Johansen.se

We often assume young people are smarter, or at least quicker, than
older people. For example, we’ve all heard that scientists, and even more so mathematicians, carry out their most important work when they’re comparatively young.

But my new research, published in Developmental Review, suggests that cognitive differences between the old and young are tapering off over time. This is hugely important as stereotypes about the intelligence of people in their sixties or older may be holding them back – in the workplace and beyond.

Cognitive ageing is often measured by comparing young adults, aged 18-30, to older adults, aged 65 and over. There are a variety of tasks that older adults do not perform well on compared to young adults, such as memory, spatial ability and speed of processing, which often form the basis of IQ tests. That said, there are a few tasks that older people do better at than younger people, such as reading comprehension and vocabulary.

Declines in cognition are driven by a process called cognitive ageing, which happens to everyone. Surprisingly, age-related cognitive deficits start very early in adulthood, and declines in cognition have been measured as dropping in adults as young as just 25.

Often, it is only when people reach older age that these effects add up to a noticeable amount. Common complaints consist of walking into a room and forgetting why you entered, as well as difficulty remembering names and struggling to drive in the dark.

The trouble with comparison

Sometimes, comparing young adults to older adults can be misleading though. The two generations were brought up in different times, with different levels of education, healthcare and nutrition. They also lead different daily lives, with some older people having lived though a world war while the youngest generation is growing up with the internet.

Most of these factors favour the younger generation, and this can explain a proportion of their advantage in cognitive tasks.

Indeed, much existing research shows that IQ has been improving globally throughout the 20th century. This means that later-born generations are more cognitively able than those born earlier. This is even found when both generations are tested in the same way at the same age.

Currently, there is growing evidence that increases in IQ are levelling off, such that, in the most recent couple of decades, young adults are no more cognitively able than young adults born shortly beforehand.

Together, these factors may underlie the current result, namely that cognitive differences between young and older adults are diminishing over time.

New results

My research began when my team started getting strange results in our lab. We found that often the age differences we were getting between young and older adults was smaller or absent, compared to prior research from early 2000s.

This prompted me to start looking at trends in age differences across the psychological literature in this area. I uncovered a variety of data that compared young and older adults from the 1960s up to the current day. I plotted this data against year of publication, and found that age deficits have been getting smaller over the last six decades.

Next, I assessed if the average increases in cognitive ability over time seen across all individuals was a result that also applied to older adults specifically. Many large databases exist where groups of individuals are recruited every few years to take part in the same tests. I analysed studies using these data sets to look at older adults.

I found that, just like younger people, older adults were indeed becoming more cognitively able with each cohort. But if differences are disappearing, does that mean younger people’s improvements in cognitive ability have slowed down or that older people’s have increased?

I analysed data from my own laboratory that I had gathered over a seven-year period to find out. Here, I was able to dissociate the performance of the young from the performance of the older. I found that each cohort of young adults was performing to a similar extent across this seven-year period, but that older adults were showing improvements in both processing speed and vocabulary scores.

The figure shows data for a speed-based task where higher scores represent better performance.
CC BY-SA

I believe the older adults of today are benefiting from many of the factors previously most applicable to young adults. For example, the number of children who went to school increased significantly in the 1960s – with the system being more similar to what it is today than what it was at the start of the 20th century.

This is being reflected in that cohort’s increased scores today, now they are older adults. At the same time, young adults have hit a ceiling and are no longer improving as much with each cohort.

It is not entirely clear why the young generations have stopped improving so much. Some research has explored maternal age, mental health and even evolutionary trends. I favour the opinion that there is just a natural ceiling – a limit to how much factors such as education, nutrition and health can improve cognitive performance.

These data have important implications for research into dementia. For example, it is possible that a modern older adult in the early stages of dementia might pass a dementia test that was designed 20 or 30 years ago for the general population at that time.

Therefore, as older adults are performing better in general than previous generations, it may be necessary to revise definitions of dementia that depend on an individuals’ expected level of ability.

Ultimately, we need to rethink what it means to become older. And there’s finally some good news. Ultimately, we can expect to be more cognitively able than our grandparents were when we reach their age. Läs mer…

Dressed in a mini skirt and passionate about boys, music, dance and fashion, the 1960s teenage girl is a pop culture icon, the seeming beneficiary of the ascendancy of mass youth culture in the west and of unprecedented social and cultural changes.

