Paraphrasing is an important skill for any writer to have. Simply put, it is the means through with which authors convey information that they learned from outside sources in their own words.
Simply put, all writers, in particular non-fiction writers, need to be able to do this. When you work with outside sources, it’s crucial that you are able to incorporate their information but retain your own voice.
This is especially crucial for students, who are routinely tasked with writing essays and other papers that incorporate outside material. Proper paraphrasing can be the difference between a good grade and an accusation of plagiarism.
However, paraphrasing is also deeply misunderstood. Many writers, including many students, hold some strong misconceptions about paraphrasing and how it’s supposed to be done.
Part of this due to the way plagiarism detection tools have changed writing. Students, seeking to avoid plagiarism issues, often become too focused on the specific words and not the concept of paraphrasing.
To help dispel these misconceptions, today we’re going to look at both why paraphrasing is important and how to do it properly.
Why Paraphrase?
There are many reasons why paraphrasing is a crucial skill.
This means that you should only quote when the quote adds something to the essay or paper. This could be because the information is particularly important or especially well-stated by the original author. Either way, overusing quotes dilutes the power of quotation and diminishes your own voice.
However, there are also benefits to the author. By paraphrasing properly, you, the author, also show that you have learned the information. By taking the information and writing it in your own words, you not only show a mastery of the knowledge, but the process itself can help you learn it.
Finally, paraphrasing is an opportunity to present the information to a new audience. For example, if the source material is a complicated document, such as a legal document or a research paper, paraphrasing is a way to take the information from it and present it to a layperson audience that may not have full understanding of the language the source material uses.
In short, paraphrasing allows you to pull information from a wide variety of sources and then present that information to your specific audience, regardless of the audience the source material was meant for.
Important First Steps
The first and most important step in properly paraphrasing is to take a cleanroom approach to your writing. Do not mix your notes and research with your original writing. Any time you do copy and paste outside material into your writing, quote and cite it immediately.
If your notes and original writing get mixed up, there’s no hope of being able to paraphrase correctly.
Second, you need to understand that, even with a good paraphrase, you are still required to cite the source of the information and, once again, it’s best to do so as you write. Waiting until you are editing the work just opens up the possibility of making mistakes and leaving out key citations.
If you have questions about what you are required to cite, please speak with your instructor or editor. If you aren’t able to do and are a student, seek out your school’s writing center/lab or their student help center.
Without these steps, no amount of proper paraphrasing will help. Contrary to what many believe, plagiarism doesn’t just cover the copying of words without attribution. Copying ideas, concepts and facts without citation can, just as easily, lead to allegations of plagiarism.
How to Properly Paraphrase
With those initial steps taken, paraphrasing is actually fairly simple:
Read the original passage carefully and try to focus less on its words, but its meaning. What is the core concept? What is the key piece of information?
Set the original aside. Put it somewhere that you can’t look at it to avoid subconsciously copying it.
Write that core concept or information in your own words. If it helps, pretend that you are telling your friend or your teacher about what you just learned. Use your voice,
Compare what you wrote to the original material. If you find that there’s a great deal of similarity in the word choice, try it again. Also, see if your words are carrying roughly the same meaning as the source.
Add the citation for the source material.
Repeat the process for the next piece of information that you want to share.
To be clear, this process can be anything from a part of a sentence to whole paragraphs of a paper as appropriate. The matter is simply how long it takes to explain the information you need to convey from that one source.
Bottom Line
Ultimately, the most important thing to remember is that paraphrasing is not simply “rewriting someone else’s words.” Paraphrasing is not rewriting, it’s putting the ideas and information in your own words. The words should be wholly original and only the information should remain the same.
Still, paraphrasing is a confusing and complicated topic. To make matters worse, what separates a good paraphrase from an outright plagiarism is often a separation of degrees and can be very subjective.
As such, the best source to go to if you need help with paraphrasing is either to your instructors, your school or your editor. Talking with the people that will be assessing your work is crucial to understanding what is expected of you with your writing.
by Andrew King, Senior Lecturer in Climate Science, The University of Melbourne
Extreme floods are devastating Pakistan, caused by a combination of heavy monsoon rains and melting glaciers. While Pakistan is no stranger to deadly floods, this event is especially shocking with more than 1,100 people dead so far and many millions more affected.
This Northern Hemisphere summer has seen extreme weather event after extreme weather event, from record-breaking drought in Western Europe, the United States and China, to flooding in Japan and South Korea.
This begs the question of the extent climate change is to blame. And, if so, is this what we should expect from now on?
A summer of extremes
The flooding in Pakistan is the latest in a sequence of exceptional disasters in the Northern Hemisphere.
Western Europe and central and eastern China have experienced record-breaking heatwaves and droughts leading to water restrictions. These heatwaves and droughts have also caused crop shortages, which are adding to the rising costs of food around the world.
China was plunged into an energy security crisis. And Italy’s longest river is flowing at one tenth of its usual rate. These droughts and their significant impacts are forecast to continue for the foreseeable future.
It has also only been a few months since we saw temperatures reach 50℃ ahead of the monsoon rains in northern India and Pakistan.
Putting it into perspective
While it’s true that several of this summer’s extreme events have been exceptional, we normally see more high-impact extreme weather events in Northern Hemisphere summer than any other time. This is because extreme heat, very heavy downpours, and drought are more likely at the warmest time of year.
Two-thirds of the planet’s land and more than 85% of the world’s population are in the Northern Hemisphere. This means there are more people to be affected by extreme weather than in the Southern Hemisphere, making the Northern Hemisphere summer the prime time for disasters to have severe impacts.
Additionally, extreme weather events can occur at the same time over different places, because of large-scale atmospheric waves called “Rossby waves”, which are a naturally occurring phenomenon, like La Niña and El Niño.
Back in 2010, western Russia experienced severe heat and wildfires while Pakistan had some of their worst floods to date. These events were connected by a Rossby wave causing a high pressure pattern to get stuck over western Russia and low pressure to persist over Pakistan.
Rossby waves can also result in heatwaves occurring at the same time, thousands of kilometres apart. Earlier this Northern Hemisphere summer, we saw simultaneous heatwaves strike the western US, western Europe and China.
Rossby waves may well have contributed to simultaneous disasters this summer, but it’s too soon to say for sure.
With so many extreme weather events causing mass deaths and large economic and environmental problems, it’s worth considering whether climate change may be making these events worse.
Human-caused climate change has warmed the planet by about 1.2℃ to date and this has caused some types of extreme weather to become more frequent and more intense,
particularly extreme heatwaves and record-high temperatures.
Every heatwave in today’s climate has the fingerprint of climate change resulting from our greenhouse gas emissions. Indeed, rapid analyses have already demonstrated that the human effect on the climate greatly increased the likelihood of the extreme heat in India and Pakistan in May, and the record high UK temperatures in July.
Research also shows climate change is increasing the occurrence of simultaneous heatwaves in the Northern Hemisphere, mainly due to long-term warming.
It’s less clear whether the Rossby wave pattern that causes simultaneous heatwaves in different places is becoming more frequent.
Climate change is also shifting rainfall patterns resulting in worsening drought in some areas, such as in much of Western Europe.
And severe downpours and extreme short-duration heavy rain, such as that seen in Seoul and Dallas in recent weeks, are being intensified by climate change. This is because global warming results in the air being able to hold more moisture – for every 1℃ of warming, the atmosphere can hold 7% more moisture.
Indeed, the heavy rains in Pakistan follow an observed trend towards increasing extreme daily rainfall totals. This area of the world is projected to see a continued intensification of daily and multi-day extreme rain events over summer, as the planet warms.
Maximum 5-day rainfall in June-August is projected to increase in Pakistan at 2°C global warming.
IPCC AR6 Interactive Atlas
Some heat extremes in recent years have been far beyond what we thought would happen after just over 1℃ of global warming, such as western North America’s record heat of last summer. But it’s hard to tell if our projections are under-forecasting extreme heat.
In any case, the world must prepare for further possible record-shattering high temperatures in the months, years and decades to come. We need to rapidly decarbonise to limit the damage caused by future extreme events.
by Wolf Gruner, Shapell-Guerin Chair in Jewish Studies and Professor of History; Founding Director, USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences
Although the Nazis deported hundreds of thousands of Jewish men and women, for many places where those tragic events happened, no images are known to document the crime. Surprisingly, there’s not even photographic evidence from Berlin, the Nazi capital and home to Germany’s largest Jewish community.
The lack of known images is important. Unlike in the past, historians now agree that photographs and film must be taken seriously as primary sources for their research. These sources can complement the analysis of administrative documents and survivor testimonies and thus enrich our understanding of Nazi persecution.
I searched for unpublished images in all the archives I visited during my research. But I have to admit that I – along with many of my colleagues – did not take the gathered visual evidence seriously as a primary source and rather used it to illustrate my publications.
During the past decade, scholars have realized how pictures can contribute to our understanding of mass violence as well as the resistance to it. Some can provide the only evidence we have about an act of persecution – for example, a photograph of anti-Jewish graffiti. Others will reveal additional details, as in the image of a court proceeding against anti-Nazi resistors.
Photographs are now in some cases the sole objects of scholarly inquiry. They are used to identify perpetrators and victims in specific cases, when other sources would not reveal them.
Here’s one example: An image shows uniformed Nazis standing in front of a passenger train filled with German Jews in Munich on Nov. 20, 1942. Who were those men? More importantly, what are the stories of the barely recognizable victims behind the windows in this image?
The deportation of Munich Jews to Kowno in Nazi-occupied Lithuania, Nov. 20, 1942.
City Archive Munich, DE-1992-FS-NS-00015, CC BY-SA
Investigating photos of Nazi deportations
Between 1938 and 1945, more than 200,000 people were deported from Germany, mainly to ghettos and camps in Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe.
This effort aims to locate, collect and analyze images of Nazi mass deportations in Germany. The deportations started with the forced expulsion of around 17,000 Jews of Polish origin in October 1938, right before the widespread antisemitic violence of Kristallnacht, and culminated in the mass deportations to Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe between 1941 and 1945.
The mass deportation targeted not only Jews, but also people with disabilities as well as tens of thousands of Romani.
Romani families, in total 490 people, from Germany’s southwest border region are deported to Nazi-occupied Poland, May 22, 1940.
Research Office for Racial Hygiene, Federal Archive Germany, Barch R 165, 244-42.
What can we learn from the pictures? Not only when, where and how these forced relocations took place, but who participated, who witnessed them and who was affected by the persecution acts.
I work with the USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research to manage the outreach for the #LastSeen Project in the English-speaking world. The project has three main goals: first, gathering all existing pictures. These images will then be analyzed to identify the victims and perpetrators and recover the stories behind the pictures. Finally, a digital platform will provide access to all the images and unearthed information, both enabling a new level of study of this visual evidence and establishing a powerful tool against Holocaust denial.
When the project began, the partners were skeptical of whether we would find a significant number of never-before-seen images of mass deportations.
But after addressing the German public and querying 1,750 German archives, within the first six months of the project we received dozens of unknown images, more then doubling the number of German towns, from 27 to over 60, where we now have photographs documenting Nazi deportations.
Many of these photos had collected dust on shelves in local archives in Germany, and some were found in private homes. In the future, the project hopes for discoveries in archives, museums and family possession in the U.S. and the U.K., but also in Canada, South Africa and Australia. We know that liberators took photographs with them from Germany at the end of the war, and survivors received them later via various channels.
Tracing unknown images beyond Germany
The project has already located photos in the United States. In two cases, survivors had donated them to archives, which project staff learned during research visits. Simon Strauss gave an image to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum depicting the deportation in his German hometown of Hanau. He wrote on it, “Uncle Ludwig transported.” The second photo was at the Leo Baeck Institute in New York, which had received the hitherto only known picture from the Nazi deportation of the Jews in Bad Homburg.
To locate more photos, the project counts on the help of ordinary citizens, researchers, archivists, museum curators and survivors’ families.
After joining the project, I searched the USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive, which holds over 53,000 video testimonies of Holocaust survivors. Many of the Jews who gave testimony talked about Nazi deportations. All interviewees shared photographs. While many of these more than 700,000 images are artifacts of personal value, such as family and wedding photos, some images depict Nazi persecution.
Within minutes of my search using the term “deportation stills” I was staring at photographs showing a Nazi deportation in a small town in central Germany. At the end of his 1996 interview, Lothar Lou Beverstein, born in 1921, shared two photographs from his hometown of Halberstadt that he had received from friends after the war. Beverstein identified his father, Hugo, and his mother, Paula, in an image showing Nazis lining up deportees in front of the city’s famous 13th-century Gothic cathedral.
Both of Lou Beverstein’s parents were deported to the Warsaw Ghetto on April 12, 1942. In his interview, Beverstein declared that to his knowledge nobody survived from that transport, which supposedly consisted of 24 men, 59 women and 23 children. Now the project needs to locate Lou Beverstein’s family in the United States or connect to other descendants from Halberstadt to find out more about the origins of the images and the identities of the deportees depicted in them.
Naming and recognizing victims
The identities of deportees and perpetrators in the existing images are often unknown. Most photographs show groups of victims whom project staff aim to identify so they and their stories can be acknowledged. This is very difficult, since there are seldom close-up shots.
Two Jewish girls awaiting deportation in Munich on Nov. 11, 1942. Their identities are not known.
City Archive Munich DE-1992-FS-NS-00013
by Helena Gjone, PhD candidate (creative writing), Griffith University
Pikene på Broen/Bernt Nilsen
As an international student at the Bolshoi Ballet Academy in Moscow in 2012, I remember studying Rekviem (requiem) by Russian poet Anna Ahkmatova, an elegy she penned in secret as a tribute to the countless victims of Stalin’s murderous purges.
Akhmatova’s writing revived the atrocities, delivering their darkness into the light.
Her words spoke of constant fear permeating lives; of distrust, anxiety and betrayal; of the secret police arriving to drag you or your family away.
To avoid detection and retribution, Ahkmatova whispered the poem to her friends who committed it to memory. She burned the incriminating scraps of paper.
In the first four-and-a-half months following Putin’s attack against Ukraine, over 13,000 anti-war protesters were detained in Russia.
Some estimates are that hundreds of thousands fled Russia in early 2022, among them thousands of artists who no longer felt safe in the climate of increasing censorship.
Some of these artists have found themselves in Kirkenes, a small Norwegian town 15 kilometres from the Russian border.
Artists performing outside Pikene på Broen, an artist collective in Norway near the Russian border.
Pikene på Broen/Torben Kule
Russia’s protest art
Russian and Soviet artists have a long history of art as protest.
The poem Stalin’s Epigram (1933) authored by Osip Mandelstam depicted Stalin as a gleeful killer. Authorities imprisoned and tortured Mandelstam, then deported the poet to a remote village near the Ural Mountains.
After returning from exile, he persisted writing about Stalin until he was sent to a labour camp in Siberia, where he died in 1938 at the age of 47.
Under the comparatively liberal rule of Stalin’s successor Nikita Khrushchev from 1953, the Soviet Union began to enjoy previously unimagined freedoms.
Protest art reflected these newfound liberties, becoming increasingly provocative and experimental.
Many famous art movements surfaced during this period, including Sots Art — a fusion between Soviet and Pop Art — as Russian artists tested the boundaries, exposing the grim realities and unhappiness of life under Stalin’s regime.
In 1962, the legendary composer Shostakovich set his 13th symphony to a series of poems by his contemporary, Yevgeny Yevtushenko. One of these poems was Babi Yar, which criticised the Soviet government for concealing the massacre of 33,371 Jews in a mass grave outside Kyiv.
In contemporary Russia, Pussy Riot came to the attention of the world in 2012 when members stepped behind the altar in Moscow’s golden-domed Christ the Saviour Cathedral wearing neon-coloured balaclavas to deliver a “punk rock prayer”.
Their voices echoed off the cavernous, hand-painted ceilings, raging against Putin’s affiliation with the Orthodox church and the homophobic, anti-feminist policies that followed.
They were sentenced to two years imprisonment.
Today, pictures from Russia reveal anonymous anti-war graffiti on the sides of buildings, “no war” chiselled into a frozen river, and yellow and blue chrysanthemums and tulips left at the feet of Soviet war memorials.
Cross-border collaborations
Pikene på Broen (girls on the bridge) is an arts collective based in Kirkenes.
