Category: The Conversation – UK

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Katie Edwards, Commissioning Editor, Health + Medicine and Host of Strange Health podcast, The Conversation

The human body, it turns out, is surprisingly good at making stone.

Give it enough time and the right conditions and it will go about crystallising minerals, hardening secretions and, in rare cases, turning tragedy into rock. Gallstones. Kidney stones. Tonsil stones. Salivary stones. And, in one of the strangest and saddest corners of medical history, stone babies.

In the second episode of The Conversation’s Strange Health podcast, we take a tour through the stony side of human anatomy and ask why this keeps happening, where these stones form and which ones you actually need to worry about.

Strange Health explores the weird, surprising and sometimes alarming things our bodies do. Each episode takes a bodily mystery or viral health claim and traces it back to anatomy, chemistry and evidence, drawing on researchers with first-hand experience of these processes. Some discoveries are not ideal mealtime material.

This episode’s guide is Adam Taylor, professor of anatomy at Lancaster University and long-time contributor to The Conversation. Taylor has spent years studying stones in both everyday and extraordinary contexts, including a rare genetic condition called alkaptonuria. In people with this condition, the body cannot properly break down certain proteins, leading to blackened cartilage, dark urine and an unusually high risk of stone formation throughout the body. It is exactly as unsettling as it sounds.

Stones, Taylor explains, form when substances that normally stay dissolved stop behaving themselves. Calcium, phosphate, uric acid and one of the building blocks of protein called cysteine can all crystallise if conditions are right. Once a few molecules stick, more follow. The process snowballs. Over time, a stone appears.

Kidney stones and gallstones are the most familiar examples, and among the most painful. Their jagged crystal edges scrape delicate tissues, trigger spasms and cause bleeding as the body desperately tries to force them through narrow ducts never designed for sharp objects. Larger stones can block urine flow entirely, damaging the kidneys and, if left untreated, causing serious harm.

Smaller stones can form elsewhere. Tonsil stones develop when food debris, bacteria and dead cells collect in the crevices of the tonsils and harden. Salivary stones can form when ducts become blocked by bacteria or foreign material, sometimes something as mundane as a stray toothbrush bristle. These stones are rarely dangerous, but they are often unpleasant, painful and, judging by social media, irresistibly watchable when removed.

Then there are stone babies, or lithopedions. In extremely rare cases, a pregnancy that cannot continue is not expelled from the body. Instead, the immune system encases the remains in calcium, effectively mummifying them to prevent infection. Some have been discovered decades later, only after death.

What unites all of these stones is not toxins or detoxing, but chemistry and fluid balance, and sometimes bad luck. Taylor stresses that dehydration is one of the biggest risk factors. When fluids slow down, materials that are normally carried in fluid begin to solidify. Stones follow.

Listen to Strange Health to understanding why solid things form inside something that is mostly water, and why some stones are medical emergencies while others are just deeply, memorably gross. You have been warned about watching while eating.

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Strange Health is hosted by Katie Edwards and Dan Baumgardt. The executive producer is Gemma Ware, with video and sound editing for this episode by Sikander Khan. Artwork by Alice Mason.

In this episode, Dan and Katie talk about a social media clip from tonsilstonessss on TikTok.

Listen to Strange Health via any of the apps listed above, download it directly via our RSS feed or find out how else to listen here. A transcript is available via the Apple Podcasts or Spotify apps.

Katie Edwards works for The Conversation.

Adam Taylor and Dan Baumgart 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. Tonsils, kidneys and gall: where and why your body makes stones – https://theconversation.com/tonsils-kidneys-and-gall-where-and-why-your-body-makes-stones-274192

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Pankhuri Agarwal, Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow, University of Bath; King’s College London

A new trade agreement between India and the UK is due to come into force this year.
The deal is expected to completely remove tariffs from nearly 99% of Indian goods, including clothing and footwear, that are headed for the UK.

In both countries, this has been widely celebrated as a win for economic growth and competitiveness. And for Indian garment workers in particular, the trade agreement carries real promise.

This is because in recent years, clothing exports from India have declined sharply as well-known fashion brands moved production to places like Morocco and Turkey, which were cheaper.