Quite how real women actually experienced – and benefited from – this era of social change is more complex. For the past six years, I have led the first detailed study of girls growing up in Britain between the 1950s and 1970s. In order to understand how this era has shaped women’s experiences and identities in later life, my colleagues and I conducted interviews with 70 women born between 1939 and 1952.

We also explored data on girlhood from Britain’s first birth cohort study, as well as the English longitudinal study of ageing.

The current Teenage Kicks exhibition, on show at the Glasgow Women’s Library and online until May 18, delves into eight of our interviewees’ stories. Edinburgh-based artist Candice Purwin has illustrated the striking diversity they relay: girls growing up in very different circumstances navigated the possibilities and pitfalls of the 1960s and early 1970s in very different ways.

Swinging London

Our interviewees were from different social class backgrounds and across both rural and urban locations. To spark memories, we played music that these women would have listened to when they were young. We talked with them about their personal photos.

Andrea.
Candice Purwin/University of Manchester, CC BY-NC-ND

One interviewee, Liz, was the epitome of a modern, mobile, young woman. At 17, she was earning an income, travelling to Europe with friends and enjoying the consumerism of swinging London. She told us about visiting clubs and shopping in new department stores. At 19, she left to work in the US.

This sense of London as a place of opportunity was a recurrent theme. Andrea embarked on a science degree in London, aged 18. Coming to the capital meant being able to escape village life and the scrutiny of her religious parents.

Andrea found freedom to engage in student politics and to come out as a lesbian. Being gay was a stigmatised identity at the time. She recalled furtive visits to London’s only lesbian club, the Gateway Club. “A crummy place really,” she said, “down in the basement, small, hot and dark.”

Another interviewee, Joyce, grew up in poverty in an overcrowded home in central London. She said she felt like “the bee’s knees” when she started earning money. She described the pair of white boots she was able to buy, to wear when she went out dancing.

Like her peers, though, Joyce mainly spent her leisure time walking the streets with friends and going to cafés. “We sat there all night with one coffee,” she said, “sometimes two, if you were feeling rash.”

Valerie.
Candice Purwin/University of Manchester, CC BY-NC-ND

In rural areas, girls were often dependent on limited public transport to access leisure venues, shops and cafes in nearby towns. Going to the cinema was a major expedition.

Valerie, who grew up on a farm near Portsmouth on England’s south coast, said: “We couldn’t get there until 6 o’clock and we had to be on the 9 o’clock bus back.” As films were often shown on a continuous loop throughout the day, she said “you’d pick up a film half way through, watch it until the bit that you came in at, and then leave.”

For girls abroad, the capital represented the opportunities Britain itself promised. One interviewee, Cynthia, migrated from St Kitts, in search of better prospects. “Jobs were easy to find when I came to Britain,” she said.

Cynthia worked as a machinist in a clothing factory by day. By night, she studied typing and administration. These new qualifications helped her secure a better-paid job as a secretary in a solicitor’s office.

Cynthia.
Candice Purwin/University of Manchester, CC BY-NC-ND

Unequal access

We found that access to the widening educational and professional opportunities for girls was uneven. More were going to university and into professional training. Most, however, left school at 15 without qualifications and with limited work prospects.

Joyce thrived at school but left at 15 when her mother became ill. Later, she took evening classes and became a telephonist.

Pamela too was a star pupil but her mother thought it pointless educating a daughter. “She’s only going to get married!”, her mother would say. Once in the workforce, however, Pamela excelled and quickly progressed into management.

Like others whose education was foreshortened due to hardship and sexism, Pamela and Joyce later regretted not having been able to pursue their studies further.

Young adults on London’s Carnaby Street in the 1960s.
National Archives UK/Wikimedia

In popular culture, the 1960s are associated with growing permissiveness. Most of the women we spoke with, however, said that, as girls, they feared getting pregnant out of wedlock.

The pill became available to married women in 1961. But access for single women was restricted until 1974. Even access to basic sex education was limited.

Pamela fell in love at 17 and got pregnant. Her mother insisted that she give up both that relationship and her baby. She eventually started a new relationship and married at 20. This was an abusive marriage. Taking control of her fertility, she went on the pill and by age 24, she had secured a divorce.

The unprecedented trend towards early marriage meant youth was typically short-lived. In 1965, 40% of brides were under 21. Easier access to divorce from 1969 proved an important development for many.

Women speak about aspects of their younger selves having stayed with them in later life. Many live with what we call “shadow selves”, the feeling that they could have been a different person and had a different life if things had gone differently when they were young.