They have spent the past 25 years curating art projects to promote cross-cultural collaboration and tackle political problems in the borderland region.
Pikene på Broen is host to the the annual art festival BarentsSpektakel (spectacle), an international artist residency including Russian, Norwegian and Finnish creatives, the gallery and project space Terminal B in Kirkenes town, and the debate series Transborder Café.
The venue has become a hub for open discussions relating to current political and cultural issues, drawing contributions from artists, musicians, writers, politicians and researchers.
Russian and Norwegian artists in discussion at the Transborder Cafe in Kirkenes.
Pikene på Broen/Mikhail Slavin
Evgeny Goman, an independent theatre director from Murmansk, Russia – about 200 kilometres from Kirkenes – has been collaborating with Pikene på Broen for over 10 years.
After moving to Norway in early 2022, Pikene på Broen worked with Goman to organise Kvartirnik (from the word kvartira, meaning apartment), an online talk group for Russian and Norwegian artists to exchange ideas.
Following Putin’s attack on Ukraine, Kvartirnik shifted to an underground movement for dissident artists. Ironically, the name Kvartirnik derives from the clandestine concerts arranged in people’s apartments during the Soviet Era when musicians were banned from performing in public.
Kvartirnik derives its name from the clandestine concerts held in apartments during the Soviet era. The tradition continues today.
Pikene på Broen/Astrid Fadnes
Party of the Dead is one of several Russian protest art groups who participated in Kvartirnik.
Pictures from the snow-decked Piskaryovskoye Cemetery in Saint Petersburg reveal members dressed as skeletons, holding placards reading: “are there not enough corpses?”.
Artists are protesting against the war even in Russia.
Party of the dead
I spoke with Goman about the art coming out of Kvartirnik today.
“In peaceful times, art is more about entertaining,” he says.
But in war and conflict, art is more important because it’s the language we use to express our pain. And through metaphors and symbolism, it allows us to speak about things that are censored.
Countering propaganda
Kvartirnik collaborators in Murmansk have also produced and distributed Samizdat (self-publishing), an anonymous newsletter containing art suppressed by the state.
“We have to be really smart now about how we do things in Russia,” Goman says. “Subtle.”
Attendees at Barents Arts Festival in Norway protested against the war in Ukraine.
Pikene på Broen/Torben Kule
Goman is pessimistic about Russia’s future. But he believes the key to moving forward is keeping communication open. He tells me the West’s decision to ban Russian culture has backfired on their plan to pressure Putin into ending the war against Ukraine.
Instead, he says, the divide is steadily increasing, leaving dissident artists isolated inside a country operating on fear and propaganda, furthering Putin’s agenda.
“Putin wants us to not affect Russian minds. And that’s why we have to keep the dialogue going,” he says of the importance of cross-border collaborations like those he has undertaken in Kirkenes.
If we stop communicating, Putin wins. Propaganda wins.
Helena Gjone does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
by Ana Estefanía Carballo, Honorary Research Fellow in Mining and Society, School of Geography, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, The University of Melbourne
Chile may soon be the second country in the world to grant constitutional rights to nature, under astoundingly progressive reforms proposed by the government. If approved in the national referendum on 4 September, the new constitution would deliver profound changes to the country.
It’s no surprise that 50 of the 387 constitutional provisions concern the environment. Like Australia, Chile is facing mounting environmental pressures. This includes an escalating water crisis made significantly more challenging by the mining industry, long seen as a key pillar of the economy.
The proposed constitution seeks to rapidly pivot Chile toward ecological democracy, one that can transition an economy long dependent on mineral extraction toward cleaner, less resource-intensive, and more socially just forms of living – _buen vivir_.
While the votes aren’t yet in, there are valuable lessons in this process for Australia and other countries grappling with similar concerns.
Initially unstructured and spontaneous, the protests were sparked by an increase in public transport costs, but quickly coalesced into a widespread constitutional crisis.
This crisis was an outcry against the deeply entrenched socio-economic inequalities seen as rooted in and perpetuated by the country’s legal framework. This is a legacy of the Pinochet dictatorship (1973-1990), which saw soaring wealth inequalities and power concentrated in the hands of business elites and private corporations.
In the face of both social and ecological breakdown, further intensified by the arrival of COVID-19, over 80% of Chileans voted in favour of re-writing the constitution in 2020.
In May 2021, a constitutional convention was elected, formed by 155 representatives from across the country. Notably, 50% of them were women, and it was led by Mapuche linguist and Indigenous rights activist Elisa Loncón.
In July 2022, the convention delivered the much-anticipated draft constitution, which was immediately heralded by supporters as an “ecological constitution”.
What are the reforms?
Over the last decade, both Ecuador and Bolivia have been at the global forefront of advocating for the “rights of nature” or “the rights of Mother Earth”. These rights have made it possible to bring cases on behalf of ecosystems into courts, and to challenge the extractive imperatives of state ministries.
The proposed changes to Chile’s constitution build on these experiments, but take them considerably further.
Not only would Chile become the second nation after Ecuador to grant nature constitutional rights, they would also create an “ombudsman for nature” tasked with monitoring and enforcing them. According to the draft text, it would be the duty of the “state and society to protect and respect these rights”.
Chile has vast reserves of lithium deposits.
Shutterstock
Citizens would also be empowered to bring environmental lawsuits, even before an environmental impact assessment has been approved. The monitoring of these rights would extend all the way down to the local level, decentralising environmental regulatory authority that has historically been concentrated in the capital of Santiago.
But perhaps even more significant are the proposals aiming to reverse another legacy of the Pinochet dictatorship: Chile’s decades-long privatisation of water.
Articles in the proposed constitution concerning water rights, the human rights of water, and the protection of glaciers and wetlands significantly roll back these trends. They declare that water is not a commodity but, instead, incomerciable or “unsellable”.
Overturning this decades-long controversial market mechanism is the direct result of involving social and Indigenous movements in the constitutional process. It reflects and affirms their often-repeated recognition that Agua es vida, or “water is life”.
Beyond enshrining water protection measures, the draft constitution represents a renewed effort to bolster Chile’s natural resources governance, a move with significant impacts on the mining industry. It specifies that exploration and exploitation of mineral resources should ensure environmental protection and the interest of future generations.
There are also requirements to ensure sustainable management of land sites after a mine has closed, and for the promotion of value chain linkages (where mineral processing occurs in the country and benefits its people).
Such considerations are particularly crucial for the global transition towards renewable energy, which poses high demands on Chile’s copper and lithium industry, minerals used for energy storage.
The global rush for these minerals is increasing governance challenges and putting pressure on communities already under environmental and water stress. Strong legal support for a more equitable, fair and sustainable governance framework is imperative.
Lessons for the world
Many questions remain about how these reforms would be put into practice. Nevertheless, they represent the culmination of dialogue between sectors that have historically been excluded from political power.
Australia has much to learn from this process. Most important, perhaps, is that despite the resistance of pro-market sectors, including the mining industry, sweeping and rapid transformations are indeed imaginable in the climate crisis. Other worlds are possible. Other forms of democratic practices are possible.
Addressing climate change while ensuring a sustainable energy transition with inter-generational and inter-cultural equity means prioritising the voices of those who have been systematically excluded – particularly Indigenous communities. Australia would do well to heed this lesson.
And the lessons aren’t just for Australia. While many countries have reluctantly acknowledged the climate emergency that continues to engulf us, Chile is nearly alone globally in acting with the sense of urgency required. What it has already achieved is historic.
From an outcry in the streets to the election of an outstandingly diverse constitutional convention, Chile has crafted one of the most progressive and environmentally conscious legal texts on the planet. Chile’s experience demonstrates that bold, just, and democratic action is not only possible, but necessary.
Ana Estefanía Carballo is a Research and Programme Manager, Accountable Mining, Transparency International Australia.
Erin Fitz-Henry does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
by Andrew Stokes, Assistant Professor of Global Health, Boston University
As of August 2022, COVID-19 vaccination rates in Black and Hispanic people exceeded those of white Americans nationally, but only for the initial shots. FatCamera/E+ via Getty Images
But boosters are a different story. Comparable booster vaccine promotion efforts have been lacking. Confusion in the public health messaging surrounding boosters and limited federal funding for rolling out vaccination campaigns have resulted in slow booster uptake across the country.
As a result, divides have once again emerged. A recent study of COVID-19 booster rates found that 45% of white adults and 52% of Asian American adults had received boosters by January 2022. But only 29% of Black adults and 31% of adults who reported another racial or ethnic identity, such as American Indian, Alaska Native, Native Hawaiian, Pacific Islander or multiracial, were boosted.
As of late August 2022, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that 36.3% of white adults in the U.S. 50 years or older and eligible for a second booster shot had received one. This is compared to only 28.4% for the Black population, 31.3% for American Indian or Alaska Native populations, and 25.1% for the Hispanic population.
Vaccine studies suggest that adults age 50 and older who receive a booster shot have 90% lower death rates from COVID-19 than those who receive only the initial vaccine regimen. But the extent to which boosters have translated into health gains at the population level remains unclear.
Preliminary analyses by our team indicate that people in the U.S. living in counties with low booster uptake are dying from COVID-19 at higher rates than people living in counties with high booster uptake. In particular, in comparing the counties in the bottom 10% of booster rates with those in the top 10%, the COVID-19 death rates for residents of the bottom 10% of counties were 64% higher. Our analysis applies to the period from January to June 2022. It also adjusts for residents’ ages.
This difference in death rates may in part reflect the fact that counties with greater booster protection also tend to have higher rates of primary-series vaccination. Nonetheless, these findings suggest that at the population level, booster rates are now a key factor behind COVID-19 deaths.
A prior study found that vaccination strategies that target high-risk geographical areas save more lives than strategies based on age alone. Thus, the evidence suggests that limited federal funding for COVID-19 booster promotion should be sent to geographical areas that are currently reporting high rates of COVID-19 deaths.
Learning from the community
An effective booster campaign could build on lessons learned from prior vaccination campaigns. Specifically, this involves bringing vaccines directly to people. From the earliest days of vaccine distribution during the pandemic, partnerships with faith-based organizations, housing communities and trusted community organizations have been successful in reaching populations with low vaccination rates.
Other strategies to make boosters more accessible include increasing access to vaccine centers via public transit and outside of typical working hours. In rural areas, evidence-based strategies to promote vaccination include education of community ambassadors, use of social media and operation of mobile vaccination sites.
In the absence of federal funding, community efforts have aimed to make boosters more accessible. A New Yorker documentary filmed in 2021 explored the challenges that one rural community in Alabama – Panola – has faced with vaccination. It highlights community leader Dorothy Oliver as she promotes vaccination with little to no support from the government. Her efforts included door-to-door campaigns, discussions with residents about their fears and concerns and coordination of vaccination logistics, including scheduling and transport.
In a similar way, Minneapolis’ Seward Vaccine Equity Project increased booster shots among East African immigrant families by having volunteers call members of their own communities and offer them a booster appointment and a ride. The volunteers were also available to answer residents’ questions and address any concerns. Successful efforts like those could be carried out by health departments on a much wider scale.
Andrew Stokes receives funding from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, and the National Institute on Aging.
Elizabeth Wrigley-Field is a member of the Seward Vaccine Equity Project, discussed in the article. She receives funding from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute on Child Health and Human Development via the Minnesota Population Center and from the National Institute on Aging via the Life Course Center, both at the University of Minnesota.
Dielle Lundberg and Rafeya Raquib do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Abortion travel isn’t new. People have been crossing national and state borders to get abortion care since the 1960s, when air travel became more common and affordable.
As a sociologist who studies gender, reproduction and health, I have interviewed hundreds of women who have sought abortions, many of whom had to travel for care. My recent study on the experiences of people who had to travel across state lines for abortion care can help people better understand what costs abortion patients face when they have to travel.
For those living in states that have restricted abortion, traveling for a procedure can be expensive, daunting and lonely.
1. Why do people travel for abortion care?
People travel for medical care for many reasons. In the case of abortion travel, they are typically traveling because abortion is either legally restricted or unavailable in their home area. To get an abortion, they have no choice but to travel.
2. What are the main costs of traveling for abortion care?
Most people rightly anticipate that abortion travel entails expenses like gas money or plane tickets and hotel charges. As research shows that most abortion patients are at or just above the federal poverty line, it is easy to see that these costs alone could represent a substantial burden.
But traveling for an abortion often also includes numerous other costs. For instance, most abortion patients are already parenting children, so they must figure out child care logistics when they have to travel for abortion care. People who do not have access to a reliable vehicle may need to rent a car to make a long-distance drive across state borders.
Abortion funds – nonprofit organizations that provide practical and financial support to people seeking abortion care – can help people who are financially struggling navigate some of these costs. But often this aid isn’t sufficient to cover all costs. There are also real questions about whether funds can meet the growing demand.
And then there is the issue of lost wages during the time a patient must spend traveling. For many people engaged in hourly work, when you don’t work, you don’t get paid.
Some companies, like Starbucks and Dick’s Sporting Goods, are offering financial support to employees who travel for an abortion.
Abortion travel can also entail emotional costs. I’m currently working on a new study based on interviews with 30 women from around the U.S. about the emotional impacts of having to travel out of state for abortion care. Based on these interviews, I’ve learned that having to travel for abortion care can mean the stress of having to navigate a new place. For some people, this could be their first time in that city or even away from home. It also means being removed from their usual support systems and the physical and emotional comforts of home. This, too, can take an emotional toll.
And, of course, having to travel means having to explain to others – including co-workers and family members – why they are traveling, which can also come at a high personal and emotional cost.
3. Are there any positives to traveling for abortion care?
There is not much work on this question to date. Most research on abortion travel has focused on its negative aspects. But in my research, some of the women who had to travel for abortion care talked about how much they appreciated the emotional support they received in their destination clinic – especially after the hostility to abortion they had experienced in their home communities.
Seeking out nonjudgmental, compassionate care might motivate someone to prefer to travel for abortion care. But in the post-Roe landscape, few will have that luxury. Rather, travel will be a necessity, not a choice. Even with the possibility of emotional benefits, travel for abortion care exacts clear and substantial costs.
Katrina Kimport receives funding from the Society of Family Planning, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, and an anonymous foundation.
by Aaron Pilkington, US Air Force Analyst of Middle East Affairs, PhD Student at Korbel School of International Studies, University of Denver
In July 2022, Iran provided the Russian military with training for using Iranian-produced weapons, including the Shahed-129 drone, displayed here at a 2019 military show in Tehran. Morteza Nikoubazl/NurPhoto via Getty Images
The war in Ukraine is helping one country achieve its foreign policy and national security objectives, but it’s neither Russia nor Ukraine.
It’s Iran.
Iran is among Russia’s most vocal supporters in the war. This has little to do with Ukraine and everything to do with Iran’s long-term strategy vis-à-vis the United States.
As Russia’s war on Ukraine passes six months and continues eroding Russia’s manpower, military stores, economy and diplomatic connections, leader Vladimir Putin has opted for an unlikely but necessary Iranian lifeline to salvage victory in Ukraine and also in Syria where, since 2015, Russian soldiers have been fighting to keep Bashar al-Assad’s government in power.
Putin’s move has, in turn, helped Iran make progress in promoting its national interests.
Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, center, and Russian President Vladimir Putin, greet each other as Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi stands at right during their meeting in Tehran, Iran, on July 19, 2022.
Office of the Iranian Supreme Leader via AP
Opposing the US everywhere
Since the Islamic Revolution of 1979, Iran’s leaders have believed the United States is constantly scheming to topple Iran’s government. They view leaders in Washington as the greatest threat and obstacle to promoting Iranian national interests – achieving economic self-sufficiency, international legitimacy, regional security, power and influence.
The fears of Iran’s leaders are not irrational – the long history of U.S. meddling in Iranian affairs, continuous open hostility between the two countries and decades of U.S. military buildup in close proximity to Iran greatly concern leaders in Tehran.
The U.S. has military forces in many Middle Eastern countries, with or without invitation. To promote its national interests, Iran is working to force the U.S. military out of the region and reduce U.S. political influence there.
Iran has an even bigger aim: to overthrow what it sees as the U.S.-dominated global political order.
