We have developed a new way to secure video transmissions so even quantum computers in the future won’t be able to break into private video livestreams or recordings. We are computer scientists who studycomputer security. Our research introduces quantum-safe video encryption, which combines two complementary techniques: quantum encryption and secure internet transmission.
With our encryption system, a hacker wouldn’t be able to access or understand the video data because it’s scrambled using a quantum key that changes unpredictably. Cryptographic keys scramble data so that only someone with the correct key can unscramble it. If the hacker even tries to peek, the system detects it and raises an alarm. The video also travels in the digital equivalent of a locked box over the internet, so nobody can swap or tamper with it in transit.
Quantum encryption scrambles video data using truly random cryptographic keys based on quantum physics. Unlike traditional encryption that relies on mathematical complexity, quantum encryption uses the fundamental unpredictability of quantum states to generate unbreakable keys.
Quantum refers to the scale of atoms and molecules, which behave in counterintuitive ways. Quantum computers take advantage of these strange behaviors to solve problems that are difficult or impossible for ordinary computers.
We combine this quantum encryption scheme with secure transmission over the internet using transport layer security. This is the encryption scheme used to keep connections between web browsers and web pages private.
Our approach works by converting each video frame into a quantum image representation, essentially a mathematical framework that captures visual information in quantum states. We then scramble the data by combining it with quantum-generated random keys, making the encrypted video statistically indistinguishable from pure noise.
Quantum encryption explained.
And because quantum encryption is resistant to future technology such as quantum computers, that video is safe for years to come.
Why it matters
Today’s encryption works well, until tomorrow’s quantum computers arrive. These super-powerful machines will be able to crack most current encryption methods in seconds. That means today’s private videos, stored on cloud platforms or transmitted over the internet, could be decrypted years from now.
More dangerously, these stolen videos can be manipulated into deepfakes: AI-generated videos that can make anyone appear to say or do anything. A forged video can ruin reputations, sway decisions and even incite violence. A secure encryption system not only protects privacy, it helps protect truth.
But most existing work focuses on images, or only on key exchange, without fully securing live or stored video data.
What’s next
We’re working toward scaling this system to encrypt full video files and real-time video streams, such as those used in video conferencing and surveillance systems.
Next steps include reducing the performance overhead for smoother playback and testing the system in real-world environments. We’re also exploring how it can work alongside deepfake detection tools, so we not only stop hackers from accessing videos but also prove the videos haven’t been altered.
While our framework shows strong early results, practical use will depend on phased adoption as quantum systems become more accessible over the years.
The Research Brief is a short take on interesting academic work.
The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Caskets of Irish railroaders whose remains were excavated from a mass grave outside Philadelphia.AP Photo/Matt Rourke
When commuters on the R5 SEPTA train that connects suburban Chester County to Philadelphia approach Malvern station, they might spot a square stone monument on the right side in a clearing surrounded by a thick stand of forest.
Above it, a sign paid for by the Amtrak electrical workers union and suspended from the trees reads:
BURIAL PLOT OF IRISH RAILROAD WORKERS: At this site, known as Duffy’s Cut, fifty-seven Irish immigrant railroad workers from the counties of Donegal, Tyrone, Derry and Leitrim died of cholera and murder in the summer of 1832.
I’m a historian at Immaculata University, about one mile west of Duffy’s Cut. In 2004, my colleagues and I were the ones to discover the mass grave when we excavated the site with the permission of the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission.
My students, who were about the same age as Duffy’s workers in 1832, provided a great deal of the labor at the excavation.
More recently, in May 2025, we discovered human remains that suggest a second Irish immigrant railroader mass grave 11 miles west of Duffy’s Cut, in Downingtown.
A SEPTA commuter train passes Duffy’s Cut in Malvern, Pa. William E. Watson, CC BY-NC-SA
57 dead railroaders
Duffy’s Cut was named after an Irish Catholic immigrant railroad contractor named Philip Duffy, who lived from 1783-1871 and was probably from County Donegal in northwest Ireland.
I learned about the site and its possible mass grave from Pennsylvania Railroad documents that survived in my family.
A 1909 file, labeled “History of Duffy’s Cut Stone enclosure east of Malvern, Pennsylvania, which marks the burial place of 57 track laborers who were victims of the cholera epidemic of 1832,” was compiled by future Pennsylvania Railroad president Martin W. Clement when he was an assistant supervisor. My grandfather, who was Clement’s executive assistant and later director of personnel, obtained the file before the records were auctioned off in 1972, and my brother showed me the file in 2002.
The Philadelphia & Columbia Railroad, the predecessor of the Pennsylvania Railroad, wanted to shorten the travel time from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh from three to four weeks by Conestoga wagon to three to four days by rail, canal and river.
The file my brother had in his possession stated that the dead railroaders at Duffy’s Cut were young men, recently arrived from Ireland. It also said the cost of mile 59 was vastly more expensive than the typical Philadelphia & Columbia Railroad mile. Laying a typical mile of P&C railroad cost US$5,000 in the 1830s. But at mile 59, gouging the landscape with a “cut” to lay the tracks on level ground and bridging the valley with a fill – an earthen bridge – cost $32,000. Although the work was especially difficult, the common laborers received about 25 cents a day.
Fragment of an Irish-made clay pipe unearthed near the Duffy’s Cut mass grave. AP Photo/Matt Rourke
Most of the men had sailed from the city of Derry in the north of Ireland to Philadelphia from April to June of 1832 aboard the John Stamp. The ship pulled into the Lazaretto quarantine station on the Delaware River in Essington, Pennsylvania, before sailing on to Philadelphia.
Forty-seven laborers from the John Stamp ship joined 10 other Irish immigrant workers who were already living with Duffy in a rental house in Willistown, a mile south of the work site.
Yet almost as soon as they arrived to the work camp at mile 59, so did cholera, which had spread to Philadelphia from New York City.
Cholera in the camps
Americans could read about the spread of cholera across Europe in 1831 in the newspapers, but very little was known about the disease until decades later.
Cholera is a bacterial infection that spreads due to poor sanitary practices in which human feces get into drinking water, via excrement passed into streams or by seepage from outhouses to wells.
But in 1832, people believed cholera was linked to intemperance and vice, which were thought to weaken the body. According to the prevailing miasma theory, it caused outbreaks once airborne. Immigrants and the poor were thought to be especially susceptible to the disease and primary vectors for its spread.
Cholera causes extreme diarrhea and vomiting that lead to rapid electrolyte loss. In 1832 it was fatal in about 50% of cases. In the Delaware Valley, cholera cases mounted from July into August 1832. Philadelphia registered its peak number of cases, 173, on Aug. 6 and peak number of deaths, 76, on Aug. 7. The hardest-hit areas in the region were working-class neighborhoods and canal and railroad work camps.
