Category: English

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Lucyl Harrison, PhD Candidate, School of Humanities, University of Hull

The year is 1926. Queen Elizabeth II is christened. Wage cuts and increased working hours for coal miners precipitate a general strike of workers. A.A. Milne publishes Winnie-the-Pooh. The League of Nations accepts Germany as the sixth permanent member on the council deeming it a “peace-loving country”.

It is also the year that Virginia Woolf published her essay, On Being Ill, in January’s volume of The New Criterion – the literary review headed up by T.S. Eliot. The essay had been written from her sickbed, as Woolf lay recovering after fainting at her nephew Quentin’s 15th birthday dinner months before.

In the essay, Woolf argues that illness is “the great confessional” which is never talked about in literature because of the “poverty” of language when it comes to sickness and disease. Books on influenza, poetry on pneumonia and tomes on toothache and typhoid are “null, negligible and non-existent”, she declares, reckoning with Shakespeare, Milton, Pope, Proust, Donne and Keats.

Recounting a conversation with her husband Leonard Woolf about the essay in her diary a month before its publication, she remarked it was the “article which I, & Leonard too, thought one of my best”. However, not everyone was of the same opinion.

Woolf’s diaries reveal that a postcard sent by Eliot illustrated that he was “not enthusiastic” about the piece, prompting her to write: “So, reading the proof just now, I saw wordiness, feebleness, & all the vices in it.” It “increased” her “distaste” for her own writing and “dejection at the thought of writing another novel”.

Nevertheless, a revised version of On Being Ill was published months later, in April 1926, in an American magazine called The Forum. This time it was under the title Illness: An Unexploited Mine. Despite her critics, Woolf persisted with the topic, believing the absence of our ailments in literature called for censure.

In November 1930, a slim quarto of 250 numbered and signed copies of On Being Ill was hand-printed by the Woolfs’ printing press, The Hogarth Press. It was printed in an original vellum-backed green cloth with marbled endpapers, woodcut vignette on final leaf and an original dust jacket designed by her sister, Vanessa Bell. Woolf set the type herself. She spent Sunday June 15 1926, in the full swing of summer doing so, writing in her diary: “I was so methodically devoting my morning to finishing the last page of type setting: On Being Ill.”

On or about December 2019, human character changed

Two years before the writing of On Being Ill, in one of the most quoted lines in literature, Woolf wrote “on or about December 1910, human character changed”, in her essay, Mr Bennett and Mrs. Brown (1924), continuing that when “human relations change there is at the same time a change in religion, conduct, politics, and literature”.

Human character changed in December 2019, when SARS-CoV-2 was discovered and the COVID pandemic began in earnest.

Pandemic Pages, the podcast that I founded and co-host with Dr Catherine Wynne at the University of Hull, charts this tectonic shift in our lives and literature through interviews with authors, creatives, academics and medical professionals. Previous guests include Booker Prize winner and chair Roddy Doyle; NHS doctor and award-winning author, Dr Roopa Farooki and Professor Lucy Easthope, the UK’s leading expert on disaster recovery and advisor to the Prime Minister’s office during COVID.

The podcast has just launched its third season, which aims to create a living dialogue with the centenary of Woolf’s On Being Ill. In one episode, I chat to associate professor of Graphic Design from the Oslo National Academy of the Arts, Ane Thon Knutsen, a letter press print artist who printed one sentence of On Being Ill every day in the early days of lockdown.

Knutsen, whose wedding was postponed due to COVID, said this project “fell into her life” when lockdown began in Norway after everything she had planned fell apart: “A couple of days into the pandemic, I read On Being Ill. I’d read it before and I had planned to work on it, but I read it again and I was just like, my God, this essay is about just what’s happening right now.”

In the introduction to Knutsen’s book, Mark Hussey, emeritus professor of English at Pace University in New York, writes that her daily meditations on a single sentence painstakingly rebuild Woolf’s words one letter at a time, resulting in a collective slow reading. Her work urges us to savour words, to ponder them, to roll them around on the tongue before swallowing.

In the UK’s National Year of Reading 2026 – a UK-wide campaign designed to inspire more people to make reading a regular part of their lives – Woolf’s essay and Knutsen’s diary feel particularly poignant to press books into the hands of everyone we can – to regift ourselves the slowness of suspended pandemic time, the stillness in that season of survival.

