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August 19, 2025

Young South Africans don’t bother with elections: would lowering the voting age make a difference?

Source: The Conversation – Africa (2) – By Dirk Kotze, Professor in Political Science, University of South Africa

South Africa is due to hold local government elections in 2026. In the last election in 2021, only 15% of the eligible voters aged 18 to 21 registered for the election. In view of this, it’s worth considering whether the minimum voting age of 18 years should be reduced to increase participation.

What are the main driving forces for such a consideration? Based on international comparisons, how advisable would it be? What would be some of the implications of such a change for elections in South Africa?

The South African constitution does not state explicitly that the voting age is 18 years, but it is implied. Section 1(d) entrenches the constitutional principle of universal adult suffrage. Section 19(3) says “every adult citizen has the right (a) to vote in elections of any legislative body and (b) to stand for public office”.

The legal description of an adult is found in South African common law. At the age of 18 years, a person becomes legally an adult or reaches the age of majority.

The South African Electoral Act, as amended in 2003, provides that a person can register as a voter at the age of 16 years but the name can be placed on the voters’ roll only once the applicant becomes 18 years old.

South Africa’s current dispensation is currently the same as those of most countries in the world.

The United Arab Emirates is the state with the oldest minimum voting age: 25 years. In the following states it is 21 years: Singapore, Lebanon, Oman, Kuwait, Samoa and Tonga. Three of them (plus the UAE) are in the Middle East. All seven of these are very small states and the majority of them are not democratic.

By far the majority of state entities (202 in total) use 18 years as the minimum voting age. Indonesia, North Korea and Greece, on the other hand, decided on 17 years as the voting age, while in Brazil, Argentina and Ecuador it is 16 years.

Lowering of the voting age is not an uncontested idea. A number of considerations can be presented as its pros and cons. The general contention is that if a larger proportion of the population elects their public representatives, it would enhance public trust in elections. But, in South Africa at least, that is offset by young people’s lack of enthusiasm in elections.

For the moment, a change in the voting age would most possibly not add major advantages to South Africa’s electoral dynamics, because it would not necessarily increase the number of voters or change the outcome of elections.

Main considerations

Voting for a political candidate is one of the most important decisions a citizen of a state can make. What determines sound decision-making?

A person should understand what the decision is about: what the issues are and what the options and their implications are. The question therefore is: at what age would a person make rational voting decisions?

In the era of populism, fake news and manipulation, a voter should be a person who can think independently, who can distinguish between reliable and misleading information and be strong enough not to be manipulated.

A voter should also have a vested interest in the future of their country and therefore participate in voting to determine what is in the best interest of that country. An illustration of this point is the 26th amendment of the American constitution in 1971 when the voting age was reduced from 21 to 18 years. The decision was influenced by the apparent contradiction that 18-year-old American citizens were drafted to fight in the Vietnam war while they were still excluded from voting.

But how well a person is informed about politics or the issues in a country isn’t determined by age. Especially in the era of easily accessible internet information and the different forms of social media. This implies that knowledge of the issues or politics in general is not a sufficient motivation for lowering the voting age.

The critical factor is how that information is used to take an informed and rational decision.

The rationale of why minors need guardians who must assist them in decision-making is that they do not have yet the life experience and judgement abilities to take the responsibility for a decision on their own. Voting is an individual and independent action and therefore no assistance in the decision-making process can be allowed.

Implications

Do 16- or 17-year-old people have a different attitude towards elections or politics in general than 18-year-olds?

In the absence of survey data, an informed guess is: no.

Adding them would not necessarily change the outcomes of elections. The minority Economic Freedom Fighters party in South Africa is the only one that has a strong appeal to young voters. But it has been losing support.

How many new registered voters could be added by 16- and 17-year-old newcomers? Statistics SA provides figures only for the age bracket 15-19, which is slightly more than 9% of the total population. The age group 16-17 years therefore might be around 3%-4% of the population. Given the trends of low voter registration among the young eligible voters, the percentage it would add to the total might therefore be quite small.

If the 16-17-year bracket were to be added to the electorate, the total number of eligible voters would increase but because the rate of registration as voters is in decline, the total percentage of registered voters would most possibly decrease. Young eligible voters are proportionally less likely to register than their older counterparts.

With a decline in the voting age, voter turnout based on the number of registered voters might not decrease dramatically. The main difference would be seen in the voter turnout as a percentage of the eligible voters, because of the low level of young eligible voters who are willing to register as voters.

Probably an unintended consequence of a 16-year voting age is that school pupils would be eligible voters during the last two or three years of their school studies. This has the potential to politicise schools, especially during election times. Political parties might insist on campaigning at schools.

At the same time, it would be an opportunity for more concentrated civic and voter education of a captured audience. Following this argument, a registered voter who complies with the constitution’s section 47 could stand as a candidate and be elected as a public representative in a legislature.

For now, the chances are slim that the voting age will change at a time when several other electoral reform processes are in the pipeline affecting the electoral system, party funding and even electronic voting.

Dirk Kotze 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. Young South Africans don’t bother with elections: would lowering the voting age make a difference? – https://theconversation.com/young-south-africans-dont-bother-with-elections-would-lowering-the-voting-age-make-a-difference-262818

August 19, 2025

Cameroon’s conflict is part of a bigger trend: negotiations are losing ground to military solutions

Source: The Conversation – Africa (2) – By Jacqui Cho, PhD Fellow, swisspeace Mediation Program, University of Basel

In central Africa, a violent conflict has been unfolding for nearly eight years. What began in 2016 as peaceful protests by lawyers and teachers against the increasing “francophonisation” of the legal and education systems in Cameroon’s anglophone regions quickly escalated into an armed conflict between separatist groups and government forces.

It has come at a devastating human cost. With both sides of the civil war using education as a weapon, over 700,000 children have been forced out of school since 2017. By October 2024, the conflict had resulted in more than 6,500 deaths and displaced over 584,000 people internally. More than 73,000 have been forced to seek refuge in neighbouring Nigeria.

Yet Cameroon’s government has refused meaningful negotiations. Though a key party to a conflict that remains unquestionably unresolved, Yaoundé insists that the situation is under control. In practice, it has pursued a dual strategy of military repression paired with a façade of dialogue. Behind the scenes, it has quietly stalled and derailed authentic efforts for peace.

Why has Yaoundé been able to avoid a peace settlement with so little international backlash? I sought answers as part of my PhD research in mediation, focused on the conflict in Cameroon.

In an era of revived rivalry between great powers, Cameroon has learned to navigate and exploit the interests of competing global actors. Western governments, eager to keep Cameroon within their sphere of influence and fearful of growing Russian and Chinese engagement, have not applied pressure for peace. Pushing hard for negotiations would risk jeopardising relations with Yaoundé – an outcome western capitals are keen to avoid.

Cameroon’s case reveals a broader trend. Across Africa and beyond, the post-cold war norm of resolving political conflicts through negotiation is losing ground. In its place, a militarised approach is becoming increasingly common. Global powers are tolerating, even encouraging, forceful approaches. This is particularly true when the regimes in question serve, or help protect, their respective strategic interests. This shift is quietly reshaping the rules of conflict resolution, with serious implications for peace and democracy.

Calculated defiance of dialogue

Between 2019 and 2022, Switzerland attempted to facilitate peace talks between the Cameroonian state and various separatist groups. The process failed, largely due to the Cameroonian government’s aloofness and lack of commitment. When the Swiss initiative was quietly shelved, there was little international backlash.

