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Excess workload has been identified as a root cause of the current health-care crisis in report, after report, after report. Excess workload for front-line staff like nurses contributes to fatigue, burnout, medical error and staff quitting.

After heroically working under decades of austerity policies, nurses are burned out and the health-care system is in collapse. If automakers took the same approach to workload management, not a single car would roll off the line with all five wheels properly connected (did you forget the steering wheel?). Excess workload lies at the root of the health-care crisis in Canada today and the wheels are flying off the cart.

So why then does our health-care system have no systematic approach to measuring workload? There is no objective measure of workload in use that can ensure staff have no more than eight hours of care work to complete in an eight-hour shift. There is a saying: “If you can’t measure it you can’t manage it” and by this standard, the Canadian health-care system is flying blind with regards to staff workloads.

It is no wonder our health-care system is in trouble: How can we set “safe staffing levels” with no measure of workload? Without evidence-based workload management, efforts to stave off the shortfall of nurses with increased hiring and “resiliency” training and other staff retention efforts are doomed to fail.

14 hours of work in a 12-hour shift

All too often nurses are working overtime or skipping breaks in an effort to deliver the quality of care they were trained for.
(Shutterstock)

While the variability in care work can make measuring workload a challenge, new tools using computer simulation technologies are opening the door to objective workload measurement. Our computer modelling approaches have shown that nurses can have over 14 hours of work to complete in a 12-hour shift.

How are staff supposed to keep up with these demands? By rushing? By skipping non-essential tasks? All too often nurses are working overtime or skipping breaks in an effort to deliver the quality of care they were trained for. No wonder nurses are quitting in droves.

Read more:
Canada’s health-care crisis is gendered: How the burden of care falls to women

These modelling tools allow us to create virtual care units based on actual unit conditions. These models have shown the impact on nurse workload goes well beyond nurse-patient ratios as is currently being discussed.

Making sure workload is balanced to the length of a nurse’s shift requires considering a number of factors, including:

the needs of the patient, including acuity and dependency levels,
the layout of the unit and positioning of medicines and materials,
the location of the beds assigned, and
the policies and practices that determine the time needed for between-shift hand-offs, safety huddles and data entry.

All of these factors can increase workload and contribute to missed care as tasks are left undone by the end of a nurse’s working shift.

If you consider the donning and doffing of personal protective equipment required for caring for those with COVID-19, for example, a nurse might spend half of their shift simply dealing with the PPE. Where is the time to deal with the extra needs of these patients?

Excess workloads compromise care quality, and workload for nurses can vary from day to day. It can also vary considerably between units and hospitals. There is no one-size-fits-all ideal nurse-patient ratio, but workload measures can help ensure the right number of staff are allocated for the needs of the patients each day.

Evidence-based workload management

Resiliency training and other popular staff retention approaches will not solve the problem of desperately overworked staff.
(Shutterstock)

The health-care system needs evidence-based workload management to stop desperately overworked health-care staff from quitting.

Similarly, privatizing health care will not help. The entire purpose of for-profit health care is to extract money from the system for investors. That’s its raison d’être. The way most private health-care systems achieve profit growth is by cutting corners and pressing staff to work faster. Do you really want your loved one’s nurse or caregiver rushing through their required care?

The “temp” agency nursing debacle illustrates the privatization problem. Nurses are hired away from hospitals, given better working conditions and then rented back to the same hospitals at exorbitant rates for shareholders’ profit. This scam cost Newfoundland and Labrador alone over $35 million in under six months in 2023.

The United States, the poster child of for-profit health care, has by far the highest health-care costs globally with per capita costs over double those in Canada. At the same time, the U.S. has some of the worst health-care outcomes in the world with the lowest life expectancy and highest mortality rate from treatable diseases among comparable countries. The U.S. system is a warning beacon of the disaster that is private health care. In for-profit health care, everyone suffers — except the investors.

None of these privatization efforts will solve the need to manage workloads for nurses and ensure staffing capacity meets patient needs. Until health-care decision-makers employ objective tools, the drive for cost reduction will continue to drive nurses into overload at work, and both staff and patients will suffer.

Better work means better care

New measurement tools enable precisely quantifying and understanding the real drivers of nurse workload. It’s time to move beyond “magical thinking” in health care to use modern workload management tools in health-care system design and management.

Better work for nurses and other health-care professionals means better and safer care for patients. This is the inspiration behind the Better Work Better Care coalition, an open network of researchers and practitioners for the exchange of knowledge on how to improve the health-care system in healthy ways.

One of the key strategic lessons of the Better Work Better Care approach is the importance of including “improved working conditions” as a measurable indicator in all process improvement efforts. This is critical, as attempts to improve the system that ignore workload are doomed to failure as staff fatigue and work overload will compromise care quality and, eventually, also increase costs related to both patient treatment and staff retention losses.

If Canadian health-care leaders and policymakers want to stop the bleeding of staff losses and shortages, then they need to address the elephant in the room: health-care staff workloads. There are tools to measure and manage workload in health care; they need to be put to use. Läs mer…

Wild chimpanzees have been studied for more than 60 years, but they continue to delight and surprise observers, as we found during the summer of 2017 in Kibale National Park in Uganda.

We were observing young chimpanzees’ play to better understand how they grow up. For most group-living animals, play is an integral component of development. Beyond just having fun, social play allows them to practice critical physical and social skills they will need later in life.

But that summer, we realized that it wasn’t just the young ones playing. Adults were joining in on play more often than we had seen before, especially with each other. Watching fully grown female chimpanzees tickling each other and laughing surprised even the most veteran researchers of our project.

Two moms with babies play with one another on small trees, and two other young chimpanzees join in.

What made this so unusual was not that adult chimpanzees were playing at all, but that they were doing it so frequently. A behavior that we typically might see once every week or two became something that we saw every day and sometimes lasted for hours.

So what had changed that summer? For us, as primatologists, this is where the fun began.

Why would adults play in the first place?

Scientists tend to think the main reason play declines with age is that individuals essentially grow out of it as they master motor and social skills and shift toward more adult behaviors. By this logic, adults only rarely play because they no longer need to. The situation is different for domesticated species like dogs because the process of domestication itself preserves juvenile behaviors like playfulness into adulthood.

Neither of these reasons would explain why our adult chimpanzees were shoving babies out of the way to play with each other that summer. Instead of asking why adults would play, we had to ask what might, in other circumstances, stop them from playing. And for this, we had to go back to the basics of primatology and consider the effects of food on behavior.

The summer of 2017 was notable because there was an unusually high seasonal peak of a lipstick-red fruit called Uvariopsis, a favorite and calorie-rich chimpanzee food. During the months when these fruits are ripe and plentiful, chimpanzees spend more time hanging out together in larger groups.