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

Lucyl Harrison 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. On Being Ill at 100: Virginia Woolf’s ‘best essay’ still shapes how we read sickness – https://theconversation.com/on-being-ill-at-100-virginia-woolfs-best-essay-still-shapes-how-we-read-sickness-274061

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Carolina Are, LSE Fellow in Interdisciplinary Social Science, London School of Economics and Political Science

My social media feed has been full of Brooklyn Beckham memes. That is, since January 19, when David and Victoria Beckham’s eldest son posted a series of Instagram stories criticising his parents, their curated public personas and what he described as long-standing slights towards him and his wife, actress Nicola Peltz.

As a researcher of online harms and freedom of speech, I’m less interested in whether the memes are funny than in what Brooklyn Beckham versus brand Beckham tells us about how social media – and public shaming – are changing.

After months of rumours of a rift between the Beckhams and their eldest, in his posts Brooklyn publicly accused his parents of a lifetime of carefully managed media narratives about the family. He alleged that family love hinged upon engaging with “performative social media posts, family events and inauthentic relationships”.

The memes posted by the public in response range from critiques of Brooklyn’s shortlived stint as a photographer to parodies of Victoria Beckham’s alleged “inappropriate” first dance takeover at Brooklyn’s wedding.

Some are undeniably funny. But taken together with other recent outbreaks of celebrity “mess”, the episode highlights social media’s shift from a space of connection to one of spectacle – where intimate conflict becomes collective entertainment, with real-world consequences.

No one’s 20s and 30s look the same. You might be saving for a mortgage or just struggling to pay rent. You could be swiping dating apps, or trying to understand childcare. No matter your current challenges, our Quarter Life series has articles to share in the group chat, or just to remind you that you’re not alone.

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In a recent study, my colleague Pam Briggs and I found that social media users are becoming disillusioned with digital spaces where their belonging depends on an algorithm’s whim. Participants described feeling overwhelmed by targeted commercial content while struggling to see posts from friends and family.

Brooklyn alleged that for the Beckhams: “Family ‘love’ is decided by how much you post on social media.” That logic sits uneasily at a moment when social media platforms are no longer primarily “social” spaces, but increasingly function as sites of entertainment, surveillance and sales. Our collective appetite for viral celebrity mess appears closely connected to this shift.

Public betrayals, viral memes

Late last year, singer Lily Allen made a return to our playlists with West End Girl, a self-described work of “autofiction” originating from the breakdown of her marriage to Stranger Things actor David Harbour.

The album played with dissonance by blending fast-paced beats and clinically detailed, seemingly personal tales of infidelity. In the process, Allen rode the wave of memes as a marketing strategy. Allen herself recently posted an image of her album cover with Brooklyn’s head photoshopped onto it to her Instagram story, suggesting she recognised parallels in how they each shared their “mess” online.

Read more:
Lily Allen’s new album is ‘autofiction’ – but turning your life into a story carries ethical and emotional risks

These viral instances of celebrity mess don’t happen in a vacuum. The case of Brooklyn Beckham is connected to the internet’s never-ending obsession with “nepo babies”, the children of famous people who are often seen to be benefiting from their fame and wealth, and who are frequently maligned in times of rising inequality. Add to this the recent Netflix documentaries that reintroduced the Beckhams to gen-Z audiences, and the conditions for virality were already in place.

This passion for mess that doesn’t involve us personally marks a shift from the polished, “brand safe” aesthetic of Millennial social media. We’re in the era of “goblin mode” (the rejection of social norms through behaviour that is unapologetically unpolished), in a climate of disillusion with an “always on” life.

Traditional social media platforms and dating apps alike are losing subscribers and users to hobby apps. Audiences crave reality, imperfection and mess – all more relatable than marketing.

In times of rising inequality, schadenfreude can feel like guilt-free entertainment. But this shift also carries serious emotional and legal implications for those caught in the viral spotlight.

The dark side of the (viral) public eye

In my work on online abuse against people in the public eye, I found that mainstream media narratives about public figures were often repeated, amplified and reworked by trolls, gaining a new lease of life online. When thousands of users participate in reinforcing these narratives, the experience can feel indistinguishable from harassment for those targeted.

So think before you share: is the post you’re amplifying playful or is it made to hurt the person at the centre of it? Is it factual, or can it contribute to creating damaging narratives?

This matters not only because speculation can worsen a public figure’s mental health, but because it can also have consequences for those who post. When online commentary veers into allegedly unsubstantiated claims or questionable opinions, posters may expose themselves to defamation risks, particularly when the subject has the means to pursue legal action, as Justin and Hailey Bieber have previously done.

If the start of 2026 is anything to go by, we are in for a turbulent year in politics, on television and online. Audiences’ thirst for messy drama reflects broader uncertainty and fatigue with digital spaces that thrive on comparison, division and commercialisation. Gossip can be cathartic. But the challenge is not whether we enjoy mess, but whether we can do so without turning real people into collateral damage.

