Category: Academic Reportage

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) – By Eric Zillmer, Professor of Neuropsychology, Drexel University

What sport combines the intensity of a high-wire circus act with the strategic thinking of a grand master chess match?

I’d say the sport of squash, for the first time an Olympic sport at the 2028 Los Angeles Games. Squash has its U.S. epicenter in Philadelphia, which is also considered the birthplace of squash in America. The sport was introduced to the U.S. at the Racquet Club of Philadelphia in 1900, where the first squash doubles court was later established.

James Zug, the preeminent historian of the game, writes about how, in the winter of 1901, 32 men competed at the club in the first squash tournament on American soil. Many other Philadelphia clubs followed, leading to a local squash culture that spread to high schools and colleges.

The United States Squash Racquets Association, now US Squash, was founded in Philadelphia in 1904, later moved to New York City, and in 2021 relocated its offices back to Philly.

I’m a sports psychologist who works with elite professional squash athletes and also writes about the game. As the former athletic director at Drexel University, I helped introduce varsity squash to the school and also assisted in starting a nonprofit community program called SquashSmarts for Philly public school students.

I believe squash is one of Philly’s best-kept secrets, as many Philadelphians do not know our city is host to an Olympic training high-performance center, the U.S. Squash Hall of Fame and youth development programs known as urban squash.

A feast for the brain

Squash originated from the older game of racquets, which was played in London’s prisons during the 19th century.

The vulcanization of rubber by Charles Goodyear in 1839 enabled the creation of a squeezable rubber ball that maintained its original shape after being “squashed” against the wall. The British Commonwealth, through its worldwide military, social and political influence, promoted and grew the game internationally and set standardized rules and courts.

Watching professional squash today feels like being in gym class and science class at the same time: The sport showcases incredible athleticism and celebrates the laws of mathematics.

Squash is best understood in terms of its form and its essence.

The form of squash includes the ancient proportions of the cella of the Parthenon, which held the sacred statue of Athena holding Nike, the goddess of victory. An international squash court is 32 feet by 21 feet, and this ratio of approximately 1 to 1.5 establishes a sense of geometric order. With all walls and angles in play, and emphasizing elements such as time, velocity and space, squash allows for an amazing spectacle of creativity, elegance and speed. It is a feast for the brain.

Mental aspects of the game

But the essence of squash is mental, and the three aspects I find especially intriguing are mindfulness, playfulness and fairness.

Mindfulness: Mindfulness involves not dwelling on the past or worrying about the future. This is easier said than done, especially when a player is exhausted and struggling. The competitive squash player must focus on the moment and anticipate the next. This requires processing information in real time and practicing mindfulness to avoid distractions.

Playfulness: When I was a young athlete, I gave a B effort in practice and an A effort during competition. I had it all wrong.

I now understand that intense, disciplined practices are the foundation for tomorrow’s world-class athlete. There are no shortcuts. Psychologist Angela Duckworth advocates that excellence is 66% grit – which she decribes as a combination of passion, effort and perseverance – with the other 34% being innate talent.

For high-performance athletes, it is beneficial to be a neurotic perfectionist in practice, but not during competition, when they need to be situationally aware. Performance coach Brian Levenson writes about the pro athlete being the opposite of a perfectionist when competing, shifting to being playful, intuitive, confident and adaptable instead.

In other words, practice like a pro, play like a kid.

Fairness: One intriguing aspect of squash is the two competitors share the same space. This requires respect for your opponent as well as the game.

At its best, squash resembles a dance between two foes, with the winner graciously allowing their opponent to leave the court first.

US Squash has made sportsmanship and character a key initiative as the sport grows in popularity at all levels of play. While the art of deception, such as head fakes or varying your swing timing, is a valued tactical skill, blocking the opponent, whether subtle or overt, is not.

Philly’s Olympic center

One of Philadelphia’s most passionate amateur players was the longtime U.S. Sen. Arlen Specter. In 2021, the Arlen Specter US Squash Center, located on the campus of Drexel University, opened and was named in his honor.

The Specter Center is a state-of-the-art training facility and home to Team USA, the administrative center for US Squash, the home for the U.S. Open, and a hub for the U.S. junior and senior national teams, as well as urban squash.