Cameroon’s ability to walk away from the facilitation effort, while escalating military operations, was a result of its diplomatic manoeuvring within the Franco-Russian rivalry. By signing a military deal with Russia in April 2022, Cameroon signalled to France and others that it had diplomatic options. This move reportedly shifted France’s stance to one of allowing Yaoundé to do as it pleased, as long as it remained within the French sphere of influence. The French president’s visit to Cameroon just months afterwards reinforced the idea that strategic relationships would take precedence over conflict resolution or democratic norms.

Cameroon has also cultivated a circle of “quiet enablers” over decades. Its strong relations with states as diverse as the US, China, Israel and Japan have similarly provided tacit support as Yaoundé took a more militarised approach and have shielded it diplomatically.

Global drift towards force

The anglophone crisis in Cameroon illustrates a troubling global development. While negotiated settlements were the dominant, or preferred, model for resolving conflicts in the post-cold war era, today that model is under threat.

This challenge to the norm of negotiated settlements stems from various sources. On the one hand, changes within so-called liberal western states, particularly since the “global war on terror”, have led to a renewed emphasis on security, sometimes at the expense of liberal democratic principles. This has generated greater tolerance for authoritarian regimes and tacit acceptance of the use of force.

On the other hand, rising powers like Russia and China are promoting alternative models of conflict management. They favour approaches that empower strong states to maintain peace, even through the use of force. Russia, for example, views its military engagements in Syria as a form of “peacemaking”. It prioritises order over justice. China’s model for peace similarly focuses on building a strong central state.

African states are far from passive observers in this evolving landscape. Drawing on experiences from the eras of empire and the cold war, African states are looking to further their own interests both domestically and internationally.

It’s not just global powers objectifying Africa. It is also about African actors strategically playing the game because they benefit.

Elections and the stakes for democracy and governance

With a presidential election looming in October 2025, the stakes for Cameroon’s democracy, governance and peace could not be clearer. At the age of 92, President Paul Biya has formally announced his candidacy for an eighth term.

Opposition parties describe a system already rigged against them, with reported incidents of harassment and intimidation. The ongoing conflict in the anglophone areas is expected to make voting harder, if not impossible. This is a situation that will likely favour Biya.

The regime’s ability to defy calls for dialogue is emboldened by geopolitical cover and a fragmented opposition. It raises the risk of a militarised status quo being mistaken for stability. Everyday violence, kidnappings, and killings – especially in rural areas – have become normalised, with little international outcry. The regime continues to pursue its strong-arm tactics without concerns about international repercussions.

Dangerous precedent

The case of Cameroon’s anglophone crisis is emblematic of a broader, worldwide struggle between a negotiations-oriented model and a militarised approach to ending violent political conflicts. The erosion of the norm of negotiated settlement, coupled with the increased agency of African states to withstand external pressure, brings an additional challenge to an already difficult process of encouraging conflict parties to come to the table.

Cameroon shows how global silence and strategic use of the geopolitical environment can give rise to and legitimise conflict resolution through brute force. Without a renewed commitment to inclusive dialogue and political settlements, the precedent being set today may shape the conflict management of tomorrow across Africa and beyond.

Jacqui Cho’s research has been funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation under Grant Number 100017_197543 and the Excellent Junior Researchers Grant from the University of Basel.

– ref. Cameroon’s conflict is part of a bigger trend: negotiations are losing ground to military solutions – https://theconversation.com/cameroons-conflict-is-part-of-a-bigger-trend-negotiations-are-losing-ground-to-military-solutions-261697

August 19, 2025

Chikungunya: what UK travellers should know about this mosquito-borne virus

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Paul Hunter, Professor of Medicine, University of East Anglia

All of the Chikungunya cases in England were associated with travel to regions which have had ongoing outbreaks of the virus. nechaevkon/ Shutterstock

The UK’s Health Security Agency has advised overseas travellers to take precautions to avoid contracting the potentially severe mosquito-borne virus, Chikungunya.

This warning was issued in response to recently published data, which shows that during the first six months of this year, there have been 73 reported cases of Chikungunya virus in England. Only 27 cases were reported during the same time last year. All of these infections were associated with travel to regions which have had ongoing outbreaks of Chikungunya virus, including Sri Lanka, India and Mauritius.

Chikungunya is a viral infection caused by the Chikungunya virus, which is almost always spread by Aedes mosquitoes. These mosquitoes usually breed in standing water, which means they generally live close to human populations. Unlike the mosquitoes that spread malaria, Aedes mosquitoes bite during the day.

A person infected with Chikungunya virus will usually start experiencing symptoms about four to eight days after the bite. The illness usually starts with a sudden high temperature, typically alongside severe joint pain. Other symptoms may include joint swelling, muscle pain, headache, nausea, fatigue and rash. Joint pain usually lasts a few days but can last for weeks, months and, in rare cases, years.

The infection is usually mild and almost all people recover without needing medical treatment. However, joint pain when it occurs can be very severe and can last long after the initial illness. Deaths from Chikungunya virus are rare. When they do occur, it’s usually in people over 60 years of age, or those who have other health conditions such as hypertension, heart disease and diabetes.

There is no treatment for the infection. Treatments, when needed, are limited to those which control the infection’s associated symptoms – such as fever or joint pain. Drugs such as paracetamol or ibuprofen would be used for joint pain.

Preventative measures are the most important step a person can take to avoid contracting Chikungunya virus.

There are currently two vaccines available which prevent Chikungunya. The UK currently recommends these vaccines are considered for people travelling to regions with active outbreaks or for long term visitors to regions which have had active transmission of the virus in the past five years.

There are two vaccine options in the UK: Vimkunya and IXCHIQ. Vimkunya can be offered to people aged 12 years and over. IXCHIQ vaccine can only be offered to people aged 18 to 59 years old. The use of IXCHIQ vaccine was recently suspended for people aged 65 years and over because of possible serious side-effects in this age group.

The other important preventative measure is avoiding mosquito bites – even during the day – by using insect repellents and wearing loose fitting clothing that cover most exposed skin.

A woman sprays bug repellent on her bare forearm. — Preventing mosquito bites will protect you from contracting Chikungunya.
SeventyFour/ Shutterstock

But the best way to reduce risk is by controlling mosquito populations. The most effective and sustainable measures for doing this are those which reduce breeding sites close to home – such as covering water containers and removing objects where water can collect, such as old tyres.

Evidence for the effectiveness of other measures at preventing Chikungunya, such as chemical or biological treatments, is not strong.

Safe travels

Over the past couple of years, there have been increasing reports of Chikungunya infections in Africa, South America, South East Asia and China. So it’s not surprising that Chikungunya virus infections have been increasing in England in returning travellers who had visited these regions.

What is particularly worrying is that we’re now seeing outbreaks of locally-transmitted Chikungunya infections in several parts of France and Italy. Although such outbreaks are not new – in fact, we’ve seen outbreaks in Europe in six out of the past 20 years – what is new is the number of localised outbreaks we’re seeing. This year, 27 clusters of localised transmissions have been recorded mainly in the south of France and northern Italy. Infection rates are still increasing.