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

Carolina Are 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. What the Beckham family feud reveals about social media and our love of ‘mess’ – https://theconversation.com/what-the-beckham-family-feud-reveals-about-social-media-and-our-love-of-mess-274150

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Alex Dryden, PhD Candidate in Economics, SOAS, University of London

When a Danish pension fund recently announced it would sell its US$100 million (£74 million) holding of US government bonds, the move was tiny in financial terms – just a drop in a US$30 trillion ocean. But it touched on a much bigger issue. Foreign investors now hold around one-third of all US government debt, amounting to roughly US$9.5 trillion.

Of these foreign holdings, Europe has US$3.6 trillion, making it collectively the largest holder of US debt, larger than Japan (which holds US$1.2 trillion) or China (which owns around US$700 billion).

Could this financial exposure be turned into political leverage – a way for Europe to push back against Donald Trump’s recent threats over Greenland and European sovereignty? Or, as the US president has claimed, does the US still “hold all the cards” in debt markets?

At the World Economic Forum in Davos recently, Trump threatened a “big retaliation” if European countries sold US assets as a response to tariff threats. When politicians talk about Europe “dumping” US government debt, it sounds like a simple, almost mechanical, act whereby political leaders make a decision and trillions of dollars’ worth of bonds are sold. But that’s not how financial markets actually work.

In Europe, US government bonds aren’t owned by governments. They’re held by pension funds, insurance companies, banks and investment funds. These are independent financial institutions that manage the savings of millions of ordinary people. There is no single switch a government can flip to make all of these investors sell at once, even if it wanted to.

Even if governments are able to cajole European investors into selling their US Treasuries, there is the tricky question of where the money would go. The US Treasury market is the largest bond market in the world. There is no easy alternative home for the US$3 trillion of US government bonds held by Europeans.

Read more:
After a year of Trump, who are the winners and losers from US tariffs?

The euro area does have a large amount of government bonds and in principle they could absorb some reallocation. But shifting even a few trillion dollars at speed would drive prices sharply higher and yields sharply lower, creating enormous distortions.

Then there’s the problem of self-harm. European banks, insurers and pension funds are packed with US Treasuries. A forced or panicked sell-off would punch a hole in their own balance sheets as price fell sharply.

At the same time, if European institutions collectively opt to move all their investments out of dollars into euros the financial market shockwaves would be massive. The surge in demand would likely drive the euro sharply higher, making European exports more expensive and quite possibly tipping the economy into recession.

This is one reason China, despite years of tough talk, never actually followed through on threats to weaponise its Treasury holdings. In modern finance, trying to use these assets as a blunt political weapon tends to look a lot like mutually assured economic damage.

Why the bond market still has a vote

So does this mean Trump really does hold all the cards? Not quite. While European governments are highly unlikely to try to weaponise their holdings of US government debt, that does not mean the United States is free to ignore international investors.

America is now heavily reliant on global capital markets to fund its large, and growing, budget deficits. Every year, the US government needs to persuade investors, at home and abroad, to buy vast quantities of new Treasury bonds. That normally happens quietly and routinely, on the assumption that the US remains a predictable and reliable steward of the world’s financial system.

But that assumption is precisely what Trump’s broader political project puts at risk. Efforts to rewrite the rules of international trade, to pressure allies or to treat economic relationships as instruments of coercion all increase uncertainty about how the US will behave in the future. Financial markets are often patient, but they are not indifferent to this kind of uncertainty.

If international investors became less willing to hold US government debt then bond prices would fall, yields would rise and the cost of financing America’s government debt would increase. That would feed through into higher borrowing costs across the entire US economy, from mortgages to business loans to government spending itself.

This kind of adjustment would not happen overnight but it is exactly the sort of slow, grinding financial pressure that even the US cannot avoid. Trump may believe he holds all the cards but, in a debt-dependent world, the bond market still gets a vote.

Alex Dryden 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. Who really holds the cards: Trump or the bond market? – https://theconversation.com/who-really-holds-the-cards-trump-or-the-bond-market-274245

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Catherine Meads, Professor of Health, Anglia Ruskin University

New data has revealed something the UK has never seen before: clear evidence that sexual minority people die earlier, and at higher rates, than their straight or heterosexual peers.

For the first time, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) has published overall mortality rates by sexual orientation in England and Wales. The findings come from a new bulletin that links voluntary sexual orientation data collected in the 2021 census with death registrations between March 2021 and November 2024. The linkage was possible for people with valid NHS identification numbers, allowing researchers to examine patterns of death across a population of nearly 29 million adults.