A typical crew on a P&C mile numbered 100 to 120 men. However, the work by Irish immigrants was segregated along sectarian lines on the railroads in the U.S., as it was in the Belfast dockyards at the same time. The other half of the workers at mile 59, according to Canal Commission reports, were Irish Protestant immigrants who worked for an Irish Protestant contractor and did the less dangerous work of laying tracks. They did not die of cholera.
The author, second from left, and his team at the dig site at Duffy’s Cut in 2011. William E. Watson, CC BY-NC-SA
Signs of a massacre
To excavate the site, we partnered with the Chester County Emerald Society, a law enforcement group that cleared our work with the county district attorney, and the coroner, in case we found human remains. The University of Pennsylvania Museum provided ground-penetrating radar, as well as archaeological and anthropological assistance for the dig. Staff trained my students in how to properly excavate and handle artifacts and bones.
Our research team uncovered seven sets of remains between 2009 and 2012 in the remaining eastern portions of the fill. The skeletons had been buried in coffins sealed with an exceptional number of nails, perhaps to contain the cholera.
Analysis at the UPenn Museum showed evidence of violence to each of the skulls – with one skull showing both an ax blow and a bullet encased in the skull. Researchers found no evidence of defensive wounds on any skeleton, suggesting that the men might have been tied up before being killed.
After our team analyzed the remains, we came to the startling conclusion that the men didn’t die from cholera – they were massacred.
I believe that fear of cholera, an epidemic that some clergymen in America and England called “a chastisement for the sins of the people,” and anti-immigrant sentiment fueled violence against them by native-born populations.
After forensic examinations of the remains, five of the skeletons were reburied during a ceremony at West Laurel Hill Cemetery in Bala Cynwyd in 2012. My team determined the identities of two of the deceased – 18-year-old John Ruddy from County Donegal and 29-year-old Catherine Burns, the daughter of one of the workers, from County Tyrone – and their remains were returned to their home counties in Ireland in 2013 and 2015.
Bishop Michael J. Fitzgerald takes part in a funeral at West Laurel Hill Cemetery in 2012 for the five 19th-century Irish immigrants whose remains were excavated from the Duffy’s Cut site. AP Photo/Matt Rourke
A second mass grave in Chester County
Historical records led us to what we believe is a second mass grave in Chester County.
An article in the Nov. 7, 1832, issue of the Village Record newspaper in West Chester reported that one man from Duffy’s Cut fled westward down the unfinished track line to another Irish immigrant railroader crew “near the line of East Bradford and East Caln.”
This was P&C mile 48 in Downingtown, Pennsylvania. It was under the direction of Irish immigrant contractor Peter Connor, whose crew of 100 to 120 men was reported to have all died around the same time as Duffy’s crew.
Forty years later, Charles Pennypacker’s 1909 “History of Downingtown” recorded that the dead Irishmen in Downingtown were carted north to a field where they were buried in a mass grave on the property of present-day Northwood Cemetery, “in the eastern part of the cemetery, near the gully.”
File photo from March 24, 2009, shows bones recovered from the mass grave at Duffy’s Cut. AP Photo/Matt Rourke, File
On May 15, 2025, the Duffy’s Cut team unearthed the first human remains from the Downingtown crew in the exact place reported by Pennypacker. This work has just started.
Up and down the East Coast, there are numerous mass graves of anonymous workers who died of epidemics and overwork in the 1820s and 1830s. Most of those people will never have their stories told.
At Duffy’s Cut, and now at the Downingtown site, we hope to humanize some of the hardworking immigrants who died building a crucial part of America’s industrial landscape.
Visitors can view artifacts found at Duffy’s Cut at the Duffy’s Cut Museum in the Gabriele Library at Immaculata University in Malvern, Pa.
William E. Watson serves as the unpaid director of the 501 c 3 educational non-profit and in 2016 served as director of an NEH summer teachers’ institute at Immaculata University. .
Source: The Conversation – USA (2) – By Lauren Gifford, Faculty, Ecosystem Science & Sustainability; Director, Soil Carbon Solutions Center, Colorado State University
Ralph Regenvanu, climate change minister of Vanuatu, speaks outside the International Court of Justice in The Hague on July 23, 2025.John Thys/AFP via Getty Images
The International Court of Justice issued a landmark advisory opinion in July 2025 declaring that all countries have a legal obligation to protect and prevent harm to the climate.
The court, created as part of the United Nations in 1945, affirmed that countries must uphold existing international laws related to climate change and, if they fail to act, could be held responsible for damage to communities and the environment.
The opinion opens a door for future claims by countries seeking reparations for climate-related harm.
But while the ruling is a big global story, its legal effect on the U.S. is less clear. We study climate policies, law and solutions. Here’s what you need to know about the ruling and its implications.
Small island states like Vanuatu, Tuvalu, Barbados and others across the Pacific and Caribbean are among the most vulnerable to climate change, yet they have contributed little to global emissions.
Waves hit the shore in Majuro, the capital of the Marshall Islands, during a storm on Nov. 27, 2019. Waves inundated parts of the island, washing rocks and debris into roads. Hilary Hosia/AFP via Getty Images
Their economies depend on tourism, agriculture and fishing, all sectors easily disrupted by climate change. For example, coral reefs are bleaching more often and dying due to ocean warming and acidification, undermining fisheries, marine biodiversity and economic sectors such as tourism.
When disasters hit, the cost of recovery often forces these countries to take on debt. Climate change also undermines their credit ratings and investor confidence, making it harder to get the money to finance adaptive measures.
The Maldives, shown in a satellite image from 2020, has an average elevation of less than 5 feet (1.5 meters) above sea level. With limited land where people can live, the country has tried to build up new areas of its islands for housing. NASA Earth Observatory
Tuvalu and Kiribati have discussed digital nationhood and leasing land from other countries so their people can relocate while still retaining citizenship. Some projections suggest nations like the Maldives or Marshall Islands could become largely uninhabitable within decades.
For these countries, sea-level rise is taking more than their land – they’re losing their history and identity in the process. The idea of becoming climate refugees and separating people from their homelands can be culturally destructive, emotionally painful and politically fraught as they move to new countries.
More than a nonbinding opinion
The International Court of Justice, commonly referred to as the ICJ or World Court, can help settle disputes between states when requested, or it can issue advisory opinions on legal questions referred to it by authorized U.N. bodies such as the General Assembly or Security Council. The advisory opinion process allows its 15 judges to weigh in on abstract legal issues – such as nuclear weapons or the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories – without a formal dispute between states.
While the court’s advisory opinions are nonbinding, they can still have a powerful impact, both legally and politically.
The rulings are considered authoritative statements regarding questions of international law. They often clarify or otherwise confirm existing legal obligations that are binding.
What the court decided
The ICJ was asked to weigh in on two questions in this case:
“What are the obligations of States under international law to ensure the protection of the climate system … from anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases?”
