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Parenting, single people and the U.S. birth rate have assumed a greater place in the 2024 presidential campaign than any race in recent memory.

Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance was widely rebuked for criticisms he lodged in 2021 against “childless cat ladies,” saying they have no “physical commitment” to the country’s future.

In August 2024, Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, also a Republican, piled on, saying Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris has no children to “keep her humble,” even though she’s stepmother to two children who call her “Mamala.”

As a historian of women, families and children in the U.S., I see these biological definitions of motherhood as too narrowly conceived. The past can serve as a reminder that other forms of mothering are important, too.

My research offers a broader perspective on women’s experiences of mothering and a deeper understanding of how women without biological children contribute to the nation and its future.

‘Mothers of all children’

One such woman was Katharine Bement Davis, the subject of my current research.

Born in Buffalo, New York, in 1860, Davis was a member of a generation of “new women” who pursued higher education, built professional careers and fought for political rights.

Other women of this generation included Nobel Peace Prize winner Jane Addams, public health nurse Lillian Wald, prison reformer Miriam Van Waters, child welfare advocate Julia Lathrop, social work pioneer Sophonisba Breckinridge and first lady Eleanor Roosevelt – to name just a few.

Of this group, only Roosevelt had children of her own. But all of them saw themselves as “mothers of all children,” as one historian has described juvenile justice advocates. Accepting responsibility for the nation’s welfare, they used their identity as public mothers to shape American politics.

In a 1927 letter to her college classmates, Davis whimsically reflected on her life choices:

“First, I am still an old maid; therefore, I cannot write interesting things about my husband and children, (and) how I have treated him and how I have raised them. First and last, however, I have had a good deal to do in the way of looking after other people’s husbands and children.”

Indeed, Davis’ life illustrated the many meanings of motherhood.

Like many ostensibly childless women, Davis was a doting aunt. With her unmarried sisters, Helen and Charlotte, she helped care for her only niece, Frances, whose mother died when she was just a toddler. In the mid-1920s, Frances lived with all three aunts while attending school in New York City.

Black feminist scholars call this sort of arrangement, long practiced in African American communities, “othermothering.”

Davis and other white women of her generation also engaged in the practice of caring for children, whether through formal adoption or informal caregiving. For instance, Breckinridge helped raise her nieces and nephews, while Van Waters legally adopted a daughter.

‘Maternalism the coming great force in government’

Throughout her life, Davis used what she called “the methods of motherhood” to promote public welfare.

After teaching school in western New York , establishing a playground in a working-class neighborhood in Philadelphia and supervising young offenders in upstate New York, Davis became New York City’s first female commissioner of correction in 1914.

Only months into her term, male inmates at Blackwell’s Island Penitentiary staged a major riot. Davis quelled the rebellion and established her own authority by addressing the refractory prisoners like wayward children. “You fellows must behave,” she pronounced. “I’ll have it no other way.”

Social reformer Katharine Bement Davis, right, wrote that she ‘had a good deal to do in the way of looking after other people’s husbands and children.’
Heritage Art/Heritage Images via Getty Images

After successfully using “motherly methods” to regain control of “the bad boys of Blackwell’s Island,” Davis proclaimed that “maternalism” was “the coming great force in government.”

Echoing her colleagues in the suffrage movement, Davis used the language of maternalism to promote women’s voting rights. Like other feminist pacifists, she believed that women were “the mother half of humanity.” Finally, like many women activists in the U.S. and Europe, she believed that all women – whether they had children of their own or not – were responsible for all children’s welfare.

Insisting that “wise motherhood” was essential to better government, Davis argued that women needed the vote – and that the nation needed women voters. Maternalist activists also promoted juvenile justice, parks and playgrounds, health care programs and financial assistance for needy families and children, laying the groundwork for the modern welfare state.

Giving women the right to choose

While she promoted public welfare and demanded political rights, Davis also advocated for what she and her contemporaries called “voluntary motherhood” – the idea that women should be able to control their reproductive lives.

Davis supported efforts to overturn the Comstock Act of 1873, which defined contraception and abortion as obscene and made distributing birth control information or devices through the U.S. postal service a federal crime.

States followed federal precedent by adopting “mini-Comstock Laws” criminalizing birth control. By the 1920s, however, some states permitted physicians to prescribe contraceptives – such as diaphragms and spermicides – to protect the health of their female patients.

When she surveyed 1,000 married women for a study of female sexuality in the 1920s, Davis found that most of her study subjects used contraceptives. In addition, nearly 1 in 10 reported having had at least one abortion, even though the procedure was illegal in every state.

And when Davis asked the women about their views on contraception – or as the survey put it, “the use of means to render parenthood voluntary instead of accidental” – she found that about three-quarters of them approved of it.

When the childless take charge

So-called childless women like Davis have shown that they have a stake in children’s welfare, women’s welfare and the nation’s welfare.

Over the past century, maternalists and feminists often have worked together to achieve their aims. Indeed, sometimes they were the same people.

Davis cuddles a kitten in a photograph taken while she was a college student.
Life and Labor, Volume 4

But today, it seems that Republican politicians are attempting to drive a wedge between mothers and others. As a recent New York Times article put it, “the politics of motherhood” have become a “campaign-trail cudgel.”

However, as Davis understood, many issues that affect mothers are important to all women. Moreover, Davis believed that everyone – not just biological mothers – shares the responsibility for the health and welfare of future generations. Finally, she insisted that women should control their own destinies.

So, was Davis a childless cat lady?

Well, a grainy photo of her cuddling a kitten suggests that she did love cats.

As for her childless status, when you consider the full range of her work on behalf of the nation’s children, the answer becomes a bit more complicated. Läs mer…

Blood samples of patients infected with a parasitic worm that causes schistosomiasis contain hidden information that marks different stages of the disease. In our recently published research, our team used machine learning to uncover that hidden information and improve early detection and diagnosis of infection.

The parasite that causes schistosomiasis completes its life cycle in two hosts – first in snails and then in mammals such as people, dogs and mice. Freshwater worm eggs enter human hosts through the skin and circulate throughout the body, damaging multiple organs, including the liver, intestine, bladder and urethra. When these larvae reach blood vessels connecting the intestines to the liver, they mature into adult worms. They then release eggs that are excreted when the infected person defecates, continuing the transmission cycle.