India’s internal migrant workers (those who move from one region of the country to another looking for work) have been hit hardest, often waiting outside factories for days for the chance of a single shift of insecure work.

Against this backdrop, more opportunities for steadier employment and a more competitive sector under the new trade agreement looks like a positive outcome. But free trade agreements are not merely economic instruments – they shape labour markets and working conditions along global supply chains.

So, the critical question about this trade deal is not whether it will generate employment in India – it almost certainly will – but what kind of employment it will create.

Few sectors illustrate this tension more clearly than the manufacture of clothing. As one of India’s biggest exports, its garments sector is expected to be one of the primary beneficiaries of the trade deal.

But it is also among the country’s most labour-intensive and exploitative industries. From denim mills in Karnataka to knitwear and spinning hubs in Tamil Nadu, millions of Indian workers receive low wages and limited job security.

Research also shows that gender and caste-based exploitation is widespread.

So, if the trade deal goes ahead without addressing these issues, it risks perpetuating a familiar cycle where we see more orders and more jobs, but the same patterns of unfair wages, insecurity and – in some cases – forced labour.

Marginalised

For women workers, who form the backbone of garment production in India, these vulnerabilities are even sharper.

Gender-based violence, harassment and unsafe working conditions have been documented repeatedly across India’s export-oriented factories. Regimes which bound young women to factories under the promise of future benefits that often never materialised show how caste- and gender-based discrimination have long been embedded within the sector.

Even in factories that formally comply with labour laws, wages that meet basic living costs remain rare. Many workers earn wages which are not enough to pay for housing, food, healthcare and education, pushing families into debt as suppliers absorb price pressures imposed by global brands.

On the plus side, the India-UK agreement does not entirely sidestep these issues. There is a chapter which outlines commitments to the elimination of forced labour and discrimination.

But these provisions are mostly framed as guidance rather than enforceable obligation. They rely on cooperation and voluntary commitments, instead of binding standards.

While this approach is common in trade agreements, it limits this deal’s capacity to drive meaningful change. But perhaps even more striking is what has been left out.

Despite the role India’s social stratification system, known as caste, plays in shaping labour markets in India, it is entirely absent from the text of the agreement.

Yet caste determines who enters garment work and who performs the most hazardous and lowest-paid tasks. A significant proportion of India’s garment workforce comes from marginalised caste communities with limited bargaining power and few alternatives.

By addressing labour standards without acknowledging caste, the free trade agreement falls short. It could have required the monitoring of issues concerning caste and gender, and demanded grievance mechanisms and transparency measures that account for social hierarchies.

Instead, a familiar gap remains between commitments to “decent work” on paper and the reality which exists on factory floors.

Missed opportunity

If the India-UK deal is to be more than a tariff-cutting exercise, protections around caste and gender must be central to its implementation.

The deal is rightly being celebrated in both countries as an economic milestone. For the UK, it promises more resilient supply chains and cheaper imports. For India, it offers renewed export growth and the prospect of some more stable employment.

But the agreement’s long-term legitimacy will rest on whether it also delivers social justice.

India can use the deal to strengthen labour protections and ensure growth does not come at the cost of dignity and safety. The UK, as a major consumer market, can use its leverage to insist on enforceable standards for fair wages and decent work.

For trade deals do not simply move goods across borders – they shape the conditions under which those goods are produced.

Pankhuri Agarwal receives funding from the Leverhulme Trust as an Early Career Research Fellow.

– ref. The India-UK trade deal is a prime opportunity to protect some of the world’s most vulnerable workers – https://theconversation.com/the-india-uk-trade-deal-is-a-prime-opportunity-to-protect-some-of-the-worlds-most-vulnerable-workers-274055

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

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Tim Heppell, Associate Professor of British Politics, University of Leeds

The Labour party’s National Executive Committee (NEC) has voted to block Andy Burnham from seeking selection for the vacant Gorton and Denton parliamentary seat. The move and its fallout have exposed fault lines within the Labour party that go beyond a single byelection.

What might otherwise have been a routine internal procedural matter has instead become a revealing episode about authority, legitimacy and control inside the party – and how Keir Starmer understands both internal democracy and political risk.

