Category: English

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Cora Lingling Xu, Associate Professor in Sociology of Education, Durham University

In November 2012, during my first year as a PhD student, a 23-year-old medical student knocked on my door. Earlier that day, we had been discussing our ages in our shared kitchen. At 30, I had stayed silent, feeling a sharp sting of embarrassment next to my 20-something housemates.

But this student was determined to get an answer from me. He shoved his passport in my face and demanded to see mine. When I admitted my age, he laughed and said: “Wow, you’re so old.”

In that moment, I felt a deep sense of shame and failure. But after a decade of research tracking more than 100 young people, I want to tell my younger self: you weren’t failing. You simply hadn’t inherited the same amount of time as your peer.

My work with students in China shows that social inequality isn’t just about money or status. It’s also about time inheritance.

I started my PhD at 30 only after spending five years working to clear my family’s debts and move my parents out of a house where sewage regularly flooded their floors. My housemate, whose father and grandfather were doctors and Cambridge alumni, had inherited “banked time” – a cushion of security that allowed him to glide straight to the academic starting line.

Banked time v borrowed time

To make sense of this, I distinguish between two kinds of time inheritance.

Some young people receive banked time. They start life with a “full tank”: parents who can afford to support them through unpaid internships, gap years, or an extra degree, and the freedom to change course or repeat a year without financial ruin. This creates a sense of temporal security that allows them to take measured risks, explore their interests, and wait for the best opportunities to arise. They have “slack” in the system that actually generates more time in the long run.

Others live on borrowed time. They start with an “empty tank,” already owing years of labour to their families before they even begin. Because their education often relies on the extreme sacrifices of parents or the missed opportunities of siblings, these students carry a heavy debt-paying mentality.

A delay in earning feels dangerous because it isn’t just a personal setback; it is a failure to repay a moral and economic debt to those who supported them. This pressure works in two punishing ways.

Some make “self-sabotaging” choices by picking lower-tier degrees or precarious jobs just because they offer immediate income. Others find their education takes far longer as they are forced to pause their studies to work and save, trapped in a cycle of paying off “time interest” before they can finally begin their own lives.

Take Jiao, a brilliant student from a poor rural family in China. He scored high enough to enter one of the country’s top two universities: Peking or Tsinghua, the equivalent of Oxford or Cambridge. Yet he chose a second-tier university.

He felt he could not afford the “time cost” of the mandatory military training that was required at the elite universities at the time he was applying. This would have delayed his ability to earn money and support his parents. On paper, this looks like a self-sabotaging decision. In reality, it was a survival strategy shaped by time poverty: he simply did not have months to spare.

In contrast, Yi, born into a comfortable Beijing family, dropped out of university after just one year because she didn’t like the teaching. She didn’t see this as a failure, but as “cutting her losses”. With her parents’ backing, she quickly applied to an elite university in Australia. Yi had inherited banked time, which gave her the security to try again.

Both students were capable. What differed was how much time they could afford to lose.

Lost learning

Although my research focuses on China, these temporal mechanisms are not culturally unique. They show up in different forms in other countries.

We saw this during post-pandemic debates about “lost learning”. In the UK, for example, tutoring programmes and extra school hours were offered as fixes. But these only work if pupils have the spare time to use them.

For those already caring for siblings or parents, working part-time or commuting long distances, the extra provision can become another burden: deepening, rather than reducing, time debt.

In universities, the cost-of-living crisis has pushed more students into long hours of paid work during term. They get through their degrees, but at a price: less time to build networks, take internships or simply think about their next steps.

Rigid career “windows” also matter. Age-limited grants, early-career schemes that expire a few years after graduation and expectations of a seamless CV all act as a time tax on those who took longer to reach the starting line. They might have been caring for relatives, changing country, or working to stay afloat.

Making education fairer means being aware of this time disparity. This could mean designing catch-up and tutoring schemes around the actual schedules of working and caring students, not an idealised timetable.

Within academia, extending age and career-stage limits on scholarships, fellowships and early-career posts would mean that those who started “late” are not permanently penalised. And more recognition of the burden of unpaid care and emotional labour in both universities and workplaces would be a valuable step.

Ultimately, doing well in education is not just about how we spend our time. It is about who is allowed to have time in the first place, and who is quietly starting the race already in debt.

Dr Cora Lingling Xu receives funding from the Cambridge International Trust, the Sociological Review Foundation, the ESRC Social Science Festival,the British Academy and various grants from Queens’ College Cambridge, Cambridge University, Keele University and Durham University.