The inclusion of squash in the 2028 Olympics is a milestone for the increasingly international sport. Currently, eight nationalities are represented among the top 10 male and female pro players, although in recent years Egypt has dominated both the men’s and women’s game.

Two U.S. women who are ranked in the world Top 10 are Team USA’s best chances to win gold: Amanda Sobhy, who went undefeated at Harvard, and Philly’s own Olivia Weaver.

If you want to catch them in action before the 2028 games, both will compete at the U.S. Open Squash Championship at the Arlen Specter US Squash Center from Oct. 19 to Oct. 25, 2025.

Read more of our stories about Philadelphia.

Eric Zillmer serves as an unpaid advisor to the following non-profit boards. 2010-present Advisory Board, Philadelphia SquashSmarts; 2019-present PHL Sports Congress, Vice Chair Advisory Board; 2020-present Philadelphia Convention & Visitors Bureau (PHLCVB) Board of Directors; and 2025-present US Squash Board of Directors.

– ref. Squash has been played in Philly for 125 years − a sports psychologist explains why it’s one of the city’s best-kept secrets – https://theconversation.com/squash-has-been-played-in-philly-for-125-years-a-sports-psychologist-explains-why-its-one-of-the-citys-best-kept-secrets-260898

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Art Jipson, Associate Professor of Sociology, University of Dayton

Small local organizations called Active Clubs have spread widely across the U.S. and internationally, using fitness as a cover for a much more alarming mission. These groups are a new and harder-to-detect form of white supremacist organizing that merges extremist ideology with fitness and combat sports culture.

Active Clubs frame themselves as innocuous workout groups on digital platforms and decentralized networks to recruit, radicalize and prepare members for racist violence. The clubs commonly use encrypted messaging apps such as Telegram, Wire and Matrix to coordinate internally.

For broader propaganda and outreach they rely on alternative social media platforms such as Gab, Odysee, VK and sometimes BitChute. They also selectively use mainstream sites such as Instagram, Facebook, X and TikTok, until those sites ban the clubs.

Active Club members have been implicated in orchestrating and distributing neo-Nazi recruitment videos and manifestos. In late 2023, for instance, two Ontario men, Kristoffer Nippak and Matthew Althorpe, were arrested and charged with distributing materials for the neo-Nazi group Atomwaffen Division and the transnational terrorist group Terrorgram.

Following their arrests, Active Club Canada’s public network went dark, Telegram pages were deleted or rebranded, and the club went virtually silent. Nippak was granted bail under strict conditions, while Althorpe remains in custody.

As a sociologist studying extremism and white supremacy since 1993, I have watched the movement shift from formal organizations to small, decentralized cells – a change embodied most clearly by Active Clubs.

White nationalism 3.0

According to private analysts who track far-right extremist activities, the Active Club network has a core membership of 400 to 1,200 white men globally, plus sympathizers, online supporters and passive members. The clubs mainly target young white men in their late teens and twenties.

Since 2020, Active Clubs have expanded rapidly across the United States, Canada and Europe, including the U.K., France, Sweden and Finland. Precise numbers are hard to verify, but the clubs appear to be spreading, according to The Counter Extremism Project, the Anti-Defamation League, the Southern Poverty Law Center and my own research.

The clubs reportedly operate in at least 25 U.S. states, and potentially as many as 34. Active U.S. chapters reportedly increased from 49 in 2023 to 78 in 2025.

The clubs’ rise reflects a broader shift in white supremacist strategy, away from formal organizations and social movements. In 2020, American neo-Nazi Robert Rundo introduced the concept of “White Nationalism 3.0” – a decentralized, branded and fitness-based approach to extremist organizing.

Rundo previously founded the Rise Above Movement, which was a violent, far-right extremist group in the U.S. known for promoting white nationalist ideology, organizing street fights and coordinating through social media. The organization carried out attacks at protests and rallies from 2016 through 2018.

Active Clubs embed their ideology within apolitical activities such as martial arts and weightlifting. This model allows them to blend in with mainstream fitness communities. However, their deeper purpose is to prepare members for racial conflict.