Some of our interviewees explained that it was not possible to rectify what they missed in their youth. Others spoke about using retirement to make up for missed opportunities. Most advise their own children and grandchildren to make the most of being young. Läs mer…

In March 2024, a 39-year-old man became the first person in England and Wales to be convicted of the new offence of cyberflashing, part of the Online Safety Act. He had sent unsolicited photos of his genitals to a 15-year-old girl and a woman.

Cyberflashing now being a criminal offence is a welcome change, and the creation of this offence was informed by our research.

But as researchers of young people’s use of social media, we have concerns that this is not enough to to counter the widespread normalisation of image-based sexual harassment and abuse, including digital flashing, in youth culture. A significant problem is that young people rarely report that they have encountered this – and without reports, no convictions can take place.

In 2019, we researched cyberflashing interviewing 144 teens about their experiences of non-consensual sexual images on social media platforms. We followed this research up with a survey of 336 young people, carried out during the pandemic lockdown of spring and summer 2020.

Together, the interviews and survey data present a compelling picture of how widespread cyberflashing is among young people.

We found that 75% of girls from our qualitative interviews had received some form of unwanted male genital images or videos. One 14-year-old girl said:

There was this guy on Snapchat, I didn’t know him but I thought my friend knew him, so I accepted this follow request and then on his story it was like who wants to see my big… you know, and then I saw like a text from him, because you know you do so I thought it was like a streak [an ongoing chat conversation], so when I pressed on it and it was a picture of his like dick […] I blocked him.

In our survey, we found that 37% of girls had been sent an unwanted sexual image and of these 80% said it left them feeling “disgusted”.

The survey also found that young people rarely reported their experiences. Only 17% of the young people in our survey reported cyberflashing to social media platforms, 5% told their parents and just 2% reported it to school.

Young people were very unlikely to talk to their school about their experience.
DGLimages/Shutterstock

A 15-year-old girl explained in an interview that normalisation and acceptance of the issues plays a role in lack of reporting:

[Young people] they think it’s normal … yeah, it’s normal, or they didn’t do anything, and that is sexual assault, but most teenagers don’t know that, so they don’t do anything about it, and they just leave it.

In our interviews, girls explained that while images from strangers were often upsetting, they felt better able to ignore or block such images than when they came from boys they knew. It was much worse for victims if the sender was in their immediate peer group at school. A 13-year-old said:

Yeah, if they go to the same school as you then you see them every day, and it just reminds you of like what they did.

In some cases, the harassment comes from boys the girls are close to. A 14-year-old said:

I had a friend, yeah, and her boyfriend must have sent her a dick pic, and then he carried on trying to pressure her to send one, I feel that’s what happens the most, these boys try and pressure them like into sending it back, because oh I send, or oh if you love me you’ll send it back to me.

These “transactional dick pics” are a doubled form of harassment: girls are being cyberflashed accompanied by requests to send sexual content back. Our survey found that girls felt much more pressure to send nudes (44%) than boys (15%).

A new criminal offence is a good step, but it doesn’t sufficiently address the culture shift that is so desperately needed.

Recommended changes

More extensive privacy settings for social media sites would be a start, given our research showed incidents of image-based sexual harassment and abuse from unknown adults as well as peers.

Sex education at school should also give young people the tools to understand harassment online and digital consent. The current updated government guidance on education regarding sharing nudes and semi nudes does include a footnote to our own online sexual harassment guidance. But the government document still does not adequately cover basic elements of image-based sexual harassment and abuse including cyberflashing, upskirting and AI deepfakes.

Parents and adults in the wider community need resources to help them understand and respond to tech facilitated abuse, including how to talk to young people about these issues.

We have produced lesson plans and resources for schools. In the evaluation report of these resources, young people, school staff and parents had vastly improved their understandings of digital sexual violence and bystander interventions.

Schools need to take an approach that builds in understanding of the impact of trauma on young people. It’s also vitally important that boys are included in this discussion. Excluding boys and boys’ voices may push them deeper into misogynistic ideologies. Creating peer mentorship programmes and setting up youth discussion groups within schools around issues of digital consent are effective ways to shift attitudes.

A focus on education will help young people know their rights and give them the tools they need to stay safe. Läs mer…

The COVID pandemic affected several aspects of children’s health and wellbeing. The number of children referred to specialist mental health teams in England has soared by more than 50% in just three years, for example. But recent research from my colleagues and I reveals that problems such as these were increasing even before the pandemic.

