The magical rhythms of Spain will reverberate in Tampa this July, as Teatro Real – The Royal Opera of Madrid embarks on a global tour of Authentic Flamenco. The critically acclaimed dance show is known as “the most prestigious and authentic Flamenco troupe,” according to a press release. They will perform at the Centro Asturiano de Tampa (1913 N Nebraska Ave) on July 12, 13 and 27. Tickets are available for purchase online.
Co-presented by Fever, the leading global live-entertainment discovery platform, this captivating live performance will visit 30 cities in North America, showcasing the rich heritage of flamenco, among the most celebrated Spanish art forms.
A unique musical experience in Tampa Bay
“We are thrilled to continue our partnership with Teatro Real – The Royal Opera of Madrid, bringing audiences the excitement and joy of flamenco,” said Ignacio Bachiller Ströhlein, Co-Founder and CEO at Fever. “As a Spanish-founded company, we are proud to champion these talented artists while reinforcing our commitment to making culture accessible for all.”
The 65-minute live presentation delivers raw passion and emotion featuring a performance by the award winning Spanish dancer Amador Rojas.
“Our Spanish traditions represent a core part of who we are as a nation, and as a people. For that reason, it brings us great pride and joy to share the magic of Flamenco with diverse audiences across the globe,” said Ignacio García-Belenguer, CEO at Teatro Real.
by Robert P. Jackson, Senior Lecturer in Political Thought, Manchester Metropolitan University
Coverage of the recent student encampments at more than 50 universities across the United States has focused on confrontations between opposing groups of protesters or between protesters and police.
The spectacle of militarised officers being called on to campus grounds, or academics and students alike being pinned to the concrete, has dominated news broadcasts.
Having recently returned from the US, where I was conducting research at Columbia University’s library, I was able to witness these events at first hand. There are several features of the protests that haven’t received much attention, but are nevertheless worth exploring.
1. Religious celebration
While there have been instances of Islamophobia and antisemitism by some protesters and counter-protesters, the overwhelming majority of students protesting have been modelling the peaceful coexistence of religious expression. There has been a huge breadth of cultural celebration – including Latinx music and Punjabi and Dabke dancing. There have also been diverse religious services including by both Muslim and Jewish students, as well as liturgical readings by Union Theological Seminary speakers taking place within the encampments. These have been largely ignored by most media reports.
Students of different faiths – and none – facilitated each other’s rituals by holding blankets aloft as screens to form makeshift spaces of worship. Religious practices were also being modified, for example, as communities of Jewish students invited others to join them in celebrating the Passover Seder and adapted religious readings to satirise college administrators.
Muslim students were also reclaiming the right to practice their faith publicly without fear. Students I spoke to viewed these acts as contributing to student safety, opposing the rise of Islamophobia and antisemitism in wider society. This provides a counterpoint to the frequent accusations of “anti-Jewish hatred” levelled against them.
2. Diversity
Earlier this academic year Columbia University suspended the student chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace. This action, along with complaints that “university disciplinary processes” were being used “to target Palestinian students and their allies on and off campus”, appears to have catalysed a wider alliance of dissent.
Thus, the Columbia encampment was organised by a “Divest” coalition of 116 groups that had far greater reach than the two suspended groups.
A recent referendum by Columbia College Student Council on divestment from Israel passed with 77% in favour on a 40% turnout. This was a significant increase from comparable earlier votes.
3. Stress-testing university ethics
The protesters are conscious that, particularly since the rise of the #BlackLivesMatter movement and decolonising initiatives, institutions have sought to signal their values. An example of this is New York University recognising that the city of New York was built through the violent displacement of the Lenape people from their homeland.
The students involved in these protests feel that the values expressed in such statements don’t match the policies and investments that are being pursued by their administrations. Nor do they believe the treatment that they are receiving reflects those ethics.
This treatment has included being arrested by police, who have been invited onto campus for the first time since 1968. There have also been threats of suspension and evictions from university accommodation, for engaging in peaceful protest that questions institutional conduct.
Members of the Columbia chapter of the American Association of University Professors have raised their concerns about the “administration’s blatant lack of respect for the safety of its students and the principles of higher education”. The actions of students at Columbia have placed on the public agenda a critical examination of the ethical legacy of their institution.
Minouche Shafik, President of Columbia University, acknowledges that “there is much debate about whether or not we should use the police on campus”, but states that the university has been “patient in tolerating unauthorized demonstrations”, and pursued a “collaborative resolution with the protesters”.
4. The protests are also about gentrification
The current protests are indisputably centred on Palestine. Students have been calling for transparency and accountability over their universities’ financial connections with Israel. But the student activists describe their campaigns as concerned equally with local issues as with global politics.
They link their discussions of displacement and occupation in relation to Gaza directly to gentrification conflicts, for example, between Columbia University and neighbouring (predominantly Black and Latinx) communities in Harlem. Students believe that Columbia’s expansion project is undermining low-income residents by acquiring property to connect its Morningside campus with the Columbia University Medical Centre.
This is a point of similarity with the 1968 Columbia protests. While those events are often framed primarily in relation to the movement against the Vietnam War, gentrification was also a significant trigger for campus occupations.
At that time, Columbia University proposed to build a gymnasium by developing land in nearby Morningside Park. Plans for a separate lower-level community entrance, seen by many as an attempt at segregation quite literally through the back door – circumventing the 1964 Civil Rights Act – provoked further opposition. The project was eventually shelved.
5. Visibility as a battleground
Students camped on Columbia’s lawns chose initially not to occupy buildings as their 1968 counterparts had. This made their activities more visible to the world. It made the protests more accessible to allies and opponents alike. But it also enabled surveillance by university and government authorities.
This visibility raises the potential stakes for each person involved in the protests. It arguably involves a greater level of commitment and immediate risk than in 1968.
The encampments at Columbia and other Ivy League universities have received disproportionate attention from the world’s media, especially when measured against protests at less wealthy or prestigious institutions. The students at Columbia have tried to use this visibility as a mirror to persuade others of the conspicuous absence of Palestinian lives in public discourse, and the necessity of centring Palestinian voices.
Confidence of youth
Behind the wave of student encampments is a constituency disillusioned with a lack of effective measures from the “international community” to achieve a ceasefire and an end to the conditions of famine in Gaza.
While the protests are student-led, there has been legal support from faculty academics as well as media interventions. Meanwhile there has also been an increasingly organised presence of academics during police interventions on campus.
There is a generational difference in outlook about the likely outcome of these protests. In conversation, staff tend to be more reserved about their expectations. By contrast, students exude a sense that the process is building towards a breakthrough moment. Their confidence in the possibility of realising their demands is reflected in the recurrent chant: “I believe that we will win.”
Robert P. Jackson 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.
Would you rather find yourself alone in the woods with a bear or a man? This is the question currently dividing social media. Based on the responses online, it looks like most women answering the question say they would choose the bear, a decision that is shocking many men.
The reactions show some men don’t understand women’s experiences. The assertion that women would prefer to encounter a bear is based on evidence about the rate of male violence against women, and on a lifetime of learning to fear and anticipate this violence. This is especially true of sexual violence, something which would not be associated with encountering a bear.
According to the World Health Organization, one in three women – around 736 million globally – will have experienced sexual or physical violence by an intimate partner or sexual violence from a non-partner in their lifetime. This figure has largely remained unchanged over the past decade.
Being attacked by a bear is much less common, with only 664 attacks worldwide over 15 years, and very few fatal attacks. And bears tend to avoid humans, attacking only when provoked or protecting their young.
This is not about generalising or fearing all men. Women know that not all men are dangerous. But women don’t know which men they should fear, only that male violence and male entitlement to women’s bodies is something that they have to be on guard for.
Women are commonly victims of sexualised violence, and men are overwhelmingly the perpetrators (including against other men). There are enough men who have hurt or are capable of hurting women, and women have no way of knowing which ones these are. While much violence against women comes from men they know, the risk of danger from men they don’t know is something that informs their day-to-day lives.
For example, research shows that women change their behaviour – making certain decisions about the routes they take or what they wear – to avoid harassment or abuse from men in public. Scholars such as Fiona Vera-Gray refer to this as safety work.
Women’s view of men is also coloured by their non-violent actions that harm women. Clearly, bears also do not contribute to or uphold systemic sexism and misogyny, but most men do.
My research on misogynistic online groups has explored how men engage in acts against women that reinforce gender inequality.
Writer Emma Pitman has described this phenomenon using the analogy of a human pyramid. The choices of some men to stay silent about abuse is the base of the pyramid, holding up other men who engage in misogynistic jokes or commit violence.
The overall effect, whether deliberate or via ignorance or indifference, is to normalise and support the actions of male sexual predators and domestic abuse perpetrators.
This culture props up the men who are silent bystanders, observing sexism, harassment or abuse but doing nothing, the men who make or laugh along with the sexist or rape jokes, those who are rape apologists and blame women for their sexual victimisation, those who become aggressive when women turn them down, those who stalk, control and abuse women, and those who are rapists, sexual harassers and murderers. This continuum of misogyny is women’s everyday reality – and at no point do bears feature.
The pyramid of misogyny is upheld by men staying silent about abuse and harm.
StillFX/Shutterstock
Men on the defensive
Men are generally surprised, defensive even, when the subject of male violence against women is discussed. This is often where people invoke the response “not all men”.
When women took to social media to express their anger and devastation following the murder of Sarah Everard by a police officer in 2021, #NotAllMen trended online. Meanwhile, police advised women not to walk alone at night, placing the burden of avoiding violence on women.
This conversation is about privilege, and not recognising it. Many men are able to move through their daily lives not being worried that they are going to be attacked or raped, can walk alone late at night without taking any safety precautions or even not having such thoughts cross their minds, and do not feel their hearts beat faster if they hear footsteps behind them. It may not be all men, but it is all women, who live smaller lives because of the threat of some men’s violence.
These discussions are an opportunity for men to understand women’s genuine fears and to be part of the solution rather than the problem.
Lisa Sugiura is affiliated with The Institute for Research on Male Supremacism
The specific demandsvary from place to place. What unites them is a call for schools to use their financial leverage and other kinds of influence to apply pressure on Israel.
The protesters are demanding divestment, meaning the sale of financial assets either related to Israeli companies or shares in other corporations perceived to assist the Israeli military. In addition, many protests include calls for the disclosure of those financial ties. They also feature demands for colleges and universities to distance themselves from Israel by ending study-abroad programs and academic exchanges.
I have spent decades teaching and researching Israeli-Palestinian relations and the global politics surrounding these issues. Along the way, I’ve learned that the discourse around the activism related to this Middle Eastern conflict is at least as relevant as the direct effects of the activism itself.
BDS tactics
In 2005, 170 Palestinian civil society groups came together to initiate a call for boycott, divestment and sanctions. Many student organizations, academic associations and other kinds of groups later embraced the initiative.
The movement also promotes divestment from holdings that support Israel’s military operations. And it seeks to impose sanctions, which could hypothetically include arms embargoes, asset freezes or trade barriers.
In other words, the U.S. government would have to participate for sanctions to work. Due to its close ties with the Israeli government, this is extremely unlikely. Nevertheless, the U.S. has recently sanctioned certain far-right Israeli entities.
U.S.-based BDS activists have, for this reason, focused on boycott and divestment rather than sanctions.
BDS goals
Along with those tactics, BDS has three goals, or pillars. The first is ending Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.
The third is attaining full equality for Palestinian citizens of Israel and the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their ancestral towns and villages in historic Palestine. About 750,000 Palestinians fled or were forced to move to surrounding areas prior to and during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war.
Two-thirds of Gaza’s current residents are refugees and their descendants who were uprooted from their homes in 1948. This right to return is enshrined in international law.
While Israel has never let these Palestinian refugees return, it does maintain a “law of return” for Jews.
BDS has caught on with many Palestinians and their supporters across the globe. But there’s been a concerted effort in Israel and the U.S. to legislate against it.
Israel has barred some BDS supporters, with Jews among them, from entering the country. And 38 U.S. states, as of 2024, have enacted anti-BDS legislation. Such laws require state contractors to pledge that they will not engage in BDS, or they require states to not invest funds in companies that support the movement’s goals.
There are also BDS critics who find the tactics legitimate but object to one or more of the movement’s goals. The least controversial goal of the three pillars is full equality for Palestinian citizens of Israel. BDS critics almost never object to this goal. Instead, the debate occurs over the degree to which different people view Palestinian citizens of Israel as already possessing equality.
The second goal – ending Israel’s occupation – tends to be opposed primarily by right-wing supporters of Israel. These more conservative Israel supporters either believe that the occupation, including the security barrier that separates Palestinian residents of the West Bank from Israeli settlers and from Israeli residents in noncontested areas, is necessary for maintaining Israeli security – or that there is no occupation at all.
Other Israelis say that Israeli settlers deserve to live in all the lands of ancient Israel, including the West Bank.
Granting all Palestinian refugees the right to return is the most controversial BDS goal because of fears that Jews would perhaps become a minority of Israel’s citizens, causing the country to cease to be a Jewish state.
People with those concerns say making Jews a minority in Israel would be unjust and perhaps even an expression of antisemitism.
Another common concern regarding the BDS movement and the slightly different demands heard on campuses today has to do with the impression that Israel is being singled out for criticism when there are many other countries that commit human rights violations.
Modest success stories
The protests on college campuses in the spring of 2024, including those with prolonged encampments, have had, at best, modest success.
For example, Brown University protesters managed to persuade the administration to hold a vote on divesting from companies connected to the Israeli military. In return, the protesters agreed to dismantle their encampment.
Perhaps most importantly, though, the protests have helped place Palestinian human rights demands squarely in the public eye.
Mira Sucharov has received funding from SSHRC (Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council). She is on the advisory council of the New Israel Fund-Canada. She is active in A Land for All, and she is the founding co-chair of Drachim.
You’ve had a long day and you’re tired. Faced with making dinner, you look in the fridge and decide to cook something that requires little effort. This is a common scenario, and one that many people act out without really thinking about it.
The fact that there is often little or no conscious thought involved in routine daily food preparation means that ingredients that must be used before they expire are often left to go off.
In research that colleagues and I recently published, we found that overcoming this habitual behaviour is key to cutting food waste. Here’s how to do it.
Every year, 1.3 billion tonnes of food is wasted globally. This is the equivalent of one-third of all the food produced for human consumption.
In the UK alone, households wasted 6.4 million tonnes of food between 2021 and 2022. Accounting for the fossil energy used to grow and harvest that food, as well as the greenhouse gases released when it rots in fields or landfills, this waste equates to 18 million tonnes of CO₂ emissions.
Food waste harms the environment, but reducing how much food is produced only to be thrown away can curb hunger. It could also save the world more than US$120 billion yearly (£96 billion) – and around £700 a year per household.
We measured fruit and vegetable waste from 154 households across the UK for an initial six-week period. Fruit and vegetables are among the most commonly wasted types of food. This may be because supermarkets often sell these ingredients in bulk or because people buying them sometimes fancy something less healthy and more convenient to prepare when the time comes to cook.
During those six weeks, half of the participants were asked to log what fresh fruit and vegetables they bought and when their purchases had to be used according to the label on the packaging, as well as guidelines provided by the researchers.
In each of these homes, the log was placed on the fridge as a daily reminder of what needed to be used each day to avoid waste. Participants also received daily text messages reminding them to check their food log and add any newly bought fruit and vegetables.
The other half of the households involved in this experiment simply measured their food waste at the end of each week without any reminders to use the fresh produce they had.
We expected the half of households receiving reminders to cut their waste more effectively – in fact, there was only a small difference between the two groups. But we did find that simply measuring fresh produce waste made all households more likely to think about what they were wasting.
This was evident from a range of responses from the participants. Taking part in the study also made participants feel as if they could control the amount of food they were throwing away.
It seems that simply asking people to measure their food waste each week for six weeks kickstarts a thinking process that guides people’s behaviour in future.
Food waste on the brain
Our findings may seem obvious, but there is more to them.
We found that across all households the reduction of fresh produce waste averaged 108 grams a week. This was sustained for six months after the experiment ended.
The experience of measuring food waste weekly during the experiment seemed to instil a mindfulness about food waste that meant participants were still throwing less away half a year on. It is interesting that only a short period of conscious effort is necessary to encourage lasting changes in behaviour.
Research into the psychology of food waste tends to focus on nudges, which are subliminal actions to change behaviour, such as menus designed to highlight plant-based options. It is not clear whether such methods, which bypass the conscious mind, work in the long term.
Our study suggests that it takes thought to alter habits. But the good news is that we found people only had to think about reducing food waste for a short time to form an enduring habit of reducing the amount of food they throw away.
Most people have busy lives and simply don’t have the mental capacity to spare each day. Strategies for reducing food waste that require only a short-term commitment of mental effort are likely to be most effective.
And even a small reduction in household food waste can make a difference. Our study showed that it is relatively easy for people to cut how much fruit and vegetables they discard each week. If just 1,000 people could do the same, it would save over 9.5 tonne of CO₂ a year, the equivalent of 1,140,000 smartphone charges.
