Some people are so good with faces that there’s a name for them – super-recognisers. And a new study using eye-tracking technology has given us some insights into how they do it.
Although most of us perform reasonably well when tasked with learning a new person’s face or recognising someone we already know, there are people whose abilities are at the extremes. Those who struggle with faces (even of close friends and family) are known as prosopagnosic or face blind. Some people are born with this difficulty, while others may develop it later in life as a result of a stroke or injury.
In contrast, super-recognisers naturally excel at recognising faces. Studies also show they may be better than most of us when deciding whether images of unfamiliar people depict the same individual (like comparing a stranger to their ID photo), and that this ability may even extend to voices.
The new study suggests the direction of super-recognisers’ gaze when learning a face is important in explaining why they perform so well.
What do super-recognisers do differently?
Since super-recognisers are outstanding at recognising faces, it is interesting and potentially useful to discover what they do differently to the rest of us.
Previous research has shown these people look at faces in a different way when learning them. They make more fixations (stop and focus on more points) while spending less time on the eye region, compared with the average viewer. Their attention is spread more broadly, sampling more information across the face as a whole.
Also, their style of responding differs from those who are highly trained (over many years) in matching face images, tending to place more confidence in their decisions (both when correct and incorrect) and responding faster.
Evidence suggests super-recognisers’ face recognition skills are likely to have a strong genetic basis, perhaps explaining why attempts to improve average people’s abilities through short periods of training have generally failed.
What eye-tracking data reveals
Since we know super-recognisers look at faces differently to the average person, researchers in Australia decided to investigate whether this might explain their superior performance levels.
They used eye-tracking data collected in 2022 for a previous study from 37 super-recognisers (identified based on their scores across several face perception tests) and 68 typical viewers, to reconstruct exactly what these participants were looking at when learning new faces.
Super-recognisers stop and focus on more points as they learn a new face, while spending less time on the eye region. Prostock-studio/Shutterstock
They viewed the faces through a simulated “spotlight” (see it here) which moved with their gaze as they explored the face. This meant the researchers could be sure of what information the participant could see during viewing.
Next, all of the regions a participant viewed were combined to create a composite image. This composite was then compared with a full, original image of either the same person (but showing a different facial expression) or a different person (with similar demographic characteristics). High similarity to images of the same person, and low similarity to different people, would mean the composite contained useful identity information.
The researchers’ analyses showed that super-recognisers accessed more valuable information, which resulted in better discrimination between “same person” and “different people” image pairs when compared with typical participants.
After accounting for the fact that super-recognisers simply took in more information than typical viewers, the results showed that the quality of their information was still higher.
More extensive exploration of faces
The researchers suggest that more extensive exploration of faces during learning could help super-recognisers in discovering the most useful features for identification. This may lead to better-formed internal representations of each learned face.
Since super-recognisers look at faces differently to the rest of us from the very earliest stages of viewing, it’s very difficult to train people to match their natural ability. However, forensic facial examiners (professionals whose job involves face comparisons) show it is possible.
They have been found to perform just as well as super-recognisers when comparing pairs of unfamiliar images, presumably due to the extensive and lengthy training and mentoring that they receive – in particular focusing on useful features in the images like the ears and any facial marks.
So there may actually be two types of face experts: those with natural ability (super-recognisers) and those with extensive training (facial examiners). But examiners might choose to pursue this particular career because of an innate ability, so further investigation is needed.
Although the existence of people with exceptional face abilities has been known for nearly two decades, researchers are still trying to understand what makes them excel. As this new study demonstrates, the way super-recognisers (and the rest of us) look at faces as we learn them could play a crucial role in how good – or bad – we are at recognising people in our daily lives.
Robin Kramer 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.
A group of friends sit around a table sharing stories and sipping mead. The men sport beards and the women sip from drinking horns – but these aren’t Vikings, they’re modern-day hipsters.
These meaderies often draw on Viking imagery in their branding. Their wares are called things like Odin’s Mead or Viking Blod and their logos include longships, axes, ravens and drinking horns. A few even have their own themed Viking drinking halls. This is part of what might be called the “Viking turn”, the renewed pop culture vogue for the Vikings in the past 20 years, which has made them the stars of a rash of films, TV shows, video games and memes.
Since the rowdy banquet scene in the 1958 film The Vikings, wild, boozy feasting has been a staple of the hyper-masculine pop culture Viking. This theme continues in the 21st century, from the History Channel’s Vikings TV series (2013-present) to games like Skyrim (2011) and Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla (2020).
But while modern media suggest that Vikings drank mead as often as water, history tells a slightly different story.
The banquet scene from The Vikings (1958).
Three stories are foundational for the Viking association with mead. The first is the Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf, which survives in a single manuscript written in Old English and now in the British Library.
The story it tells is set in southern Sweden and Denmark in the early 6th century, so the warrior culture and lifestyle that Beowulf idealises are actually of a period considerably earlier than the Viking age (usually dated from the later 8th century onward). It does share a great deal of its substance with later Viking notions of the good life and so, for good or ill, they have tended to be conflated.
Most of Beowulf’s action plays out around mead-halls – the power centres of lords such as the Danish king Hrothgar, where the leader would entertain his followers with feasts and drinking in return for their support and military service. This relationship, based upon the consumption of food and drink, but inextricably bound up with honour and loyalty, is the basis of the heroic warrior society that is celebrated by the poet. Not surprisingly, therefore, episodes in which mead is drunk are frequent and clearly emotionally loaded.
A second high-profile appearance of mead comes in Norse mythology. At the god Odin’s great hall, Valhöll, the Einherjar – the most heroic and honoured warriors slain in battle – feast and drink. They consume the unending mead that flows from the udders of a goat named Heiðrún who lives on the roof. Norse myth, it should be noted, is sometimes quite odd.
Odin excreting mead in the form of an eagle, from an Icelandic 18th century manuscript. Det Kongelige Bibliotek
Lastly, another important myth tells of Odin’s theft of the “mead of poetry”. This substance was created by two dwarves from honey and the blood of a being named Kvasir, whom they had murdered. The mead bestows gifts of wisdom and poetic skill upon those who drink it.
The whole myth is long and complicated, but it culminates with Odin swallowing the mead and escaping in the form of an eagle, only to excrete some of it backwards when he is especially hotly pursued.
These are striking and impressive episodes that clearly demonstrate the symbolic and cultural significance of mead in mythology and stories about heroes of the Viking age. But that is far from proof that it was actually consumed on a significant scale in England or Scandinavia.
As far back as the 1970s, the philologist Christine Fell noted that Old English medu, (mead), and compound words derived from it appear far more frequently in strongly emotive and poetic contexts such as Beowulf than in practical ones such as laws or charters.
