountable, that could complicate matters. The leader of now ruling Hayat Tahrir al-Sham is the founder of the al-Nusra Front and might not be willing to hold his group or others accountable or acknowledge the crimes of that group.
An uncovered mass grave believed to contain the remains of civilians killed by the ousted Assad regime in Daraa, Syria. Bekir Kasim/Anadolu via Getty Images
Who investigates?
There are three dimensions of accounting for the missing following conflict. First, there is the task of identifying and repatriating the remains of those in mass graves to allow family and friends to grieve. Second, the rights of victims to know the truth about what happened to their loved ones needs to be addressed. And finally, the process needs to provide justice, accountability and reconciliation, regardless of who was responsible.
But before this can take place, the question of who is responsible for the accounting needs to be addressed.
Countries coming out of civil conflict have turned to different mechanisms, from truth commissions to criminal tribunals. In the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, special U.N. courts were set up to investigate and prosecute perpetrators of grievous crimes. These tribunals were created as independent judicial bodies dedicated to investigating and prosecuting those most responsible for the crimes that had been committed during conflict.
The nongovernmental Forensic Anthropology Foundation of Guatemala, or FAFG, has since 1993 formed a fundamental part of searching, identifying and repatriating the missing. FAFG collects personal information, DNA profiles and witness statements and is responsible for protecting the rights of victims’ families in Guatemala’s judicial system.
Its work continues to this day.
What crimes to include
As to the Syrian civil war, a decision over the scope of any investigation into the disappeared and dead will likewise have to be made.
Will it include all those missing and in mass graves in areas held by al-Nusra, the Islamic State group and other armed groups, as well as those killed by Assad? The fact that groups and individuals that now form the government could have been involved in human rights violations may risk future investigations being skewed toward just the victims of Assad.
Even if the scope was narrowed to Assad’s crimes, it’s unclear how far back one should go. Assad rule in Syria began more than 50 years ago under Assad’s father, Hafez al Assad. And killings and disappearances date back to the elder’s time in power, including the 1982 massacre in the city of Hama in which an estimated 20,000 to 40,000 were killed.
The role of the state
Another fact-finding question concerns the sharing of information between civil society groups and the state.
The information gathered on the war by various NGOs so far is technically held or “owned” by such groups, not the Syrian state. This is for a good reason, as victims trust these organizations to protect information from the perpetrators, some of whom might form part of the new government.
The International Commission on Missing Persons, an NGO with its seat in the Netherlands, gained its reputation while identifying the dead from the conflict in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s and early 2000s. It has already collected and stored testimonies from over 76,200 Syrian relatives of more than 28,000 missing persons and has identified 66 mass grave locations. Other organizations have similar testimonies.
At some point, the state of Syria will need to be involved in the process. Legally and in practice, the state issues a citizen’s “civil identity” through things such as a birth certificate that establish a person with rights and responsibilities. In the same manner, the state issues death certificates in which the manner of death determines any judicial reactions – such as a criminal investigation in cases where the death is due to homicide.
The state is also important in resolving issues such as inheritance and widower status.
Identifying the remains from the mass graves is therefore not just a “technical” issue dependent on cutting-edge DNA laboratories and missing-persons databases. It is also something that any future Syrian state should work toward, and then own and take responsibility for.
Shifting responsibility away from the state to an international body would not really help Syria develop its own accountability mechanisms or hold the government to delivering justice for the victims and their families.
In my view, empowering victims in this transitional justice process needs to be a priority for the Syrian state. This includes the establishment of a transparent forensic and investigative effort to address the concerns of families searching for loved ones.
It should not, I believe, be outsourced. From my experience with similar processes elsewhere, it is important that Syrians become “experts” in all aspects of this process. No doubt, the task will take time and searching for the truth about what happened, and will involve perpetrators and victims alike.
It might well be a painful and painstaking process. But it is a necessary one if postconflict Syrian is to hold to account those who attempted to “erase” the identity of victims by disappearing them, burying them in mass graves, or leaving them under the bombed rubble of their neighborhoods.
Stefan Schmitt does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Source: The Conversation – USA – By Paul Webster Hare, Master Lecturer and Interim Director of Latin American Studies, Boston University
Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro with Richard Grenell, President Donald Trump’s special envoy, in Caracas, Venezuela, on Jan. 31, 2025. Venezuela’s presidential press office, via AP
The policy, which led Venezuela to officially sever ties with the United States, was consistent with the first Trump administration’s policy of maximum pressure and a desire for regime change when it came to the socialist government in Caracas.
Fast forward six years: The early days of Trump’s second administration has seen the U.S. president negotiate with Maduro over the release of detained Americans and an apparent willingness from Venezuela to receive hundreds of thousands of its nationals being deported from the U.S.
So far, the second Trump’s administration seems to be sticking to the line of not officially recognizing Maduro and preferring his departure from the scene. It has kept sanctions on the country intact and continues to recognize Maduro’s opponent, Edmundo González, as the legitimate president-elect.
But that hasn’t stopped the administration from pursuing negotiations. In late January, Trump’s envoy Richard Grenell visited Caracas to secure the release of six Americans accused by Venezuela of plotting to destabilize the country. Trump subsequently announced that Maduro would accept repatriation of deportations of Venezuelans in the U.S. The U.S. administration also revoked the Temporary Protected Status, a categorization prioritized by President Joe Biden, for hundreds of thousands of people who fled Maduro’s Venezuela.
On Feb. 10, two Venezuelan planes returned home from the U.S with nearly 200 deported Venezuelan nationals, a signal that negotiations between the two nations were more than just optics. But news that the Trump administration has sent Venezuelan detainees to a U.S. military camp at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba – and is trying to send more – could yet prove a thorn in the side of any diplomatic thaw.