France is clearly at risk for imported Chikungunya as Reunion Island in the Indian Ocean, one of its overseas territories, has been experiencing a particularly severe outbreak with 47,500 cases and 12 deaths between August 2024 and May this year. Reunion is a popular tourist destination particularly for French tourists. It is likely that many of the clusters we are seeing in France would be traced back to a returning traveller.

This summer’s heatwaves have been particularly severe and prolonged and this could be further increasing the risk of local transmission in Europe after an infection has been brought back. Work on dengue fever, a similar mosquito-borne infection, shows that for localised transmission to occur, you generally need daily temperatures of around 30°C to 35°C for several weeks.

The most likely explanation for the increase in Chikungunya in UK residents is the general global increase with travellers picking it up abroad. And if the outbreaks in France and Italy continue to spread, this could mean an even greater number of UK travellers might pick up Chikungunya virus.

It’s unlikely the UK will see localised transmission – though not impossible. We would need the very hot weather to continue for longer than we are seeing in the UK.

The best advice to remain safe from Chikungunya, and the similar but more lethal dengue fever, is to avoid mosquito bites. This is especially important for people over 60 or those who have existing medical problems.

If you’re planning on travelling to a region where there is an active Chikungunya outbreak, it’s advised you speak to your doctor about getting vaccinated. Where Chikungunya virus is present, use insecticides on exposed skin and wear loose fitting clothes that cover arms and legs.

Paul Hunter consults for the World Health Organization. He receives funding from National Institute for Health Research and has received funding from the World Health Organization and the European Regional Development Fund

– ref. Chikungunya: what UK travellers should know about this mosquito-borne virus – https://theconversation.com/chikungunya-what-uk-travellers-should-know-about-this-mosquito-borne-virus-263296

August 19, 2025

AI-generated misinformation can create confusion and hinder responses during emergencies

Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Ali Asgary, Professor, Disaster & Emergency Management, Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies & Director, CIFAL York, York University, Canada

In one of the first communications of its kind, the British Columbia Wildfire Service has issued a warning to residents about viral, AI-generated fake wildfire images circulating online. Judging by comments made by viewers on social media, some people did not realize the images were not authentic.

As more advanced generative AI (genAI) tools become freely accessible, these incidents will increase. During emergencies, when people are stressed and need reliable information, such digital disinformation can cause significant harm by spreading confusion and panic.

This vulnerability to disinformation stems from people’s reliance on mental shortcuts during stressful times; this facilitates the spread and acceptance of disinformation. Content that is emotionally charged and sensational often captures more attention and is more frequently shared on social media.

Based on our research and experience on emergency response and management, AI-generated misinformation during emergencies can cause real damage by disrupting disaster response efforts.

Circulating misinformation

People’s motivations for creating, sharing and accepting disinformation during emergencies are complex and diverse. Some individuals may generate and spread disinformation for a number of reasons. Self-determination theory categorizes motivations as intrinsic — related to the inherent interest or enjoyment of creating and sharing — and extrinsic, which involve outcomes like financial gain or publicity.

The creation of disinformation can be motivated by several factors. These include political, commercial or personal gain, prestige, belief, enjoyment and the desire to harm and sow discord.

People may spread disinformation because they perceive it to be important, they have reduced decision-making capacity, they distrust other sources of information, or because they want to help, fit in, entertain others or self-promote.

On the other hand, accepting disinformation may be influenced by a reduced capacity to analyze information, political affiliations, fixed beliefs and religious fundamentalism.

Misinformation harms

Harms caused by disinformation and misinformation can have varying levels of severity and can be categorized into direct, indirect, short-term and long-term harms.

These can take many forms, including threatening people’s lives, incomes, sense of security and safety networks.

During emergencies, having access to trustworthy information about hazards and threats is critical. Disinformation, combined with poor collection, processing and understanding of urgent information, can lead to more direct casualties and property damage. Misinformation disproportionately affects vulnerable populations.

CBC News reports on AI-generated imagery of fires circulating in British Columbia.

When individuals receive risk and threat information, they usually check it through vertical (government, emergency management agencies and reputable media) and horizontal (friends, family members and neighbours) networks. The more complex the information, the more difficult and time-consuming the confirmation and validation process is.

And as genAI improves, distinguishing between real and AI-generated information will become more difficult and resource-consuming.

Debunking disinformation

Disinformation can interrupt emergency communications. During emergencies, clear communication plays a major role in public safety and security. In these situations, how people process information depends on how much information they have, their existing knowledge, emotional responses to risk and their capacity to gather information.

Disinformation intensifies the need for diverse communication channels, credible sources and clear messaging.

Official sources are essential for verification, yet the growing volume of information makes checking for accuracy increasingly difficult. During the COVID-19 pandemic, for example, public health agencies flagged misinformation and disinformation as major concerns.

Digital misinformation circulated during disasters can lead to resources being improperly allocated, conflicting public behaviour and actions, and delayed emergency responses. Misinformation can also lead to unnecessary or delayed evacuations.

In such cases, disaster management teams must contend not only with the crisis, but also with the secondary challenges created by misinformation.

Counteracting disinformation

Research reveals considerable gaps in the skills and strategies that emergency management agencies use to counteract misinformation. These agencies should focus on the detection, verification and mitigation of disinformation creation, sharing and acceptance.

This complex issue demands co-ordinated efforts across policy, technology and public engagement:

Fostering a culture of critical awareness: Educating the public, particularly younger generations, about the dangers of misinformation and AI-generated content is essential. Media literacy campaigns, school programs and community workshops can equip people with the skills to question sources, verify information and recognize manipulation.
Clear policies for AI-generated content in news: Establishing and enforcing policies on how news agencies use AI-generated images during emergencies can prevent visual misinformation from eroding public trust. This could include mandatory disclaimers, editorial oversight and transparent provenance tracking.
Strengthening platforms for fact-checking and metadata analysis: During emergencies, social platforms and news outlets should need rapid, large-scale fact-checking. Requiring platforms to flag, down-rank or remove demonstrably false content can limit the viral spread of misinformation. Intervention strategies need to be developed to nudge people about skeptical information they come across on social media.
Clear legal consequences: In Canada, Section 181 of the Criminal Code already makes the intentional creation and spread of false information a criminal offence. Publicizing and enforcing such provisions can act as a deterrent, particularly for deliberate misinformation campaigns during emergencies.

Additionally, identifying, countering and reporting misinformation should be incorporated into emergency management and public education.

AI is rapidly transforming how information is created and shared during crises. In emergencies, this can amplify fear, misdirect resources and erode trust at the very moment clarity is most needed. Building safeguards through education, policy, fact-checking and accountability is essential to ensure AI becomes a tool for resilience rather than a driver of chaos.

Maleknaz Nayebi receives funding from NSERC.

Ali Asgary 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. AI-generated misinformation can create confusion and hinder responses during emergencies – https://theconversation.com/ai-generated-misinformation-can-create-confusion-and-hinder-responses-during-emergencies-263081

August 19, 2025

Part of your brain gets bigger as you get older – here is what that means for you

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Esther Kuehn, Professor of Neuroscience, University of Tübingen

I recently asked myself if I’ll still have a healthy brain as I get older. I hold a professorship at a neurology department. Nevertheless, it is difficult for me to judge if a particular brain, including my own, suffers from early neurodegeneration.

My new study, however, shows that part of your brain increases in size with age rather than degenerating.

The reason it’s so hard to measure neurodegeneration is because of how complicated it is to measure small structures in our brain.