Our study explored changes in the health and wellbeing of 36,951 primary school children between 2014 and 2022. We analysed the data from anonymous annual surveys given to children aged between eight and 11 in Wales. The questions covered various aspects of health and wellbeing such as physical activity, diet, sleep and mental health and wellbeing.

It shows a significant decline in various aspects of childhood health and wellbeing over an eight year period. While societal factors like Brexit, the pandemic and the cost of living crisis likely play a role, our research suggests a decline was underway even before these events.

Understanding these trends is crucial. Childhood experiences significantly affect adult health and behaviour, with half of all mental health problems established by age 14.

Decline in swimming and cycling

We found a particularly troubling decline in swimming and cycling ability. For example, 85% of children reported being able to swim 25 metres in 2018, but that percentage dropped to 68% by 2022.

This is concerning as activities such as these are essential for developing fundamental movement skills and coordination in childhood. Funding cuts to free swimming schemes in 2019 in Wales and the closure of swimming pools during the pandemic to prevent virus transmission will have not helped the situation.

The decline in swimming ability disproportionately affected children from disadvantaged backgrounds, further highlighting the potential for such cuts to widen existing inequality.

Swimming ability significantly declined according to the research.
Michael Kemp/Alamy

We also identified a decline in fruit and vegetable consumption, while there was a rise in eating sugary snacks. Sugar intake spiked in 2020, coinciding with the COVID lockdowns. This suggests a possible link between the increase in time spent at home and unhealthier dietary choices.

School routines often provide structure and regular mealtimes, which may have been disrupted during the pandemic. These findings may support arguments for universal free school meals, which could help reduce the inequality in access to a healthy and balanced diet.

Mental health issues, including emotional and behavioural difficulties, also increased. Emotional difficulties affected between 13% and 15% of children between 2017 and 2018. But that percentage increased to 29% between 2021 and 2022. Girls also reported higher emotional and behavioural difficulties than boys.

There was also an increase in children worrying and feeling lonely, and this was present even before the pandemic. This highlights the need to provide settings which promote socialisation and support children’s wellbeing.

More than a pandemic problem

Our research suggests the decline in children’s health and wellbeing that began before the pandemic has either continued or plateaued. This indicates that more complex issues are present and require further action than simply assuming that returning to pre-pandemic routines would improve matters.

The wellbeing of school-aged children is a cornerstone of future public health. Our findings, based on children’s own experiences, underscore the urgent need for interventions to address this concerning trend. This is particularly significant as children’s voices are often absent from policy and planning discussions.

Read more:
More mental health support in schools makes sense – but some children may fall through gaps

Governments and public bodies must prioritise developing and implementing effective, long-lasting ways to reverse these trends. Policies and funding should address critical aspects of childhood health and wellbeing. These include essential physical skills like swimming and cycling, confidence and independence in physical activity, and children’s overall wellbeing and ability to socialise. Creating supportive environments within schools and communities is also crucial.

Greater investment is needed in these areas and a stronger focus on listening to children and understanding their needs. Only then can we bring about meaningful change and ensure a brighter future for children everywhere. Läs mer…

When its six-week abortion ban went into effect on May 1, 2024, Florida joined nearly two dozen other U.S. states that ban abortion or greatly restrict it.

These laws came into effect after the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision to overturn Roe v. Wade ended nearly 50 years of the constitutional right to abortion in the United States.

Florida health officials in 2023 reported more than 84,000 abortions statewide, including nearly 7,800 from out-of-state residents.

The Tampa Bay Times recently reported that about 2 in 5 abortions in Florida over the past six years occurred in the first six weeks of pregnancy, meaning that roughly 60% of the procedures performed over that time frame would be illegal under the new restrictions.

The new laws in Florida and other states are sending some Americans across the border into Mexico to access an abortion, where the procedure was legalized in recent years.

Clinics in Mexico do not require proof of residency, so solid numbers about who they are treating are hard to come by. But providers in Mexico report they have been seeing more Americans.

In 2022, Luisa García, director of Profem, an abortion clinic in the border city of Tijuana, told NPR that the percentage of patients coming from the United States had jumped from 25% to 50% in just the two months following the Dobbs decision.

My research and teaching focuses on gender and sexuality in Latin America and the Caribbean. I often ask students to think about the differences between the United States and Latin America — and the struggles the two regions share.