– ref. Another kind of student debt is entrenching inequality – https://theconversation.com/another-kind-of-student-debt-is-entrenching-inequality-274142

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Anthony Ince, Senior Lecturer in Human Geography, Cardiff University

As winter set in across the UK, the flags strung up during 2025’s controversial Operation Raise the Colours were becoming tatty and grey. Yet, they continue to send an important message: despite increasingly digitally connected lives, neighbourhoods still matter when it comes to political views.

The strength of feeling among those putting up flags since summer 2025 and those who objected to them is proof that people filter big political issues through the places where they live and work. People measure their lives through local heritage, memories and a sense of home. So these areas are also battlegrounds for competing visions of what it means to belong.

Reform UK has clearly recognised this. It has worked hard to win council elections in England, appealing to concerns held across the political spectrum about the character and decline of neighbourhoods. But such tactics tend to to push people’s buttons on sensitive issues such as immigration and encourage resentment.

Historically, local civic institutions – pubs, working men’s clubs, trade union halls, church halls – came into their own when communities faced hard times. They acted as emergency shelters and dining halls, information points and advice services, they gave emotional and practical support, as well as being spaces for enjoyment and celebration. Some such spaces still exist, but today, much of this social infrastructure has declined or been dismantled.

Into this vacuum steps populist right and far-right parties. They generate support by offering some residents a renewed sense of community, security or hope. In Epping, a recent site of major anti-immigrant protests, some residents have established Essex Spartans, a vigilante patrol group to “protect women, children and the elderly”.

Offering help to vulnerable residents in a spirit of community and care is laudable but these groups risk exaggerating local feelings of “stranger danger” towards migrants and minorities. And with alleged connections to both Reform UK and other rightwing groups, Essex Spartans and initiatives like them could create pathways to more extreme perspectives.

Far-right groups such as Homeland are also actively seeking to enter the mainstream civic life of communities. This has included joining parish councils, church congregations and sports clubs, distributing food to homeless people, and establishing litter-picking groups.

Communities pushing back

But it is a common mistake to assume that the political winds are blowing only in the favour of the right and far right, and that working-class white communities are hotbeds of racism or xenophobia. The research I’ve conducted in two of Bristol’s poorest suburbs has revealed the huge efforts made by neighbourhood groups to show that communities targeted by far-right messaging can be inclusive, imaginative and progressive.

These communities fit the profile for an area at risk of far-right influence: working-class, peripheral, declining and predominantly white. Far-right and anti-immigrant sentiments are shared openly on local social media groups, as stickers and graffiti on walls and lampposts, and in conversations in the few pubs and cafes that remain.

So they are not unusual communities, but they are also home to impressive levels of hidden work being done by community activists who want to turn the tide.

In one community that abuts a major logistics zone, British-born and migrant job-seekers and low-waged workers are crammed into overcrowded and low-quality homes. They are drawn there by a promise of plentiful work which does not always materialise.

Instead of simply blaming immigration for negative side effects, several community groups are working together to support the residents, challenge the council and landlords to improve their conditions, and clean up the neighbourhood’s streets.

Monica, manager of the community hall, explains her approach: “Just work on the ground, and person by person.” This is how she helped a longstanding older people’s club and the migrant women learning English down the hallway to start sharing lunch together. Now this semi-regular lunch date has become an unthreatening way for these very different groups to mingle.

In a neighbourhood on the other side of Bristol, decades of neglect, disinvestment and stigma have left the area in decline. But rather than blaming immigration, networks of residents and organisations are leading the charge on neighbourhood renewal.

By pooling resources, skills, and ingenuity, finding workarounds to divert resources where they are needed, they are rebuilding dignity and agency from below. This isn’t dramatic transformation but small changes that benefit everyone, such as reintroducing bins in the park.

Community groups are also safer spaces for difficult conversations about local identity and sense of place that acknowledge residents’ feelings of loss or injustice. Darren, a youth worker, explains that well-loved community spaces are “vital” for keeping conversations respectful.

Bristol’s identity – a vibrant and exciting city with a troubled colonial past – rarely fits their own experience of growing up at its forgotten peripheries. Instead of becoming mired in these citywide “culture wars”, groups in both areas celebrate their neighbourhood’s unique heritage in response to this desire for pride and belonging.

Looking to the future

Community activists nationwide are defying assumptions about working-class neighbourhoods as being “on benefits, uneducated, having loads of kids, racist”, as Trish, a tenants’ group member told me.

With elections around the UK in 2026, the future of the country’s neighbourhoods is up for grabs. But trust in any politician is at rock bottom in these Bristolian communities and elsewhere. One resident told me, if any party set up a stall outside the local shops, “that table’s getting flipped”.