But so long as Trump feels Venezuela under Maduro is useful to his aims of deportations, other U.S. issues with the government in Caracas are, I believe, likely to remain of secondary importance.
Rhetoric vs. reality
The complicated dynamic of two men, ideologically opposed but aware of the other’s usefulness, is reciprocated by Maduro. The Venezuelan leader congratulated Trump on his election victory in November, and he appears to treat his more powerful adversary with some pragmatism. But Maduro also remains willing to take a strident line rhetorically, even suggesting that Venezuela might “liberate” Puerto Rico if the U.S. keeps meddling with Venezuela’s affairs.
Rhetoric aside, Maduro – as evidenced by his apparent willingness to deal with the new administration on hostages and immigration – is likely to pursue self-interest where possible. And he will be well aware that the survival of his rule may be tied with his country’s economic situation.
Venezuela has been hit hard by U.S. sanctions that have been in place since 2017.
Under Biden, the U.S. granted some exemptions for oil companies to work in Venezuela despite sanctions, helping the struggling export industry to recover some of its lost productivity.
Maduro will want to see where he can work with the Trump team to continue such allowances and avoid a full embargo. But recent noises coming from the administration have been mixed on this front. On Jan. 20, Trump suggested that he may pull the plug on Venezuelan oil exports to the U.S. “We don’t have to buy their oil. We have plenty of oil for ourselves,” he said.
Such a move would be a severe blow to Venezuela’s economy, which has benefited from increased exports to the U.S. in recent years. But the move will likely face resistance from oil producers like Chevron, the American company that has a license to operate in Venezuela.
Election fraud and beyond
It’s plausible Trump will be swayed by the elements of his base or administration who view Venezuela primarily in terms of a socialist authoritarian adversary to be defeated.
Many in Trump’s circle viewed the fraudulent election as another reason for being hawkish toward the nation – a position that takes in both ideological and electoral considerations.
Rubio, in particular, is a longtime critic of any accommodation with Venezuela. He has spoken to opposition leaders, called González the legitimate president, blasted any relaxation of sanctions and, during his confirmation hearing, labeled Maduro’s government “a narco-trafficking organization.”
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, right, oversees a ‘seized’ sign being placed on a Venezuelan government airplane on Feb. 6, 2025. Mark Schiefelbein/AFP via Getty Images
And while U.S. envoy Grenell has been shaking hands with Maduro, Rubio has been seizing the Venezuelan leader’s aircraft. On Feb. 6, the U.S. secretary of state personally oversaw its confiscation while visiting the Dominican Republic, where it had been impounded since last year.
Competition with China
During his first administration, Trump failed in his efforts to encourage the replacement of Maduro.
In any case, the Venezuelan government under Maduro, like Chavez before him, has shown itself capable of withstanding U.S. pressure.
Throwing a further wrinkle to any U.S. intentions of influencing the future of Venezuela is the role China has taken on in the country and Maduro’s increasing closeness with Beijing. In contrast to leaders in the West, China’s president, Xi Jinping, congratulated Maduro following the latter’s claim of victory in 2024. China is the leading importer of Venezuelan crude oil and has signed a series of bilateral trade and tourism pacts that have provided Maduro an economic lifeline.
Ultimately, whatever path Trump chooses on relations with Venezuela is likely to be conditioned on what factions win out in his administration and which political constituencies the president is most keen to please.
Paul Webster Hare does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
As we have written, American history is not a steady march toward greater equality, democracy and individual rights. America’s commitment to these liberal values has competed with an alternative set of illiberal values that hold that full American citizenship should be limited by race, ethnicity, gender and class.
The most famous example of this conflict is the Jim Crow era after Reconstruction, when many of the political and legal rights gained by African Americans in the Civil War era were swept away by disenfranchisement, segregation and discrimination. From roughly 1870 until 1940, democracy and equal rights were retreating, not advancing, leaving what was described in the 1960s by President Lyndon Johnson as “the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice.”
Today, the Trump administration is seeking to roll back America’s commitment to equality and engaging in a broad effort to limit – if not outright deny – the rights, liberties and benefits of democracy to all Americans.
President Donald Trump attacked the FAA’s DEI initiatives during a press conference on the D.C. plane crash.
Progress, then rollbacks
The biggest gains in African American rights came during the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, World War II and the Cold War, when the United States confronted enemies that Americans believed contradicted its liberal values – the British monarchy, Southern slaveholders, fascist dictators and communist tyrants. The United States highlighted its commitments to democracy and human rights as a way of contrasting itself from its enemies.
But once the pressures of war faded, America’s illiberal values reasserted themselves. With the end of the Revolutionary War and the Civil War, the movement for greater equality stalled and many of the previous gains were rolled back.
The onset of World War II and then the Cold War forced Americans to renew their commitment to democracy and human rights for all Americans. This period is often described as the Second Reconstruction.
Like the First Reconstruction a century earlier, the federal government helped to ensure civil and voting rights for African Americans. These efforts laid the groundwork for advancing the political and civil rights of women, other racial and ethnic groups, immigrants, disabled persons and, eventually, members of the gay and lesbian community.
But like the First Reconstruction, these changes generated intense backlash.
Since his second inauguration, Trump has mounted a full-scale effort to undermine the policies of the Second Reconstruction. This effort has been masked as an attack on diversity, equity and inclusion – or DEI – policies. According to Trump and other critics of DEI, these policies are themselves racist, since they allegedly single out white Americans for shame and scorn.