Since diagnosis currently relies on detecting eggs in feces, doctors usually miss the early stages of infection. By the time eggs are detected, patients have already reached an advanced stage of the disease. Because diagnosis rates are poor, public health officials typically mass-administer the drug praziquantel to populations in affected regions. However, praziquantel cannot clear juvenile worms in early stages of infection, nor can it prevent reinfection.

Schistosomiasis isn’t usually diagnosed until the late stages of the disease.
DPDx/CDC

Our study provides a clear path forward to improving early detection and diagnosis by identifying the hidden information in blood that signals active, early stage infection.

Your body responds to a schistosomiasis infection by mounting an immune response involving several types of immune cells, as well as antibodies specifically targeting molecules secreted by or present on the worm and eggs. Our study introduces two ways to screen for certain characteristics of antibodies that signal early infection.

The first is an assay that captures a quantitative and qualitative profile of immune response, including various classes of antibodies and characteristics that dictate how they communicate with other immune cells. This allowed us to identify specific facets of the immune response that distinguish uninfected patients from patients with early and late-stage disease.

Second, we developed a new machine learning approach that analyzes antibodies to identify latent characteristics of the immune response linked to disease stage and severity. We trained the model on immune profile data from infected and uninfected patients and tested the model on data that wasn’t used for training and data from a different geographical location. We identified not only biomarkers for the disease but also the potential mechanism that underlies infection.

Why it matters

Schistosomiasis is a neglected tropical disease that affects over 200 million people worldwide, causing 280,000 deaths annually. Early diagnosis can improve treatment effectiveness and prevent severe disease.

In addition, unlike many machine learning methods that are black boxes, our approach is also interpretable. This means it can provide insights into why and how the disease develops beyond simply identifying markers of disease, guiding future strategies for early diagnosis and treatment.

Clusters of Schistosoma haematobium eggs surrounded by immune cells in bladder tissue.
CDC/Dr. Edwin P. Ewing Jr.

What still isn’t known

The schistosomiasis infection signatures we identified remain stable across two geographical regions across two continents. Future research could explore how well these biomarkers apply to additional populations.

Further, our work identifies a potential mechanism behind disease progression. We found that a particular immune response against a specific protein on the surface of the worm signals an intermediate stage of infection. Understanding how the immune system responds to this understudied antigen could improve diagnosis and treatment.

What’s next

Besides improving our understanding of how the immune system responds to different stages of infection, our findings identify key antigens that could pave the way for designing cost-effective and efficient approaches to diagnosis and treatments. Our next steps will include actually deploying these strategies in the field for early detection and management of disease.

The Research Brief is a short take about interesting academic work. Läs mer…

A growing number of students in public schools – right now, about 15% of them – are eligible for special education services. These services include specially designed instruction for students with autism, learning or physical disabilities, or traumatic brain injuries. But going into the current school year, more than half of U.S. public schools anticipate being short-staffed in special education. Dr. Kimber Wilkerson, a professor of special education and department chair at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, explains why there’s a shortage and what needs to be done to close the gap.

Dr. Kimber Wilkerson discusses the special education teacher shortage.

The Conversation has collaborated with SciLine to bring you highlights from the discussion, which have been edited for brevity and clarity.

Which students receive special education services?

Kimber Wilkerson: Students with a disability label receive special education services. They need these additional services and sometimes instruction in school so they can access the curriculum and thrive like their peers.

What is happening with staffing for special education?

Wilkerson: Since special education became a thing in the ’70s, there have always been challenges in filling all the special education positions.

In the past 10 years preceding the COVID-19 pandemic, those challenges started to increase. There were more open positions in special education at the beginning of each school year than in previous decades. In the 2023-24 school year, 42 states plus the District of Columbia reported teacher shortages in special education.

What is causing these shortages?

Wilkerson: One, there are fewer young people choosing teaching as a major in college and as a profession. And special education is affected by these lower rates more than other forms of education.

Also, there’s more attrition – people leaving their teaching job sooner than you might expect – not because they’re retiring, but because they are tired of the job.

They want to do something different. They want to go back to school. Sometimes it’s life circumstances, but the number of people leaving the job before retirement age has increased. And in our state, Wisconsin, about 35% of all educators leave the field before they hit their fifth year.

That number is even higher for special educators. About half of special educators are out of the profession within five years.

Why do special education teachers leave the profession?

Wilkerson: There’s not a national study that speaks to that reason. There are some localized studies, and people report things like too much paperwork or too many administrative tasks associated with the job. Sometimes they report the students’ behavioral challenges. Sometimes it’s a feeling of isolation, or a lack of support from the school.

How are students with disabilities affected when their school does not have enough special educators?

Wilkerson: In a school that’s one special educator short, the other special educators have to take over that caseload. Instead of having 12 students on their caseload, maybe now they have 20. So, the amount of individual attention given to each student with a disability decreases.

Also, when teachers with experience leave the profession, they leave behind a less experienced group of teachers. This means the students are losing out on the benefit of those years of wisdom and experience.

What are some strategies to recruit and retain more special education teachers?

Wilkerson: There’s a range of strategies that different universities, states and school districts have taken, like residency programs.

In these programs, the person who is learning to be a teacher, and who is referred to as a teaching resident, works alongside a mentor teacher for an entire year in a school, and they get paid to do so. They’re not the teacher of record, but they’re learning and getting paid, and they’re in that school community.

Can you tell us about your recent study on supporting new special education teachers?

Wilkerson: One thing that made a big difference is when the teachers in our study, which is now under review, had access to a mentor and a group of their peers. We called this facilitated peer-to-peer group of teachers a “community of practice.” Every other week, on Zoom, we’d get these new special education teachers from different school districts together, along with experienced teachers. And they would do some sort of work on problems, bringing in the things that were challenging, and work on possible solutions as a group.

We also used Zoom to do one-on-one mentoring. And what people liked about it was that they could talk to someone who wasn’t right in their building and right in their district who they could be open and vulnerable with.

Sometimes, special educators can be isolated because they’re not necessarily a part of a grade-level team. They work with kids across a lot of classrooms. This gave them an opportunity to have their own kind of community, and that made a difference.

We also surveyed their level of burnout and how good they felt about the job they did. And then we surveyed special education teachers who weren’t participating in our community of practice.

At the end of the year, those people who had that mentoring and the community of practice felt less burnt out, and they also felt more effective in the area of classroom management. And that’s critical, because burnout is one of the primary reasons people leave the profession.

