Category: Analysis

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Harriet Fletcher, Lecturer in Media and Communication, Anglia Ruskin University

Based on the bestselling novel by Freida McFadden, The Housemaid is a dark, sexy and satisfying thriller with plenty of twists to enjoy along the way.

Millie (Sydney Sweeney) applies for a job as a housemaid for the wealthy Winchester family. We first meet her as she pulls up to the grand Winchester house in her run-down car – a gated mansion with echoes of the sinister and mysterious Manderley in Hitchcock’s Rebecca. What secrets might be contained behind these gates? Millie is about to find out.

She is interviewed by Nina Winchester (Amanda Seyfried), an eccentric and over-familiar housewife who is so taken with Millie that she immediately offers her the job on a live-in basis. An alarmingly artificial family portrait looms large in this early scene, suggesting that the Waspy Winchesters are more artist’s impression than reality.

Millie is given a bedroom in the attic – a strange place to lodge a housemaid, considering the enormity and grandeur of the Winchester mansion. The attic is stark, claustrophobic and loaded with gothic literary connotations that the story knowingly leans into.

Also part of the Winchester household is Nina’s charming and sensitive husband Andrew (Brandon Sklenar) and their cold, and at times creepy, daughter Cecelia (Indiana Elle). Sklenar expertly plays all the right notes as Andrew – the heartthrob husband, doting dad and even Millie’s patient confidant, routinely apologising for his wife’s erratic behaviour.

He grows even more compelling as the film gains momentum. Directed by Paul Feig of Bridesmaids and Spy fame, The Housemaid is a thriller tinged with comedy. Its best, darkly funny moments are often delivered by Sklenar in climactic scenes where his lines land with perfect timing.

Cecelia, meanwhile, is an archetypal creepy kid, often found tinkering with a rickety old doll’s house that uncannily resembles the Winchester mansion, or spouting cryptic and ominous messages. That said, she serves her purpose of dropping narrative breadcrumbs as we piece together the family’s secrets.

Sweeney is adept at portraying the enigmatic housemaid, Millie. Early on, Millie confesses to us via voice-over that she has lied on her resume: she is under-qualified, sleeps in her car and washes in public restrooms.

She is desperate to hold on to this job, no matter what. Sweeney excels in playing a character who seems broken and desperate, without veering into melodrama. Even in the most high-stakes moments, there is a captivating sense of control and subtlety to her performance.

Seyfried’s troubled housewife is the foil to Sweeney’s mysterious housemaid. It’s here that Seyfried’s notably expressive style of acting comes powerfully into play. Excessively warm but with sharp edges, Nina too is something of an enigma. From her interactions with so-called friends – a shallow coterie of Stepford-wife types who gossip about her the moment she leaves the room – we learn that Nina’s life is far from perfect.

The Housemaid is an adaptation of McFadden’s hugely successful novel. She has been dubbed the “queen of crime fiction” on BookTok (the TikTok subculture dedicated to discussing fiction) due to the immense popularity of her work among influencers.

As this origin story suggests, The Housemaid is an unapologetic crowd pleaser. It doesn’t reach the intellectual heights of a thriller like Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl, which straddles genre and literary fiction. In fact, when I asked a friend why she’d read the novel, she said she’d Googled “what’s the easiest book to read?”

The Housemaid has less to say than Gone Girl about the complexity of gender roles and relationship dynamics, and I’d be surprised if any of the performances receive the kind of critical acclaim Rosamund Pike earned for her iconic turn in David Fincher’s adaptation. But let’s be clear: The Housemaid is a hell of a good time at the cinema.

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Harriet Fletcher 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.

– ref. The Housemaid: this dark, sexy thriller is a seriously satisfying watch – https://theconversation.com/the-housemaid-this-dark-sexy-thriller-is-a-seriously-satisfying-watch-272116

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Quynh Hoang, Lecturer in Marketing and Consumption, Department of Marketing and Strategy, University of Leicester

Switching off can be surprisingly expensive. Much like the smoking cessation boom of the 1990s, the digital detox business – spanning hardware, apps, telecoms, workplace wellness providers, digital “wellbeing suites” and tourism – is now a global industry in its own right.

People are increasingly willing to pay to escape the technology they feel trapped by. The global digital detox market is currently valued at around US$2.7 billion (£2bn), and forecast to double in size by 2033.