The Trump administration’s effort to end DEI programs is really an attack on decades of efforts by the federal government to make good on the promise of America: to engage in rigorous nondiscrimination efforts and open up opportunities for all.
These diversity initiatives have for more than 50 years included requirements that beneficiaries of these policies must be qualified for the benefits they obtain.
But to Trump and many conservatives, such policies force employers to engage in racial and gender quotas to prove that they don’t discriminate. Furthermore, these efforts to end discrimination, according to Trump’s executive order, “diminish the importance of individual merit, aptitude, hard work, and determination,” leading to “disastrous consequences.”
In other words, Trump and others claim that efforts to end discrimination are themselves a form of discrimination and force the hiring of unqualified and incompetent people.
Trump made this view clear in his comments on the recent collision between a passenger airliner and a military helicopter in Washington, D.C. Before any formal investigation, Trump alleged that the crash resulted from Obama and Biden administration efforts to diversify the Federal Aviation Administration staff. Such efforts, he suggested, elevate unqualified people.
Efforts to reverse DEI have been accompanied by other antidiversity moves. One example: According to a news release, the Defense Department will no longer use “official resources” to mark “Black History Month, Women’s History Month, Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, Pride Month, National Hispanic Heritage Month, National Disability Employment Awareness Month, and National American Indian Heritage Month.”
Undoing 19th-century advances
The attack on DEI goes beyond the federal government. Other executive orders mandate that K-12 schools as well as colleges and universities end DEI programs, since they are “anti-American, subversive, harmful, and false ideologies.”
Such a policy will almost certainly prevent schools from honestly addressing the ways in which racial, ethnic and gender discrimination have influenced America’s past and present.
This provision was included in order to explicitly overturn the notorious 1857 Supreme Court decision, Dred Scott v. Sandford, that ruled that African Americans were not citizens and consequently “they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”
Pushback capacity
A protester at a demonstration against the Trump administration at the Texas State Capitol on Feb. 5, 2025, in Austin, Texas. Brandon Bell/Getty Images
How far can the Trump administration go in its efforts to undo the Second Reconstruction?
Numerous legal challenges have already been filed. In the case of the executive order limiting birthright citizenship, a lower federal court judge appointed by President Ronald Reagan blocked the order, calling it “blatantly unconstitutional.”
Many of these cases will ultimately be decided by the Supreme Court, which under Chief Justice John Roberts has been willing to overturn long-established equal rights precedents. Besides its 2012 gutting of the Voting Rights Act, in 2022 the court limited the reproductive rights of women by overturning its 1973 decision, Roe v. Wade. Most recently, in 2023 the court ended a 45-year precedent that allowed colleges and universities to engage in limited forms of affirmative action in order to achieve more student diversity.
Yet despite years of attacks by conservatives and now the Trump administration, most efforts to end discrimination and open doors to all Americans, including DEI, remain popular. And the groups empowered by the Second Reconstruction – racial and ethnic minorities, women, immigrants, the LGBTQ community – are far more numerous and have far more legal and political resources available with which to fight back than those that were aided by the First Reconstruction.
There are now no government pressures driving Americans to make greater progress toward democracy and equal rights for all, as in the relatively brief earlier periods of significant reform in America.
But those reforms have given many more Americans the capacity to push back against policies that violate both American values and American interests.
The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
When Elon Musk acquired Twitter in 2022, many users looked for alternatives, fuelling a wave of online migration from the social media platform. Musk says he’s using Twitter, now named X, to champion free speech and that “cancel culture has been cancelled”. But his closeness to Donald Trump and his use of X to support far-right political ideologies around the world, have driven even more people to explore new options.
How do these alternative platforms differ from traditional social media, and what does the future hold for these online spaces? In this episode of The Conversation Weekly podcast, we speak to Robert Gehl, Ontario Research Chair of Digital Governance at York University, Canada, about the evolving landscape of decentralised social media.
In 2018, technologists working at the World Wide Web Consortium built a new protocol for social media called ActivityPub. It would give birth to the Fediverse, a decentralised form of social media. Robert Gehl likens the Fediverse to email.
”A friend of mine can have a Gmail account, another friend can have an Outlook account with Microsoft. I could have an account with ProtonMail. And even though these are three different companies and three different locations in the world, I can email all my friends and they can email me back because all those email servers agree to speak a shared protocol.“
ActivityPub does the same, but for social media. Somebody could set up a server that speaks that protocol and invite their friends to sign up. Somebody else could set up a different type of server, and those two could connect using ActivityPub’s protocol. Gehl explains: “You can build a big network out of all these little servers that removes a centre.”
Examples of platforms on the Fediverse include micro-blogging site Mastodon, image-sharing site Pixelfed and video-sharing platform PeerTube. By comparison to these decentralised systems, traditional social media platforms like X, Instagram or YouTube centralise user data, content, moderation and governance and control how information is organised and distributed to their users.
Other alternative platforms, which aren’t part of the Fediverse, include Bluesky, which launched to the public in 2024. Bluesky grew out of Twitter, and Twitter’s founder, Jack Dorsey, used to be on its board. However, Gehl says analysts still see Bluesky as a quite centralised because of the way it’s designed.
”They’re building an architecture where all posts are accessible and then they let people build filters to go to that big stack of posts and pull out the things that they want to see … I personally find Mastodon and the Fediverse to be a little bit more compelling because they’re federated systems. When you run a federated social media system, you install the software like Mastodon, and then it pulls in messages from the network as need be … so you don’t have the entire network on one box.“
Listen to the interview with Robert Gehl on The Conversation Weekly podcast, which also includes an introduction with Nehal El-Hadi, interim editor-in-chief at The Conversation Canada.