‘You need to learn how to fight’

Active Club messaging glorifies discipline, masculinity and strength – a “warrior identity” designed to attract young men.

“The active club is not so much a structural organization as it is a lifestyle for those willing to work, risk and sweat to embody our ideals for themselves and to promote them to others,” Rundo explained via his Telegram channel.

“They never were like, ‘You need to learn how to fight so you can beat up people of color.’ It was like, ‘You need to learn how to fight because people want to kill you in the future,’” a former Active Club member told Vice News in 2023.

These cells are deliberately small – often under a dozen members – and self-contained, which gives them greater operational security and flexibility. Each club operates semi-autonomously while remaining connected to the broader ideology and digital network.

Expanding globally and deepening ties

Active Clubs maintain strategic and ideological connections with formal white supremacist groups, including Patriot Front, a white nationalist and neofascist group founded in 2017 by Thomas Rousseau after the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Active Clubs share extremist beliefs with these organizations, including racial hierarchy and the “Great Replacement” theory, which claims white populations are being deliberately replaced by nonwhite immigrants. While publicly presenting as fitness groups, they may collaborate with white supremacist groups on recruitment, training, propaganda or public events.

Figures connected to accelerationist groups – organizations that seek to create social chaos and societal collapse that they believe will lead to a race war and the destruction of liberal democracy – played a role in founding the Active Club network. Along with the Rise Above Movement, they include Atomwaffen Division and another neo-Nazi group, The Base – organizations that repackage violent fascism to appeal to disaffected young white men in the U.S.

Brotherhood as a cover

By downplaying explicit hate symbols and emphasizing strength and preparedness, Active Clubs appeal to a new generation of recruits who may not initially identify with overt racism but are drawn to a culture of hypermasculinity and self-improvement.

Anyone can start a local Active Club chapter with minimal oversight. This autonomy makes it hard for law enforcement agencies to monitor the groups and helps the network grow rapidly.

Shared branding and digital propaganda maintain ideological consistency. Through this approach, Active Clubs have built a transnational network of echo chambers, recruitment pipelines and paramilitary-style training in parks and gyms.

Club members engage in activities such as combat sports training, propaganda dissemination and ideological conditioning. Fight sessions are often recorded and shared online as recruitment tools.

Members distribute flyers, stickers and online content to spread white supremacist messages. Active Clubs embed themselves in local communities by hosting events, promoting physical fitness, staging public actions and sharing propaganda.

Potential members first see propaganda on encrypted apps such as Telegram or on social media. The clubs recruit in person at gyms, protests and local events, vetting new members to ensure they share the group’s beliefs and can be trusted to maintain secrecy.

From fringe to functioning network

Based on current information from the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, there are 187 active chapters within the Active Club Network across 27 countries – a 25% increase from late 2023. The Crowd Counting Consortium documented 27 protest events involving Active Clubs in 2022-2023.

However, precise membership numbers remain difficult to ascertain. Some groups call themselves “youth clubs” but share similar ideas and aesthetics and engage in similar activities.

Active Club members view themselves as defenders of Western civilization and masculine virtue. From their perspective, their activities represent noble resistance rather than hate. Members are encouraged to stay secretive, prepare for societal collapse and build a network of committed, fit men ready to act through infiltration, activism or violence.

Hiding in plain sight

Law enforcement agencies, researchers and civil society now face a new kind of domestic threat that wears workout clothes instead of uniforms.

Active Clubs work across international borders, bound by shared ideas and tactics and a common purpose. This is the new white nationalism: decentralized, modernized, more agile and disguised as self-improvement. What appears to be a harmless workout group may be a gateway to violent extremism, one pushup at a time.

Art Jipson 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.

– ref. Active Clubs are white supremacy’s new, dangerous frontier – https://theconversation.com/active-clubs-are-white-supremacys-new-dangerous-frontier-262786

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Sam Wineburg, Emeritus Professor of Education, Stanford University

Mike Evans knew something had to change.

As the lead instructor for American Government 1101 at Georgia State University in 2021, Evans had watched his students over the years show up with fewer facts and more conspiracy theories. Gone were the days when students arrived on campus with dim memories of high school civics. Now they came armed with bold, often misleading beliefs shaped by hours spent each day on TikTok, YouTube and Instagram.