Different paths

In recent years, the U.S. and Mexico have each struggled over access to abortion care, with the two countries moving in opposite directions.

The year before the U.S. Supreme Court reversed Roe, the Mexican Supreme Court ruled the criminalization of abortion by the northern state of Coahuila unconstitutional. This decision set a precedent that led to decriminalization at the federal level in 2023.

Change has since been slow. Only 13 of Mexico’s 31 states have modified their penal codes to reflect the court’s resolution, with Jalisco being the latest state to do so, in April 2024.

Unlike in the U.S., federal laws in Mexico do not automatically overrule local ones. But Mexican women living in states where abortions are illegal can still have one in a federally run hospital or clinic. And the federal statute protects the staff of those facilities from punishment.

Marea Verde movement

A crucial force behind the legalization of abortion care in Latin America is a movement called Green Tide, or Marea Verde, which emerged in Argentina and expanded across the region over the past two decades.

Although it began as a collective fight for abortion rights, Green Tide has grown to encompass issues such as the prevention of violence against women and members of the LGBTQ+ community, as well as femicide – the violent death of women motivated by gender.

Expansion of abortion access in Mexico

Following the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in 2022, Mexican organizations offering abortions have expanded locations to increase choices for Mexican and U.S. residents seeking care. For example, Fundación MSI opened its newest clinic in Cancún late last year.

It chose this location intentionally, MSI’s Latin America regional managing director told the health news website Stat. Cancún’s status as a popular tourist destination means that multiple U.S. airports offer direct flights for about US$400 round trip. In-person abortion services range from $250 to $350. MSI’s website caters to Americans by offering information in English and featuring links to search for flights.

In Mexico, an ‘acompanante’ often accompanies other women who want to terminate their pregnancy but don’t know where to turn or fear hostility at public clinics.
AP Photo/Maria Alferez

To assist those traveling to Mexico, Mexican and American abortion rights groups created the Red Transfronteriza, a transnational network that supports those crossing the border in search of care but whose primary mission has become the shipping of misoprostol and mifepristone, the pills generally used to induce abortions, into the United States.

One group that is part of the network on the Mexican side of the border is Guanajuato-based Las Libres, or The Free Ones. In September 2023, its founder estimated that her organization had sent abortion pills to approximately 20,000 women in the U.S. since the Dobbs decision.

Red Necesito Abortar, or I Need to Abort Network, was founded in 2017 by Sandra Cardona and Vanessa Jimenez in the northern city of Monterrey, Nuevo León, to help those seeking abortion services.

History of abortion, US-Mexico border

Although the Dobbs decision brought renewed attention to the issue, the relationship between the United States and Mexico and people from both countries seeking abortions has a long history.

Women’s studies professor Lina-María Murillo, who studies the U.S.-Mexico borderlands and teaches a course on global reproduction, explains that abortion in the United States was legal and performed by midwives before the Civil War. In the following decades, declining birth rates and gender inequality led to restrictions across the country and a nationwide ban in 1910.

As Murillo’s research has documented, criminalization led women seeking abortions to travel to Mexico more than a century ago.

These border crossings ultimately declined as Mexican abortion restrictions were enforced and clinics shut down by the late 1960s. At the same time, U.S. activists and doctors contributed to the narrative that portrayed Mexico as a dangerous place where “back alley” abortions were performed by “butcher” physicians. Murillo argues that these myths contributed to a loosening of abortion restrictions in several U.S. states like California and New Mexico, helping set the stage for Roe v. Wade.

As elections loom closer in the United States, abortion will likely take center stage once again – including in Florida, where a referendum to reverse the six-week ban will be on the November ballot. Läs mer…

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.

In recent weeks, a palpable unease has gripped some Democrats, fearing that anger among young people displayed at campuses such as Columbia’s could spill over into November’s election. Headlines like “The campus is coming for Joe Biden” (The Economist) and “How protests against Israel and war in Gaza could hurt Biden in November” (PBS) underscore the gravity of concern among certain White House officials.

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.

Elite universities tend to foster progressive, activist student bodies that don’t look like the demography of American higher education generally, much less the US youth population overall.

Also, just a tiny fraction of students, even at elite institutions, are active in the Gaza demonstrations. At Columbia, for example, only about 200 students were arrested at a school that enrols more than 30,000.

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.

A campsite of supporters of Gaza popped up around Columbia University, New York.
Sipa/Alamy

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.