So if we can make people feel like they’re better equipped to handle this challenging position, then that’s one strategy to increase the number of people wanting to stay in their job year after year.

Watch the full interview to hear more.

SciLine is a free service based at the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a nonprofit that helps journalists include scientific evidence and experts in their news stories. Läs mer…

Psychologists know that childhood trauma, or the experience of harmful or adverse events, can have lasting repercussions on the health and well-being of people well into adulthood. But while the consequences of early adversity have been well researched in humans, people aren’t the only ones who can experience adversity.

If you have a rescue dog, you probably have witnessed how the abuse or neglect it may have experienced earlier in life now influence its behavior – these pets tend to be more skittish or reactive. Wild animals also experience adversity. Although their negative experiences are easy to dismiss as part of life in the wild, they still have lifelong repercussions – just like traumatic events in people and pets.

As behavioral ecologists, we are interested in how adverse experiences early in life can affect animals’ behavior, including the kinds of decisions they make and the way they interact with the world around them. In other words, we want to see how these experience affect the way they behave and survive in the wild.

Many studies in humans and other animals have shown the importance of early life experiences in shaping how individuals develop. But researchers know less about how multiple, different instances of adversity or stressors can accumulate within the body and what their overall impact is on an animal’s well-being.

Wild populations face many kinds of stressors. They compete for food, risk getting eaten by a predator, suffer illness and must contend with extreme weather conditions. And as if life in the wild wasn’t hard enough, humans are now adding additional stressors such as chemical, light and sound pollution, as well as habitat destruction.

Given the widespread loss of biodiversity, understanding how animals react to and are harmed by these stressors can help conservation groups better protect them. But accounting for such a diversity of stressors is no easy feat. To address this need and demonstrate the cumulative impact of multiple stressors, our research team decided to develop an index for wild animals based on psychological research on human childhood trauma.

A cumulative adversity index

Developmental psychologists began to develop what psychologists now call the adverse childhood experiences score, which describes the amount of adversity a person experienced as a child. Briefly, this index adds up all the adverse events – including forms of neglect, abuse or other household dysfunction – an individual experienced during childhood into a single cumulative score.

This score can then be used to predict later-life health risks such as chronic health conditions, mental illness or even economic status. This approach has revolutionized many human health intervention programs by identifying at-risk children and adults, which allows for more targeted interventions and preventive efforts.

So, what about wild animals? Can we use a similar type of score or index to predict negative survival outcomes and identify at-risk individuals and populations?

These are the questions we were interested in answering in our latest research paper. We developed a framework on how to create a cumulative adversity index – similar to the adverse childhood experiences score, but for populations of wild animals. We then used this index to gain insights about the survival and longevity of yellow-bellied marmots. In other words, we wanted to see whether we could use this index to estimate how long a marmot would live.

A marmot case study

Yellow-bellied marmots are a large ground squirrel closely related to groundhogs. Our research group has been studying these marmots in Colorado at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory since 1962.

A marmot wearing an ear tag.
Xochitl Ortiz Ross

Yellow-bellied marmots are an excellent study system because they are diurnal, or active during the day, and they have an address. They live in burrows scattered across a small, defined geographical area called a colony. The size of the colony and the number of individuals that reside within varies greatly from year to year, but they are normally composed of matrilines, which means related females tend to remain within the natal colony, while male relatives move away to find a new colony.

Yellow-bellied marmots hibernate for most of the year, but they become active between April and September. During this active period, we observe each colony daily and regularly trap each individual in the population – that’s over 200 unique individuals just in 2023. We then mark their backs with a distinct symbol and give them uniquely numbered ear tags so they can be later identified.

Although they can live up to 15 years, we have detailed information about the life experiences of individual marmots spanning almost 30 generations. They were the perfect test population for our cumulative adversity index.

Among the sources of adversity, we included ecological measures such as a late spring, a summer drought and high predator presence. We also included parental measures such as having an underweight or stressed mother, being born or weaned late, and losing their mother. The model also included demographic measures such as being born in a large litter or having many male siblings.

Importantly, we looked only at females, since they are the ones who tend to stay home. Therefore, some of the adversities listed are only applicable to females. For example, females born in litters with many males become masculinized, likely from the high testosterone levels in the mother’s uterus. The females behave more like males, but this also reduces their life span and reproductive output. Therefore, having many male siblings is harmful to females, but maybe not to males.

A yellow-bellied marmot shown on a trail camera in Montana.

So, does our index, or the number of adverse events a marmot experienced early on, explain differences in marmot survival? We found that, yes, it does.

Experiencing even just one adversity event before age 2 nearly halved an adult marmot’s odds of survival, regardless of the type of adversity they experienced. This is the first record of lasting negative consequences from losing a mother in this species.

So what?

Our study isn’t the only one of its kind. A few other studies have used an index similar to the human adverse childhood experiences score with wild primates and hyenas, with largely similar results. We are interested in broadening this framework so that other researchers can adopt it for the species they study.

A better understanding of how animals can or cannot cope with multiple sources of adversity can inform wildlife conservation and management practices. For example, an index like ours could help identify at-risk populations that require a more immediate conservation action.

Instead of tackling the one stressor that seems to have the greatest effect on a species, this approach could help managers consider how best to reduce the total number of stressors a species experiences.

For example, changing weather patterns driven by global heating trends may create new stressors that a wildlife manager can’t address. But it might be possible to reduce how many times these animals have to interact with people during key times of the year by closing trails, or providing extra food to replace the food they lose from harsh weather.

While this index is still in early development, it could one day help researchers ask new questions about how animals adapt to stress in the wild. Läs mer…

Curious Kids is a series for children of all ages. If you have a question you’d like an expert to answer, send it to curiouskidsus@theconversation.com.

Is a zombie apocalypse caused by fungi, like the Cordyceps from “The Last of Us,” something that could realistically happen? – Jupiter, age 15, Ithaca, New York

Zombies strike fear into our hearts – and if they’re persistent, eventually they get inside our heads. Animals taken over by zombies no longer control their own bodies or behaviors. Instead, they serve the interests of a master, whether it’s a virus, fungus or some other harmful agent.

The term “zombi” comes from Vodou, a religion that evolved in the Caribbean nation of Haiti. But the idea of armies of undead, brain-eating human zombies comes from movies, such as “Night of the Living Dead,” television shows like “The Walking Dead” and video games like Resident Evil.