One example of misinformation making the rounds back then was an anonymously posted video that more than half of teens in a national survey said provided “strong evidence” of U.S. voter fraud. The video was actually shot in Russia, crucial context that could be gleaned by entering a few choice keywords into a browser.

Ignoring the problem of online gullibility felt irresponsible – even negligent. How could the course deliver on its aim of helping students become “effective and responsible participants in American democracy” if it turned a blind eye to digital misinformation? At the same time, a major overhaul of a course that enrolls more than 4,000 students each year – with 15 instructors teaching 42 sections in person, online and in a hybrid format – would create a logistical nightmare.

That’s when Evans, a political scientist, came across the Civic Online Reasoning curriculum, developed by the research group I used to lead at Stanford University. The curriculum, which is freely available to anyone, teaches a set of strategies based on how professional fact-checkers evaluate online information.

In fall 2021, he reached out with a question: Could aspects of the curriculum be incorporated into American Government 1101 without turning the whole course on its head?

My team and I thought so.

Teaching informed citizenship

Evans’ challenge was hardly unique to his campus.

For Generation Z, born between 1997 and 2012, social media – especially YouTube, TikTok, Instagram and Snapchat – has become their source of information about the world, eclipsing traditional news outlets. In a survey of more than 1,000 young people ages 13 to 18, 8 in 10 said they encounter conspiracy theories in their social media feeds each week, yet only 39% reported receiving instruction in evaluating the claims they saw there.

We built our Civic Online Reasoning program to address this gap.

When we launched the program in 2018, digital literacy was a catchall that included everything from editing and uploading videos to cyberbullying and sexting. “Checking the credibility of sources” was just one criterion among many buried in a list of desired outcomes.

We narrowed the focus of our program to skills essential to being an informed citizen, such as “lateral reading” − that is, using the full context of the internet to judge the quality of a claim, identify the people or organizations behind it and assess their credibility. Rather than fixate solely on the message, we taught students to vet the messenger: What organizations stand behind the claim? Does the source of the claim have a conflict of interest? What are the source’s credentials or expertise?

We tested our approach in an experiment in 12th grade classrooms teaching government in Lincoln, Nebraska, public schools.

Across six hours of instruction – two hours less than the average teen spends online each day – students nearly doubled in their ability to locate quality information compared to a control group. We thought it wouldn’t be a huge leap to extend our approach to college classrooms.

In a version of this program modified for Evans’ course, we designed six short modules that could be used asynchronously, meaning that students could complete them on their own time, regardless of course format. Unlike information literacy lessons that soar above the particulars of any one discipline, our modules were closely tied to course content.

In a unit on the executive branch, for instance, students examined an Instagram video that falsely claimed President Joe Biden wanted Americans to pay more at the gas pump. In a module on the judiciary, they watched a video on TikTok about Ketanji Brown Jackson’s Supreme Court confirmation, posted by a partisan, left-leaning organization.

We created videos that pulled back the curtain by deconstructing tactics common in political campaigns – quotes ripped from context, videos spliced and selectively edited, and corporate-funded websites that masquerade as grassroots efforts.

We also taught students how to check facts like the pros. The main strategy was lateral reading – searching across the internet to see what other, more credible sources say about an organization or influencer. We challenged common assumptions too, such as that Wikipedia is always unreliable. Not true, especially for “protected pages,” indicated by a padlock icon at the top of an article, which prevent editorial changes except those made by established Wikipedians. Another is the belief that a dot-org website has passed rigorous tests that qualify it as a charity, which is never true. Dot-org has always been an “open” domain that anyone can register, no questions asked.

These lessons took just 150 minutes in total over the semester, and instructors didn’t need to change a thing; they just listed the lessons on the course schedule.

Positive outcomes, modest effort

Did this approach work for Evans and his American Government 1101 students?

Across two semesters in one academic year, 3,488 students took a test at the beginning of the course and again at the end. It included items such as one in which students evaluated a website that claimed it “does not represent any industry or political group” but is actually backed by fossil fuel interests.