Thinking about food waste for six weeks is a small price to pay if the result is a significant and long-term difference to our planet’s wellbeing.
by Claire B. Wofford, Associate Professor of Political Science, College of Charleston
There was a lot of press attention paid to the Trump immunity hearing at the Supreme Court building on April 25, 2024. Mandel NGAN / AFP/Getty Images
Following the nearly three-hour oral argument about presidential immunity in the Supreme Court on April 25, 2024, many commentators were aghast. The general theme, among legal and political experts alike, was a hand-over-the-mouth, how-dare-they assessment of the mostly conservative justices’ questioning of the attorneys who appeared before them in the case known as Trump v. United States.
Rather than a laser-focused, deep dive into the details of Trump’s attempt to subvert the 2020 election, virtually all of the nine justices instead raised larger questions, peppered with hypotheticals – hello again, Seal Team Six! – about the reach of executive power, the intent of the nation’s founders and the best way to promote a stable democracy.
Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s “I’m not focused on the here and now of this case” and Justice Neil Gorsuch’s “We are writing a rule for the ages” drew particular fire.
The headline and subheadline on the New York Times analysis by Supreme Court reporter Adam Liptak complained that the court had taken “Trump’s immunity arguments in unexpected direction” with “very little about the President’s conduct.” And the story itself fumed that the justices had responded to Trump’s claim that he should not face charges as a “weighty and difficult question.”
Slate’s Amicus podcast decried the court for failing to focus on the “narrow question” the case presented, instead going “off the rails” and “bouncing all over the map” with various legal arguments. A guest on NPR’s 1A program lamented that the court had “injected new questions” into the oral argument to “slow-walk” the case and prevent Trump from facing trial before the election.
But here’s what the pundits seem to have forgotten: What happened that day in the court should have surprised no one, especially those constitutional scholars like me familiar with Supreme Court procedure.
Donald Trump’s attorneys told the Supreme Court that the actions of a president should be immune from criminal prosecution.
Curtis Means-Pool/Getty Images
Five words ‘change everything’
Trump’s case stemmed from his prosecution by Special Counsel Jack Smith for his alleged attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential election. Trump claimed he, as president, was immune from prosecution, and he took his case to the Supreme Court.
When parties appeal their case to the court, they must tell the justices what specific legal question or questions they want the justices to answer. As a colleague and I have explored in a recent academic journal article, the court generally accepts what is called the “Questions Presented” as given, agreeing to hear a case without making any adjustments to its legal framing.
Sometimes, however, the court will alter the legal question in some way. Why it does this is an issue that scholars like myself are just beginning to explore. And because it is that question – not the one the litigant initially asked – that frames the legal analysis, the justices can exert real control over both the case itself and the development of the law.
Trump v. United States is a classic example. When attorneys for the former president filed their request with the court, the question presented by them was “Whether the doctrine of absolute presidential immunity includes immunity from criminal prosecution for a President’s official acts.”
When it granted the petition in late February 2024, the court changed this language to “Whether and if so to what extent does a former President enjoy presidential immunity from criminal prosecution for conduct alleged to involve official acts during his tenure in office.”
Five of those additional words – “if so to what extent” – changed everything. They sent a clear-as-day signal that the court would move well beyond the simple yes-or-no of whether Trump could be prosecuted.
With their reformulation of the question, the justices would instead be determining how, when and for what acts any president could ever be held criminally responsible.
That is a much larger inquiry, one that necessarily involves formulating a legal test to draw a line between what is constitutionally permissible and what is not. That the justices spent oral argument trying do exactly that is not a problem, much less an outrage: It’s just the court, the highest appellate court in the land, doing its job.
The scope of the argument, the expansiveness of the coming opinions and the time suck for the justices to write them and the possible vanishing of Trump’s prosecution are not at all shocking. The court signaled it would address the broader question months ago when it took the case; the time to fault the court for making the case about more than just Donald Trump was then, not now.
But perhaps commentators’ response to the oral argument can be a good lesson. Americans are told to take Trump at his word, expecting his second term to contain all the extremes he gleefully says it will.
When the Supreme Court indicates what legal question it will answer, the smart response is to do the same thing – pay attention and believe. This may not make the ultimate outcome any less distasteful to many, but at least it won’t be quite as disturbing.
Claire B. Wofford 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.
by Thomas Gift, Associate Professor and Director of the Centre on US Politics, UCL
As hundreds of New York police officers in riot gear were called in to clear away a student protest at Columbia University on Tuesday night, the university president Nemat Shafik was saying she had “no choice” but to take this action.
Earlier that day, after defying administrative orders to disband their two-week encampment, a group of Columbia students had broken into and occupied a major academic building on campus, causing considerable damage. The incident and other protests have not only brought tensions over the Gaza war protests erupting across American universities to a fever pitch, it has also made the political stakes much clearer.
Yet, despite the political pitfalls that campus protests pose for Biden on the left, dissatisfaction among young people over the Israel-Hamas war is unlikely to initiate a major swing in the 2024 presidential election. What it could do, however, is turn the broader electorate against Biden if he fails to take a stiff enough line against the most extreme agitators. Here’s why.
Protesters are unrepresentative
If there’s one point to glean from the recent spate of campus protests, it’s that participants are unrepresentative of young Americans as a whole. While protests have since rippled out to other institutions, demonstrations have mostly originated at America’s most prestigious (and expensive) universities, including Columbia, Harvard, Yale and Princeton.
Reports suggest that some protesters are non-students, and that outsiders have been responsible for orchestrating public displays. Some protesters don’t even have strong or well-formed views on Israel.
Zooming out, there’s no clear consensus among America’s youth on how the US should deal with Israel, or that it’s a top concern in the forthcoming election. According to the most recent Harvard Institute of Politics Survey of Young Americans, a slight majority, 51%, of young voters support a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas. For 18- to 29-year-olds around 41% have no firm position on America’s alliance with Israel.
Among youth voters, ordinary domestic issues like the cost of living are almost certain to be more salient in driving ballot box decisions than violence in the Middle East. For instance, according to the same Harvard IOP poll, only 2% of young Americans cite the Israel-Palestine conflict as the issue that concerns them the most.
Campus protests could trigger a backlash in favour of support for Israel — not against it. Some Americans are unhappy about the student protests, which will only be exacerbated by the recent violence at Columbia. And one poll suggests that overall 80% of Americans support Israel in the war against Hamas.
While there’s doubtlessly sympathy among Democrats (and Americans as a whole) for a Gaza ceasefire, much of the rhetoric employed on campuses — such as chants of “from the river to the sea”, calls for a “global intifada”, or exhortations for Israel to “go to hell” — threaten to undermine public support.
Other examples of student agitation will also earn enemies. The hoisting of the Palestinian flag over Harvard Yard, the central courtyard at Harvard University, in violation of school policy. A UCLA student wearing a Star of David necklace appeared to be denied access to a campus entrance by protesters. One masked protester yelling: “Never forget the 7th of October. That will happen not one more time, not five more times, not 10 more times, not 100 more times, not 1,000 more times, but 10,000 times.” And another demanding “humanitarian aid” be provided in the form of a meal plan from university officials after occupying an academic building. The list goes on.
In part, the campus protests over Gaza can be seen as an outgrowth of the protests that Biden has seen in the primary elections. In the Michigan primary, for example, the state with the highest percentage of Arab Americans in the country, more than 100,000 Democrats voted “uncommitted” to express their discontent with the administration’s policies.
Yet if Biden were to align himself more closely with these protests, he’d encounter resistance from Jewish and other voters who demand his full-throated support of Israel. That could open up a lane for Donald Trump, who’s already trying to frame campus protests as evidence of chaos under the current administration.
Even before the recent violence, Republican senator Tom Cotton had labelled the Columbia protests a “nascent pogrom” and encouraged enlisting the National Guard to quell student “mobs”.
Former Harvard president Larry Summers has observed that: “Academic leaders who fail to enforce regulations at many of our leading universities are giving a political gift to Donald Trump and his acolytes.”
Biden has said that he “condemn[ed] the antisemitic protests”, while also “condemn[ing] those who don’t understand what’s going on with the Palestinians”. Although the both-sideism statement has been criticised, it largely reflects Biden acknowledging the complexity of the issue.
Young voters will be critical to Biden winning in November. If Democrats can get that age group out to vote out, they may just nudge Biden over the line. However, this means appealing to far more young people than those who attend the country’s top universities.
Thomas Gift 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 are in the midst of a global biodiversity crisis, with high extinction rates and many wildlife populations showing clear evidence of decline (such as caribou and lions).
As a wildlife ecologist and conservation biologist, I am concerned that we are putting the squeeze on wildlife in ways that can increase conflicts and displace animals from the habitats they need.
Observing animal behaviour
If we are to protect the animals we treasure for their ecological, economic and cultural values, we must find ways to promote human-wildlife coexistence. To successfully adapt our own behaviours, we must also understand whether and how animals can adapt to us.
Two key challenges have limited this understanding. First, it is hard to observe animals in the wild. Encounters are rare because animals are elusive, and the mere presence of a human observer may influence our understanding.
Second, it is not generally feasible to conduct experiments — hallmarks of rigorous science — that manipulate human activities in varied contexts. In a recent study published in Nature Ecology and Evolution, my colleagues and I set out to tackle these challenges by using the COVID-19 pandemic as a form of “unplanned experiment.”
This “anthropause” spurred scientists to ask how animals responded — our curiosities were piqued by unusual sightings.
Captured images
Our team recognized that such anecdotal observations could be prone to biases; we sought a more systematic approach to cover a wide range of species and locations while overcoming the elusive nature of wild animals. The popularity of motion-triggered wildlife camera traps has made it much easier to glimpse into the secret lives of animals.
These remote cameras work diligently to capture photographs of animals — including humans — that wander past, without the need for observers to be physically present.
Recognizing this opportunity, we assembled a team of more than 200 scientists from 21 countries that were monitoring mammals before and during the lockdowns. We sifted through millions of images of 163 species of wild mammals, collected from more than 5,000 camera traps. After estimating changes in the amount and timing of activity for animals as small as snowshoe hares and as big as African elephants, some striking patterns emerged.
Contrary to popular narratives, we did not see an overall trend of wildlife running free while humans sheltered in place.
Rather, we saw great variation in the activity of people and wildlife. While some areas emptied of people as parks closed, others saw increases in use, such as urban greenspaces or rural refuges where people sought solace from pandemic pressures.
Comfort with humans
Animals had a wide range of reactions to the changes in human activity, with the strongest pattern being that their responses depended on their position in the food chain and the condition of the landscape. Predator species, like wolves and wolverines, tended to be warier of people, reducing their activity when more people were around and being lost altogether from the busiest areas.
By contrast, prey species, including large herbivores like deer or moose, often increased activity when more people were around, potentially to take advantage of the “human shield” that deterred predators.
Notably, animals living in wilder landscapes were more sensitive to increases in human activity, while their urban cousins tended to be more tolerant but shifted to being more active at night. This highlights that even within the same species, animals can have different responses to people depending on where they live.
We believe that wildlife managers should take note of these results. Levels of outdoor recreation and other human endeavours may need to be carefully managed in wildland landscapes to avoid displacing the sensitive animals that depend on these more remote areas.
While in more modified landscapes — such as near cities and farms — animals may become habituated to humans, even attracted to “free food” like garbage or gardens, while working to avoid conflicts by moving frequently and using the cover of darkness.
CBC looks at human-bear encounters.
Human-wildlife coexistence in these developed areas requires care to remove unhealthy attractants that may promote conflict, while limiting disturbances at night so animals can access the food, cover and mates that they need to persist.
Overall, our study highlights the tremendous complexity of animal behaviours, and the fact that there are no silver bullets when it comes to coexistence. It is clear that animals are working hard to adapt to humanity’s ever-expanding presence, and that we need to do our part to ensure we can keep sharing space with the wildlife we cherish.
Establishing and maintaining effective biodiversity monitoring systems, including the camera trap surveys that underpinned our analysis, will be critical as we strive to understand and steward our ever-changing ecosystems.
Cole Burton receives funding from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) and Government of British Columbia.
Florida is full of caterpillars this month. But what are they and what can you do about them? Are they dangerous? Learn more about the most common springtime caterpillars in Florida.
Some common caterpillars are the tussock moth , the echo moth, oak leaf-roller and the woolly gray moth.
Most are not poisonous, but some have sticky hairs that are itchy if touched. The echo moth caterpillar can be toxic if eaten.
They do not harm property but can be a visual nuisance.
Caterpillars are important for the local ecosystem and provide food for birds and bats.
One of the most commonly spotted caterpillars is the tussock moth, a yellow-and-black insect covered with spiked hairs, which is commonly found on oak trees.
And yes, it does seem like they’re just about everywhere.
“They’re out now and there’s a lot of them. They tend to come out in large numbers,” said Lebouitz, Chemicals in the Environment agent with UF/IFAS Extension Sarasota County.
Leave them alone
These caterpillars should be left alone unless you’re wearing gloves because the setae, or “hairs,” on the body can cause irritation when touched.
Other caterpillars that are out and about across the state include the echo moth and oak leaf-roller.
The oak leafroller, along with the woolly gray and other types of geometer moths, are often referred to as “inchworms,” Lebouitz said, but the echo moth caterpillar can be mildly toxic if eaten, so keep pets and small children from touching them.
Similar to the tussock moth caterpillar, the echo moth caterpillar has fine hairs that may cause minor dermatitis if touched without gloves for some sensitive individuals.
Why are you seeing them now?
These caterpillars are coming out in force because it’s a normal part of spring, Lebouitz said. Part of it may be due to all the fresh, new growth of leaves.
They don’t cause considerable damage to the trees or any damage to the homes they crawl on, and they don’t bite.
“It’s very much a seasonal nuisance, and they aren’t really anything to worry about,” she said. “They’re an important part of the ecosystem. A lot of caterpillars are an important source of food. They have a place.”
Some caterpillars, like the woolly gray, oak leafroller, and tussock moth, will normally stay on trees, such as oaks, while they feed, but they may migrate onto cars and buildings, she said. Don’t be alarmed. They can’t cause any structural damage and won’t harm the paint on your car. You don’t need to use pesticide to remove them.
“The better call is if they’re coming in the home, just gently relocating them with a broom and dustpan, if possible,” she said.
When they form cocoons, they will hang on for a few weeks until they emerge as moths. The best bet, Lebouitz said, is to leave them alone and enjoy them as uniquely Floridian signs of spring.
“I always get really excited when I see them because, in Florida, it’s kind of hard to differentiate the seasons,” she said. “You have to appreciate those signs of subtlety that spring has arrived, and for me it’s one of those signs of spring.”
by Emma Shortis, Adjunct Senior Fellow, School of Global, Urban and Social Studies, RMIT University
In April 2022, conservative American think tank the Heritage Foundation, working with a broad coalition of 50 conservative organisations, launched Project 2025: a plan for the next conservative president of the United States.
The Project’s flagship publication, Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, outlines in plain language and in granular detail, over 900-plus pages, what a second Trump administration (if it occurs) might look like. I’ve read it all, so you don’t have to.
The Mandate’s veneer of exhausting technocratic detail, focused mostly on the federal bureaucracy, sits easily alongside a Trumpian project of revenge and retribution. It is the substance behind the showmanship of the Trump rallies.
Developing transition plans for a presidential candidate is normal practice in the US. What is not normal about Project 2025, with its intertwined domestic and international agenda, are the plans themselves. Those for climate and the global environment, defence and security, the global economic system and the institutions of American democracy more broadly aim for nothing less than the total dismantling and restructure of both American life and the world as we know it.
The unapologetic agenda, according to Heritage Foundation president Kevin D. Roberts, is to “defeat the anti-American left – at home and abroad.”
Recommendations include completely abolishing the US Federal Reserve in favour of a system of “free banking”, the total reversal of all the Biden administration’s climate policies, a dramatic increase in fossil fuel extraction and use, ending economic engagement with China, expanding the nuclear arsenal and a “comprehensive cost-benefit analysis of U.S. participation in all international organizations” including the UN and its agencies. And that’s not all.
Australia itself is mentioned just seven times in the substantive text, with vague recommendations that a future administration support “greater spending and collaboration” with regional partners in defence and send a political appointee here as ambassador. But even if only partially implemented, the document’s overarching recommendations would have significant implications for Australia and our region.
Project 2025 is modelled on what the Foundation sees as its greatest historical triumph. The launch of the first Mandate for Leadership coincided with Ronald Reagan’s inauguration in January 1981. By the following year, according to the Foundation, “more than 60 percent of its recommendations had become policy”.
Four decades later, Project 2025 is trying to repeat history.
The Project is not directly aligned with the Trump campaign: it has in fact attracted some ire from the campaign for presuming too much. Trump is under no obligation to adopt any of its plans should he return to the White House. But the sheer number of former Trump officials and loyalists involved in the Project, and its particular commitment to supporting a Trump return, suggest we should take its plans very seriously.
Much of what is happening now in the US is unprecedented. Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee, is currently locked in a Manhattan courtroom defending himself from criminal charges. Despite this unedifying spectacle, current polling separates Biden and Trump by a gap of just 2%, according to the latest poll. This year will be an existential test for American democracy.