Those all are fictional. Nature is where we can find real examples of zombification – one organism controlling another organism’s behavior.

I study fungi, a huge biological kingdom that includes molds, mildews, yeasts, mushrooms and zombifying fungi. Don’t worry – these “brain-eating organisms” tend to target insects.

The fungus Ophiocordyceps unilateralis infects and kills ants. Over time, they can diminish the local ant population.

Insect body snatchers

One of the most famous examples is the zombie ant fungus, Ophiocordyceps unilateralis, which is part of a larger group known as Cordyceps fungi. This fungus inspired the video game and HBO series “The Last of Us,” in which a widespread fungal infection turns people into zombie-like creatures and causes society to collapse.

In the real world, ants usually comes into contact with this fungus when spores – pollen-size reproductive particles that the fungus makes – fall onto the ant from a tree or plant overhead. The spores penetrate the ant’s body without killing it.

Once inside, the fungus spreads in the form of a yeast. The ant stops communicating with nestmates and staggers around aimlessly. Eventually it becomes hyperactive.

Finally, the fungus causes the ant to climb up a plant and lock onto a leaf or a stem with its jaws – a behavior called summiting. The fungus changes into a new phase and consumes the ant’s organs, including its brain. A stalk erupts from the dead insect’s head and produces spores, which fall onto healthy ants below, starting the cycle again.

A citrus cicada nymph infected with Ophiocordyceps sobolifera. The nymph lives underground, but the fungus ensures that it ‘summits’ to just below the soil line, so that its stalks (pink) and spores find their way above ground.
Matt Kasson, CC BY-ND

Scientists have described countless species of Ophiocordyceps. Each one is tiny, with a very specialized lifestyle. Some live only in specific areas: for example, Ophiocordyceps salganeicola, a parasite of social cockroaches, is found only in Japan’s Ryukyu Islands. I expect that there are many more species around the world awaiting discovery.

The zombie cicada fungus, Massospora cicadina, has also received a lot of attention in recent years. It infects and controls periodical cicadas, which are cicadas that live underground and emerge briefly to mate on 13- or 17-year cycles.

The fungus keeps the cicadas energized and flying around, even as it consumes and replaces their rear ends and abdomens. This prolonged “active host” behavior is rare in fungi that invade insects. Massospora has family members that target flies, moths, millipedes and soldier beetles, but they cause their hosts to summit and die, like ants affected by Ophiocordyceps.

The real fungal threats

These diverse morbid partnerships – relationships that lead to death – were formed and refined over millions of years of evolutionary time. A fungus that specializes in infecting and controlling ants or cicadas would have to evolve vastly new tools over millions more years to be able to infect even another insect, even one that’s closely related, let alone a human.

In my research, I’ve collected and handled hundreds of living and dead zombie cicadas, as well as countless fungus-infected insects, spiders and millipedes. I’ve dissected hundreds of specimens and uncovered fascinating aspects of their biology. Despite this prolonged exposure, I still control my own behavior.

Dozens of Massospora cicadina-infected 13-year cicadas being prepared for drying and analyzing in Matt Kasson’s mycology lab at West Virginia University.
Matt Kasson, CC BY-ND

Some fungi do threaten human health. Examples include Aspergillus fumigatus and Cryptococcus neoformans, both of which can invade people’s lungs and cause serious pneumonia-like symptoms. Cryptococcus neoformans can spread outside the lungs into the central nervous system and cause symptoms such as neck stiffness, vomiting and sensitivity to light.

Invasive fungal diseases are on the rise worldwide. So are common fungal infections, such as athlete’s foot – a rash between your toes – and ringworm, a rash that despite its name is caused by a fungus.

Fungi thrive in perpetually warm and wet environments. You can protect yourself against many of them by showering after you get sweaty or dirty and not sharing sports gear or towels with other people.

Not all fungi are scary, and even the alarming ones won’t turn you into the walking dead. The closest you’re likely to come to a zombifying fungus is through watching scary movies or playing video games.

If you’re lucky, you might find a zombie ant or fly in your own neighborhood. And if you think they’re cool, you could become a scientist like me and spend your life seeking them out.

Hello, curious kids! Do you have a question you’d like an expert to answer? Ask an adult to send your question to CuriousKidsUS@theconversation.com. Please tell us your name, age and the city where you live.

And since curiosity has no age limit – adults, let us know what you’re wondering, too. We won’t be able to answer every question, but we will do our best. Läs mer…

Social class continues to influence British people’s opportunities and the way they think about them, even if the boundaries between those classes have shifted.

In the third part of Know Your Place: what happened to class in British politics, a podcast series from The Conversation Documentaries, we explore how class is defined and measured, and how the UK’s changing class identity interacts with identity politics.

Over the course of the last half century, there’s been a big shift in the make up of the labour market, and a decline in what are traditionally considered working class jobs, such as in manufacturing. And yet, data from the annual British Social Attitudes (BSA) survey run by the National Centre for Social Research, found that 52% of people identify as working class compared with 43% who identify as middle class.

According to Oliver Heath, professor of politics at Royal Holloway University of London, who co-authored the chapter on class for the BSA report in 2023, people still think about themselves in class terms to exactly the same degree as they did 40 years ago.

There’s been no decline in terms of whether people think of themselves as identifying with a class, and no decline in whether they identify with being working class or not. So that seems remarkably stable and if anything showed some signs of actually increasing.

The growth of self-employment, and in particular the gig economy, has disrupted the UK’s traditional class structure, according to Daniel Evans, a lecturer of criminology, sociology and social policy at Swansea University.

The size of the formally self-employed has absolutely exploded. It’s close to about 5 million,  which is coming very close to the size of the entire public sector. This is absolutely unprecedented. In the early 1970s, it was about 1 million self-employed people.

Evans argues this has also muddled what it means to be part of the petit bourgeoisie, someone who own the means of your own production in a Marxist sense.

So many people are doing almost like bogus forms of self-employment. Whereas in the past, lots and lots of people are doing this voluntarily, a lot of working class people aspired to join the ranks of the self-employed because they wanted to be their own boss … more and more people have been forced, basically, into self-employment.

Education, education, education

Amid these shifts, education has become a dominant force in recent years, overriding class defined by occupation or income as the most influential factor in voter behaviour. According to Paula Surridge, professor of political sociology at the University of Bristol, this was true for the Brexit vote too, she says.