Read more:
US election: two graphs show how young voters influence presidential results as Biden gets poll boost

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. Läs mer…

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.

The full Supreme Court, with nine justices, heard oral arguments in the immunity case.
Fred Schilling, Collection of the Supreme Court of the United States

The court doing its job

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. Läs mer…

Brain cancers remain among the most challenging tumors to treat. They often don’t respond to traditional treatments because many chemotherapies are unable to penetrate the protective barrier around the brain. Other treatments like radiation and surgery can leave patients with lifelong debilitating side effects.

As a result, brain cancer is the leading cause of cancer-related death in children. Brain tumors in children frequently do not respond to treatments developed for adults, likely due to the fact that pediatric brain cancers are not as well-studied as adult brain cancers. There is an urgent need to develop new treatments specific to children.

We developed a new messenger-RNA, or mRNA, cancer vaccine, described in newly published research, that can deliver treatments more effectively in children who have brain cancer and teach their immune systems to fight back.

Cancer treatments designed for adults may not necessarily work as well in children.
Virojt Changyencham/Moment via Getty Images

How do cancer vaccines work?

The immune system is a complex network of cells, tissues and organs whose primary function is to continuously surveil the body for threats posed by foreign invaders – pathogens that damage tissues and make you sick. It accomplishes this by recognizing antigens, or abnormal proteins or molecules, on pathogens. T cells that recognize these antigens seek out and destroy the pathogens.

Your immune system also protects you from domestic threats like cancer. Over time, your cells sustain DNA damage from either internal or external stressors, leading to mutations. The proteins and molecules produced from mutated DNA look quite different from the ones cells typically produce, so your immune system can recognize them as antigens. Cancer develops when cells accumulate mutations that enable them to continue to grow and divide while simultaneously going undetected by the immune system.

In 1991, scientists identified the first tumor antigen, helping lay the framework for modern-day immunotherapy. Since then, researchers have identified many new tumor antigens, facilitating the development of cancer vaccines. Broadly, cancer vaccines deliver tumor antigens into the body to teach the immune system to recognize and attack cancer cells that display those antigens. Although all cancer vaccines conceptually work very similarly, they each significantly vary in the way they are developed and the number and combination of antigens they carry.

Cancer vaccines help the immune system differentiate between healthy cells and tumor cells.

One of the biggest differences among cancer vaccines is how they are created. Some vaccines use protein fragments, or peptides, of tumor antigens that are directly given to patients. Other vaccines use viruses reengineered to express cancer antigens. Even more complex are vaccines where a patient’s own immune cells are collected and trained to recognize cancer antigens in a laboratory before being delivered back to the patient.

Currently, there is a lot of excitement and focus among researchers on developing mRNA-based cancer vaccines. Whereas DNA is the blueprint of which proteins to make, mRNA is a copy of the blueprint that tells cells how to build these proteins. Thus, researchers can use mRNA to create blueprint copies of potential antigens.

mRNA cancer vaccines

The COVID-19 pandemic brought significant attention to the potential of using mRNA-based vaccines to stimulate the immune system and provide protection against the antigens they encode for. But researchers have been investigating the use of mRNA vaccines for treating various cancers since before the pandemic.

Our team of scientists in the Brain Tumor Immunotherapy Program at University of Florida has spent the past 10 years developing and optimizing mRNA vaccines to treat brain cancer.

Cancer vaccines have faced significant challenges. One key hurdle is that these vaccines may not always trigger a strong enough immune response to eradicate the cancer completely. Moreover, tumors are not made up of one type of cancer cell, but rather a complex mix of cancer cells that each harbors its own unique cocktail of mutations.

Our cancer vaccine seeks to address these issues in a number of ways.

Lipid nanoparticles can carry therapeutic mRNA into the body.
Buschmann et al. 2021/ Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA

First, we designed our vaccines by using the RNA of a patients’ own cancer cells as a template for the mRNA inside our nanoparticles. We also packaged our cancer vaccine inside of nanoparticles made up of specialized lipids, or fat molecules. We maximized the amount of mRNA packaged within each nanoparticle by sandwiching them between lipid layers like the layers of an onion. In this way, we increase the likelihood that the mRNA molecules in our nanoparticles produce enough tumor antigens from that patient’s cancer to activate an immune response.