Modern neuroimaging technology allows us to detect a brain tumour or to identify an epileptic lesion. These abnormalities are several millimetres in size and can be depicted by a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanner, which operates at around 30,000-60,000 times stronger than the natural magnetic field of the Earth. The problem is that human thinking and perception operate at an even smaller scale.

Our thinking and perception happens in the neocortex. This outer part of our brain consists of six layers. When you feel touch to your body, layer four of your sensory cortex gets activated. This layer is the width of a grain of sand – much smaller than what MRI scanners at hospitals can usually depict. When you modulate your body sensation, for example by trying to read this text rather than feeling the pain from your bad back, layers five and six of your sensory cortex get activated – which are even smaller than layer four.

For my study, published in the journal Nature Neuroscience, I had access to a 7 Tesla MRI scanner which offers five times better image resolution than standard MRI scanners. It makes snapshots of the fine-scale brain networks during perception and thought visible.

Using a 7 Tesla scanner, my team and I investigated the sensory cortex in healthy younger adults (around 25 years old) and healthy older adults (around 65 years old) to better understand brain ageing. We found that only layers five and six, which modulate body perception, showed signs of age-related degeneration.

Layer four, needed to feel touch to your body, was enlarged in healthy older adults in my study. We also did a comparative study with mice. We found similar results in the older mice, in that they also had a more pronounced layer four than the younger mice. However evidence from our study of mice, which included a third group of very old mice, showed this part of the brain may degenerate in more advanced old age.

Current theories assume our brain gets smaller as we grow older. But my team’s findings contradict these theories in part. It is the first evidence that some parts of the brain get bigger with age in normal older adults.

Woman in white lab coat taps a medical image of a brain on a computer screen. — There is still a lot to learn about how the human brain ages.
Gorodenkoff/Shutterstock

Older adults with a thicker layer four would be expected to be more sensitive to touch and pain, and (due to the reduced deep layers) have difficulties modulating such sensations.

To understand this effect better, we studied a middle-aged patient who was born without one arm. This patient had a smaller layer four. This suggests their brain received fewer impulses in comparison to a person with two arms and therefore developed less mass in layer four. Parts of the brain that are used more develop more synapses, hence more mass.

Rather than systematically degenerating, older adults’ brains seem to preserve what they use, at least in part. Brain ageing may be compared with a complex machinery in which some often used parts are well oiled, while others less frequently used get roasted. From that perspective, brain ageing is individual, shaped by our lifestyle, including our sensory experiences, reading habits, and cognitive challenges that we take on in everyday life.

In addition, it shows that the brains of healthy older adults preserve their capacity to stay in tune with their surroundings.

A lifetime of experiences

There is another interesting aspect about the results. The pattern of brain changes that we found in older adults – a stronger sensory processing region and a reduced modulatory region – shows similarities to neurodivergent disorders such as the autism spectrum disorder or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.

Neurodivergent disorders are characterised by enhanced sensory sensitivity and reduced filtering abilities, leading to problems in concentration and cognitive flexibility.

Do our findings indicate that ageing drives the brain in the direction of neurodivergent disorders? Older adults brains have been formed by a lifetime of experiences whereas neurodivergent people are born with these brain patterns. So it would be hard to know what other effects building brain mass with age might have.

Yet, our findings give us some us clues about why older adults sometimes have difficulties adapting to new sensory environments. In such situations, for example being confronted with a new technical device or visiting a new city, the reduced modulatory abilities of layers five and six may become particularly evident, and may increase the likelihood for disorientation or confusion. It may also explain reduced abilities for multitasking with age, such as using a mobile phone while walking. Sensory information needs to be modulated to avoid interference when you’re doing more than one thing.

Both the middle and the deep layers had more myelin, a fatty protective layer that is crucial for nerve function and communication, in the older mice as well as humans. This suggests that in people over the age of 65, there is a compensatory mechanism for the loss of modulatory function. This effect seemed to be breaking down in the very old mice though.

Our results provide evidence for the power of a person’s lifestyle for shaping the ageing brain.

Esther Kuehn works for the Hertie Institute for Clinical Brain Research and the German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases (DZNE) Tübingen. She receives funding from the European Research Council (ERC).

– ref. Part of your brain gets bigger as you get older – here is what that means for you – https://theconversation.com/part-of-your-brain-gets-bigger-as-you-get-older-here-is-what-that-means-for-you-257156

August 19, 2025

Kharkiv: what I saw in Ukraine’s ‘unbreakable’ eastern capital

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Frank Ledwidge, Senior Lecturer in Military Strategy and Law, University of Portsmouth

Last week I visited Ukraine to update my knowledge of the military situation there. I was privileged to be invited to visit Kharkiv by a friend – and spent several days there seeing the sights, while avoiding the more dangerous parts of the city where drone and missile attacks are relatively common.

There aren’t many trains to Kharkiv, and if you’re late in booking, then it’s an eight-hour bus ride from the capital Kyiv. Buses in Ukraine, like anywhere else, have their advantages. For a start, there is the opportunity to see some of the small and often very poor communities on the way. These towns say a great deal more about the country than the sophistication and relative wealth of Kyiv.

It is striking that while Kyiv has no apparent shortage of military-age men on the streets and in the bars and restaurants, the eastern towns and Kharkiv itself are notably man-free. When you do see males between 25 and 60 (the ages between which men are liable to conscription), they are clearly on leave from the front.

Kharkiv, Ukraine’s Soviet capital between 1919 and 1934, was the centre of tank and military production until 2022. Now its dozens of factories are silent. With Russia about 25 miles away there is little warning for missile or drone attacks, and it would be impossible to sustain any kind of wartime production. The eastern suburbs have been ravaged by artillery and bombs and are almost uninhabited.

Kharkiv’s centre is far more visibly embattled than the almost undamaged centre of the country’s capital. Many public buildings, including those around its vast central Freedom Square, have been smashed or burned out. Nonetheless throughout the city, few windows are visibly broken. As soon as blast shatters them, they are boarded up almost immediately by the astonishingly efficient city authorities. The city is remarkably clean and evidently far better run than most English cities.

Life during wartime

At first sight life seems to go on much as anywhere else. Shevchenko and Gorky parks are immaculate in the summer sunshine with flowers in bloom and children riding their little trains along the litterless paths. Something of the Soviet idyll remains, with classical music wafting through trees, piped in through speakers.

The plush Nikolsky shopping mall just off the central Sumy Prospekt, said to be the largest in Ukraine, is well stocked, bright and vibrant. At night the bars are busy. Their clientele is regarded by their young counterparts in Kyiv as little short of crazy just for being there. It is appropriate that Kharkiv’s proud epiphet – “unbreakable” – is seen on signs everywhere.

Despite all this, there is an abiding sense of emptiness. Before the full-scale war began in 2022, Kharkiv had a population of around 1.5 million. My friend, an academic, estimates that less than half remain, although no official figures are available. Perhaps a million are abroad or elsewhere in Ukraine. People worry about how many will return.

The city was Ukraine’s academic powerhouse, hosting among its 30 or so colleges and universities the country’s oldest, the Karazin Kharkiv National University, named after its eponymous founder in 1804. This year, student enrolment is expected to be well under 100,000 – down from 300,000 before the war. Previously, many students were from Asia and Africa – a tradition stretching into Soviet times. They are all gone now and may never come back.