In June, Evans, two co-authors and I uploaded a preprint of a journal article, which hasn’t yet been peer reviewed, that documents the experiment and its results. We found that from the beginning to the end of the semester, students became a lot smarter at identifying shady sources and more confident in evaluating where information comes from. Students’ scores showing how well they were able to do this improved by 18%. Even better, 80% said they “learned important things” from the modules.

Not bad for an easily adopted addition to the course.

These results add to other studies we’ve conducted, such as one in a college nutrition class and one in a rhetoric and writing intro course, that similarly showed how educators can improve students’ digital literacy – and their awareness of misinformation – without causing a major disruption to the curriculum.

And I believe it’s needed. A chasm separates the approved content that appears on students’ reading lists and the massive amount of unregulated, unverified and unreliable content they consume online.

The good news? This intervention could work in any subject where misinformation runs wild: history, nutrition, economics, biology and politics. Findings similar to ours from other college campuses buoy our confidence in the approach.

These changes don’t require waiting for a big revolution. Small steps can go a long way. And in a world flooded with misinformation, helping students learn to sort fact from fiction might be the most civic thing we can do.

Sam Wineburg received funding from the William & Flora Hewlett Foundation for this research. He is a board member of the not-for-profit Digital Inquiry Group (inquirygroup.org), which now operates the Civic Online Reasoning curriculum.

– ref. College students are bombarded by misinformation, so this professor taught them fact-checking 101 − here’s what happened – https://theconversation.com/college-students-are-bombarded-by-misinformation-so-this-professor-taught-them-fact-checking-101-heres-what-happened-262409

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) – By Barbara Kates-Garnick, Professor of Practice in Energy Policy, The Fletcher School, Tufts University

When the Trump administration announced it was moving to eliminate dozens of U.S. climate policies, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin said he was sending “a dagger straight into the heart of the climate change religion.”

That drive – to both repeal environmental regulations and cast doubt on science – reflects the Trump administration’s approach to environment policy.

Deregulation has long been a key theme in Republican environmental policy. The conflict between the obligation to protect public health and the desire to boost markets traces back to Ronald Reagan’s presidential administration. Reagan’s perspective that government is not a solution to problems, but is the problem instead, set the stage for Republican administrations that followed.

Reagan argued that the growth of government spending and business regulation had stymied economic prosperity. Environmental regulations were a prime target.

Forty years later, America is seeing many of the same concepts in the Trump administration. However, its strategy could have a greater effect than Reagan ever envisioned.

Slashing budgets and staffing

There are many ways to kneecap government agencies: Instituting massive budget cuts, cutting staff with critical functions and appointing leadership whose goal is limiting the reach and effectiveness of the very agencies they direct are just a few.

In these efforts, Reagan and Trump had similar approaches to the EPA, although with different levels of intensity.

Trump’s EPA budget plan for 2026 includes a draconian 50% cut from the previous year and the lowest budget proposal, when adjusted for inflation, since Reagan. Staff cuts in just the first six months of the second Trump administration put the agency’s total employment at 12,448, down from 16,155 in January.

Reagan dissolved the EPA Office of Enforcement to limit “unnecessary regulation,” which resulted in a 80% decline in actions to enforce environmental regulations. Trump is also stopping enforcement actions, dismantling the EPA’s Science and Research Office and politicizing the agency’s science by putting political appointees in charge, moves that undermine EPA’s independence and expertise.

Both cut EPA’s budget, but that alone does not reduce an agency’s effectiveness.

Politicizing EPA leadership

When the EPA was founded in 1970 during the Nixon administration, it represented a bipartisan consensus: After decades of auto exhaust, polluted waterways and smog-filled air, environmental protection had become a national policy priority.

But industries that EPA regulated argued that the costs of implementing the agency’s mandates were too high. That created tension between economics and science and enforcement.

As part of his “government is not the solution” approach, Reagan issued an executive order shortly after taking office in 1981 requiring federal agencies to submit all proposed rules to the White House Office of Management and Budget before making them public. In Reagan’s eyes, this approach centralized power in the White House and was a way to eliminate burdensome regulations before the agencies announced them to the public.