The vacancy itself arose from the resignation of the Labour MP, Andrew Gwynne. A byelection must now be held in a constituency long assumed to be safely Labour. The party won 50% of the vote at the last general election with Reform second on 14%. Recent electoral volatility, however, has made even such strongholds less predictable.

This context matters. Byelections are no longer cost-free exercises in party management. They can become national political moments, particularly when they intersect with questions of leadership and direction.

Burnham’s interest in returning to Westminster must be understood against this backdrop. Since leaving parliament and becoming mayor of Greater Manchester in 2017, Burnham has established himself as one of Labour’s most recognisable and electorally successful figures.

His mayoralty has given him a distinct political identity, rooted in devolution, public services and a forthright northern voice. His approach has often contrasted with the more centralised and cautious tone of Starmer’s leadership since 2020.

And with Burnham consistently cited as a contender to replace Starmer, it’s difficult to separate his desire to return to parliament from his desire for the leadership. A return to Westminster could provide Burnham with influence, visibility and long-term options that a regional office, however powerful, cannot fully provide.

It is precisely because Burnham occupies such a prominent executive role that he needed the NEC’s approval to run. Labour’s rules are clear: directly elected mayors must seek permission before becoming parliamentary candidates. This is largely to prevent the disruption and expense of triggering further elections. Burnham would have to be replaced as mayor and a contest would be costly.

On the surface, therefore, the NEC’s involvement was procedurally acceptable. What transformed it into a political controversy was how its decision to block him is being interpreted.

Internal democracy vs central control

Supporters of Burnham argued that the case for allowing him onto the shortlist was strong. At a basic level, they maintained that local party members should have been trusted to decide whether he was the right candidate. This argument drew on long-standing Labour principles about internal democracy and local autonomy.

Burnham’s profile, record of winning elections as mayor and roots in Greater Manchester were seen as assets that could only strengthen Labour’s chances of holding the seat. At a potentially awkward moment in the electoral cycle and with high-profile figures rumoured to be thinking of running for other parties, this is by no means a given.

Beyond electoral calculation, there was also a symbolic dimension. Allowing a figure of his stature to compete would have signalled confidence within the party. It would have shown a willingness to tolerate pluralism and ambition rather than to manage it out of existence.

For some senior figures, including the deputy leader, Lucy Powell (no ally of Starmer) the issue was not whether Burnham should automatically be selected, but whether it was right for the national party to remove him from the contest before it began.

The arguments against Burnham’s candidacy focused on the costs and risks associated with triggering a mayoral election. There was also a concern about distraction. The leadership has been keen to project stability and discipline, and the return of a high-profile figure with an independent political base could complicate this.

Yet it is difficult to ignore the political subtext. Burnham’s record of public disagreement with elements of the leadership’s strategy marked him out as a potential alternative focus of authority within the party.

Blocking his return to parliament therefore carries the appearance, whether intended or not, of pre-emptive containment. For critics, this reinforces a perception that the NEC is being used not simply as a guardian of rules, but as an instrument of political management.

The committee’s eight-to-one vote against Burnham intensified these concerns. Powell was the only member to vote in Burnham’s favour and the chair, home secretary Shabana Mahmood, abstained.

On one reading, this demonstrated that the leadership’s position commanded overwhelming institutional support. On another, it underlined the marginalisation of dissenting voices, even at the highest levels of the party.

That the only explicit supporter of Burnham was also one of Labour’s most senior elected figures lends the episode a particular symbolic weight. Powell won her position via a membership vote rather than being appointed by Starmer.

What happens next

The broader political ramifications of this situation are complex. In the short term, the decision may suit Starmer. Preventing Burnham from re-entering parliament reduces the likelihood of an alternative leadership figure emerging on the backbenches. It also allows the leadership to maintain tight control over messaging and candidate selection at a moment when it believes discipline is electorally advantageous.

However, the longer-term risks should not be underestimated. The episode feeds into an existing narrative that Labour under Starmer is highly centralised and wary of internal competition. For party members and supporters who value participation and openness, this risks alienation.

There is also an electoral gamble in blocking Burnham. Should Labour struggle in or even lose the Gorton and Denton byelection, the decision to exclude Burnham will be retrospectively scrutinised as a missed opportunity. Conversely, even a comfortable victory will not entirely erase the impression that the party prioritised internal control over open debate.