Reform UK doesn’t have a foothold like Labour here, but its candidates could still be in contention here if they can ride their national party’s wave. For now, the hard work of community activists appears to be having some effect.

This fight won’t just play out in the halls of power or the ballot box – it will unfold in streets, parks, and community halls.

Anthony Ince has received research funding from the British Academy and the Independent Social Research Foundation.

– ref. How ordinary neighbourhoods became battlegrounds in the politics of ‘broken Britain’ – https://theconversation.com/how-ordinary-neighbourhoods-became-battlegrounds-in-the-politics-of-broken-britain-271663

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Ignazio Cabras, Professor of Regional Economic Development, Northumbria University, Newcastle

English pubs will receive a 15% discount on their business rates from April this year. The government deal, which also applies to music venues, follows a backlash from landlords who were facing a steep increase in their tax bills.

Some industry campaigners have said the support package – worth around £1,600 per pub – will allow landlords to breathe a sigh of relief. Some opposition politicians think it doesn’t go far enough.

Either way, it’s been a tough few years. High energy costs, inflation and wage increases have contributed to the serious financial difficulties facing many pubs.

The sector was also among the worst affected (alongside retail and leisure) by the social distancing and lockdowns of COVID. The government responded at the time by giving pubs significant business rate discounts in a show of support.

Then, in November 2025, it was announced that those discounts would be reduced and then phased out completely. This move, combined with big increases in the rateable values of pub premises, left landlords with the prospect of much higher bills.

But pubs are far more than cash machines for the Treasury. To many, they represent a vital part of British traditions and heritage. They also play a pivotal role in building and maintaining social relationships among the people who live near them.

Whether that’s a family meeting up for Sunday lunch, university students at their society gathering, or some elderly fans of real ale, pubs have a clear and long-standing role in creating community cohesion.

Several scientific studies have measured their positive effects on people, economies and societies.

One, for example, confirms the strong link between pubs and local community events. It has also been shown that pubs are often more effective than other organisations at stimulating a wide range of social activities. This could include everything from sports teams and quiz nights to hosting book groups, as well as charitable and volunteering initiatives.

Pubs also frequently promote community events – such as charity events and social clubs – more effectively than other places such as sport or village halls. Research has shown that in rural areas especially, pubs are very effective – more so than village shops for example – at building community cohesion and local social networks.

Overall, opportunities for communal initiatives in some areas would be extremely reduced, if not nonexistent, without pubs. This is why the loss of a pub has a much broader impact than a mere business closure.

Yet despite all of this proven positive impact, the number of UK pubs has been constantly declining since the start of the century. According to the British Beer and Pub Association, there were 60,800 in 2000, compared to about 45,000 in 2024, meaning one in four closing its doors in the past 25 years.

Last year, one pub a day in England and Wales closed down for good.

Life for publicans has been extremely hard for a long time. This is why the changes proposed in the last budget prompted a significant pushback from the industry.

Last orders

But other businesses probably deserve a tax break too. High street shops can also help maintain higher levels of socialisation and community cohesion.

Particularly in remote and rural areas, which suffer from a general lack of local services and public transport options compared to urban areas, these businesses are important in terms of economic development and social activity.

They are also a vital part of their local economic structure, providing employment opportunities and training for local residents. This is why the Treasury should consider a rethink about business rates across the board.

Like pubs, local businesses have value beyond the revenue they generate. A tax system which recognises their positive social impact would be a better and fairer fiscal tool all round.

In the past, Ignazio Cabras’ research work has received financial support from multiple funding bodies, including the British Academy, the Society of Independent Brewers (SIBA), and the Vintners Federation of Ireland (VFI). He is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences (FAcSS).

– ref. Pubs are far more valuable to society than the tax they pay – https://theconversation.com/pubs-are-far-more-valuable-to-society-than-the-tax-they-pay-273426

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Sarah Annes Brown, Professor of English Literature, Anglia Ruskin University

Ali Smith’s Glyph is the companion novel to her earlier novel, Gliff (2024). Gliff was set in a surreal near-future dystopia. Glyph, meanwhile, is set in the present. But like Smith’s earlier Seasonal Quartet, it offers the reader an uncanny version of our world, haunted by ghostly voices from the past.

The novel focuses on two sisters, Petra and Patricia (aka Patch). The action moves between scenes from their childhood in the 1990s and their present-day estrangement.

Two chance family anecdotes of wartime tragedy have a shaping influence on their imaginative lives. One is the story of a first world war soldier who deserted the army, fleeing with a blinded horse he wished to save. We learn that he was eventually court-martialled and executed.