Education is a stronger predictor of Brexit vote than class, with those with degree or higher level education more likely to vote remain than those with lower level qualifications. And the reason for that is the Brexit vote was primarily driven by a set of social values that don’t relate to economics.

Town and gown: Britain’s modern political divide.
Shutterstock

This can be a tricky dynamic to talk about. The education divide is not a term intended to deliver a value judgement but describes two distinct experiences of life. The university population in the UK has exploded since the 1990s and going to university has a profound effect on a person’s outlook, according to John Curtice, professor of politics at the University of Strathclyde and senior research fellow at Natcen:

The experience of university, where people get mixed with people from diverse backgrounds, they’re encouraged, particularly in the humanities, to be critically reflective about culture, etc. that that seems to create a rather more socially liberal ambience.

For more analysis, listen to the full episode of Know Your Place: what happened to class in British politics on The Conversation Documentaries.

A transcript is available on Apple Podcasts.

Know Your Place: what happened to class in British politics is produced and mixed by Anouk Millet for The Conversation. It’s supported by the National Centre for Social Research.

Newsclips in the episode from BBC Newsnight, Financial Times, The Frost Report, CBC News, Sky News, France24 English, AP Archive, BBC News, Official Jeremy Corbyn Channel and Channel 4 News.

Listen to The Conversation Documentaries via any of the apps listed above, download it directly via our RSS feed or find out how else to listen here. Läs mer…

The first anniversary of the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel and the beginning of conflict in Gaza left UK schools with a dilemma: how to mark the event. It has affected many around the world, including school children and their families in the UK.

Earlier in 2024, government adviser on social cohesion, Sara Khan, suggested that schools were not supporting reasonable debate about the Israel-Gaza conflict because teachers are nervous about handling such a sensitive topic in the classroom.

But if schools shut down the topic they risk encouraging mistrust, anger, hate and polarisation. Not least because students will instead seek out information online – and are quite likely to stumble upon fake news and conspiracy theories.

The leader of the UK’s biggest education union, Daniel Kebede, recently noted that there simply isn’t enough space in the curriculum for students to discuss such difficult issues. He claims the solution is to embed philosophy as a subject across England’s school curriculum.

The subject of philosophy is specifically set up to promote critical thinking skills and teach people how to have difficult conversations about controversial issues.

Teaching controversial topics

Controversial and sensitive topics are unavoidable. We encounter them discussed in the media, on the news, in the street and in our homes. Yet we are not always sure what to think, especially when the issue is complex, or how to talk to people we disagree with. And the skills of reasonable dialogue can be even harder when emotions are running high.

Young people need to learn how to discuss controversial issues like the Israel-Gaza war. The best way to do this is by including philosophy on the curriculum. Philosophy has an excellent toolkit designed to explore various points of view in a critically engaged way and, when taught dialogically – through discussion between students and teachers – students become seekers of shared knowledge and wisdom.

A key aspect of a democracy involves welcoming different ideas. Such diversity is a strength because it allows for many claims to be scrutinised, with only the best arguments gaining traction. Yet this process of sharing ideas requires our citizens to be able to hold reasoned discussions and to think critically.

The ability to hold reasoned, critical discussion is a valuable skill.
fizkes/Shutterstock

To avoid aggression or chaos, people need to engage charitably with one another, being respectful of various experiences and perspectives while also being critical of the ideas presented.

The dialogical skills of philosophy

Philosophy, more than any other subject, encourages students to think about the reasons why they think something, and entertain the possibility that there are other points of view.

Philosophy is inherently dialogical. The most common teaching approach is to think about the steps in an argument, and then to consider the weaknesses in each of these.

Philosophy does this by teaching students to check: What assumptions am I making? Are the premises of my position sound? Does the conclusion logically follow from my starting point? What is a counterargument or counterexample to which I need to reply? Could I be wrong about this? What additional information do I need to draw a conclusion?

These kinds of questions encourage intellectual humility: the idea that I, like anyone else, could be wrong. Intellectual humility goes hand in hand with open-mindedness, ensuring we remain open to relevant new information.

Such skills of critical thinking and respectful disagreement are vital in a time of disinformation and fake news. Not only do we need young people to learn how to fact check and be critical of what they see and hear, but we also need them to learn that it is OK to disagree.

Being open-minded

The influential American philosopher Daniel Dennett, who died earlier this year, wrote about the importance of criticising with kindness and seeking the most charitable version of your opponent’s position. This is so important when discussing controversial topics, because reasonable people will disagree.

Criticising with kindness means staying humble and open to different points of view when having difficult conversations. And it means creating space for the airing of diverse arguments and examples. In this way, teachers who are trained in philosophy are able to remain politically neutral while helping students converse with one another about important issues that affect them and those they care about.

Philosophy is about learning to be respectful of others whose views differ from one’s own and to accept reasonable disagreement. It also teaches us to be comfortable with unsettled questions and complex answers. Teaching philosophy in the classroom leads to students engaging with ideas charitably and critically, encouraging open-mindedness and intellectual humility.

It is the skills of dialogue that we need as our society faces increasing polarisation and violent disagreement. These skills are some of the defining characteristics of a democracy. Happily, teachers are uniquely positioned to embrace the subject of philosophy and the skills it has to offer. Läs mer…

The Guardian and anti-fascist group Hope Not Hate have revealed the existence of a new network of far-right intellectuals and activists in an undercover investigation. Called the Human Diversity Foundation (HDF), this group advocates scientific racism and eugenics. Although it presents itself as having a scientific purpose, some of its figureheads have political ambitions in Germany and elsewhere.

Research shows these kinds of groups are nothing new and are linked to eugenics groups that have been active since the second world war. Defending the scientific legitimacy of eugenics, these organisations worked to keep a discredited intellectual tradition alive.

Although it has been debunked by decades of research evidence, eugenics once enjoyed a reputation as a credible science since it emerged in the late 19th century.

First coined by Francis Galton, a prominent Victorian statistician and evolutionary theorist, the term eugenics refers to the study of what Galton considered favourable and unfavourable genetic patterns within the population. Galton believed that the principles of evolutionary theory could be applied to the human species and used to intervene in its genetic fitness.