It is thought not to be advisable for foreigners to stay in hotels. Several of them have been targeted by the Russians on the basis that journalists may be staying there. Foreign media and troops from the Ukrainian Army’s foreign legion are the only non-Ukrainians seen around now, and then not very often. With so many apartments empty, there is no shortage of accommodation on offer.

Everpresent war

The war is always there. There are few commercial advertisements. Instead, the ads on bus shelters, hoardings and buildings promote the images of leaders of the various elite army corps: Azov, Kartiia (which defends Kharkiv), the marines, the 93rd mechanised.

These young generals are likely to be prominent in a post-war Ukraine. Citizens are never left in any doubt that they and their men stand directly between them and the brutalities of the Russian army.

Despite its firm ground defences, Kharkiv has little of the kind of air defences that protect Kyiv. Sirens sound half a dozen times a day and at all hours of the night, accompanied by a baleful female voice echoing almost preternaturally over the rooftops: “Attention, air alarm. Please proceed to shelters.”

No Patriot anti-aircraft missiles streak into the skies over Kharkiv – it’s just too close to potential Russian counterstrike capabilities which could identify and target the critical launchers and radars. The rapid-fire anti-aircraft guns, which provide more encouragement than efficacy, can be heard at night all over the city. The occasional thump announces a drone or missile strike.

The bus back to Kyiv and the west begins its journey in one of the “fortress cities” of Donetsk Oblast – or province – picking up passengers in Kharkiv. Most are women with large bags or tired soldiers, going home for their few days’ leave away from the front, the drones and the artillery. The bus winds once again through those dilapidated towns and villages. Few get off in the capital. I’m reminded once again that this, like all others is a poor man’s war.

Frank Ledwidge 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. Kharkiv: what I saw in Ukraine’s ‘unbreakable’ eastern capital – https://theconversation.com/kharkiv-what-i-saw-in-ukraines-unbreakable-eastern-capital-263452

August 19, 2025

Chaos gardening – wild beauty, or just a mess? A sustainable landscape specialist explains the trend

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Deryn Davidson, Sustainable Landscape State Specialist, Extension, Colorado State University

A mix of annuals and perennials can look colorful and carefree. Deryn Davidson

If you’ve spent any time in the gardening corners of social media lately, you’ve likely come across a trend called “chaos gardening.”

The name alone is eye-catching – equal parts fun, rebellious and slightly alarming. Picture someone tossing random seeds into bare soil, watering once or twice, and ending up with a backyard jungle of blooms. No rows, no color coordination, no spacing charts. Just sprinkle and hope for the best.

As a sustainable landscape specialist at Colorado State University Extension, I think a lot about how to help people make designed landscapes more sustainable. Occasionally, a new trend like this one crops up claiming to be the silver bullet of gardening – supposedly it saves water, saves the bees and requires no maintenance.

But what is chaos gardening, really? And does it work? As with most viral trends, the answer is: sometimes.

What chaos gardening is and isn’t

At its core, chaos gardening is the practice of mixing a wide variety of seeds, often including leftover packets, wildflower mixes, or cut flower favorites, and scattering them over a planting area with minimal planning.

The goal is to create a dense, colorful garden that surprises you with its variety. For many, it’s a low-pressure, joyful way to experiment.

But chaos gardening isn’t the same as ecological restoration, pollinator meadow planting or native prairie establishment. Unlike chaos gardening, all of these techniques rely on careful species selection, site prep and long-term management.

Chaos gardening is a bit like making soup from everything in your pantry – it might be delicious, but there are no guarantees.

Chaos gardening’s appeal

One reason chaos gardening may be catching on is because it sidesteps the rules of garden design. A traditional landscape design approach is effective and appropriate for many settings, but it is a time investment and can feel intimidating. Design elements and principles, and matching color schemes, don’t fit everyone’s style or skill set.

A flower bed with a curved border, and curved rows of white and pink flowers, with equally spaced hedges and bushes — Organized and manicured home gardens such as this can be stressful to maintain.
Elenathewise/iStock via Getty Images Plus

Even the apparently relaxed layers of blooms and informal charm of an English cottage garden actually result from careful planning. Chaos gardening, by contrast, lets go of control. It offers a playful, forgiving entry point into growing things. In a way, chaos gardening is an antidote to the pressure of perfection, especially the kind found in highly curated, formal landscapes.

There’s also the allure of ease. People want gardening to be simple. If chaos gardening brings more people into the joy and mess of growing things, I consider that a win in itself. Broader research has found that emotional connection and accessibility are major motivators for gardening, often more than environmental impact.

When does chaos gardening work?

The best outcomes from chaos gardening happen when the chaos has a few guardrails:

Choose plants with similar needs. Most successful chaos gardens rely on sun-loving annuals that grow quickly and bloom prolifically, like zinnias, cosmos, marigolds, snapdragons and sunflowers. These are also excellent cut flowers to use in bouquets, which makes them doubly rewarding.
Consider your region. A chaos garden that thrives in Colorado might flop in North Carolina. It is beneficial to select seed mixes or individual varieties suited to your area since factors like soil type and growing season length matter. Different plants have unique needs beyond just sun and water; soil pH, cold hardiness and other conditions can make a big difference.
Think about pollinators. Mixing in nectar- and pollen-rich flowers native to North America, such as black-eyed Susans, bee balm or coneflowers, provides valuable resources for native bees, butterflies, moths and other local pollinators. These species benefit even more if you plan your garden with phenology – that is, nature’s calendar – in mind. By maintaining blooms from early spring through late fall, you ensure a steady food supply throughout the growing season. Plus, a diverse plant palette supports greater pollinator abundance and diversity.
Prep your site. Even “chaos” needs a little order. Removing weeds, loosening the top layer of soil and watering regularly, especially during germination when seeds are sprouting, will dramatically improve your results. Successful seed germination requires direct seed-to-soil contact and consistent moisture; if seeds begin to grow and then dry out, many species will not survive.

When does chaos gardening not work?

There are a few key pitfalls to chaos gardening that often get left out of the online hype:

Wrong plant, wrong place. If your mix includes shade-loving plants and your garden is in full sun, or drought-tolerant plants whose seeds end up in a soggy low spot, they’ll struggle to grow.
Invasive species and misidentified natives. Some wildflower mixes, especially inexpensive or mass-market ones, claim to be native but actually contain non-native species that can spread beyond your garden and become invasive. While many non-natives are harmless, some spread quickly and disrupt natural ecosystems. Check seed labels carefully and choose regionally appropriate native or adapted species whenever possible.
Soil, sun and water still matter. Gardening is always a dialogue with place. Even if you’re embracing chaos, taking notes, observing how light moves through your space, and understanding your soil type will help you know your site better, and choose appropriate plants.
Maintenance is still a thing. Despite the “toss and walk away” aesthetic, chaos gardens still require care. Watering, weeding and eventually cutting back or removing spent annuals are all part of the cycle.

Beyond the hashtag

Beneath the chaos gardening memes, there’s something real happening: a growing interest in a freer, more intuitive way of gardening. And that’s worth paying attention to.

Once someone has success with a zinnia or cosmos, they may be inspired to try more gardening. They might start noticing which flowers the bees are visiting in their garden. They may discover native plants and pay attention to the soil they are tending, seeing how both are part of a larger, living system. A chaotic beginning can become something deeper.