“What are the legal consequences under these obligations for States where they, by their acts and omissions, have caused significant harm to the climate system?”
In its 140-page opinion, the court cited international treaties and relevant scientific background to affirm that obligations to protect the environment are indeed a matter of international environmental law, international human rights law and general principles of state responsibility.
The decision means that in the authoritative opinion of the international legal community, all countries are under an obligation to contribute to the efforts to reduce global greenhouse emissions.
To the second question, the court found that in the event of a breach of any such obligation, three additional obligations arise:
The country in breach of its obligations must stop its polluting activity, which would mean excess greenhouse gas emissions in this case.
It must ensure that such activities do not occur in the future.
It must make reparations to affected states in terms of cleanup, monetary payment and apologies.
While the ICJ’s opinion doesn’t assign blame to specific countries or trigger direct reparations, it may provide support for future legal action in both international and national courts.
U.S. courts rarely treat international law that has not been incorporated into domestic law as binding. And the U.S. has not consented to ICJ jurisdiction in previous climate cases.
Contentious cases before international tribunals can be brought by one country against another, but they require the consent of all the countries involved. So there is little chance that the United States’ responsibility for climate harms will be adjudicated by the World Court anytime soon.
Still, the court’s opinion sends a clear message: All countries are legally obligated to prevent climate harm and cannot escape responsibility simply because they aren’t the only nation to blame.
The unanimous ruling is particularly remarkable given the current hostile political climate in the United States and other industrial nations around climate change and responses to it. It represents a particularly forceful statement by the international community that the responsibility to ensure the health of the global environment is a legal duty held by the entire world.
Vulnerable countries now have a more concrete, legally grounded base to claim rights and press for accountability against historical and ongoing climate harm – including financial claims.
How it will be used in the coming years remains unclear, but the opinion gives small island states in particular a powerful narrative and a legal tool set.
Lauren Gifford receives funding from the National Science Foundation and the US Department of Agriculture.
Daimeon Shanks-Dumont 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 – USA (3) – By Julie Walsh, Whitehead Associate Professor of Critical Thought and Associate Professor of Philosophy, Wellesley College
An illustration from ‘The History of Witches and Wizards,’ published in 1720, depicting witches offering wax dolls to the devil.Wellcome Collection/Wikimedia Commons
Between 1400 and 1780, an estimated 100,000 people, mostly women, were prosecuted for witchcraft in Europe. About half that number were executed – killings motivated by a constellation of beliefs about women, truth, evil and magic.
But the witch hunts could not have had the reach they did without the media machinery that made them possible: an industry of printed manuals that taught readers how to find and exterminate witches.
The printing press, invented around 1440, revolutionized how information spread – helping to create the era’s equivalent of a viral conspiracy theory.
By 1486, two Dominican friars had published the “Malleus Maleficarum,” or “Hammer of Witches.” The book has three central claims that came to dominate the witch hunts.
First, it describes women as morally weak and therefore more likely to be witches. Second, it tightly links witchcraft with sexuality. The authors claim that women are sexually insatiable – part of what leads them to witchcraft. Third, witchcraft involves a pact with the devil, who tempts would-be witches through pleasures such as orgies and sexual favors. After establishing these “facts,” the authors conclude with instructions for interrogating, torturing and punishing witches.
Prior to 1500, witch hunts in Europe were rare. But after the “Malleus Maleficarum,” they picked up steam. Indeed, new printings of the book correlate with surges in witch-hunting in Central Europe. The book’s success wasn’t just about content; it was about credibility. Pope Innocent VIII had recently affirmed the existence of witches and conferred authority on inquisitors to persecute them, giving the book further authority.
Ideas about witches [from earlier texts and folklore] – such as the fact that witches could use spells to make penises vanish – were recycled and repackaged in the “Malleus Maleficarum,” which in turn served as a “source” for future works. It was often quoted in later manuals and woven into civic law.
The popularity and influence of the book helped crystallize a new domain of expertise: demonologist, an expert on the nefarious activities of witches. As demonologists repeated one another’s spurious claims, an echo chamber of “evidence” was born. The identity of the witch was thus formalized: dangerous and decisively female.
Skeptics fight back
Not everyone bought into the witch hysteria. As early as 1563, dissenting voices emerged – though, notably, most didn’t argue that witches weren’t real. Instead, they questioned the methods used to identify and prosecute them.
These skeptics also identified something more insidious: the moral responsibility of people spreading the stories. In 1677, English chaplain, physician and philosopher John Webster wrote a scathing critique, claiming that most demonologists’ texts were straightforward copy and paste jobs where the authors repeated one another’s lies. The demonologists offered no original analysis, no evidence and no witnesses – failing to meet the standards of good scholarship.
The cost of this failure was enormous. As Montaigne wrote, “The witches of my neighborhood are in mortal danger every time some new author comes along and attests to the reality of their visions.”
Demonologists benefited from the social and political status associated with the popularity of their books. The financial benefit was, for the most part, enjoyed by the printers and booksellers – what today we refer to as publishers.
Witch hunts petered out throughout the 1700s across Europe. Doubt about the standards of evidence, and increased awareness that accused “witches” may have been suffering from delusion, were factors in the end of the persecution. The skeptics’ voices were heard.
“If they were to cease punishing (women accused of witchcraft) and treat them as mad people,” Malebranche wrote, “in a little while they would no longer be sorcerers.”
Today’s researchers have identified similar patterns in how misinformation and disinformation – false information intended to confuse or manipulate people – spreads online. We’re more likely to believe stories that feel familiar, stories that connect to content we’ve previously seen. Likes, shares and retweets becomes proxies for truth. Emotional content designed to shock or outrage spreads far and fast.
Social media channels are particularly fertile ground. Companies’ algorithms are designed to maximize engagement, so a post that receives likes, shares and comments will be shown to more people. The more viewers, the higher the likelihood of more engagement, and so on – creating a cycle of confirmation bias.
Speed of a keystroke
Early modern skeptics reserved their harshest criticism not for those who believed in witches but for those who spread the stories. Yet they were curiously silent on the ultimate arbiters and financial beneficiaries of what got printed and circulated: the publishers.
Today, 54% of American adults get at least some news from social media platforms. These platforms, like the printing presses of old, don’t just distribute information. They shape what we believe through algorithms that prioritize engagement over accuracy: The more a story is repeated, the more priority it gets.
The witch hunts offer a sobering reminder that delusion and misinformation are recurring features of human society, especially during times of technological change and social upheaval. As we navigate our own information revolution, those early skeptics’ questions remain urgent: Who bears responsibility when false information leads to real harm? How do we protect the most vulnerable from exploitation by those who profit from confusion and fear?
In an age when anyone can be a publisher, and extravagant tales spread at the speed of a keystroke, understanding how previous societies dealt with similar challenges isn’t just academic – it’s essential.