Ultimately, the Burnham affair illuminates a central tension within Labour: the balance between authority and legitimacy. The NEC may have acted within its formal powers, but legitimacy in politics is never solely procedural. It is also relational, shaped by how decisions are perceived by members, voters and the wider public.

Tim Heppell 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. Labour blocks Andy Burnham from standing for parliament: how it happened and why – https://theconversation.com/labour-blocks-andy-burnham-from-standing-for-parliament-how-it-happened-and-why-274309

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Stefan Wolff, Professor of International Security, University of Birmingham

Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky has said a security agreement with the United States has been finalised following his most recent meeting with Donald Trump. Taken at face value, Zelensky’s repeated assertions that the document is ready to sign looks like major win for Kyiv. The reality is very different.

The meeting came after a particularly turbulent period for the transatlantic alliance. The disagreement over Greenland has further undermined western unity and cast yet more doubt on the trustworthiness and dependability of the current incumbent of the White House.

If there was even a hint of Trump being capable of self-reflection, one could add that it was a rather embarrassing week for him – on at least three counts.

First Trump seemed to perform a climb-down in his speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos on January 21 when he ruled out the use of force to acquire Greenland for the US. He also dropped the threat of imposing tariffs on European Nato members which had dispatched military personnel to Greenland in a highly symbolic show of support.

Second, he insisted that the US would always be there for its Nato allies, in contrast to earlier pronouncements that the American security guarantee for Europe was conditional on allies’ financial contributions to Nato. But, as is usually the case with Trump, it was one step forward, two steps back, as he went on to cast doubt on the allies reciprocating in an American hour of need.

Worse still, in a subsequent interview with Fox News, he denigrated the sacrifices of allied servicemen and women in Afghanistan, prompting a chorus of justified outrage from across the alliance.

After a phone call with the British prime minister, Keir Starmer, on Saturday and an expression of concern in a message conveyed “through backchannels” from King Charles III, Trump changed his tune. He did not exactly apologise, but he used his TruthSocial platform to praise the bravery and sacrifices of British soldiers in Afghanistan. No other Nato ally has received even that acknowledgement yet.

Third, by the end of the week we were also reminded that progress on one of Trump’s flagship projects – making peace between Russia and Ukraine – is as elusive as ever. The US president appeared to have had a constructive meeting with Zelensky in Davos.

But the much-touted agreement on US security guarantees has not been officially signed yet. And there’s been no progress on a deal for Ukraine’s post-war reconstruction.

Contrary to how swiftly the US president threatened the imposition of tariffs on supposed allies for sending a few dozen soldiers to Greenland, Trump failed – yet again – to get tough on Putin. There is still no sign of a vote on a bipartisan Russia sanctions bill which Trump allegedly greenlit in early January.

The bill, in the making since the spring, aims to cripple Russia’s ability to finance its war against Ukraine and “to provide sustainable levels of security assistance to Ukraine to provide a credible defensive and deterrent capability”.

Ominous signs from Washington

One could, therefore, argue that it was a bad week for Trump and a much better week for the rest of the western alliance. After all, Nato is still intact. Europe seems to have discovered more of a backbone. Perhaps more importantly, they are realising that pushing back against Trump is not futile.

The US president has neither abandoned Zelensky nor walked away from mediating between Russia and Ukraine. And Trump might soon get distracted by plans for regime change in Cuba or Iran, preventing him from wreaking any more havoc in Europe.

But such a view underestimates both the damage already done to relations between Europe and the US and the potential for things to get worse. Consider the issue of Greenland. Trump’s concession to renounce the use of force was, at best, only a partial climb-down. Throughout his speech, Trump reiterated several times that he still wants “right, title and ownership” of Greenland.

And, as it’s not at all clear what his framework deal actually entails, his closing comments on Greenland included an unambiguous warning to other Nato members that they can “say ‘yes‘ and we will be very appreciative, or … ‘no’ and we will remember”.

There is already, it seems, some advance remembering happening in Trump’s renamed Department of War, which released its new national defence strategy on Friday night. According to the document, the Pentagon will provide Trump “with credible options to guarantee US military and commercial access to key terrain from the Arctic to South America, especially Greenland, the Gulf of America, and the Panama Canal”.