Project 2025’s chosen method for engineering its radical reshaping of that democracy takes a startlingly familiar bureaucratic approach. It aims to create a system where any potential chaos is contained by an administration and bureaucracy united by the same conservative vision. The vision rests on four “pillars”.
Pillar one is the 920-page Mandate – the manifesto for the next conservative president (and the major focus of this analysis).
Pillar two is the foundation’s recruitment program: a kind of conservative LinkedIn that aims to build a database of vetted, loyal conservatives ready to serve in the next administration.
The program is specifically designed to “deconstruct the Administrative State”: code for using Schedule F, a Trump-era executive order (since overturned), that would allow an administration to unilaterally re-categorise, fire and replace tens of thousands of independent federal employees with political loyalists.
Pillar three, the “Presidential Administration Academy”, will train those new recruits and existing amenable officials in the nature and use of power within the American political system, so they can effectively and efficiently implement the president’s agenda.
Pillar four consists of a secret “Playbook” – a resources bank of things like draft executive orders and specific transition plans ready for the first 180 days of a new administration.
The four pillars inform each other. The Mandate, for example, doubles as a recruitment tool that educates aspiring officials in the complex structures of the US federal government.
A response to Trump’s failures
The Mandate doesn’t specify who the next conservative president might be, but it is clearly written with Trump in mind. As it outlines, “one set of eyes reading these passages will be those of the 47th President of the United States”. What the Mandate can’t acknowledge is that the man aiming to be the 47th president was notorious for not reading his briefs when he occupied the Oval Office.
An unspoken aim of Project 2025 is to inject some ideological coherence into Trumpism. It aims to focus if not the leader, then the movement behind him – something that did not happen in the four years between January 2017 and January 2021. The entire project is a response to the perceived failures and weaknesses of the Trump administration.
Project 2025’s vision rests on almost completely gutting and replacing the bureaucracy that (in the view of its authors) thwarted and undermined the Trump presidency. It aims to remodel and reorganise the “blob” of powerful people who cycle through the landscape of American power between think tanks, government and higher education institutions.
It explicitly welcomes conservatives to this “mission” of assembling “an army of aligned, vetted, trained, and prepared conservatives to go to work on Day One to deconstruct the Administrative State”. “Conservatives”, in this framing, are not those who would defend and protect the institutions and traditions of the state, but rather right-wing radicals who would fundamentally change them.
The choice of language – “mission”, “army” – is also deliberate. The Mandate repeatedly distinguished between “real people” and what it sees as existential enemies. “America is now divided,” it argues, “between two opposing forces”. Those forces are irreconcilable, and because that fight extends abroad, “there is no margin for error”.
This framing of an America and a world engaged in an existential battle is underpinned by granular, bureaucratic detail – right down to recommendations for low-level appointments, budget allocations and regulatory reform. Effective understanding – and use of – the machinery of American power is, the Heritage Foundation believes, essential to victory.
That is why the Mandate is 920 pages from cover to cover, why it has 30 chapters written by “hundreds of contributors” with input from “more than 400 scholars and policy experts” and why it can now claim the support of 100 organisations.
What follows is a broad analysis of the implications of Project 2025 for the world outside the United States.
Drill baby, drill: climate and the environment
In late 2023, Donald Trump was asked by Fox News anchor Sean Hannity if he would be a “dictator”. Trump responded he would not, “except on day one”. In the flurry of coverage that followed, rightly condemning and outlining Trump’s repeated threats to American democracy, the aspiring president’s stated reasons for a day of dictatorship were overshadowed.
But Trump was explicit: “We’re closing the border and we’re drilling, drilling, drilling.” While Trump himself may not be across or even aligned with the specific detail of much of Project 2025’s aims, on “drilling, drilling, drilling,” they are very much in sync.
Trump says he will be a dictator on day one.
The Mandate condemns what it describes as a “radical climate agenda” and “Biden’s war on fossil fuels”, recommending an immediate rollback of all Biden administration programs and reinstatement of Trump-era policies.
One of Biden’s signature legislative achievements, the Inflation Reduction Act, attracts a great deal of attention. Unsurprisingly, the broad recommendation is that the Act be repealed in its entirety. But the recommendations are also specific: repeal “credits and tax breaks for green energy companies”, stop “programs providing grants for environmental science activities” and ensure “the rescinding of all funds not already spent by these programs”. This would include removing “federal mandates and subsidies of electric vehicles”.
But this is not all. The elimination of climate-focused programs, legislation, offices and policies would be accompanied by a dramatic increase in fossil fuel extraction and use – a reversal of Biden’s “war”.
The chapter on the Department of the Interior, which manages federal lands and natural resources, recommends it “conduct offshore oil and natural gas lease sales to the maximum extent permitted” and restart the coal-leasing program.
This should include returning to the first Trump administration’s plans to further open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil fields development. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission should, likewise, “not use environmental issues like climate change as a reason to stop LNG projects”.
Given the size and influence of the US economy, these policies would inevitably have global implications. This is not lost on the Mandate’s authors: the fight against the “radical climate agenda” is both local and global.
Analysis by the Guardian argues that taken together, these plans for rewinding climate action and accelerating fossil fuel extraction and use would be “even more extreme for the environment” than those of the first Trump administration.
This would not be a straightforward case of the US reverting from being a “good” actor on climate to a “bad” one. While the Biden administration has presided over some of the most significant climate legislation and actions in US history, domestic oil production has also hit a record high under Biden’s leadership. The US is already the second highest emitter of greenhouse gases in the world.
Several nations, including Australia, might find it convenient to hide behind the much more explicitly destructive policies of a future conservative US administration.
According to modelling by UK-based Carbon Brief, which does not include the increases in fossil fuel extraction and use outlined by the Mandate, a second Trump administration could result in an increase in emissions “equivalent to the combined annual emissions of the EU and Japan, or the combined annual total of the world’s 140 lowest-emitting countries”.
That would mean, even without accounting for the opening of new oil reserves in places like Alaska, “a second Trump term […] would likely end any global hopes of keeping global warming below 1.5C”.
Project 2025’s authors are, of course, unapologetic. The Mandate demands that the next conservative administration “go on offense” and assert “America’s energy interests […] around the world” – to the point of establishing “full-spectrum strategic energy dominance”, in order to restore the nation’s global primacy.
A world on fire: security and defence
Restoring that global primacy is the focus of Section 2 of the Mandate. This section argues the Departments of Defense and State are “first among equals” with the executive branch, suggesting international relations should be a major focus for the next conservative presidency. It argues the success of such an administration “will be determined in part by whether [Defence and State] can be significantly improved in short order”.
Why is that improvement so important? Because, according to the Mandate, the US is engaged in an existential battle with its enemies, in “a world on fire”. China is, unsurprisingly, the main game: “America’s most dangerous international enemy”.
The Mandate’s overwhelming focus on China and its assessment that the world is in an era of “great power competition” is not radically different from the position of the current administration – nor the rest of the Western world. But the Mandate’s suggested response is different.
“The next conservative President,” the Mandate claims, “has the opportunity to restructure the making and execution of U.S. defense and foreign policy and reset the nation’s role in the world.”
For Defense, this reset means restoring “warfighting as its sole mission” and making its highest priority “defeating the threat of the Chinese Communist Party”. It means dismantling the Department of Homeland Security and bringing its remit under Defense. It then recommends the department help with “aggressively building the border wall system on America’s southern border” and deploy “military personnel and hardware to prevent illegal crossings”.
Along with this expanded, more aggressive role for the Pentagon, the Mandate advocates for a dramatic expansion in defence personnel. A reduced force in Europe would be combined with an increase in “the Army force structure by 50,000 to handle two major regional contingencies simultaneously”.
It’s not quite clear how recruitment would be boosted so quickly. But at one point, the Mandate recommends requiring completion of the military entrance examination “by all students in schools that receive federal funding”. This is one of many lines that hints at a radical reshaping of American life.
The “two major contingencies” the department must prepare for appear to be “threats” from both China and Russia. As the long fight over US funding for Ukraine has demonstrated, however, many Trump-aligned conservatives have an ideological affinity with Putin’s Russia. This radical turnaround in the recent history of US–Russia relations marks a clear tension in conservative politics.
The Mandate acknowledges Russia now “starkly divides conservatives”. But it offers no real resolution, suggesting this would be left up to the president. Inevitable contradictions like this run throughout.
Even on China – one of very few issues that unites conservatives and liberals – the Mandate can contradict itself. One chapter, for example, worries about China blocking market access for the United States. Another advocates complete market decoupling.
Modernise, adapt, expand: on the nuclear arsenal
Trump has repeatedly toyed with the possibility of using nuclear weapons. In 2016, the then-candidate was pressed on why he wouldn’t rule out using them. He responded with his own question: “Then why are we making them? Why do we make them?”
As president, Trump repeatedly bragged about the US nuclear arsenal and weapons development, and allegedly illegally removed classified documents concerning nuclear capabilities from the White House. During his presidency, the US also dropped the biggest non-nuclear bomb, nicknamed with characteristic misogyny the “mother of all bombs”, on Afghanistan.
Trump alarmed nuclear experts by talking about America’s nuclear weapons.
The Mandate encourages more weapons development. It argues the Department of Energy should refocus on “developing new nuclear weapons and naval nuclear reactors”. Its recommendation that the United States “expand” its nuclear arsenal in order to “deter Russia and China simultaneously” will especially concern advocates of non-proliferation.
The Mandate also recommends the next administration “end ineffective and counterproductive nonproliferation activities like those involving Iran and the United Nations”.
“Friends and adversaries” abroad
This ramping up of American militarism should be accompanied, according to the Mandate, by a radical shakeup of American diplomacy. The next administration should
significantly reorient the U.S. government’s posture toward friends and adversaries alike – which will include much more honest assessments about who are friends and who are not. This reorientation could represent the most significant shift in core foreign policy principles and corresponding action since the end of the Cold War.
In a line that inevitably provokes thoughts of regime change, the Mandate suggests “the time may be right to press harder on the Iranian theocracy […] and take other steps to draw Iran into the community of free and modern nations”. It is, of course, silent on how disastrous regime change has proved to be in the conduct of US foreign policy over the past half century.
The Mandate also suggests a return to the Trump administration’s “tough love” approach to US participation in international organisations, ensuring no foreign aid supports reproductive rights or care, and that USAID, the nation’s major aid agency, “rescind all climate policies”.
All of this would mean installing “political ambassadors with strong personal relationships with the President”, especially in “key strategic posts such as Australia, Japan, the United Kingdom, the United Nations, and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)”. In the State Department specifically, “No one in a leadership position on the morning of January 20 should hold that position at the end of the day.”
Perhaps most significantly, Roberts argues in the Mandate’s foreword that “Economic engagement with China should be ended, not rethought.” The chapter on the Department of Commerce similarly argues for “strategic decoupling from China”.
Given the size and scope of the American and Chinese economies, and smaller nations like Australia’s reliance on stable economic relations with both, such a “decoupling” from China, alongside a ramping up of militarism, would have significant, wide-ranging consequences.
Another recommendation is that the United States “withdraw” from both the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and “terminate its financial contribution to both institutions”. The global consequences of even more radical suggestions like a return to the gold standard, or even “abolishing the federal role in money altogether” in favour of a system of “free banking”, are genuinely mind-boggling.
A new, frightening world in the making?
Project 2025 opens a window onto the modern American conservative movement, documenting in minute detail just how much it has reoriented itself around Trump and the ideological incoherence of Trumpism more broadly. The success, or not, of this effort to unify the movement will also have international implications, as those same organisations and individuals cultivate their connections with the far-right globally.
While Trump, as always, is difficult to predict, there are long and deep links between his campaign and supporters and the Project’s supporters and contributors. Nothing is inevitable, but should Trump return to the White House, it is highly likely at least some of Project 2025’s recommendations, policies, authors, and aspiring officials will join him there. These include people like Peter Navarro, a former Trump official, loyalist and Mandate author, who is currently serving a four-month prison sentence for contempt of Congress because he refused to comply with a congressional subpoena during the January 6 investigation.
Project 2025’s Mandate is iconoclastic and dystopian, offering a dark vision of a highly militaristic and unapologetically aggressive America ascendant in “a world on fire”. Those who wish to understand Trump and the movement behind him, and the active threat they pose to American democracy, are obliged to take it seriously.
Emma Shortis is Senior Researcher in International and Security Affairs at The Australia Institute, an independent think tank.
An artificial sweetener called neotame can cause significant harm to the gut, my colleagues and I discovered. It does this harm in two ways. One, by breaking down the layer of cells that line the intestine. And, two, by causing previously healthy gut bacteria to become diseased, resulting in them invading the gut wall.
The study, published in the journal Frontiers in Nutrition, is the first to show this double-hit negative effect of neotame on the gut, resulting in damage similar to that seen in inflammatory bowel disease and sepsis.
To reduce childhood obesity, six years ago this month, the UK government introduced a soft drinks industry levy. This “sugar tax” required a levy to be paid for any soft drink – equivalent to manufacturers adding 72p for a three-litre bottle of soft drink.
Since the levy was introduced, there has been a nearly 50% decrease in the average sugar content of soft drinks. While reducing sugar content certainly addresses childhood obesity, it does not give the same sweet taste perception that consumers are used to experiencing in their diet. That’s where artificial sweeteners can make a real difference.
Artificial sweeteners are chemical compounds are up to 600 times sweeter than sugar with very few (if any) calories, and are cheap and easy for manufacturers to use.
Traditional artificial sweeteners, such as aspartame, sucralose and acesulfame potassium (acesulfame K) have been found in a wide range of foods and drinks for many years as a way to increase the sweet taste without adding significant calories or costs.
However, in the last few years, there has been controversy in the field. Several studies have suggested potential health harms associated with consuming these sweeteners, ranging from gastrointestinal disease to dementia.
Although none of these harms have been proved, it has paved the way for new sweeteners to be developed to try to avoid any possible health issues. These next-generation sweeteners are up to 13,000 times sweeter than sugar, have no calories and no aftertaste (a common complaint with traditional sweeteners). An example of this new type of sweetener is neotame.
Neotame was developed as an alternative to aspartame with the aim of being a more stable and sweet version of the traditional sweetener. It is very stable at high temperatures, which means it is a good additive to use in baked goods. It is also used in soft drinks and chewing gum.
Neotame has been approved for use in more than 35 countries, including the UK, although the European Food Safety Agency is currently reviewing the sweetener as part of a series of evidence‐based risk assessments of certain sweeteners.
While neotame has been shown to change the profile of gut bacteria, very little research has investigated the effect of neotame at the cellular level.
Kills the cells that line the gut wall
The new study my colleagues and I conducted aimed to fill that gap in our knowledge. We used a cell model of the human intestine and model bacteria from the human gut microbiota to study how neotame consumed in the diet could affect gut health.
We found that, at higher concentrations, neotame can kill the cells that line the gut wall and, at lower concentrations, the sweetener can cause the gut to become more susceptible to leaks. Both these effects could result in inflammation of the intestine, which is linked to inflammatory bowel disease and sepsis.
We found that exposure of human gut cells to the acceptable daily intake, as decided by food safety agencies, of neotame causes cells to die. However, it is worth noting that, because neotame is so intensely sweet, it is unlikely that a person would consume enough sweetener in their daily diet to achieve this amount.
At lower concentrations of neotame, which could be seen in the diet, we still found a breakdown of the gut barrier was sufficient to be associated with an increased chance of infection in the body.
In the gut bacteria models, a type of E coli and E faecalis, neotame did not kill the bacteria but instead increased their ability to form “biofilms”. When bacteria form a biofilm, they cluster together as a protective mechanism which makes them more resistant to antibiotics. Our study also shows that neotame increases the ability of the E coli to invade and kill human gut cells.
These findings are very similar to those with traditional sweeteners, such as sucralose and aspartame, in terms of their effect on gut bacteria and human gut cells.
This suggests that the next-generation sweeteners may not be the solution that had been hoped for. So we are still stuck with the vexing question: how do we enjoy a sweet taste in our diet without the health harms that sugars, and now sweeteners, seem to give?
Havovi Chichger 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.
This may seem a little baffling. In fact, when I tell this to friends who don’t keep up with these issues, they’re stunned. How, they want to know, is DEI being blamed for these issues? And why would anyone do so?
They’re right to be skeptical: these explanations really are quite terrible. But there are reasons why the term DEI is leaping to the forefront of the culture war, pushed by the far right into every conversation possible.
In right-wing rhetoric, the DEI label is often used to play upon racial resentments. It is increasingly appropriated as a racist dog whistle used to question and undermine the positions, qualifications and abilities of racialized people.
“What they’re doing is trying to create a framework whereby any person of colour’s position is inherently suspect…It’s about building a sociocultural mechanism for reinforcing the existing hierarchy.”
Co-opting terms
There’s nothing new about this sort of effort. But the way DEI is used to play into racist sentiments is uniquely powerful, and more potent than other culture war terms.