This sort of energy surplus has been linked to rigorous activities, such as hunting among monkeys. We wondered whether fruit abundance might be linked to social play as well. Perhaps adult play is constrained because grown chimpanzees just don’t usually have the extra time and energy to devote to it.

Gathering enough food to eat is a critical daily task.
Kris Sabbi

When life gets in the way of play

To test this idea, we turned to the long-term records of the Kibale Chimpanzee Project, extracting nearly 4,000 observations of adult play over 10 years.

Whether tussling with a young chimpanzee or playing chase with another adult, the frequency of adult play was strongly correlated with the amount of ripe fruit in the diet in any given month. When the forest was full of high-quality food, adult chimpanzees played a lot.

But when their prized fruits dwindled, their playful sides all but disappeared – that is, except for mothers.

A surprising sex difference

Among chimpanzees, males are much more social than females. Males invest a lot of time developing friendships, and, in turn, they reap the rewards of those bonds: higher dominance rank and more sex. For females, the high energetic costs of pregnancy and lactation mean socializing comes at the cost of sharing food that they need for themselves and their offspring.

We expected that play, as a social behavior, would follow other social patterns, with males playing more and being able to afford to play even when food abundance was low. To our surprise, we found the opposite. Females played more, especially during months with less fruit – because mothers kept playing with their babies even when all other chimpanzees had stopped.

A hidden cost of motherhood

Chimpanzees live in multimale, multifemale societies that exhibit what researchers call fission-fusion. In other words, the whole social group is rarely, if ever, all together. Instead, chimpanzees break up into temporary subgroups called parties that individuals move among throughout the day.

When food is scarce, parties tend to be smaller, and mothers are often alone with just their young. This strategy reduces feeding competition with group mates. But it also leaves mothers as the only social partners for their offspring. Mothers’ time and energy that might be devoted toward other daily tasks, such as feeding and rest, go toward play instead.

A chimpanzee mom tussles playfully with her young daughter while her infant nurses.

Not only did our study reveal this previously unknown cost of motherhood, but it also highlighted how important play must be for these young chimpanzees that their mothers accept this cost.

You might be curious about how chimpanzee fathers fit in here. Chimpanzees mate promiscuously, so males do not know which offspring are theirs. Mothers are left to bear the costs of parenthood on their own.

An ape connection

Child development researchers know that play, and especially play with parents, is critically important for human social development. In fact, caregivers of young children might be reading this in between bouts of play with their little ones right now.

Chimpanzees and people enjoy some of the same kinds of physical play, like playing airplane.

Since chimpanzees are one of our closest living relatives, these kinds of behavioral similarities between our species are not uncommon.

But not all primate parents reckon with costly play. In fact, there are almost no records of monkey mothers playing with their babies at all. Most other primate species, such as baboons and capuchins, don’t go their separate ways during the day, so babies can play with each other and moms can catch a break.

Whether maternal play is a product of fission-fusion grouping or the developmental needs of offspring still needs to be tested directly. But the responsibility to play with your little ones certainly resonates with many human parents who experienced a sudden shift to become their children’s main play partners when COVID-19 interrupted normal activities.

So on this Mother’s Day, consider raising a glass to also celebrate these amazing – and tired – chimpanzee moms. Läs mer…

When the Arizona Supreme Court ruled on April 9, 2024, that the state’s Civil War-era law banning nearly all abortions was enforceable, it brought into stark reality the potential impacts of leaving reproductive rights up to the states to regulate, and the related consequences for women’s health.

The ruling, set to go into effect in late June 2024, will only remain active for a few months because Arizona lawmakers repealed the law on April 30. Starting in the fall, a previous state law banning abortion after 15 weeks will be reinstated.

The rapidly changing legal landscape and conflicting information has fueled fear and confusion for women, families, hospitals, physicians and other health care providers, and had a chilling effect on abortion services.

We are a health policy expert who studies how laws and policies affect health outcomes, especially for women and children, and a soon-to-be health care lawyer who is focused on health law and policy.

After having studied how reproductive health care has been affected by the 2022 Dobbs decision that overturned Roe v. Wade, it’s clear to us that the implications of bans like those in Arizona and dozens of other states go well beyond abortions. They include reduced availability of safe birthing services, pre- and postnatal care, pap smears, testing for sexually transmitted diseases, family planning, gynecological conditions and miscarriage management.

These downstream effects are not just predicted: They are already playing out in real time in states with the most restrictive reproductive rights laws across the nation.

On May 3, 2024, Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs signed into law a repeal of the recently instated near-total abortion ban.

Hobbling the medical workforce

Policies restricting abortion affect much more than access to abortion.

For one, these laws limit the supply of women’s health specialists like obstetricians and gynecologists, or OB-GYNs. Medical students are less inclined to enter the specialty and more likely to avoid training positions, employment or both in states with restrictive or near-total bans. These states also have difficulty retaining existing OB-GYNs.

This impact on the availability and locations of future women’s health specialists further exacerbates physician shortages, financial strains on families and racial and ethnic health disparities. The dampening effect on the workforce can also worsen the already dismal maternal mortality rates in rural and low-income communities of color.

Having a well-trained and adequate number of OB-GYNs is critical to promoting women’s health. One survey of third- and fourth-year medical students found that 60% were unlikely to apply for residencies in states where abortion is illegal or heavily restricted.

The Association of American Medical Colleges found that there was a 5.2% decline in the number of fourth-year medical student applications for OB-GYN residencies in the 2022–2023 application cycle. This is a steeper decline than in 2021, the year before the Dobbs decision overturned Roe v. Wade.

Most alarmingly, applications to OB-GYN residencies in the 13 states with the most restrictive abortion laws dropped 11% between 2022–2023, signaling a future disparity in the supply of women’s health providers in those states.

Dobbs also affected the retention of OB-GYN residents in abortion-restrictive states: 17.6%, or more than 1 in 6, respondents said they are likely to reconsider where they will practice following their training. They also noted concerns about the potential lack of comprehensive OB-GYN training opportunities in these restrictive states for procedures related to miscarriages, ectopic pregnancies and more.

Reduced access to women’s health care

The Dobbs decision has exacerbated the challenges that women of color and women in rural communities face in accessing women’s health care. Black women account for nearly half of all abortions in the United States yet are more likely to live in a contraceptive desert – meaning areas where they lack access to a full spectrum of contraceptive options – and are less likely to be able to afford the cost of an abortion and associated travel expenses.

A national survey of OB-GYNs found that 70% report racial and ethnic inequities have worsened since Dobbs.

Even before Dobbs, many rural women had to travel more than 180 miles to get an abortion. As a result of state laws banning abortions, at least 66 clinics across 15 states ceased offering abortion services within the first 100 days after the Dobbs decision, leaving many women without access to critical reproductive health care.