The other is the curious account of how a female agent, travelling under cover through France in the second world war, discovered a mysteriously flattened corpse on the road.

When young Patch becomes distressed by the fate of the flattened man, Petra pretends that she can communicate with him in the afterlife. Episodes from his life are presented in vivid detail, and the reader is invited to speculate that the ghost may be real.

Smith teasingly draws attention to the different levels of reality at work in the novel. The image of a flattened corpse becomes a metaphor for other kinds of flattening, including that of characters in fiction. At one point the narrating voice, with apparent authorial detachment, refers to “the flat character / literary device called Patricia”.

It is then revealed that Patricia herself is narrating this section. And the ghost of the flattened man – who may simply be Petra’s invention – remembers reading a book in which books are described as “flattened flowers at best”.

The novel also asserts a powerful link between stories and ghosts: “Story, however. It is haunting. Everything tells it.”

Glyph v Gliff

Although it can be read as a standalone work, Glyph inevitably invites the reader to explore its relationship with Gliff (2024), adding yet a further dimension to this multilayered novel.

Read more:
Ali Smith’s new novel Gliff is a dystopian nightmare with flashes of fairytale enchantment

In many ways Petra and Patch’s relationship mirrors that between Gliff’s siblings, Briar and Rose. Both younger sisters share a fondness for puns and sly malapropisms. And the soldier’s doomed escape with the horse seems to echo the mysterious disappearance of Rose on the back of a horse she rescued from being slaughtered.

Smith adds a further complication into the mix when it is revealed that the novel Gliff exists in the world of Glyph. A brief discussion of its merits (and weaknesses) between Petra and Patch offers a humorous reflection of real-world reader responses to Gliff: “A bit too dark for me. A bit too clever-clever, a bit too on the nose politically, for a novel.”

The presence of Gliff within Glyph also complicates the meaning of some of the links between the two novels. Petra is sure she is being haunted by the blind horse of family legend. But Patch suggests that this is a delusion sparked by reading Gliff. The duology forms a kind of textual Möbius strip – a mind-bending twisted loop with just one side – perhaps nodding back to the double strands of Smith’s 2014 novel How to be Both.

Alongside all this playful twistiness sits a passionate commitment to a more just society. Billie, Patch’s teenage daughter, is central to this element of the novel. She resembles young Florence in Ali Smith’s earlier novel Spring (2019). Both are charismatically exuberant Greta Thunberg-style campaigners for social justice.

The future world of the earlier novel Gliff seemed horrifyingly absurd in its unfairness. Viewed through Smith’s bitterly satirical lens in Glyph, our own present world seems little less surreal in its destructiveness, its attacks on creativity, freedom and the environment, and its addiction to war and violence.

Like all of Smith’s works, Glyph is multifaceted. She is equally adroit at capturing the emotional nuances of family life, mapping out the larger political landscape, or beguiling the reader with joyfully witty metafictional and linguistic games.

Readers often feel pulled in two directions when reading her novels. There is so much to pause on, so many startling turns of phrase or clues to hidden mysteries. Yet there is also an irresistible compulsion to turn the pages, to find out what happens next.

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This article features references to books that have been included for editorial reasons, and may contain links to bookshop.org. If you click on one of the links and go on to buy something from bookshop.org The Conversation UK may earn a commission.

Sarah Annes Brown 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. Ali Smith’s Glyph is an exhilarating and excoriating follow-up to Gliff – https://theconversation.com/ali-smiths-glyph-is-an-exhilarating-and-excoriating-follow-up-to-gliff-274075

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Kamran Matin, Associate Professor of International Relations, University of Sussex

Many Kurdish people will be feeling betrayed by the US after the Syrian army, backed by the US and armed by Turkey, launched an offensive against the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) in early January. The SDF has long been hailed as the west’s most effective partner against the Islamic State (IS) terrorist organisation.

Led by Ahmed al-Sharaa, the Syrian president who was formerly an al-Qaeda commander, the army initially targeted two Kurdish neighbourhoods in the city of Aleppo. Government forces then captured the SDF-held provinces of Deir ez-Zor and Raqqa further east before advancing on the Kurdish-majority regions of Hasakah and Kobani in the north-east corner of the country.

The Syrian army and the SDF are currently observing a fragile 15-day ceasefire, brokered by the US. But according to the UN, at least 134,000 Kurds have already been displaced. And many Kurdish civilians fear a repeat of the 2025 sectarian mass killings and widespread abuse against Syria’s Alevi and Druze communities.