This episode of The Conversation Weekly was written and produced by Mend Mariwany with assistance from Katie Flood and Gemma Ware, Sound design was by Michelle Macklem, and theme music by Neeta Sarl.
When parliamentarians left Canberra on Thursday after the fortnight sitting, federal politics had the air of an uneasy waiting game.
Waiting for the election date, although the campaign has been running for months.
Waiting to know whether there will be a budget on March 25.
Waiting for capricious United States President Donald Trump to decide whether to grant Australia that keenly-sought exemption from his new 25% tariff on aluminium and steel imports.
Most immediately, waiting for the Reserve Bank to announce on Tuesday whether interest rates will be cut.
In policy terms, the government could be satisfied with this sitting week. Its Future Made in Australia legislation, with promised tax credits for major projects, passed. So too, did its sweeping new rules to put caps on political donations and spending.
The electoral reform legislation has been an extraordinarily drawn-out saga. Special Minister of State Don Farrell had originally hoped to introduce it by early 2024, with it operating at this election. But the process proved immensely complex, including for constitutional reasons. Finally the bill was introduced late last year, and has passed with virtually no time to spare. The measures won’t operate until the next parliamentary term.
Farrell brought to the task negotiating skills honed in a lifetime as a right wing factional power broker. He always wanted the deal to be done with the Liberals. He knew they would be the easiest dancing partners, because the changes are in the big parties’ mutual interests. But he also believed bipartisanship would reduce the chance of them being unravelled by a subsequent government.
The Coalition came on board – after the government made some concessions on donation and disclosure amounts – in the knowledge the reforms help put a floor under the two-party system. It’s obvious the Liberals want to limit the spread of the teal movement, that Climate 200 has helped finance.
But the potential for the increase in independents is a future danger also for Labor, which at this election is trying to win back Fowler, that fell in 2022 to independent Dai Le.
While the changes will limit the amount of money available to small players, they are a compromise and less unfair than some crossbenchers claim. Of course, judgements on fairness will differ according to where those making them are coming from. But it’s a substantial leap from urging newcomers should be encouraged into the system to believing the system should facilitate a financial auction for a seat.
As he basks in his victory of the electoral legislation Farrell, who is also trade minister, finds himself in a supporting role in a more immediately high-profile issue: the tariff battle with the US. Farrell is anxious to engage as soon as possible with his US counterpart, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, preferably face-to-face. But he can’t officially do so until Lutnick is confirmed.
The tariff issue is being cast by the opposition as a test of Albanese’s ability to deal successfully with the Trump administration.
It’s an easy test to pose, but the government has done all it can to pursue a positive relationship with the administration. Notably, Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles was in Washington a week ago for talks with new defence secretary Pete Hegseth, armed with a hefty cheque for some A$800 million as part of Australia’s contribution under the AUKUS deal.
The Albanese-Trump call this week, when the PM argued for a tariff exemption, apparently went well. But the outcome is unpredictable, as is the timing of a decision. Trump might have sounded encouraging but, as we’ve been seeing, there’s some strong opposition in the system to giving Australia special treatment.
A win for Australia would be a significant fillip for the PM; a Trump rebuff would be a corresponding blow. Timing is also important: it would not be good for the government if this issue was unresolved through the election campaign (even worse, if there was a bad result then).
The opposition seeks to grab headlines by calling for Albanese to rush to Washington. Even if practical that could be counterproductive; if the mission failed it would be a disaster. Voters wouldn’t give him too many marks for trying.
While Peter Dutton might have thought the arrival of Trump and a more general swing against “wokeism” would be helpful to him at the election, as the US scene becomes more unsettling, the risk for him is that some “soft” voters might decide now is not the time to change.
Though the tariff issue is important, the election contest is mainly on cost of living in all its manifestations.
Trump has the power to inflict a blow on Albanese on the tariffs, but the Reserve Bank is a much bigger player in the government’s thinking.
Expectations remain high of a rate cut next Tuesday. If that didn’t happen, it would be a serious setback for the government. The next chance for a cut would then be April 1.
It’s not that a cut would necessarily directly swing a lot of votes. The electorate’s mood is likely too negative for that. But the absence of the much-anticipated cut would badly mess with the government’s narrative that things are on the right track for people to become better off.
Many political stories have dominated this term. A lot could have been foreseen. One, however, was predicted by no one: the appalling antisemitism crisis that has overtaken us, and reached new lows this week. This crisis is the product of far away events triggering a local malignancy that was lurking largely unrecognised.
A parliamentary inquiry into antisemitism at universities said, in a report tabled this week, that it had found “a disturbing prevalence of antisemitism that has left Jewish students and staff feeling unsafe, hiding their identity on campus and even avoiding campus all together”.
On the same day that report was tabled, a horrifying video emerged of two nurses at a Sydney hospital, in an online discussion with Israeli influencer Max Veifer, spewing vile sentiments about killing Israeli patents. One of the two is an Afghan who became an Australian citizen several years ago. Dutton has seized on the video to call for a discussion “about the way in which the whole migration system works”.
Antisemitism has extended beyond being an appalling assault on Jews in our community – it is starting to undermine our institutions and society.
Michelle Grattan does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Milad Haghani, Associate Professor & Principal Fellow in Urban Risk & Resilience, The University of Melbourne
Public transport in Queensland now costs just 50 cents. Yet in the first six months of the trial, it’s been revealed that thousands of commuters were fined for fare evasion.
More than 3,000 people received fines of A$322 each, amounting to more than $1 million in penalties. And more than 21,000 were issued warnings over this period.