As of December 2023, over a dozen states lack an abortion clinic. As more states continue to restrict abortion, these disparities will likely worsen.

Lesser-known downstream effects

As of April 2024, in five states, including Arizona, women cannot get a divorce if they are pregnant. This reality, paired with a lack of access to abortion services, can be deadly to pregnant women, who often experience increased rates of intimate partner violence. One study found that in states where abortion is restricted, homicides rates of pregnant women were 75% higher than in states where abortion is legal.

Nationally, maternal mortality rates have been increasing year after year, even before Dobbs. The U.S. has among the worst maternal mortality rates in the developed world and more than 10 times the rates of some developed nations such as Australia, Japan and Spain.

Stark disparities also exist within American maternal mortality rates: Black and Native women are disproportionately impacted compared to their white counterparts. In 2018, the maternal mortality rate in the U.S. was 17.4 deaths per 100,000 births; in 2021, the rate was 32.9 deaths per 100,000 births.

In 2018–2019, there were 26 deaths per 100,000 births in Arizona, a 43% increase from 2016–2017.

During this time frame, 89.9% of deaths were preventable. A pregnancy-related death is deemed preventable if a maternal mortality review committee determines that the death could have been averted through a reasonable change to the patient’s care.

While extensive post-Dobbs maternal mortality data is not yet available, 64% of surveyed OB-GYNs report that maternal mortality has increased since the decision.

For Black and Native American women, the risk of maternal mortality is even higher. Nationally, in 2021, there were 69.9 deaths of Black mothers per 100,000 births, 2.6 times higher than for white women. Experts anticipate that the Dobbs decision and state restrictions will worsen this racial divide. The maternal mortality rate for Native American mothers has increased drastically in a 20-year period, from 14 to 49.2 deaths per 100,000 births. This trend is highly significant for a state like Arizona with its large Native population.

Health care access helps reduce maternal mortality

Limited access to maternal health care is a critical contributor to maternal mortality rates. Across the United States, approximately 12% of all births occur in counties with little to no access to maternal care, known as “maternity care deserts.”

Women living in abortion-restrictive states are 62.2% more likely to have had no or late prenatal care compared to women living in states where abortion is not restricted. In Arizona, 6.7% of all births occur in counties that lack a hospital with an obstetric unit or obstetric providers.

Women who are forced to prolong their high-risk pregnancies due to abortion bans are at elevated risk of needing emergency maternity care. Without proper maternity care, many of these women will suffer severe complications, and in some cases, they will die.

In the early 1900s, famed women’s rights activist Margaret Sanger stated, “No woman can call herself free who does not own and control her body.”

These words continue to be tested via the political and legal battles taking place. Läs mer…

By the end of winter 2024, the return of Donald Trump to the top of the GOP presidential ticket has revealed a surprising trend in the former president’s base of support: his increasing popularity among Black and Latino voters.

Several polls suggest as many as 23% of Black voters and 46% of Latino voters could cast their ballot for Trump.

If the polls are right, these numbers represent a far cry from the 6% of Black and 28% of Latino voters who supported Trump in 2016 and the 8% of Black voters and 32% of Latino voters who voted for Trump in 2020.

Given Trump’s long record of racist and xenophobic comments, the question, then, is why Trump’s support among voters of color has increased over the years.

A ‘racial realignment’?

Two explanations have emerged to explain Trump’s growth in support among voters of color.

The first is based on the faulty assumption, made by some Democratic strategists that the increasing racial and ethnic diversity of the U.S. electorate would automatically benefit Democratic candidates. This assumption rests on the idea that voters of color are inherently progressive on issues such as education, social services, health care and criminal justice reform.

According to this line of thinking, Trump’s polling numbers are mostly the result of poor messaging by the Democrats – a failure to remind voters of color that their interests align with Joe Biden, not Trump.

The second explanation is that voters of color are inherently conservative, particularly working-class Black and Latino men, who identify more closely with the political right on issues such as immigration, law and order and cultural conservativism.

“Many of America’s nonwhite voters have long held much more conservative views than their voting patterns would suggest,” data analyst John Burton-Murdoch argued in the Financial Times in March 2024. “The migration we’re seeing today is not so much natural Democrats becoming disillusioned but natural Republicans realizing they’ve been voting for the wrong party.”

Though few other analysts go as far, Burton-Murdoch concluded that the numbers represent “racial realignment.”

GOP appeals to cultural identities

Both interpretations suffer from the same faulty assumption that politics can be reduced to a simple exercise in consumer branding and retailing.

Polls provide snapshots of how individual voters feel about certain topics at particular points in time. But they cannot capture the complex forces shaping the varied political realities of the estimated 35 million voters of color.

More important in understanding the apparent racial political shifts are the efforts that are made on the ground in local communities, especially by right-wing activists, that are appealing to a sense of isolation, economic precariousness and widespread mistrust in government.

To see those efforts in action, we attended the December 2023 America Fest, an annual conference in Phoenix sponsored by Turning Point USA, a right-wing organization focused on students and young adults. Perhaps half of the 13,000 attendees were under 35, including small but noticeable numbers of people of color.

At the conference, the emphasis of the group’s messaging was on connecting people who say they feel frustrated about contemporary political and cultural life.

These appeals, which attempted to exploit widespread cynicism among young voters, were used in every part of the group’s social media and outreach efforts. Paraphernalia for such efforts are part of the group’s online activism kits that provide posters and buttons emblazoned with slogans such as “Deep in the heart of freedom,” “Womanhood is not a costume,” “Take pride in my country” and “I 2nd that.”

Cultural refrains that mock gay and transgender people and support the Second Amendment right to bear arms are becoming more popular across the right.

During the 2020 campaign, then-U.S. President Donald Trump spoke with Latino supporters in Phoenix.
Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images

On another front, the Libre Initiative, a libertarian organization funded by the conservative billionaire Koch brothers, launched in August 2023 a multistate advertising campaign aimed at Latino voters that blames Biden for the economic precariousness many of them are facing.

With six months remaining in the presidential campaign, these and other GOP efforts appealing to voters of color appear to be working, based on polling thus far.

But the outcome of the election is far from certain.

in our view, what the polls are revealing is the GOP’s attempt to win support of an increasingly diverse electorate – not through appeals to policy or ideological interests but through forging connections often rooted in identity, community and a sense of belonging.

While polls may provide some useful information and cues, it’s important for American voters to remain cautious about using them as the catchall explanations for these complex and ongoing racial dynamics. Läs mer…

It almost sounds like a bad joke: What did the 78-year-old male senator say to the 69-year-old female justice?

“RETIRE!”