“Affirmative action” is also used to attack members of underrepresented groups who find their way into desirable positions, but it’s no good for book bans. Other terms like “woke,” “snowflake” and “politically correct” can readily be used to discredit anti-racist activists, but they can’t be easily applied to someone who integrates into a white workplace.
DEI can cover all of these. Those books you don’t like? Blame DEI initiatives. Black people getting prestigious jobs? DEI is at fault. Annoying young student activists? Too much DEI on university campuses. It’s hard to find a hot-button issue or social context where DEI can’t be hurled as a term of abuse to undermine marginalized people.
And that’s just what has happened. A Republican lawmaker in Utah blamed the Baltimore bridge collapse on DEI saying, “this is what happens when you have governors who prioritize diversity over the wellbeing and security of citizens.” Others called the city’s Black mayor, Brandon Scott, a “DEI mayor.”
In response to a door falling off a Boeing plane, Elon Musk asked Twitter users: “Do you want to fly in an airplane where they prioritized DEI hiring over your safety?”
Harvard professor Alan Dershowitz claimed that a “DEI bureaucracy has become a central contributor to anti-Jewish attitudes on campuses.”
However, DEI is more than just a convenient catch-all term for culture war flashpoints. This rhetoric is having a real effect on how various institutions run. Universities in Texas and Florida have cut dozens of jobs in response to state bans on DEI initiatives.
DEI as a dog whistle
When people blame DEI for airplane doors coming off, or a bridge collapsing, they are really blaming Black people without saying so explicitly. As American TV host Joy Reid noted:
“At this point it’s evident what they mean by ‘DEI,’ right? It means Black people… It’s not fashionable to be openly racist anymore in America… so referring to a Black mayor as a DEI mayor gets the point across.”
“We know what these folks really want to say when they say DEI mayor… They really want to say the N-word.”
Dog whistles require two meanings. The surface, more acceptable one, is widely understood; the other is the less acceptable one, hidden because it needs to be.
Scott explained the hidden meaning of “DEI” in racist contexts. But the surface one matters too because it provides good cover to argue that one’s rhetoric is not racially charged. The Utah lawmaker was able to insist that he meant officials had been more concerned with DEI programs than with safety, and that’s the very same line that was used about Boeing. It’s more acceptable to criticize a program or corporation than it is to criticize people for their race.
Another reason DEI is especially effective as cover for racist views is because even anti-racists can find it objectionable. Workplace DEI training sessions are widespread, and face criticism from across the political spectrum.
On the right, the concern is that white people are being made to feel guilty. On the left, it’s that these sessions can be a way for organizations to virtue signal while avoiding effective action.
DEI, then, can be seen as a rhetorical Swiss Army knife of weaponized language. It can be used to blame racialized people for doors falling off airplanes, history classes, bridges collapsing, student activism or simply for getting jobs. And it will carry with it the hostility that people from all along the political spectrum feel towards DEI training programs.
All the while, it will also be dog whistling the very worst racist sentiments. Swiss army knives are useful, but in the wrong hands they can be dangerous. We need to recognize the very real dangers of how DEI is being used.
Jennifer Saul 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.
Some reports and popular books, such as Bill Gammage’s Biggest Estate on Earth, have argued that extensive areas of Australia’s forests were kept open through frequent burning by First Nations people. Advocates for widespread thinning and burning of these forests have relied on this belief. They argue fire is needed to return these forests to their “pre-invasion” state.
A key question then is: what does the evidence say about what tall, wet forests actually looked like 250 years ago? The answer matters because it influences how these forests are managed. It’s also needed to guide efforts to restore them to their natural state.
In a new scientific paper, we looked carefully at the body of evidence on the natural pre-invasion state of Australian forests, such as those dominated by majestic mountain ash (Eucalyptus regnans), the world’s tallest flowering plant. We analysed historical documents, First Nations Peoples’ recorded testimonies and the scientific evidence.
Our analysis shows most areas of mainland mountain ash forests were likely to have been dense and wet at the time of British invasion. The large overstorey eucalypt trees were relatively widely spaced, but there was a dense understorey of broad-leaved shrubs, tree ferns and mid-storey trees, including elements of cool temperate rainforest.
Old-growth mountain ash forest in Tarra Bulga National Park on Brataualung Country.
Chris Taylor
We looked at many sources of historical evidence. We read colonial expeditioners’ diaries. We reviewed colonial paintings and photographs. We sought out recorded and published testimonies from First Nations People. We compiled evidence from studies such as those that used carbon dating, tree rings and pollen cores.
We also examined the basic ecology of how the forests grow and develop, the plants’ level of fire sensitivity and different animals’ habitat needs.
As an example of the many accounts we found, 19th-century civil servant and mining engineer Robert Brough Smyth wrote about:
[…] heavily timbered ranges lying between Hoddle’s Creek and Wilson’s Promontory. The higher parts and the flanks of these ranges are covered with dense scrubs, and in the rich alluviums bordering the creeks and rivers the trees are lofty, and the undergrowth luxuriant; indeed in some parts so dense as to be impenetrable without an axe and bill-hook.
Similarly, in 1824, colonial explorers Hamilton Hume and William Hovell described their encounter with mountain ash forests at Mount Disappointment in Victoria:
Here […] they find themselves completely at a stand, without clue or guide as to the direction in which they are to proceed; the brush wood so thick that it was impossible to see before them in any direction ten yards.
The ecological and other scientific evidence suggests mountain ash forests evolved under conditions where high-severity bushfires were rare. As a result, mature forests of eucalypt trees of multiple ages dominated these landscapes. There was no evidence of active and widespread use of recurrent low-severity fire or thinning.
Our key conclusion is that these forests were not open or park-like – as was the case in some other vegetation types in Australia.
First Nations People knew not all Country needs fire
Importantly, tall wet forests were not wilderness. Rather, they were places of significance for First Nations People. They used these forests seasonally to access important sites and resources and as pathways to visit others in neighbouring Countries.
There is no doubt parts of Australia were subject to recurrent cultural burning for many diverse and important reasons before the British invasion. However, our discussions with Traditional Custodians in the Central Highlands of Victoria, including Elders, indicate cultural burning was not widely practised in most of the mountain ash forests there. Nor were these forests actively thinned.
Many First Nations People advocate the need to consider ecological responses to fire. The right fire (or not) for the right Country is a guiding principle of traditional fire management. In the words of Elder and cultural fire practitioner Victor Steffensen:
Aboriginal fire knowledge is based on Country that needs fire, and also Country that doesn’t need fire. Even Country we don’t burn is an important part of fire management knowledge and must be within the expertise of a fire practitioner.
Repeated burning, and even low-severity fire, is unsuited to the ecology of tall, wet forests. It can lead to their collapse and replacement by entirely different vegetation such as wattle scrub.
Thinning and burning will also destroy habitat for a wide range of species. They include critically endangered ones such as Leadbeater’s possum. Indeed, mountain ash forests are themselves recognised as a critically endangered ecosystem.
Thinned alpine ash forest that was subsequently burned in the 2009 fires near Lake Mountain.
Chris Taylor
The compelling evidence we compiled all indicates mountain ash forests were dense, wet environments, not open and park-like, at the time of British invasion.
The use of scientific evidence is essential for managing Australia’s natural environments. Based on this evidence, we should not be deliberately burning or thinning these forests, which will have adverse impacts.
Rather, restoration should involve letting these forests mature. We should aim to expand the size of the old-growth forest estate to precolonial levels. Where regeneration has failed, practices such as planting and reseeding will be important to restore ecological values.
David Lindenmayer receives funding from the Victorian and Australian governments. He is a member of the Biodiversity Council and Birds Australia.
Elle Bowd receives funding from the NSW government.
Chris Taylor and Philip Zylstra 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.
by James B. Dorey, Lecturer in Biological Sciences, University of Wollongong
Australian teddy bear bees are cute and fluffy, but get a look at that massive (unbarbed) stinger!
James Dorey Photography
Most of us have been stung by a bee and we know it’s not much fun. But maybe we also felt a tinge of regret, or vindication, knowing the offending bee will die. Right? Well, for 99.96% of bee species, that’s not actually the case.
Only eight out of almost 21,000 bee species in the world die when they sting. Another subset can’t sting at all, and the majority of bees can sting as often as they want. But there’s even more to it than that.
To understand the intricacies of bees and their stinging potential, we’re going to need to talk about the shape of stingers, bee genitals, and attitude.
Our beloved, and deadly, honey bees
What you most likely remember getting stung by is the European honey bee (Apis mellifera). Native to Europe and Africa, these bees are today found almost everywhere in the world.
They are one of eight honey bee species worldwide, with Apis bees representing just 0.04% of total bee species. And yes, these bees die after they sting you.
But why?
We could say they die for queen and colony, but the actual reason these bees die after stinging is because of their barbed stingers. These brutal barbs will, most of the time, prevent the bee from pulling the stinger out.
Instead, the bee leaves her appendage embedded in your skin and flies off without it. After the bee is gone, to later die from her wound, the stinger remains lodged there pumping more venom.
Beyond that, bees and wasps (probably mostly European honey bees) are Australia’s deadliest venomous animals. In 2017–18, 12 out of 19 deaths due to venomous animals were because of these little insects. (Only a small proportion of people are deathly allergic.)
Talk about good PR.
So what is a stinger?
A stinger, at least in most bees, wasps and ants, is actually a tube for laying eggs (ovipositor) that has also been adapted for violent defence. This group of stinging insects, the aculeate wasps (yes, bees and ants are technically a kind of wasp), have been stabbing away in self-defence for 190 million years.
You could say it’s their defining feature.
A Sycoscapter parasitoid wasp laying eggs into a fig through her ovipositor (bottom middle). Her ovipositor sheath, which usually surrounds the ovipositor, is curved behind her and to the right. Sycoscapter wasps are sister to the aculeate wasps (they don’t sting).
James Dorey Photography
With so much evolution literally under their belts they’ve also developed a diversity of stinging strategies. But let’s just get back to the bees.
The sting of the European honey bee is about as painful as a bee sting gets, scoring a 2 out of 4 on the Schmidt insect sting pain index.
But most other bees don’t pack the same punch — though I have heard some painful reviews from less-than-careful colleagues. On the flipside, most bee species can sting you as many times as they like because their stingers lack the barbs found in honey bees. Although, if they keep at it, they might eventually run out of venom.
Even more surprising is that hundreds of bee species have lost their ability to sting entirely.
Can you tell who’s packing?
Globally, there are 537 species (about 2.6% of all bee species) of “stingless bees” in the tribe Meliponini. We have only 11 of these species (in the genera Austroplebeia and Tetragonula) in Australia. These peaceful little bees can also be kept in hives and make honey.
Stingless bees can still defend their nests, when offended, by biting. But you might think of them more as a nuisance than a deadly stinging swarm.
An Australian stingless bee, Tetragonula carbonaria, foraging on a Macadamia flower.
James Dorey Photography
Australia also has the only bee family (there are a total of seven families globally) that’s found on a single continent. This is the Stenotritidae family, which comprises 21 species. These gentle and gorgeous giants (14–19mm in length, up to twice as long as European honey bees) also get around without a functional stinger.
The long ovipositor of this parasitoid, and non-stinging, wasp is essentially a hypodermic needle for injecting an egg.
James Dorey Photography
The astute reader might have realised something by this point in the article. If stingers are modified egg-laying tubes … what about the boys? Male bees, of all bee species, lack stingers and have, ahem, other anatomy instead. However, some male bees will still make a show of “stinging” if you try to grab them.
Some male wasps can even do a bit of damage, though they have no venom to produce a sting.
Why is it always the honey bees?
So, if the majority of bees can sting, why is it always the European honey bee having a go? There are a couple of likely answers to that question.
First, the European honey bee is very abundant across much of the world. Their colonies typically have around 50,000 individuals and they can fly 10km to forage.
In comparison, most wild bees only forage very short distances (less than 200m) and must stay close to their nest. So those hardworking European honey bees are really putting in the miles.
Second, European honey bees are social. They will literally die to protect their mother, sisters and brothers. In contrast, the vast majority of bees (and wasps) are actually solitary (single mums doing it for themselves) and lack the altruistic aggression of their social relatives.
A complicated relationship
We have an interesting relationship with our European honey bees. They can be deadly, are non-native (across much of the world), and will aggressively defend their nests. But they are crucial for crop pollination and, well, their honey is to die for.
But it’s worth remembering these are the tiny minority in terms of species. We have thousands of native bee species (more than 1,600 found so far in Australia) that are more likely to simply buzz off than go in for a sting.
James B. Dorey has received funding from organisations like the University of Wollongong, Flinders University, the Playford Trust, and the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (New Colombo Plan); but none in relation to this article.
Amy-Marie Gilpin receives funding from Western Sydney University and Horticulture Innovation Australia. She is also a member of the IUCN Wild Bee Specialist Group Oceania.
Rosalyn Gloag receives funding from The Australian Research Council, but not in relation to this article. She is affiliated with The University of Sydney. She is also a member of the IUCN Wild Bee Specialist Group Oceania.
These incidents are not just glitches, but examples of more fundamental problems. As artificial intelligence and machine learning tools become more integrated into daily life, ethical considerations are growing, from privacy issues and race and gender biases in coding to the spread of misinformation.
The general public depends on software engineers and computer scientists to ensure these technologies are created in a safe and ethical manner. As a sociologist and doctoral candidate interested in science, technology, engineering and math education, we are currently researching how engineers in many different fields learn and understand their responsibilities to the public.
Yet our recent research, as well as that of other scholars, points to a troubling reality: The next generation of engineers often seem unprepared to grapple with the social implications of their work. What’s more, some appear apathetic about the moral dilemmas their careers may bring – just as advances in AI intensify such dilemmas.
Aware, but unprepared
As part of our ongoing research, we interviewed more than 60 electrical engineering and computer science masters students at a top engineering program in the United States. We asked students about their experiences with ethical challenges in engineering, their knowledge of ethical dilemmas in the field and how they would respond to scenarios in the future.
First, the good news: Most students recognized potential dangers of AI and expressed concern about personal privacy and the potential to cause harm – like how race and gender biases can be written into algorithms, intentionally or unintentionally.
One student, for example, expressed dismay at the environmental impact of AI, saying AI companies are using “more and more greenhouse power, [for] minimal benefits.” Others discussed concerns about where and how AIs are being applied, including for military technology and to generate falsified information and images.
When asked, however, “Do you feel equipped to respond in concerning or unethical situations?” students often said no.
“Flat out no. … It is kind of scary,” one student replied. “Do YOU know who I’m supposed to go to?”
Another was troubled by the lack of training: “I [would be] dealing with that with no experience. … Who knows how I’ll react.”
Other researchers have similarly found that many engineering students do not feel satisfied with the ethics training they do receive. Common training usually emphasizes professional codes of conduct, rather than the complex socio-technical factors underlying ethical decision-making. Research suggests that even when presented with particular scenarios or case studies, engineering students often struggle to recognize ethical dilemmas.
‘A box to check off’
Accredited engineering programs are required to “include topics related to professional and ethical responsibilities” in some capacity.
Yet ethics training is rarely emphasized in the formal curricula. A study assessing undergraduate STEM curricula in the U.S. found that coverage of ethical issues varied greatly in terms of content, amount and how seriously it is presented. Additionally, an analysis of academic literature about engineering education found that ethics is often considered nonessential training.
Many engineering faculty express dissatisfaction with students’ understanding, but report feeling pressure from engineering colleagues and students themselves to prioritize technical skills in their limited class time.
Researchers in one 2018 study interviewed over 50 engineering faculty and documented hesitancy – and sometimes even outright resistance – toward incorporating public welfare issues into their engineering classes. More than a quarter of professors they interviewed saw ethics and societal impacts as outside “real” engineering work.
About a third of students we interviewed in our ongoing research project share this seeming apathy toward ethics training, referring to ethics classes as “just a box to check off.”
“If I’m paying money to attend ethics class as an engineer, I’m going to be furious,” one said.
These attitudes sometimes extend to how students view engineers’ role in society. One interviewee in our current study, for example, said that an engineer’s “responsibility is just to create that thing, design that thing and … tell people how to use it. [Misusage] issues are not their concern.”
One of us, Erin Cech, followed a cohort of 326 engineering students from four U.S. colleges. This research, published in 2014, suggested that engineers actually became less concerned over the course of their degree about their ethical responsibilities and understanding the public consequences of technology. Following them after they left college, we found that their concerns regarding ethics did not rebound once these new graduates entered the workforce.
Joining the work world
When engineers do receive ethics training as part of their degree, it seems to work.
Along with engineering professor Cynthia Finelli, we conducted a survey of over 500 employed engineers. Engineers who received formal ethics and public welfare training in school are more likely to understand their responsibility to the public in their professional roles, and recognize the need for collective problem solving. Compared to engineers who did not receive training, they were 30% more likely to have noticed an ethical issue in their workplace and 52% more likely to have taken action.
Over a quarter of these practicing engineers reported encountering a concerning ethical situation at work. Yet approximately one-third said they have never received training in public welfare – not during their education, and not during their career.