An orange and black butterfly perched on top of a flowerhead with small, pink flowers — Choosing nectar-rich flowers such as milkweed for your seed mix can help local pollinators.
Brian Woolman/iStock via Getty Images Plus

Chaos gardening might not replace the structured borders of a manicured garden or a carefully curated pollinator patch, but it might get someone new into the garden. It might lower the stakes, invite experimentation and help people see beauty in abundance rather than control.

If that’s the entry point someone needs, then let the chaos begin.

Deryn Davidson does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Chaos gardening – wild beauty, or just a mess? A sustainable landscape specialist explains the trend – https://theconversation.com/chaos-gardening-wild-beauty-or-just-a-mess-a-sustainable-landscape-specialist-explains-the-trend-261249

August 19, 2025

How bigotry crushed the dreams of an all-Black Little League team

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) – By Chris Lamb, Professor of Journalism, Indiana University

Members of the 1955 Cannon Street All-Star YMCA team chat before a game at Nationals Park in Washington, D.C., on Aug. 19, 2011. Robert E. Pierre/The Washington Post via Getty Images

John Rivers, John Bailey, David Middleton, Leroy Major and Buck Godfrey – all teammates from the 1955 Cannon Street YMCA Little League All-Star team – left Charleston, South Carolina, on a bus on Aug. 18, 2025.

After a stop at the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York, for a couple days – where their story is included in an exhibit on Black baseball that opened in 2024 – they’ll head to Williamsport, Pennsylvania.

There, they’ll be recognized before the Little League World Series championship game on August 24, 2025 – 70 years after the players, then 11 and 12 years old, watched the championship game from the bleachers, wondering why they weren’t on the field living out their own dreams instead of watching other boys live out theirs.

When the Cannon Street team registered for a baseball tournament in Charleston in July 1955, it put the team and the forces of integration on a collision course with segregation, bigotry and the Southern way of life.

White teams refused to take the field with the Cannon Street team, who represented the first Black Little League in South Carolina. The team won two tournaments by forfeit. They were supposed to then go to a regional tournament in Rome, Georgia, where, if they won, they’d advance to the Little League World Series.

But Little League officials ruled the team ineligible for the regional tournament because it had advanced by winning on forfeit and not on the field, as the rules stipulated.

A 4-team Black league is born

The Civil Rights Movement is often told in terms of court decisions, bus boycotts and racist demagogues. It’s rarely told from the point of view of children, who suffered in ways that left physical and emotional scars.

When I was a journalism professor at the College of Charleston, I learned how the presence of a single Black all-star team was enough to cause one of the biggest crises in Little League history. In 2022, I wrote the book “Stolen Dreams: The 1955 Cannon Street All-Stars and Little League Baseball’s Civil War.”

The team’s story begins in 1953. Robert Morrison, president of the Cannon Street YMCA, petitioned Little League Baseball to create a league for Black teams, and Little League Baseball granted the charter. Dozens of Black 11- and 12-year-old boys were selected for the four-team league before the 1954 season.

They played on a diamond of grass and gravel at Harmon Field in Charleston, a city with a long history of racial strife. In 1861, the Civil War began in Charleston harbor, where hundreds of thousands of slaves had been brought to the U.S. from the 1600s to the 1800s. The field also wasn’t far from Emanuel AME church, where nine Black parishioners were murdered during a prayer meeting in 2015.

Little League Baseball barred first-year leagues from the postseason tournaments. At some point during the 1955 season, the best players were selected for the league’s All-Star team. Cannon Street YMCA officials then registered the team for the Charleston city tournament, which included all-star teams from the city’s all-white leagues.

Little League Baseball officially prohibited racial discrimination. But in South Carolina, racial discrimination was still legal.

Dixie fights back

The U.S. Supreme Court had ruled a year earlier that segregation in schools was unconstitutional in the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision, paving the way for racial integration.

Few states resisted integration as fiercely as South Carolina, and no politician fought harder against racial equality than the state’s junior U.S. senator, Strom Thurmond.

So when the Cannon Street YMCA All-Stars registered for Charleston’s citywide tournament in July 1955, all the white teams withdrew. The Cannon Street team won by forfeit and advanced to the state tournament.

Danny Jones, the state’s director of Little League Baseball, petitioned the organization to create a segregated state tournament. Little League Baseball’s president, Peter McGovern, denied Jones’ request. He said that any team that refused to play the Cannon Street team would be banned from the organization.

Thurmond let it be known to Jones that an integrated tournament could not be permitted. In the end, Jones urged all the white teams to withdraw from the state tournament. He then resigned from Little League Baseball, created the Little Boys League and wrote the league’s charter, which prohibited Black players.

A baseball with an American flag superimposed over it, surrounded by four stars. — The official logo for Dixie Youth Baseball, which was originally established as an all-white league.
Dixie Youth Baseball

The Little Boys League – which was rebranded as Dixie Youth Baseball – soon replaced Little League in other Southern states; within six years, there were 390 such leagues spanning most of the former Confederacy. It would be decades before Little League Baseball returned to South Carolina.

Having won the South Carolina tournament by forfeit, the Cannon Street YMCA All-Stars prepared for the regional tournament in Rome, Georgia, where the state’s governor, Marvin Griffin, objected to integration. If youth baseball could be integrated, so, too, could schools, swimming pools and municipal parks, he said.

Let them play!

Little League rules said that teams could advance only by playing and winning, so the Cannon Street’s state championship was ruled invalid because it had come by forfeit.

McGovern decided against making an exception for the Cannon Street YMCA All-Stars.

Most white-owned newspapers, whether in the South or North, had long stayed silent on the topic of racial discrimination. But the story of the Cannon Street All-Stars broke through. Editors and reporters may have wanted to avoid the topic of racism, but boys being denied the opportunity to play in a baseball tournament was too objectionable to ignore.

On July 31, 1955, New York Daily News columnist Dick Young asked Brooklyn Dodgers star Jackie Robinson, who had broken Major League Baseball’s color barrier eight years earlier, about the white teams that had quit the tournament rather than play against a Black team.

“How stupid can they be?” Robinson said. “I had to laugh when I read the story.”

Perhaps pressured by criticism, McGovern, Little League’s president, invited the team to be Little League’s guests for the championship game. So the team boarded a bus for Williamsport. They arrived the night before the championship game, which pitted Morrisville, Pennsylvania, against Delaware Township, New Jersey, an integrated team.

The Cannon Street YMCA All-Stars and their coaches were introduced before the game, and the players recall hearing a loud voice from the bleachers.

“Let them play!” it boomed.

Others in the crowd joined in, the players said.

“Let them play! Let them play!”

John Rivers, who played second base for the team, told me he can still “hear it now.”

After their brief moment on the field, the Cannon Street All-Stars returned to their seats and watched other boys live out their dreams. A photograph of the team in the stands reveals the disappointment on their faces.

Black and white photo of Black boys and adults sitting in the stands at a baseball stadium. — The Cannon Street All-Stars watch from the stands at the 1955 Little League World Series in Williamsport, Pa.
1955 Cannon Street All-Stars/Facebook

On the following day – Aug. 28, 1955 – the team boarded its bus to return to Charleston. It was the same date that Emmett Till, not much older than the players on the team, was brutally murdered in Money, Mississippi, for reportedly whistling at a white woman.