That’s effectively what happened recently when U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut suggested that Sonia Sotomayor – the first Hispanic and third woman Supreme Court justice – retire so that President Joe Biden could appoint a younger and presumably healthier replacement.

Blumenthal is not alone. Fearing a repeat of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death in September 2020 — just weeks before Election Day — progressives such as Josh Barro, Mehdi Hasan and Nate Silver want to ensure that if Donald Trump does defeat Biden in November, he would not have another opportunity to replace a departed liberal justice with a young conservative ideologue.

If Sotomayor is indeed ill, she could justifiably choose to retire. But such calls are not clear-eyed assessments of the justice’s health. Blumenthal and the progressive columnists calling for Sotomayor’s retirement aren’t medical doctors who have reviewed the justice’s records.

Instead, in my view as a political scientist who studies the Supreme Court, these calls are gimmicks really designed to keep a seat on the Supreme Court in the hands of a liberal justice.

Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut has urged Sonia Sotomayor to resign from the Supreme Court.
Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images

Long tenure is a problem

Don’t get me wrong. As I write in my new book, “A Supreme Court Unlike Any Other: The Deepening Divide Between the Justices and the People,” the increasingly long tenure of justices is a serious problem for American democracy. The confirmation of younger justices who stay far longer than they once did prevents the court’s membership from changing organically.

Consider, for example, a hypothetical I pose in my book. Justice Clarence Thomas once said that he intends to serve until he is 86 years old because, as he put it, “The liberals made my life miserable for 43 years, and I’m going to make their lives miserable for 43 years.”

If Thomas, who at 75 is the oldest sitting justice, is able to fulfill that promise and no younger justice leaves the court before him, the U.S. would not see another vacancy until 2034.

A court unchanged for 12 years would be unprecedented in American history. This is just one of the factors that has deepened the “democracy gap” between the justices and the people, which I define in the book as “the distance between the court and the electoral processes that endow it with democratic legitimacy.”

Some reforms would prevent justices from remaining on the high bench for three-plus decades, on average. But publicly requesting an ideologically aligned justice to retire isn’t one of them. It isn’t likely to work, and in the case of Sotomayor, it has been viewed as sexist.

Perhaps more importantly, it misses the point.

Win elections, shape the court

When it comes to the Supreme Court, progressives are now in the position where conservatives found themselves for many years. They’re on the outside looking in.

Instead of advancing gimmicks that are unlikely to work, progressives could take a page from the playbook of conservatives who learned from liberals of the previous era: Take the argument to the people.

Winning on Election Day is the best path for any party to remake the court. Recall how the conservatives came to dominate the court. In election after election, Republican presidential nominees rallied conservative voters to the polls by critiquing the court’s most politically divisive decisions, such as Roe, and promising a different type of justice if given the opportunity to fill a seat.

Winning on Election Day is the best path for a political party to remake the Supreme Court.
Artis777/iStock/Getty Images Plus

Democrats often stayed silent about the Supreme Court during these campaigns, preferring to motivate voters to the polls with other issues. A 2016 exit poll question asked respondents about the importance of Supreme Court appointments in determining their vote for president. Twenty-one percent answered that it was “the” most important issue for them. And significantly, 56% of that 21% supported Trump, 15 percentage points more than those who backed Hillary Clinton.

In fact, when Trump named Neil Gorsuch as his first high court nominee mere days after his presidential inauguration, he highlighted this data, saying that “millions of voters” had supported him based on his promise to appoint conservatives to the court.

Voters are key

Progressives have already shown that the politically astute response to the conservative Supreme Court and its decisions isn’t to go after one of their own. It is to take advantage of the great distaste many Americans have toward some of the court’s decisions, particularly its 2022 Dobbs ruling uprooting Roe.

Just weeks after the Dobbs decision, Kansans overwhelmingly rejected a proposed constitutional amendment that would have denied women a right to obtain an abortion in their state. In the 2022 midterm elections, the expected red wave turned into a ripple as Democrats highlighted the abortion issue. And as the 2024 campaign season heats up, Democrats are primed to highlight their pro-Roe views to rally voters to the polls.

History shows that parties can win elections after losing the Supreme Court. Those parties have done so by strategically focusing on convincing voters to support them, not persuading justices to retire. Läs mer…

Think about taking a walk: where you need to go, how fast you need to move to get there, and whether you need to bring something along to carry the results of your errand.

Are you going on this walk with someone else? Does walking with a friend change your preparation? If you’re walking with a child, do you remember to bring an extra sweater or a snack? You probably did – because people intuitively vary their plan depending on their current needs and situations.

In my research as an anthropologist, I’ve focused on the evolution of human walking and running because I love the flexibility people bring to these behaviors. Humans in all kinds of environments across space and time vary how far they go, when they go and what they go for – whether food, water or friends – based on a multitude of factors, including season, daylight, rituals and family.

Anthropologists split their studies of human activity into two broad categories: what people need to do – including eat, keep their kids alive and so on – and what solutions they come up with to accomplish these needs.

How people keep their children alive is a key issue in my research because it has a direct impact on whether a population survives. It turns out that kids stay alive if they’re with adults. To this end, it is a human universal that women carry heavy loads every day, including kids and their food. This needs-based behavior seems to have been an important part of our evolutionary history and explains quite a few aspects of human physiology and female morphology, such as women’s lower center of mass.

Women are built for endurance. What needs-based behaviors drove this evolutionary path?
Robert Decelis/Stone via Getty Images

The solutions to other key problems, like specifically which food women will be carrying, vary across time and space. I suggest that these variations are as integral to explaining human biology and culture as the needs themselves.

Impacts of uncommon activities

Evolutionary scientists often focus on how beneficial heritable traits get passed on to offspring when they provide a survival advantage. Eventually a trait can become more common in a population when it provides a useful solution.

For example, researchers have made big claims about how influential persistence hunting via endurance running has been on the way the human body evolved. This theory suggests that taking down prey by running them to exhaustion has led to humans’ own abilities to run long distances – by increasing humans’ ability to sweat, strengthening our head support and making sure our lower limbs are light and elastic.

But persistence hunting occurs in fewer than 2% of the recorded instances of hunting in one major ethnographic database, making it an extremely rare solution to the need to find food. Could such a rare and unusual form of locomotion have had a strong enough impact to select for the suite of adaptive traits that make humans such excellent endurance athletes today?

Maybe persistence hunting is actually a fallback strategy, providing a solution only at key moments when survivorship is on the edge. Or maybe these capabilities are just side effects of the loaded walking done every day. I think a better argument is that the ability to predict how to move between common and uncommon strategies has been the driver of human endurance capacity.