Iran counters U.S. influence by maintaining partnerships with an assortment of nonstate militias and governments united by their fierce anti-U.S. hostility. The country nurtures a network of militant partner and proxy groups, whose own political preferences and ambitions align with Iran’s objectives, by providing weapons, training, funds – and, in some cases, direction. Among the recipients are Hezbollah, Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, friendly Iraqi militias and Ansar Allah in Yemen, better known as the Houthis or the Houthi rebels.
Through these militias and their political arms, Iran extends its influence and works to shape an Iran-friendly government in states like Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Yemen. It threatens U.S. forces and antagonizes Western-allied governments in states such as Israel, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates.
At the national level, Iran maintains no permanent mutual defense treaties. Its closest strategic partners include Syria, Venezuela, North Korea, China and Russia. They cooperate politically, economically and militarily to create an alternative to what their leaders perceive as the U.S.-led world political order.
Few political leaders understand Putin’s newfound political isolation and related animosity toward the United States more than Iranian leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. But Iran-Russia relations are complicated.
The two countries found common cause in helping Syrian strongman Assad defeat his country’s opposition forces, but for different national interests.
Saving Assad helps Russia reassert itself as a major power in the Middle East. For Iran, a friendly Syria is a critical link in Iran’s anti-U.S., anti-Israel coalition.
As Russia and Iran fought to sustain Assad, they also competed for lucrative postwar reconstruction and infrastructure contracts in that country, and to shape the post-civil war political environment to their advantage.
But neither country was bold enough to influence the way the other operated in Syria. Consequently, sometimes Iranian-backed and Russian forces cooperated, and at other times they squabbled. Mostly they left each other alone.
Ultimately, though, Russia’s plight in Ukraine compelled its leader to solicit Iran’s help in two ways.
First, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, a branch of the Iranian military, provided supplementary manpower to fill the void left when Russia reallocated troops from Syria to its Ukraine campaign.
Second, Russia will use Iran’s low-cost and battle-proven unmanned aerial vehicles, commonly known as drones, to counter Kyiv’s Western-supported arsenal and buttress its own struggling forces and surprisingly inept warfighting capabilities.
U.S. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan tells reporters on July 11, 2022, that Iran planned to send ‘several hundred’ drones, including some equipped with weapons, to Russia.
Ukraine war promotes Iran’s interests
This warming alliance may not help Russia defeat Ukraine. It will promote Iran’s national interests.
Russia’s Syria drawdown brought additional Iranian soldiers there to further prove their fighting abilities and entrench themselves in Syria. That then allows Iran to control territory threatened by anti-Assad forces and maintain an open corridor or “land bridge” by which Iran extends support to its network of anti-America and anti-Israel partners and proxies.
Second, Russia’s acquisition of Iranian arms will significantly boost Iran’s weapons industry, whose primary clientele right now is its own militias. Iran’s recent efforts to expand drone manufacturing and exports yielded limited success in small, mostly peripheral markets of Ethiopia, Sudan, Tajikistan and Venezuela.
Lastly, Russia’s war in Ukraine extends a new avenue by which Iran might directly counter U.S.-provided weapons, as well as the opportunity to undermine U.S. and NATO influence in Eurasia. Iran’s drones could afford Moscow an effective and desperately needed response to U.S. weapons wreaking havoc against Russian forces in Ukraine – the High Mobility Artillery Rocket System, the Javelin anti-tank guided missile, the Switchblade “kamikaze” or suicide drone and others.
Iranian weapons may force Ukraine’s Western benefactors to allocate additional billions for counter-drone or air defense systems, or aid to replace assets that Iranian weapons potentially neutralize.
Limited tactical victories scored by Iranian drones may prolong and further destabilize the war in Ukraine, but they will not tip the scales of conflict in Russia’s favor.
Their greater contribution is to Iran’s national interests: They allow Iran to directly check and undermine the U.S. and NATO outside of Iran’s usual regional area of operations. They boost Iran’s profile among countries that also wish to challenge the United States and NATO’s political, military and economic power. And they strengthen solidarity among those countries.
As Iran’s fighters, advisers and weapons proliferate to new areas and empower U.S. adversaries, Iran further promotes its national interests at the expense of U.S. national interests.
Aaron Pilkington is a U.S. Air Force analyst of Middle East affairs now studying at the University of Denver, conducting research on Iranian national security strategy. He will later join the Military & Strategic Studies department at the U.S. Air Force Academy. The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Department of Defense, Department of the Air Force, the United States Air Force Academy, or any other organizational affiliation.
by Cristian Apetrei, Professor of Immunology, Infectious Diseases and Microbiology, University of Pittsburgh Health Sciences
Disinformation can derail public health measures vital to controlling the spread of infectious disease. AP Photo/Jeff Chiu
Since health officials confirmed the first COVID-19 cases, misinformation has spread just as quickly as the virus. Social media may have made the amount, variety and speed of misinformation seem unprecedented, but COVID-19 isn’t the first pandemic where false and harmful information has set back public health.
What sets the COVID-19 pandemic apart, however, is the sheer magnitude of damaging disinformation put in circulation around the world. Data shows that regions and countries where disinformation thrived experienced more lethal pandemic waves despite vaccine availability. In the U.S., for example, viewership of a Fox News program that downplayed the pandemic is associated with increased COVID-19 cases and deaths. Similarly in Romania, disinformation is a contributing factor to the country’s disastrous fourth wave of COVID-19.
The COVID-19 infodemic began as soon as the first few cases of infections were confirmed.
The problem of misinformation has been so widespread that it has its own word: “infodemic,” a portmanteau of “information” and “epidemic.” Coined by journalist David Rothkopf during the 2003 SARS outbreak, it describes a situation where “a few facts, mixed with fear, speculation and rumor, are amplified and relayed swiftly worldwide by modern information technologies.”
Infodemics can affect economies, politics, national security and public health. The COVID-19 infodemic became such a problem that the Royal Society and the British Academy released an October 2020 report noting its significant impact on vaccine deployment, endorsing legislation that prosecutes those who spread misinformation.
As a researcher who studies HIV and lived through the AIDS pandemic, I felt a sense of déjà vu as COVID-19 disinformation spread. In the 40 years since the emergence of AIDS, society has learned how to cope with the disease with more effective diagnostics, treatments and preventive strategies, transforming AIDS from a lethal condition to a chronic disease.
In general, these groups tend to also deny germ theory, claiming that infectious diseases are not caused by pathogens like viruses and bacteria. Instead, they promote the idea that pathogens don’t cause disease, but rather are a consequence of it.
Misinformation is just one common theme between the COVID-19 and HIV/AIDS pandemics.
Likewise, some denied the role of the HIV virus in AIDS infection. AIDS denialist Peter Duesberg was one person who disseminated this misinformation, which had been refuted by the scientific community at large. But his erroneous claim still reached the then president of the Republic of South Africa, Thabo Mbeki, who banned the use of lifesaving antiretrovirals in public hospitals. This decision resulted in the deaths of over 330,000 people from HIV/AIDS between 2000 and 2005.
Mbeki’s decision was considered so damaging that scientists and physicians worldwide signed the Durban Declaration, reiterating that HIV indeed causes AIDS and urging Mbeki to reconsider his decision. While the government did reverse the ban after strong international political pressure, the damage had been done.
Gain of function claims
Gain of function experiments involve manipulating a pathogen to understand what contributes to its ability to cause disease. At the same time, such experiments can give pathogens new abilities, such as making viruses more transmissible or more dangerous to humans. Conspiracy theorists have made claims that the COVID-19 virus resulted from alterations to a bat version of the virus that gave it the ability to replicate in human cells.
But these claims ignore several key facts about the COVID-19 virus, including that all coronaviruses from bats can infect humans without additional adaptation. The mutations that increased the transmissibility of COVID-19 occurred after it started circulating in people, resulting in even more infectious variants.
HIV also saw conspiracy theories claiming that it was created in a lab for genocide. But research has shown that HIV also naturally evolved from an animals. African non-human primates are natural hosts to a vast group of viruses collectively called simian immunodeficiency viruses (SIV). Despite their high rates of SIV infection in the wild, these primate hosts typically don’t experience symptoms or progress to AIDS. Throughout the evolutionary history of SIV, jumping to a new host species involved naturally occurring genetic changes over the course of thousands of years.
Miracle cures
During a public health crisis, researchers and health officials are learning about a disease in real time. While missteps are expected, these can be perceived by the public as hesitation, incompetence or failure.
There are some steps you can take to identify misinformation.
As researchers looked for possible COVID-19 treatments, others were offering their own unproven drugs. Multiple treatments for COVID-19, including ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, were tested and abandoned. But not before large amounts of time, effort and money were spent on disproving claims that these were supposed miracle treatments. Similarly for HIV, frustration and anxiety from a continued lack of available treatments amid rising deaths led to fraudulent cures, with price tags of tens of thousands of dollars.
Even though treatment delays and changing guidelines are a natural process of learning about a new diseases as it unfolds, they can open the door to disinformation and generate distrust in doctors even as they care for infected patients.
Preventing misinfodemics
The next pandemic is not a question of if but when and where it will occur. Just as important as devising ways to detect emerging viruses is developing strategies to address the misinfodemics that will follow them. The recent monkeypox outbreak has already seen similar spread of mis- and disinformation about its source and spread.
As author Gabriel Garcia Marquez once said, “A lie is more comfortable than doubt, more useful than love, more lasting than truth.” Countering misinformation is difficult, because there are reasons other than ignorance for why someone believes in a falsehood. In those cases, presenting the facts may not be enough, and may sometimes even result in someone doubling down on a false belief. But focusing on urgent scientific and medical needs to the exclusion of rapidly addressing misinformation can derail pandemic control. Strategies that take misinformation into account can help other pandemic control measures be more successful.
Cristian Apetrei receives funding from the National Institutes of Health/National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases/National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases: R01 DK113919, R01 DK119936, R01 DK131476, R01 AI119346.
by Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones, Professor Emeritus of American History, University of Edinburgh
In the early 1990s, Senator Patrick Moynihan campaigned for the abolition of the CIA. The brilliant campaigner thought the US Department of State should take over its intelligence functions. For him, the age of secrecy was over.
For 30 years the intelligence community systematically misinformed successive presidents as to the size and growth of the Soviet economy … Somehow our analysts had internalised a Soviet view of the world.
In the speech introducing his Abolition of the CIA bill in January 1995, Moynihan cited British author John le Carré’s scorn for the idea that the CIA had contributed to victory in the cold war against the Soviet Union of Leonid Brezhnev and his successors. “The Soviet Empire did not fall apart because the spooks had bugged the man’s room in the Kremlin or put broken glass in Mrs Brezhnev’s bath,” Le Carré had written.
This was one of the CIA’s lowest points since its establishment in 1947 (my new book marks the agency’s 75th anniversary). It was created with two key goals in mind: thwarting Soviet expansionism, and preventing another surprise attack like that carried out by the Japanese on Pearl Harbour during the second world war. While Moynihan’s campaign to shut down the CIA did not ultimately prevail, there was certainly a widespread perception that the agency was no longer fit for purpose and should be curtailed.
This story is part of Conversation Insights The Insights team generates long-form journalism and is working with academics from different backgrounds who have been engaged in projects to tackle societal and scientific challenges.
Throughout the cold war, many had regarded fighting communism as the CIA’s raison d’être. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the agency’s role was less clear, and it came under heavy criticism for having distorted intelligence and “blatantly pandered” to one ideological viewpoint: blind anti-communism. Without the cold war, Moynihan predicted, the CIA would become “a kind of retirement programme for a cadre of cold warriors not really needed any longer”.
Three decades on, however, Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has put Russia’s threat to the stability of the world back at the top of the US foreign agenda. With a formidable Kremlinologist now in charge of the CIA and Donald Trump out of the presidential picture (for the moment, at least), the agency might be expected to be an influential player in the US response to this “new cold war”. But how much does Washington trust the CIA these days – and how much influence does it really have on events in Ukraine? To shed light on these questions, we need to go back to the early days of the Ronald Reagan presidency.
‘Stay the f-ck out of my business’
As US president from 1981 to 1989, the neoconservative Reagan unleashed the CIA from restrictions that had been imposed on it during the reforming post-Vietnam 1970s.
Like other anti-communists, Reagan saw the agency as a prime weapon in weakening the Soviet Union, which he famously denounced as the “evil empire”, and preventing the worldwide spread of communism. The new US president was convinced that in opposing an unethical foe, one could not afford to be too scrupulous. He chose as his CIA director Bill Casey, a veteran of intelligence in the second world war – a time when it had been “gloves off” for dirty tricksters.
An outright cold warrior, Casey resuscitated old CIA habits, running covert operations against the left-leaning – but democratically elected – Sandinista government in Nicaragua from December 1981 to the ceasefire of March 1988. Even the veteran conservative senator Barry Goldwater admitted he was “pissed off” when, in 1984, the CIA mined Nicaragua’s harbours without informing Congress. Accosted with this oversight, the uncompromising Casey replied: “The business of Congress is to stay the fuck out of my business.”
The CIA worked closely with the Contras, right-wing terrorists who sought to overthrow the Sandinista government. The agency trained these guerrillas in secret camps in adjacent countries and organised munition drops from planes stationed in clandestine bases. In one initiative, a contracted CIA operative wrote a manual for the Contras explaining how to assassinate individuals on one’s own side – skulls had to be fractured in just the right way – and then blame the enemy.
A disapproving US Congress banned these weapons drops and cut off the necessary funds. To get around this, arms were illegally supplied to Iran (then at war with Iraq) via Israel – paid for by covert Iranian financial assistance to the Contras. However, fearing the wrath of Congress should this ruse be discovered (as it later was), the Reagan administration bypassed the CIA in administering the Iran-Contra scam. While the president had not lost confidence in the agency, this was a sign that the CIA was becoming increasingly toxic in the eyes of Congress – making it too risky to deploy its spooks in the customary manner.
On the threat posed by the Soviet Union, though, there was far greater accord. CIA director Casey lined up with the secretary of defence, Caspar Weinberger, and the majority of Reagan’s cabinet in adopting an intransigent stance towards Moscow. They were supported by the CIA’s senior Russia expert, Bob Gates, who having gained his PhD in Russian affairs without ever visiting the country, proclaimed that the Soviet Union was an example of “oriental despotism”.
A keen boy scout in his youth, Gates – whether out of conviction or career calculation – glued himself to the American flag and offered no challenge to any president who wanted to play up the Moscow menace. Under Reagan, Casey and Gates, the CIA worked tirelessly to undermine the Soviet Union – secretly supporting Poland’s opposition movement Solidarity, and engaging in acts of economic sabotage against the Soviet economy.
Indeed, according to Republican partisans who argued that President Reagan won the cold war (the “victory thesis”), the US launched its Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI or “Star Wars”) with the aim of forcing Moscow to respond, thus ruining the Soviet economy and bringing about the collapse of communism. SDI was a multi-billion-dollar space defence system designed to intercept and destroy incoming enemy missiles. According to the victory thesis, Gates’ exaggerated estimates of Soviet military might were not an instance of unthinking anti-communism but rather, a cunning ploy designed to persuade Congress to fund the Star Wars bluff.
Gates would go on to lead the CIA from 1991-93, the years when Senator Moynihan was campaigning for its abolition. The Senate confirmation hearings that preceded Gates’ tenure would be the occasion for some bitter denunciations from erstwhile colleagues. Gates later recalled that these charges of 1980s intelligence distortion “truly imperilled my confirmation”.
Jennifer Lynn Gaudemans, who in 1989 had left the CIA’s Office of Soviet Analysis (Sova) in a disillusioned state of mind, accused Gates of seeing Soviet conspiracies around every corner, and of “blatantly pandering to one ideological viewpoint”.
At the Senate hearings, Gaudemans testified that Sova analysts were deeply upset when Gates suppressed their findings that the Soviet Union was not, in fact, orchestrating mischief in Iran, Libya and Syria. She claimed he had denied them even the opportunity to publish dissenting footnotes. Sova division chiefs were, she said, routinely dismissed for being “too soft” on issues such as Soviet policy in the developing world, and arms control.
But while the agency’s analysts had problems with Gates, more powerful individuals – not least, the US secretary of state George Shultz – were prepared to listen. Sova-generated data and findings made their way on to the desks of US negotiators.