Hardware manufacturers such as Light Phone, Punkt, Wisephone and Nokia sell minimalist “dumb phones” at premium prices, while subscription-based website blockers such as Freedom, Forest, Offtime and RescueTime have turned restraint into a lucrative revenue stream.

Wellness tourism operators have capitalised too: tech-free travel company Unplugged recently expanded to 45 phone-free cabins across the UK and Spain, marketing disconnection as a high-value experience.

However, my new research, with colleagues at Lancaster University, suggests this commercialised form of abstinence rarely extinguishes digital cravings – instead merely acting as a temporary pause.

We carried out a 12-month netnography focusing on the NoSurf Reddit community of people interested in increasing their productivity, plus 21 in-depth interviews (conducted remotely) with participants living in different countries. We found that rather than actively confronting their habits, participants often reported outsourcing self-discipline to blocker apps, timed lockboxes and minimalist phones.

Joan*, a NoSurf participant, explained how she relies on app-blocking software not to bolster her self-control, but to negate the need for it entirely. “To me, it’s less about using willpower, which is a precious resource … and more about removing the need to exert willpower in the first place.”

Philosopher Slavoj Žižek defines this kind of behaviour – delegating the work of self-regulation to a market product – as “interpassivity”. This produces what he calls “false activity”: people thinking they are addressing a problem by engaging with consumer solutions that actually leave their underlying patterns unchanged.

Several of our detoxing participants described a cycle in which each relapse prompted them to try yet another tool, entrenching their dependency on the commercial ecosystem. Sophia, on the other hand, just wished for a return to “dumb phones with the full keyboard again, like they had in 2008”, adding: “I would use one of those for the rest of my life if I could.”

Individualised digital detox interventions have been found to produce mixed and often short-lived effects. Participants in our study described short breaks in which they reduced activity briefly before resuming familiar patterns.

Many users engaged in what sociologist Hartmut Rosa calls “oases of deceleration” – temporary slowdowns intended not to quit but recover from overload. Like a pitstop, the digital detox offered them momentary relief while ultimately enabling a swift return to screens, often at similar or higher levels of engagement than before.

Community-wide detox initiatives

While the commercialisation of digital detox is often portrayed as a western trend, the Asia-Pacific region is the world’s fastest-growing market for these goods and services. But in Asia, we also see some examples of community- or country-level, non-commercial responses to the problem of digital overload.

In central Japan, Toyoake has introduced the country’s first city-wide guidance on smartphone use. Families are encouraged to set shared rules, including children stopping device use after 9pm. This reframes digital restraint as a community practice, not a test of individual willpower.

In western India, the 15,000 residents of Vadgaon are asked to practise a nightly, 90-minute digital switch-off. Phones and TVs go dark at 7pm, after which many of the villagers gather outdoors. What began during the pandemic is now a ritual that shows healthy tech habits can be easier together than alone.

And in August 2025, South Korea – one of the world’s most connected countries – passed a new law banning smartphone use in school classrooms from next March, adding to the countries around the world with such a rule. A similar policy in the Netherlands was found to have improved focus among students.

The commercial detox industry thrives because personal solutions are easy to sell, while systemic ones are much harder to implement. In other areas ranging from gambling addiction to obesity, policies often focus on personal behaviour such as self-regulation or individual choice, rather than addressing the structural forces and powerful lobbies that can perpetuate harm.

How to avoid detox industry traps

To address the problem of digital overload, I believe tech firms need to move beyond cosmetic “digital wellbeing” features that merely snooze distractions, and take proper responsibility for the smartphone technologies that offer coercive engagement by default. Governments, meanwhile, can learn from initiatives in Asia and elsewhere that pair communal support with enforced rules around digital restraint.

At the same time, if you’re considering a digital detox yourself, here are some suggestions for how to reduce the chances of getting caught in a commercial detox loop.

1. Don’t delegate your agency

Be wary of tools that promise to do the work for you. While you may think you’re solving the problem this way, your underlying habits are likely to remain unchanged.

2. Beware content rebound

We found that digital detoxers often seek real experiences like going outdoors and “touching grass” – but then feel pulled to translate them back into posts, photos and updates.

3. Seek solidarity, not products

Like the villagers of Vadgaon, try to align your disconnection with other people’s. It’s harder to scroll when everyone else has agreed to stop.

4. Reclaim boredom

We often detox to be more “productive” – but try embracing boredom instead. As the philosopher Martin Heidegger has noted, profound boredom is a space where reflection becomes possible. And that can be very useful indeed.

*Names of research participants have been changed to protect their privacy.