Evidence on whether sexual minority people experience higher overall mortality has been mixed, with many previous studies limited by small sample sizes, indirect measures of sexual orientation or a focus on specific causes of death rather than all-cause mortality. The new ONS analysis is the first UK study to link self-reported sexual orientation from the census with national death registrations, allowing population-level mortality rates to be examined across millions of people.

The headline result is difficult to ignore. People identifying as lesbian, gay, bisexual or another minority sexual orientation were 30% more likely to die from any cause during the study period than those identifying as straight or heterosexual. In age-standardised terms, this equates to 982.8 deaths per 100,000 people in the LGB+ group, compared with 752.6 per 100,000 among straight or heterosexual people.

Sexual orientation was included in the census for the first time in 2021. Around 92.5% of people aged 16 and over answered the question, representing roughly 44.9 million people.

Most respondents (89.4%) identified as straight or heterosexual, while 3.2% identified with an LGB+ orientation. A further 7.5% chose not to answer. After linking census responses to death records, the final ONS analysis covered just under 28.7 million people.

While this is the first UK release to examine all-cause mortality by sexual orientation, it builds on earlier ONS findings. In April 2025, the agency reported that people identifying as LGB+ had more than double the risk of suicide and two-and-a-half times the risk of intentional self-harm compared with straight or heterosexual people.

What the new data shows is that higher mortality among sexual minority people extends well beyond mental health.

Heart disease, for example, was the leading cause of death in both groups together and specifically in men (the leading cause of death in LGB+ women was intentional self-harm, and heart disease was the second leading cause). It accounted for 11.9% of deaths among LGB+ people and 10.7% among straight or heterosexual people.

This might not sound surprising until age is taken into account. On average, people in the LGB+ group were much younger, with a mean age of 35.6 years, compared with 48.6 years in the straight or heterosexual group.

Because the risk of ischaemic heart disease rises steeply with age, a higher share of deaths from this cause in a younger population is particularly troubling.

Read more:
Sexual minority women face barriers to health care

The ONS does not attempt to explain why these differences exist, and the data alone cannot establish cause. But the broader evidence base offers important clues. Smoking, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, diabetes, obesity and physical inactivity are all well-established risk factors for cardiovascular disease, and some are known to be more common among sexual minority populations.

Earlier ONS analysis has shown that lesbian, gay and bisexual people are more likely to smoke than heterosexual people, especially women, even after accounting for factors such as age, ethnicity and socioeconomic status.

Other research suggests higher rates of obesity among sexual minority women, though not consistently among men. Evidence for differences in conditions such as high blood pressure and diabetes is more mixed.

Beyond individual behaviour, decades of research point to the health effects of minority stress on heart disease. Exposure to discrimination, stigma and violence is associated with higher levels of smoking and alcohol use, disrupted sleep, obesity and hypertension, all of which accumulate over time to increase the risk of serious illness and early death.

The most distressing findings in the new ONS release concern young people. Among those aged 16 to 24 who identified as LGB+, suicide accounted for 45.3% of all deaths. Among straight or heterosexual people of the same age, the figure was 26.6%.

Suicide is preventable, but it rarely has a single cause. What these findings make clear is that living in today’s society still places a heavier burden on sexual minority people, particularly the young. That burden shows up not only in mental health statistics, but in patterns of physical illness and early death.

If sexual minority young people were able to grow up in safer, more inclusive environments, these stark inequalities might not exist. The emerging evidence suggests they are not inevitable. They are shaped by social conditions and, at least in part, they can be changed.

Catherine Meads volunteers occasionally for the Liberal Democrat political party in the UK but is not a member.

– ref. People from sexual minorities really do die younger, new data suggests – https://theconversation.com/people-from-sexual-minorities-really-do-die-younger-new-data-suggests-273415

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Thomas Lockwood, PhD Researcher in Politics, York St John University

Suella Braverman’s decision to defect to Reform UK is not just another blow to Kemi Badenoch’s attempt to stabilise the Conservatives after their 2024 defeat. It also changes what Reform is being judged on.

Earlier this month, Badenoch sacked Robert Jenrick from the shadow cabinet for plotting to defect to Reform. Hours later, he did just that. Braverman’s move takes Reform’s number of MPs to eight. Party leader Nigel Farage has said Reform had been in talks with her for a year.

At this point, though, Reform is at risk of absorbing so many former Tories that it starts to look like the establishment it denounces. This recruitment spree rewrites the insurgent brand.