Kobani, a city famous as the site of heroic Kurdish resistance against IS in 2014, is under siege with its water and electricity supplies cut off. And Elham Ahmad, a senior Kurdish official, claims the Syrian army has already executed hundreds of captured Kurdish fighters and civilians. She has characterised the actions of the state as a “war of extermination” against the Kurds.

Abandoning Kurdish allies

The geopolitical fulcrum of this upheaval is US regional strategy. Shortly after becoming Nato’s first secretary general in 1952, Lord Hastings Ismay said the organisation’s purpose was “to keep the Soviet Union out, the Americans in and the Germans down”. In a similar vein, the US strategy in Syria arguably seeks to keep America afar, Iran out and Israel and Turkey apart.

In line with the Trump administration’s 2025 national security strategy, Washington has sought to block Iranian influence in the Middle East. Keen to shift the burden for overseeing the region’s security away from the US, it has also looked to withdraw US forces from Syria after al-Sharaa’s Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) coalition of Turkey-backed Islamist groups toppled longtime dictator Bashar al-Assad in December 2024.

A strong HTS-led Sunni Muslim state that is hostile to Iran and its Shia proxies in Iraq and Lebanon, under Turkish tutelage and supported by the Gulf states, was deemed the best option. Yet diverging Israeli and Turkish priorities have complicated this approach.

Israel viewed al-Sharaa’s al-Qaeda past and the inclusion of foreign jihadist fighters in the Syrian military as grave security threats. This helps explain why, immediately after Assad’s fall, Israel destroyed much of Syria’s strategic military infrastructure to prevent it from falling into Islamist hands.

Turkey, meanwhile, has long regarded the autonomy of Syrian Kurds (effective since 2012) as a threat, given the decades-long struggle of its own large Kurdish population for political and cultural rights. Washington sought to square these competing interests through a two-pronged approach.

First, it pushed Syria and Israel towards negotiating a security-economic deal, addressing Israeli concerns in return for sanctions relief and reconstruction aid for Syria. Seeking state consolidation, al-Sharaa accepted the de facto demilitarisation of Syria’s southern regions. He also signalled Syria’s readiness to join the Abraham accords, a series of agreements to normalise relations between Israel and Middle Eastern countries.

Second, the US pressured the Kurds to integrate their military and administrative institutions into the new Syrian state to address Turkish concerns. This led to an agreement between the SDF and Damascus in March 2025, with precise details left to be worked out by joint special working committees.

However, implementation soon stalled over Kurdish demands for local autonomy and integrating the SDF into the national army as a bloc to preserve its organisational coherence, akin to the Kurdish Peshmerga forces in Iraq. Spurred by Ankara, Damascus rejected Kurdish demands, producing a deadlock.

During US-mediated talks in Paris in early January 2026, the security-economic deal between Israel and Syria was agreed and will soon be finalised. At the same meeting, a Syrian government proposal for a limited operation to recapture SDF-held territory reportedly met no objections. And almost immediately thereafter, the Syrian army launched its offensive.

Another blowback in the making?

US policy in west Asia has repeatedly generated blowback – from support for the anti-Soviet Afghan jihad of the 1980s to the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the chaotic 2022 withdrawal from Afghanistan. Abandoning the Kurds in favour of an anti-Iranian government in Syria risks repeating this pattern.

Domestically, it could embolden al-Sharaa to forcibly subordinate Druze, Alawite, Assyrian and other minority groups. This would reproduce a centralised state sustained by repression, like Saddam Hussein’s Ba’athist Iraq, and risks renewed civil war.

Regionally, it destabilises neighbouring Iraq. Nouri al-Maliki, an influential politician who has been nominated for prime minister by dominant Shia factions in the Iraqi parliament following the October 2025 elections, has described al-Sharaa’s Syria as being governed by terrorists.

Indeed, alarmed by the handover of camps holding former IS fighters from the SDF to Damascus, the Iraqi government asked Washington to relocate thousands of IS detainees to Iraq. The US has accepted this request, despite having admitted Syria into the global anti-IS coalition only two months earlier.

Maliki is also closely aligned with Iran. Meanwhile, Iran-backed Shia militia groups in Iraq are concerned about the deployment of Syrian government forces on border crossings previously held by the SDF. Any US attack on Iran, as Donald Trump has threatened recently, could thus draw in Iraq.

Internationally, the danger of abandoning the Kurds is the return of IS terrorism to cities in the west. Reports suggest many IS detainees escaped from detention camps as SDF forces guarding them came under attack. And videos released by the SDF show what it claimed were IS members being broken out of a prison by armed “Damascus factions”.

Washington must honour its own conditions: support for Syria’s transitional government must be contingent on the creation of a genuinely democratic, plural and inclusive political order that constitutionally enshrines and protects minority rights – including those of the Kurds.