Quynh Hoang 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.

– ref. Digital detox: how to switch off without paying the price – new research – https://theconversation.com/digital-detox-how-to-switch-off-without-paying-the-price-new-research-272037

Source: The Conversation – UK – By James Beale, Senior Lecturer in Sport Psychology, University of East London

Across the UK and far beyond, a quiet shift in midlife exercise is underway. A decade ago, the cultural image of midlife fitness was the Lycra-clad cyclist speeding along suburban roads. Now, a different scene has emerged: women in hats and tow-floats stepping into freezing lakes at dawn – especially through the winter.

Outdoor swimming participation has risen sharply worldwide, and women make up a striking proportion of regular year-round swimmers. To many observers, this seems counterintuitive. Why would busy women in midlife choose cold water as their weekly reset?

A new qualitative study published in the European Journal of Ecopsychology set out to understand what this practice does for wellbeing – not just physically, but psychologically. Rather than simply asking swimmers how they feel, the research examined “flourishing”. This is a term from positive psychology that describes a sense of thriving. It includes positive relationships, confidence, vitality, emotional balance and coping with challenges.

Nine women aged 39 to 59 who swim year-round at a monitored lake in south London took part in in-depth interviews. These conversations were led by a female interviewer who became familiar with the swimming setting – someone who spent time at the lake, observed routines, and created a space where women felt comfortable talking about personal themes that are often hidden.

What emerged was a detailed picture of how nature based outdoor swimming becomes woven into identity, social life and emotional resources. Several women contrasted the lake with indoor pools – chlorine, noise and confinement made some feel uncomfortable, while the lake felt expansive and calming. They described the atmosphere as “low-key”, “homely” and grounded in quiet mutual support rather than competition.

Flourishing showed up in many ways. Women spoke of uplifting emotion after swimming and a calmer outlook that stayed with them long after leaving the water. Some felt better able to face demanding days. Strong social bonds formed too, with swimmers talking about a caring female community built around shared routines.

Nature played an important role. The lake environment – light on water, wildlife, weather and seasons – was part of the experience, not decoration. Immersion helped women feel like “physical, natural beings”, suggesting that being in nature helped them connect with themselves differently.

Safety mattered. Lifeguards, water-quality checks and visibility gear created conditions where women could come alone and still feel secure – enabling regular participation without fears that might deter them elsewhere.

One of the most surprising findings surfaced without prompting: menopause.

Participants repeatedly linked open-water swimming with easing symptoms or navigating emotional changes at midlife. This is the first scientific study to show women themselves spontaneously connecting cold lake swimming with relief during menopause – something not widely reported in wellbeing research.

Opportunity and equality

The sample – white, middle-class women – reflects a common pattern in outdoor swimming communities internationally. This highlights opportunity and inequality: access to safe places to swim, time and equipment often depend on geography and resources.

Later exploratory work from the same research group has begun examining how Black women experience outdoor exercise differently, where belonging, safety and visibility can be harder to achieve.

Taken together, these findings help explain why so many middle-aged women are flocking to cold lakes. Outdoor swimming offers challenge, community, soothing immersion, confidence, nature connection and, unexpectedly, support during menopause.

Instead of being defined by deficit or decline, the women in this study through open-water swimming framed midlife as a period of growth, connection and resilience.

As open-water swimming continues to rise, from New Zealand’s harbours to Scandinavian fjords, the stories emerging from this London lake shed light on why women keep stepping into icy water: not just to exercise, but to flourish.

This article draws on research conducted with co-researcher JJ Fisher, who led participant interviews. The author has also previously published research on wellbeing among middle-aged recreational cyclists, indirectly referenced here.

– ref. How open-water swimming can transform midlife wellbeing – new research – https://theconversation.com/how-open-water-swimming-can-transform-midlife-wellbeing-new-research-271589

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Thomas White, Lecturer in China and Sustainable Development, King’s College London

Dust storms regularly affect northern China, including its capital Beijing. In recent years, Chinese scientists and officials have traced the source of the dust storms to its neighbour Mongolia.

Much of the dust over Beijing in the spring of 2023, for example, originated from parts of Mongolia, seemingly driven by the warming and drying of the climate in the region.

Mongolia’s environment has come to be seen as China’s problem. Chinese netizens have blamed Mongolia’s herders and miners for the exploitation of natural resources and environmental destruction.