Reform’s leadership will understandably celebrate Braverman’s arrival as a serious coup. She is a former home secretary and a national media figure. Her departure is an unmistakable signal that the Conservative right is fragmenting. The Times reports she told supporters it felt like she had “come home”, but there is a basic strategic tension here. Reform has thrived by arguing that British politics is run by a closed circle of insiders who fail repeatedly and then reshuffle into new jobs. A rapid intake of ex-ministers risks making Reform look less like a clean break and more like a migration route for political careers.

That attack line is already being deployed. After former chancellor Nadhim Zahawi’s switch earlier this month, the Liberal Democrats described Reform as “a retirement home for disgraced former Conservative ministers”. The same basic charge has followed Braverman’s move: critics argue that people who helped shape the recent Conservative record are now trying to rebrand themselves inside Reform rather than account for that record.

For Reform, then, the immediate gain in publicity comes with a reputational cost: the party becomes easier to frame as a collection of defectors rather than a coherent alternative.

The May deadline: Reform knows the danger

If Reform were confident that any defection is good news, it would have no need for a cut-off date. But Farage has set the local elections date of May 7 as the latest date he will take Conservative switchers. After that, he believes his party would start to look like “a rescue charity for every panicky Tory MP”.

That is revealing. It implies Reform is trying to capture the benefits of defections (experience, profile, the aura of inevitability) while limiting the downside (brand dilution, factional chaos, accusations of being “Tories in new colours”). A deadline is, in effect, an admission that there is such a thing as too many ex-Tories… or at least too many arriving too quickly.

The deeper issue is organisational. Recruiting MPs is not the same as building a party machine. Defectors bring personal followings, constituency operations, donor networks and ideological baggage. They can add reach but they can also add volatility, especially if Reform’s appeal relies on projecting discipline and clarity.

And internal tensions are not theoretical. Braverman and Jenrick are not merely Conservatives who happen to have drifted rightwards. They were also senior figures in a government that Reform has attacked as incompetent and deceitful.

That is why a July 2025 post on X by Zia Yusuf (widely circulated as Braverman joined) lands so sharply. In the post, the head of policy at Reform UK referred to the Conservative government’s handling of an Afghan data leak and secret resettlement, asking “who was in government?”, and then named Braverman as home secretary and Jenrick as immigration minister.

The point isn’t whether Yusuf’s earlier argument was fair or unfair. It’s that it feeds an “own goal” narrative. Reform’s senior figures have recently depicted these people as emblematic of the failures of the Conservative state, and now the party is inviting them into the tent.

That forces Reform into a delicate position. If it embraces defectors uncritically, it weakens its anti-establishment brand. If it keeps attacking them, it destabilises its own recruitment strategy.

Braverman’s seat: opportunity and risk

Braverman’s own constituency, Fareham and Waterlooville, illustrates why Reform wants converts of her stature and why the strategy can backfire.

On official local results for the 2024 general election, Braverman won with 35% of the vote; Reform placed fourth on 18%, behind Labour (23%) and the Liberal Democrats (19%).

That is the kind of compressed result Reform dreams about: a sizeable right-populist base already present, plus a Conservative vote that if transferred could turn a marginal into a secure Reform seat. From this perspective, defections are not just PR. They are an attempt to solve Reform’s hardest electoral problem: converting diffuse national support into winnable constituency coalitions.

But the same numbers show the danger. If Braverman fails to bring a large share of Conservative voters with her, the most likely short-term effect is to make the seat more competitive for her opponents through vote fragmentation and tactical voting. Defections can therefore produce a paradox: they make Reform look bigger nationally while making individual contests messier locally.

And at the national level, the risk is huge. Reform’s central claim – that it is the “alternative” to a failed political class – is now colliding with the reality of who it is recruiting from that class.

If Reform wants to remain a pure insurgency, it must keep its distance from establishment figures and prioritise new candidates. If it wants to look like a credible government-in-waiting, it will keep collecting experienced politicians, but it must then accept the costs – intensified scrutiny, more ammunition for opponents, and the constant suspicion that it is simply rebranding Conservatism rather than replacing it.

Thomas Lockwood 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. Suella Braverman defects: is Reform becoming a magnet for Tory baggage? – https://theconversation.com/suella-braverman-defects-is-reform-becoming-a-magnet-for-tory-baggage-274344

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Thom Wilcockson, Senior Lecturer in Psychology, Loughborough University

The earliest signs of dementia are rarely dramatic. They do not arrive as forgotten names or misplaced keys, but as changes so subtle they are almost impossible to notice: a slightly narrower vocabulary, less variation in description, a gentle flattening of language.