This contrasts strongly with the pattern of usage of other words for alcohol such as ealu (ale), beor (counter intuitively probably “cider”) or win (wine), which are far more frequently used in a functional and practical way. This led Fell to believe that the concentration on mead in the likes of Beowulf was a “nostalgic fiction”. Mead, she concluded, was a fundamental part of an idealised and backwards-looking imagined heroic world rather than something customarily drunk in the course of everyday life.
In 2007, a PhD candidate at the University of York demonstrated the same point in the Scandinavian sources: mjǫðr (“mead”) is far more common in the corpus of Eddic and skaldic poetry than it is in the saga stories of everyday life. Equally, both the word mjǫðr and compound words derived from it are used far less frequently in the sort of practical and purposeful contexts in which ǫl and mungát (the Old Norse words for ale) are plentiful.
Drinking horns on display at a Viking-themed pub in York. Author provided, CC BY
The strong impression in both England and Scandinavia is that, by the time sources like Beowulf were written from the 10th century onward, the plentiful drinking of mead by a lord’s retinue was largely symbolic. It represented the contractual bonds of honour in an idealised warrior society.
This was more a poetic image than a reflection of frequent real-life practice. The standard drink at feasts, let alone at normal everyday household meals, was far more likely to be ale.
Mead was once a highly prized drink – probably the most desirable beverage well before the Viking age, as its honoured place in Valhöll and Hrothgar’s hall suggests. However, honey’s scarcity made mead expensive and hard to source in northern Europe. By the Viking age, exotic Mediterranean wine, mentioned as Odin’s drink in the Grímnismál, may have begun to replace mead as the elite’s preferred choice.
So what, then, for modern mead-drinking Viking enthusiasts? The point is not, of course, that Vikings or any other early medieval people never drank mead – some clearly did, if not perhaps quite so often as is sometimes alleged – but rather that it served more as a symbol of a story-filled heroic neverland. But that is arguably exactly how many of today’s mead-drinkers also use it.
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Simon Trafford 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.
Tesla has announced it is offering its CEO Elon Musk a performance-based pay package worth US$1 trillion. That’s right: 12 zeros.
To put this figure in perspective, it is double the amount of Musk’s existing fortune of US$500 billion (£380 billion) and equal to the GDP of Switzerland.
There are, of course, strings attached. The compensation will be be paid out in new shares on the condition that the company meets some ambitious goals within the next decade. Still, US$1 trillion is an absurd amount of money – even for someone who is already the richest person in the world.
So how do we make sense of it?
Tesla’s chair of the board Robyn Denholm warned shareholders that Musk might walk away from the company if they didn’t approve the unprecedented pay package. Shareholder confidence was no doubt buoyed by the recent rise in Tesla’s stock, with one investor describing Musk as “key” to the entire enterprise.
But what the chair of the board didn’t mention was that Tesla’s sales (and stock price) had plummeted earlier this year, thought to be largely due to Musk’s cost-slashing activities at the US department of government efficiency (Doge). After Musk stepped back from the Trump administration, Tesla’s share price rebounded.
So why award him this record-breaking pay plan? According to Tesla’s board, the package is meant to “incentivise” Musk to propel the company to new heights. In other words, Musk will aspire to achieve more if he is paid more.
This explanation rests on the longstanding myth of the “economic man” – the idea that humans are primarily motivated by financial gain. But behavioural economists such as Daniel Kahneman and Dan Ariely have long since debunked this. Humans often act in weird, irrational ways that don’t always make economic sense. They make decisions based on habits and emotions rather than careful calculation.
The figure of homo economicus offers only a partial account of human behaviour at best, and a misrepresentation of reality at worst. And what’s a few hundred billion dollars more to a man with a personal wealth that is already on a par with the total value of energy giant ExxonMobil?
To understand excessive executive pay, forget the rational “economic man”. In management studies, there’s a theory called the “the romance of leadership”. It tells us that people grossly overestimate the influence of leaders on organisations.
In his classic account of charismatic leadership, German sociologist Max Weber notes that people tend to attribute “extraordinary” qualities to certain individuals, making them appear capable of feats that are far beyond the reach of ordinary people. They become larger than life, at least to those who are in their circle of influence.
The deeds of charismatic leaders are rarely viewed by their followers in a clear-eyed way. As if blinded by their charisma, people tend to exaggerate the leader’s efficacy and ignore their shortcomings.
A typical product engineer at Tesla earns around US$115,000 a year, plus stock options. Musk’s pay package is several million times larger than the average salary at his own company. It’s enough to buy a Rolls-Royce Droptail – one of the world’s most expensive cars at around £25 million – every day for 90 years.
Only a true believer, someone with faith in the power of leadership, could think this is a good idea.
A Rolls-Royce La Rose Noire Droptail – one of the world’s most expensive cars. Rolls-Royce Motor Cars
Other companies are following Tesla’s lead. EV company Rivian recently awarded its CEO RJ Scaringe performance-based stock options that could exceed US$4 billion dollars. Small change for Elon, but probably a big deal for RJ.
In the case of Tesla, Musk is portrayed as a “visionary” leader, despite recent controversies. In the words of business professor Gautam Mukunda: “Tesla’s current valuation only makes sense if you attribute magic powers to Elon Musk.” So another part of the explanation is that Musk was awarded the biggest pay package in history because shareholders believe him capable of performing corporate miracles.
There is a good chance that the bonus never materialises. But what if it does?
Tech elites like to ask each other about their “P(doom)” – the likelihood that AI will destroy the world in the foreseeable future. Some of this is sci-fi hokum, based on the idea that AI will soon develop human-like agency and begin making decisions in its own interest. But decisions like the one made by Tesla’s shareholders could actually raise the P(doom) value for the world.
Why? Because AI is what Musk likes to spend his money on. The entrepreneur is building AI-driven businesses, including Grok, that have reportedly reproduced contentious arguments around climate change, claims about “white genocide” in South Africa and praise for Hitler.
After these incidents, parent company xAI said it had taken steps to make Grok “politically neutral”, which could allow space for more minority views and so amplify climate scepticism, and blamed the South Africa posts on an “unauthorised modification” to the system prompt. In response to the Hitler posts, Musk wrote on X that Grok had been “manipulated” and that the issue was being addressed.
The problem isn’t a superintelligent AI diverting every resource on Earth into making paperclips as in a well-documented thought experiment. The problem is a run-of-the-mill chatbot spouting dangerous nonsense.
Tesla shares dipped after the compensation package was announced. Perhaps the shareholders are finally on to something?
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.
In clinical trials around the world, a surprising treatment is showing promise for people with terminal illnesses: psychedelic therapy.