Sir Francis Galton was a proponent of social Darwinism, eugenics and scientific racism.
Portrait by Charles Furse/Alamy stock photo

Galton and other early eugenicists advocated policies that would ensure that groups they believed held “desirable” traits, such as high intelligence, creative ability, or productivity, could reproduce in greater numbers than groups with less favourable genetics. Some even believed that “undesirable” groups should be prevented from reproducing, through forced sterilisation or abortion.

Ruling elites used eugenics to justify brutal treatment of disabled people, ethnic minorities, colonial populations, and LGBTQ+ people.

In the 1930s these ideas came to form the bedrock of Nazi race doctrine. Eugenics was a key component of Nazism and shaped both formal fascist ideology and how the Nazi regime treated its victims.

Before the second world war, many researchers regarded eugenics as a legitimate science. But in the aftermath of the war came a shift in attitudes, and scientists and society came to view eugenics as scientifically false and morally objectionable.

Instead of disappearing from academia, however, eugenics merely retreated into the
margins. Racial research became the focus of a handful of groups intent on keeping
the eugenics tradition alive.

Though they operated on the fringes of academia, these groups received financial support from private donors. The most prominent of these donors was the Pioneer Fund, a charity established in 1937 to support race science and white supremacy in the US and elsewhere.

These groups were close-knit. United by a shared sense of exclusion from the
academic mainstream, the people involved were prolific writers and together
generated a large body of work. They inflated their own citation counts by frequently referencing each other’s work and, in this way, established the impression of scientific rigour.

Pseudoscientific journals

Seeking to salvage the reputation of eugenics as a legitimate science, these groups
tended to cluster around journals and periodicals.

Chief among these was Mankind Quarterly, established in 1961 by a group called the International Association for the Advancement of Ethnology and Eugenics (IAAEE). Some decades later ownership of the journal was transferred to the Ulster Institute for Social Research, a eugenicist think tank founded and directed by Richard Lynn. Lynn is widely considered the intellectual figurehead of 21st-century eugenics.

The Mankind Quarterly quickly became known as a bastion of scientific racism. It published work by notorious pseudoscientists, neo-fascists, and such controversial political figures as former British MP Enoch Powell, remembered for appealing to racial hatred in his speeches.

Other similar journals emerged in the following decades. In France, Nouvelle École (“New School”) was established in 1967 by a white nationalist group. In Germany, Neue Anthropologie (“New Anthropology”) was first published in 1973.

These publications were part of the same networks. Their editors received funding from the same sources, including the Pioneer Fund, they published translations of each other’s articles, and their editorial boards overlapped.

Eugenics today

Reported to have developed out of the Pioneer Fund and to have taken ownership of Mankind Quarterly, the HDF is the successor to earlier groups like the IAAEE and the Ulster Institute.

Today, the eugenics movement is experiencing a period of uncertainty following the
death of Richard Lynn in July 2023. When he died, Lynn was the director of the Pioneer Fund and the editor-in-chief of Mankind Quarterly. Organisations like HDF, led by people who have worked closely with Lynn, are trying to fill that void.

Whether the HDF will survive public scrutiny remains to be seen. But the broader networks from which it emerged are arguably stronger than at any previous moment in post-war history, facilitated by the rise of the far right and online extremism. All of which means it has never been more important to remember the tradition’s history. Läs mer…

In a significant diplomatic manoeuvre that may have far-reaching implications for the international system of alliances, Turkey has submitted a formal request to join Brics, the group of emerging-market economies, signalling its intent to diversify its partnerships beyond the west.

The Brics grouping, named after Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, comprises some of the world’s largest economies. Earlier this year, it welcomed four new members: Iran, the United Arab Emirates, Ethiopia and Egypt. Although Saudi Arabia has been invited to join, the official process is yet to take place. Often viewed as an alternative to western-led organisations such as the EU, G7 and Nato, Brics signifies a significant shift in global power dynamics.

Ankara’s decision could be a strategy to strengthen relations with non-western powers as the global economy’s centre continues to shift away from the west, but is also about chasing more trade with Brics members.

Announced ahead of the Brics summit starting on October 22, Turkey’s application has raised questions about the broader implications for its role within Nato. If accepted, Turkey would be the first Nato member of Brics. However, this is not to say that Turkey is entirely turning away from the west. Turkey’s institutional ties with the western world run deep. At most, this move signals Turkey’s president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s intention to increase the government’s flexibility in its foreign relations.

Erdoğan said on September 1 that this move shows Ankara’s aims to cultivate ties with all sides simultaneously to “become a strong, prosperous, prestigious and effective country if it improves its relations with the east and the west simultaneously”.

Turkey’s acceptance into the group could be discussed during the upcoming 16th Brics summit, in Kazan, Russia. Malaysia, Thailand and Azerbaijan are among other countries expecting to join.

Between east and west

Turkey’s balancing act between east and west is not a recent phenomenon but a continuation of its policies since the end of the cold war, and is in line with its geographical position at the edge of Europe and Asia.

This strategy has been central to Turkey’s intricate, at times conflicting, approach to international relations and remains pertinent in an increasingly complex world. The shift from a unipolar world – the idea that the world is dominated by one super power – to one with more global powers has led all governments to reassess their foreign policies, and Ankara is no different.

Turkey’s longstanding commitment to Nato makes it highly unlikely that its willingness to join the Brics group signifies a move away from its western allies. Since 2016, Turkey has strengthened its economic, political, and military ties with Russia and China, and its recent application to the Brics group reflects this trend. According to some experts in Turkish foreign policy, while this development may raise concerns in western capitals, there is no pressing reason for the west to be alarmed about Turkey making concessions to Russia or acting independently of Nato.

Map of the Black Sea region.
Shutterstock

There are two incentives driving Turkey’s application. According to Sinan Ülgen, director of the Istanbul-based Centre for Economic and Foreign Policy Studies: “The first is Turkey’s aspiration to enhance its strategic autonomy in foreign policy which essentially involves improving ties with non-western powers like Russia and China in a way to balance the relationship with the west. The second is the accumulated frustrations over the relationship with the west. For example, the EU has not even been able to decide on the start of negotiations on the updating of the customs union, its trade deal with Turkey that dates back to 1996.”