Queensland’s 50 cent fares trial was designed to boost ridership and ease cost-of-living pressures. Now it has exposed a paradox: why do people evade fares even when the price is nearly free?
Fare evasion isn’t just a Queensland problem — it’s a nationwide challenge. Queensland’s experience raises bigger questions about enforcement, policy, and the role of public transport funding.
A nationwide challenge
Across the country, fare evasion drains millions from state public transport budgets. In New South Wales, for example, fare evasion costs the state government about $80 million each year.
The latest NSW Fare Compliance Survey inspected 52,152 tickets, including Opal cards, contactless payments, and single-trip tickets, across the NSW public transport network.
It found most non-compliance came down to passengers travelling without a valid ticket. This included not only those customers carrying no ticket at all, but also those who did have an Opal or other payment card but hadn’t tapped on.
Another form of non-compliance was when passengers used concessions for which they weren’t eligible.
The survey also highlighted variations in compliance – across different modes of transport, times of day and days of the week.
Overall, compliance did not significantly differ between weekends and weekdays.
Looking at weekday use, Sydney Metro had the highest compliance rate at 97%. This was followed by Sydney Ferries (95.9%), all trains (93.6%), Sydney Light Rail (91%) and all buses (89.2%).
Who evades fares and why?
Fare evasion isn’t just about people trying to save money. Research shows there are different types of fare evaders, ranging from habitual dodgers to those who evade unintentionally.
An international study on Santiago’s Transantiago system found that evaders could be categorised into four groups:
radical evaders who view non-payment as a form of protest
strategic evaders who evade when they believe the risk of being caught is low
ambivalent evaders who sometimes pay but don’t always see the value in it
accidental evaders who forget or run into ticketing system barriers.
A separate study in Melbourne also identified a wide spectrum of attitudes on fare evasion, from those who consider it morally wrong to those who take calculated risks based on enforcement patterns.
Does lowering fares reduce evasion?
Queensland’s 50-cent fare trial presents a real-world test of a long-standing question: does cheaper public transport reduce fare evasion?
Our calculations using the state’s early data show a 27% drop in fare evasion fines since the trial began, compared with the same period in the previous year.
This aligns with the idea that fare evasion is, at least partially, a rational economic decision. When the price is lower, the incentive to evade diminishes – though it does not completely disappear.
Modelling evidence from Santiago’s bus system also suggests price sensitivity, but with caveats. A 10% increase in fares led to a two-percentage-point rise in fare evasion.
The role of trust and public perception
A surprising insight from research is that fare evasion isn’t just an economic decision. It’s a social one, too.
When passengers perceive the system as unfair (due to factors such as unreliable service, high fares or lack of investment), fare evasion rises.
Further, if fare dodging behaviour is normalised within a city or demographic, it spreads like contagion.
Studies have suggested that permissive social attitudes toward fare evasion are as strong a predictor as actual financial hardship.
The limits of enforcement
Most transit agencies rely on two standard deterrents: more ticket inspections, and harsher fines for fare evaders.
Does this approach work? Research suggests only to a point.
Empirical evidence suggests that potential evaders are more deterred by the certainty of getting caught than by the size of the fine.
In other words, the visibility of inspectors matters more than the penalty itself. For many, the social stigma of getting caught is a key factor, regardless of how big the penalty is.
A crucial question in the Queensland debate is: if public transport is already nearly free, does fare evasion even matter?
The lost revenue from the unpaid fares by those who were issued a fine over the period in question amounts to just $1,663.
Depending on the level of crackdown, at such low fees, enforcement measures could easily end up costing more than the revenue lost. Security patrols, inspections and fine processing can amount to significant costs.
Why it matters
There are at least two key factors to consider in relation to whether cracking down on evaders is worth it.
First, allowing widespread fare evasion could erode social norms around paying for public services. If the expectation of compliance disappears, what happens if fares rise again?
And second, even when fares are zero or near-zero, requiring passengers to validate a ticket (such as by tapping on and off) allows transport agencies to track demand, plan services, and prevent system abuse.
Even in Tallinn, Estonia — where residents ride for free — tap-ons are still required for data collection and preventing system abuse.
Even at 50 cents a trip, authorities still expect public transport to function within a structured system, with rules that encourage accountability and predictability.
But enforcement alone won’t solve fare evasion. Winning public trust is just as important as enforcing rules. Investing in better service quality, reliability and community engagement can be as effective as increasing inspections.
The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jane Younger, Lecturer in Southern Ocean Vertebrate Ecology, Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies, University of Tasmania
Australia’s Antarctic territory represents the largest sliver of the ice continent. For decades, Australian scientists have headed to one of our three bases – Mawson, Davis and Casey – as well as the base on sub-Antarctic Macquarie Island, to research everything from ecology to climate science.
But despite our role as leaders in Antarctic science, Australian funding and logistics for Antarctic research hasn’t kept pace. Our single icebreaking vessel spends most of its time on resupply missions, restricting its use for actual science. And funding is often piecemeal, which makes it hard to plan the complex, multi-year efforts it takes to do research down on the ice.
This week, we saw a welcome change. The federal parliamentary committee on Australia’s external territories delivered a report calling for a second icebreaking vessel and more reliable funding. It also urged the government to progress work on marine protected areas in east Antarctica as well as resume fishing patrols, due to concern over illegal or exploitative fishing.
These measures are long overdue. For those of us who work and study on the ice continent, logistics and funding have long been a challenge. Illegal fishing in Antarctica must be stamped out, and a second vessel would support our ambitious, world-leading science.
Why is Antarctic science so important?