Julie Walsh receives funding from the National Science Foundation
On July 24, 2025, the American pro wrestling celebrity Hulk Hogan, whose real name was Terry Bollea, died at the age of 71. Hogan had chronic lymphocytic leukemia and a history of atrial fibrillation, or A-fib, a condition in which the upper chambers of the heart, or atria, beat irregularly and often rapidly. His cause of death has been confirmed as acute myocardial infarction, commonly known as a heart attack.
Hogan became a household name in the 1980s and has long been known for maintaining fitness and a highly active lifestyle, despite having had 25 surgeries in 10 years, including a neck surgery in May.
Hogan’s death has brought renewed attention to the importance of maintaining heart health through exercise. Many people think that bodybuilders are the “picture” of health. However, the truth is that too much muscle can increase strain on the heart and may actually be harmful. It may seem ironic, then, that people who exercise to extreme levels and appear healthy on the outside can, in fact, be quite unhealthy on the inside.
As the director of sports cardiology at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus, I see patients of all age groups and at varying levels of fitness who are interested in promoting health by incorporating exercise into their lifestyle, or by optimizing their current exercise program.
More exercise and less sedentary behavior reduces the risk of heart disease, stroke, cancer and dementia. andreswd/E+ via Getty Images
Exercise is the foundation for good health
When people think of vital signs, they usually think about things such as heart rate, blood pressure, temperature, breathing rate and blood oxygen levels. However, the American Heart Association also includes “fitness” as an additional vital sign that should be considered when determining a patient’s overall health and risk of heart disease, cancer and death.
While fitness may be determined in various ways, the best way is by checking what is known as peak oxygen uptake, or VO2 max, through a specialized evaluation called a cardiopulmonary exercise test. These can be performed at many doctors’ offices and clinics, and they provide a wealth of information related to overall health, as well as heart, lung and skeletal muscle function.
In fact, a large study done by the Cleveland Clinic found that a low level of fitness poses a greater risk of death over time than other traditional risk factors that people commonly think of, such as smoking, diabetes, coronary artery disease and severe kidney disease.
When it comes to brain health, the American Stroke Association emphasizes the importance of routine exercise and avoiding sedentary behavior in their 2024 guidelines on primary prevention of stroke. The risk of stroke increases with the amount of sedentary time spent throughout the day and also with the amount of time spent watching television, particularly four hours or more per day.
Regarding cognitive decline, the Alzheimer’s Society states that regular exercise reduces the risk of dementia by almost 20%. Furthermore, the risk of Alzheimer’s disease is twice as high among individuals who exercise the least, when compared to individuals who exercise the most.
There is also strong evidence that regular exercise reduces the risk of certain types of cancer, especially, colon, breast and endometrial cancer. This reduction in cancer risk is achieved through several mechanisms.
Finally, exercise improves the quality of life for all people, regardless of their health or their age. In 2023, Hulk Hogan famously quipped, “I’m 69 years old, but I feel like I’m 39.”
7,000 steps is just over 3 miles – depending on your pace, that’s about 40 to 60 minutes of walking.
These organizations all recommend doing at least 150 minutes per week of moderate-intensity exercise, or at least 75 minutes per week of vigorous-intensity exercise. Moderate exercises include activities such as walking briskly (2.5 to 4 miles per hour), playing doubles tennis or raking the yard. Vigorous exercise includes activities such as jogging, running or shoveling snow.
A good rule of thumb for figuring out how hard a specific exercise is is to apply the “talk test”: During moderate-intensity exercise, you can talk, but not sing, during the activity. During vigorous intensity exercise, you can say only a few words before having to stop and take a breath.
There is a lot of solid data to support these recommendations. For example, in a very large analysis of about 48,000 people followed for 30 years, the risk of death from any cause was about 20% lower among those who followed the physical activity guidelines for Americans.
Life can be busy, and some people may find it challenging to squeeze in at least 150 minutes of exercise throughout the course of the week. However, “weekend warriors” – people who cram all their exercise into one to two days over the weekend – still receive the benefits of exercise. So, a busy lifestyle during the week should not prevent people from doing their best to meet the guidelines.
What about the number of steps per day? In a new analysis in The Lancet, when compared with walking only 2,000 steps per day, people who walked 7,000 steps per day had a 47% lower risk of death from any cause, a 25% lower risk of developing heart disease, about a 50% lower risk of death from heart disease, a 38% lower risk of developing dementia, a 37% lower risk of dying from cancer, a 22% lower risk of depression and a 28% lower risk of falls.
One question that many patients ask me – and other doctors – is: “Is it ever too late to start exercising?” There is great data to suggest that people can reap the benefits even if they don’t begin an exercise program into their 50s.
However, in a study of previously sedentary adults with an average age of 53, two years of regular exercise reversed the age-related stiffening of the heart that otherwise occurs in the absence of routine exercise.
And it is important to remember that you do not have to look like a body builder or fitness guru in order to reap the benefits of exercise.
Almost three-quarters of the total benefit to heart, brain and metabolic health that can be gained from exercise will be achieved just by following the guidelines.
William Cornwell 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.
Vaccination against shingles increased among adults age 50 and older in the U.S. during the COVID-19 pandemic, but not equally across all population groups. That’s the key finding from a new study my colleagues and I published in the journal Vaccine.
Shingles is caused by the reactivation of the varicella-zoster virus, the same virus that causes chickenpox. It leads to a painful rash and potentially serious complications – especially in older adults – such as persistent nerve pain, vision loss and neurological problems. While antiviral treatments can ease symptoms, vaccination is the most effective way to prevent shingles.
We analyzed nationally representative survey data from almost 80,000 adults age 50 and over between 2018 and 2022, collected by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to monitor the health of the U.S. population. The survey tracked vaccination rates in people of different ethnic backgrounds as well as other factors such as sex, household income and the presence of chronic conditions like diabetes and cardiovascular disease.
The uptake of shingles vaccines rose notably during the pandemic – from 25.1% of people for whom it is recommended in 2018-2019, to 30.1% during 2020-2022. We observed this overall increase across nearly all groups in our study.
We saw the greatest relative increases among groups that historically have had lower rates of shingles vaccination. These included adults ages 50-64, men, people from racial and ethnic minority groups such as non-Hispanic Black adults, those with lower household incomes, current smokers and people without chronic conditions like cancer or arthritis.
Shingles is caused by the same virus that causes chickenpox. It leads to a painful rash and other potentially serious complications. Irena Sowinska/Moment via Getty Images
Why it matters
In the U.S., the CDC recommends shingles vaccination for all adults age 50 and older. However, uptake has been low, partly due to limited awareness, cost concerns and missed opportunities during routine health care visits.