On November 18 1985, the eve of Reagan’s summit meeting with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in Geneva, the president and his negotiators received an intelligence assessment to the effect that, while Gorbachev was repairing the economic damage of the Brezhnev era, he would not meet his growth targets. Because of this and the acute nationalist discontent in Poland, CIA analysts told Reagan that Gorbachev was ready to deal with the US.
Through such insights, the agency played an important role in ending the “old” cold war, culminating in the dissolution of the Soviet Union on Christmas Day, 1991. But in the process, it also unwittingly contributed to the idea that the CIA might no longer be needed by the now-globally dominant US.
Intelligence to please
A decade later, the US’s confident post-cold war demeanour changed at a stroke when two hijacked planes flew into the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. And the CIA would be the fall guy.
The attack masterminded by Osama bin Laden glaringly exposed the CIA’s inability to uphold its founding mission of preventing another Pearl Harbour-style attack on the US. Under renewed pressure to justify its existence, the agency succumbed to the demands of the George W Bush administration in the “war on terror” that arose from the ashes of 9/11.
As the US government desperately sought a rationale for invading Iraq, a deal was struck. Senior leaders of the agency may squirm at the charge, but the CIA supplied intelligence to please in exchange for the right to survive. Its leadership endorsed the mythical charge that Iraq was developing weapons of mass destruction (WMD). And when the ensuing war was a disaster, the CIA took the hit for having delivered that faulty intelligence.
With the role of the CIA thus diminished, the US intelligence community became an unresolved puzzle. Demoralised CIA personnel threw up their hands in despair. CIA veteran Art Hulnick, now teaching intelligence studies at Boston University, was at a loss to explain to his students the new arrangements for analysing intelligence. Hulnick complained of an overreaction to what he termed the “threat du jour”.
Resources were being poured into the huge and unwieldy Department of Homeland Security; the Department of Defence was poaching assets from the CIA; and the agency had even lost its monopoly on preparing the president’s daily briefing (the first item on the president’s desk each morning, memorably described by Michelle Obama as the “death, destruction and horrible things book”.)
By the mid-2000s, intelligence work was being heavily outsourced to private businesses in accordance with the ideology of the George W Bush administration. Private recruiters such as Blackwater were appearing at the CIA HQ’s cafeteria in Langley, Virginia, hiring personnel with promises of big salary increases before sometimes subcontracting them back to the agency at inflated rates.
The CIA had never been a fainting lily but now, in the interests of its own survival, its directors agreed to engage in unsavoury practices including torture, illegal kidnapping, and execution-by-drone without trial. Waterboarding, whereby water is poured over a cloth on the victim’s face to produce a sensation of drowning, was a common practice in the agency’s “dark sites” – secret interrogation centres in Poland, Egypt and other countries around the world where kidnapped suspects were held.
Investigative journalism and persistently curious congressional committees are staples of American democracy, and these dubious practices were bound to come to light – with the aid of whistleblowers such as Edward Snowden. Snowden had worked for the CIA as a highly regarded computer security expert before moving to a private subcontractor engaged by the US foreign signals intelligence organisation, the National Security Agency (NSA).
In 2013, Snowden leaked numerous files to the Guardian and Washington Post before fleeing to Russia in order to evade rendition by the CIA. His revelations about US internal surveillance practices infuriated the guardians of America’s secrets, and fed the fears of those who deplored the use of dirty tricks abroad – and the development of a “secret state” at home. Snowden was accused of having revealed the identities of CIA personnel on active duty to the possible detriment of their safety – a form of treason (should it be proved) that was a deeply sensitive matter within CIA headquarters. It was fortunate for the agency, though, that the main thrust of Snowden’s revelations was about the NSA’s role in global surveillance.
An end to CIA ‘groupthink’
By 2007, while the Iraq war grew mired, the Bush administration was talking loudly about another familiar Middle Eastern foe: Iran.
In 1953, the CIA had conspired to overthrow the country’s democratically elected but mildly leftist government headed by Mohammad Mossadegh. There followed a period of despotic royal rule by the last shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. His overthrow in 1979 saw a period of priestly mullah rule and of alienation, mitigated only briefly by the Iran-Contra deal.
While the Iraq war continued, the US shared the concerns of Israel, its fellow nuclear power and Iran’s regional rival, that Tehran was developing the wherewithal to produce an atomic bomb. The hawks in the Bush administration issued strident warnings on the subject, but had to contend with a rising force in the intelligence community: the US National Intelligence Council (also known as “Nick”).
By this time, Nick was generating national security estimates that informed US security and foreign policy. While it traced its origins to pre-CIA days, once the agency was founded Nick became reliant on the data and analysis it provided – an arrangement that increasingly caused resentment on the part of state department officials.
After 2004, however, things changed: Nick could now call in other experts to help formulate its analyses and conclusions. And in 2007, Nick determined that Iran, contrary to claims made by the vociferous hawks in the Bush administration, was not developing nuclear weapons. This was an outstanding example of “intelligence to displease” – of speaking truth to power. The CIA was still supplying Nick with data and with some skilled analysts. But according to Thomas Fingar, who presided over Nick at the time of the 2007 Iran estimate, CIA “groupthink” no longer prevailed.
As Nick drew on a wider base of experts, it could not be accused, as the CIA had been, of gnawing at the same bone over and over again. Fingar’s colleagues backed his firm stance on Iran. Overcompliance was avoided in a manner that had not been possible in earlier cases such as the WMD scandal, when the CIA had enjoyed unalloyed supremacy.
Perhaps because of this, many CIA analysts appear to have been at ease with the new arrangement – a point stressed by Peter A Clement, who was in charge of Russian analysis at the point of transition to the new system. Elsewhere in the intelligence bureaucracy, however, there was discontent. The CIA’s counterterrorism unit’s absorption into a new National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) elicited this comment from former agency employee and sociologist Bridget Rose Nolan:
There is a general sense that NCTC was almost a knee-jerk reaction to 9/11 – a way for the government to treat the symptoms, but not the cause, of the perceived problem.
Compared with others within the agency, the CIA’s analysts could think themselves fortunate. Though some of them had transitioned to other units, their own team of Russian experts remained intact and unrivalled within the US intelligence community.
‘I’m a smart person’
Perhaps surprisingly, the CIA’s fortunes really began to revive with the election of Donald Trump as the 45th US president on November 8, 2016.
At first glance, Trump’s election looked like more bad news for the CIA. In keeping with its mission, the agency was alert to any threat to American interests and security posed by the Kremlin. Trump, on the other hand, was keen to achieve an era of renewed Russian-American friendship – an ambition fuelled by his appetite for deal-making, his acquaintance with Russia’s president Vladimir Putin, and perhaps even his ambitions to make a memorable contribution to world peace.
The indications were that Trump, once in office, would not wish to bolster the role played by the ever-suspicious CIA in Russo-American relations. Yet in the immediate aftermath of his election, the outgoing Barack Obama administration effected a policy shift which saw a significant strengthening of the CIA’s Russia capability. This shift arose from the specific circumstance of Russia’s interference in the 2016 election – but in the process, promised a wider and timely refocusing of the US intelligence effort.
In the words of the subsequent US Senate inquiry, a St Petersburg entity called the Internet Research Agency had “sought to influence the 2016 US presidential election by harming Hillary Clinton’s chances of success and supporting Donald Trump at the direction of the Kremlin”. It was an attempt to subvert American democracy, and the ease with which the Russians obtained Clinton’s confidential emails confirmed there was a wider threat to national security.
Trump gave the CIA little support during his presidency (2017-2021) and treated its personnel with contempt. He accused the agency of being elitist and of conspiring against him in the 2016 election. He dispensed with the daily intelligence briefing to which the CIA still contributed, telling Fox News: “You know, I’m, like, a smart person … I don’t have to be told the same thing and the same words every single day for the next eight years.”
But President Obama’s boost to Kremlinology has endured beyond the Trump presidency, and now looks fortuitous in light of current circumstances. Experts on the Kremlin need informers-in-place, and they are scarce assets.
We know, for example, that the CIA had to exfiltrate a key Kremlin mole in 2016, in case they were identified as the source of the agency’s information on Russian smear tactics against Hillary Clinton. The mole had alerted the agency that in June 2016, Russian cyberwarfare personnel had released thousands of hacked emails from Clinton’s Democratic campaign and from the computers of the Democratic National Committee. Time will tell what else this mole was telling the CIA about Kremlin tactics and intentions, up until their hasty departure from Russia.
A formidable Kremlinologist
In 2021, newly elected US president Joe Biden nominated his longstanding friend William J Burns as the CIA’s new director. Unlike some of his recent predecessors, Burns was no pushover.
When Biden declared his intention of continuing the Trump policy of withdrawing US forces from Afghanistan, Burns made it known he was unhappy with the intelligence implications. The Taliban who took over in the wake of American withdrawal had a history of shielding terrorists. So when the CIA pinpointed the location in Kabul of Al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri, leading to his assassination by a drone-dispatched Stinger missile on July 31 2022, the event satisfied both men – even if it smacked of gunslinger diplomacy.
But the new CIA director also brings more subtle skills to the role. Crucially, Burns has many years’ experience of Russo-American relations, making him exceptionally well qualified to help shape America’s response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Certainly, he is a very different character from Casey, his predecessor from the Reagan era. Burns is a formidable Kremlinologist with an impressive negotiating pedigree. His father, Major-General William F Burns, engaged in arms control negotiations and, in the final year of the Reagan administration, was director of the US Arms Control and Disarmament Agency.
The younger William Burns served in the Moscow embassy in the 1990s and as US ambassador to Russia from 2005 to 2008, describing it as his “dream job”. During that period of engagement with Moscow, he repeatedly warned that Nato expansion was anathema to Putin, a leader who back then appeared potentially open to an accommodation with the US.
Burns was capable of empathising with Moscow while appreciating its threat to mankind. He was a devotee of behind-the-scenes diplomacy well before he became CIA director (the title of his 2021 autobiographical study of modern US diplomacy is The Back Channel). According to the Hoar Amendment adopted by the US Senate in 1893, secret agents are not supposed to engage in official diplomacy, but it is a rule that has been much honoured in the breach. As ambassador to Russia, Burns reached agreement with the Kremlin on how to inhibit nuclear-weapon proliferation – but he was under no illusions about Putin.
Burns had accompanied Biden, then the US vice-president, on a mission to Moscow to discuss instability in Libya at the time of the Arab Spring in 2011. In his memoir, Burns wrote that Russia’s then-president, Dmitri Medvedev, was a reasonable man who cared about humanitarian issues and admired President Obama. In contrast, Putin was “dyspeptic about American policy in the Middle East” – especially when it aimed at toppling autocrats.
In November 2021, Burns led a discreet delegation to Moscow that signalled, according to the New York Times, “heightened engagement between two global adversaries”. On this occasion he met Putin’s adviser Nikolai Patrushev. Their conversation ranged over nuclear disarmament, cyberspace rivalry, Russians’ hacking activities and climate policy, as well as problems of mutual interest affecting Iran, North Korea and Afghanistan.
Burns’ efforts did not, however, signify CIA complacency over Russian intentions regarding Ukraine. Together with British intelligence (but meeting with incredulity elsewhere in Europe, except for Scandinavia), the agency’s Kremlinologists were convinced that Putin intended to invade Russia’s neighbour.
Banned by Putin
Burns is under no illusion about the threat posed by the Russian leader. Having previously likened him to the Romanov czars, he has warned that Putin may resort to using nuclear weapons. When Russia’s president retaliated against western sanctions by issuing travel bans on selected individuals, Burns was on his list.
From Putin’s perspective, the US and its CIA preach civilised values but do not observe them. He wrote in 2012 that they had spent decades upholding dictatorships in Latin America, regimes that routinely tortured to death thousands of their own citizens. To Putin, it was all part of a pattern:
The development of the American continent began with large-scale ethnic cleansing that has no equal in the history of mankind. The indigenous people were destroyed. After that [came] slavery … That remains until now in the souls and hearts of the people.
The CIA is doubtless operating within Russia, but autocracies are difficult to penetrate – and the agency does not have a great record of success in this regard. The extent of its covert actions will likely also be limited because the US remains reluctant to risk being seen as directly involved in the conflict.
While US armed forces are responsible for passing on military intelligence such as that which enabled the sinking of Russia’s flagship the Moskva, the New York Times reported in June 2022 that CIA personnel were “directing much of the vast amounts of intelligence the US is sharing with Ukrainian forces”. Though few other concrete details have emerged, the report stated that the CIA’s presence “hints at the scale of the secretive effort to assist Ukraine”.
If precedents are a guide, the CIA will be engaged in intelligence gathering and dissemination as well as “black” propaganda – psychological warfare aimed at Russians, Belarusians, Ukrainians and the wider world. Through undeclared strategies including the secret funding of both Ukrainian and international front organisations, it will attempt to bend world opinion to favour the Ukrainian cause and isolate the Russians.
But there is also no reason why Burns cannot revive back channel diplomacy, should the opportunity arise. Whether or not undertaken by the CIA, diplomatic engagement with Russia depends on good intelligence on both sides. It is reliant on Putin getting reliable analysis from his own people, and being prepared to act in light of that analysis.
In early February 2022, Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) collected opinion data in Ukraine which found that 40% of those polled would not fight to defend their country. Peter Clement, who worked for the CIA until 2017, observed to me that Putin and his advisers should have noted this meant that 60% were either willing to fight or undecided. The Russian leadership paid insufficient heed to such analysis.
The future of the CIA
How strong is the CIA’s team of Russian analysts today? Hundreds of analysts were recruited after 9/11, largely in response to Muslim radicalism – Hulnick’s “threat du jour”. Yet the agency’s Russian affairs division suffered a relative setback.
It was obliged to ask for volunteers among its analysts to quit Kremlinology and work instead on counterterrorism. According to a senior official who oversaw these sensitive changes, an effort was made to hang on to linguistic and area specialists, but the division had to give up gifted individuals who had transferable skills.
A reorganisation of the CIA in 2015 led to the formation of a Directorate for Digital Innovation, which gave the agency potentially greater capability of assessing Moscow’s disinformation via social media. This was on the initiative of John Brennan, President Obama’s admired pick to lead the CIA from 2013 to 2017. But for civil liberties reasons, the 1947 National Security Act which established the CIA also banned the agency from operating domestically. So it is still not capable of tracking Moscow’s use of US-based, but Russian-controlled, digital media sources in stirring up divisions in American society.
Nonetheless, the standing of the agency’s Kremlinologists received a boost under Obama – and have again under Biden. Meanwhile the “distractions” of recent decades such as the debate over torture are receding. We still get periodic reminders of CIA ruthlessness, such as the recent assassination without trial of al-Qaeda’s al-Zawahri. But the leadership of CIA directors Brennan and Burns has set the agency on a path that bodes well for its role in seeking a resolution to the current Ukraine crisis.
The CIA, being the instrument of a democracy, is a broad church and there will always be conflicting voices. One senior source tells me the agency opposed the expansion of Nato that Moscow finds so abhorrent. Another, a veteran of Reagan’s Office of Soviet Analysis, insists its Kremlinologists are too apolitical for that kind of judgement to be upheld – and does not believe today’s analysts will be able to contribute to intelligence successes such as those achieved during the 1980s cold war era.
But these competing views reflect a healthy struggle within the CIA to get at the truth. While the agency still has vocal critics and always will do, no one is calling for its dissolution today.
To hear about new Insights articles, join the hundreds of thousands of people who value The Conversation’s evidence-based news. Subscribe to our newsletter.
Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
by Stephen Hall, Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Politics, International Relations and Russia, University of Bath
Russia's oldest synagogue in Irkutsk: around 20,000 Russian Jews have left the country since the war with Ukraine started. Shutterstock
It’s not the first time that Jews have felt it necessary to flee Russia, but the invasion of Ukraine has resulted in the fourth wave of exiles in the past hundred years.
Since Putin became president for the second time in 2012, the authorities have become increasingly repressive towards minorities, as well as cracking down on freedom of speech and getting rid of any opposition figures. But it was the 2022 invasion of Ukraine that was the final straw for many Jewish people.
With anti-Jewish crackdowns between 1880 and 1906, about 2 million people left the Russian empire for the US; many were Jews. From 1970-88 around 291,000 Jews left the Soviet Union and in the 1990s a further 128,000 left for Germany. The new Jewish exodus has been sudden, and many are still trying to leave. Out of 165,000 Jews in Russia at the beginning of the war, reports suggest that 20,500 have left in the past six months.