Read more:
Bottled up in the Black Sea: Russia is having a dreadful naval war, hindering its great power ambitions

Control of the Black Sea

Turkey has been keen on joining the Brics group since 2018. Putin, during a meeting with Turkish foreign minister Hakan Fidan in Moscow in June this year, welcomed Ankara’s interest and promised that Moscow “will support this desire to be together with the countries of this alliance [Brics], to be together, closer, to solve common problems”.

Since the war in Ukraine, Russia has been making extra efforts to gain the support of more countries. Turkey holds a particular significance in this effort due to its strategic location, and its control of the Black Sea straits, an essential trade route for both Ukraine and Russia. The Black Sea has played an important part in the Ukraine war, and Turkey has been part of an alliance that has stymied Russia’s attempts to fully control the waters, and allowed Ukraine to continue to use the waters.

The Montreux Convention regulates maritime traffic through the Turkish Straits. The convention distinguishes between Black Sea and non-Black Sea powers, acknowledging specific advantages for the former, which includes Ukraine and Russia.

In March 2022, Erdoğan indicated that the convention allows Turkey to restrict the passage of naval vessels belonging to warring parties. Putin may be hoping that with Turkey on board as a Brics ally he may be able to persuade Ankara to give him more leeway. Currently Russia’s inability to control the Black Sea and cargo ships within it are seriously weakening its ability to constrain Ukraine’s economy.

Turkey anticipates that Brics membership will enhance its geopolitical standing and expand its economic influence, especially in non-western markets. Most importantly, leveraging its geopolitical position to influence global affairs and pursuing a more balanced and diversified foreign policy.

It is evident that Turkey aims to maintain its connections with the west while also desiring the flexibility to engage with other regions. It is highly improbable that this would lead to a significant overhaul of Turkey’s ties with western countries. It may, however, cause concern among fellow Nato members about how much they can rely on Turkey in the future. Läs mer…

There is a city nearby that we hide from view. Its people are of all ages, ethnicities and classes. What unites them is a disease: all are diagnosed with myalgic encephalomyelitis, or ME.

We hide them there because we don’t know where else to put them. Like a plague village, we have no plans to treat them, to study their disease or to trial possible drugs for them. We could choose to draw up such plans, to give the residents hope for their future health. But our country’s choice is to turn away and forget about these 250,000-plus inhabitants altogether. A city the size of Brighton that we deliberately ignore.

Worse, when we don’t ignore them, we blame them, telling them that they are all free to rise from their beds and wheelchairs, to walk away from the city. Doctors tell them they can free themselves of the disease by changing their belief systems. Make the effort, they say, and you will regain your health and previous lives.

This article is part of Conversation Insights.
Our co-editors commission long-form journalism, working with academics from many different backgrounds who are engaged in projects aimed at tackling societal and scientific challenges.

Outwardly, the city is quiet: its clocks have stopped, the streets are empty and house blinds are drawn. Inwardly, some lie still in their darkened rooms, masks on to protect them from their light sensitivity, keeping within their limited energy level, unable to tolerate sound, food and touch – lives spent in the shadows, barely lived. Inside, they feel like they have life-sapping toxins coursing through their veins. They say it feels like being on the verge of death; some even call it a “pseudo dying syndrome”.

A brief conversation with a friend, or washing their hair, or a sudden movement causes their symptoms to flare. This intensifies a fatigue that sleep cannot alleviate, and heightens their muscle or joint pain, headaches, or sensitivities to food, light or sound.

Simon McGrath, a close friend of mine who has lived with ME and written about it for 20 years, tells me:

I never know how much it is safe for me to do. It’s like I’m surrounded by an electric fence that will trigger a bad day if I touch it. But the fence is invisible, and moves every day.

A ‘scandal’ so much more than chronic fatigue

Fatigue does not begin to describe this disease, despite its other name being chronic fatigue syndrome, or CFS. “A bad day is like a very bad hangover lasting 24 hours or more: the morning after, without the night before,” Simon explains. “But with much more pain, much more fatigue and very bad brain fog. I feel as if all the neurons in my skull have collapsed and disconnected from each other.” By spotlighting fatigue, ME’s other name fails to convey its many debilitating symptoms.

Simon – or, rather, his illness – is why I am a ME researcher. At university, where we met, he graduated with a biochemistry degree, fizzing with energy and talent. His ME soon dimmed his bright future but would not stop him making a difference to the ME community through his writing, and in helping me understand this horrible disease.

Treatment of ME has been called “the greatest medical scandal of the 21st century” by Guardian journalist George Monbiot. It is difficult to disagree when there is not a single bed anywhere in the UK set aside for treating people with severe ME.

The Times journalist, Sean O’Neill, says that ME is “routinely stigmatised and ignored by the NHS” and calls it “a scandal waiting for its Post Office moment”. O’Neill and his family had to endure the inquest into the death of his daughter, Maeve Boothby O’Neill, who died from natural causes because of severe ME.

Maeve’s ME left her unable to move, communicate or tolerate light, sound or touch. She did not want to go to hospital because, according to her GP, she “always gets worse when [she] goes in”.

Why is it that we give the least or worst treatments to those who are most in need?

Exile and misogyny

ME exiles people from their family, friends, and hoped-for futures. For most, this banishment is for life because nine in ten will never recover, and also because we expend too little effort to end this wicked disease.

That’s the irony – it’s society’s lack of effort to understand this illness and its treatment; our societal inertia; our failure to accept patients’ symptoms that perpetuate their exile.

So let’s attempt to diagnose what causes our apathy towards this cruel disease. The chief cause is misogyny, an ingrained prejudice born of the disease’s strong female bias: for every five women living with ME, there is only one man. It also has a strong age bias – young men are ten times less likely to be diagnosed with it than older women.

Another female-dominant disease is endometriosis. Like ME, the medical establishment is only just starting to appreciate the full nature of this debilitating condition.

In her memoir, Giving up the Ghost, the prize-winning novelist Hilary Mantel said of her endometriosis: “The more I said that I had a physical illness, the more they said I had a mental illness. The more I questioned the nature, the reality of the mental illness, the more I was found to be in denial, deluded.”

ME patients also report feeling that their concerns and symptoms are all too often dismissed.

Women with ME have spoken about their experiences of medical misogyny. For example, I talked to the Vikings actress Jennie Jacques who has spoken openly about her experiences of ME. She said that “Medical misogyny [is] at the heart of it. ME was psychologised when it most definitely shouldn’t have been”.