For many, the hardest part of dying isn’t physical pain but the fear, anxiety and sense of meaninglessness that often accompany it. While palliative care in the UK is rightly praised for easing pain and managing symptoms, patients’ emotional and spiritual suffering is often less well addressed.
Standard treatments – such as antidepressants, counselling and mindfulness – may ease some symptoms but often fail to help patients accept their diagnosis or find meaning in their remaining time. This is where psychedelic therapy may offer support.
The therapy involves the use of psychedelics such as psilocybin in combination with psychological support. This approach is designed to help patients explore difficult emotions, shift perspective and achieve profound psychological breakthroughs.
In twolandmark studies, a high dose of psilocybin with psychotherapy was shown to reduce depression and anxiety in patients with life-threatening cancer. These effects were rapid and, in many cases, sustained for up to six months, with many participants reporting improved mood, emotional clarity and reduced fear of death.
Some also described experiences of deep emotional release, awe and a sense of connection during psychedelic therapy – altered states that appeared to help patients reframe their relationship to dying.
Recognition of the potential of psychedelics for treating severe mental health conditions generally has led to significant regulatory shifts in several countries. For example, Australia, Germany and Canada are beginning to allow access to psychedelics for people with serious or treatment-resistant conditions.
Meanwhile, the EU has invested millions in research into psychedelic-assisted therapy. But in the UK, progress remains slow. Psychedelics are classed as substances of little or no medicinal value and are tightly controlled by the Misuse of Drugs Regulations. This makes research slow and access nearly impossible. Even clinical trials face costly licensing requirements and delays, discouraging researchers and limiting innovation.
A timely debate
Questions about how best to support people at the end of life are especially timely, as the end of life bill is currently being debated in parliament. While the bill focuses on legalising assisted dying, it has also sparked wider debate about the quality and scope of end-of-life care.
Access to good palliative support is not always guaranteed – a concern shared by both supporters and opponents of the bill. Against this backdrop, the limits of conventional approaches to psychological suffering become harder to ignore.
The bill opens up space to consider the potential role of psychedelic therapy, and to reflect more broadly on what it means to die well and whether current systems adequately support that goal.
The bill has prompted renewed public interest in how we treat psychological distress in the final stages of life. A recent YouGov poll found that most UK adults support relaxing restrictions on psilocybin research, especially for people with terminal illness. This suggests that public attitudes may be ahead of policy.
The bill provides an opportunity to question why the UK continues to implement such strict legal controls that hamper research and access to much-needed treatments, and why it lags behind other countries’ approaches. It invites a broader conversation about how the UK supports those facing the emotional and existential challenges of dying.
Clinical evidence, public attitudes and the changing international landscape all highlight growing interest in psychedelic therapy as a complement to conventional approaches like counselling. For those nearing the end of life, it may offer a rare chance to face death with less fear and more meaning and emotional clarity.
Psychedelic therapy won’t be right for everyone, but for some, it could mean meeting death with peace instead of despair.
Joanna Neill is affiliated with DrugScience, Onaya and Heroic Hearts Project UK.
Laura Downey and Muireann Quigley 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.
Shannon McCoole ran one of the world’s largest dark web child abuse forums for around three years in the early 2010s. The forum provided a secure online space in which those interested in abusing children could exchange images, advice and support. It had around 45,000 users and was fortified with layers of online encryption that ensured near-complete anonymity for its users. In other words, it was a large and flourishing community for paedophiles.
McCoole eventually became the subject of an international investigation led by Taskforce Argos – a specialist unit in Australia’s Queensland Police Service dedicated to tackling online child abuse networks.
Key to the investigation – and McCoole’s eventual arrest and conviction – was a piece of linguistic evidence: his frequent use of an unusual greeting term, “hiyas”, as noticed by an investigating officer.
Investigators began searching relevant “clear web” sites (those openly accessible through mainstream search engines) for any markers of a similar linguistic style. They knew the kinds of websites to search because McCoole would speak about his outside interests on the forum, including basketball and vintage cars.
A man was discovered using the giveaway greeting on a four-wheel drive discussion forum. He lived in Adelaide and used a similar handle to the paedophile forum’s anonymous chief administrator. Another similarly named user – also using “hiyas” as a preferred greeting term – was discovered on a basketball forum. Suddenly, the police had their man.
This linguistic evidence contributed to the identification, arrest and eventual conviction of McCoole. But it didn’t end there. After McCoole’s arrest, Taskforce Argos took over his account and continued to run the forum, as him, for another six months. Police were able to gather vital intelligence that led to the prosecution of hundreds of offenders and to the rescue of at least 85 child victims.
McCool’s case is breathtaking, and it offers a compelling demonstration of the power of language in identifying anonymous individuals.
The power of language
My journey into forensic linguistics began in 2014 at Aston University, where I began learning about the various methods and approaches to analysing language across different contexts in the criminal justice system.
A forensic linguist might be called upon to identify the most likely author of an anonymously written threatening text message, based on its language features; or they might assist the courts in interpreting the meaning of a particular slang word or phrase.
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Forensic linguists also analyse the language of police interviews, courtroom processes and complex legal documents, pointing out potential barriers to access to understanding, especially for the most vulnerable groups in society. Without thoughtful consideration of the linguistic processes that occur in legal settings and the communication needs of the population, these processes can (and do) result in serious miscarriages of justice.
A particularly egregious example of this occurred when Gene Gibson was wrongly imprisoned for five years in Australia after being advised to plead guilty to manslaughter. Gibson was an Aboriginal man with a cognitive impairment and for whom English was a third language. The conviction was overturned when the court of appeal heard Gibson had not understood the court process, nor the instructions he was given by his appointed interpreter.
So forensic linguistics is not just about catching criminals, it’s also about finding ways to better support vulnerable groups who find themselves, in whatever capacity, having to interact with legal systems. This is an attempt to improve the delivery of justice through language analysis.
Something that struck me in the earliest days of my research was the relative lack of work exploring the language of online child sexual abuse and grooming. The topic had long received attention from criminologists and psychologists, but almost never linguists – despite online grooming and other forms of online child sexual offending being almost exclusively done through language.
There is no doubt that researching this dark side of humanity is difficult in all sorts of ways, and it can certainly take its toll.
Nonetheless, I found the decision to do so straightforward. If we don’t know much about how these offenders talk to victims, or indeed each other, then we are missing a vital perspective on how these criminals operate – along with potential new routes to catching them.
These questions became the central themes of both my MA and PhD theses, and led to my ongoing interest in the language that most people never see: real conversations between criminal groups on the dark web.