Hunting big game is only one way to get food – this Inuit man and children are heading out to find eggs.
George Rinhart/Corbis via Getty Images

Everyday life’s influence on evolution

Hunting itself, especially of large mammals, is hardly ubiquitous, despite how frequently it is discussed. For example, anthropologists tend to generalize that people who lived in the Arctic even up to a hundred years ago consumed only animal meat hunted by men. But actually, the original ethnographic work reveals a far more nuanced picture.

Women and children were actively involved in hunting, and it was a strongly seasonal activity. Coastal fishing, berry picking and the use of plant materials were all vital to Arctic people’s day-to-day sustenance. Small family groups used canoes for coastal foraging for part of the year.

During other seasons, the whole community participated in hunting large mammals by herding them into dangerous situations where they were more easily killed. Sometimes family groups were together, and sometimes large communities were together. Sometimes women hunted with rifles, and sometimes children ran after caribou.

The dynamic nature of daily life means that the relatively uncommon activity of hunting large terrestrial vertebrates is unlikely to be the main behavior that helps humans solve the key problems of food, water and keeping children alive.

Anthropologist Rebecca Bliege Bird has investigated how predictable food is throughout the day and the year. She’s noted that for most communities, big game is rarely caught, especially when a person is hunting alone. Even among the Hadza in Tanzania, generally considered a big-game hunting community, a hunter acquires 0.03 prey per day on average – essentially 11 animals a year for that person.

Bird and others clearly argue that the planning and flexible coordination done by females is the crucial aspect of how humans survive on a daily basis. It’s the daily efforts of females that allow people to be spontaneous a few times a year to accomplish high-risk activities such as hunting – persistence or otherwise. Therefore it is female flexibility that allows communities to survive between the rare big-game opportunities.

Roles and identities shift across the life span.
Jose Luis Pelaez Inc/DigitalVision via Getty Images

Changing roles and contributions

Some anthropologists argue that in some parts of the world, behavior varies more for cultural reasons, like what tools you make, than for environmental ones, such as how much daylight there is during winter. The importance of culture means that the solutions vary more than the needs.

One of the aspects of culture that varies is the role assigned to specific genders. Varying gender roles are related to the distribution of labor and when people take on certain solution-based tasks. In most cultures, these roles change across a female’s life span. In American culture, this would be like a grandparent going back to college to hone a childhood passion in order to take on a new job to send their grandchildren to college.

In many places, females go from youth when they might carry their siblings and firewood, to early parenthood where they might go hunting with a baby on their back, to older parenthood where they might carry water on their head, a baby on their back and tools in their hands, to postmenopausal periods when they might carry giant loads of mangoes and firewood to and from camp.

Even though always load carrying, our capacity to plan and change our behavior for diverse environments is part of what drives Homo sapiens’ success, which means that the behavior of females across their different life stages has been a major driver of this capability. Läs mer…

Located 163 light-years from Earth, a Jupiter-sized exoplanet named WASP-69b offers astrophysicists a window into the dynamic processes that shape planets across the galaxy. The star it orbits is baking and stripping away the planet’s atmosphere, and that escaped atmosphere is being sculpted by the star into a vast, cometlike tail at least 350,000 miles long.

I’m an astrophysicist. My research team published a paper in the Astrophysical Journal describing how and why WASP-69b’s tail formed, and what its formation can illuminate about the other types of planets astronomers tend to detect outside of our solar system.

Artist’s interpretation of an aerial view of the exoplanet WASP-69b on its 3.8-day orbit around its host star. Its atmosphere is being stripped away and sculpted into a long cometlike tail that trails the planet.
W. M. Keck Observatory/Adam Makarenko

A universe filled with exoplanets

When you look up at the night sky, the stars you see are suns, with distant worlds, known as exoplanets, orbiting them. Over the past 30 years, astronomers have detected over 5,600 exoplanets in our Milky Way galaxy.

It isn’t easy to detect a planet light-years away. Planets pale in comparison, in both size and brightness, to the stars that they orbit. But despite these limitations, exoplanet researchers have uncovered an astonishing variety – everything from small rocky worlds barely larger than our own moon to gas giants so colossal that they’ve been dubbed “super-Jupiters.”

However, the most common exoplanets astronomers detect are larger than Earth, smaller than Neptune, and orbit their stars more closely than Mercury orbits our Sun.

These ultra-common planets tend to fall into one of two distinct groups: super-Earths and sub-Neptunes. Super-Earths have a radius that’s up to 50% larger than Earth’s radius, while sub-Neptunes typically have a radius that’s two to four times larger than Earth’s radius.

Sub-Neptunes, or Neptune-like planets, look at lot like a super-Earth, but with a thick atmosphere.
NASA-JPL/Caltech

Between those two radius ranges, there’s a gap, known as the “Radius Gap,” in which researchers rarely find planets. And, Neptune-sized planets that complete orbits around their stars in less than four days are exceedingly rare. Researchers call that gap the “Hot Neptune Desert.”

Some underlying astrophysical processes must be preventing these planets from forming – or surviving.

Planet formation

As a star forms, a large disk of dust and gas forms around it. In that disk, planets can form. As young planets gain mass, they can accumulate significant gas atmospheres. But as the star matures, it starts to emit high amounts of energy in the form of ultraviolet and X-ray radiation. This stellar radiation can bake away the atmospheres that the planets have accumulated in a process called photoevaporation.

A planet-forming disk.
ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO)

However, some planets resist this process. More massive planets have stronger gravity, which helps them hold onto their original atmospheres. Additionally, planets that are farther away from their star aren’t hit with as much radiation, so their atmospheres erode less.

So, maybe a significant portion of super-Earths are actually the rocky cores of planets that had their atmospheres completely stripped, while sub-Neptunes were massive enough to retain their puffy atmospheres.

As for the Hot Neptune Desert, most Neptune-sized planets simply are not massive enough to completely resist the stripping power of their star if it orbits too closely. In other words, a sub-Neptune orbiting its star in four days or fewer will quickly lose its entire atmosphere. When observed, the atmosphere has already been lost and what remains is a bare rocky core – a super-Earth.

To put this theory to the test, research teams like mine have been collecting observational evidence.

WASP-69b: A unique laboratory

Enter WASP-69b, a unique laboratory for studying photoevaporation. The name “WASP-69b” comes from the way it was discovered. It was the 69th star with a planet, b, found in the Wide Angle Search for Planets survey.

Despite being 10% larger than Jupiter in radius, WASP-69b is actually closer to the mass of much lighter Saturn – it’s not very dense, and it has only about 30% the mass of Jupiter. In fact, this planet has about the same density as a piece of cork.

This low density results from its ultra-close 3.8-day orbit around its star. Being so close, the planet receives an immense amount of energy, which causes it to heat up. As gas heats, it expands. Once the gas expands enough, it begins to escape the planet’s gravity for good.