In pointing the finger at Mongolians, they ignore the role that Chinese demand for Mongolian resources plays in Mongolia’s environmental problems. In the south of Mongolia, it is dust churned up by mining trucks carrying coal to China on unpaved roads that locals are concerned about.

In August 2026, a major UN conference will be held in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia’s capital, on the subject of tackling desertification. According to the Mongolian organisers of the conference, the country is one of the most severely affected by this process, whereby fertile land becomes like a desert and vegetation disappears, with almost 77% of its land now classified as degraded.

In recent years, China has sought to export its own expertise in preventing and tackling desertification to Mongolia, and this conference will provide a platform for China to showcase its global leadership on tackling this phenomenon.

Questions remain, however, about how Chinese anti-desertification measures might work within Mongolia. In China, for instance, these measures have often targeted herders, while in Mongolia, nomadic herding is central to ideas of national identity.

In the spring of 2023, China was hit by a series of unexpectedly severe dust storms. Vulnerable residents of Beijing were told to remain inside their homes as the sky turned an apocalyptic orange.

Dust storms like these originate from dry bare soil exposed to seasonal winds in semi-arid regions, often hundreds if not thousands of miles away.

Increasing dust emissions are linked to climate change, reducing rainfall and increasing temperature, and to desertification. Land degradation due to poor management practices exposes bare soil, as well as leading to the expansion of huge areas of “sand seas”, which kick up dust.

In recent decades, China has adopted a series of measures within its own borders in an attempt to prevent desertification. Notable among these has been the “great green wall”, initiated in 1978, which seeks to constrain the many deserts and sand seas in the north, north-east and north-west of the country by stabilising the shifting sand with extensive tree-planting. These also act as windbreaks.

Building a relationship?

In 2023, the China-Mongolia desertification prevention and control centre was established in Ulaanbaatar. At a meeting between China’s president Xi Jinping and his Mongolian counterpart Khürelsükh Ukhnaa, Xi pledged support for Mongolia’s “billion tree movement”. This initiative aims to plant that number of trees across the country by 2030.

Cooperation with Mongolia has also offered China an opportunity to demonstrate its expertise in desertification control techniques outside its borders.

Besides using traditional tree-planting and straw checkerboard sand barriers, Chinese engineers have developed techniques for immobilising sand dunes, as well as significant expertise in steel and concrete sand fence designs – and increasingly, in the installation of extensive solar panel farms, including novel vertical panels that also act as wind breaks. However, stopping sand dunes at the desert’s edge doesn’t necessarily prevent dust blowing off the soil in sparsely vegetated semi-arid land.

More broadly, China’s efforts to control desertification within its borders have targeted the livelihoods of herders, who are often from one of China’s ethnic minorities.

Official narratives have blamed herders for desertification, claiming they mismanage rangelands by accumulating excessive numbers of livestock. China’s top-down, state-led environmental plan has seen herders resettled away from the grasslands in a policy known as “ecological migration”. Those who remain have often been subjected to grazing bans or strict limits on the number of animals they can keep.

These policies are based on the privatisation of grassland use, often accompanied by the erection of fencing. This has severely reduced the mobility of herders. Some researchers suggest it is, in fact, this privatisation of land that is primarily responsible for the degradation of China’s grasslands.

It increases localised grazing pressure by preventing the herders and their livestock moving around. Enclosing large tracts of grassland to be turned into forests or solar farms further reduces the land available to herders.

So will China’s model of desertification prevention and control be exported to its neighbours? A recent headline in the South China Morning Post describes the possible expansion of China’s great green wall into Mongolia. Further afield, China has been a model for a similar project in Africa.

The idea of a Chinese great wall, however “green”, expanding into Mongolia would be unpalatable to many Mongolians, because of their deep anxieties over China’s territorial ambitions.

Official announcements from China talk instead of the joint construction of an “ecological security barrier” on the Mongolian plateau, which straddles the border between the two countries.

Unlike China, Mongolia’s grasslands remain largely unfenced. The country is proud of its nomadic heritage, and the kind of large-scale fencing of rangelands and livestock reduction programmes that have been seen in China would be highly contentious in democratic Mongolia.

For now, cooperation remains confined to small, isolated “demonstration zones”, scientific exchange, and support for Mongolia’s own billion-tree movement – which, not surprisingly perhaps, makes no reference to walls.

The upcoming UN conference in Mongolia will take place during the UN’s International Year of Rangelands and Pastoralists. It remains to be seen how China’s environmental diplomacy there engages with the growing international recognition of the positive role that herders can play in fostering biodiversity, and in helping prevent grasslands becoming deserts.