The COVID-19 pandemic, while disruptive, may have inadvertently created new opportunities to improve adult vaccination uptake, particularly among groups with historically low uptake of the shingles vaccine. Factors contributing to this shift likely included heightened public awareness of the importance of vaccination, more frequent health care encounters, especially during COVID-19 vaccine rollouts, and the expanded availability of adult vaccines in pharmacies and primary care settings.
However, major inequities persist. While shingles vaccination rates improved across the board, groups that had lower uptake before the pandemic continued to lag behind wealthier, non-Hispanic white populations with greater health care access. Overall, the vaccination rate for shingles is still low – below other vaccines such as the flu vaccine.
This gap reflects long-standing disparities in getting needed health care, which became even more prominent during the pandemic. It also highlights the need for fairer policies and customized outreach efforts to underserved communities that build trust and raise awareness about the health benefits of the shingles vaccine.
What still isn’t known
Although the upward trend we observed is encouraging, several questions remain. For example, we could not tell from the survey data we worked with whether participants received both doses of the Shingrix vaccine. Both are needed for full protection against shingles.
Nor could we tell whether participants received the shingles vaccine alongside their COVID-19 vaccination. Receiving multiple vaccines at a single health care visit makes vaccination more convenient and may boost vaccine uptake by reducing the number of needed visits. Also unknown is how immunocompromised people fared during this period. Current guidelines recommend that immunocompromised adults regardless of age also receive the shingles vaccine, but the data only included adults age 50 and over.
Addressing these questions in future studies would help public health experts develop strategies to encourage more eligible people to receive the shingles vaccine.
The Research Brief is a short take on interesting academic work.
Jialing Lin 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.
Driven by a desire to explore Nigeria’s literary and cultural history beyond the metropolis of Lagos, I took a road trip to Ibadan, once the most important university town in the country. Ibadan, in Oyo State, was the first city in Nigeria to have a university set up in 1948.
It’s the city where celebrated Nigerian artist and architect Demas Nwoko imagined and built his utopias. Where the Oxford University Press and Heinemann Educational Books established their west African headquarters.
Books have always been a form of cultural currency in Ibadan. The presence of major publishers meant that bookshops were not just retail outlets, but intellectual salons, sites of encounter and exchange.
So while in Ibadan I visited cultural spaces and independent bookshops but it was the charms of the University campus that mostly captured my imagination. And my favourite place was the University of Ibadan Bookshop. At this campus bookshop I lingered the most, in awe and wonder. Its eclectic range of books, journals, public lecture pamphlets, novels, poetry collections and monographs excited me.
Today, when the global publishing economy has increasingly digitised and centralised, the bookshop feels almost radical just by existing. It’s a reminder that intellectual life in Africa is not peripheral or derived from the west. It is present, prolific and profoundly local. To walk through the shelves of this bookshop was to encounter a history of African thought written and produced on its own terms.
As a scholar of African literature and archives, my research traces the hidden lives of spaces that have shaped publishing and archives. University bookshops have been overlooked but are essential nodes in the continent’s intellectual history.
A snapshot of Nigeria
This campus bookshop gives a snapshot of Nigeria as a print country. Here we witness the nation through its printed matter. A nation of prolific publishing. I found the literary output in the Ibadan campus bookshop not only vast but exuberant and unrelenting. It reflects the texture of the Nigerian personality: loud, boisterous, layered and insistent. Stacks upon stacks of books.
In these stacks, it dawned on me that beneath the surface lies a vibrant, ongoing literary discourse that is unmistakably Nigerian, and sadly not resonant far beyond its borders. These are books you don’t see on reference lists of “popular” and “influential” scholarship that privileges work produced and imported to Africa from the Euro-American academy.
I was especially intrigued with how the Nigerian academic and writer does not tire in producing academic and cultural journals. There are journals for every subject under the sun.
While the critical framework of African literature is too often shaped by the global north (see critiques by Ato Quayson, Biodun Jeyifo, Simon Gikandi and Grace Musila) in Ibadan, I saw a distinctly local and deeply African critical discourse rooted in place, language and lived experience. To walk into the University of Ibadan Bookshop is to step into legacy. Its shelves bear the weight of decades of African thought, theory and storytelling.
Despite being housed in an ageing building, it has stayed defiant. Even though floods destroyed books and computers worth a small fortune in 2019, the bookshop is still standing proudly. And there was pride too among the staff who were eager to help or answer any questions about the books.
More than bookshops
The University of Ibadan bookshop reminded me of the bookshop from my undergraduate days in Zimbabwe. Even though our campus bookshop was much smaller, I used to find pleasure going there in between lectures. It often felt like walking into a vault of African knowledge and memory.
Our bookshop at Midlands State University stocked old, canonical books alongside current literature. On occasion, rare, out-of-print secondhand books would appear on the shelves. The bargain sales also meant I spent most of my money there.
But to call these spaces on African university campuses “bookshops” hardly does them justice. They are hybrid cultural ecosystems that function as part bookshop, part print shop, stationer, library and sometimes even archive. They have long served as vital nodes in the circulation of African knowledge and thought.
Yet this ecosystem is rapidly eroding, undermined by the rise of internet culture, artificial intelligence, piracy and harsh economic conditions. The result is a slow but devastating disappearance of African intellectual memory. As scholars remind us, digital platforms are not neutral. They are structured by algorithms that often marginalise black and African knowledge. So, the loss of these analogue spaces is more than nostalgic, it is epistemic erasure.
In this digital age, there is something vital about the physical presence of bookshops on African campuses. Thanks to them, as a student, for me literature was the serendipity of discovery, the tactile feel of books, the beautiful persistence of a local knowledge system that was relatable and produced by people like me.
On the way out of the city, we stopped at Bower’s Tower. From there you can see Ibadan’s sprawling layout, the ancient hills from which the settlement was built, and its red roofs.
The view reflected the complexity and density of ideas the city has nurtured. And despite shifts in Nigeria’s publishing geography from here to Lagos and Abuja, Ibadan still matters. It’s a city that remembers, that archives, that holds on to knowledge.
Tinashe Mushakavanhu 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.
The announcement this week by UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer on the recognition of a Palestininian state has been welcomed by many who want to see a ceasefire in Gaza and lasting peace in the region.
In contrast to other recent statements on the status of Palestine, however, the UK has said it will recognise Palestine as a state in September
unless the Israeli government takes substantive steps to end the appalling situation in Gaza and commits to a long term sustainable peace, including through allowing the UN to restart without delay the supply of humanitarian support to the people of Gaza to end starvation, agreeing to a ceasefire, and making clear there will be no annexations in the West Bank.
Until this week, the UK’s position had been that recognition would only follow a negotiated two-state solution in Israel-Palestine. Other countries have now begun to shift from that position, too.
The latest UK statement was preceded by announcements from France on July 25 and Canada on July 31 that they too would recognise Palestine as a state in September.