Kamran Matin is affiliated with Kurdish Peace Institute.

– ref. US abandons Syria’s Kurds, risking regional turmoil and an IS resurgence – https://theconversation.com/us-abandons-syrias-kurds-risking-regional-turmoil-and-an-is-resurgence-274169

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Peter Watt, Lecturer in Organisation, Work and Technology, Lancaster University

When Industry first aired in 2020 it seemed, ostensibly, to be a drama about a recent cohort of ambitious young graduates entering the cut-throat world of investment banking. But as the opening season unfolded and its central characters were established, it became clear that although the trading floor of the fictional-but-all-so-familiar Pierpoint and Co. was its setting, this was not just a show about finance.

In 2021, I had the opportunity to speak to the show’s co-writers and creators, Mickey Down and Konrad Kay. In this conversation, Down described the show as “a universal take on workplace culture”, which, he explained, was why they gave it such a generic title.

For the first time, a television drama was treating contemporary corporate cultures and graduate work with an unprecedented seriousness, sensibility and insight. It managed to capture, in heightened form, pressures that are recognisable far beyond the world of the trading floor and the corporate boardroom.

Indeed, Industry is about work, and how central work has come to all facets of our lives. As it heads into its fourth season and beyond the trading floor, the show is set to expose the all consuming nature of work more than ever before.

Industry was, and remains, a show about how work has become more than a mere site of economic activity. For some people, work is the main arena in which a person’s self-worth is awarded or withdrawn. In this, ambition is sharpened into pathological obsession and the employment contract contains a Faustian logic where total submission to work will be answered with “more” – more money, more power, more life.

In its fourth season, Industry continues to capture the tragic underbelly of modern professional life. The tone is set in the opening episode by Harper Stern, the series’ most vivid engine of ruthless ambition.

Early on she announces: “The story of our lives – giving everything to something that kills you.” If the previous seasons are anything to go by, this line works as a verdict not only on her, but on the entire grammar of contemporary professional life.

With Pierpoint collapsing in the finale of season three, the pathology of work that Industry has shed a light on is definitively revealed as a universal issue – the trading floor was simply its first and most visible stage. As the workplace drama grows outward beyond the office, the conditions of competition, appraisal, self-preservation and self-assertion are set to be revealed as something even more totalising.

In episode one, Harper is introduced on her 30th birthday as heading her own fund. By episode two, she has already alienated her investors. And, by episode three, she is starting again – back alongside her old Pierpoint mentor, Eric Tao, pitching a new venture to investors.

Harper may be an extreme case, but she shows, in concentrated form, what a constantly changing and increasingly insecure job market: the imperative of perpetual reinvention and self-assertion to gain and maintain employment. These characters and real world workers do all of this in the pursuit of a future that is always promised and never quite possessed.

Indeed, a dark irony and dramatic tension in Industry is that it so often places its characters near power – money, titles, access, invitations – only to show how little control they possess.

For instance, the two remaining characters from the first season have risen in status: Harper begins season four as head of an asset management fund and Yasmin is now tied to the peerage through her marriage to Sir Reginald Henry Ferrers de Chartley Norton Muck, the failed green-tech prince of season three.

However, they remain perpetually devoured by the same forces that shaped their self-destructive trajectories (and relationship) from the beginning. The difference now is that these forces have extended beyond the office and have spilled over into the intoxicating worlds of politics, start-ups, high-finance, aristocracy and celebrity.

The spilling over of work culure is most clear in episode two where Harper attends a birthday party hosted by Yasmin. As ever, the lines between work and play, networking and socialising, intimacy and leverage blur into a heady mix of debauchery, embarrassment and new business opportunities.

Only those who refuse to keep any part of life separate from the job are set to gain: “It starts and ends with work. And being proven fucking right”, Harper tells Eric in episode three.

Season four will likely be bigger and glossier but also the bleakest yet: more wealth, more ambition, more politics, and more reputational warfare. But, more subtly, we can expect Industry to reveal more of what has been its deepest cruelty and deepest truth from the beginning: that for so many, life no longer interrupts work – life is work.

Looking for something good? Cut through the noise with a carefully curated selection of the latest releases, live events and exhibitions, straight to your inbox every fortnight, on Fridays. Sign up here.

Peter Watt 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. Industry season four exposes the Faustian bargain of modern work culture – https://theconversation.com/industry-season-four-exposes-the-faustian-bargain-of-modern-work-culture-274328

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Christopher J. Parker, Senior Lecturer in UX Design, School of Design and Creative Arts, Loughborough University

Apple introduced Liquid Glass in June 2025 in a self-declared attempt to bring “joy and delight to every user experience”. The visual design style – which is being applied to all Apple products from iPhone to watch to TV – is named for the company’s new type of screen designed to look like translucent liquid.