When we observed this planet, my colleagues and I detected helium gas escaping WASP-69b rapidly – about 200,000 tons per second. This translates to the mass of the Earth lost every billion years.

Over the star’s lifetime, this planet will end up losing a total atmospheric mass equivalent of nearly 15 times the mass of Earth. This sounds like a lot, but WASP-69b is approximately 90 times Earth’s mass, so even at this extreme rate, it will only ever lose a small fraction of the total amount of gas from which it is comprised.

The cometlike tail of WASP-69b

Perhaps most striking is the discovery of WASP-69b’s extended helium tail, which my team detected trailing behind the planet for at least 350,000 miles (about 563,000 kilometers). Strong stellar winds, which are a constant flow of charged particles emitted from stars, sculpt tails like this. These particle winds ram into the escaping atmosphere and shape it into a cometlike tail behind the planet.

WASP-69b’s escaping atmosphere.

Our study is actually the first to suggest that WASP-69b’s tail was so extensive. Past observations of this system suggested the planet had only a modest tail or even no tail at all.

This difference likely comes down to two main factors. For one, each research group used different instruments to make their observations, which could result in varying detection levels. Or, there could be actual variability in the system.

A star like our Sun has a magnetic activity cycle, called the “solar cycle.” The Sun’s lasts for 11 years. During peak activity years, the Sun has more flares, sunspots and changes to the solar wind.

To complicate things even more, each cycle is unique – no two solar cycles are the same. Solar scientists are still trying to better understand and predict our Sun’s activity. Other stars have their own magnetic cycles, but scientists just don’t have enough data to understand them yet.

So the variability observed for WASP-69b may come from the fact that every time it gets observed, the host star is behaving differently. Astronomers will have to continue to observe this planet more in the future to get a better idea of exactly what’s going on.

Our direct look at WASP-69b’s mass loss tells exoplanet researchers like me more about how planetary evolution works. It gives us real-time evidence for atmospheric escape and supports the theory that hot Neptunes and Radius Gap planets are hard to find because they just aren’t massive enough to retain their atmospheres. And once they lose them, all that is left to observe is a rocky super-Earth core.

The WASP-69b study highlights the delicate balance between a planet’s composition and its stellar environment, shaping the diverse planetary landscape we observe today. As astronomers continue to probe these distant worlds, each discovery brings us closer to understanding the complex tapestry of our universe. Läs mer…

Are drone strikes legitimate, meaning on sound moral and legal footing? How people perceive the legitimacy of U.S. drone strikes – firing missiles from remotely piloted aircraft at terrorist and insurgent leaders – is central to whether and how the government can continue to use them.

The American public tends not to question military action it perceives as rightful, and U.S. policymakers often reference the legitimacy of U.S. drone strikes. The U.S. military, responsible for conducting most drone strikes globally, has also adopted legitimacy as a principle of counterterrorism operations.

Yet what shapes perceptions of legitimate drone warfare, how these perceptions vary across audiences, and the implications for the U.S. drone program are not well understood. This gap is surprising, given that “over-the-horizon” drone strikes – firing missiles at targets many miles away – have defined U.S. counterterrorism policy in Afghanistan and elsewhere, despite being routinely criticized.

Drone strikes differ from other uses of force in the remoteness of the operators firing the weapons. Drone operators are typically hundreds or thousands of miles away from their targets, which they view through drone- and satellite-based cameras and sensors. In the worst-case scenario, this can lead to target misidentification and civilian casualties.

Part of the problem is that scholars disagree on what constitutes drone warfare, which has implications for how they understand variations in public perceptions of legitimacy. As military scholars who study the topic, we define drone warfare as a function of strike attributes, meaning how and why they are used abroad.

Using this definition, we have found that how a country uses and constrains the use of drones shapes how people perceive their legitimacy. We’ve also found that perceptions of legitimacy differ between U.S. citizens and soldiers, particularly chaplains, who guide the moral use of force. We are scheduled to present our study of the attitudes of military chaplains on drone strikes at both the U.S. Army’s Institute for Religious Leadership and the American Political Science Association’s annual meeting in September 2024.

A U.S. drone strike in Iraq in February 2024 killed three members of an Iranian-backed militia accused of an attack that killed three U.S. service members.

Uses and constraints

Countries use drones for different purposes.

Tactical strikes are designed to achieve battlefield objectives, such as destroying an enemy compound.

Strategic strikes destroy terrorist organizations to achieve overall war aims. They are used to remove key terrorist leaders. The goal of such “decapitation operations” is to hasten a terrorist group’s collapse.

Countries also constrain drone use differently. Some use self-imposed constraints. These include targeting standards, which are calibrated to balance effectiveness against anticipated civilian casualties. Others use externally imposed constraints such as international approval for drone strikes.

One of the authors gave a presentation about a book he co-wrote that examines public perceptions of the legitimacy of drone warfare.

US citizens’ beliefs

Drawing on our definition of drone warfare as a matter of varying uses and constraints of drones, we reviewed and analyzed public perceptions of the legitimacy of drone strikes.

We found that U.S. citizens perceive over-the-horizon drone strikes, where drones are used strategically without external oversight, as most legitimate. This pattern of drone warfare characterizes the United States’ approach globally.

However, we also found that U.S. citizens’ perceptions of legitimacy are affected by civilian casualties, which lead Americans to reconsider reliance on internal constraints such as targeting standards. Given civilian casualties, U.S. citizens’ perceptions of legitimacy are shaped by international, rather than national, oversight, reflecting a belief that international approval is central to the appropriate use of force.

A 2011 U.S. drone strike killed Anwar al-Awlaki, a U.S. citizen, sparking debate about the legitimacy of the attack.

US Army chaplains’ beliefs

We compared these results with the beliefs of U.S. Army chaplains, offering the first evidence for how these key advisers to military commanders perceive the legitimacy of drone warfare.

The U.S. Army conducts the most strikes of any service. Chaplains in the Army are “moral advocates” during conflict who “provide professional advice, counsel, and instruction on religious, moral, and ethical issues,” according to regulations. Many commanders in the military have strong religious beliefs, suggesting they may draw on chaplains’ counsel. Similarly, chaplains minister to drone operators, who are vulnerable to moral injury, meaning the emotional or psychological damage people suffer when they transgress their moral boundaries.

Some experts suspect that chaplains’ advisory role may be exaggerated. These scholars often study chaplains during interstate war, however. Our research sheds new light on chaplains’ attitudes toward the use of drones against nonstate adversaries such as terrorist organizations.

We found that, in contrast to the U.S. public, chaplains perceive over-the-horizon drone strikes as illegitimate. Rather, chaplains perceive tactical-level strikes on the battlefield as most legitimate, especially when they are tightly constrained by policy.