Anonymity and the dark web
The dark web originated in the mid-1990s as a covert communication tool for the US federal government. It is best described as a portion of the internet that is unindexed by mainstream search engines. It can only be accessed through specialist browsers, such as Tor, that disguise the user’s IP address.
This enables users to interact in these environments virtually anonymously, making them ideal for hidden conversations between people with shared deviant interests. These interests aren’t necessarily criminal or even morally objectionable – consider the act of whistleblowing, or of expressing political dissent in a country without free speech. The notion of deviance depends on local and cultural context.
Nonetheless, the dark web has become all but synonymous with the most egregious and morally abhorrent crimes, including child abuse, fraud, and the trafficking of drugs, weapons and people.
Combating dark web crime centres around the problem of anonymity. It is anonymity that makes these spaces difficult to police. But when all markers of identity – names, faces, voices – are stripped away, what remains is language.
And language expresses identity.
Through our conscious and unconscious selections of sounds, words, phrases, viewpoints and interactional styles, we tell people who we are – or at least, who we are being from moment to moment.
Language is also the primary means by which much (if not most) dark web crime is committed. It is through (written) linguistic interaction that criminal offences are planned, illicit advice exchanged, deals negotiated, goals accomplished.
For linguists, the records and messages documenting the exact processes by which crimes are planned and executed become data for analysis. Armed with theory and methods for understanding how people express (or betray) aspects of their identity online, linguists are uniquely placed to address questions of identity in these highly anonymous spaces.
What kind of person wrote this text?
The task of linguistic profiling is well demonstrated by the case of Matthew Falder. Falder pleaded guilty to 137 charges relating to child sexual exploitation, abuse and blackmail in 2018. The case was dubbed by the National Crime Agency (NCA) as its first ever “hurt-core” prosecution, due to Falder’s prolific use of “hidden dark web forums dedicated to the discussion and image and video sharing of rape, murder, sadism, torture, paedophilia, blackmail, humiliation and degradation”.
As part of the international investigation to identify this once-anonymous offender, police sought out the expertise of Tim Grant, former director of the Aston Institute for Forensic Linguistics, and Jack Grieve from the University of Birmingham. Both are world-leading experts in authorship analysis, the identification of unknown or disputed authors and speakers through their language. The pair were tasked with ascertaining any information they could about a suspect of high interest, based on a set of dark web communications and encrypted emails.
Where McCoole’s case was an example of authorship analysis (who wrote this text?), Falder’s demanded the slightly different task of authorship profiling (what kind of person wrote this text?).
When police need to identify an anonymous person of interest but have no real-world identity with which to connect them, the linguist’s job is to derive any possible identifying demographic information. This includes age, gender, geographical background, socioeconomic status and profession. But they can only glean this information about an author from whatever emails, texts or forum discussions might be available. This then helps them narrow the pool of potential suspects.
Grant and Grieve set to work reading through Falder’s dark web forum contributions and encrypted emails, looking for linguistic cues that might point to identifying information.
They were able to link the encrypted emails to the forum posts through some uncommon word strings that appeared in both datasets. Examples included phrases like “stack of ideas ready” and “there are always the odd exception”.
They then identified features that offered demographic clues to Falder’s identity. For example, the use of both “dish-soap” and “washing-up liquid” (synonymous terms from US and British English) within the same few lines of text. Grant and Grieve interpreted the use of these terms as either potential US influence on a British English-speaker, or as a deliberate attempt by the author to disguise his language background.
Ultimately, the linguists developed a profile that described a highly educated, native British English-speaking older man. This “substantially correct” linguistic profile formed part of a larger intelligence pack that eventually led to Falder’s identification, arrest and conviction. Grant’s and Grieve’s contribution earned them Director’s Commendations from the NCA.
Linguistic strategies
The cases of McCoole and Falder represent some of the most abhorrent crimes that can be imagined. But they also helped usher into public consciousness a broader understanding of the kinds of criminals that use the dark web. These online communities of offenders gather around certain types of illicit and criminal interests, trading goods and services, exchanging information, issuing advice and seeking support.
For example, it is not uncommon to find forums dedicated to the exchange of child abuse images, or advice on methods and approaches to carrying out various types of fraud.
In research, we often refer to such groups as communities of practice – that is, people brought together by a particular interest or endeavour. The concept can apply to a wide range of different communities, whether professional-, political- or hobby-based. What unites them is a shared interest or purpose.
But when communities of practice convene around criminal or harmful interests, providing spaces for people to share advice, collaborate and “upskill”, ultimately they enable people to become more dangerous and more prolific offenders.
The emerging branch of research in forensic linguistics of which I am part explores such criminal communities on the dark web, with the overarching aim of assisting the policing and disrupting of them.
Work on child abuse communities has shown the linguistic strategies by which new users attempt to join and ingratiate themselves. These include explicit references to their new status (“I am new to the forums”), commitments to offering abuse material (“I will post a lot more stuff”), and their awareness of the community’s rules and behavioural norms (“I know what’s expected of me”).
Research has also highlighted the social nature of some groups focused on the exchange of indecent images. In a study on the language of a dark website dedicated to the exchange of child abuse images, I found that a quarter of all conversational turns contributed to rapport-building between members – through, for example, friendly greetings (“hello friends”), well-wishing (“hope you’re all well”) and politeness (“sorry, haven’t got those pics”).
This demonstrates the perhaps surprising importance of social politeness and community bonding within groups whose central purpose is to trade in child abuse material.
Linguistic research on dark web criminal communities makes two things clear. First, despite the shared interest that brings them together, they do not necessarily attract the same kinds of people. More often than not they are diverse, comprising users with varied moral and ideological stances.
Some child abuse communities, for example, see sexual activity with children as a form of love, protesting against others who engage in violent abuse. Other groups openly (as far as is possible in dark web settings) seem to relish in the violent abuse itself.
Likewise, fraud communities tend to comprise people of highly varied motivations and morality. Some claim to be seeking a way out of desperate financial circumstances, while others proudly discuss their crimes as a way of seeking retribution over “a corporate elite”. Some are looking for a small side hustle that won’t attract “too many questions”, while a small proportion of self-identifying “real fraudsters” brag about their high status while denigrating those less experienced.
A common practice in these groups is to float ideas for new schemes – for example, the use of a fake COVID pass to falsely demonstrate vaccination status, or the use of counterfeit cash to pay sex workers. That the morality of such schemes provokes strong debate among users is evidence that fraud communities comprise different types of people, with a range of motivations and moral stances.
Community rules – even in abuse forums
Perhaps another surprising fact is that rules are king in these secret groups. As with many clear web forums, criminal dark web forums are typically governed by “community rules” which are upheld by site moderators. In the contexts of online fraud – and to an even greater extent, child abuse – these rules do not just govern behaviour and define the nature of these groups, they are essential to their survival.