Standing out by design has been paramount for Apple ever since Steve Jobs co-founded the company half a century ago. He was quick to kill off every uninspired idea, declaring: “Deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do.”

Jobs’ leadership style could verge on the tyrannical, yet his approach was essential to Apple’s enduring success, which, more than 14 years after his death, still ranks as the world’s most valuable brand.

To Jobs, the twin importance of design aesthetics and user experience (UX) was non-negotiable – both must be perfect for the public to see the product. But the recent history of Liquid Glass – introduced under Jobs’ successor as CEO, Tim Cook – suggests Apple may now be losing that ethos.

Upon Liquid Glass’s official release last September, many customers criticised the design of Apple’s new operating system (known as OS 26). Social media was inundated with complaints about its slow or nonsensical animations, distracting colour shifts, excessive interactions, cartoonish or blurry icons, poor contrast, inconsistent highlighting, and battery-hungry effects that were too subtle to be worth the bother.

A review by the UX consultancy NN/g was equivocal at best: “At first glance, the system looks fluid and modern. But try to use it, and soon those shimmering surfaces and animated controls start to get in the way.”

Wired magazine called the new system “awful”, concluding: “People don’t enjoy forking over data and dollars in exchange for annoyance.”

With OS 26 and Liquid Glass, Apple opted to throw away many of the interactions that its users had spent years ingraining into their motor functions. Poor usability feels unforgivable for a company built on Jobs’ mantra: “It works like magic.” Evidently, it didn’t.

Apple’s difficult 2025 culminated in the sudden departure of its vice-president of human interface design, Alan Dye, to big tech rival Meta in December.

While this was primarily seen as a coup for Meta, some speculated that Dye’s departure might have been partly due to Liquid Glass’s underwhelming reception. When the news broke, Cook stressed that Apple “prioritises design and has a strong team”.

Where did Apple go wrong?

As a senior lecturer in UX design, I have devoted much of my professional life to understanding how and why digital interactions shape the way we live and our consumer behaviour. Small interactions matter.

Central to the criticisms of Liquid Glass has been OS 26’s poor usability – in particular, how the “transparency” of Liquid Glass made everything hard for many users to read.

Even during its pre-launch beta testing, Apple realised its new design had some issues, pushing design changes to reduce the transparency effects on notification backgrounds, for example. On the iPhone, the (very) transparent elements looked good on some stock wallpapers – but were widely rated unusable on others.

The first update, two months after the official September 2025 launch, let users disable Liquid Glass’s transparency to increase legibility. But by reducing transparency and blurs on some backgrounds, the user experience also became more sterile.

There’s still plenty to admire in Liquid Glass’s design and functionality. When using my iPhone, for example, I find the “glass bubble” magnifying glass effect during text selection exquisitely decadent.

Yet all the while, the great German designer Dieter Rams’ tenth principle haunts me: “Good design is as little design as possible.” Jony Ive, Apple’s design guru for more than two decades, based almost all of the iPhone’s original aesthetic on Rams’ designs.

Liquid Glass’s usability issues become (literally) clearest when I select the “clear” homescreen setting – a flagship visual aesthetic in Apple’s promotional material. Not only is it hard to read, but the app icons become almost indistinguishable.

Every time I look at my screen in this mode, I feel pain from the lack of colour and muddiness of the icons blending into the background (I can’t find the WhatsApp icon!). Selecting the “wrong” kind of wallpaper, such as a photo of my child on holiday, compounds the issue.

It feels a peculiar decision to let users get rid of the core colour signals that have underpinned Apple’s exceptional usability for so long. After one day I can no longer take the pain, switching back to the default colour setting.

What’s next for Liquid Glass?

I believe Liquid Glass’s design and UX issues are symptomatic of wider cultural issues at Apple. Dye’s departure came hard on the heels of the announcement of John Giannandrea’s retirement – the British software engineer who presided over the company’s AI chatbot system, Apple Intelligence.

Like Liquid Glass, this has so far failed to signal excellence, having been unfavourably compared with rivals such as Google Gemini and ChatGPT since its (delayed) 2024 introduction.

These leadership shifts come at a time when, according to one UK survey, 69% of consumers desire more affordable smart products – a market now well served by Chinese brands. Where once brands such as Oppo copied Apple mercilessly, now they are producing highly distinctive handsets.