Also, instead of injecting nanoparticles into the skin, muscle or directly into the tumor, as is commonly done for many therapeutic cancer vaccines, our mRNA nanoparticles are injected into the bloodstream. From there, they travel to organs throughout the body involved in the immune response to teach the body to fight against the cancer. By doing so, we’ve found that the immune system launches a near immediate and powerful response. Within six hours of receiving the vaccine, there is a significant increase in the amount of blood markers connected to immune activation.

Looking to the future

Our mRNA-based vaccines are currently undergoing early-phase clinical trials to treat real patients with brain cancer.

We administered our mRNA-based vaccine to four adult patients with glioblastoma who had relapsed after previous treatment. All patients survived several months longer than the expected average survival at this advanced stage of illness. We expect to treat children with a type of brain tumor called pediatric high-grade glioma by the end of the year.

Importantly, mRNA vaccines can be developed to treat any kind of cancer, including childhood brain tumors. Our Pediatric Cancer Immunotherapy Initiative focuses on developing new immune-based therapies for children afflicted with cancer. After developing an mRNA vaccine for glioma in chidren, we will expand to treat other kinds of pediatric brain cancers like medulloblastoma and potentially treat other kinds of cancers like skin cancer and bone cancer.

We are hopeful that mRNA-based vaccines may lead to more children being cured of their brain tumors. Läs mer…

Tony Blair left Downing Street nearly 17 years ago, but in terms of his impact on the Labour party, it’s almost like he never left.

After Gordon Brown led Labour into the 2010 general election, and lost, the party entered what has turned out to be a lengthy spell in opposition. Labour changed a lot after that point, including some ways nobody could have predicted.

There was a common theme, though, which I describe in my book, Getting Over New Labour. Actions taken after 2010 were often motivated by a desire to be (and were presented as) in marked contrast to New Labour.

What is striking is that, regardless of people’s particular views on New Labour, we are still talking about it. When Blair speaks, he gets headlines. And the contemporary Labour party is still somewhat animated by a reaction to the politics of the 1990s.

The New Labour legacy

When David and Ed Miliband contested the 2010 Labour leadership election, along with Diane Abbott, Ed Balls and Andy Burnham, they did so in the shadow of New Labour. The “rival” political identities of Blair and Brown loomed large. Ed Miliband had worked closely with Brown for many years, David Miliband more with Blair. When Ed Miliband triumphed, he did so, he later said, as “the ‘moving on from New Labour’ candidate”.

The list of New Labour achievements, certainly from a Labour party member’s perspective, is long. So too is the list of mistakes. Blair had left office in 2007 an unpopular figure, defined in large part by his continued belief that it was right for the UK to join the US in invading Iraq in 2003. The New Labour project itself had ended with the 2010 election, and the aftermath of the global financial crisis, which was followed by a Conservative-led government’s austerity programme.

Ed Miliband and Tony Blair, pictured in 2012.
Alamy/Dan Kitwood

Big questions about how New Labour had managed the UK economy, and specifically about continued high levels of economic inequality after the Conservative governments of the 1980s, took centre-stage within Labour. Miliband’s leadership, and Corbyn’s leadership after 2015, can be located in what the sociologist Mike Savage has called the “inequality paradigm” – a different set of propositions for understanding the world after the global financial crisis; ones that challenged New Labour’s acquiescence within an unfair economic model.

A different kind of party

While New Labour was electorally successful, some felt the project to have become too distant from both the party and the people – too technocratic and too “top-down”.

David and Ed Miliband both believed in the party resembling a “movement” once again, and this was important for much of Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership, too. It was another way of moving on from New Labour. Embracing a different kind of politics was also key. Labour wanted to become less obsessed with focus groups and unafraid of challenging conventional wisdom.

Just how successful was this? The post 2010 story is a paradoxical one. It was electorally unsuccessful, though at times defied political pessimism. There were new ideas coming from the Labour party, often based upon a convincing account of the problems the UK faced.

There were some big failures, too. Corbynism ultimately could not manage the politics of Brexit. On what became the defining political issue of the 2017-2019 period, Corbyn’s leadership seemed to lack both certainty and principle. And on organisational culture, the Corbyn project failed, most seriously when it came to tackling antisemitism within Labour.

New Labour today

New Labour factionalism has lessened over the past few years. New generations of Labour politicians and activists are beginning to treat the New Labour project like any other part of the party’s past.

And there is much for policymakers to learn from studying the recent past – just look at recent evidence about the difference made by New Labour’s flagship Sure Start programme, for example. It is less productive, I think, to continue debating New Labour’s personalities.