Since the war began in February 2022, the authorities have doubled down on repression, changing it from a targeted practice to mass repression. An example is the arrest of children for placing flowers outside the Ukrainian embassy in Moscow in March. This is something that the Russian authorities have not done before. At the same time, the economy appears to be spiralling beyond the control of the authorities.
Historically, when economies tank, governments often look for minorities to blame – and Russian Jews know this could be the case again.
Data from the International Monetary Fund in early August 2022 suggested that the Russian economy would only contract by 6% in 2022, rather than the predicted 8.5%. Although the economy has not collapsed – as predicted by many western specialists – businesses are leaving or have curtailed operations in Russia, and sanctions are beginning to cripple the economy.
People gather at Moscow’s Beis Menachemn synagogue on International Holocaust Remembrance Day in 2012. Today many Russian Jews are worried about their future.
Pavel L Photo/Shutterstock
Although Russia’s Jewish population is very small at 165,000, compared to the whole Russian population (145.2 million), it makes up a disproportionate number of the Russian middle class. This group has been in decline for a while, but the possibility of mass conscription, a failing economy and increased restrictions over the few independent areas of life have led to about 200,000 middle-class Russians leaving during the Ukraine war for Georgia, Turkey, Armenia and beyond.
Significantly, Moscow’s chief rabbi, Pinchas Goldschmidt, left Russia in July after the authorities put pressure on him to support the war in Ukraine. In late July, the ministry of justice of the Russian Federation announced it would shut down the Moscow office of the Jewish Agency, which organises migration to Israel, after Israeli prime minster, Yair Lapid, condemned the war.
Both of these actions put many Russian Jews on high alert. In an interview after he left Russia, Goldschmidt said that the sanctions and pressure to support the war changed Russia from a modern country back to one echoing the Soviet Union.
History of Jewish repression
Sadly, antisemitism has a long and painful history in Russia. The expansion of Muscovy – a name given to combine the Grand Duchy of Moscow (1263-1547) and the Tsardom of Russia (1547-1721) – to the east and west, culminating in the pronouncement of the Russian empire in 1721, saw Russia incorporate a large Jewish population.
The partitions of Poland between 1772 and 1795 and victory over the Ottomans in the 17th century gave Russia a large Jewish minority. The Pale of Settlement, an area where Jews were forced to live, was created in 1791 to keep most Jews in the newly annexed territories and away from inner Russia.
Throughout the period of the Russian empire (1721-1917) the Jewish population experienced numerous pogroms (organised massacres). In the late Tsarist period (1905-1917), famine and state support of nationalist groups, such as the Black Hundredsresulted in the need to locate an “enemy” to blame for Russia’s woes. The Jews served this purpose and pogroms, like the one in Kishinev in 1903 (present day Chișinău, capital of Moldova) were widespread across the empire.
The Tsarist regime was imbued with a deep antisemitism, epitomised by the deep fake publication the Elders of Zion. This document was created by the Tsarist secret police – Okhrana – to justify this antisemitism and create the conspiracy that the Jews were trying to control the world.
This antisemitism continued into the Soviet Union, which was anything but the egalitarian society it claimed to be. Jewish schools and cultural institutions were closed, Jewish leaders murdered and antisemitic plots were created by the Soviet system to justify crackdowns. The 1953 doctors plot, where Jewish doctors were accused of murdering Stalin is the most famous example of these fake creations.
This persecution, combined with Israel being a key ally of the US in the cold war, put Jews in a difficult position. Facing discrimination at school and in the workplace many Russian Jews chose to leave the Soviet Union. This led to the term refusenik, where many Soviet Jews had “refused” stamped in their visa applications.
Claims circulated that Soviet Jews were a fifth column, a set of organisations aiming to undermine the national interest, and in cahoots with the US. This led to further persecution, more Soviet Jews fleeing and further accusations.
Soviet similarities
While Russia is not the Soviet Union, the Putinist system is increasingly reactionary and autocratic – some would say fascist. Autocracies generally need an enemy to put the public on their side and show that they are fighting instability and protecting the population.
The phrase came up recently, during a state-sponsored rally in the Luzhniki Stadium in Moscow in March 2022, when Putin spoke about a fifth column and national traitors. Authoritarian leaders often like to cite an internal enemy as well as an external enemy.
The fear of Russian history repeating itself doesn’t go away. Past and present Russian regimes have always blamed Jews for their problems. Many Russian Jews are not waiting around to find out if Russia is about to take this dark path, again.
Stephen Hall does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
by Matthew A Baum, Marvin Kalb Professor of Global Communications & Professor of Public Policy, Harvard Kennedy School
An Indiana Senate committee hearing on a GOP proposal to ban nearly all abortions in the state, at the Statehouse in Indianapolis, July 26, 2022.
AP Photo/Michael Conroy
Both are conservative-leaning states that supported President Donald Trump’s reelection bid by near-identical margins in 2020 - 56.1% to 41.5% in Kansas and 57% to 41% in Indiana. So what explains the different outcomes?
The answer is that in Kansas, voters decided the outcome directly. In Indiana, legislators did so. This distinction matters because for contentious issues like abortion, as well as in other high-profile instances, state legislatures do not always represent public preferences within their states.
We are a multi-university team of social scientists that has been regularly polling Americans in all 50 states since April 2020. In the wake of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision overturning the constitutional guarantee of the right to abortion, our polling found a disconnect between the wave of new state laws restricting abortion access and the preferences of those states’ residents.
This raises the question of why public policy is sometimes inconsistent with what the public wants.
Here are four factors that help explain such disconnects.
Abortion rights supporters react to the vote to maintain the right to abortion in Kansas on Aug. 2, 2022.
Dave Kaup/AFP via Getty Images
In many states, partisan state legislatures often create districts to maximize their party’s dominance in upcoming elections. In North Carolina, despite a 50%-49% presidential vote in 2020, indicating an evenly divided voting public, an electoral map proposed by the Republican-controlled state legislature would, if implemented, result in Republicans likely winning 10 of 13 congressional seats in 2022.
In Illinois, Republicans won 41% of the 2020 presidential vote. Yet the proposed electoral map – drawn by Democrats – would, if implemented, likely yield Republicans only 3 of 17 congressional seats in the 2022 election.
Gerrymandering can lead to elections in which one party’s candidate is primed to win, resulting in noncompetitive general elections where the only real contest occurs during the primary election. Since the abortion issue is strongly polarized between the two major political parties, gerrymandering can result in elected officials who do not represent the majority of constituents on this issue.
2. Low and uneven voter turnout
Policies enacted by democratically elected governments can fail to reflect the will of the people they represent if people don’t – or can’t – vote.
Turnout in U.S. elections, especially at the state and local levels, and in nonpresidential years, can be abysmal. For instance, turnout in national midterm elections since 2002 has averaged just 42% of eligible voters.
Numerous factors influence the decision to vote, including whether people feel their voice matters and, to a smaller extent, how easy it is to vote. The U.S. has a long history of restricting access to the ballot box, and in recent decades the Supreme Court has weakened laws protecting voting access. In the post-civil rights era, however, most political scientists have concluded that restrictive election laws are less important than whether individuals think their votes will influence the political process.
So far, there are mixed signals on whether the Dobbs decision will prompt greater turnout. Polls have found that the people who care most about abortion after the Dobbs ruling tend to hold pro-choice attitudes. However, our research and a recent Washington Post-Schar School poll find that Americans who are most concerned about abortion are less certain that they will vote in the upcoming midterm elections than their less concerned counterparts.
In contrast, a large, representative republic bound by the Constitution theoretically creates a system in which interests would counteract one another to prevent any one from dominating the others. The system was intended to elect representatives who were more patriotic, enlightened and committed to the public good than the people at large, and thus to limit the direct representation of the people.
But the Founding Fathers’ design of American political institutions also contributes to the disconnect between the people and public policy.
For instance, Americans do not vote directly for president. They vote for electors to the Electoral College, who then cast their vote for president. Each state’s delegation of electors is equal to the state’s federal congressional delegation. Because every state automatically has two senators, individuals in states with small populations have outsize influence in presidential elections and in the U.S. Senate.
Even in cases where the Electoral College winner aligns with the winner of the national popular vote, both chambers of Congress must pass a bill in order for the bill to be signed into law by the president. Because of Senate rules, enacting most legislation requires a supermajority of senators.
This combination of design and rules means legislative processes are skewed toward inaction, sometimes contrary to the will of the majority of Americans.
4. Geographic polarization
The U.S. is politically polarized along geographic lines, particularly among states and across population density. Rural areas tend to support Republicans and are more anti-abortion compared to urban areas.
The primary causes of this geographic polarization are the influence of location itself, including local sociocultural differences, as well as preexisting demographic patterns that reflect differences between typical members of the two parties.
So, for instance, urban city centers tend to appeal to relatively young, highly educated and ethnically diverse people who tend to align with the Democratic Party. Residents of rural areas tend to be older, less educated and white, all characteristics typically associated with the Republican Party.
Rural areas and states with smaller populations have more electoral influence at the national level, especially due to features such as the Electoral College and equal numbers of senators per state. In turn, national-level partisan tendencies can affect decisions such as judicial appointments.
In the case of abortion, geographic polarization has contributed to a disconnect between public preferences and government policies by yielding state legislatures whose members are, on average, more strongly anti-abortion than the overall state populations they represent.
The U.S. system of government was forged in the 18th century from a compromise between relatively rural and urban states with widely varying population levels. It was designed to insulate the government from popular passions while making policy change difficult, and has inevitably led to public policies that fail to reflect the will of the majority.
Recent trends like those described above have exacerbated these tendencies. Abortion is merely the latest, and among the more contentious, cases in point.
Matthew A Baum has received funding from The National Science Foundation and the Russell Sage Foundation.
Alauna Safarpour and Kristin Lunz Trujillo do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
by Marni Sommer, Associate Professor of Sociomedical Sciences, Columbia University
Many young people receive limited guidance about what to expect as they near menstruation. SolStock/E+ via Getty Images
One thing few people have been talking about since Roe v. Wade was overturned is how abortion restrictions will affect young girls across the United States.
Around the time of their first period, many young people learn the basic mechanics of managing their periods, such as how to put on a pad or tampon and that it happens once a month. Traditionally they might also receive some admonishment to keep their period hidden. Young people may get information about menstruation from a family member, friends or a teacher, or by searching on the internet.
But often it is only later that they learn and truly understand the more complex details about the menstrual cycle. This includes guidance around regular and irregular patterns and when to seek medical care for any shifts in timing, duration or the overall experience, including the severity of menstrual pain or heavy bleeding. These conversations also have clear implications for ovulation and pregnancy prevention.
Now, with the overturning of Roe v. Wade, young people who begin to menstruate will also need to learn early on how to recognize a missed period as soon as possible. In the past, a young person’s delay in mentioning that a period was late or skipped a few months might not have presented any particular urgency. However, going forward, in contexts where a ban on abortions beyond a very short period of weeks exists, even one missed period could have serious implications for a young person’s life.
Conversely, it’s critical that young people know that irregular periods can be normal and that it’s not always cause for alarm.
Based on those suggestions and insights, we published “A Girl’s Guide to Puberty and Periods,” a body-positive illustrated graphic novel-style book that includes first period stories, advice and questions written by girls.
Globally, I have learned that girls growing up in Africa, Asia and here in the U.S. often receive inadequate information and support about their periods.
Information about menstruation is inadequate
Menstrual health literacy, or a person’s understanding of the menstrual cycle and its intersection with one’s health and well-being, is essential from the time leading up to the first menstrual period through menopause.
These professional societies suggest that health care providers prepare girls and their families for the onset of menstruation and ensure that they understand the variation in menstrual patterns.
My team’s U.S. study focused on adolescent girls in Los Angeles, New York and Chicago. Our findings, along with research on state-level menstruation education standards across the country, suggest that the U.S. is a long way from delivering menstrual health literacy to the population. Our research indicated that many girls received no guidance before their first period or had been given information that felt dated and hard to relate to. Think educational videos made in the 1990s.
The menstrual cycle can lead to highs and lows in mood and energy level.
A recent publication from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that the median age of onset of menstruation decreased from 12.1 years old in 1995 to 11.9 by 2017. This means that nowadays, many girls are in elementary school when they get their first period.
For this reason, it’s clear that young people in fourth or fifth grade need to be receiving health education that addresses menstruation. Girls who do not receive education and support – particularly those who get their first period at a young age – are more likely to experience depression and low self-esteem. Low-income and minority girls are particularly vulnerable.
Yet many American girls still do not learn the basic facts about their menstrual cycles at home or school or from health care providers. As our study found, parents are often uncomfortable discussing periods, perhaps because it feels too linked to sexuality.
Our research also captured American girls’ first-period stories across 25 states and found that many young people are afraid, ashamed and do not know whom to ask for advice when their menstruation starts.
How to discuss the menstrual cycle with a young person.
Missed opportunities
The internet and social media, which are important sources of news and guidance for many young people, may deliver misinformation or reinforce menstrual stigma. And a 2020 study of members of the American Academy of Pediatricians found that 24% of pediatricians surveyed do not regularly provide guidance before the first period. Furthermore, 33% do not discuss periods with their menstruating patients. Male pediatricians were also less likely to assess a patient’s menstrual cycles and provide information, perhaps because of discomfort with the topic.
Schools also may not be delivering the necessary guidance. In New York state, where I work, there is no requirement for the provision of menstrual health education, and sexual education is not required to be taught or to be medically accurate. Only 30 states and Washington, D.C., mandate sexual education in schools, but not all of them require medical accuracy.
It’s hard to know if many states are even including menstrual health in the curriculum, as data is limited and public information is not always available. I believe that, given the critical importance of some menstrual health literacy by late elementary school, schools could consider delivering puberty education – including menstrual health – separate from sexual education. This is particularly true in states that are hesitant to mandate sexual education.
Menstrual health literacy translates to health literacy
One survey of women of childbearing age suggested that fewer than 50% knew the average number of days of a regular menstrual cycle. Not knowing what is “normal or not normal” in relation to an average menstrual cycle – ranging from how often you get your period to the extent of bleeding or pain experienced – increases the health risk for an adolescent girl or woman.
Health – including menstrual health - is a basic human right. For those who menstruate, this means a right to menstrual health literacy, along with being able to seek care for the myriad menstrual and reproductive health disorders. These range from dysmenorrhea, or severe pain, to endometriosis, a condition in which endometrial tissue grows outside the uterus and can cause menstrual irregularities and significant discomfort. Both require diagnosis and treatment.
Menstruation is an issue of public health, and one long overdue for increased attention and resources, starting with – but not limited to – menstrual health literacy. The fall of Roe adds urgency to this public health priority.
Marni Sommer receives funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to develop guidance on indicators and related measures for improving national level monitoring of progress on menstrual health and hygiene globally.
by Clark D. Cunningham, W. Lee Burge Chair in Law & Ethics; Director, National Institute for Teaching Ethics & Professionalism, Georgia State University
The seal of the Federal Bureau of Investigation is seen outside of its headquarters in Washington, DC on August 15, 2022. Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images
Large portions of the affidavit were blocked from public view, leaving many questions about details of the investigation. Nonetheless, what is visible shows the FBI had solid evidence that Trump took documents critical to national security to his Mar-a-Lago estate.
Florida federal Judge Bruce Reinhart had ordered on Aug. 22, 2022, that the affidavit – which typically contains key details about an investigation to justify a search warrant – be made public following a lawsuit from media organizations and other groups. But Reinhart also said in his order that he would allow the Justice Department to first redact some of the affidavit’s most critical information, like “the identities of witnesses, law enforcement agents, and uncharged parties … the investigation’s strategy, direction, scope, sources, and methods, and … grand jury information.”
It’s the latest development in the legal conflict over government documents, including national security material, that Trump has kept in violation of the law, according to the affidavit. The document shows that there is what the law calls “probable cause” to believe that Trump committed various crimes, including violation of the Espionage Act.
We asked Georgia State University legal scholar and search warrant expert Clark Cunningham to answer five key questions to help explain this new development.