He also appointed an EPA administrator who shared his anti-government perspective. Anne Gorsuch Burford was a lawyer and state legislator from Colorado, where she routinely voted against toxic waste cleanup and auto pollution controls.

Once in Washington, she appointed several people to the EPA’s leadership team with direct ties to industries the EPA regulated. An example was Rita Lavelle, head of the EPA’s toxic waste programs, who was later convicted of perjury for lying to Congress about when she knew her former employer, a defense contractor, was disposing of toxic waste at a now notorious dump site.

These appointments were an example of regulatory capture by the industries EPA was in charge of overseeing. Anne Gorsuch Burford was held in contempt of Congress for not turning over records related to the Superfund cleanup of the same hazardous waste site, which led to her resignation. The Superfund program to clean up toxic waste dumps was new and one of EPA’s largest programs at the time.

The scandals, broken staff morale, stripped budgets and fights over policy discredited the agency.

Going after government scientists

Anne Gorsuch Burford’s deregulation efforts weren’t fully successful, in part because EPA staff experts rallied to preserve science and regulatory functions. They leaked materials about delays in the Superfund site cleanup to sympathetic congressional staff, who in turn found support from Republican and Democratic senators.

That history may have influenced the Trump administration’s strategy toward the federal bureaucracy’s staff experts, who Trump calls “the Deep State.”

The Department of Government Efficiency, an unofficial group Trump set up in early 2025 headed by Elon Musk, directed the firing of tens of thousands of government scientists and other staff with expertise that government agencies rely on. Thousands more have resigned amid intimidation tactics such as surveillance.

Trump’s head of the Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vought, has been clear about targeting bureaucrats. He said in 2023: “We want their funding to be shut down so that the EPA can’t do all of the rules against our energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so. We want to put them in trauma.”

There is a clear focus today on EPA programs that don’t align with the administration’s views. Programs related to environmental justice for low-income communities are in the line of fire. The appointment of people from the chemical, fossil fuel and corporate industries to high-level regulatory and legal positions raises questions about regulatory capture – whether their focus will be more on the health of the industries they oversee than on the health of the public.

The first Trump administration had a focus on reforming permitting and bureaucracy. While appearing radical at the time, the revamping of scientific boards to include more industry representatives, the undoing of power plant rules and the lessening of enforcement hobbled but did not completely undo the agency.

The second Trump administration, in actively supporting fossil fuel “energy dominance,” is taking steps to not just eliminate regulations but to ensure future administrations can’t bring the regulations back, by using a complex set of legal arguments related to the regulation of greenhouse gases.

At the same time, the administration is trying to discredit scientific research to downplay the risks of a warming planet.

The Reagan administration, while it also pushed for deregulation and expanded permitting of oil, gas and coal leases, embraced some elements of environmental protection. Reagan designated more than 10 million acres as protected wilderness and signed the Coastal Barriers Resources Act, which helped protect 3.5 million acres of shoreline from development. When Reagan signed the Montreal Protocol in 1988 to help protect the ozone layer, he cited scientific data showing the growing risks of ozone-depleting substances.

When Congress doesn’t push back

There is another critical difference between the first and second Trump administrations: The current Republican-controlled Congress is consenting to almost every request the president makes.

Congress has a constitutional responsibility to be a check on the executive branch, and a bipartisan Congress has long taken an active role in oversight and investigation involving environmental issues.

In 2025, however, Congress has approved most of Trump’s demands, including voting to repeal much of the Inflation Reduction Act, a package of pro-environment spending it had just passed two years earlier and that included many projects in Republican districts.

The administration’s effort to eliminate U.S. climate policies will take time and face lawsuits.

In an irony of history, Anne Gorsuch Burford’s son Neil Gorsuch now sits on the Supreme Court. His vote when those cases come before the court may be the ultimate Reagan legacy on the Trump EPA.

Barbara Kates-Garnick 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.

– ref. Like Reagan, Trump is slashing US environment regulations, but his strategy may have a far deeper impact – https://theconversation.com/like-reagan-trump-is-slashing-us-environment-regulations-but-his-strategy-may-have-a-far-deeper-impact-262929