Thomas White receives funding from UKRI (ESRC) (ES/W005433/1).

Andreas Baas has held a 2025 President’s International Fellowship (PIFI) with the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Han Cheng 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.

– ref. China and Mongolia are battling to control massive dust storms – https://theconversation.com/china-and-mongolia-are-battling-to-control-massive-dust-storms-267585

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Wasim Ahmed, Senior Lecturer in Marketing, University of Hull

A criminal court recently pored over the social media posts of the ex-footballer Joey Barton and found them to be “grossly offensive”. So much so that he was handed a suspended prison sentence, ordered to do 200 hours of unpaid work in the community and pay more than £20,000 in costs.

We also examined Barton’s comments on female footballers and pundits as part of our research into harmful online rhetoric against women and girls in sport.

Our study found that his posts not only targeted individual women – including Mary Earps, Eni Aluko, Lucy Ward and Ava Easdon – but also alleged that it fuelled a wider culture of online hostility toward female athletes.

This is part of a digital culture which normalises misogyny, which then encourages online violence against women. They help to legitimise harmful narratives that might otherwise remain at the fringes of online discourse and extremes of society.

When people with significant reach engage in abusive or inflammatory commentary, their posts act as catalysts that shape polarised and hostile digital environments.

During our research we noticed that this can often occur with the symbolic use of emojis, using seemingly trivial icons as coded tools of intimidation and ridicule. In the extensive online abuse aimed at female athletes and pundits, we found combinations of weapon emojis such as 🗡️ (knife), 🔫 (gun), or 💣 (bomb) which were often paired with female-identifying emojis or gendered slurs to imply threats or intimidation.

We also found animal emojis like 🐷 (pig), 🐽 (pig snout), or 🐕 (dog) used to dehumanise women. There were sexualised emojis such as 🍑 (buttocks), 🍆 (phallic symbol), or 👅 (tongue) deployed alongside derogatory comments to humiliate or objectify them.

These emojis are often used to mask hostility as humour, making abusive remarks appear playful, despite inflicting real harm. They were also employed as a strategic tool for evading moderation systems, meaning that they can avoid having their comments and messages removed.

Misogyny influencers

Digital violence functions as a mechanism of professional exclusion and economic sabotage. When female pundits are bombarded with threats of rape and death simply for analysing a football match, the goal of the abuse is clear: to silence them and drive them out of the industry.

This creates a violent effect where aspiring female journalists may self-censor or abandon their careers to avoid becoming the next target of a misogynistic pile-on.

And while celebrities can themselves be the victims of online abuse, our research shows that they can also use their status to incite hate. Networked misogyny and the mass circulation of anti-women and anti-feminist sentiments online have been perpetuated by popular online figures such as Barton, creating a new form of influencer known as “misogyny influencers”.

These influencers wield disproportionate cultural power. And when they engage in misogynistic or aggressive rhetoric, they reinforce and embolden harmful norms in online communities. Their influence can mobilise thousands of users and create hostile environments that women in sport must navigate daily.

For our research shows that when public figures attack women online, their followers often replicate and escalate the abuse. This turns personal hostility into a much broader campaign of misogyny.

Barton’s conviction – which he is appealing – demonstrates that status or celebrity does not shield individuals from responsibility when their words could incite hate. It affirms that online violence carries consequences and that public figures who weaponise their influence to target women can no longer assume impunity.

However, we must also confront a paradoxical reality. For someone like Barton, a suspended sentence may not be a deterrent, but a marketing asset. In the “manosphere” economy, legal censure often validates the influencer’s status as an anti-establishment truth-teller being “silenced” by the state.

By avoiding immediate jail time, Barton could spin this verdict to his supporters as a battle scar in a “war on free speech”. This allows him to use the controversy to his advantage, framing himself as a martyr while facing minimal restrictions on his liberty.

It is evident that online abuse is a persistent and highly significant societal issue that requires attention. It should be recognised as a direct threat to the safety of recipients and those exposed to such violence through online platforms.

Protecting athletes will require stronger policies, clearer sanctions for repeat offender and support for those targeted. Addressing this growing threat is essential if women and girls are to participate safely and fearlessly in sport.

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.

– ref. How figures like Joey Barton could fuel a culture of online hostility toward female athletes – new research – https://theconversation.com/how-figures-like-joey-barton-could-fuel-a-culture-of-online-hostility-toward-female-athletes-new-research-271878