But the UK position is different in one important way: it is conditional on Israel failing to comply with its international humanitarian obligations in Gaza and the West Bank.
In other words, recognition of Palestine as a state by the UK is being used as a stick to persuade Israel to agree to a ceasefire. Should Israel agree to those conditions, the UK will presumably not recognise Palestine as a state in September, but will revert to its original position on a two-state solution.
Conditional recognition subject to action by Israel – a third state – represents an unwelcome and arguably dangerous departure from international practice.
While recognition (or otherwise) of states is inherently political – as demonstrated by the unique status of Taiwan, for example – it is not and should not be made conditional on the action or inaction of third states.
How states are recognised
According to the Convention on the Rights and Duties of States, a state must have a permanent population, territory, an independent government, and the capacity to enter into relations with other states, as well as self-determination.
Palestine has arguably met all these criteria, with the possible exception of an independent government, given the level of Israeli intervention in the West Bank and the current situation in Gaza.
Although recognition by other states is arguably not a formal criterion of statehood, it is very difficult to function as a state without reasonably widespread recognition by other states.
Some 147 countries – two-thirds of UN members – now recognise the State of Palestine, including Spain, Ireland and Norway, which made announcements in 2024.
Those choosing not to formally recognise a Palestinian state are now in a small minority, including Australia and New Zealand. This is inevitably leading to calls in those countries to change position.
Australia is considering such a shift, subject to conditions similar to those set out by Canada – including the release of Israeli hostages, the demilitarisation of Hamas, and reform of the Palestinian Authority.
New Zealand is currently maintaining its longstanding position of recognising Palestine within the context of a two-state solution. On July 30, Foreign Minister Winston Peters and 13 of his counterparts issued a joint statement – the “New York Call” – demanding an immediate ceasefire in Gaza and reiterating “unwavering commitment to the vision of the two-State solution”.
The statement also asserted that “positive consideration” to recognise the state of Palestine is “an essential step towards the two-state solution”.
Better options are available
The UK’s position, however, introduces another dynamic. By using recognition of Palestine as a tool to punish Israel for its actual and alleged breaches of international law in Gaza, it is implicitly failing to respect Palestine’s right to self-determination.
If Palestine deserves statehood, it is on its own terms, not as a condition of Israel’s policies and actions.
But it is also setting a dangerous precedent. Countries could choose to recognise (or not recognise) states to pressure or punish them (or indeed other states) for breaches of international law. Such breaches may or may not be connected to the state actually seeking recognition.
This is important, because the post-colonial settlement of geographical boundaries remains deeply insecure in many regions. As well, low-lying island nations at risk of losing territory from sea-level rise may also find their status challenged, as territory has traditionally been a requirement of statehood.
The UK’s apparent conditional recognition of Palestine is only likely to increase this international instability around statehood.
While the UK’s announcement may be “clever politics” from a domestic perspective, and avoids outright US opposition internationally, it has conflated two separate issues.
The better option would be for the UK to recognise Palestine as a state, joining a growing number of countries that plan to do so in advance of the UN General Assembly meeting in September. It could make this subject to conditions, including the release of hostages and exclusion of Hamas from Palestinian governance.
And it should continue to press Israel to agree to a ceasefire in addition to the other demands set out in its announcement, and hold Israel accountable for its gross breaches of international law in Gaza. It can back up those demands with appropriate diplomatic and trade sanctions.
New Zealand, too, has a range of options available, and can help increase the pressure on Israel by using them.
Karen Scott 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.
The Roman baths at Sabratha, Libya, were damaged in the earthquake and tsunami of 365 ADReza / Getty Images
The Greek poet Crinagoras of Mytilene (1st century BC–1st century AD) once addressed a little poem to an earthquake. He asked the quake not to destroy his house:
Earthquake, most dread of all shocks … spare my new-built house, for I do not know of any terror equal to the quivering of the earth.
Like us, ancient people had many things to say about natural disasters. So, what information did they leave behind for us, and what can we learn from them?
The story of Nicomedia
One of the most vivid ancient accounts of an earthquake is found in the writings of the Roman historian Ammianus Marcellinus (c. 330–395 AD).
On August 24 358 AD, there was a huge earthquake at Nicomedia, a city in Asia Minor.
A terrific earthquake completely overturned the city and its suburbs … since most of the houses were carried down the slopes of the hill, they fell one upon another, while everything resounded with the vast roar of their destruction.
The human effect was devastating.
The palace of the emperor Diocletian at Nicomedia was damaged in the quake of 358 AD. G. Berggren / Getty Images
Most people were “killed at one blow”, says Ammianus. Others, he tells us, were “imprisoned unhurt within slanting house roofs, to be consumed by the agony of starvation”.
Hidden in the rubble “with fractured skulls or amputated arms or legs”, injured survivors “hovered between life and death”, but most could not be recovered, “despite their pleas and protestations” resounding from beneath the rubble, according to Ammianus.
Famous natural disasters in the ancient world
A number of natural disasters involving earthquakes and tsunamis were especially famous in ancient Greek and Roman times.
In 464 BC, in Sparta, there was a huge earthquake. People at the time said it was greater than any earthquake that had ever occurred beforehand.
According to the Greek writer Plutarch (c. 46–119 AD), the earthquake “tore the land of the Lacedaemonians into many chasms”, collapsed the peaks of the surrounding mountains, and “demolished the entire city with the exception of five houses”.
In 373–372 BC, the Greek coastal cities of Helice and Buris were destroyed by tsunamis. They were permanently submerged beneath the waves.
An anonymous Greek poet evocatively wrote that the walls of these cities, which had once been thriving with many people, were now silent under the waves, “clad with thick sea-moss”.
But arguably the most famous ancient tsunami occurred on July 21 365 AD on the northern coast of Africa, at that time controlled by the Romans.
Again according to Ammianus, early in the morning there was a huge earthquake. Then, not long after, the water retreated from the shore:
the sea with its rolling waves was driven back and withdrew from the land, so that in the abyss of the deep thus revealed people saw many kinds of sea-creatures stuck fast in the slime … and vast mountains and deep valleys, which nature had hidden in the unplumbed depths.
Then, suddenly, the sea returned with a vengeance. As Ammianus tells us, it smashed over the land destroying everything in its path:
The great mass of waters killed many thousands of people by drowning … the lifeless bodies of shipwrecked persons lay floating on their backs or on their faces … great ships, driven by the mad blasts, landed on the tops of buildings, and some were driven almost two miles inland.
Earthquakes were famous for their sound. The Roman scholar Pliny the Elder (23–79 AD) explained that earthquakes have a “terrible sound” – like “the bellowing of cattle or the shouts of human beings or the clash of weapons struck together”.
Ancient ideas about what causes earthquakes and tsunamis
Like today, ancient people wanted to know what caused these phenomena. There were various different theories.
Some people thought Poseidon, god of the sea, earthquakes and horses, was responsible.