Current leader Keir Starmer is more comfortable sharing a stage with Blair than his predecessors.
Alamy

Since Keir Starmer has become leader, there has been something of a counter-reaction to how New Labour was interpreted and debated during the Corbyn and Miliband years. Starmer was initially elected leader with a narrative similar to that of his predecessors, including the theme of moving on from New Labour. He has since, however, sought a much stronger association with the New Labour record. That has included interacting with Blair and his high-profile, influential thinktank the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change.

Starmer seems much keener than his predecessors to be associated with New Labour – particularly, unsurprisingly, its record of winning three general elections. That doesn’t, however, make the contemporary party a “continuity New Labour” project. On economic policy, for example, shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves has spoken extensively about how the politics of the 1990s and early 2000s – and the economics of New Labour – had significant weaknesses. Globalisation was a leitmotif for Blair’s take on the modern world. According to Reeves: “globalisation, as we once knew it, is dead”.

After 2010, the Labour Party couldn’t stop talking about New Labour. Starmer’s leadership marks a change on that front: less talking about “moving on”, but still actually moving on.

Yet, like everyone, politicians are still trying to understand an uncertain world. They will continue looking back at the near-past to explore the origins of certain problems, and to justify how they wish to change things. We haven’t, then, heard the last of New Labour. Läs mer…

The extraordinary sight of five horses galloping through London, sweating and covered in blood, caused the hashtag #Apocalypse to trend briefly on social media last week.

Colliding with vehicles and startling pedestrians, the military horses had been taking part in an exercise in the capital when they were spooked by noisy building works nearby. And while not exactly an omen for the end of days, the incident does give us cause to reflect on the role of working horses in our daily lives.

And it’s a role with a long history. For centuries, horses have transported people, goods and armies, and provided power on farms and in factories.

Then after the second world war, many were replaced by motorised vehicles and machinery. But that doesn’t mean they stopped working.

Today there are around 850,000 horses in the UK. As well as military units, there are 13 police forces with mounted branches. Horses are a familiar sight at football matches and demonstrations as well as ceremonial occasions. But most working horses are now employed in the sport, tourism and leisure industries.

And this is one of the reasons we may fail to recognise horses as “workers”. Our hard-wired anthropocentrism (believing humans are the most important beings) means we often fail to consider that, from a horse’s perspective, what is leisure to us is still work to them. This is compounded by the assumption that it is paid work which matters. We cannot pay horses, so how can we describe what they do as work?

Yet even to the untrained eye, it is hard to describe what many horses do in any other way. It is their physical effort which carries soldiers or police officers, delights punters at the racetrack, or hauls logs from sustainably managed forests.

And they engage in skilful emotional labour too, navigating crowded city streets or anticipating the next move of the rodeo rider.

Crowd control ahead of a football match in Newcastle, UK.
Islandstock/Alamy Stock Photo

When we properly consider horses as workers, it becomes clear that they deserve consideration, respect and safe working conditions, just like their human colleagues.

The unsettling scenes in London on April 24 showed what happens when those conditions are violated by a hostile outside world. And it was a reminder that we should bear in mind that while the people involved have largely chosen their line of work, the same cannot be said of the horses themselves.

The questions become tougher still if we take a global perspective. We are clearly a long way from a world in which decent work is a possibility for everyone, regardless of species. In many cases, not only horses, but the people working alongside them are often subject to extremely poor working conditions, or what one researcher calls “shared suffering”.

Stable relationships

In contrast, the working life of London’s cavalry horses is characterised by a high level of care, extensive training and a long retirement. This gives some insight into what is possible in a world where we treat animal workers with respect.

But for many working animals, the reality is very different. And our reluctance to recognise the animal workers among us is a symptom of a bigger problem. As a global society, we often seem unable to recognise our non-human neighbours as anything other than resources for our own benefit – with disastrous consequences.

If we are to find a way through environmental challenges like the climate crisis, we need to find new ways of thinking about the planet and all the species who share it with us. Recognising horses and other animals as workers is one small step along that road.

Recent research has found that working with horses has an influence on people’s understanding of what makes for a “good life”, which then inspires them to take better care of their environment.

This is an example of what one expert calls “interspecies solidarity” – the idea that someone does not need to be the same as us in order for us to care about their wellbeing.
And perhaps that’s a sense that our longstanding working relationship with horses could help to reignite. Läs mer…