The boys and girls who play in the 2025 tournament will forever remember the experience. The surviving members of the Cannon Street All-Stars, who are all in their early 80s, never forgot what they were denied.

Rivers, who went on to become a successful architect, says this is the moral of their story.

“It’s a tragedy to take dreams away from a youngster,” Rivers told The Washington Post in 2022. “I knew it then. I know it now, and I’ve seen to it that no one takes dreams away from me again.”

Now there are some on the political right who want to bury America’s ugly racial history.

America has never fully reckoned with slavery or the decades of segregation, Rivers recently told me. “It just decided to move on from that ugly period in its history without any kind of therapy,” he said. “And now they are trying to sweep it all under the rug again.”

Portions of this article first appeared in an article published on Aug. 19, 2016.

Chris Lamb does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. How bigotry crushed the dreams of an all-Black Little League team – https://theconversation.com/how-bigotry-crushed-the-dreams-of-an-all-black-little-league-team-263003

August 19, 2025

What an old folktale can teach us about the ‘annoying persistence’ of political comedians

Source: The Conversation – USA (3) – By Perin Gürel, Associate professor of American Studies, University of Notre Dame

Stephen Colbert has been defiant following the cancellation of The Late Show. Photo by Richard Shotwell/Invision/AP

Fear of reprisals from the Trump administration has made many people cautious about expressing their opinions. Fired federal workers are asking not to be quoted by their name, for fear of losing housing. Business leaders are concerned about harm to their companies. Universities are changing their curricula, and scholars are self censoring.

But one group has refused to back down is the hosts of America’s late night comedy shows.

Jon Stewart and the rest of The Daily Show team, for example, have been scathing in their coverage of the Epstein case. John Oliver continues to amass colorful analogies for describing the president and his actions. After the “Late Show” was canceled, ostensibly due to financial reasons, host Stephen Colbert was defiant: “They made one mistake – they left me alive!”

We may think of being loud, persistent, and edgy as the modern comedians’ job. However, unrelenting, critical humor has a long history in folklore.

I’m a scholar who examines the intersections between culture and politics and I teach a class on “Humor and Power.” A timeless folktale, known as “The Bird Indifferent to Pain,” can help us understand why comedy fans enjoy the annoying persistence of the jester, and explain why this trope has endured across cultures for centuries.

The invincible rooster

“The Bird Indifferent to Pain” belongs to a genre known as “formula tales.” Such tales consist of repeated patterns or chains of events, often with rhymes weaving through them. “The Gingerbread Man” captures this style perfectly with its infectious, teasing rhyme – “Run, run, run as fast as you can…”

“The Bird Indifferent to Pain” also stars a persistent and irritating creature. In most versions, a bird – often a rooster – angers a master or king for singing too loudly or saying the wrong things. The king comes up with elaborate punishments, but the bird always seems indifferent to them, responding to each move with an increasingly defiant and sometimes vulgar rhyme. At the end, the king cooks and eats the rooster, but the bird flies unharmed out of his body, rhyming and singing ever more.

Because folklore is shared casually across cultures and languages, it’s hard to tell when and where this tale first originated. However, folklorists have identified versions all over the world, from Tajikistan in Central Asia to India and Sri Lanka in South Asia, as well as Sudan in northeast Africa.

Armenia’s famous poet Hovhannes Tumanyan collected one version of this tale, which he titled “Anhaght Aklore” or “The Invincible Rooster.” In this version, a rooster finds a gold coin, and boasts about it from the rooftop: “Cock-a-doodle-doo, I’ve found gold!” When the king’s servants take the gold, the rooster continues crowing defiantly: “Cock-a-doodle-doo … the king lives on my account!” Frustrated, the king orders his servants to return the money. But the rooster still won’t shut up: “The king got scared of me!”

Finally, the king orders him slaughtered for dinner. “The king has invited me to his palace!” the rooster boasts. While he’s cooked, he claims the king is treating him to “a hot bath.” Served as the main course, he crows, “I’m dining with the king!”

The tale reaches its climax when the rooster, now in the king’s belly, complains about the darkness. The king, driven to fury by the persistent voice, orders his servants to cut open his own stomach. The rooster escapes and flies to the rooftops, crowing triumphantly once more: “Cock-a-doodle-doo!”

Tumanyan doesn’t tell us what happens to the king after that.

My great-grandmother told us a Turkish version of this tale, featuring a rooster defying his “bey,” or master, in the 1980s. Her rooster crowed in rhyming couplets and used some naughty words to describe the master’s digestive system. Plus, in her version, the master’s behind – and not his stomach – tore open during the bird’s escape. We were obsessed with this story and begged her to tell it over and over.

Hovhannes Tumanyan’s ‘The Invincible Rooster’

The power of persistent irritation

What makes this tale, and its many variations, so compelling across languages and centuries? Why do so many cultures enjoy the rooster’s humorous defiance and literal indifference to punishment?

In our case, as children, we were drawn in by the rhythm of repetition and rhyme. The rooster’s colorful language held a delightful sense of transgression. Children also often identify with animals because of a shared vulnerability to adults’ power. Therefore, it is significant that the bird, the weaker of the two parties, survives the ordeal, whereas the master’s fate is uncertain. But the rooster doesn’t merely survive – he thrives and keeps on squawking. This is a story of hope.

In fact, when I told Tumanyan’s version to my 6-year-old son, he said he loved the rooster’s optimism.

Modern American popular culture contains many jocular characters that resemble this folkloric bird, who is delightfully impervious to pain, from cartoon characters such as the Road Runner – an actual bird – to the foulmouthed, self-regenerating antihero Deadpool.

Today’s political comedians, I argue, are using the rooster’s tactics as well.

Release or resistance?

Debates about political humor often circle back to its purpose. Scholars debate whether anti-authoritarian humor is just a coping mechanism, or whether can it spark change.

Psychologist Sigmund Freud believed humor’s main function was “release”: jokes offered a way to reveal our unacceptable urges in a socially acceptable way. A mean joke, for example, allowed its teller to express aggression without risking serious repercussions.

Philosophers Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer argued that humor in corporate capitalist media was a mere safety valve, siphoning off protest and releasing righteous outrage as laughter.

Anthropologist James Scott, however, gives jokesters more political credit. In his 1992 book “Domination and the Arts of Resistance,” Scott agreed that authorities allow some dissident humor as a safety valve. But he also identified a powerful “imaginative function” in humorous resistance. Humor, he claimed, can help people envision alternatives to the status quo.

Scott pointed out that release and resistance need not be mutually exclusive. Instead of reducing the chance of actual rebellion, comedy could serve as practice for it.

Authorities do perceive some danger in comedians’ output. In countries with fewer free speech protections, comedians may face more serious repercussions than a stern tweet.

In the case of Colbert, President Donald Trump’s gleeful response to the show’s cancellation, and his suggestion that others will be “next up,” shows just how seriously some political figures take comedic critique. At the very least, they are irritated.

And the story of the “Bird Indifferent to Pain” reminds us that sometimes the best a jokester can do is to keep irritating the bowels of the system, singing all the way.

Perin Gürel does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. What an old folktale can teach us about the ‘annoying persistence’ of political comedians – https://theconversation.com/what-an-old-folktale-can-teach-us-about-the-annoying-persistence-of-political-comedians-262860

August 19, 2025

One of Hurricane Katrina’s most important lessons isn’t about storm preparations – it’s about injustice

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) – By Ivis García, Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture and Urban Planning, Texas A&M University

New Orleans residents wait to be rescued from a rooftop two days after Hurricane Katrina made landfall. AP Photo/David J. Phillipp

Twenty years after Hurricane Katrina swept through New Orleans, the images still haunt us: entire neighborhoods underwater, families stranded on rooftops and a city brought to its knees.