1. What is a search warrant affidavit?
Let’s start with a search warrant, which is a court order authorizing government agents to enter property without an owner’s permission to search for evidence of a crime. The warrant further authorizes agents to seize and take away such evidence if they find it.
In order to get a search warrant, the government must provide the court one or more statements made under oath that explain why the government believes a crime has been committed, establishing that there is sufficient justification for issuing the warrant. If the statement is written, it is called an affidavit. This is why the first sentence of the unsealed affidavit has the words “being duly sworn” following the blacked-out name of the agent making the statement.
2. What’s the most important takeway from this affidavit?
Given that a lot of the information on the affidavit has been blacked out, probably the most telling new information is that the FBI agent says that a review of Mar-a-Lago documents the government had already obtained by grand jury subpoena earlier this year were marked in a way that would clearly indicate national security was at risk.
3. How does the affidavit show national security was at risk?
The affidavit reveals that some of the documents stored at Mar-a-Lago were marked HCS, indicating they were intelligence derived from clandestine human sources – or what we would think of as secret intelligence information provided by undercover agents or sources within foreign governments. If the identity of agents or sources is revealed, their intelligence value is compromised and, even, their lives may be at risk.
There were also documents marked FISA, meaning they were collected under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, documents marked NOFORN, meaning that the information cannot be released in any form to a foreign government, as well as documents marked SI, meaning they were derived from monitoring foreign governments’ communications.
4. Is it common for a court to unseal an affidavit while an investigation is underway?
Because a search warrant affidavit usually lays out the government’s case and identifies witnesses, it is very rare for a search warrant affidavit to be unsealed if there is an ongoing criminal investigation. That’s why there were so many redactions in the version of the affidavit that was released. If such an affidavit is unsealed, it’s most often later in the process, when criminal charges are actually filed.
Security officers guard the entrance to the federal courthouse in West Palm Beach on Aug. 18, 2022, as the court holds a hearing to determine if the Trump affidavit should be unsealed.
Chandan Khanna/AFP via Getty Images
5. What does this say about the investigation and the seriousness of Trump’s alleged crimes?
The information revealed in the affidavit indicates that the country’s national security and the safety of intelligence agents were possibly put at severe risk when national defense documents were apparently stored in a room at a resort in Florida.
It’s a little confusing – there’s been much talk in the media about classified information. Improper storing of classified information is a crime, but that is not what is being investigated here. A much more serious crime under the Espionage Act is at stake.
It’s been documented that a Chinese spy penetrated Mar-a-Lago while Trump was president. It is an unsecured location. If a foreign spy got into that room and walked out with information disclosing U.S. undercover agents around the world, or how we have been monitoring and collecting classified information around the world, I see the potential harm as staggering.
Clark D. Cunningham does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
On the off chance you’ve yet to weigh in, now would be a good time to see where you stand. Please answer the following:
8÷2(2+2)=?
If you’re like most, your answer was 16 and are flabbergasted someone else can find a different answer. Unless, that is, you’re like most others and your answer was 1 and you’re equally confused about seeing it another way. Fear not, in what follows, we will explain the definitive answer to this question — and why the manner in which the equation is written should be banned.
Our interest was piqued because we have conducted research on conventions about following the order of operations — a sequence of steps taken when faced with a math equation — and were a bit befuddled with what all the fuss was about.
Clearly, the answer is…
Two viable answers to one math problem? Well, if there’s one thing we all remember from math class: that can’t be right!
A person following this order would have 8÷2(2+2) become 8÷2(4) thanks to starting with parentheses. Then, 8÷2(4) becomes 8÷8 because there are no exponents, and “M” stands for multiplication, so they multiply 2 by 4. Lastly, according to the “D” for division, they get 8÷8=1.
Were different ways of teaching the order of operations responsible for confusion?
(Shutterstock)
By contrast, Canadians may be taught to remember BEDMAS, which stands for applying brackets, exponents, division, multiplication, addition and subtraction. Someone following this order would have 8÷2(2+2) become 8÷2(4) thanks to starting with brackets (the same as parentheses). Then, 8÷2(4) becomes 4(4) because (there are no exponents) and “D” stands for division. Lastly, according to the “M” for multiplication, 4(4)=16.
Do not omit multiplication symbol
For us, the expression 8÷2(2+2) is syntactically wrong.
Key to the debate, we contend, is that the multiplication symbol before the parentheses is omitted.
Such an omission is a convention in algebra. For example, in algebra we write 2x or 3a which means 2 × x or 3 × a. When letters are used for variables or constants, the multiplication sign is omitted. Consider the famous equation e=mc2, which suggests the computation of energy as e=m×c2.
The real reason, then, that 8÷2(2+2) broke the internet stems from the practice of omitting the multiplication symbol, which was inappropriately brought to arithmetic from algebra.
Inappropriate priority
In other words, had the expression been correctly “spelled out” that is, presented as “8 ÷ 2 × (2 + 2) = ? ”, there would be no going viral, no duality, no broken internet, no heated debates. No fun!
Had the problem been correctly presented as 8 ÷ 2 × (2 + 2) = ?, there would be no heated debate.
(Egan J. Chernoff), Author provided
Ultimately, omission of the multiplication symbol invites inappropriate priority to multiplication. All commentators agreed that adding the terms in the brackets or parentheses was the appropriate first step. But confusion arose given the proximity of 2 to (4) relative to 8 in 8÷2(4).
We want it known that writing 2(4) to refer to multiplication is inappropriate, but we get that it’s done all the time and everywhere.
Nice symbol for multiplication
There is a very nice symbol for multiplication, so let’s use it: 2 × 4. Should you not be a fan, there are other symbols, such as 2•4. Use either, at your pleasure, but do not omit.
As such, for the record, the debate over one versus 16 is now over! The answer is 16. Case closed. Also, there should have never really been a debate in the first place.
Egan J Chernoff received and receives funding from SSHRC (Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada) which is not explicitly related to this article.
Rina Zazkis received funding from SSHRC (Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada ) which is not explicitly related to the article
Americans dislike Congress, especially when it fails to act on pressing problems. They are then surprised by legislative accomplishments on climate change, gun control and maintaining competitiveness with China.
We have spent more than a decade exploring the thousands of bills and hundreds of laws produced by members of Congress each year. We find that individual representatives and senators vary dramatically in how interested they are in lawmaking and how effectively they advance their proposals. And we see opportunities to build a better Congress.
We have devised and generated a “Legislative Effectiveness Score” for each member of the House and Senate for each two-year Congress for the past 50 years. These scores are based on 15 metrics, capturing how many bills each lawmaker sponsors, how far they progress toward law and how substantively significant they are. The scores are politically neutral, with members of both parties scoring higher upon advancing whatever policies they think are best.
Voters can use these scores to see how their political representatives have fared in this measure, perhaps finding them among the 23% of representatives or 19% of senators who were highly effective in the most recently completed Congress. And researchers use them to determine the factors that make lawmakers effective in Congress.
Based on our work, we have identified five ways that legislators, reformers and voters can help promote effective lawmaking in Congress.
Lawmakers willing to work with those from the other party are the most successful at advancing their bills through Congress. GOP Sens. Mitt Romney of Utah, left, and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia talk during a joint session of Congress.
Win McNamee/Getty Images
1. Lawmakers can focus their legislative agendas on their interests, committee assignments and constituency needs
Members of Congress face many demands on their time. They are almost always campaigning or raising money for the next election. Their time on Capitol Hill is punctuated with committee meetings and calls to votes on the House or Senate floor.
Such pressures leave little time to formulate new policies, build coalitions and advance their proposals. Effective lawmakers do not have more time than others – they simply align these various activities toward a common goal of lawmaking.
Effective lawmakers introduce bills that combine their own interests and passions with the needs of their constituencies and their committee assignments.
Thus, time spent away from Washington, in their home states and districts, is focused on identifying the policy needs of their constituents and highlighting their policy successes; time in committee is spent making and refining their policy proposals; time milling around between votes is used to build coalitions.
For the effective lawmaker, all these different activities form a coherent whole.
2. Legislators can view lawmaking as a team sport
No member of Congress can accomplish anything by himself or herself. Effective lawmakers recognize this and build a successful team.
They then join with like-minded colleagues to take advantage of the added resources provided by legislative caucuses, such as additional staff support and independent policy analyses, apart from the help provided by party leadership.
Moreover, for effective lawmakers, their team is not limited to their political party. Those willing to co-sponsor bills written by members of the other party find more bipartisan support for their own efforts. Our analysis demonstrates that such bipartisan lawmakers are the most successful at advancing their bills through Congress.
3. Lawmakers can specialize and develop policy expertise
Members of Congress need to be generalists to vote knowledgeably on diverse policy topics on any given day. Many take that generalist view to their lawmaking portfolio, sponsoring legislation in each of the 21 major issue areas addressed by Congress.
But we find that the most effective lawmakers dedicate about half of their time, attention and legislative proposals to a single issue area. By becoming an acknowledged experts in issues of health or education or international affairs, for example, lawmakers become central to policy formulation in their area of interest.
4. Reforms can reinforce good lawmaking habits
Individual lawmakers in Congress could adopt any of the practices above to become more effective. But institutional reforms could help reinforce such good behaviors.
Election workers in Pittsburgh recount ballots on June 1, 2022, from the recent Pennsylvania primary election.
AP Photo/Gene J. Puskar
5. Voters can reward effective lawmaking
Without electoral rewards for effective lawmaking, members of Congress may focus on being show horses rather than legislative workhorses.
The role of voters starts with the initial selection of candidates. Voters might consider whether candidates demonstrate policy expertise and speak about the benefits of bipartisanship, for example. They might consider our analysis showing that effective state legislators and women tend to be more effective lawmakers in Congress, on average.
On the whole, Congress can function much better. Effective lawmakers from the past have shown the path forward. Our analysis of 50 years of data offers lessons that any representative or senator can adopt, as well as reforms and electoral pressures that can nudge them in the right direction.
Craig Volden co-directs the Center for Effective Lawmaking, which receives funding from the Democracy Fund and from the U.S. Democracy Program at the Hewlett Foundation.
Alan Wiseman is the Chair of the Department of Political Science at Vanderbilt University and he co-directs the Center for Effective Lawmaking, which receives funding from the Democracy Fund and from the U.S. Democracy Program at the Hewlett Foundation.
I was always an Addams Family fan. The Munsters were more lighthearted and peppy, but the Addams were creepy and odd. This new series from NetFlix looks like it'll cover the bases nicely. Wednesday seems appropriately murderous.
Watch this terrifying video below of a crocodile that looks like it fully intends to capture and devour the man running away from it at an Orlando, Florida park. The original video was posted by Gatorland Orlando and features one of their Cuban crocodiles—appropriately named "Chainsaw"—galloping toward a man who is, quite sensibly, running away. — Read the rest
The New York Times podcast The Daily recently did a story called "The Rise of Workplace Surveillance," which provided a deep dive into the ways in which companies are remotely monitoring the productivity of employees. Unsurprisingly, some of this monitoring is intrusive and unfair — the tracking systems often penalize workers when they are actually working, because they are incapable of counting work done out of the view of the screen or offline. — Read the rest
The answer is, quite simply, not much. According to the study, only one in 25 even attempts to transfer copyright ownership with the purchase of the NFT and even that may be ineffective.
The “vast majority” of NFT projects did not attempt to convey any ownership of intellectual property rights. In those that did, the language was often confusing and, even when the language was clear, it’s still unclear how those transfers would hold up in court.
In that regard, The Galaxy study mirrors one by Cornell University and the Initiative for CryptoCurrencies and Contracts that was published in January. Simply put, the legal issues of copyright ownership are complicated even under the best of circumstances, and NFTs are far from the best of circumstances. This may explain why most NFT projects aren’t even attempting to spell out those rights.
However, from the perspective of NFT sellers, this isn’t a bug, it’s a feature. NFTs were never meant to address copyright issues, they had a different purpose altogether.
Scarcity, Not Copyright
As I said in my post earlier this month, blockchain technology has a long history of being a solution looking for a problem to solve. To that end, blockchain and cryptocurrency supporters have long looked to copyright as an area where they could make an impact.
However, as we’ve seen time and again, those pushing blockchain technology as a solution to copyright issues, rarely understand the issues that they are trying to solve. Though there are potential uses for blockchain in this space, they are niche uses and are largely incompatible with the current marketplace.
To that end, NFTs have long been heralded as a great solution for transferring copyright in a simple, elegant way. However, NFTs were never designed for this purpose. Despite the confusing language that many still use, buying an NFT does not (necessarily) convey any rights to the work.
But that shouldn’t be a big deal. NFTs weren’t meant to transfer copyright, they were meant to create scarcity.
The problem is that, in our digital world, one digital work is the same as any other. This is an especially large problem for photographers and visual artists, whose works are trivially copied and reshared. Since there is no difference between an original digital photograph and a copy of that photography, there’s no scarcity online. This is why such images are considered fungible.
NFTs, as per their name, are non-fungible. A photographer or an artist can mint a limited number of NFTs based on a work and, theoretically, only that number will exist. So, while anyone and everyone can download the image an NFT is based on, only those that purchase the NFT will own that token.
However, the token itself is of limited value. Outside of limited uses, such as Twitter’s octagonal profile pictures, the token is just a line sitting in a blockchain. It’s easy to verify ownership, but it doesn’t give anyone special rights over the work the NFT is based upon.
Still, any scarcity could have been a boon for a wide variety of artists, in particular those that work with digital media. Unfortunately, that ended up not happening either.
Why Scarcity Failed
The big problem with NFTs turned out to be a dead obvious one. There’s nothing stopping anyone from minting NFTs based on anything they want.
NFTs failed to create scarcity because there is no limit on who can create NFTs. Some blamed artists for not jumping on the bandwagon fast enough, but those infringers were always going to be there, especially in a boom market, and they would always outnumber the legitimate creators.
So, if NFTs can’t fulfill their meager promise of creating digital scarcity, how can they be useful in handling copyright issues? The answer is simple: They can’t.
This is why we need a complete reimagining of how Blockchain is used. The current approach is useful for speculative investing and private money transfers, and not much else. More controls and checks could expand that usefulness, but those concepts go against the very ethos of blockchain and cryptocurrency.
In short, as long as blockchain and NFTs are so heavily unregulated, they are likely to be little more than a headache for artists. It’s not a place where they can reliably make money, but it’s a place that their work can and will be regularly exploited by others.
This is especially true now that the NFT market has shrunk so profoundly. Legitimate artists only have a limited number of works that they can sell, namely, works they created. For infringers, the sky is the limit and there are no such restrictions. This means that, even if they make only a small amount per transaction, they can still take in a decent amount of money.
With the boom over, NFTs will not be a financial windfall for artists. The only people that can reliably profit from it, are either those that ignore the rules around copyright, or those that automatically generate a large volume of works.
Simply put, as the value of NFTs have dropped, it’s become more a matter of quantity over quality and that is not only disadvantageous for legitimate artists, but counter to the idea of scarcity that NFTs were supposed to represent.
Bottom Line
I believe that many crypto supporters genuinely want to help artists. They see the struggles that I see and want to help just as badly as I do. However, for crypto and blockchain to provide any real solutions, it’s going to require a complete overhaul of not just the technology, but of how people think about the technology.
Sadly, there’s no motivation to do that.
Blockchain cannot be both a speculative investment and a solution to real-world problems. We have seen this time and time again. NFTs failed to create digital scarcity. Blockchain technology has not solved a single copyright issue.
In fact, all attempts at using blockchain to address copyright issues have come from outside and have been hacks overlaid on top of the blockchain rather than pure blockchain approaches.
With that in mind, it’s little surprise that virtually no NFT projects make any mention of copyright. NFTs were not designed to be a copyright panacea, they were designed to create scarcity, something they failed to do.
In the end, the confusion over the rights NFT holders have is very much by design. NFTs were never meant to transfer copyright and likely couldn’t even if they were. As such, leaving the issue ambiguous was probably the best thing that NFT creators could do, at least in terms of keeping the value high.
This new study simply highlights that, making it incredibly clear that NFTs will never be a copyright panacea, but that they were never meant to be at all.
Throughout my many years of studying obesity and related health conditions, I’ve observed that relatively little is said about two significant pieces of this very complex puzzle: lack of hydration and excessive salt intake. Both are known to contribute to obesity.