Antarctica is often out of sight, out of mind for many Australians. But what happens on the ice doesn’t stay there.
For climate science, Antarctica matters a great deal. For decades, much of the concern about melting ice focused on the Arctic and Greenland, while Antarctica stayed relatively stable. But this is now changing. Sea ice is melting more quickly than in the past. Glacial ice is retreating. Increased melting will affect sea level rise and ocean currents.
I study diseases such as the lethal strain of bird flu which has devastated bird and some mammals populations around the world. It recently reached Antarctica, where it killed large numbers of penguins, skuas, crabeater seals and more. I saw the devastation myself on my recent journey there.
If this strain makes it to Australia – the last continent free of it – it could come from the south and devastate both Australian wildlife and poultry.
To study these large and important changes, we need to be down there on the ice. It’s not an easy task. Keeping our bases functional means we need regular resupply missions. Repairs and extensions require tradies. Scientists and other workers need to be brought home.
Antarctic science has long relied on just one vessel, now the RSV Nuniya, which the Australian Antarctic Division describes as the “main lifeline to Australia’s Antarctic and sub-Antarctic research stations and the central platform of our Antarctic and Southern Ocean scientific research”.
The problem is, resupply can trump science. After all, no one wants bases running short of food or fuel. This is, in fact, what the Nuniya is largely doing.
Australia’s role is key
The Australian Antarctic Territory represents about 40% of the ice continent – the largest territory by far.
Territory, here, doesn’t mean exclusive rights. In 1959, 12 nations with a scientific interest in the ice continent signed the Antarctic Treaty. This treaty was an agreement that Antarctica – the only landmass with no indigenous human presence – would be reserved for peaceful, scientific purposes.
But in recent years, this treaty has come under pressure. Nations such as Norway and China have expanded fishing operations for krill. Illegal and unregulated fishing from various nations continues.
The report recommends the Australian government continue efforts to establish a marine protected area off East Antarctica – where fishing would be restricted – as well as reopening fishing patrols. China – which recently opened its fifth Antarctic base – is opposed to the idea of fishing-free zones and is pushing to expand fishing in the Southern Ocean.
Under Antarctica’s ice lie many resources. Mining is banned in Antarctica until 2048. What happens after that is uncertain. The race to tap critical minerals in Greenland signals what may lie ahead for Antarctica.
This is why Australia’s leadership in Antarctic science matters. Australia was an original signatory to the Antarctic Treaty, and has a long history of exploration and science. Hobart has long been the home of Australia’s Antarctic vessels.
As Antarctica changes, Australian scientists must be there to analyse, understand and report back. To do that, improvements are needed, including new vessels and longer-term funding. This report is the first step.
The government is yet to formally respond to the report’s recommendations. Let’s hope it takes heed of the findings.
Jane Younger receives funding from the Australian Research Council, WIRES Australia, the Geoffrey Evans Trust and the National Geographic Society.
Two federal politicians from opposing camps reached across the aisle this week to promote a valuable cause – the wellbeing of future Australian generations.
In an election year no less, this was a highly unusual moment of bipartisan collaboration.
It is extremely rare for private members bills to be passed into law. But the ideas in the Scamps bill have merit – especially its central recommendation that all decision makers properly consider the needs of young people when drafting government policy.
The bill was a direct response to a diverse civil society campaign in Australia and overseas to prioritise long term solutions to deliver a fairer, more sustainable future.
We support those efforts through our involvement in the youth-driven non-profit Foundations for Tomorrow, which worked closely with Scamps on her bill.
What is in the bill?
The bill would introduce a range of measures to try and apply a future focus to decision making across the policy spectrum. This includes housing, environment, climate change, mental health and job security, all of which are pressing issues for young people.
An independent Commissioner for Future Generations would be appointed to advocate for better policies and sustainable practices, while the government would have a public duty to always consider the best interests of future generations.
Importantly, a national conversation would be launched to engage Australians in a public consultation to help shape the nation’s vision for the future.
What is future governance?
Globally, we are in a state of polycrisis.
We are confronting cascading climate disasters, intense regional conflicts and geo-strategic competition. In response to this, a growing international movement representing the interests of future generations has emerged.
The concept incorporates an approach to decision making that overcomes the trappings of short-term, inadequate solutions. Instead, the emphasis is on planning for the future, not just the here and now.
Here in Australia, it aspires to future-proof the country by managing extreme, long-term risks that are damaging current and future prosperity.
Growing inequality is showing up in many policy areas, none more so than in the housing wealth gap between people in their 30s and 50s, which has widened to an extraordinary 234%.
By improving governance, it is hoped that intergenerational justice will be achieved. This ethical lens is compatible with the Australian Public Service value of good stewardship.
The Australian bill is based on the experience in Wales, where similar legislation was introduced in 2015.
The Welsh model has delivered significant practical benefits by including community involvement in planning, and protecting essential services from election cycles. For instance, environmental protection has been given higher status in decision making about transport.
The Australian landscape
Australia has undertaken other efforts to think long term. The Intergenerational Report was launched by former treasurer Peter Costello in 2002 to build consensus around the big issues facing Australia over the next 40 years.
The most recent report, in 2023, identified five major areas needing future generations policy. These were population and ageing, technological and digital transformation, climate change and the net zero transformation, rising demand for care and support services, and geopolitical risk and fragmentation.
The ideas in the Wellbeing of Future Generations bill could help guide policy in these critical areas. It would be an improvement on our current approach of recognising issues, but constantly kicking the can down the road.
There have been other excellent future generations measures at all levels of government. One of these is the Albanese government’s commitment to the Measuring What Matters framework.