This gap in ethics education raises serious questions about how well-prepared the next generation of engineers will be to navigate the complex ethical landscape of their field, especially when it comes to AI.
To be sure, the burden of watching out for public welfare is not shouldered by engineers, designers and programmers alone. Companies and legislators share the responsibility.
But the people who are designing, testing and fine-tuning this technology are the public’s first line of defense. We believe educational programs owe it to them – and the rest of us – to take this training seriously.
Elana Goldenkoff receives funding from National Science Foundation and Schmidt Futures.
Erin A. Cech receives funding from the National Science Foundation.
I would not say these are the best of times. I would not say these are the chillest of times. I would not say, as we emerge from a dark and hot winter into a wet and hotter spring, that these are the most predictable of times. And yet I cannot tell you how excited I am that we are barreling toward Passover. Passover sucks (a week-plus of unleavened meals, a distinct heaviness in the form of constant reminders of our past, too much sugar-wine, etc.), but it always brings matzo times. And I positively adore matzo times.
To be clear: Matzo sucks, too. No, I hear you—matzo is a mammothly important food, a colossally symbolic one. No, no really—I understand (I will attach my Hebrew high school certificate here, where is yours?!)! But also, matzo is a worse version of a large and stale salt-free Saltine. Even when it’s at its absolute freshest and best, it’s still the same level of bad as when it’s been sitting inside a box in a damp basement for 11 and ¾ months. What other foods can you name that are, without exception, always at their very best…and simultaneously at their very worst? Matzo is so bad. I still love matzo.
Over the past few months, we have been subjected to the introduction of Girl Dinner, #WaterTok, Fruit Roll-Up ice cream, the cottage cheese-ification of everything…you’re familiar, I’m sure. Do you know what wasn’t featured in anyone’s Girl Dinners? Broken shards of solid flour-water. Do you know what no one was eating that made them so thirsty, prompting them to bum-rush an area Target and monopolize all the Stanleys? Holy holey cardboard. Matzo will never go viral. Nobody wants it to! None of us aspire to live in a world where matzo is aspirational. And that’s just some of the beauty of matzo.
Over the course of the next week, on the internet and IRL, we will see lush vats of charoset, hacks for horseradish housing, and takes on how to best arrange a Seder plate amidst a larger Seder spread, but no one will talk about matzo. We will all sit there and grimace as we pile charoset and then horseradish onto the vehicle that is matzo—a mandated player at the same table—and comment on everything we just ate…except for the matzo. To be clear, matzo will make continuous appearances in all this super-cute Seder content across the world during the holiday…but it will likely be enveloped in gorgeous, sentimental matzo covers, never to be seen by the naked eye. What other foods can you name that are, without exception, so synonymous with a holiday but nobody wants to talk about eating them?
Every year for as long as I can remember, right around the time the sun starts rising closer to 6 a.m. than to 7, two boxes of matzo appear on my parents’ countertop right by the coffee machine. They’re not prepping for Passover quite yet; not explicitly. But they’re slowly rotating buttered or cream-cheesed pieces of it into their breakfast routines. Different pots of toppings—sweet preserves, salty spreads, straight salt for that already salty butter—end up spread around their plates. They mix and match their matzo toppings from piece to piece. They offer me a piece every time, every single year, across days in February and the beginning of March, always insisting the strawberry jam makes it so much better. It doesn’t, and they know it, but it’s nice that we all pretend.
A few weeks later, fresh boxes stack up on their counter, next to the fridge, on the table. There’s a lot of fucking matzo before there’s none at all for months and months. I love the brown-and-yellow stacks of boxes. I love the pre-matzo times that every single year dovetail us right into the matzo times. They are completely predictable, unremarkable times, and I love the bowel-clogging cracker that ushers all of it in.
Passover sucks. Matzo sucks. I love Passover. I love the matzo times.
There are few foods more reviled than gefilte fish—the mere mention of it almost always triggers a compulsory acknowledgement of its inherent disgustingness. Gefilte fish elicits acks and icks in conversation and preemptive apologies from food and recipe writers, who manage to say in a single breath: "I value this food enough to spill ink about it" and "of course we all agree it's pretty gross."
I will not do that, because I do not believe it. Yes, it's a poached fish ball often served in its own chilled jelly, but I don't think there's anything particularly offensive about that. Its flavor is pleasantly clean verging on mild, its seasonings constrained and balanced, and I can think of no other food that makes prepared horseradish taste so good—not even roast beef. I have always loved gefilte fish, and I am convinced that if more people dropped their reflexively aghast posture when in its presence, many of them would, too.
Serious Eats / Amanda Suarez
I've eaten enough gefilte fish in my life to stuff a whale, but only now have I done the work to put together a recipe of my own, to the degree I can even call it my own. My recipe below is a very traditional recipe, free of tricks or "upgrades" or culinary flourishes. I arrived at it by reading many, many recipes for gefilte fish, noting their similarities as well as their differences, and running test batch after test batch to work out the ingredients and ratios that most aligned with my tastes. As it turns out, it landed not too far from a lot of classic recipes.
In many ways, this is an incredibly easy recipe to put together, though finding and preparing the fish itself can be a major pain—I mean that literally, my fingers are still healing from all the scratches and pricks I endured when washing and cleaning the bones for the broth. But just as a good latke requires grating a few knuckles, so, apparently, does good gefilte fish require getting your finger caught on mysterious sharp bits inside a pike's mouth. I'd say it's worth it.
Gefilte What?
Gefilte is the Yiddish word for "stuffed," because in centuries past, the seasoned ground fish mixture—a "forcemeat" if you want to use the technical culinary term for it—was packed back into the skin of the fish from which it had come before being cooked. Almost no one does the stuffing part anymore, but the cooked forcemeat filling remains a staple of the Ashkenazi Jewish table, especially for the Passover seder—though I, for one, am happy to eat gefilte fish any day.
Serious Eats / Amanda Suarez
Today, you'll usually see gefilte fish prepared a couple different ways, either packed into a loaf shape and baked, or formed into patties or balls and poached in a broth made from the fish bones. This recipe is for the poached version, which is what I mostly ate growing up. Often, that poached version is served cold, at times with its jellied aspic alongside. While the fish used varies depending on location and varying Ashkenazi traditions, the most common ones in the United States are freshwater fish like carp, pike, and whitefish, typically seasoned simply with onion, pepper, salt, and sugar and bound with eggs and matzo meal.
There is much more to gefilte fish's story, including that it originated as a popular Christian food for Lent during Medieval times. You can read more about that via the link, but the point I'd like to stress is that there is nothing unusual about gefilte fish. It has a history that goes back centuries and is rooted in a widespread tradition of making flavorful forcemeats from fish and then cooking them gently. Millions of people have enjoyed this dish, and ones like it—including France's famed pike quenelles—across vast stretches of land for ages through to the present. That hardly sounds like an inherently disgusting recipe to me.
Finding and Prepping the Fish
By far the most difficult thing about making gefilte fish is securing the fish itself. I live in New York City and ran into wall after wall trying to order it for this recipe in the lead-up to Passover. Many fishmongers told me I would have needed to place an order weeks in advance, and even when I tried to pull the "this is for a major food publication" trump card with the PR reps of one significant fish wholesaler, I still got bupkis. Ultimately, Citarella in the West Village came through for me, handing me a heavy bag of pounds upon pounds of carp, whitefish, and pike two days after I placed my order. (I name them not because I owe them—I paid for the fish in full—but simply because, if you're in the New York City area, it may help to know they're one of your best bets. Plus I'm just so grateful they made it work.)
Serious Eats / Amanda Suarez
To be clear, you don't have to use all three of those fishes. If you can only find fresh carp, or pike, or whiting, you can still make gefilte fish with just that. And if you live somewhere where those three types of fish are not available, you can probably ask around at good fishmongers to find out what's best to use for gefilte fish.
It doesn't even have to be freshwater fish. From what I've read, Jews in the United Kingdom routinely make gefilte fish with saltwater fish like cod. But for most Jews in most places, the sweet flesh of freshwater fish is the preferred option. But now I will issue a major warning: If you cannot find good freshwater fish from a quality fishmonger, do not under any circumstances use whatever freshwater fish you can find easily, because most of the time that fish is garbage. I know because I made this mistake: In the early stages of developing this recipe, before Citarella came through with the good stuff, I relented and bought pounds upon pounds of mixed freshwater fish from a local market, including fillets of frozen tilapia. I knew it was going to be bad, but the resulting gefilte fish tasted so horrendously muddy that I spit every bite straight into the garbage. Avoid low-quality freshwater fish, low-quality farmed fish, and anything that's been held in a tank for too long. They will taste like the concentrated conditions in which they lived.
Once you have a source for your fish locked in, you'll need to make a decision about how to go about prepping it. You need to buy whole fish so that you can use the heads and bones for the stock, but that fish needs to be filleted, skinned, deboned, and ground. You can do this yourself, but it's quite a chore. It's much easier is to ask your fishmonger to do this for you, and will eliminate one of the biggest labors of the whole process.
The Tricky Issue of Knowing How Much Fish to Buy
Many gefilte fish recipes call for a whole fish weight, since you need the heads and bones to make the stock. They then estimate a yield based on that whole fish weight for the meat that will be used to make the gefilte fish itself. One very common estimate I've seen is that roughly seven pounds of whole fish will yield about three pounds of ground meat. When I bought my fish from Citarella, though, the whole fish weight was more than 12 pounds, but the ground meat I received was just about four pounds.
This raises a problem. If the yield is inconsistent, the resulting recipe will be inconsistent as well, since you may end up using the incorrect amount of ground fish relative to all the other ingredients that go into the forcemeat. The ratios matter to the final results, so you want to make sure you have the right amount of ground fish. For that reason, I've written my recipe to prioritize the weight of the ground meat: It calls for three pounds, which makes enough gefilte fish to serve an extended family of at least 12 and up to about 24 at a seder. Everything else is scaled to those three pounds (and of course you can easily scale this recipe up or down depending on how many people you're feeding: See my section below on scaling for how to do that).
I recommend talking with your fishmonger and specifying how much ground fish you want, and then asking for their help in determining how much whole fish will be required to accomplish that. Since you'll be buying the fish whole, you may end up erring on the side of slightly too much fish, but that is preferable to having too little for your needs.
The Importance of Cleaning the Fish
Let's assume that you have your fish and it's the right amount. Let's talk about about what to do with those bones and fish heads, since your fishmonger may still leave some work for you. Before cooking the fish bones and heads in the stock, you must make sure all the entrails are removed from the cavity and that the gills have been pulled fully out of the head, as the presence of any of that stuff will ruin the broth, turning it murky and foul.
Serious Eats / Amanda Suarez
It's also a good idea to wash the bones and heads well, using your fingers to rub away as much remaining blood as possible. Most of it will be located in the head and along the spine. I've tested this before when I worked on my fish stock recipe, and found that while washing makes a cleaner, clearer, less funky stock, it's not something that has to be 100% perfect. A little bit remaining won't ruin anything.
To further ensure your fish stock cooks up nice and clean, I've also written an optional blanching step into the recipe, in which the bones are brought to a simmer to coagulate some of the free-floating proteins and impurities. After the bones are simmered briefly, they're dumped into a colander and rinsed; then the the bones go back in the pot with fresh water and aromatics (I've included some especially fresh-tasting ones like fennel and dill) to cook. You don't have to do this blanching step, but it will produce a cleaner stock in both looks and flavor.
In addition to cleaning the bones for a nice clear stock, you'll want to be sure to pick through the meat, whether you grind the fish yourself or the fishmonger does it for you. Bones and scales can slip through when the person prepping the fish is working quickly, and even some chunks of fish can pass through without being ground properly. Getting a little extra to account for loss as a result of picking through the ground fish is a good idea.
Ratios, Ratios, Ratios
Making the fish mixture for gefilte fish is easy as can be: Mix the ingredients together and...that's it. So my focus when developing this recipe was to get a better sense of the ratios of ingredients and how they impact the final results. My favorite way to do this is to create a spreadsheet and log the ingredient details of as many great recipes as I can find to compare ingredients and ratios. Then I go into the kitchen and test the variations I'm seeing in the recipes to find out which I like best.
The ingredients themselves are fairly consistent from recipe to recipe: They almost all contain fish, eggs, matzo meal, onion, salt, sugar, and spices (usually white or black pepper, sometimes a touch of nutmeg). Carrot is an important element in most gefilte fish recipes, with some including it in the forcemeat itself, though I grew up mostly eating gefilte fish with boiled carrot served as a garnish and not folded into the fish mixture, so that's what I stuck with here.
Serious Eats / Amanda Suarez
Onion: Some recipes have you sauté the onion first while others have it folded in raw. I tried both and decided I liked each in their own way, so I split the onion in half, cooking half of it for a sweeter, more tender bite and leaving the rest raw for a little more texture and pronounced allium flavor.
Egg: Most recipes use one large egg per pound of fish, and I found this worked well; adding two per pound made bouncier gefilte fish that started to seem a little rubbery.
Matzo meal: Matzo meal, meanwhile, was most pleasing to me at the lower end of the ratio spectrum, about 1/4 cup per pound. The inclusion of matzo in the recipe is often described as a tactic to stretch the fish to feed more people, and without a doubt adding bread or other starches to protein mixtures does accomplish that. But there are culinary reasons for it that are just as, if not more, important. A starch that is mixed into ground meat is known in French cooking as a panade, and it helps to both bind and tenderize the proteins, reducing their overall rubberiness once cooked. While I'm sure poor families in the past added hefty amounts of matzo meal to truly stretch the fish, the 1/4 cup per pound called for in my and many other modern recipes hardly adds any mass at all. It is not there for economics, it is there for gustatory reasons.
The panade, though, can dry a meat mixture out, especially when it's made from something as dry as matzo. So it's helpful to add a small amount of water to the forcemeat and let it stand for at least 30 minutes to hydrate the matzo and loosen the mixture. This is typical in many meatball and meatloaf recipes, and it's a good move here too even though some recipes don't call for it.
How to Scale This Recipe Up or Down
After testing a range of ratios for various ingredients, I was able to nail down a basic per-pound recipe for gefilte fish. This is useful to know, as the recipe can easily be scaled up and down. If you only need to cook gefilte fish for a few people, you can probably make do with a one- or two-pound batch. If you need to feed a synagogue's worth of folks, you can scale it up (though you'll probably need to do it in batches at a certain point if the recipe exceeds the capacity of your gear).
For reference, here are my per-pound ratios so that you can scale as needed. Everything else about the recipe remains the same in terms of process and estimated cooking times.
Please don't take these precise numbers too literally. You do not need to measure 33 grams of matzo meal to the gram, nor do you need to go searching through your utensils drawer for a 1/3 teaspoon measure for the pepper—you can just go down to 1/4 teaspoon or up to 1/2 teaspoon for pound, or just eyeball it, which is what I would actually do in real life. Gefilte fish is forgiving and will be close enough as long as you're within these general ranges.
The main reason I'm specifying the brand of salt here is not because it's kosher, though that's a fitting choice for this recipe given its place on the Passover table, but instead because salt amounts can vary significantly when measured by volume. If you're using table salt and you measured one tablespoon, for example, you'd end up with twice as much salt as if you used Diamond Crystal. Similarly, Morton's kosher salt has a different mass per volume than Diamond Crystal, so once again, volumes are not equivalent. I, like many professional cooks and recipe developers, have grown very accustomed to Diamond Crystal, as it tends to be the basic salt of choice in most professional settings. They do not pay me to include their name, and I don't love giving them the free advertising, but it's important to be specific when it comes to salt to avoid problems when you're making this recipe at home.
Serious Eats / Amanda Suarez
One final note: These seasonings are good to my taste, but the nice thing about a forcemeat like this is you can easily adjust. You should absolutely poach a small sample fish dumpling in the broth and taste it for seasoning before committing to cooking the whole batch. You can alway bump up the salt or sugar or make any other adjustments necessary before you cook the rest.
Let's Talk Sugar, Baby
Sugar is possible one of the most divisive topics when it comes to how best to make gefilte fish, and the truth is there's no right answer. Preference for sweetness maps directly to where one's family comes from, and it's a clear enough demarcation in Europe that there's something literally called the Gefilte Fish Line: If your people came from the more Eastern portions of Ashkenazi lands, like Lithuania and Ukraine, the taste tends to lean more salty and savory. If you're from areas slightly more to the west, like Poland, the taste can become so sweet that it's a shock to many who have never experienced it before.
Serious Eats / Amanda Suarez
My Jewish ancestors came from Latvia and so my tolerance for the super-sweet gefilte fish is limited. My recipe calls for only a touch of sugar to balance the more savory or salty elements, but not make the fish overtly sweet. If your tastes run more sweet than mine, the solution is as simple as adding more sugar until you hit the level you want. Once again, you can pinch off and cook sample bits of the forcemeat to get it where you want before you cook the rest.
Inspect fish heads and bone cages, removing and discarding any remaining viscera and gills if necessary. Under cold running water, wash fish heads and bone cages well, using your fingers to work away traces of blood, especially inside the head and along the spine (it doesn't have to be perfect, but try to get what you can).