Lessons learned from a desert sand rat
Nature provides a clue to the role these factors play with the desert sand rat Psammomys obesus, a half-pound rodent with a high-pitched squeak that lives in the salty marshes and deserts of Northern Africa. It survives, barely, by eating the stems of Salicornia – the glasswort – a plant that looks a bit like asparagus.
Although low in nutrients, the glasswort’s fleshy, succulent sap is filled with water that’s rich in salt, at concentrations as high as what’s found in seawater.
Recent studies have provided new insights into why the desert sand rat might crave the salty sap of glasswort. Although this has not yet been proven specifically in the sand rat, it is likely that a high-salt diet helps the sand rat convert the relatively low amount of carbohydrates it’s ingesting into fructose, a type of sugar that occurs naturally in fruits, honey and some vegetables.
This helps the animal survive when food and fresh water are sparse. This is because fructose activates a “survival switch” that stimulates foraging, food intake and the storage of fat and carbohydrates that protect the animal from starvation.
However, when the rat is brought into captivity and given the common rodent diet of about 50% carbohydrates, it rapidly develops obesity and diabetes. But if given fresh vegetables low in starchy carbohydrates, the rodent remains lean.
The desert sand rat, also known as the fat sand rat, is actually a gerbil. It’s found in Asia as well as Africa.
Kristian Bell/Moment via Getty Images
My research, and the research of many other scientists over the decades, shows that many Americans unwittingly behave much like a captive desert sand rat, although few are in settings where food and water are limited. They are constantly activating the survival switch.
Fructose and our diets
As mentioned, fructose, a simple sugar, appears to have a key role in activating this survival switch that leads to fat production.
Small amounts of fructose, like that found in an individual fruit, are not the problem – rather it is excessive amounts of fructose that are problematic for human health. Most of us get our fructose from table sugar and high-fructose corn syrup. Intake of these two sugars totals approximately 15% of calories in the average American diet.
Since fructose is made from glucose, production of fructose increases when blood glucose levels are high. This process happens when we eat a lot of rice, cereal, potatoes and white bread; those are carbs that rapidly release glucose into the blood rapidly.
To be clear, fat does not contain water. But when fat breaks down, it generates water in the body. The amount produced is substantial, and roughly equivalent to the amount of fat burned. It’s so significant that some animals rely on fat to provide water during times when it’s not available.
Whales are but one example. While they drink some seawater, they get most of their water from the foods they eat. And when they go for extended periods without food, they get their water primarily by metabolizing fat.
Hold the fries
The role of dehydration as a contributor to obesity should not be underestimated. It commonly occurs after eating salty foods. Both dehydration and salt consumption lead to the production of fructose and fat.
This is why salty french fries are especially fattening. The salt causes a dehydration-like state that encourages the conversion of the starch in the french fry to fructose.
What’s more, studies show most people who are overweight or obese don’t drink enough water. They are far more likely to be dehydrated than those who are lean. Their salt intake is also very high compared with lean people’s.
Research shows that people with obesity frequently have high levels of vasopressin, a hormone that helps the kidneys hold water to regulate urine volume.
For someone at risk of dehydration or starvation, vasopressin may have a real survival benefit. But for those not at risk, vasopressin could drive most of the metabolic effects of excess fructose, like weight gain, fat accumulation, fatty liver and prediabetes.
That’s why I encourage drinking eight tall glasses of water a day. And eight is likely enough; don’t assume more is better. There have been cases of people drinking so much that “water intoxication” occurs. This is particularly a problem with people who have heart, kidney or liver conditions, as well as those who have had recent surgery or are long-distance runners. It’s always good to first check with your doctor about water intake.
For the desert sand rat, and for our ancestors who scavenged for food, a high-salt and limited-water diet made sense. But human beings no longer live that way. These simple measures – drinking more water and reducing salt intake – offer cheap, easy and healthy strategies that may prevent or treat obesity.
Richard Johnson is a Professor of Medicine at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus who has received funding from the National Institutes of Health, Veteran's Health Administration, and Department of Defense to understand the role of fructose metabolism in a variety of metabolic disorders. He also has equity with Colorado Research Partners LLC that is developing inhibitors of fructose metabolism. He is also author of Nature Wants Us to Be Fat (Benbella books, 2022) that discusses the science of fructose and its role in obesity and metabolic disorders.
Educators in Tennessee, Missouri, Texas and elsewhere have been fired or forced to resign for discussions of race and racism. Teachers across the country are teaching in fear.
The fear may be heightened for educators who teach AP courses, which – by their very design – require teachers to deal with sensitive and controversial subjects that deal with matters of race.
Preparing for a showdown
These controversial subjects would include Martin Luther King Jr.‘s famous “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.” In that 1963 letter, King – who had been arrested for parading without a permit during anti-segregation protests in Birmingham, Alabama – critiques what he refers to as an “unjust law.”
“Sometimes a law is just on its face and unjust in its application,” King wrote. He added that such laws exist when those in power impose laws against a minority that they don’t abide by themselves. Historians and critical race scholars view King’s letter as an early example of critical race theory. The letter is featured in AP English Language and Composition.
I’m not the only one who is taking seriously how AP course requirements might contradict laws against critical race theory.
Consider an advisory that the College Board itself put out in March 2022. The advisory states that courses that do not cover topics in the required curriculum will lose their AP designation.
This could affect the college plans of large numbers of America’s students, who rely on AP courses to earn college credit while still in high school. This enables students to save money by skipping certain courses in college.
The Advanced Placement program has been widely adopted throughout the country. As of fall 2021, 32 states had statewide or systemwide AP credit policies that require colleges to award credit to students who score high enough on their AP exams.
The College Board reports that more than 1.17 million U.S. public high school graduates in the class of 2021 – 34.9% – took at least one AP exam. Despite the disruptions from the pandemic, that figure is up from the roughly 898,000 – or 28.6% – who did so in the class of 2011.
Despite the laws that seek to control how teachers can discuss race and the history of racism in the United States, the College Board plans to pilot a new AP course in African American studies in the fall of 2022 at about 60 schools.
Precautions taken
Anticipating the potential for conflicts with the College Board, the Yorba Linda school board in Orange County, California, made Advanced Placement courses exempt from restrictions it enacted regarding classroom conversations on race.
A College Board official told me that as of yet, there have been no cases of schools removing content in AP history. How long that will be the case remains to be seen.
Historically, there have already been cases in which books have been removed from the reading list for AP classes. For instance, in 2007, Jefferson County Public Schools – a school district that covers Louisville, Kentucky – removed Toni Morrison’s “Beloved” from an AP English class at Eastern High School. “Beloved,” along with other books authored by Toni Morrison, is among the most frequently referenced texts on the AP Literature and Composition exam.
When states ban critical race theory, it potentially affects more than just AP history and AP English. AP U.S. Government and Politics, for example, requires educators to teach students about race-based gerrymandering and different perspectives on affirmative action. The AP Psychology course description includes conversations about how race affects criminal trials.
Vague and contradictory
Some of the new laws that ban critical race theory are confusing and contradictory. A new law in Georgia, for example, includes systemic racism as a “divisive topic” that “any curriculum … may not teach.” However, the bill explicitly allows teachers to address how “the enactment and enforcement of laws” can lead to “oppression, segregation, and discrimination.”
This contradiction has the potential to create uncertainty and uneasiness among AP teachers.
A bill passed in Texas states that “no teacher shall be compelled … to discuss current events or widely debated and currently controversial issues of public policy.” Controversy, however, is a centerpiece of AP English Language and Composition. The curriculum requires teachers to consider controversial issues and to help students “develop a critical and informed understanding of the controversy and the authority to enter the conversation themselves.”
Critical choices
If people complain that AP courses violate laws against critical race theory, the College Board may have to show that it is serious when it says it will strip AP designation from schools that remove required material from the AP curriculum.
Research is on the College Board’s side. Studies show that discussions on race and racism help prepare students to participate in America’s multiracial democracy. There are academic benefits as well. A Stanford University study found that a ninth grade ethnic studies course boosted Black and Hispanic students’ GPA by 1.4 points and their attendance by 21 percentage points. The authors of that study say the findings point to wider academic benefits of lessons that are culturally relevant to students, such as lower dropout rates.
Since many parents and members of the public see the value of taking AP courses, this could force opponents of critical race theory to make a crucial choice: Do they want to constrain classroom discussions about race? Or do they want to keep AP and all its benefits intact for the sake of America’s students? The College Board has made it clear they can’t have it both ways.
Suneal Kolluri does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Have you ever listened to a talk by somebody who came across as an expert, only to find that they had no clue after all? Or perhaps you’ve been annoyed by a colleague who explains the obvious in a condescending way. The way expertise is expressed is very similar to how confidence is expressed. And despite the trope of mansplaining, this happens independent of gender, although communicative styles do tend to differ between the genders.
When someone states their thoughts with high confidence, we assume they know what they are talking about and we are inclined to believe them. Often enough, we are correct: there are various indications in the way they talk that reflect their knowledge. However, it’s relatively easy to express certainty in language without having any sort of expertise to back it up. For more than 20 years, I’ve studied how people communicate their thoughts through language – including how they demonstrate expertise and confidence in their discourse.
Experts may know exactly what they cannot be sure about, while non-experts may confidently claim pure nonsense, if they believe in it. Some may even be skilled at claiming nonsense even if they don’t believe in it – this might help their political career or other interests that can be served by misleading people.
Actual expertise is important in a world where misinformation spreads easily. Here are five questions to ask yourself to determine whether the person you’re listening to is an expert, or just a confident speaker:
1. How likely is it that this person is an expert?
Consider their background, their possible motivation, their skills and goals in the present conversation. People may have true expertise and knowledge in areas you wouldn’t expect. But seeing no relation between what you know about this person and their proclaimed expertise is an indication that they’re just overconfident in a topic they actually know little about.
In research, actual expertise can be identified by objective measures such as facts about a person’s life history, or performance assessments. For instance, experts differ from novices in memory as well as perception and categorisation of complex facts. In daily life, awareness of someone’s background can help you treat their statements with appropriate caution.
2. How does this person communicate in general?
People differ in their communicative styles. Some tend to talk over others as a habit, needing to dominate a conversation. Others listen more, offering opinions and views only when they’re well-founded.
In a medical setting, an attentive style – one that prioritises listening over talking – can lead to better collaboration between physicians and nurses and improve the quality of care for the patient.
Sweeping statements are easy to make. While experts know more details and will be ready to provide them, people without true knowledge have to stay on a superficial level. They might repeat the same general message over again, unable to elaborate. This presents another problem: If a message is repeated often enough, we will eventually believe it – that’s only natural. When it comes to COVID-19, research shows people believe repeated false information, especially about less known aspects.
Events that we have not observed with our own eyes, that cannot be repeated in a scientific experiment, that happened long ago in the past or in the future – all of these naturally come with a certain amount of uncertainty. An expert will adequately acknowledge the limits to certainty. Their statements will contain uncertainty markers (words such as “maybe” or “could”) where appropriate.
Here, a crucial difference is that between “I am uncertain” and “It is uncertain”. A non-expert simply doesn’t know the available facts. But an expert knows whatever can be known about the matter at hand. In some cases, this goes as far as stating explicitly what the likelihood of a certain event is. Climate experts, for instance, will not be able to predict extreme weather events with certainty, beyond what immediate weather forecasts can provide. However, they can demonstrate how the occurrence of such events has increased in the past, and based on this they can provide the statistical likelihood of events such as flooding for the future.
5. Can they provide information flexibly?
Consider the difference between automatic route navigation systems (such as Google Maps) and the kind of directions you would get from a friend. The friend would be able to give you just the information you need, providing more details at tricky decision points, but skipping over those parts of the route that they know you’re already familiar with. Automatic systems are unable to do that. They’re not “experts” – they’re simply pulling information from a database, without actual insight or intelligence, using the same phrases over and over again.
True experts use concepts and terminology in their field (jargon) flexibly and with ease – and they are typically able to adjust their communication to accommodate the specific needs of their audience.
Thora Tenbrink works for Bangor University and currently receives funding by the AHRC (AH/W003813/1) and by SellSTEM MSCA ITN Project No. 956124.
by Farzam Kharvari, PhD Candidate, Building Engineering, Carleton University
Thermal discomfort is just another reason employees may prefer to continue teleworking. (Shutterstock)
Working from home during the pandemic presented a wide array of challenges and benefits for those who were able to do so. For some, a benefit was workplace comfort.
While the conversation on gender differences when it comes to thermal comfort in the workplace is not new — men tend to report being more comfortable than women — our research on teleworkers’ behaviours during the pandemic revealed that women were more comfortable in their home offices because they could control the temperature, add or remove layers.
Specifically, our results and previous research suggest that workplaces that do not provide personalized thermostat settings or require any formal attire don’t promote equitable thermal comfort conditions.
We sought to uncover how teleworking impacted workers’ behaviours at home compared to their behaviours in traditional office spaces.
What we found strongly suggests that teleworkers experienced many benefits, including increased productivity, less mental exhaustion and greater thermal comfort.
Relaxed formal attire requirements
Our data indicates that improved thermal comfort at home is because of personal control over the thermostat and greater flexibility over what to wear during the workday.
In our study, most teleworkers’ primary action to stay comfortable was to add or remove clothing layers when they felt too hot or cold, unless they had a child. When teleworkers’ had a child, they kept the thermostat set to a temperature that was comfortable for their children.
“I am more comfortable now [at home] because it’s warmer and the office, it was colder,” said one of our interviewees.
Thermostat settings were originally designed based on men’s formal office attire.
(Moja Msanii/Unsplash)
In traditional office settings, employees typically cannot control the thermostat or temperature to suit their needs, which can lead to discomfort.
“I remember feeling cold all the time over there [office] […] definitely, that was something that doesn’t happen anymore because it’s my own home, and I’m comfortable with temperatures here,” said an interviewee.
Teleworking brought more relaxed attire requirements to employees because, well, there often weren’t any. Both men and women during video conferencing said they only wore formal clothes on the portion of their bodies that was visible to others via the camera.
There remains a need to take action and improve conditions in traditional workspaces by giving employees more ways to control the temperature and their comfort. Some solutions may be providing them with flexible or less formal clothing options, or coming up with other ways of improving thermal comfort like desk fans, openable windows and chairs with built-in heaters. Perhaps it’s also time to revisit the ideal office thermostat settings.
Thermal discomfort is just another reason employees may prefer to continue teleworking.
Employers should revisit formal dress codes and consider personalized thermostat settings.
(Hunters Race/Unsplash)
Workplace attire
Business researchers Katherine Karl and Joy Peluchette found that workplace attire was linked to productivity, as well as perceived authoritativeness, trustworthiness, friendliness, creativity and competency of employees. In other words, a company’s goals are directly linked to how employees will be required to dress.
For instance, banks might need their employees to convey a sense of trustworthiness and so require their customer-facing employees to wear more formal clothes, whereas organizations in creative fields might allow their employees to choose their attire more freely.
Our research suggests that employers should revisit formal dress codes and consider personalized thermostat settings. By applying such strategies, organizations can move toward improved workplace equity and benefit from increased productivity and performance.
The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
by Sandra Jeppesen, Professor of Media, Film, and Communications, Lakehead University
The Black Lives Matter movement began as a hashtag started by Black women in the United States, and grew into a global protest. (AP Photo/Frank Augstein, File)
Swatting involves calling 911 to falsely report a high-risk emergency at their victim’s home, triggering deployment of a SWAT team. In some swatting cases, victims have died at the hands of police.
She is a new type of intersectional digital activist. These activists work on intersectional issues, drawing connections between systems of oppression including race, gender, sexuality, and so on. And a great deal of their activism takes place online.
Digital campaigns such as #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter have been successful partially because young women, Black peopleand LGBTQ+ are the power users of social media — they are online more often and particularly adept at using social networks.
But despite successes in social justice campaigns, intersectional activists are increasingly at risk — both online and off.
Intersectional activists are also doxxed at higher rates, meaning personal information is dumped online, such as their address, phone number or workplace. Sorrenti’s swatting is a textbook example — there are ongoing emotional impacts of her doxxing, including confronting transphobic police behaviours such as using her deadname (the name used before transitioning) and incorrect gender.
Global News reports on the swatting of activist Clara Sorrenti, who was arrested at gunpoint.