Even then, chaplains voice less support for these drone strikes than their perceptions of legitimacy might suggest. Why would chaplains not support drone strikes they perceive as legitimate? We found that this “legitimacy paradox” reflects underlying concerns. Chaplains in our survey often questioned the legality of strikes, the veracity of intelligence, the territorial integrity of targeted countries and the implications for national security.

The future of US drone warfare

These findings have implications for policy, strategy and military readiness. In order to increase perceptions of legitimacy of the U.S. drone program among citizens and soldiers, our findings suggest that elected and military leaders would need to take several steps.

First, elected officials would need to transparently discuss the program. Specifically, they would need to justify a transgression of a country’s sovereignty, especially in terms of anticipated security gains.

Second, military leaders would need to explain the intelligence driving drone operations, measures to protect civilians, and how strikes comply with international law.

Finally, military leaders would need to research the potential for differences in perceptions of legitimacy held by other soldiers, especially with the emergence of fully autonomous drones that can identify, track and engage targets without human oversight. Military lawyers, for instance, also fulfill a key advisory role to commanders. Lawyers’ training, shaped more by their understanding of the laws of armed conflict rather than moral considerations, suggests that it is possible they may interpret the legitimacy of drone strikes differently than chaplains.

In our expert opinion, taking these steps would bring the necessary transparency and reflection to address questions of legitimacy that are fundamental to civilian and military support for the U.S. drone program. Läs mer…

Between Columbus and Cincinnati, Ohio, drivers pass a billboard on Interstate 71 that has achieved some internet fame.

Since 2004, a black sign has risen from this flat stretch of highway declaring “HELL IS REAL.” The H in “Hell” is painted in red, a color Christians have long associated with sin and Satan.

The developer who erected the warning, Jimmy Harston, has similar signs scattered across the Midwest, including ones that ask, “If you died today, where would you spend eternity?”

For years, this confrontational sign was mostly a local attraction. But it gained wider notoriety when Ohio’s two Major League Soccer teams, Columbus Crew and FC Cincinnati, dubbed their 2017 matchup “Hell is Real.” The sign has now spawned TikTok content, T-shirt designs, mugs and decals. But it also reflects a genuine belief in hell held by a majority of Americans today, though the numbers are slipping.

A 2023 Gallup poll found that 59% of respondents believe in hell, while 67% believe in heaven. The numbers for hell belief are far higher among those who identify as Protestant Christians (81%) and Republicans (79%).

Hell belief is holding steady in the U.S., but this was not always the case. In my research on spirit communication in 19th century American culture, I have found an organized effort to “cancel” hell by Spiritualists, who made up the fastest-growing religious movement of the century.

Spiritualists believed that people could maintain communication with the living even after death. They thought communicative spirits had a principal role to play in addressing the era’s most pressing social and political concerns, which would be impossible if souls were damned. This idea was a cornerstone of their practice and a driver of their politics.

Hell hath no fury

Many traditions, including Catholic Christianity, have beliefs about eternal destiny, but Protestant beliefs predominated in America’s settler colonies.

Puritan minister Michael Wigglesworth’s epic and best-selling poem “Day of Doom,” written in 1666, scared generations of believers with its vivid depiction of “yonder Lake,/where Fire and Brimstone flameth.”

A century later, revivalist minister Jonathan Edwards warned of the “dreadful pit of the glowing flames of the wrath of God” awaiting the unrepentant.

On the edges of organized religion, though, were believers interested in alternative afterlives. Swedish theologian and scientist Emmanuel Swedenborg, for example, speculated in 1758 that “The world of spirits is not heaven, nor is it hell; but it is a place or state intermediate between the two.”

Swedenborg’s ideas gained public traction in the U.S. after sisters Kate and Margaret Fox of Hydesville, New York, reported “rapping” and “knocking” sounds in their home. The knocking seemed responsive to the sisters’ questions, and they soon claimed that they could hold conversations with the deceased. Rising from this domestic drama was a national and international phenomenon that recalibrated people’s relationship with death and offered a balm to the grieving.

Some of the Foxes’ first advocates were Quaker activists Isaac and Amy Post. Isaac Post became a writing medium, recording alleged spirit communications from luminaries like George Washington and Napoleon Bonaparte and also everyday people.

An 1841 painting ‘Pandemonium’ by John Martin, based on John Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost,’ where Pandemonium is the capital of Hell.
John Martin via Wikimedia Commons

Spiritualists held that after shedding the body in death, the spirit would continue on a celestial journey. A spirit’s assignment was to help those still in their bodies to create a better, more just world. Through mediums, séances and object manipulation, spirits were believed to be able to enlighten the living by giving them a glimpse into life on a broader plane of existence.

Spiritualists felt that embodied life was narrow and full of biases, wants, needs and conflicts. In his 1850 book, “Singular Revelations,” spirit medium Eliab W. Capron recorded an insight he claimed to receive from the spirit of radical Methodist preacher Lorenzo Dow, who had died 14 years prior: “The Presbyterians say hell is a place of fire and brimstone that burns the soul forever. This is not so. The Hell is man’s own body, and when he escapes from that he escapes from bondage.”

Fires of reform

In neutralizing the threat of hell, Spiritualists believed that even deeply corrupted spirits could spur the living toward progressive reforms.

In an 1858 gathering of self-described “friends of free thought” in Vermont known as the Rutland Free Convention, Spiritualists and social reformers debated the question of hell vis-a-vis issues like slavery, the death penalty and maternity.

Lecturer and clairvoyant Andrew Jackson Davis cheekily announced to the Rutland crowd, “Hell has undergone the most extensive alterations and improvements” in the hands of Spiritualists. By caring “less about the fear of the devil, and more about the actual necessity of goodness,” people could act expediently to address real social problems rather than fight what Davis considered imaginary ones.

Spirit medium Achsa Sprague.
vtdigger/via Wikimedia Commons

Spirit medium Ascha Sprague linked hell belief to the persistence of capital punishment in American jurisprudence, asking, “Who blames man that he hangs his brother between heaven and earth, when he has been taught to believe that the Almighty God, infinite in power and wisdom, will in a moment plunge him into a burning pit, and save him never?”

In other words, Spiritualists warned that the idea of hell allowed people to remain complacent: Let hell punish the brutal enslaver, the cruel prison warden, the merciless factory foreman, the abusive husband. Hell gave believers a way to escape the responsibility of addressing burning social ills in the here and now. By relinquishing the “bottomless pit, which they have been taught to believe in,” Isaac Post quoted a spirit saying, a new ethos of urgent and sweeping reform could materialize.

Even today, some spiritual activists consider hell belief an impediment to systemic social change. For example, prison abolitionist Hannah Bowman wrote in a 2023 collection on spirituality and abolition, “Insofar as hell is defined by coercion/confinement, separation, and retribution, it is to some degree related to any societal and state interventions reliant upon those practices.”