New research my colleagues and I conducted suggests that these changes may be detectable years before a formal diagnosis — and one of the clearest examples may lie hidden in the novels of Sir Terry Pratchett.

Pratchett is remembered as one of Britain’s most imaginative writers, the creator of the Discworld series and a master of satire whose work combined humour with sharp moral insight. Following his diagnosis of posterior cortical atrophy, a rare form of Alzheimer’s disease, he became a powerful advocate for dementia research and awareness. Less well known is that the early effects of the disease may already have been present in his writing long before he knew he was ill.

Dementia is often described as a condition of memory loss, but this is only part of the story. In its earliest stages, dementia can affect attention, perception and language before memory problems become obvious. These early changes are difficult to detect because they are gradual and easily mistaken for stress, ageing or normal variation in behaviour.

Language, however, offers a unique window into cognitive change. The words we choose, the variety of our vocabulary and the way we structure description are tightly linked to brain function. Even small shifts in language use may reflect underlying neurological change.

In our recent study, we analysed the language used across Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels, examining how his writing evolved over time. We focused on “lexical diversity” — a measure of how varied an author’s word choices are — and paid particular attention to adjectives, the descriptive words that give prose its texture, colour and emotional depth.

Across Pratchett’s later novels, there was a clear and statistically significant decline in the diversity of adjectives he used. The richness of descriptive language gradually narrowed. This was not something a reader would necessarily notice, nor did it reflect a sudden deterioration in quality. Instead, it was a subtle, progressive change detectable only through detailed linguistic analysis.

Crucially, the first significant drop appeared in The Last Continent, published almost ten years before Pratchett received his formal diagnosis. This suggests that the “preclinical phase” of dementia — the period during which disease-related changes are already occurring in the brain — may have begun many years earlier, without obvious outward symptoms.

This finding has implications that extend far beyond literary analysis. Dementia is known to have a long preclinical phase, during which opportunities for early intervention are greatest. Yet identifying people during this window remains one of the biggest challenges in dementia care.

Linguistic analysis is not a diagnostic tool in itself, and it would not work equally well for everyone. Factors such as education, profession, writing habits and linguistic background all influence how people use language. But as part of a broader approach — alongside cognitive tests, brain imaging and biological markers — language analysis could help detect early risk in a non-invasive and cost-effective way.

Importantly, language data already exists. People generate vast amounts of written material through emails, reports, messages and online communication. With appropriate safeguards for privacy and consent, subtle changes in writing style could one day help flag early cognitive decline long before daily functioning is affected.

Why early detection matters

Early detection matters more than ever. In recent years, new drugs for Alzheimer’s disease have emerged that aim to slow disease progression rather than simply manage symptoms. Drugs such as lecanemab and donanemab target amyloid proteins that accumulate in the brain and are thought to play an important role in the disease. Clinical trials suggest these treatments would be most effective when given early, before significant neuronal damage has occurred.

Identifying people during the preclinical phase would allow people and their families more time to plan, access support and consider interventions that may help slow progression. These may include lifestyle changes, cognitive stimulation and, increasingly, new drugs to slow the disease progression.

More than a decade after his death, Terry Pratchett continues to contribute to our understanding of dementia. His novels remain deeply loved, but hidden within them is another legacy: evidence that dementia may leave its mark long before it announces itself. Paying closer attention to language — even language we think we know well — could help transform how we detect, understand and ultimately treat this devastating condition.

The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Terry Pratchett’s novels may have held clues to his dementia a decade before diagnosis, our new study suggests – https://theconversation.com/terry-pratchetts-novels-may-have-held-clues-to-his-dementia-a-decade-before-diagnosis-our-new-study-suggests-273777

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Timothy Hearn, Lecturer, University of Cambridge; Anglia Ruskin University

An upside-down jellyfish drifts in a shallow lagoon, rhythmically contracting its
translucent bell. By night that beat drops from roughly 36 pulses a minute to nearer 30, and the animal slips into a state that, despite its lack of a brain, resembles sleep.

Field cameras show it even takes a brief siesta around noon, to “catch up” after a disturbed night.

A new Nature Communications study has tracked these lulls in cassiopea jellyfish, which belong to a 500 million year-old lineage, as well as in the starlet sea anemone nematostella. The study findings may help settle a long-running debate among biologists about what sleep is for.

Does sleep conserve energy, consolidate memories – or do something more biologically fundamental? Until recently, most evidence for a “house-keeping” role for sleep came only from vertebrates.