One type of algorithmic bias is shadowbanning, which happens when a platform limits the visibility of specific users without outright banning them. Activists have noted that social media content about intersectional issues is often shadowbanned.
Algorithmic bias and shadowbanning of marginalized users can make intersectional activists feel invisible, with their posts facing challenges to achieve the virality crucial to activist campaigns.
Response strategies
One tactic activists have used to address intersectionality online is to create a “breakaway hashtag.” The #MeToo movement is a powerful example of hashtag activism that drew global attention to sexual harassment and abuse. However, for Egyptian-American writer Mona Eltahawy, #MeToo did not feel like the right space for her as a Muslim woman. She created #MosqueMeToo to draw attention to sexual assault in the Muslim community, focusing on the intersectional context of gender, Islamophobia and racism.
Breakaway hashtags like #MosqueMeToo add intersectional dimensions to the premise of a mainstream hashtag, both relying on the original hashtag’s virality and challenging its limitations.
Digilante justice
Young feminist women who are trolled online use the tactic of “digilante justice,” or “digilantism,” which involves using digital means to fight for justice, in this case against trolls. They learn how to hack social media platforms to reveal the identities of trolls and confront them in real life. Activists have also excluded trolls from their personal social networks through “hackback” tactics, which are hacker tactics used against hackers.
In another example, feminist game developer Randi Harper was intensely trolled by misogynists in an incident known as GamerGate. In response, Harper developed Good Game Auto Blocker (ggautoblocker) that blocks users who follow misogynist Twitter accounts, the digital equivalent of walking out of a room when someone spews hateful speech.
Digital solidarity
Digital activists understand that social media platforms are designed for the capitalist exploitation of content and data produced by everyday users. Countering this, intersectional hacktivists (hacker activists) have designed technologies for solidarity rather than exploitation.
For example, activists in Athens designed an app to share text message costs so media activists within a group would not have to foot the whole bill. The program itself was designed with sharing in mind, illustrating that technologies do not have to be exploitative.
Intersectional activists aim to empower both givers and receivers of support, acknowledging that all citizens play both roles, sometimes needing support and other times contributing it. This is sometimes called mutual aid.
Digital mutual aid can take place through mentorship and skillshare workshops that might teach new marginalized activists how to code computers, promote social media posts, produce radio shows or write media releases. Workshops are conducted by individuals sharing some aspect of their identities with participants to create a safer space through a shared experience of lived oppression.
Digital solidarity and mutual aid are important strategies of support and care that can work toward countering the negative emotional tax of being trolled, doxxed, shadowbanned or subjected to algorithmic bias.
More work to be done
Beyond intersectional digital activism, more work needs to be done by the tech industry, police services and broader social movements to eliminate the colonialism, racism, sexism and transphobia of online interactions and the devastating offline impacts they can have in people’s everyday lives.
This work is important to a well-functioning, inclusive and diverse democracy, as it aims to ensure that online participation is available equally — and safely — to all citizens.
Sandra Jeppesen receives funding from Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada
by Robyn Ober, IRC Fellow, Batchelor Institute of Indigenous Tertiary Education
It’s essential for non-Aboriginal researchers to establish relationships with First Nations people when conducting research in their communities.
Past research practices have left a legacy of mistrust towards non-Indigenous researchers among many First Nations people. This is because research has been steeped in colonial practices, including viewing research as something done to Indigenous peoples without them having a say in how they are represented.
First Nations people and communities have had data about them collected with little or no input into the processes or questions asked. Even now, standard questions used for data collection do not always acknowledge that First Nations ways of living may be different from the rest of the population.
This includes things like the effects of intergenerational trauma, the fact First Nations family systems often involve more people than are blood related, and different cultural needs within health services.
This is where research practices such as “yarning” can offer an opportunity to establish relationships with these communities.
Once researchers establish a connection with people from the place they’re wishing to conduct their research, a mutual and inclusive relationship can be forged. This is essential to ensuring First Nations research participants are included in research, and not seen as research subjects.
Being able to build a relationship is vital to ensuring the lives of First Nations people are accurately portrayed and recorded, participants are not taken advantage of, and communities can benefit from the research.
A history of research ‘on’ instead of research ‘with’
Since colonisation, Indigenous people have had negative experiences of Western research. Through fields such as anthropology, First Nations peoples were observed without permission, and had remains stolen.
Because non-Aboriginal researchers lack significant knowledge about First Nations people, their cultures and societies have often been judged by the degree they conform to Western customs and norms. As a result, misconceptions have followed, and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples have received very little benefit from the research conducted about them.
However in the past two decades, research has been undergoing a significant transformation. This is through incorporating First Nations practices such as yarning into the way research is conducted, providing additional insight into First Nations ways of being, doing and knowing.
Not only does yarning have the power to decolonise Eurocentric research practice, but it can also contribute to non-Indigenous researchers gaining a better understanding of Indigenous peoples and their communities.
Yarning is a tradition practised for thousands of years by many First Nations people in Australia. It is an integral part of Indigenous ways of learning and sharing.
It is usually undertaken by Aboriginal people coming together informally to unwind or in more formal ways such as discussing community or cultural matters. Storytelling is an important part of yarning that allows for reflection on recent or past histories and lived experiences and sharing knowledge.
Researchers can take part in “yarning” by talking to First Nations people about where each of them is from, people they know in common, and their connection to the place on which they meet, just to give a few examples.
Relationships are important in research
We have explored relationships between researchers and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander participants, and have found building trust is essential, but can be difficult.
For example, we found when a young non-Indigenous teacher started work in an Aboriginal community it took her roughly a year before the Aboriginal community decided she was ready to know about their land and culture. According to the teacher, the time proved she was “serious” about being the children’s teacher.
Researchers in First Nations communities need to make connections through sharing dialogues and lived experiences, mutual investment and building trust and credibility. This can be done by taking trips out to the bush and demonstrating commitment to the communities they wish to learn about.
Establishing relationships with the community like this also allows researchers to become acquainted with non-verbal communication such as body language and gestures fundamental to how some Aboriginal people interact.
Ideally these relationships should extend beyond local Aboriginal communities to relevant Aboriginal service providers, educators, practitioners, policymakers, academics and even park rangers. This will ensure additional background information, cultural contexts, and by extension, more robust research.
Researchers need to ask themselves how the research they are undertaking could have useful outcomes for communities, not just academia. This reciprocity can potentially address mistrust with some First Nations people.
It’s important researchers undertake culturally appropriate research that gives back to communities. Through establishing relationships and taking the time to listen to these communities, this will better ensure research undertaken is safe, ethical and useful for them too.
Robyn Ober receives funding from Australian Research Council
Rhonda Oliver receives funding from Australian Research Council.
Sender Dovchin receives funding from Australian Research Council.
Work around cars long enough, and you'll start to notice certain products have a ubiquitous presence in garages; certain products like Heli-coil, Bondo, and Loctite, have earned success to the point that their brand names often replace the respective product type name, e.g. — Read the rest
Internet users’ private messages, files, and photos of everyday people are increasingly being examined by tech companies, which check the data against government databases. While this is not a new practice, the public is being told this massive scanning should extend to nearly every reach of their online activity so that police can more productively investigate crimes related to child sexual abuse images, sometimes called CSAM.
We don’t know much about how the public gets watched in this way. That’s because neither the tech companies that do the scanning, nor the government agencies they work with, share details of how it works. But we do know that the scanning is far from perfect, despite claims to the contrary. It makes mistakes, and those mistakes can result in false accusations of child abuse. We don’t know how often such false accusations happen, or how many people get hurt by them.
The spread of CSAM causes real harms, and tech companies absolutely should work on new ways of fighting it. We have suggested some good ways of doing so, like building better reporting tools, privacy-respecting warning messages, and metadata analysis.
An article published yesterday in the New York Times reports on how Google made two of these false accusations, and the police follow-up. It also highlights Google’s refusal to correct any of the damage done by its erroneous scans, and the company’s failed human review processes. This type of scanning is increasingly ubiquitous on tech products we all use, and governments around the world want to extend its reach even further, to check even our most private, encrypted conversations. The article is especially disturbing, not just for the harm it describes to the two users Google falsely accused, but also as a warning of potentially many more such mistakes to come.
Google’s AI System Failed, And Its Employees Failed Too
In February of last year, Google’s algorithms wrongly flagged photos taken by two fathers in two different states as being images of child abuse. In both cases, the fathers—one in San Francisco, one in Houston—had small children with infections on their genitals, and had taken photos of the area at the request of medical professionals.
Google’s algorithms, and the employees who oversee them, had a different opinion about the photos. Without informing either parent, Google reported them to the government. That resulted in local police departments investigating the parents.
The company also chose to perform its own investigation. In the case of Mark, the San Francisco father, Google employees looked at not just the photo that had been flagged by their mistaken AI, but his entire collection of family and friend photos.
Both the Houston Police Department and the San Francisco Police Department quickly cleared the fathers of any wrongdoing. But Google refused to hear Mark’s appeal or reinstate his account, even after he brought the company documentation showing that the SFPD had determined there was “no crime committed.” Remarkably, even after the New York Times contacted Google and the error was clear, the company continues to refuse to restore any of Mark’s Google accounts, or help him get any data back.
Google’s False Accusations Cause Real Harm
Google has a right to decide which users it wants to host. But it was Google’s incorrect algorithms, and Google’s failed human review process, which caused innocent people to be investigated by the police in these cases. It was also Google’s choice to destroy without warning and without due process these fathers’ email accounts, videos, photos, and in one case, telephone service. The consequences of the company’s error are not trivial.
We don’t know how many other people Google has wrongly accused of child abuse, but it’s likely many more than these two. Given the massive scope of the content it scans, it could be hundreds, or thousands.
Mark and Cassio, the two fathers wrongly flagged by Google, were accused within one day of each other in February 2021. That could be coincidental timing, or it could suggest that one or more flaws in Google’s system—either flaws in the AI software, or flaws in the human review process—were particularly manifest at that time.
Google’s faulty CSAM scans caused real harm in these cases, and it’s not hard to imagine how they could be more harmful in other cases. Once both Google employees and police officers have combed through an accused parent’s files, there could be consequences that have nothing to do with CSAM. Police could find evidence of drug use or other wrongdoing, and choose to punish parents for those unrelated crimes, without having suspected them in the first place. Google could choose to administer its own penalties, as it did to Mark and Cassio.
Despite what had happened to them, both Mark and Cassio, the Houston father, felt empowered to speak out to a reporter. But systems like this could report on vulnerable minorities, including LGBT parents in locations where police and community members are not friendly to them. Google’s system could wrongly report parents to authorities in autocratic countries, or locations with corrupt police, where wrongly accused parents could not be assured of proper due process.
Governments Want More Unaccountable CSAM Scans
Google isn’t the only company doing scans like this. But evidence is mounting that the scans are simply not accurate. A Facebook study on 150 accounts that were reported to authorities for alleged CSAM found that 75% of the accounts sent images that were “non-malicious” and were sending images for reasons “such as outrage or poor humor.” LinkedIn found 75 accounts that were reported to EU authorities in the second half of 2021, due to files that it matched with known CSAM. But upon manual review, only 31 of those cases involved confirmed CSAM. (LinkedIn uses PhotoDNA, the software product specifically recommended by the U.S. sponsors of the EARN IT Bill.)
In the past few years, we’ve seen governments push for more scanning. Last year, Apple proposed a form of on-device scanning on all of its devices that would search user photos and report matches to authorities. That program was scuttled after a public outcry. This year in the U.S., the Senate Judiciary Committee considered and passed the EARN IT Act, which would have opened the door for states to compel companies to use CSAM scanners. (The EARN IT Act hasn’t been considered in a floor debate by either house of Congress.) The European Union is considering a new CSAM detection law as well. The EU proposal would not only search for known and new abuse images, it would use AI to scan text messages for “grooming,” in an attempt to judge abuse that might happen in the future.
Earlier this month, EU Commissioner Ylva Johnasson wrote a blog post asserting that the scanners they propose to use have accuracy rates “significantly above 90%.” She asserts “grooming” detection will be 88% accurate, “before human review.”
These accuracy rates are nothing to brag about. If billions of private messages in the EU are scanned with a false positive rate of “above 90%,” it will result in millions of falsely flagged messages. This avalanche of false positives will be a humanitarian disaster even in wealthy democracies with rule of law—to say nothing of the autocracies and backsliding democracies, which will demand similar systems. Defenders of these systems point to the very real harms of CSAM, and some argue that false positives–the kind that result in erroneous reports like those in the article–are acceptable collateral damage.
What we’re being asked to accept here is nothing less than “bugs in our pockets.” Governments want companies like Google and Apple to constantly scan every digital space we have, including private spaces. But we’re seeing the results when companies like Google second-guess their own users’ family lives—and even second-guess the police.
The Solution is Real Privacy
At EFF, we’ve been fighting against spying on peoples’ digital lives for more than 30 years. When police want to look at our private messages or files, they should follow the 4th Amendment and get a warrant. Period.
As for private companies, they should be working to limit their need and ability to trawl our private content. When we have private conversations with friends, family, or medical professionals, they should be protected using end-to-end encryption. In end-to-end encrypted systems, the service provider doesn’t have the option of looking at the message, even if they wanted to. Companies should also commit to encrypted backups, something EFF has requested for some time now.
The answer to a better internet isn’t racing to come up with the best scanning software. There’s no way to protect human rights while having AI scan peoples’ messages to locate wrongdoers. The real answer is staring us right in the face: law enforcement, and elected leaders, that work to coexist with strong encryption and privacy, not break them down.
Juxtapoz magazine recently published a beautiful and disturbing photo essay about Florida, titled "Anastasia Samoylova and Walker Evans: A Photo-Dialogue on Florida Past and Present." The photos on the site are from the book Floridas, published by Steidl, and feature overly tanned bodies, lush green landscapes, alligators, run-down roadside motels, and, of course, guns. — Read the rest
The “Stop WOKE Act” was suspended by federal courts, protecting workplaces, but not universities. SPECIAL TO THE ORACLE/FLICKR/GAGE SKIDMORE
Many companies strive to make their workplace a diverse and comfortable place for all employees. This sentiment is now safe after Gov. Ron DeSantis’ “Stop WOKE Act” was suspended Aug. 18 due to a lawsuit, according to court documents.
The Stop WOKE Act, introduced Dec. 15, amends the Florida Civil Rights Act, making it unlawful for employers to host mandatory employee trainings that promote certain concepts related to anti-discrimination, diversity, equity and inclusion, according to the website of HR Lawyers Ford Harrison.
If this law were passed, it would further silence and oppress marginalized communities in their own workplace. It violates constitutional rights such as the First and Fourteenth Amendments.
While these rights are still protected in the workplace due to a complaint filed by Honeyfund, educational facilities are still seemingly unprotected. This bill should not be allowed to move further in any aspect.
Proponents of the bill claimed that the state has authority to prevent employers from imposing “repugnant speech on captive employees,” according to an Aug. 18 court document.
U.S. District Judge Mark Walker, the judge who suspended this act, stated the First Amendment doesn’t give the state license to censor speech because it finds it “repugnant” no matter how captive the audience, according to the court document.
This isn’t the first time DeSantis has tried to block free speech, as noticed by Walker.
DeSantis previously pushed SB 7072, a bill filed in April that was made to punish social media platforms that he felt censored conservative voices. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit decided against it on May 23, seeing as it violated social media companies’ First Amendment rights.
The decision to suspend the Stop WOKE Act will be fought by DeSantis and his team.
“Judge Walker has effectively ruled that companies have a First Amendment right to instruct their employees in white supremacy,” Taryn Feske, DeSantis’ communications director, told The Hill. “We disagree and will be appealing his decision.”
Any attempts to continue pushing this bill must be squashed by the court. The effects of such a bill being passed is unfathomable, as some have spoken out on.
“The ‘Stop WOKE Act’ is designed to further exclude marginalized groups from necessary conversations in our schools, communities and workplaces, and to further limit individuals who deserve to exist freely, proudly and to have their stories shared,” said State Legislative Director Cathryn Oakley.
State government is meant to protect our rights, not attack them. Passing the Stop WOKE Act attacks equity in Florida as we know it, which is why it needs to stay as far away as possible from universities and workplaces.