An increasing number of leaders and policy makers are recognising the power and potential of expanding our definitions of policy success.
Young voters and the 2025 election
However, much more needs to be done to overcome intergenerational inequities. Policy-making continues to be driven by short-term political objectives, which is eroding trust and optimism in Australia’s future.
In a 2021 survey for Foundations for Tomorrow, 71% of young Australians said said that they “do not feel secure”. Young people are also drifting away from supporting the major parties, especially the Coalition.
Tabling her bill, Scamps correctly pointed out that today’s young Australians are the first generation in modern history to be worse off than their parents.
Australians want politicians to start thinking beyond their own re-election prospects. They want long term solutions, they want vision, they want hope. We owe them that much.
A recent survey by EveryGen (a network convened by Griffith University’s Policy Innovation Hub) found that 81% of Australians feel that politicians focus too much on short-term priorities. An overwhelming 97% of people believe that current policies must consider the interests of future generations.
Genuine futures thinking is not always easy. But it does add an important ethical dimension to decision making, that of real attention to political legacy.
Susan Harris Rimmer receives funding from the Australian Research Council. She is affiliated with Foundations for Tomorrow as a board member who are running the For the Future campaign, and is founder of the EveryGen network. EveryGen is a member of the Intergenerational Fairness Coalition.
Elise Stephenson receives funding from the Australian Research Council. She is a founding member of the EveryGen network and supporter of Foundations for Tomorrow. EveryGen is a member of the Intergenerational Fairness Coalition.
Imagine you are asked to give a small amount of money to a stranger. It’s not your money, so it doesn’t cost you anything. You’re just deciding how much they get.
But first, a pair of coins is flipped – one for you and one for the stranger – and you are told the results.
Would the coin flip change how much money you give? Specifically, would you give them a larger amount if you both got heads or tails than if you got different results?
As we discovered in a series of experiments with more than 1,400 participants, the coin flip – or other seemingly insignificant points of similarity or difference – might well affect your behaviour.
In a new paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, we show how understanding why even a coin flip can influence behaviour might help us understand what makes people discriminate against others.
‘Us’ versus ‘them’
Historically, many psychological theories that aim to explain discrimination have focused on group processes, rather than on how we respond to individual people.
This focus on group processes followed, in part, from the discovery that people benefit their own group over another group even if the division into groups had happened based on seemingly irrelevant features.
The use of such features has been crucial for explaining the core psychology of discrimination, stripped from any wider societal elements such as race, gender, values or attitudes.
In the seminal “minimal group” experiment, people were assigned to one of two groups based on seemingly irrelevant differences. Some groups were split by a preference for the paintings of Paul Klee versus those of Wassily Kandinsky, others by whether they had over- or underestimated the number of dots in an image. Some were even allocated to groups by a random event like a coin flip.
The so-called ‘minimal group’ experiment showed that separating people into groups was enough to make them favour members of their own group. Andrii Yalanski/Shutterstock
The result? Klee fans tended to give financial benefits to other Klee fans ahead of Kandinsky enthusiasts. Likewise, people in the “heads” group favoured their own group over those in the “tails” group.
The results could not be explained easily by existing research at the time. Some theories had emphasised that people show favour towards an individual after agreeing on more meaningful topics than painting preferences or dots estimations. The meaningful topics were things like one’s belief system, values or political or religious views.
Small studies had also found that a coin flip – which didn’t lead to explicitly dividing people into groups – was not enough to make people show discriminatory tendencies.
An influential theory called social identity theory thus concluded that social categorisation – thinking in terms of “us” versus “them” – could lead to people discriminating. This was tied to an idea that people elevate their self-image or improve their self-esteem by benefiting their own group over others.
New research emphasises a role for even random similarity versus difference
In our recent research, we set out to reassess whether group division is crucial to understand discriminatory tendencies.
We carried out seven experiments with over 1,400 participants in total (all based in the United Kingdom).
The study analysed data from participants who were asked to either repeatedly choose their preferred painting from two, estimate the number of dots presented in a “cloud”, or take part in a coin toss.
After each choice or coin flip, participants had to assign money to another person (the same person each time).
The result of a coin flip was enough to change how study participants treated another person. Motortion Films/Shutterstock
The only information participants were given about the other individual was their outcome in the same situation. Neither participants nor the other person were assigned to groups. Someone asked to pick between two paintings, for instance, was only told which painting the person they were allocating money to preferred in that instance.
Participants allocated on average 43.1% more money to another person who demonstrated the same judgement – or chance outcome – to their own.
Our research demonstrates that some of our discriminatory tendencies may be driven by individual difference versus sameness even when that difference or sameness is based on random chance, like a coin flip.
The findings raise the possibility that more basic neural processes than thinking about groups may have contributed to these outcomes.
Detecting a difference often comes with a conflict signal in the brain, and may come with negative emotions. Sameness with another person may hence lead to a more favourable treatment. However, this potential explanation will require further research.
Why does this matter?
The findings can help understand our own tendencies for favouring another person.
Previous research had suggested that “incidental similarity” with somebody, such as sharing a birthday or a name, can influence pro-social behaviour or liking because we associate the person with the way we see ourselves.
Our research surprisingly suggests that something similar can happen on the basis of an even less-relevant chance event such as a coin flip.
This may affect how we think about discrimination. We usually understand discrimination as making unfair distinctions between people based on groups or other social categories.
Our research suggests future perspectives on discrimination may incorporate a role for individual-level difference, too.
Does this new understanding suggest ways we can lessen discrimination? At this stage, they would only be speculative.