Rules of child sexual exploitation and abuse forums are often extremely specific, laying out behaviour which are encouraged (often relating to friendliness and support among users) as well those which will see a user banished immediately and indefinitely. These reflect the nature of the community in question, and often differ between forums. For instance, some forums ban explicitly violent images, whereas others do not.
Rules around site and user security highlight users’ awareness of potential law enforcement infiltration of these forums. Rules banning the disclosure of personal information are ubiquitous and crucial to the survival and longevity of these groups.
Dark web sites often survive only days or weeks. The successful ones are those in which users understand the importance of the rules that govern them.
The rise of AI
Researching the language of dark web communities provides operationally useful intelligence for investigators. As in most areas of research, the newest issue we are facing in forensic linguistics is to try and understand the challenges and opportunities posed by increasingly sophisticated AI technologies.
At a time when criminal groups are already using AI tools for malicious purposes like generating abuse imagery to extort children, or creating deepfakes to impersonate public figures to scam victims, it is more important than ever that we understand how criminal groups communicate, build trust, and share knowledge and ideas.
By doing this, we can assist law enforcement with new investigative strategies for offender prioritisation and undercover policing that work to protect the most vulnerable victims.
As we stand at this technological crossroads, the collaboration between linguists, technology and security companies, and law enforcement has become more crucial than ever. The criminals are already adapting. Our methods for understanding and disrupting their communications must evolve just as quickly.
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Emily Chiang has received funding from UKRI – Innovate UK.
In early October 2025, with his political future hanging by a thread, France’s resigned-and-reappointed prime minister Sébastien Lecornu pledged to suspend unpopular pension reforms until 2027, when presidential elections will be held.
One striking feature of the debate over pension reform in Europe is how well understood and extensively documented its root problems are. Europe’s population is aging. The birth rate is declining. Life expectancy is growing ever longer. Fewer people are contributing to fund public systems that will have more people drawing money from them for longer periods of time. At the same time, technological disruption is reducing the share of labour income in gross domestic product.
Since most of Europe’s pay-as-you-go systems were designed when demographics were entirely different, they must be adjusted to reflect the current reality. We accept this in other areas like education, where we rezone school districts and trim new school construction to reflect smaller numbers of children in our neighbourhoods. But any talk of adjusting the retirement age is met with thousands of furious protesters filling the streets of Paris, Madrid or Brussels.
In France, it’s also important to put the reform in perspective: it proposed raising the retirement age by two years, to 64. Denmark adjusts its retirement age every five years in line with life expectancy, and approved raising it to 70 by 2040 from its current 67 earlier in the year.
Pension reforms keep failing because the politics overrules the economics. Demographic transitions are predictable, their costs are measurable, and the policy tools needed to address their consequences already exist. But reforms collapse when they collide with electoral incentives and public mistrust.
How to move beyond these problems? Rather than looking at only one item, such as retirement age, we propose a multidimensional approach that addresses expenditures as well as contributions and compensates those who are initially impacted by the reforms. Spain served as our case study, but the lessons hold true for many European countries, France among them.
Part of the solution is incorporating new automatic adjustment mechanisms, or rules that adapt pensions according to changing economic and demographic realities. These mechanisms make pension systems more predictable and credible, and reduce their reliance on series of ad-hoc reforms that are fraught with political difficulties.
We also propose compensating the workers and retirees that bear the brunt of lowered pensions. This would be done through a one-off transfer of liquid assets from the government to households.
The downside of this policy is that governments would have to fund these payments, most likely by issuing new public debt. But as we have seen many times, reforms that are pushed through without any attempt to compensate those who lose out very often get reversed. Older voters with an eye on retirement – and there are increasing numbers of them every day – will block any attempt to cut their benefits unless they understand that they will be compensated for their losses.
For pension reforms to actually work, they should rest on five elements:
Introduce a sustainability factor that adjusts the amount of initial pensions to the life expectancy of the cohort of the worker who is retiring. In practice, this means people who retire younger will receive a lower pension because they are likely to receive payments for more years. This creates an incentive for workers to extend their working lives.
Introduce an automatic adjustment rule that updates pension rights and/or pensions to guarantee the financial sustainability of the system. Currently, many systems update pensions using the consumer price index. This is not sustainable, as it reduces the pension replacement rate, the ratio of pre-retirement salary to pension income. This is especially true in an environment of low or even zero labour productivity growth (as is the case in Spain).
Calculate pensions using the contributions made during the entire working life of the workers who retire, rather than the last 25 years or some other reduced measure. Disregarding initial years worked tends to benefit top earners, and underfunds the system as a whole.
Eliminate the caps on payroll tax contributions but maintain maximum pensions, so that higher earners pay more into the system without receiving higher pensions in return.
Offer a one-time compensation for the workers and retirees that lose with these reforms. These compensations can be financed with public debt. This transitional component facilitates a fair transition and prevents the social rejection that often causes pension reforms to fail.
When combined, these measures not only improve the financial sustainability of the pension systems reducing future pension expenditures, but they also encourage private savings and promote longer working lives. If the reforms are announced well in advance, the cost of the transition may be lower, as households have more leeway to adjust their consumption, savings and retirement choices.
This doesn’t mean pension reforms will not create controversy. If these measures were adopted, governments would need to explain them clearly and anticipate public pushback. They would also need to make clear that without reforms, substantial tax increases will be inevitable.
The alternative, however, is worse. According to our calculations, Spain would have to raise its average value-added tax by 9 percentage points, from 16% to 25%, in order to raise enough revenues to sustain the current system indefinitely. By delaying unpopular decisions on pensions, politicians are setting themselves up for even more unpopular tax hikes in the future.
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Javier Díaz Giménez is the holder of the Cobas Asset Management Chair on Savings and Pensions at IESE Business School.
Julián Díaz Saavedra has received financial support from the Cobas Asset Management Chair on Savings and Pensions at IESE Business School.
The icon has various iterations, but all convey the same meaning: an image should be here.Christopher Schaberg, CC BY-SA
It’s happened to you countless times: You’re waiting for a website to load, only to see a box with a little mountain range where an image should be. It’s the placeholder icon for a “missing image.”
But have you ever wondered why this scene came to be universally adopted?
The little mountain icon – sometimes with a sun or cloud in the background, other times crossed out or broken – has become the standard symbol, across digital platforms, to signal something missing or something to come. It appears in all sorts of contexts, and the more you look for this icon, the more you’ll see it.
You click on it in Microsoft Word or PowerPoint when you want to add a picture. You can purchase an ironic poster of the icon to put on your wall. The other morning, I even noticed a version of it in my Subaru’s infotainment display as a stand-in for a radio station logo.