When mice sleep, brain and spinal cord fluid surges through the brain and washes away metabolic waste. And a 2016 mouse study found that some types of DNA breaks are mended more quickly during sleep. Time-lapse imaging in a 2019 study of zebrafish showed that sleep lets neurons (nerve cells) repair DNA breaks that build up during waking hours.

The new study showed for the first time that the same process occurs in some invertebrates. That while the jellyfish and sea anemone are awake, DNA damage accumulates in their nerve cells and when they doze, that damage is repaired.

The work pushes the origins of sleep back more than 600 million years, to before the cnidarian branch (jellyfish, anemones, corals) split from the line that led to worms, insects and vertebrates roughly 600–700 million years ago. It also gives weight to the idea that sleep began as a form of self-defence for cells.

The new work moves the discussion to creatures whose nervous systems are much simpler than ours and are little more than thin nets. If sleep repairs their neurons too, that function is probably fundamental because simpler nervous systems evolved first.

The researchers first had to figure out when a jellyfish or anemone is asleep. This is surprisingly tricky: even when they rest, bell muscles keep twitching or the polyp drifts in slow motion. To do this they filmed the animals under infrared light and flashed white light at them or a pulse of food (a tiny squirt of liquid brine-shrimp extract).

Jellyfish that had been pulsing below 37 beats per minute for at least three minutes, and anemones that had stayed still for eight minutes, reacted more slowly. This meets the “reduced responsiveness” criterion for sleep, which is the same across the animal kingdom.

Next, the scientists stained nerve cells in tissue taken from jellyfish in a lab tank to mark where DNA breakages happened. The number of breakages peaked at the end of each species’ active spell (mid-morning for the jellyfish and late afternoon for the anemone) and dropped after a long rest.

When the scientists kept the animals awake by changing the tank’s water currents, both the DNA breaks and the next day’s sleeping time increased, similar to classic “sleep rebound” in humans where your body catches up on sleep.

To test cause and effect, the team shone ultraviolet-B light, which damages DNA, on the animals. This treatment doubled the number of DNA breaks within an hour and prompted extra sleep later the same day. When the animals had dozed, the breaks reduced back toward baseline and the jellyfish resumed their usual daytime rhythm.

Melatonin, the overnight hormone familiar to jet-lag sufferers, was added to the tank water and caused both species to doze during what should have been their busiest stretch (daytime for the jellyfish, night-time for the anemone), leaving their usual rest period unchanged.

The new finding is surprising because melatonin’s soporific role was thought to have evolved alongside vertebrates with centralised brains and circadian rhythms that respond to light cues. Seeing it work in a brainless animal suggests that this evolution took place much longer ago.

Putting these pieces together, it seems wakefulness gradually stresses the DNA in nerve cells. Sleep offers a period of sensory deprivation during which repair enzymes that stitch or swap the components of DNA can work unimpeded.

This logic fits with experiments in fruit-flies and mice which have linked chronic sleeplessness to neurodegeneration. Insomnia has also been linked to build-ups of reactive oxygen molecules (highly reactive by-products of normal metabolism that can punch holes in DNA, proteins and cell membranes).

If jellyfish need sleep to keep their nerve nets intact, the need to sleep probably predates the evolution of brains, eyes and even bodies that are the same on both left and right sides. In evolutionary terms, a nightly repair window could have been vital. Ancient organisms that skipped it may have accumulated mutations in irreplaceable neurons and slowly lost control of movement, feeding and reproduction.

The new study tracked two species in the lab and one in a Florida lagoon, but cnidarians live in many different light levels and temperatures. To be able to generalise this finding, future work will need to confirm that DNA-repair during sleep happens in similar animals that live in different conditions such as cold, deep or turbid waters.

Does this study settle the debate? Not entirely. Sleep almost certainly carries more than one benefit. Tasks such as memory consolidation could have been layered onto an ancient physiological maintenance programme as nervous systems grew more complex.

Yet the new findings strengthen the view that guarding DNA is a core purpose of sleep.

Timothy Hearn 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. What an ancient jellyfish can teach us about the evoution of sleep – https://theconversation.com/what-an-ancient-jellyfish-can-teach-us-about-the-evoution-of-sleep-273307

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Steven David Pickering, Honorary Professor, International Relations, Brunel University of London

Academic freedom is often described as a cornerstone of democratic society. Politicians regularly claim to defend it, universities invoke it in mission statements and most members of the public say they support it in principle.

So why does it provoke such intense disagreement once it becomes concrete? At first glance, these disputes look like arguments about universities. But our research suggests something else is going on. Public disagreements over academic freedom are not simply about campus policy. They reflect deeper divides over political ideology and trust in expertise.