To hell and back

Putting out the fires of hell was not easy in the 19th century U.S., especially at the outbreak of the Civil War when mass death fed apocalyptic rhetoric. The promise of God’s “terrible swift sword” of judgment was sung out in the canonical words of suffragist Julia Ward Howe’s “Battle Hymn of the Republic.”

Spiritualism’s popularity waxed and waned after the war, and its reformist leanings largely faded. Mass casualty events like war and flu led to periodic revivals, especially of séance culture. But hell belief in America ultimately held steady and reignited by the middle of 20th century.

The reasons for this range from a decline in religious belief between the world wars to a religious revival following them, and the horrors of war itself. In his 1949 memoir, “To Hell and Back,” World War II 2nd Lt. Audie Murphy recounts a fellow soldier’s impromptu verses; “Oh, gather round me comrades and listen while / I speak / Of a war, a war, a war, where hell is six feet deep.” Hell was everywhere.

Cornell University’s Roper Center poll from 1957 – in the thick of the Cold War – found that 74% of Americans polled believed in an afterlife, but 84% felt that the dead were uncommunicative. These modern trends indicate that hell belief captures the zeitgeist of an era. It ebbs and flows along with attitudes about justice, human suffering and even the health of the planet.

The “Hell is Real” sign has experienced a similar flux. Last summer, street artist LISP pasted a cutout of a cartoonish red devil on the highway sign and shared the covert operation on Instagram. “Is nothing sacred?” one user asked, riffing on the sign’s iconic, if peculiar, status. The sign has since been replaced with a fresh one, a visible reminder that for some people, hell belief will never die. Läs mer…

Board games are booming: In 2023 alone, the industry topped US$16.8 billion and is projected to reach $40.1 billion by 2032.

Classics like “Scrabble” are being refreshed and transformed, while newer inventions such as “Pandemic” and “Wingspan” have garnered millions of devotees.

This growing cardboard empire was on my mind when I visited the American Antiquarian Society in August 2023 to research its collection of early games.

As I sat in that archive, which houses such treasures as the 1640 Bay Psalm Book, the first book printed in British America, I beheld another first in American printing: a board game called “The Travellers’ Tour Through the United States.”

This forgotten game, printed the year after Missouri became a state, has a lot to say about America’s nascent board game industry, as well as how a young country saw itself.

An archival find

Produced by the New York cartography firm of F. & R. Lockwood, “The Travellers’ Tour Through the United States” was an imitation of earlier European geography games, a genre of educational game. Geography games generally used a map for a board, and the rules involved players reciting geographic facts as they race toward the finish.

“The Travellers’ Tour” first appeared in 1822, making it the earliest known board game printed in the U.S.

But for almost a century another game held that honor.

In 1894, the game manufacturer Parker Brothers acquired the rights to “The Mansion of Happiness,” an English game first produced in the U.S. in 1843. In its promotional materials, the company declared it “The first board game ever published in America.”

That distinction ended in 1991 when a game collector found the copy of “The Travellers’ Tour” in the archives of the American Antiquarian Society.

The title and printer’s address for the game. The copyright notice of July 12, 1822, appears in small type at the bottom.
Library of Congress

A new game for the new year

By 1822 the American market for board games was already becoming established, and middle- and upper-class parents would buy games for their families to enjoy around the parlor table.

At that time, New Year’s – not Christmas – was the holiday for gift giving. Many booksellers, who earned money from the sale of books, playing cards and other paper goods throughout the year, would sell special wares to give as presents.

These items included holiday-themed books, puzzles – then called “dissected maps” – and paper dolls, as well as games imported from England such as “The New Game of Human Life” and “The Royal And Entertaining Game of Goose.”

Since “The Travellers’ Tour” was the first board game to employ a map of the U.S., it might have been an especially interesting gift to American consumers.

It’s difficult, however, to gauge just how popular “The Travellers’ Tour” was in its time. No sales records are known to exist, and since so few copies remain, it likely wasn’t a big seller.

A global database of library holdings shows only five copies of “The Travellers’ Tour” in institutions around the U.S. And while a handful of additional copies are housed in museums and private archives, the game is certainly a rarity.

Teetotums and travelers

Announcing itself as a “pleasing and instructive pastime,” “The Travellers’ Tour” consists of a hand-colored map of the then-24 states and a numbered list of 139 towns and cities, ranging from New York City to New Madrid, Missouri. Beside each number is the name and description of the corresponding town.

The ‘stop’ at Bennington, Vt., highlights the town’s Revolutionary War history, while Philadelphia’s entry points to the city’s educational institutions.
Library of Congress

Using a variant spelling for the device, the instructions stipulate the game should be “performed with a Tetotum.” Small top-like devices with numbers around their sides called teetotums functioned as alternatives to dice, which were associated with immoral games of chance.

Once spun, the teetotum lands with a random side up, revealing a number. The player looks ahead that number of spaces on the map.

If they can recite from memory the name of the town or city, they move their token, or traveler, to that space. Whoever gets to New Orleans first, wins.

‘New-Orleans’ is the game’s ‘finish line.’
Library of Congress

An idealized portrait of a young country

Though not necessary to play “The Travellers’ Tour,” the descriptions provided for each location tell historians a lot about America’s national aspirations.

These accounts coalesce into a flattering portrait of the nation’s agricultural, commercial, historical and cultural character.

Teetotums were used in an era when dice were associated with vice.
Victoria and Albert Museum, CC BY-NC-SA

Promoting the value of education, the game highlights institutions of learning. For example, Philadelphia’s “literary and benevolent institutions are numerous and respectable.” Providence boasts “Brown University, a respectable literary institution.” And Boston’s “citizens … are enterprising and liberal in the support of religious and literary institutions.”

As the game pieces meander toward New Orleans, players learn about Richmond’s “fertile backcountry” and about the “polished manners and unaffected hospitality” of the citizens of Charleston. Savannah “contains many splendid edifices” and Columbia’s “South Carolina College bids fair to be a valuable institution.”

Absent from any corresponding descriptions, however, is any mention of what John C. Calhoun called America’s “peculiar institution” of slavery and its role in the fabric of the nation.

And while four entries briefly reference American Indians, no mention is made of the ongoing dispossession and genocide of millions of Indigenous people.

Though it promotes an American identity based on a sanitized version of the nation’s economic might and intellectual rigor, “The Travellers’ Tour” nonetheless represents an important step toward what has become a burgeoning American board game industry.

Two centuries later, board game culture has matured to the point that new titles such as “Freedom: The Underground Railroad” and “Votes for Women” push the genre to new heights, using the joy of play to teach the history of the era that spawned America’s first board game. Läs mer…