So why this particular image of the mountain peaks? And where did it come from?
Arriving at the same solution
The placeholder icon can be thought of as a form of semiotic convergence, or when a symbol ends up meaning the same thing in a variety of contexts. For example, the magnifying glass is widely understood as “search,” while the image of a leaf means “eco-friendly.”
It’s also related to something called “convergent design evolution,” or when organisms or cultures – even if they have little or no contact – settle on a similar shape or solution for something.
In evolutionary biology, you can see convergent design evolution in bats, birds and insects, who all utilize wings but developed them in their own ways. Stilt houses emerged in various cultures across the globe as a way to build durable homes along shorelines and riverbanks. More recently, engineers in different parts of the world designed similar airplane fuselages independent of one another.
For whatever reason, the little mountain just worked across platforms to evoke open-ended meanings: Early web developers needed a simple shorthand way to present that something else should or could be there.
Depending on context, a little mountain might invite a user to insert a picture in a document; it might mean that an image is trying to load, or is being uploaded; or it could mean an image is missing or broken.
Down the rabbit hole on a mountain
But of the millions of possibilities, why a mountain?
In 1994, visual designer Marsh Chamberlain created a graphic featuring three colorful shapes as a stand-in for a missing image or broken link for the web browser Netscape Navigator. The shapes appeared on a piece of paper with a ripped corner. Though the paper with the rip will sometimes now appear with the mountain, it isn’t clear when the square, circle and triangle became a mountain.
Users on Stack Exchange, a forum for developers, suggest that the mountain peak icon may trace back to the “landscape mode” icon on the dials of Japanese SLR cameras. It’s the feature that sets the aperture to maximize the depth of field so that both the foreground and background are in focus.
The landscape scene mode – visible on many digital cameras in the 1990s – was generically represented by two mountain peaks, with the idea that the camera user would intuitively know to use this setting outdoors.
Another insight emerged from the Stack Exchange discussion: The icon bears a resemblance to the Microsoft XP wallpaper called “Bliss.” If you had a PC in the years after 2001, you probably recall the rolling green hills with blue sky and wispy clouds.
The stock photo was taken by National Geographic photographer Charles O’Rear. It was then purchased by Bill Gates’ digital licensing company Corbis in 1998. The empty hillside in this picture became iconic through its adoption by Windows XP as its default desktop wallpaper image.
If you used a PC at the turn of the 21st century, you probably encountered ‘Bliss.’ Wikimedia Commons
Mountain riddles
“Bliss” became widely understood as the most generic of generic stock photos, in the same way the placeholder icon became universally understood to mean “missing image.” And I don’t think it’s a coincidence that they both feature mountains or hills and a sky.
Mountains and skies are mysterious and full of possibilities, even if they remain beyond grasp.
Consider Japanese artist Hokusai’s “36 Views of Mount Fuji,” which were his series of paintings from the 1830s – the most famous of which is probably “The Great Wave off Kanagawa,” where a tiny Mount Fuji can be seen in the background. Each painting features the iconic mountain from different perspectives and is full of little details; all possess an ambiance of mystery.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the landscape icon on those Japanese camera dials emerged as a minimalist reference to Mount Fuji, Japan’s highest mountain. From some perspectives, Mount Fuji rises behind a smaller incline. And the Japanese photography company Fujifilm even borrowed the namesake of that mountain for their brand.
The enticing aesthetics of mountains also reminded me of the environmental writer Gary Snyder’s 1965 translation of Han Shan’s “Cold Mountain Poems.” Han Shan – his name literally means “Cold Mountain” – was a Chinese Buddhist poet who lived in the late eighth century. “Shan” translates as “mountain” and is represented by the Chinese character 山, which also resembles a mountain.
Han Shan’s poems, which are little riddles themselves, revel in the bewildering aspects of mountains:
Cold Mountain is a house
Without beams or walls.
The six doors left and right are open
The hall is a blue sky.
The rooms are all vacant and vague.
The east wall beats on the west wall
At the center nothing.
The mystery is the point
I think mountains serve as a universal representation of something unseen and longed for – whether it’s in a poem or on a sluggish internet browser – because people can see a mountain and wonder what might be there.
The placeholder icon does what mountains have done for millennia, serving as what the environmental philosopher Margret Grebowicz describes as an object of desire. To Grebowicz, mountains exist as places to behold, explore and sometimes conquer.
The placeholder icon’s inherent ambiguity is baked into its form: Mountains are often regarded as distant, foreboding places. At the same time, the little peaks appear in all sorts of mundane computing circumstances. The icon could even be a curious sign of how humans can’t help but be “nature-positive,” even when on computers or phones.
This small icon holds so much, and yet it can also paradoxically mean that there is nothing to see at all.
Viewing it this way, an example of semiotic convergence becomes a tiny allegory for digital life writ large: a wilderness of possibilities, with so much just out of reach.
Christopher Schaberg 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.
Thanksgiving is a time for family, friends and feasting. However, amid the joy of gathering and indulging in delicious food, it is essential to keep food safety in mind. Foodborne illnesses can quickly put a damper on your celebrations.
As an immunologist and infectious disease specialist, I study how germs spread – and how to prevent them from doing so. In my courses, I teach my students how to reduce microbial risks, including those tied to activities such as hosting a big Thanksgiving gathering, without becoming germophobes.
Foodborne illnesses sicken 48 million Americans – 1 in 6 people – each year. Holiday meals such as Thanksgiving pose special risks because these spreads often involve large quantities, long prep times, buffet-style serving and mingling guests. Such conditions create many opportunities for germs to spread.
This, in turn, invites a slew of microbial guests such as Salmonella
and Clostridium perfringens. Most people recover from infections with foodborne bacteria, but each year around 3,000 Americans die from the illnesses they cause. More routinely, these bugs can cause nausea, vomiting, stomach cramps and diarrhea within hours to a couple of days after being consumed – which are no fun at a holiday celebration.
Foods most likely to cause holiday illness
Most foodborne illnesses come from raw or undercooked food and foods left in the so-called danger zone of cooking temperature – 40 degrees to 140 degrees Fahrenheit – in which bacteria multiply rapidly. Large-batch cooking without proper reheating or storage as well as cross contamination of foods during preparation can also cause disease.
Put that bird right in the oven as soon as you’ve stuffed it to keep bacteria from multiplying inside. kajakiki/E+ via Getty Images
Not all dishes pose the same risk. Turkey can harbor Salmonella, Campylobacter and Clostridium perfringens. Undercooked turkey remains a leading cause of Thanksgiving-related illness. Raw turkey drippings can also easily spread bacteria onto hands, utensils and counters. And don’t forget the stuffing inside the bird. While the turkey may reach a safe internal temperature, the stuffing often does not, making it a higher-risk dish.