However, earlier scientific efforts to find ways to reduce prejudice and discrimination have largely been informed by group-based theories of discrimination. For example, some interventions have aimed to influence people’s perceptions of other groups.
In the same way, our new findings may inspire future research into interventions based on individual-level drivers of discrimination.
Eliane Deschrijver receives funding from the Australian Research Council.
Richard Ramsey does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Housework, a new play by Emily Steel, lifts the rock off politics to expose its crawling, ruthless, yet undeniably comic underside. The result is masterful, hilarious and deeply incisive.
Housework opens with the day-to-day demands of a local MP electorate office and then sweeps to the halls of power in Canberra.
Chief of staff Anna Cooper (Emily Taheny), media advisor Ben (Benn Welford) and junior staffer Kelly (Franca Lafosse) try to perform damage control for their headstrong, cherry-picked, first-term MP Ruth Mandour (Susie Youssef).
In Canberra, Ruth is preparing for her first private member’s bill, calling for health care reform; Anna has a sick child back home; and Ben is absent with COVID. Add in a star-struck young female staffer, a predatory older male MP (Paul, played by Renato Musolino), and a photo of them leaving a bar together and we strap in for a rollicking ride through media manipulation, personal and political sacrifice, and the fleeting moments of power.
It is absolutely compelling and all too recognisable.
This is everything you’ve always wanted to know about Australian politics but were too afraid to have your worst fears confirmed. Steel’s play is laugh-out-loud funny in its satire and send-ups. But it is also deeply affecting in her bleak but loving depiction of the chasm between personal dreams and the reality of politics.
Uproarious comedy
Steel has based her script on interviews with politicians and staffers (confidential, of course) and media stories. She centres the experiences of women in politics, personal lives, gender roles, sexism, fighting the patriarchal socio-political systems. This sits within the story of a new MP butting up against potential scandal and the power plays of Parliament, and the relentless 24-hour news cycle.
It is a timely reminder of the barriers that continue to obstruct social equality.
The cleaning woman eventually gets one of the best skewering zingers of the play. Matt Byrne/STCSA
Steel’s script is bookended with a woman cleaning (who eventually gets one of the best skewering zingers of the play). The constant references to rubbish disposal are a highlight, from the hilarious opening scene (“we don’t do bins”) to the frantic scramble to weaponise a “scandal” and who is sacrificed to save who.
Steel’s writing revels in the roller coaster of political life, balancing the high comedy with deep insight into the human cost.
This is the kind of play you want to see again to delight in Steel’s use of language, the uproarious comedy and the undercurrents of bloodthirsty power.
A brilliant cast
Director Shannon Rush has expertly paced this excellent cast to bring out every laugh, back stab and all-too-familiar power jostle. They don’t miss a beat or drop a spark of energy. The sense of building political pressure and personal conflict is relentless and exciting; the depiction of the sense of place and power is spot on.
Every one of Steel’s political animals is instantly recognisable. We watch them with morbid fascination as they spar, jostle, align and detonate, revealing more of themselves as the stakes rise.
Every one of Steel’s political animals is instantly recognisable. Matt Byrne/STCSA
Taheny effortlessly makes the whip-smart staffer Anna multifaceted, with internal conflict alongside high-energy pragmatism and expertly timed comedy. Youssef’s Ruth is blunt, no-nonsense and idealistic, with comically few diplomatic skills and no idea how the machinations of government work – but an unflinching desire to make a change for good.
Lafosse brings depth, subtlety and excellent comic foil timing to the young idealist. Musolino revels in the role of the leader-in-waiting Paul, giving us a joyously morally bankrupt character. Every moment of his scenes is a delight and his repulsively predatory-yet-attractive older white male politician was all-too recognisable. The scenes between Paul and Taheny’s Anna spark and hum with energy and presence.
Welford is wonderful as Ben the media officer and Duncan the party apparatchik, bringing out the offhanded ruthless grabs for power and casual decimations between laughs.
Youssef’s Ruth is blunt, no-nonsense and idealistic, with comically few diplomatic skills. Matt Byrne/STCSA
The ensemble cast all play smaller roles, filling out the world of parliament with the faceless “schemers and plotters” in the back rooms and corridors, ABC news journalists, and continual stream of environmental protesters.
Sunitra Martinelli plays both the ever-present (and mostly voiceless) cleaner, and the prime minister. This pairing is a genius move, played with presence and deft contrast. The cleaning woman, constantly fixing the mess others make, bookends the play as a constant reminder of the mopping-up required for the people in power. Politics is literally a dirty business.
A future classic
Ailsa Paterson’s stylish set references the stark white outside of Parliament House in Canberra. The repetitive doorways and hallways, entries and frames for the machinations of the people of government. A rotating long timber table divides the scenes and the sides of parliament.
Sound design by Andrew Howard punctuates scene changes and mood swings with pounding relentless pace, the tick-tock of time passing, and rich sonic textures to create the insistent, driving tempo of government.
The stylish set references the stark white outside of Parliament House in Canberra. Matt Byrne/STCSA
Nigel Leavings’ lighting is superb, creating menace, blinding office fluros, and shadows in this mad-rush-to-the-top climb over the bodies of everyone to get to the top.
Housework is firmly in the now-familiar worlds of Total Control (2019–24), Rake (2010–18) and The Thick Of It (2005–12). It is a deft capturing of a socio-political moment in time, undeniably Australian and gloriously uncompromising.
Dare I say it, this a future Australian classic: a Don’s Party for our time, but with fewer blokes and WAGs – and a female PM.
Housework is at the State Theatre Company South Australia until February 22.
Catherine Campbell does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