Fixing Liquid Glass’s flaws will happen – I’ll put money on March’s OS 27 release making the necessary adjustments. But the necessity for them betrays an underlying problem: Apple is fallible. While a single poor design decision can be addressed, the pattern of underwhelming UX is eroding Apple’s luxury status.

Apple’s core philosophy of perfectionism should be non-negotiable. What it needs now is a bolder vision for the way people will interact with its products in future, not just yet another new aesthetic. To quote the American ice hockey legend Wayne Gretzky, as Jobs was fond of doing: “I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.”

Christopher J. Parker 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. Apple’s unrivalled commitment to excellence is fading – a designer explains why – https://theconversation.com/apples-unrivalled-commitment-to-excellence-is-fading-a-designer-explains-why-274475

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Oliver Taherzadeh, Assistant Professor, Environmental Economics, Leiden University

Who grows our food? This seemingly simple question is getting harder to answer in a world where our food crosses borders to get to our plate.

As countries increasingly rely on food imports, the mention of distant countries on our food labels is commonplace. Today, only one in seven countries are food self-sufficient across key food groups. So to understand who farms our food, researchers like me need to take a global vantage point.

The contribution of small and industrial-scale farming to global food supply has attracted much attention and debate. Yet, my research shows we’ve been measuring the wrong thing – production and not consumption. Focusing only on national farming systems skews our perception of which farmers are feeding the world by ignoring the food – and farmers – that sustain our daily diets.

This approach also amplifies the assumption that industrial farming is the foundation of global security. But when we lift the lid on our globalised food system, the story is very different.

By studying production and trade patterns of 198 countries, I have found that it’s small-scale farms (typically smaller than 20 hectares), not huge industrial operations, that underpin our daily diets. My team’s research, published in Nature Food, reveals that small-scale farmers contribute a third of the food consumed in high-income nations such as the UK and the US.

This insight has been overlooked by previous studies that solely focused on food distribution from farmers within national borders. These small-scale farms are often unrecognisable from the mega-farms that have come to dominate rural landscapes in Europe, South America and the US.

Although concentrated in sub-Saharan Africa and across Asia, small farms play a key role in exporting fruit, vegetables, pulses, and root and tuber crops, to western countries. A few key cases stand out.

Despite small-scale farms making up less than 1% of Australian farms they supply around 15% of their food needs. In Canada and Europe, small farms contribute nearly 20% to national food needs, mostly from overseas. They also make up the majority of the food supply in 46 of the countries we studied, meeting the bulk of food needs for 5 billion people every day.

Agri-food export of food crops such as lentils and sweet potatoes from small-scale farms comes at a cost to low- and middle-income countries where these farming systems are dominant. These nations end up importing vast amounts of cereals and oil crops from high-income nations, to compensate for food and nutrition insecurity created by cash cropping and contract farming.

These dynamics bear the signature of colonial extractivism in the global agri-food system. They also signal a growing consolidation of food supply chains in low- and middle-income countries due to imports from industrial farms, a dependency that is set to grow with increased appetite for meat and processed food in rapidly industrialising countries.

Small-scale farms play a crucial role in creating global food security. But farmers of small farms often find themselves facing insecure land tenure, climate risk, unequal terms of trade and international trade regimes.

This new research, also reported in the latest State of Food and Agriculture report from the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization, shows that such risks are not only contained to domestic food systems but will cross borders. Food and land insecurity for small-scale farmers means food insecurity for us all. Cuts to overseas aid from high-income nations makes this more likely, as support for climate-resilient farming dries up.

Safeguarding production from smallholders relies not only on domestic efforts to protect farmer livelihoods but transboundary measures to secure their land, rights and access to markets, such as land titles, small loans and living wages.

Subsidies, trade agreements and corporate consolidation erode these pillars of smallholder security and threaten the healthiest food on our plates – fruit, vegetables and pulses. Shining a light on the farmers hidden in national supply chains is a first step to ensure agri-food finance and regulation delivers sustainable livelihoods for all food producers.

This new study highlights the key role small-scale farmers play in meeting current food needs and hints to their importance in a sustainable food future. A plant-rich dietary transition, as called for by scientists, will rely on fruit, vegetable and pulse production, disproportionality produced by smaller farms, farms which typically produce more diverse food types than large-scale farms, higher yields and greater biodiversity. Now that we know who grows our food, we must give farmers equal priority in national farming policy, within and beyond our borders.

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Oliver Taherzadeh receives funding from Horizon Europe.

– ref. Small-scale farmers produce more of the rich world’s food than previously thought – new study – https://theconversation.com/small-scale-farmers-produce-more-of-the-rich-worlds-food-than-previously-thought-new-study-274057