As the Greek writer Plutarch (c. 46–119 AD) comments, “men sacrifice to Poseidon when they wish to put a stop to earthquakes”.
An ancient statue of Poseidon, god of the sea and earthquakes, from the island of Milos. Sepia Times / Getty Images
However, other people looked beyond divine explanations.
One interesting theory held by the philosopher Anaximenes (6th century BC) was that the earth itself was the cause of earthquakes.
According to Anaximenes, huge parts of the earth beneath the ground can move, collapse, detach or tear away, thus causing shaking.
“Huge waves”, said Anaximenes, are “produced by the weight [of falling earth] crashing down into the [waters] from above”.
Ancient people knew nothing of tectonic plates and continental drift. These were discovered much later, mainly through the pioneering work of Alfred Wegener (1880–1930).
Preparing for natural disasters
Ancient Greeks and Romans had little way of predicting or preparing for earthquakes and tsunamis.
Pherecydes of Samos (6th century BC) was said to have predicted an earthquake “from the appearance of some water drawn from a well”, according to the Roman statesman Cicero (106–43 BC).
For the most part, though, ancient people had to live at the mercy of these occurrences.
As the anonymous author of a treatise titled On the Cosmos once wrote, natural disasters are part of life on earth:
Violent earthquakes before now have torn up many parts of the earth; monstrous storms of rain have burst out and overwhelmed it; incursions and withdrawals of the waves have often made seas of dry land and dry land of seas…
While our understanding of these events (and our ability to prepare for them, and recover afterward) has improved immeasurably since ancient times, earthquakes and tsunamis are things we will always have to deal with.
Konstantine Panegyres 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.
The money is easy to trace. Scroll back through tech entrepreneur Peter Thiel’s political donations and you’ll soon hit US$15 million worth of transfers sent to Protect Ohio Values, JD Vance’s campaign fund. The donations, made in 2022, are a staggering contribution to an individual senate race, and helped put Vance (Thiel’s former employee at tech fund Mithril Capital) on a winning trajectory.
But if money matters, so do ideas. Scroll back through Vance’s speeches, and you’ll hear echoes of Thiel’s voice. The decline of US elites (and by extension, the nation) is supposedly a result of technological stagnation: declining innovation, trivial distractions, broken infrastructure. To make the nation great again, Thiel believes, tech should come first, corporates should be unshackled, and the state should resemble the startup. For Vance, who has now risen to the office of US vice-president, a Thiel talk on these topics at Yale Law was “the most significant moment” of his time there.
Thiel’s influence on politics is at once financial, technical and ideological. In the New York Times, he was recently described as the “most influential right-wing intellectual of the last 20 years”. And his potent cocktail of networks, money, strategy and support exerts a rightward force on the political landscape. It establishes a powerful pattern for up-and-coming figures to follow.
To “hedge fund investor” and “tech entrepreneur”, Thiel has recently added a new label: Republican kingmaker.
Who is Peter Thiel?
Thiel was born in Germany but grew up in the United States, with a childhood sojourn in apartheid South Africa. Max Chafkin’s critical but balanced biography, The Contrarian, claims Thiel was bullied growing up and protected himself by becoming resolutely “disdainful”. He studied philosophy and then law at Stanford, where he founded The Stanford Review, a libertarian–conservative student paper that signalled his early interest in controversial politics and culture wars.
While difficult to pin down precisely, Thiel’s Christianity shapes his belief in a declining or even apocalyptic world that can only be countered with unapologetic interventions and technological innovations. God helps those who help themselves – but could always use additional help from ambitious tech elites.
In 1998, Thiel cofounded his first tech company, Confinity, which launched its flagship product PayPal in 1999 and merged with Elon Musk’s X.com in 2000. In 2002, eBay bought PayPal for $1.5 billion and Thiel became a multimillionaire. He invested in several startups, including Facebook, and established his hedge fund, Clarium, and his venture capital firm, Founders Fund.
In their own ways, each of these developments is a response to Thiel’s thesis that the world is stuck. In his 2011 essay The End of the Future, he decries the “soft totalitarianism of political correctness in media and academia” and the “sordid world” of entertainment. The result is “50 years of stagnation” that has transformed humanity “into this more docile kind of a species”.
Thiel’s answer is more risk, more tech and more ambition. It’s exemplified most clearly by Palantir Technologies, the data analytics firm he cofounded in 2004.
Palantir has worked closely with US armed forces and intelligence agencies for 14 years. It is currently working closely with the Trump administration to create a “super-database” of combined data from all federal agencies, and building a platform for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) “to track migrant movements in real time”.
Investing in right-wing politics
Thiel’s political interventions have ramped up over time. Libertarianism generally takes an arms-length approach to politics in favour of individual freedom and market determination. But even in “purely” financial spaces, politics creeps in.
Clarium’s macroeconomic approach meant the political landscape had to be factored in: “high-conviction, directional investments based on key drivers of the global economy and fundamental themes underappreciated by the marketplace”.
If politics, like technology, had stagnated – into a non-choice between similar parties – how could it be “disrupted”? Thiel began making political donations in December 2011, with contributions totalling at least $2.6 million, to the third presidential campaign of Ron Paul, a longstanding conservative congressman in Texas.
While Paul would ultimately be unsuccessful, Thiel recognised something others had missed. Voters had not been attracted to some idealistic libertarian, as the media portrayed him, but to the old Ron Paul, a neoconservative whose newsletters published in his name in the 1980s and ‘90s suggested 95% of Black men in Washington DC were criminals. (He denied writing them in 2011, calling the statements “terrible”.) His appeal was never “merely” about economic freedom, but about race and class, fear and grievance.
Donald Trump took this dark undercurrent, a strain that has always underpinned parts of US politics, and ran with it. Dog-whistles were dispensed with in favour of overt claims that most illegal immigrants were rapists, certain Latin American countries were shitholes, women were bitches, and white supremacists were “very fine people”. Trump, noted one article, was “weaponizing the conservative id”.
In these visions, multiculturalism and progressivism are not just cultural threats, but economic ones. They undermine the ability of company founders to exploit labour, blow past regulations, and obey the brutal logic of the market.
“A world safe for capitalism is presumably one of monopoly companies and patriarchal networks,” note media scholars Ben Little and Alison Winch in their profile of Thiel. It’s a world “where ‘the multiculture’ has been transformed into racialised domination”.
Thiel has certainly contributed to the rise of Trump and the new breed of right-wing politicians through his vast wealth. In 2016, Thiel contributed $1.25 million to Trump’s campaign, thinking “he had a 50-50 chance of winning”. This earned him a speaking slot at the Republican convention. But his influence extends beyond mere money.