Debates about academic freedom have become increasingly prominent in the UK. New free speech legislation to protect academic freedom in universities was introduced in 2025. Disputes over offensive research, controversial speakers or international partnerships routinely make headlines.

Similar tensions exist elsewhere, even if they are less visible. In Japan, for example, academic freedom is formally protected in article 23 of the constitution, but scholars often report subtle pressures to avoid politically sensitive topics.

In a new study, we surveyed over 3,300 people in the UK and Japan to examine how citizens understand academic freedom when it is presented in concrete terms rather than abstract slogans.

Instead of asking whether people support “academic freedom” in general, we asked how much they agreed or disagreed with specific scenarios. These included whether universities should protect research that causes offence, and whether academics should be free to publish controversial findings. We also asked whether universities should collaborate with multinational corporations or political regimes accused of human rights abuses.

This approach matters. In surveys, people often express strong support for free inquiry in the abstract. But once academic freedom is tied to real-world trade-offs, such as offence, harm, reputation or political controversy, agreement tends to fracture.

Across both countries, political ideology emerged as one of the strongest predictors of attitudes toward academic freedom.

Right-leaning respondents were consistently more supportive of academic freedom. They were more likely to oppose restrictions on offensive research and more likely to agree that academics should be protected even when their work provokes controversy. This pattern appeared not only in the UK, where universities are deeply entangled in culture-war debates, but also in Japan, where such disputes are less visible in public life.

Left-leaning respondents, by contrast, were more likely to emphasise accountability. They tended to support limits on research perceived as offensive or harmful, reflecting greater concern for social sensitivity and the potential impact of academic work on marginalised groups.

These differences suggest that academic freedom is not a single, universally understood value. Instead, people interpret it through broader political worldviews. For some, it primarily means freedom from interference. For others, it is inseparable from social responsibility.

Trust in scientists matters

Trust also plays a crucial role. In both countries, people who trusted scientists more strongly were more likely to support academic freedom, particularly when asked whether researchers should be protected regardless of whether their findings cause offence.

Trust appears to act as a kind of permission structure. When people believe scientists are acting in good faith, they are more willing to tolerate controversial outcomes.

This effect was especially pronounced in Japan. There, trust in scientists was one of the strongest predictors of support for academic freedom across multiple scenarios. This likely reflects Japan’s institutional culture. Deference to expertise remains relatively high and political conflict over universities is more muted than in the UK.

In Britain, by contrast, trust in scientists mattered most when academic freedom was framed as protection for individual researchers, but less so when questions involved partnerships with controversial regimes. In those cases, trust was more conditional. This suggests that even trusted experts are expected to exercise judgement about ethical boundaries.

Taken together, these findings point to a deeper pattern. Public attitudes toward academic freedom are structured by two competing logics.

One emphasises autonomy. This is the idea that scholars must be insulated from political and social pressure in order to pursue knowledge freely. The other emphasises accountability: the belief that universities, as publicly funded institutions, should be responsive to social norms and moral concerns.

Most people do not fully embrace one logic or the other. Instead, they shift between them depending on the issue at hand. Many support free research in principle but draw lines when offence, ethics or international politics enter the picture.

This helps explain why debates over academic freedom so often feel polarised and unresolved. They are not simply disputes about policy details. They are disagreements about which values should take priority when liberal principles collide.

These findings have important implications.

First, they suggest that appeals to “academic freedom” alone are unlikely to persuade sceptics. Because people understand the concept differently, arguments that assume a shared meaning often talk past their audience.

Second, they highlight the importance of trust. Where confidence in scientists and universities is high, support for academic autonomy is more resilient. Where trust erodes, demands for oversight and restriction grow stronger.

Finally, disputes over academic freedom reflect broader tensions within democratic societies between liberty and accountability. These tensions are not new, but they are becoming more visible as universities sit at the centre of political and cultural change.

Rather than asking whether academic freedom is under threat, a better question may be this: how can institutions sustain public trust while defending the autonomy that makes academic inquiry possible in the first place?

Steven David Pickering received funding from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS, grant reference JPJSJRP 20211704) and the UK Research and Innovation’s Economic and Social Research Council (UKRI-ESRC, grant reference ES/W011913/1).

Yosuke Sunahara receives funding from Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (grant reference JPJSJRP 20211704.

Martin Ejnar Hansen 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. How political leanings affect views on academic freedom – new research – https://theconversation.com/how-political-leanings-affect-views-on-academic-freedom-new-research-273408