Leftovers stored too long, reheated improperly or cooled slowly also bring hazards. If large pieces of roasted turkey aren’t divided and cooled quickly, any Clostridium perfringens they contain might have time to produce toxins. This increases the risk of getting sick from snacking on leftovers – even reheated leftovers, since these toxins are not killed by heat.
Washing anything makes it cleaner and safer, right? Not necessarily.
Many people think washing their turkey will remove bacteria. However, it’s pretty much impossible to wash bacteria off a raw bird, and attempting to do so actually increases cross contamination and your risk of foodborne illness.
Since 2005, federal food safety agencies have advised against washing turkey or chicken. Despite this, a 2020 survey found that 78% of people still reported rinsing their turkey before cooking – often because older recipes or family habits encourage it.
When you rinse raw poultry, water can splash harmful bacteria around your kitchen, contaminating counter tops, utensils and nearby foods. If you do choose to wash turkey, it’s critical to immediately clean and disinfect the sink and surrounding area. A 2019 USDA study found that 60% of people who washed their poultry had bacteria in their sink afterward – and 14% had bacteria in the sink even after cleaning it.
Food prep tips for a safe and healthy Thanksgiving
Wash your hands regularly. Before cooking and after touching raw meat, poultry or eggs, wash your hands thoroughly with soap and water for at least 20 seconds. Improper handwashing by people handling food is a major source of bacterial contamination with Staphylococcus aureus. This bacterium’s toxins are hard to break down, even after cooking or reheating.
Thaw turkey safely. The safest way to thaw a turkey is in the refrigerator. Allow 24 hours per 4-5 pounds. There’s also a faster method, which involves submerging the turkey in cold water and changing the water every 30 minutes – but it’s not as safe because it requires constant attention to ensure the water temperature stays below 40 F in order to prevent swift bacteria growth.
Stuff your turkey immediately before cooking it. Stuffing the turkey the night before is risky because it allows bacteria in the stuffing to multiply overnight. The toxins produced by those bacteria do not break down upon cooking, and the interior of the stuffing may not get hot enough to kill those bacteria. The USDA specifically warns against prestuffing. So cook stuffing separately, if possible, or if you prefer it inside the bird, stuff immediately before roasting, making sure it reaches 165 F.
Avoid cross contamination. Use separate cutting boards for raw meat, vegetables and bread. Change utensils and plates after handling raw meat before using them for cooked foods.
Keep food at safe temperatures.Serve hot foods immediately, and make sure hot foods are served above 140 F and cold dishes below 40 F to keep them out of the microbial danger zone.
Be cautious with buffet-style serving. Limit food time on the table to two hours or less – longer than that, any bacteria present can double every 20 minutes. Provide dedicated serving utensils, and avoid letting guests serve with utensils they have eaten from.
Be mindful of expiration dates. Don’t forget to check dates on food items to make sure that what you are serving isn’t expired or left from last Thanksgiving.
Educate guests on food safety. Remind guests to wash their hands before preparing or serving food, and politely discourage double-dipping or tasting directly from communal dishes.
Thanksgiving should be a time of gratitude, not gastrointestinal distress. By following these simple food safety tips, you can help ensure a safe and healthy holiday.
Lisa Cuchara 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.
Source: The Conversation – Africa (2) – By Folahanmi Aina, Lecturer in Political Economy of Violence, Conflict and Development, SOAS, University of London
The Sahel region, south of the Sahara, is notorious for being the global epicentre of terrorism. With a combined population of 75 million people, the region has accounted for more fatalities than any other on the African continent since 2021.
In 2024, deaths from terrorism across the region stood at 11,200: more than half of Africa’s toll that year.
The situation has deteriorated following the coups in Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger. The three countries are among the most affected in the troubled region. As of June 2025, these countries contributed to the more than 2.9 million people who have been displaced across the region, more than half of them being children.
As a political scientist with over 10 years of expertise on terrorism, insurgencies and extremism in west Africa, I have closely monitored the emergence, evolution and endurance of armed non-state actors.
Violent extremist groups operating across the region, affiliated to the Islamic State (IS) and al-Qaida, have used tactics like kidnappings for ransom, ambushes, cattle rustling, and attacks on military formations.
Recent attacks have reflected the changing character of this hybrid warfare. Low-cost commercial drones have been weaponised and artificial intelligence has been adopted as part of a broader propaganda strategy. There have been forays into the world of cryptocurrency to diversify revenue sources.
These violent extremist groups have leveraged local grievances which have their roots in worsening socio-economic conditions, poor governance, weak institutions, and environmental degradation.
I have been tracking the rapid spread of one of the most powerful extremist groups in Africa: Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal Muslimeen (JNIM). JNIM seeks to expand beyond kidnappings for ransom, cattle rustling, human trafficking and taxes on local communities. It has its eyes set on gaining access to gold fields. Control of artisanal gold mines in parts of the Sahel region is a central part of its financial and strategic operations.
Given JNIM’s strength and capabilities, the group now poses an existential threat to Nigeria, which already faces multiple security threats. But the group can be quickly repelled with the right measures in place.
Who is JNIM?
JNIM was formed in 2017 and has up to 6,000 fighters. It is an al-Qaida affiliated group representing a coalition of armed groups driven by similar political ideologies. Al-Qaida is a terrorist organisation formed in the 1980s with the goal of establishing a global Islamic caliphate governed by sharia law.
The Islamic State (IS), though also inspired by Al-Qaeda, has become a rival. It is a Sunni jihadist organisation that also seeks the establishment of a self-governing Islamic caliphate under strict sharia law.
JNIM continues to expand. The group has previously been mostly active in Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso. In May 2025, the group launched an attack in the town of Djibo, in Burkina Faso, which resulted in the deaths of 200 soldiers. In more recent times, it has carried out attacks in Benin, Togo and Côte d’Ivoire.
On 29 October 2025, JNIM recorded its first attack on Nigerian soil, which resulted in one fatality. The attack was on soldiers who were on patrol, in the north central state of Kwara, near the border with Benin, in the early hours of the day.
JNIM had indicated in June that it intended to set up a Katiba (a brigade) in Nigeria, thereby signalling an interest in establishing a presence in west Africa’s largest country.
Why Kwara State?
The choice of Kwara is significant and strategic, given its location at the centre of Nigeria and its proximity to the Federal Capital Territory, Nigeria’s seat of power.
Nigeria’s porous borders have been a major issue of national security concern which violent extremist groups like JNIM are keen to exploit. By establishing a footprint in Kwara State, the group could expand across other neighbouring states, including Niger State, close to the Federal Capital Territory. Another al-Qaida linked Boko Haram cell has already established a presence there, in Shiroro, in recent times.