Serious Eats / Amanda Suarez
Transfer fish heads and bone cages to a large stock pot and add cold water until just covered. Set over high heat, bring to a bare simmer, then drain in a colander in the sink. Rinse out pot and fish bones and heads, then return to pot (this step, while optional, coagulates and removes proteins that can cloud up the stock for a more pristine result).
Serious Eats / Amanda Suarez
Thinly slice 1 onion and add to stock pot along with celery, fennel, and parsley and dill sprigs. Cover with fresh cold water, set over medium-high heat and bring to a bare simmer. Reduce heat to maintain bare simmer and cook for 1 hour.
Serious Eats / Amanda Suarez
While the stock cooks, finely dice remaining 3 onions. In a small skillet, heat oil over medium heat until shimmering. Add half the diced onion along with a pinch of salt and cook, stirring often, until softened, about 4 minutes. Set aside to cool.
Serious Eats / Amanda Suarez
Transfer ground fish to a large mixing bowl. Carefully pick through ground fish, removing and discarding any bones or scales. Add raw onion, sautéed onion, matzo meal, eggs, salt, sugar, and pepper. Add 6 tablespoons (90ml) cold water, then stir until very well combined and fish mixture develops a slightly sticky texture. Let rest, refrigerated, for 30 minutes.
Serious Eats / Amanda Suarez
When fish stock is ready, strain through a fine-mesh strainer set over a large heatproof vessel. Discard solids and wash out stock pot. Return fish stock to stockpot.
Serious Eats / Amanda Suarez
Return fish stock to medium-high heat and bring to a simmer. Add sliced carrots.
Serious Eats / Amanda Suarez
Using 2 large serving or sauce spoons, scoop up a generous ball of fish mixture and scrape it back and forth between the 2 spoons to form a compact football shape (if you want to make it look like a classic French quenelle, try to use the spoons to give it 3 defined sides). Carefully free the fish ball from the spoons and slide it right into the water. Repeat with remaining fish mixture until all has been formed into balls and added to the pot, shaking the pot from time to time to ensure fish balls do not stick to each other. Simmer until fish balls are cooked through and register 150°F (65°C) on an instant-read thermometer inserted in the center, 10 to 15 minutes. (Note that depending on the size of your pot, you may need to cook the fish mixture in batches. If you do need to do this, transfer the cooked fish balls to a platter, then add the next batch. Once all are cooked, add them back to the pot.)
Serious Eats / Amanda Suarez
Season fish broth with salt and sugar to taste, then let cool until warm. Serve gefilte fish warm with cooked carrots, parsley and/or dill garnish, and horseradish. Alternatively, cover and transfer to the refrigerator and allow to chill overnight, then serve chilled with carrots, herb garnish, horseradish, and, if desired, a small amount of aspic (the chilled, slightly gelled broth).
Serious Eats / Amanda Suarez
Notes
While you can fillet, debone, and grind the meat from a whole fish yourself, it's a significant labor. It's much easier is to ask your fishmonger to do this for you; make sure to communicate that you want the bones, heads, and skin from the fish along with the meat. The ingredient list in this recipe calls for the weight of the ground fish instead of a starting weight for the whole fish because my experience is that the yield is too variable from the whole fish: I've seen many recipes that estimate that a 7-pound carp will yield more than three pounds of meat, but when I shopped for the fish to develop this recipe, I barely got four pounds of ground meat from 13 pounds of whole fish. Talk to your fishmonger about your desired yield of ground meat to ensure you get the right amount of whole fish.
by Raymond A. Patterson, Professor, Area Chair, Business Technology Management, Haskayne School of Business, University of Calgary
Within the first three seconds of opening a web page, over 80 third parties on average have accessed your information. (Shutterstock)
Websites sometimes hide how widely they share our personal information, and can go to great lengths to pull the wool over our eyes. This deception is intended to prevent full disclosure to consumers, thus preventing informed choice and affecting privacy rights.
Governments are responding to consumer concerns about privacy with legislation. These include the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and California’s Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA). The impact of this legislation is visible as websites request permission to track online user activity.
However, many users remain unaware of the impact of these choices, or how the extent of sharing is deceptively hidden.
Websites and privacy
As Canadian policymakers grapple with updates to online privacy regulations, our research looks at when and why companies actively hide — and how widely they share — our personal data. We found that the obfuscation, or disguise, of information sharing is a strategy commonly used by websites to mislead users and raise the cost of monitoring.
Our research team has been studying website privacy issues for a number of years, specifically with respect to the sharing of consumer data with third parties as a way to monetize web traffic.
Our research has established that websites with privacy-sensitive content, such as medical and banking websites, are naturally constrained by the market in terms of their third-party sharing. These websites are also more privacy-sensitive, and so are less likely to obscure the extent of information-sharing.
We examined third-party data collection by websites, highlighting the extensive tracking mechanisms deployed by platforms and advertisers to capture consumer information. This pervasive surveillance raises significant concerns about privacy infringement and the commodification of personal data.
Within the first three seconds of opening a web page, over 80 third parties on average have accessed your information. Some of these third parties provide services to improve a website’s functionality and performance.
Other third parties are engaged in advertising and targeted advertising, which includes scooping up and selling your most personal information. Some third parties are extremely predatory in their privacy abuses.
Our research reveals circumstances where websites actively hide how widely our data is shared. As content sensitivity increases — for example, websites dealing with sensitive personal medical information — websites reduce the level of deception compared to websites with less sensitive content.
We also found that websites that are more popular are more likely to hide their data-sharing practices than websites with smaller audiences.
Websites modify how widely they share user information and hide how much they share because it can sometimes help increase profits by taking advantage of unknowing consumers. This means that visitors are unable to make fully informed decisions regarding their data privacy.
Similar to ambiguous website privacy policies, requesting consent to collect and share information does not necessarily resolve the information asymmetry between websites and users. A common strategy is to overwhelm users with an overly extensive list of third parties that do not necessarily reflect their particular interaction.
Asking for consent to gather information is a gesture that can hide a website’s actions.
(Shutterstock)
Pervasive surveillance
Websites use a variety of techniques to keep users from understanding the true level of information sharing and its privacy implications. One deception is the use of dark patterns, defined as “user interface design choices that benefit an online service by coercing, steering or deceiving users into making unintended and potentially harmful decisions.” These dark patterns trick users into giving away their privacy.
Another deception technique relates to the lack of transparency surrounding third-party sharing. Who websites share information with depends upon a myriad of variables — the consumer never knows how or why their information is shared. Third parties can differ depending on where a user is located: third-party sharing across the largest 100,000 websites is on average higher for customers clicking from California compared to New York, for example.
Obfuscated customization occurs when the website actively tries to hide their abusive third party sharing. For example, consumers can use a Do Not Track (DNT) request: however, websites can make it difficult for users to understand the website’s response to the request, and it is very difficult to figure out what happens after the request is made.
Sometimes, websites actually track users more in response to a DNT request. In an unpublished experiment that we performed, 40 per cent of the top 100 largest news websites in the world shared your data with more third parties if you made a DNT request. Even if a website engages fewer third parties, the changes in response to a DNT request may still be abusive because they may now share data with more intrusive third parties.
Simply disclosing the presence of third parties and requesting user consent is insufficient because the consumer, for all practical purposes, is unaware of the extent of third-party sharing and tracking. Because of this information asymmetry, it is impossible to know when or to what extent personal information has been shared.
Raymond A. Patterson received financial support from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Haskayne School of Business at the University of Calgary.
Hooman Hidaji receives funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
Ram Gopal receives funding from the Gillmore Centre for Financial Technology at the Warwick Business School.
Ashkan Eshghi 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.
by Lynn Greenky, Professor Emeritus of Communication and Rhetorical Studies, Syracuse University
Columbia University President Nemat Shafik testifies before the House Committee on Education & the Workforce during an April 17, 2024, hearing on antisemitism on campus. Alex Wong for Getty Images
Lawmakers grilled Columbia University President Minouche Shafik and three colleagues on April 17, 2024, over antisemitism on college campuses, just four months after three of her presidential peers were summoned to Capitol Hill over how their institutions were handling antisemitism on campus following Hamas’ attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. Two of them resigned shortly thereafter. Here, Lynn Greenky, a scholar of communication and rhetoric, gives her take on how Shafik handled being in the same hot seat as her colleagues.
How did today’s hearing differ from the one on Dec. 5?
Unlike Claudine Gay, Liz Magill and Sally Kornbluth – the presidents of Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania and MIT, respectively – Shafik and the other witnesses representing Columbia University spoke with greater moral clarity on the issue of what constitutes antisemitism on campus. Of course, they had the benefit of being able to first see what happens when you don’t.
Columbia’s president, Minouche Shafik, as well as David Schizer and David Greenwald, co-chairs of the Columbia University Task Force on Antisemitism, and Co-Chair of the Board of Trustees Claire Shipman, came ready to acknowledge their responsibility, even culpability, in their failure to recognize and control hate speech directed at Jews on campus. Shipman in particular made it clear that Columbia is suffering a “moral crisis” on its campus.
All of the witnesses showed a lot of deference to the committee. They even thanked the committee for the investigation and asked for the committee’s help to address antisemitism on campus. In fact, Shipman concluded her opening statement saying she looked forward to the committee’s input as Columbia seeks to refocus its vision back to its core values of wisdom, empathy and respect.
What did committee members say about faculty?
Professors Joseph Massad, Katherine Franke and Mohamed Abdu were mentioned by name.
Several members of the Congressional committee singled out Massad, who on Oct. 8, 2023, described the Hamas attack on Israel as “awesome” and “innovative” in an online article, for particular scorn. Shafik promised the committee that Massad would be removed from his position as chair of Columbia’s academic review committee, whose principle function is to “assess program quality and effectiveness,” “foster planning and improvement” and “provide guidance for administrative decisions.” Shafik also indicated Massad might be fired even though his position is tenured.
While some might argue that removing Massad as chair, or firing him, infringes on the professor’s First Amendment right to academic freedom, it is unclear whether that assertion will save him. The Supreme Court has not provided specific guidance on the parameters of academic freedom. In fact, the concept of academic freedom generally refers to a scholar’s freedom to pursue inquiry, discussion and teaching within the sphere of that scholar’s research and consistent with the institution’s curriculum. Academic freedom is not the same as a professor’s individual right to speak one’s mind.
The committee’s chairperson, Virginia Foxx, a Republican from West Virginia, warned that radical faculty remain a huge problem at Columbia. She said she expects Columbia to make “tangible progress” to sanction or remove radical faculty. If not, she says, Columbia will be brought before the committee again.
Was there any conflict over what is hate speech?
Recalling a House resolution that condemned the chant “from the river to the sea” as antisemitic, Rep. Elise Stefanik, a Republican from New York, pushed Shafik to amend her previous testimony that alluded to how the chant can, in some circumstances, represent protected political speech.
Shafik seemed reluctant to label students or faculty as engaging in hate and harassment. She tried very hard, sometimes unsuccessfully, to assert the need to balance constitutionally protected speech with the educational mission of the university.
Still, Shafik frequently testified that the policies and structures in place at Columbia prior to the Oct. 7 attack were inadequate. In her written statement to the committee, Shafik admitted that before Oct. 7, Columbia’s process for reporting allegations of hate speech, harassment and other forms of disruptive behavior needed to be simplified. She also said staff training needed to be improved. Throughout her testimony she acknowledged her personal horror at the hatred and vitriol expressed on campus both before and after Oct. 7.
What action did Shafik and her colleagues say they would take?
Shafik, Schizer and Shipman each repeated the refrain that they recognize the mistakes and failures made in response to events on campus that – according to their testimony – left Jewish students angry and frightened. They said they are working on revising policies and practices that will promote vigorous debate while protecting student safety.
As a result of some of the preliminary recommendations of Columbia’s Task Force on Antisemitism, the university has updated the reporting and response process regarding harassment and discrimination.
Certainly, a college or university has a compelling interest in protecting its students, faculty and staff’s freedom, safety and integrity. However, as always, the devil is in the details. It is difficult to mediate the appropriate balance between promoting robust debate and protecting against offense. Often, when colleges and universities undertake the task, I believe it is the freedom to speak one’s mind that suffers.
Lynn Greenky 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.
The restrictions on how educators can teach and the lack of pay has deterred education majors, like sophomore Aidan Wright, from wanting to teach in Florida. Wright’s hesitation represents a larger issue facing Florida teachers. This year, the Florida Education Association reported a teacher shortage of over 4,000 educators. This has left “potentially…hundreds of thousands […]
It’s not at all clear that disinformation has, to date, swung an election that would otherwise have gone another way. But there is a strong sense that it has had a significant impact, nonetheless.
With AI now being used to create highly believable fake videos and to spread disinformation more efficiently, we are right to be concerned that fake news could change the course of an election in the not-too-distant future.
To assess the threat, and to respond appropriately, we need a better sense of how damaging the problem could be. In physical or biological sciences, we would test a hypothesis of this nature by repeating an experiment many times.
But this is much harder in social sciences because it’s often not possible to repeat experiments. If you want to know the impact of a certain strategy on, say, an upcoming election, you cannot re-run the election a million times to compare what happens when the strategy is implemented and when it is not implemented.
You could call this a one-history problem: there is only one history to follow. You cannot unwind the clock to study the effects of counterfactual scenarios.
To overcome this difficulty, a generative model becomes handy because it can create many histories. A generative model is a mathematical model for the root cause of an observed event, along with a guiding principle that tells you in which way the cause (input) turns into an observed event (output).
By modelling the cause and applying the principle, it can generate many histories, and hence statistics needed to study different scenarios. This, in turn, can be used to assess the effects of disinformation in elections.
In the case of an election campaign, the primary cause is the information accessible to voters (input), which is transformed into movements of opinion polls showing changes of voter intention (observed output). The guiding principle concerns how people process information, which is to minimise uncertainties.
So, by modelling how voters get information, we can simulate subsequent developments on a computer. In other words, we can create a “possible history” of how opinion polls change from now to the election day on a computer. From one history alone we learn virtually nothing, but now we can run the simulation (the virtual election) a million times.
A generative model does not predict any future event, because of the noisy nature of information. But it does provide the statistics of different events, which is what we need.
Modelling disinformation
I first came up with the idea of using a generative model to study the impact of disinformation about a decade ago, without any anticipation that the concept would, sadly, become so relevant to the safety of democratic processes. My initial models were designed to study the impact of disinformation in financial markets, but as fake news started to become more of a problem, my colleague and I extended the model to study its impact on elections.
Generative models can tell us the probability of a given candidate winning a future election, subject to today’s data and the specification of how information on issues relevant to the election is communicated to voters. This can be used to analyse how the winning probability will be affected if candidates or political parties change their policy positions or communication strategies.
We can include disinformation in the model to study how that will alter the outcome statistics. Here, disinformation is defined as a hidden component of information that generates a bias.
By including disinformation into the model and running a simulation, the result tells us very little about how it changed opinion polls. But running the simulation many times, we can use the statistics to determine the percentage change in the likelihood of a candidate winning a future election if disinformation of a given magnitude and frequency is present. In other words, we can now measure the impact of fake news using computer simulations.
I should emphasise that measuring the impact of fake news is different from making predictions about election outcomes. These models are not designed to make predictions. Rather, they provide the statistics that are sufficient to estimate the impact of disinformation.
Does disinformation have an impact?
One model for disinformation that we considered is a type that is released at some random moment, grows in strength for a short period but then it is damped down (for example owing to fact checking). We found that a single release of such disinformation, well ahead of election day, will have little impact on the election outcome.
However, if the release of such disinformation is repeated persistently, then it will have an impact. Disinformation that is biased towards a given candidate will shift the poll slightly in favour of that candidate each time it is released. Of all the election simulations for which that candidate has lost, we can identify how many of them have the result turned around, based on a given frequency and magnitude of disinformation.
Fake news in favour of a candidate, except in rare circumstances, will not guarantee a victory for that candidate. Its impacts can, however, be measured in terms of probabilities and statistics. How much has fake news changed the winning probability? What is the likelihood of flipping an election outcome? And so on.
One result that came as a surprise is that even if electorates are unaware whether a given piece of information is true or false, if they know the frequency and bias of disinformation, then this suffices to eliminate most of the impact of disinformation. The mere knowledge of the possibility of fake news is already a powerful antidote to its effects.
Alerting people to the presence of disinformation is part of the process of protecting them.
Shutterstock/eamesBot
Generative models by themselves do not provide counter measures to disinformation. They merely give us an idea of the magnitude of impacts. Fact checking can help but it is not hugely effective (the genie is already out of the bottle). But what if the two are combined?
Because the impact of disinformation can be largely averted by informing people that it is happening, it would be useful if fact checkers offered information on the statistics of disinformation that they have identified – for example, “X% of negative claims against candidate A were false”. An electorate equipped with this information will be less affected by disinformation.