Thiel’s endorsement of Trump at the 2016 Republican convention was hugely significant for garnering support. So was his famous declaration there that he was proud to be gay, Republican and American. After Trump won his first term, Thiel continued to be involved. He joined the transition team and recommended aligned individuals for key positions, such as Michael Kratsios, who would become chief technology officer.
So, Thiel’s support of Trump should be understood as an investment, just like his early investments in PayPal and Facebook. As Chafkin notes, Thiel’s bet on Trump is a wager with high upsides and low risk. Thiel’s outspoken views in favour of “seasteading” (floating independent city-states) and against immigration and women’s emancipation had already alienated the more progressive sectors of Silicon Valley.
If the bet paid off, Thiel and his empire could benefit handsomely. And this is exactly what has played out. Since Trump has taken office in his second term, Palantir has already netted more than $113 million in federal government spending.
Palantir: from information to domination
Palantir’s origin story reflects its blend of technical expertise and political ambition. To combat rising fraud, members of PayPal developed a software tool that could mine vast amounts of transactions and find the connections between them, homing in on a handful of culprits in a deluge of data.
Thiel was prescient in spinning this core idea from finance to intelligence, where analysts were searching for patterns and anomalies amid the noise – a needle in a haystack. Palantir commercialised and expanded this concept, bringing a leaner, data-driven Silicon Valley approach to a sector dominated by established Washington incumbents.
Thiel and Palantir chief executive Alex Karp believe Silicon Valley has lost its way, frittering away its vast talents and ingenuity on trivial pursuits: advertising, gaming, social media. For them, the era of ambitious scientific projects and unapologetic military industrial collaborations – the Manhattan Project, the Moon landing — needs to be revived.
In his book, the Technological Republic, Karp calls for a state that looks more like a startup – lean, technology-driven, and led authoritatively by a founder-like figure who is not afraid to “move fast and break stuff” (the Silicon Valley motto), especially when it comes to dominating enemies and ensuring the safety of a nation’s citizens.
Palantir, of course, answers this call. It combines machine learning with military spending, data-driven “intelligence” with naked violence. This is most clear in its longstanding collaboration with ICE, which is now carrying out notorious immigration raids at the behest of the Trump administration. “On the factory floor, in the operating room, on the battlefield,” states a recent Palantir recruitment ad placed across US college campuses, “we build to dominate.”
Palantir’s blueprint has been emulated by a growing array of others. Anduril, Skydio and Shield AI are all founded on developing information technologies for military and intelligence use. Last week, Rune Technologies closed a $24 million Series A round of funding to move warfare logistics away from the “Excel era” and towards AI-augmented tools.
Answering Karp’s call, these startups are unapologetic in leveraging engineering expertise for more substantial, authoritarian and historically controversial areas.
Playing the scapegoat
One of the clearest outlines of Thiel’s political philosophy is laid out in the Straussian Moment, a 30-page essay he published in 2007.
For Thiel, the spectacular violence of the September 11 terrorist attacks was a wake-up call, rousing the citizenry from that “very long and profitable period of intellectual slumber and amnesia that is so misleadingly called the Enlightenment”.
In Thiel’s view, the Enlightenment project – to advance knowledge, cultivate tolerance, and elevate humanity as a whole – rested on a naive understanding of human nature. Like Curtis Yarvin and other influential Silicon Valley political thinkers, he asserts that humanity is brutal and a shift from Enlightenment optimism to Dark Enlightenment pessimism is required.
It is unsurprising, then, that Thiel looks to René Girard (once called “the new Darwin of the human sciences”) for inspiration; he even organised a symposium at Stanford with Girard in attendance. Girard begins from a bleak view of human nature, a Hobbesian world where life is nasty, brutish and short. For Girard, mimesis or imitation is at the heart of the human. This mirroring quality means violence is always threatening to escalate, to constantly ramp up with no inherent limit.
To corral this violence, ancient cultures created the scapegoat, a sacrificial system where all-against-all was replaced by all-against-one. Yet the scapegoat is no longer viable – the revelation of Christ is that the scapegoat is an innocent victim.
Thiel takes Girard’s insights and twists them to his own ends. First, Thiel asserts that even if violence begets more violence, nonviolence is not an option. Enemies must not be allowed to prevail. In the face of uncompromising adversaries, such as the 9/11 attackers, who threaten to dismantle some idealised way of life, preemptively responding to violence is “urgently demanded”.
Second, Thiel takes the concept of the scapegoat and flips it. In this judo-like manoeuvre, the real victims are not the marginalised or the minority, but the hegemonic class (whites, males, liberals, conservatives), who are being pressured by cancel culture, political correctness, diversity initiatives and so on.
Shortly after graduating, Thiel coauthored a book, The Diversity Myth, about alleged political intolerance at Stanford. In it, he rails against a rampant multiculturalism that he claims stifles freedom of speech and derails education and entrepreneurialism. Here, scapegoating is weaponised. It’s mobilised toward a conservative advance in the ongoing cultural wars, which are always also political wars.
Contradiction or evolution?
Thiel is a walking paradox. He bemoans cancel culture and political correctness, while waging a highly expensive and clearly personal war to bankrupt a media outlet that offended him. (After Gawker printed the “open secret” of Thiel’s gay status in 2007, Thiel funded lawsuits against them until they were shut down.)
He calls himself a libertarian, but has founded a company that derives millions in contracts from the bloated budgets of the many military agencies (the National Security Agency, the FBI, the US Army) that now comprise the sprawling state.
He celebrates capitalism and the free hand of the market, but always stresses that the path to business success rests on establishing monopolies with no real competition. He is a German-born immigrant who actively supports technologies (Palantir) and candidates (Trump) that establish xenophobic environments and seek to deport those deemed “other”. And, most personally, he is both a conservative Republican and an openly gay man.
At a purely logical level, these elements are incompatible. There is a perceived gap between Thiel’s words and actions, a gulf between his ideologies and his activities. For staunch libertarians at Thiel’s companies, his manoeuvrings at the state level make no sense. For queer scholars, Thiel’s exclusionary rather than liberatory politics mean he is a man who has sex with other men, rather than being gay.
For these critics, both things cannot be true; therefore, some labels, identities and activities are fake, marginal or impossible. Yet one of Thiel’s many lessons is that contradiction is a strength rather than a weakness.
Thiel’s philosophy, which journalists have called techno-fascism, recalls philosopher Umberto Eco, who described fascism as a “beehive of contradictions” and “a collage of different philosophical and political ideas”. The radical right, in particular, has no problem mashing together many views that at face value should not fit: scavenger ideologies that are opportunistic in grabbing elements that work for them.
Instead of contradictions, these hybrid forms need to be understood as evolutions. They are tensions, held within the body and the mind of the subject, that push monolithic frameworks like conservatism beyond their existing limits. Thiel’s power – and his political blueprint for others – is insisting you can be a philosophical entrepreneur, an illiberal patriot, and a queer conservative.
Luke Munn 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.
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