We study disaster planning at Texas A&M University and look for ways communities can improve storm safety for everyone, particularly low-income and minority neighborhoods.

Katrina made clear what many disaster researchers have long found: Hazards such as hurricanes may be natural, but the death and destruction is largely human-made.

A man with a destressed look walks in thigh-deep water while people watch from a doorway several steps above street level. — People walk out of their homes into New Orleans’ flooded streets after Hurricane Katrina on Aug. 29, 2005. In parts of the city, homes were underwater up to their roofs.
Mark Wilson/Getty Images

How New Orleans built inequality into its foundation

New Orleans was born unequal. As the city grew as a trade hub in the 1700s, wealthy residents claimed the best real estate, often on higher ground formed by river sediment. The city had little high ground, so everyone else was left in “back-of-town” areas, closer to swamps where land was cheap and flooding common.

In the early 1900s, new pumping technology enabled development in flood-prone swamplands and housing spread, but the pumping caused land subsidence that made flooding worse in neighborhoods such as Lakeview, Gentilly and Broadmoor.

Then redlining started in the 1930s. To guide federal loan decisions, government agencies began using maps that rated neighborhoods by financial risk. Predominantly Black neighborhoods were typically marked as “high risk,” regardless of the actual housing quality.

This created a vicious cycle: Black and low-income families were already stuck in flood-prone areas because that’s where cheap land was. Redlining kept their property values lower. Black Americans were also denied government-backed mortgages and GI Bill benefits that could have helped them move to safer neighborhoods on higher ground.

In this 1939 map prepared for the Federal Home Loan Bank Board, redlining separated New Orleans into grades. Green is an A, or first grade; followed by blue, yellow and red, which is last as a D, or fourth grade. The Lower Ninth Ward is the red block farthest to the right.
National Archives via Mapping Inequality/University of Richmond

Hurricane Katrina showed how those lines translate to vulnerability.

When history came calling

On Aug. 29, 2005, as Hurricane Katrina battered New Orleans, the levees protecting the city broke and water flooded about 80% of the city. The damage followed racial geography − the spatial patterns of where Black and white residents lived due to decades of segregation − like a blueprint.

About three-quarters of Black residents experienced serious flooding, compared with half of white residents.

People off all ages, including young children, stand in line to board a bus. — New Orleans residents who evacuated to the Superdome during Hurricane Katrina board buses to be taken to Houston on Sept. 1, 2005. Many of them lost their homes, and with much of New Orleans damaged, Houston took in evacuees.
Robert Sullivan/AFP via Getty Images

Between 100,000 and 150,000 people couldn’t evacuate. They were disproportionately people who were elderly, Black, poor and without cars. Among survivors who did not evacuate, 55% did not have a car or another way to get out, and 93% were Black. More than 1,800 people lost their lives.

This lack of transportation — what scholars call “transportation poverty” — left people stranded in the city’s bowl-shaped geography, unable to escape when the levees failed.

Recovery that made things worse

After Hurricane Katrina, the federal government created the Road Home program to help homeowners rebuild. But the program had a devastating design flaw: It calculated aid based on prehurricane home value or repair costs, whichever was less.

That meant low-income homeowners, who already lived in areas with lower property values due to the history of discrimination, received less money. A family whose US$50,000 home needed $80,000 in repairs would receive only $50,000, while a family whose $200,000 home needed the same $80,000 in repairs would receive the full repair amount. The average gap between damage estimates and rebuilding funds was $36,000.

As a result, people in poor and Black neighborhoods had to cover about 30% of rebuilding costs after all aid, while those in wealthy areas faced only about 20%. Families in the poorest areas had to pay thousands of dollars out-of-pocket to complete repairs, even after government help and insurance, and that slowed the recovery process.

A house missing it walls and with a torn-down fence. — Homes damaged by Hurricane Katrina still sat vacant in New Orleans’ Lower Ninth Ward in 2013.
AP Photo/Patrick Semansky

This pattern isn’t unique to New Orleans. A study examining data from Hurricane Andrew in Miami (1992) and Hurricane Ike in Galveston (2008) found that housing recovery was consistently slow and unequal in low-income and minority neighborhoods. Lower-income families are less likely to have adequate insurance or savings for quick rebuilding. Low-value homes with extensive damage still had not regained their prestorm value four years later, while higher-value homes sustaining even moderate damage gained value.

Ten years after Katrina, while 70% of white residents felt New Orleans had recovered, only 44% of Black residents could look around their neighborhood and say the same.

Community-led solutions for climate resilience

Katrina’s lessons in the inequality of disasters are important for communities today as climate change brings more extreme weather.

Federal Emergency Management Agency denial rates for disaster aid remain high due to bureaucratic obstacles such as complex application processes that bounce survivors among multiple agencies, often resulting in denials and delays of critical funds. These are the same systemic barriers that added to the reasons Black communities recovered more slowly after Hurricane Katrina. FEMA’s own advisory council reported that institutional assistance policies tend to enrich wealthier, predominantly white areas, while underserving low-income and minority communities throughout all stages of disaster response.

A 2021 photo showing the low-lying neighborhood and the canal just across a flood wall. — Homes were rebuilt along the Industrial Canal, shown here in 2021, where a levee break flooded the Lower Ninth Ward during Hurricane Katrina.
Patrick T. Fallon/AFP via Getty Images

The lessons from New Orleans also point to ways communities can build disaster resilience across the entire population. In particular, as cities plan protective measures — elevating homes, buyout programs and flood-proofing assistance — Hurricane Katrina showed the need to pay attention to social vulnerabilities and focus aid where people need the most assistance.

The choice America faces

In our view, one of Katrina’s most important lessons is about social injustice. The disproportionate suffering in Black communities wasn’t a natural disaster but a predictable result of policies concentrating risk in marginalized neighborhoods.

In many American cities, policies still leave some communities facing a greater risk of disaster damage. To protect residents, cities can start by investing in vulnerable areas, empowering a community-led recovery and ensuring race, income or ZIP code never again determine who receives help with the recovery.

Natural disasters don’t have to become human catastrophes. Confronting the policies and other factors that leave some groups at greater risk can avoid a repeat of the devastation the world saw in Katrina.

Ivis García receives funding from National Science Foundation, U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, Ford Foundation, National Academy of Sciences, Fundación Comunitaria de Puerto Rico, UNIDOS, Texas Appleseed, Natural Hazard Center, Chicago Community Trust, American Planning Association, and Salt Lake City Corporation.

Deidra D Davis receives funding from the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. The views expressed are those of Deidra D Davis and do not necessarily represent those of the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.

Walter Gillis Peacock receives funding from the National Science Foundation to conduct research related to issues discussed in this article. The opinions expressed are those of Walter Gillis Peacock and do not necessarily reflect those of the National Science Foundation.

– ref. One of Hurricane Katrina’s most important lessons isn’t about storm preparations – it’s about injustice – https://theconversation.com/one-of-hurricane-katrinas-most-important-lessons-isnt-about-storm-preparations-its-about-injustice-261936