Dorje C. Brody receives funding from Engineering and Physical Science Research Council (EP/X019926/1). He is currently affiliated with the University of Tokyo.
by Mark M. Lambert, Assistant Professor of Behavioral Medicine, Medical Humanities, and Bioethics, Des Moines University
The island of Molokai, where the Ball Method successfully treated leprosy sufferers. Albert Pierce Taylor
Hansen’s disease, also called leprosy, is treatable today – and that’s partly thanks to a curious tree and the work of a pioneering young scientist in the 1920s. Centuries prior to her discovery, sufferers had no remedy for leprosy’s debilitating symptoms or its social stigma.
This young scientist, Alice Ball, laid fundamental groundwork for the first effective leprosy treatment globally. But her legacy still prompts conversations about the marginalization of women and people of color in science today.
Alice Augusta Ball, born in Seattle, Washington, in 1892, became the first woman and first African American to earn a master’s degree in science from the College of Hawaii in 1915, after completing her studies in pharmaceutical chemistry the year prior.
Alice Augusta Ball, who came up with The Ball Method, a treatment for leprosy that didn’t come with unmanageable side effects.
After she finished her master’s degree, the college hired her as a research chemist and instructor, and she became the first African American with that title in the chemistry department.
Doctors now understand that leprosy, also called Hansen’s disease, is minimally contagious. But in 1865, the fear and stigma associated with leprosy led authorities in Hawaii to implement a mandatory segregation policy, which ultimately isolated those with the disease on a remote peninsula on the island of Molokai. In 1910, over 600 leprosy sufferers were living in Molokai.
Doctors had attempted to use nearly every remedy imaginable to treat leprosy, even experimenting with dangerous substances such as arsenicand strychnine. But the lone consistently effective treatment was chaulmoogra oil.
Chaulmoogra oil is derived from the seeds of the chaulmoogra tree. Health practitioners in India and Burma had been using this oil for centuries as a treatment for various skin diseases. But there were limitations with the treatment, and it had only marginal effects on leprosy.
The oil is very thick and sticky, which makes it hard to rub into the skin. The drug is also notoriously bitter, and patients who ingested it would often start vomiting. Some physicians experimented with injections of the oil, but this produced painful pustules.
Dr. Isabel Kerr, a European missionary, administering to a patient a chaulmoogra oil treatment in 1915, prior to the invention of the Ball Method.
George McGlashan Kerr, CC BY
The Ball Method
If researchers could harness chaulmoogra’s curative potential without the nasty side effects, the tree’s seeds could revolutionize leprosy treatment. So, Hollmann turned to Ball. In a 1922 article, Hollmann documents how the 23-year-old Ball discovered how to chemically adapt chaulmoogra into an injection that had none of the side effects.
The Ball Method, as Hollmann called her discovery, transformed chaulmoogra oil into the most effective treatment for leprosy until the introduction of sulfones in the late 1940s.
In 1920, the Ball Method successfully treated 78 patients in Honolulu. A year later, it treated 94 more, with the Public Health Service noting that the morale of all the patients drastically improved. For the first time, there was hope for a cure.
Ball’s death meant she didn’t have the opportunity to publish her research. Arthur Dean, chair of the College of Hawaii’s chemistry department, took over the project.
Dean mass-produced the treatment and published a series of articles on chaulmoogra oil. He renamed Ball’s method the “Dean Method,” and he never credited Ball for her work.
Ball’s other colleagues did attempt to protect Ball’s legacy. A 1920 article in the Journal of the American Medical Association praises the Ball Method, while Hollmann clearly credits Ball in his own 1922 article.
Ball is described at length in a 1922 article in volume 15, issue 5, of Current History, an academic publication on international affairs. That feature is excerpted in a June 1941 issue of Carter G. Woodson’s “Negro History Bulletin,” referring to Ball’s achievement and untimely death.
Joseph Dutton, a well-regarded religious volunteer at the leprosy settlements on Molokai, further referenced Ball’s work in a 1932 memoir broadly published for a popular audience.
Historians such as Paul Wermager later prompted a modern reckoning with Ball’s poor treatment by Dean and others, ensuring that Ball received proper credit for her work. Following Wermager’s and others’ work, the University of Hawaii honored Ball in 2000 with a bronze plaque, affixed to the last remaining chaulmoogra tree on campus.
In 2019, the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine added Ball’s name to the outside of its building. Ball’s story was even featured in a 2020 short film, “The Ball Method.”
The Ball Method represents both a scientific achievement and a history of marginalization. A young woman of color pioneered a medical treatment for a highly stigmatizing disease that disproportionately affected an already disenfranchised Indigenous population.
The state of Hawaii honored Ball by declaring Feb. 28 Alice Augusta Ball Day.
In 2022, then-Gov. David Ige declared Feb. 28 Alice Augusta Ball Day in Hawaii. It was only fitting that the ceremony took place on the Mānoa campus in the shade of the chaulmoogra tree.
Mark M. Lambert 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.
Last month, Danny Mamlok, a friend of mine and an Israeli professor from Tel Aviv University, was scheduled to give a talk at Concordia University in Montreal on the topic of education for tolerance. Four days before the presentation was supposed to take place, the organizers of this event said they were subjected to significant pressure from pro-Palestinian activist groups at McGill and Concordia to cancel Mamlok’s presentation.
Not wanting to give in to this pressure, the organizers insisted that Mamlok, who has advocated for peace for decades and as an Israeli soldier even refused to serve in the West Bank, be allowed to deliver his talk.
Ironically, in order to attend a presentation on tolerance, the audience was directed to enter the venue through the basement, since the pro-Palestinian activists had blocked the main access and later disrupted the talk on Zoom.
This effort to cancel individuals or silence free speech on college campuses has become a more common occurrence in the days since the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas terrorist attack. But even before, it was a growing phenomenon in higher education and the media across America.
A 2023 report by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression in Education, a nonprofit dedicated to protecting free speech, found that “attempts to punish college and university scholars for their speech skyrocketed over the past two decades, from only four in 2000 to 145 in 2022.” That report also showed that censorship of professors has come from both sides of the American political spectrum and that a majority of these cases led to some form of sanction, including about 20% that resulted in termination.
In her 2021 Atlantic magazine article titled “The New Puritans,” Anne Applebaum documented more than a dozen cases of professors and journalists who were punished for saying or writing controversial statements. Applebaum focused on the cases of Donald McNeil, science reporter from The New York Times; Laura Kipnis, an academic at Northwestern; and Ian Buruma, editor of The New York Review of Books. Applebaum’s investigative report concluded that these individuals were victims of mob justice and online campaigns that demanded the swift firing of “offenders.” Moreover, she noted that these campaigns lacked just cause and did not grant the canceled individuals the right to due process.
The issue of canceling and cancel culture has received considerable attention in the media and among various scholars, with a focus on the personal consequences suffered by those who have been canceled, the political risks, and the legal issues raised by this practice. Yet, I believe that the educational dangers for democracy that can come about from attempts to cancel individuals or ideas, though profound, have received less attention.
What does a democratic society stand to lose, educationally speaking, when people choose to ban or cancel someone or something? My own research suggests that there are at least four educational detriments that can result from the practice of canceling.
1. Cognitive biases
The practice of canceling has been shown to exacerbate a host of cognitive biases shared by many people, such as confirmation bias and motivated reasoning.
Confirmation bias is the tendency to seek and focus on information that supports one’s existing beliefs and discount contrary evidence.
Motivated reasoning is the inclination to scrutinize evidence with greater skepticism if it does not fit one’s existing beliefs or values. Studies have found that when people close themselves to alternative perspectives, voices and sources of information, they undermine their ability to gain a deeper understanding of issues and expand their knowledge. In contrast, the cognitive dissonance that results from views being challenged by those who have different perspectives can lead to new insights and enhanced learning.
Suppressing unorthodox opinions, dodging conflict or avoiding engaging with controversial perspectives often results in uninspiring conversations aimed at merely “preaching to the choir.” Such predictable conversation with a limited range of acceptable viewpoints can lead people to adopt a herd mentality, one that accepts a set of assumptions and values uncritically.
In his essay “On Liberty,” philosopher John Stuart Mill argued that having to justify one’s opinions to someone who opposes them is enlightening for all. Mill was adamant that the mission of higher education was not to indoctrinate students on what they should believe but to help them develop their own worldviews based on their interaction with different perspectives and sources of evidence.
3. Promoting dogmatism
Canceling has the adverse educational effect of promoting dogmatism rather than open-mindedness.
Silencing ideas that are politically incorrect, insensitive or controversial may make people feel good, but it does nothing – as Mill recognized and my own research shows – to engage or edify people holding on to those views.
The danger is that banning subversive opinions leaves both the people who hold them and those who oppose them in their segregated enclaves, thereby reducing the interactions of diverse perspectives that American philosopher and educator John Dewey regarded as the lifeblood of democracy. Following Mill and Dewey, I would argue that such critical interaction with controversial viewpoints helps promote intellectual open-mindedness and prevents people from becoming dogmatic.
4. Suppressing dissent
The practice of canceling is educationally dangerous because it seeks to suppress dissent and creates a false sense of consensus.
As historian and bioethicist Alice Dreger has illustrated with the help of numerous examples in her book “Galileo’s Middle Finger,” banning controversial or minority views deprives the public of valuable information on a host of social problems that should concern everyone. Likewise, canceling narrows the range of perspectives that can be used to analyze issues such as climate change and global pandemics and come up with potential solutions to resolve them.
Consensus destroys democracy by greatly curtailing the possibility that spirited discussion, diverse viewpoints and rigorous critique – all essential to maintaining the democratic process – will play a major role in shaping the direction of the U.S. and other democracies. And consensus destroys democracy by privileging the majority opinion, ignoring the needs and interests of minorities and marginalizing the voices of dissent.
My analysis suggests that canceling is a misguided and undemocratic practice – one that leads to numerous negative educational consequences, such as promoting dogmatism, discouraging dissent and undermining vigorous debates.
Mordechai Gordon 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.
by Keagan Brewer, Macquarie University Research Fellow, Macquarie University
Yale University Library
The Voynich manuscript has long puzzled and fascinated historians and the public. This late-medieval document is covered in illustrations of stars and planets, plants, zodiac symbols, naked women, and blue and green fluids. But the text itself – thought to be the work of five different scribes – is enciphered and yet to be understood.
In an article published in Social History of Medicine, my coauthor Michelle L. Lewis and I propose that sex is one of the subjects detailed in the manuscript – and that the largest diagram represents both sex and conception.
Manuscript 408, also called the Voynich manuscript, is held at a Yale University library.
Yale University Library
Research on the Voynich manuscript has revealed some clues about its origins.Carbon dating provides a 95% probability the skins used to make the manuscript come from animals that died between 1404 and 1438. However, its earliest securely known owner was an associate of Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II, who lived from 1552 to 1612, which leaves more than a century of ownership missing.
Certain illustrations (the zodiac symbols, a crown design and a particular shape of castle wall called a swallowtail merlon) indicate the manuscript was made in the southern Germanic or northern Italian cultural areas.
One section contains illustrations of naked women holding objects adjacent to, or oriented towards, their genitalia. These wouldn’t belong in a solely herbal or astronomical manuscript. To make sense of these images, we investigated the culture of late-medieval gynaecology and sexology – which physicians at the time often referred to as “women’s secrets”.
Women illustrated in the manuscript are shown holding unidentified objects towards their genitalia.
Yale University Library
First we looked at Bavarian physician Johannes Hartlieb (circa 1410–68), who lived around the time and place the Voynich manuscript was made.
Hartlieb wrote about plants, women, magic, astronomy and baths. He also recommended the use of “secret letters” (such as a cipher, secret alphabet, or similar) to obscure medical recipes and procedures that may result in contraception, abortion or sterility.
Although his secret alphabet hasn’t survived, analysing his work has helped us understand the attitudes that would have inspired the use of encipherment at the time. For instance, Hartlieb felt a strong apprehension about “women’s secrets” becoming widely known. He worried his writings could facilitate extramarital sex and that God would condemn him if this happened.
In his un-enciphered writings, he either refuses or hesitates to write about certain topics, such as post-partum vaginal ointments, women’s sexual pleasure, claims of women giving birth to animals, the “correct” coital positions for conception, libido-altering dietary advice, and information about poisonous, hallucinogenic, contraceptive or abortive plants.
Writing for male aristocrats in vernacular Bavarian (rather than academic Latin), Hartlieb says such knowledge should be restricted from sex workers, commoners, children, and in some cases from women themselves – who were becoming increasingly literate.
As a man who valued heterosexual marriage and women’s “modesty”, and who condemned lust, promiscuity and prostitution, he was perfectly conventional for his milieu.
If such attitudes were widespread back then, was the censorship of women’s secrets also widespread? The short answer is: yes.
During our research, we decoded a number of ciphers from this period (but none from the Voynich manuscript). The longest was a 21-line cipher from late-medieval northern Italy that obscured a recipe with gynaecological uses, including abortion.
We also found many examples of authors self-censoring, or of readers erasing or destroying information in gynaecological and/or sexological texts. Censors would often only obscure a few words, usually genital terms or plant names in recipes – but sometimes they would remove entire pages or chapters.
One Bavarian manuscript includes recipes for invisibility and magic spells for sexually coercing women, after which two pages have been removed. The censor writes this removal was done “not without reason”.
The Rosettes
By analysing the Voynich illustrations through this lens, we propose the Rosettes – the manuscript’s largest and most elaborate illustration – represents a late-medieval understanding of sex and conception.
Our proposal is in keeping with the patriarchal culture of the time and resolves many of the manuscript’s apparent contradictions. It also allows us to identify several of the illustration’s features.
The Rosettes illustration consists of circles, tubes, dots, bulbs, passageways, castles and town walls.
Yale University Library
In late-medieval times the uterus was believed to have seven chambers, and the vagina two openings (one external and one internal).
We believe the nine large circles of the Rosettes represents these, with the central circle representing the outer opening, and the top-left circle representing the inner opening. The eight outer circles have smooth edges since they represent internal anatomy, while the central circle has a shaped edge since it represents external anatomy.
Abu Bakr Al-Rāzī, a Persian physician who influenced late-medieval European medicine, wrote that five small veins exist in the vaginas of virgins. We see these running from the top-left circle towards the centre.
The five veins running from the top-left to the central circle.
Yale University Library
Physicians back then also believed a male and female component were necessary for conception, and both of these were called “sperm”. These are shown in yellow (male) and blue (female). Women were thought to receive pleasure from the motion of the two sperms in the uterus, which is depicted through the lines and patterns.
It was also thought the uterus had two horns or spikes, which we can see on the top-right and bottom-right circles.
A closeup of the bottom ‘horn’.
Yale University Library
The castles and town walls may represent wordplay on the German term schloss, which had meanings including “castle”, “lock”, “female genitalia” and “female pelvis”.
A closeup of a castle embedded in the illustration.
Yale University Library
And the two suns in the far top-left and bottom-right likely reflect Aristotle’s belief that the Sun provides natural heat to the embryo during its early development.
Aristotle thought the Sun provided natural heat to the embryo.
Yale University Library
While many features of the illustration are yet to be understood, our proposal is worth close scrutiny. We hope future research into the manuscript will approach it through a similar lens. Perhaps, with enough clues, we might find a way to finally decode this elusive text.
Keagan Brewer receives funding from a Macquarie University Research Fellowship.
A review into gender identity services for young people has said under-18s are being let down by the NHS. The final report of the Cass review describes a lack of long-term data and “remarkably weak” evidence on the effects of medical interventions in gender care.
However, medical transitioning, through hormone therapy or surgery, is only one route for transgender and gender non-conforming people of any age to explore their identity. Many will “socially transition” before or instead of medically transitioning. The report, alongside other research, recommends more long-term, robust research on both social transitioning and medical intervention.
Broadly speaking, social transitioning consists of actions or expressions that align with a chosen gender other than that assumed at birth. This can include changing one’s appearance through clothes and hairstyle, or choosing to use a different name or pronouns.
People may identify as agender, gender-fluid or non-binary, and may use gender neutral pronouns such as they/them, or those that have arisen specifically for this purpose like ze/zir. Or, if people feel that they were assigned the wrong identity at birth they may wish to identify as transgender.
Social transitioning, as the report notes, usually occurs at home or in schools or workplaces, not in medical establishments. For young people exploring their gender identity, this makes schools a particularly important environment.
Existing research suggests that social transitioning in early adolescence itself is not harmful, but an unsupportive environment where gender-diverse young people feel “othered” or are subject to bullying can lead to long-term, negative wellbeing. Another study of trans UK adults identified a supportive environment for social transition as a key factor in decreasing suicidal thoughts.
Social transitioning is also an important first step in obtaining a gender recognition certificate (GRC). If someone wants to be legally recognised as their acquired gender, they must provide evidence of a change of name or title, or change of gender marker for at least two years.
A GRC cannot be obtained under the age of 18. The process does not require any medical interventions. For young people to obtain a GRC at 18, they must have socially transitioned and be recognised by another name or pronoun from at least age 16.
Teachers want students to feel safe and supported in schools.
The role of schools and teachers
There is no question that educational institutions should foster positive, affirming environments for young people. What does this mean when it comes to gender exploration?