This leaves other states, particularly Osun, vulnerable, given its proximity to Kwara.
Over the past two months, JNIM has enforced a fuel blockade in Mali’s Kayes region, which accounts for over 70% of Mali’s gold production.
With the recent rise in gold prices, the terror group has a greater incentive to tighten its grip on the region.
Nigeria’s response
Nigeria has made gains in its counterterrorism efforts, which have included military and non-military approaches. But a lot still needs to be done to avert threats such as those from terror groups.
A first step would be to strengthen border security and management by using advanced technologies, including facial recognition technology and unmanned aerial vehicles, to complement human intelligence on the ground.
The establishment of temporary military positions across Nigeria’s north central region for rapid deployment would provide useful offensive bulwarks against the advancement and expansion of armed groups into the north central region.
The sub-national states within the region must also get and use tactical early warning mechanisms.
Implications for the region
Insecurity in the Sahel region is worsening. Violent extremist groups are entering new territories such as Nigeria and parts of coastal west African states, including Benin, Togo, Ghana and Cote d’Ivoire.
The implications for regional peace, security and stability are dire. In Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger, despite the juntas’ promises to bring an end to insecurity, a more realistic solution to the problem entails the restoration of democratic rule. That would pave the way to strengthening institutions that could address the root causes of the crisis.
Folahanmi Aina 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.
Critics, from President Donald Trump to establishment Democrats, condemned his platform as radical and unrealistic. And The New York Times warns that Mamdani risks becoming the latest “big-city civic leader promising bold, progressive change” to “mostly deliver disappointment.” Among past offenders, it lists former New York Mayor Bill de Blasio.
But the comparison to de Blasio reveals a paradox.
As candidate for mayor in 2013, after the Occupy Wall Street movement against economic inequality, de Blasio campaigned on the core progressive tenet of tackling inequality through social welfare and the redistribution of wealth.
Over two terms, de Blasio alienated many New Yorkers and became a pariah among Democratic politicians. A committed progressive, he is perceived to have lost touch with the movements and communities that he hoped to lead.
Maybe the question is not whether Mamdani’s policies are realistic, but what it actually takes to win over citizens with a progressive vision. De Blasio himself cautions that it takes more than policy. He recently said that he “often mistook good policy for good politics, a classic progressive error.”
As a scholar of public policy, I think that policy achievements are neither self-evident nor self-sustaining. In my research on urban governance, I have found that it takes continuous political work to maintain local belief in urban progress and its leaders.
Based on an analysis of de Blasio’s two terms, I have identified three key respects in which his politics fell short.
Keep up the ground game
Many accounts of de Blasio’s unpopularity emphasize his personal flaws. Open and humorous in person, he was described by critics – and even some supporters – as stubborn, didactic and self-righteous. His designs on higher offices – first governor, then president – repeatedly backfired.
But for someone elected with the support of progressives, de Blasio’s bigger problem was losing touch with local progressive politics. He missed the rise of the anti-corporate left in Queens in 2018, led by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez – so much so that his team miscalculated and agreed to place an Amazon headquarters near her district.
Many New Yorkers remember former Mayor Bill de Blasio for his unpopularity. AP Photo/Seth Wenig
The contours of progressive politics can shift under one’s feet. But as a veteran of street-level politics, Mamdani has the skills to respond to, and keep shaping, the city’s progressive movement. A dynamic “ground game” – on the model of his walk of the length of Manhattan – will likely remain as important in governing as it was in campaigning.
Early in de Blasio’s first term, while seeking state funding for universal pre-K, de Blasio angered Cuomo by insisting on funding it through a tax on the city’s wealthy. Lacking necessary state approval, de Blasio eventually accepted a different state funding source. Universal pre-K became de Blasio’s cornerstone achievement, but the lasting feud with Cuomo remained a problem, even compromising the city’s plans to address the COVID-19 pandemic.
Critics also thought de Blasio could have been tougher on Big Tech. Letting a Google-backed consortium run the city’s free Wi-Fi program without meaningful oversight left the city with a privacy scandal and serious financial deficits.
In trying to attract Amazon’s headquarters, de Blasio’s administration offended New Yorkers’ sensibilities by allowing the company to bypass local development review processes. Though famously byzantine, these processes were created to ensure local control over development decisions. One could not simply bulldoze them aside.
Though some progressives wish mayors ruled the world, U.S. cities have traditionally depended on states, the federal government and private companies for capital and resources. As I and others have shown, and de Blasio’s experiences attest, these outside players can undermine the progressive ideal of a city that seeks to redistribute economic benefit.
Mayoral powers are limited, but Mamdani can use his popularity to protect New York City’s capacity for self-government from outside interference, while cooperating strategically with the state when necessary. Gov. Kathy Hochul’s endorsement of Mamdani, driven by a shared interest in universal child care, was a start. United, they stand a better chance of defending local – city and state – autonomy against threats from President Donald Trump.
Meanwhile, there is little evidence that it pays for cities to court private businesses with expensive incentives – a common but contested city practice. Instead, following mayors elsewhere, Mamdani might pressure tech companies to end union-busting practices and thereby ensure local workers’ right to organize.
Supporters for Democratic mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani watch returns during election night, Nov. 4, 2025, in New York. AP Photo/Yuki Iwamura
Lead with the social compact
Though de Blasio delivered many progressive policies, he was unable to keep alive his campaign promise to end New York’s “tale of two cities” – the stark divide between extreme wealth and poverty.
Such inconsistencies loomed large in the public discussion. Over time, de Blasio’s administration could no longer convince the public that its energies were being channeled toward a coherent vision of progress.
I believe that urban governance is about clarifying the rights and responsibilities that urban residents can expect to have, what I think of as the social compact between the city and its subjects. De Blasio’s growing unpopularity weakened his ability to show that his policy achievements amounted to upholding a tacit progressive promise to guarantee basic economic rights for all.
Former New York Gov. Mario Cuomo, father of losing mayoral candidate Andrew Cuomo, often said: “You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.” While campaigning, Mamdani offered a poetic vision for a new social compact in New York.
“City government’s job,” he has said, “is to make sure each New Yorker has a dignified life, not determine which New Yorkers are worthy of that dignity.”
Many commentators insist that Mamdani must now abandon poetry and deliver the policy. But that is only partly right.
New Yorkers will disagree about the details, but the election results suggest that they want to believe in the promise of a dignified life for all. Mamdani’s ability to lead New York City – and a wider post-Trump progressive movement – will be a matter of setting an example in rearticulating and reaffirming what that promise means, to him and to his city.
Nicole West Bassoff 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.