Soon after the World Health Organization recognised ME as a disease in 1969, the Royal Free Hospital ME outbreak of 1955 was re-evaluated by two psychiatrists, Colin McEvedy and William Beard. They reassessed this outbreak as “an epidemic of hysteria” principally because there was a “high attack rate in females compared with males”.

When later asked by ME specialist Byron Hyde MD “why had he written up the Free Hospital epidemics as hysteria without any careful exploration of the basis of his thesis?”, McEvedy responded devastatingly, saying: “It was an easy PhD, why not?”

This explains in part why the state invests a mere £3 per ME patient each year on researching this disease.

In the US, female-biased conditions attract less funding than male-biased ones. Funding for ME is 400-times less than for HIV/Aids, a male-biased disease, once their different disease burdens are accounted for.

In 2021, the previous UK government acknowledged the problem stating: “Studies suggest gender biases in clinical trials and research are contributing to worse health outcomes for women.”

COVID empathy?

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic should have woken us up from our collective lethargy, and should have turned apathy into empathy. For then there were times when we all became housebound, often sick with the SARS-CoV-2 virus, and moreover so many of us – a million people, more than Liverpool and Manchester combined – came down with Long COVID.

Long COVID and ME share so many symptoms: post-exertional malaise, fatigue, widespread pain, disordered sleep, and brain fog. This overlap should never have surprised us – after all, two-thirds of people with ME report having had a triggering infection, such as glandular fever, just prior to their initial symptoms. Around 10% of people with glandular fever go on to develop ME symptoms.

It is as if we have our own brain fog, obscuring everyone with ME, forgetting how we – if fortune had been different – might have been them.

If we do not act to reduce the spread of infection, through immunisation and better ventilation, then numbers of people with long COVID – and other ME-like illnesses – will continue to rise, as infections so often trigger these conditions.

Read more:
Long COVID: effects on fatigue and quality of life can be comparable to some cancers – new research

Harmful treatments

Going back to Simon, ME made him housebound, then bedbound. The NHS treated him with therapies based on increasing activity levels (Graded Exercise Therapy, or GET). This involves “gradually increasing physical activity to improve fitness and get the body used to activity again”.

The other NHS treatment approach, Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), is about changing “illness beliefs”. Here, patients are asked to examine “how thoughts, behaviour and CFS/ME symptoms interact with each other”.

But these treatments are ineffective as cures. And worse still, for the majority of 11,000 people with ME on one survey, GET did more harm then good.

ME blogger and friend of the author, Simon McGrath.
Simon McGrath, Author provided (no reuse)

In a different online survey, of 542 ME patients, 81% responded that their symptoms worsened because of GET treatment. National Institute for Health and Care Excellence guidelines, revised in 2021, say that CBT is not curative and that GET should not be offered to people with ME. Yet this new guidance has been implemented by only 28% of English NHS Trusts and Integrated Care Boards.

So, despite GET being described by patients as causing harm, and CBT as being ineffective as a cure, they are still being offered as a treatment. Over decades, very little has changed for Simon and hundreds of thousands of others with ME.

As we grew older together, Simon watched as I changed scientific career from physics into biology. I watched as his health might begin to rebuild, before suddenly collapsing, setting him back months or years. His ME has cost so much, he told me:

It’s so isolating and there’s so much loss. I got ill in the prime of life. It cost me relationships, my social life, my career, the chance of a family, the chance to contribute. Everything. Plenty of people seem to think it’s a lifestyle choice. Nobody would choose this.

As if his ME burden was not heavy enough, he started to carry other long-term health conditions, which each alone would bring me to my knees. Even though he does not feel it, I see his strength and resolution in adversity. At a time when biomedical evidence was rarely championed, he began his ME blog, and together with co-authors re-analysed clinical trial data. They concluded that the “recovery rates in the CBT and GET groups were not significantly higher than those in the control, no-therapy group”.

His own experience of ME, and his scientific eye-for-detail, make him a go-to person for people in the ME community.

In contrast, by 2013, and despite my decades of scientific training and academic privileges, I had done nothing for ME research. Why did I hesitate? “It’s not my scientific area,” I told myself. I trusted other researchers to identify effective and potentially curative treatments soon.

I was unprepared for the shock of my first ME research meetings. When studying other diseases, I had become used to vast conference halls brimming with celebrated scientists, enthusiastic PhD students, science prize winners, funders, and journal editors, all on the hunt for the next big breakthrough, grant or career opportunity.

For ME, however, the rooms were small and half-empty, funders and journal editors were nowhere to be seen, and researchers were talking at cross-purposes, showing sparse data from small-scale studies. These meetings were also empty of robust evidence for what physiologically had gone wrong for so many. At each meeting, a single word came to my mind: “forsaken” – those who others shun, neglect and abandon, whose existence is denied. I could not then, in all conscience, turn my back and walk away.

Not once have I regretted this decision. Its professional cost – measured in traditional markers of esteem, such as “glamour” publications, international conference and seminar invitations – has been more than offset by the fulfilment from working in this long-neglected field.

The extent of scientific disinterest in ME is clear: so far this year, there have been 17-times more publications mentioning “multiple sclerosis” than those mentioning ME or CFS, despite MS being rarer.

New study

My privilege now is to walk ME’s city of stolen futures alongside many people – like Simon – whose lost decades have been spent searching for their disease’s root causes. Together, for two-and-a-half years our team went back-and-forth with the Medical Research Council MRC and the National Institute for Health and Care Research NIHR. Eventually, we managed to secure a £3.2m award for DecodeME, a hunt for ME’s genetic causes.

DecodeME is not just the world’s largest study of the genetic causes of ME, but it was the first to place people with experience of ME at its heart. A total of 27,000 people with ME in the UK took part. We will report the study’s results as soon as we can. When we do, we will give them back first to the ME community whose data and samples we hold in trust.

The UK government has pledged to publish its delivery plan on ME in 2025. Andrew Gwynne MP, parliamentary under-secretary of state at the Department of Health and Social Care, has said that it “will focus on boosting research, improving attitudes and education and bettering the lives of people with this debilitating disease”.

This delivery plan will need to be radical.

Today, we urgently need more people to move through this city of lost hope to hear and to listen.

We need scientists to develop new vaccines against infections that trigger ME.

We need researchers, clinical specialists, hospital managers, and politicians to give deserved priority to this long-forsaken community and help lead these long-lost inhabitants back into the land of the well.

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