The review chair, retired consultant paediatrician Dr Hilary Cass, noted that rigid binary gender stereotypes can be unhelpful for young people, and that exploration of gender is a normal process. In my research, I have interviewed teachers navigating interactions between schools, students and their parents regarding this exploration.
Citing their duty of care, teachers expressed a need for clear guidelines from the government on how to best support students who are socially transitioning.
To this end, the government has recently closed a consultation on guidance for schools on gender questioning children. The draft guidance encourages parental consent if a child wants to change their name or pronoun.
However, teachers I interviewed expressed concern that, in some cases, telling parents about a student’s social transitioning could lead to safeguarding risks. This disclosure, they said, would not be expected of teachers if the student was disclosing their sexuality.
The teachers I interviewed placed student welfare at the heart of their concerns. Some discussed safeguarding incidents where students were made homeless due to parents’ disapproval of their child’s gender identity or expression. Ultimately, they want students to feel safe, heard and have autonomy over their gender expression in school.
Teachers were concerned that existing school policies were based on the subjective beliefs of school leaders, rather than student wellbeing. Those I interviewed highlighted contradictions in how their schools treated gender-diverse students.
For example, many students prefer to be called by a shortened name or middle name rather than the name on their birth certificate. These name changes were never challenged. However, if a student presented as gender-diverse, a different approach was imposed by head teachers.
Above all, the teachers I spoke to in my research want schools to be a place where students feel acknowledged, safe, empowered and supported, whether they are navigating their sexuality or gender expression.
EJ-Francis Caris-Hamer 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.
“ هل أنت جاد ,” my co-worker says to my boss. The bagel shop just finished its rush hour, and my co-workers fill the empty building with their Arabic conversation. All I understand is their body language: mouths curving into smiles and bodies leaning back to release a laugh. My white girl, Florida-raised self, has […]
From the mid-sixteenth century, broadsheets depicting wondrous, celestial events circulated widely across the Holy Roman Empire against the backdrop of Reformation.
by Mari Ellis Dunning, PhD Candidate, Welsh History, Aberystwyth University
The fear of witchcraft led to centuries of persecution and executions across Europe. While there were an estimated 500 executions in England, and between 3,000 and 4,000 killings in Scotland, only five people were hanged for witchcraft in Wales.
Early modern Wales was unique in its outlook on witchcraft. Distinct elements of Welsh culture, including superstition and religion, halted the witch trials seen across the rest of Britain and Europe.
In fact, the witch is steeped in Welsh culture. There is speculation among some researchers that the traditional tall, black hat of the Welsh woman served as inspiration for the wide-brimmed hat of the fairy tale witch. Yet Wales saw no witch hunt. So, what are the reasons behind the lack of prosecutions in Wales?
It’s not that Welsh people had no fear of witchcraft or of supernatural harm – they did. But this fear usually played out in arguments among neighbours and family members, amounting to little more than name-calling.
There were other factors, such as the preference for unreformed religion. And the people’s reliance on wise women and soothsayers who could cure sickness and find missing items, and the ever-present influence of old beggar women, meant witchcraft was less poised to be brought to the attention of the courts. When it did very occasionally come to trial, it was usually dismissed.
Accusations of witchcraft
Welsh court records dating from the 16th century onward are held at the National Library of Wales. We know from those trial records that suspicions and verbal accusations of witchcraft like those seen across the rest of Britain and Europe were common in Wales. They also happened under similar circumstances where accusations often followed an argument, or a request for charity which was denied.
In the records, there are bitter arguments between neighbours and family members. Horses are killed, cattle are bewitched, pigs perish, men and women are injured, there are miscarriages and even murders. Most of the time, when someone was accused of being a witch, they were accused by other people in the community. Their accusers were neighbours, relatives and in many cases, people with financial and personal reasons to make accusations.
For a long time, Wales has been seen by outsiders as a land of magic, superstition and the supernatural. English men and women sometimes travelled into Wales looking for consultations with enchanters and soothsayers.
Women in Wales even looked like witches. They tended to dress in long, heavy woollen skirts, aprons, blouses and large woollen shawls. Most peasant women would have brewed mead and ale. They would have let their community know that there was ale for sale by placing some form of signage outside their cottages. The most popular and well-remembered of these signs was a broomstick.
There are similarities between average Welsh women and the witches written about in early modern literature such as the Malleus Maleficarum, written by a German Catholic clergyman in 1486. These similarities, such as appearance, unreformed religion and tendency to rely on charms and herbs, painted a picture of Wales as a magical land rife with witchcraft. This left juries in early modern Wales in serious doubt about how sensible witch accusations were.
Religion
The people of Wales were not without religion, but they preferred prayer to doctrine. This was perhaps as a result of language barriers. Generally, Welsh people could not read or understand the Bible, which was not fully translated into Welsh until the late 1500s.
Rather than conforming to the Protestant worship indicated by the reformed church, Welsh tradition preferred to worship within the household in ways that mimicked Catholic practices. There is evidence that many people continued to seek the aid of charmers instead of the church. And so Elizabethan and Stuart politicians frequently spoke about the religious “ignorance” in Wales.
The church in Wales also took part in practices some would describe as witchcraft. There was even a strong medieval tradition of cursing by clerics. This sort of formal cursing was often phrased as a petitionary prayer to God, emphasising the overlap between witchcraft and religion in Wales. Parsons were also responsible for writing protective prayers.
It was perhaps for this reason that religious radicals in the south of England saw Wales, as well as Cornwall and the north of England, as “dark corners of the land”. Religious ignorance, superstition and residual Catholicism all contributed to a view of Wales as rife with magic and mystery.
Both charms and curses across Wales contained Christian references and quotations taken from the Bible, showing the overlap between different belief systems. In many Welsh charms and curses, small crosses are written in the margins, indicating the need to perform the symbol of the cross.
A charm shared by Gwen ferch Ellis, the first woman to be hanged for witchcraft in Wales, included the words “Enw'r Tad, y Mab, a’r Ysbryd Duw glân a’r tair Mair” (translated as “the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit of God, and the three Marys”). Her execution was probably a result of having crossed the wrong people, who had enough influence to sway the assize judges.
Ultimately, there is no one reason that Wales never saw a witch hunt. Wise women, cunning folk and soothsayers were highly regarded in Wales, using “magic” to perform important services for the community. Even clerics were part of this ritual of charming and cursing.
Whether they were brewing, cursing, charming or soothsaying, in Wales, the people accused were rarely doing anything out of the ordinary. While fear of the supernatural was rife among common people, it seems Welsh juries tended to be more concerned with prosecuting theft than witchcraft.
Mari Ellis Dunning 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.
by Astrid Hopfensitz, Professor in organizational behavior, EM Lyon Business School
What makes a person beautiful has fascinated artists and scientists for centuries. Beauty is not, as it is often assumed to be, “in the eye of the beholder” – but follows certain predictable rules. Symmetry and proportions play a role, and though culture and norms shape our perception of beauty, researchers observe a consistently striking agreement among people on whom they regard as beautiful.
Not surprisingly the beauty market has been on a steady rise (besides a minor 2020 Covid slump), reaching $430 billion in revenue in 2023, according to a recent McKinsey report. The fascination for the perfect makeup or skincare is fired up by the impact of perfect faces displayed on social media and enhanced by image processing and filters. But is all this money well spent?
Pretty privilege
The short answer is: yes. In today’s fiercely competitive job market, the economic advantages of beauty are undeniable. Numerous studies have shown that attractive individuals benefit from a beauty bonus and earn higher salaries on average. Certain high-paying professions are built around beauty (such as show business) but what is more surprising is that for almost any kind of employment, beauty can lead to a positive halo effect. Beautiful individuals are consistently expected to be more intelligent and thought to be better leaders, which influences career trajectories and opportunities.
It is thought individuals perceived as beautiful are also more likely to benefit from people’s trust, which makes it easier for them to get promoted or to strike business deals. The idea is that individuals who look better are thought to be healthier or/and to have had more positive social interactions in their past, which might influence their trustworthiness.
Does being attractive make you more trustworthy?
But does that theory hold water? In our recent paper Adam Zylbersztejn, Zakaria Babutsidze, Nobuyuki Hanaki and I set out to find out. Previous studies presented different portraits of individuals to observers and asked them about their beliefs about these people. However, often these pictures are taken from portrait databases or even computer generated, and thus allow researchers to study perceptions but not whether these beliefs are accurate. To study this question, we needed to develop an experimental paradigm in which we could observe the trustworthiness of different people, take photos of them, and later present these photos to other individuals for rating. This is how we did it.
Comprising a total of 357 volunteers, our study started in Paris in October 2019, where we asked a first group of 76 volunteers to participate in a short experiment on economic decision-making. In the study, the participants were randomly matched into pairs without knowing with whom they were playing. Some played a role that required to trust another individual (Group A), while others were in a position to reciprocate or break the trust they had received (Group B). To heighten the stakes, real money was on the table.
It went like this: in a first stage, Player A had to choose whether to trust Player B (by saying “Right”) or not (by saying “Left”). Secondly, Player B had to decide whether to roll a dice or not.
Each player’s payoff thus depended on their own actions and/or the actions of the other player:
If player A chooses “Left”, then regardless of player Bs’ choice:
player A and player B both receive a payoff of 5 euros;
If player A chooses “Right” and player B chooses “Don’t roll”:
player A gets nothing and player B receives 14 euros;
If player A chooses “Right” and player B chooses “Roll”:
When the number of on the die is between 1 and 5, player A gets 12 euros and player B receives 10 euros;
When the number on the die is 6, player A gets nothing and player B receives 10 euros.
Group A participants could earn up to 12 euros, but only if they trusted the other player. To do so they were presented with the abstract choice scenario explained above while individually sat in a cubicle.
If they decided not to trust, they were sure to receive a meagre 5-euro payout for their participation in the study. However, once an A player decided to trust their B partner, their fate was in the B player’s hands. The latter could act in a trustworthy fashion by rolling a dice that promised to generate a 12-euro gain for the A player – or untrustworthy by claiming a 14-euro reward for themselves and leaving nothing for the others.
This type of game (called a “hidden action game”) has been previously developed as a measure of the selfless trustworthiness attitude of individuals.
We not only observed how participants acted in this game but also took neutral ID pictures of them before they were introduced to the task. These photographs were presented to 178 participants recruited in Lyon. We first made sure that none of these individuals knew each other. We then gave the participants in Lyon the task of trying to predict how the person they saw in the picture behaved in the game. If they were right, they would be rewarded by earning more money for their participation. We finally showed the same photographs to a third group of 103 people from Nice, in southern France. These individuals were asked to rate how beautiful they considered the faces in the pictures.
Does gender come into play?
Our results confirm that those people who are considered to be more beautiful by our raters are also believed to be much more trustworthy. This implies that in our abstract economic exchange, beautiful individuals are more likely to benefit from the trust of others. However, when investigating actual behaviour, we see that beautiful individuals are neither more nor less trustworthy than anyone else. In other words, trustworthiness is driven by good old individual values and personality, which are not correlated with how someone looks.
A beauty premium has been previously observed as well for men as for women. We might however suspect that women, who are generally believed to have a higher degree of social intelligence, might be better at determining the trustworthiness of their partners. Our results do not show any evidence of this. Women are on average rated as more beautiful and also rate others on average as more beautiful. However women do not act any more honourably in the game then men. Finally men and women agree in their expectations about who will be acting trustworthy or not and thus women are no better in predicting behaviours than men.
Are beautiful people more suspicious of their peers?
The adage that “not everything that glitters is gold” is thus also true for beauty in humans. However, we might wonder who is more likely to fall prey to this bias. One idea is that people who are themselves often treated favourably because of their looks might be aware that this is not something that should influence who you should trust.
We constructed our study such that we could also investigate this question. Specifically, the participants we recruited in Lyon to make their predictions also had their photos taken. We thus knew how much they were influenced by the looks of others but also how conventionally good-looking they were themselves. Our results are clear. The beauty bias is there for everyone. Though we might think that those who benefit from good looks can see behind the mask, they are as much influenced by the looks of others upon deciding whom to trust.
The beauty industry is thus right. Investing in beauty really is worth it because it creates real benefits. However, recruiters or managers should guard themselves against being fooled. One way of doing this is to make CVs anonymous and forbid photos in applications. But in many interactions, we see people who we have to decide to trust. Being aware of one’s bias is therefore crucial. Our results stress that this bias is very hard to overcome, since even individuals who from their own experience should be aware of beauty’s skin-deep value fall prey to it.
Astrid Hopfensitz 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.
by Megan Lindloff, PhD Candidate in Psychology, Western University
Fat stigma can take the form of overt discrimination, but it is often insidious, pervasively entrenched into our society and environment. (Shutterstock)
People may think weight stigma only manifests as rude comments, is harmless or can even do some good.
Recurrent and commonplace discriminatory acts that demean members of stigmatized groups are called microaggressions. The impacts of microaggressions have been described as “death by a thousand cuts,” referring to how seemingly minor incidents, when repeated cumulatively, contribute to real harm.
With combined input from reports of lived experiences, expert testimony and large studies with diverse samples, we identified four main types of fat microaggressions.
Indirect microaggressions are the type most experienced by fat people – they invade every aspect of daily life and remind them that it is not viewed as OK to be fat.
(Shutterstock)
Direct microaggressions are the ones that most people might think of: rude remarks, being laughed at or publicly shamed on social media, being excluded from activities with friends or family, or having people make assumptions about them, for example, that they couldn’t possibly be in a loving relationship with a conventionally attractive partner.
The built environment can also be a source of direct microaggressions, such as at sporting events, theatres or restaurants where the seats are not wide or sturdy enough.
Indirect microaggressions are slights not targeted directly at an individual, but whose effects are still felt. Think fat jokes, unintelligent, gross, and/or unattractive fat characters on TV and in movies (like “Fat Monica” from Friends or Gwyneth Paltrow’s character in Shallow Hal), and thin friends complaining they “feel fat” in front of a larger person and commenting on how much they hate their bodies.
Our data confirm that indirect microaggressions are the type most experienced by fat people — they invade every aspect of daily life and remind fat people that they are not viewed as OK.
Clothing exclusion
Limited choices for larger bodies send a message that they are not deserving or worthy of clothing to which others have access.
(Shutterstock)
One type of direct microaggression that emerged as its own category in our analysis was clothing exclusion. Stores typically have far fewer options in larger sizes, or they are less stylish, yet cost more. It is also common to see clothing in stores with claims that “one size fits all,” that really don’t.
Limited choices for larger bodies send a message that they are not deserving or worthy of clothing to which others have access. But fat people still must turn up to work, social events, weddings, with sometimes the only purchasing criteria being, “does it fit?”
Easily overlooked by those who have endless options, selecting clothing is an everyday decision that can impact how fat people express themselves, how comfortable they feel in their bodies, as well as how the world sees them.
Fat activists have also long recognized that clothing exclusion acts as a proxy for other societal forms of erasure, in that the more standard options fail you, the more you are likely facing other forms of everyday oppressions.
Benevolent weightism
The other specific type of direct microaggression that was prominent in the lived experience of fat people is something we call “benevolent weightism.” These are the often (although not always) well-meaning suggestions of diets and other weight-loss strategies that friends, family, co-workers and even total strangers feel obliged to share with fat people.
You would be hard-pressed to find a fat person who has not tried multiple weight-loss methods, only to end up unsuccessful and feeling worse about themselves than ever.
Weight stigma doesn’t have to be malicious or targeted directly at a person to cause harm. Every single microaggression, however well meaning, is a small violation of feeling safe in the world and cumulatively create a hostile environment.
(Shutterstock)
Across four studies, we established the prominence of fat microaggressions in the lives of fat people and linked experiencing fat microaggressions to poorer mental health, such as greater stress, anxiety and depression, and worse self-esteem. Fat microaggressions were even associated with discrimination-related trauma symptoms, including feeling on edge or constantly on guard, fearing embarrassment or feeling isolated from others.
Experiencing fat microaggressions was also connected to avoidant coping strategies, such as not attending social events, avoiding eating in front of others or going to the gym, and fear of seeking advancement in education and employment. This avoidance can lead to the accumulation of worse life outcomes and additional negative health effects.
Importantly, these findings were consistent for all the different types of microaggressions, including simply observing weight stigma directed at others and those meant to be helpful.
How you can help
Microaggressions often seem trivial. But every single microaggression, however well meaning, is a small violation of feeling safe in the world and cumulatively creates a hostile environment, putting targets under constant stress and vigilance, anticipating future microaggressions.
Greater awareness and recognition of fat microaggressions is an important first step to confronting them. Understanding their harm may lead us to think twice before engaging in fat talk, sharing fat jokes and memes, or providing unsolicited diet advice. If you really are concerned about health, do not tell fat people they need fixing; these microaggressions make people’s health worse, not better.
Beyond this, speak up when you see these occurrences, and advocate for greater seating accessibility and better clothing options for people in larger bodies. Vote with your wallet when companies engage in fat shaming or exclusion. Challenging anti-fat attitudes when they manifest in these other ways is key to a more inclusive and less harmful world.
Angela Meadows has received funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
Megan Lindloff and Rachel Calogero 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.