On Nato, Trump’s ambivalence towards the alliance goes deeper than his most recent comments. Critically, it is the casual nature with which Trump treats this core pillar of international security that has fundamentally undermined the trustworthiness of the US as a dependable partner.

Combined with the efforts to set up his board of peace as an alternative to the UN, there can be little doubt left that the US president has his sights trained on the very institutions that Washington spent decades building.

Fools’ gold?

When it comes to Ukraine, meanwhile, Trump may well just be dangling the prospect of an agreement to try to get Zelensky to make territorial concessions that will please Putin. If past encounters are any guideline, the Russian president will accept the concessions but baulk at the prospect of the US (or anyone) offering security guarantees.

Trump, going on what we have seen over the past year, is then likely to water down what he apparently agreed in order not to jeopardise a deal with Putin. I think it most likely that Zelensky and Ukraine will, yet again, be left out in the cold.

For Trump, ending the war more and more seems primarily as a way to enable future business deals with Russia, even it means sacrificing 20% of Ukrainian territory and the long-term security of European allies in the process.

The conclusion to draw for European capitals from London to Kyiv from a week of high drama should not be that Trump and the relationship with the US can be managed with a new approach that adds a dose of pushback to the usual flattery and supplication.

After one year of Trump 2.0, America-first has become America-only. Europe and its few scattered allies elsewhere need to start acting as if they were alone in a hostile world. Because they are.

Stefan Wolff is a past recipient of grant funding from the Natural Environment Research Council of the UK, the United States Institute of Peace, the Economic and Social Research Council of the UK, the British Academy, the NATO Science for Peace Programme, the EU Framework Programmes 6 and 7 and Horizon 2020, as well as the EU’s Jean Monnet Programme. He is a Trustee and Honorary Treasurer of the Political Studies Association of the UK and a Senior Research Fellow at the Foreign Policy Centre in London.

– ref. Ukraine: Zelensky upbeat on US deal – but Davos showed the US president to be an unreliable ally – https://theconversation.com/ukraine-zelensky-upbeat-on-us-deal-but-davos-showed-the-us-president-to-be-an-unreliable-ally-274223

Source: The Conversation – UK – By John Wyver, Professor of the Arts on Screen, University of Westminster

On the evening of January 26 1926, members of the Royal Institution and other guests climbed three flights of draughty stairs to a tiny workshop in Soho’s Frith Street. They were there to witness the first public presentation of what inventor John Logie Baird called “true television”. A hundred years later, we are now marking the centenary of British television.

Throughout the following 13 years, until the second world war imposed a seven-year hiatus, television developed rapidly. From November 1936 onwards, a regular “high definition” service was transmitted from the BBC’s television station at Alexandra Palace. Alongside countless variety performances and outside broadcasts of pageantry and sports, television established a productively rich relationship with the arts of 1930s Britain.

More than 300 plays were broadcast in these years, including productions of William Shakespeare, George Bernard Shaw and Noel Coward, with appearances by Laurence Olivier, Ralph Richardson, Valerie Hobson and Sybil Thorndike among many others. West End productions were restaged in the studio and outside broadcast cameras relayed shows such as J.B. Priestley’s When We Are Married, and the Lupino Lane musical comedy Me and My Girl, to tens of thousands of viewers across London.

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This article is part of our State of the Arts series. These articles tackle the challenges of the arts and heritage industry – and celebrate the wins, too.

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Artists and architects made frequent appearances, as did a regular selection of classical and contemporary works from London galleries. Other visual artists who featured included Paul Nash, Laura Knight and Wyndham Lewis, along with architects Frank Lloyd Wright, Berthold Lubetkin and Serge Chermayeff. There were numerous performances of opera, including excerpts of contemporary work like Albert Coates’ Pickwick and an ambitious staging of Act 2 of Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde.

Once the transmissions could present a full-length figure on the tiny portrait-format screens of the first receiving sets, ballet enjoyed a central presence in TV schedules. Prima ballerinas who performed in the studios included Alicia Markova, Lydia Sokolova and the young Margot Fonteyn.

Touring companies like the Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo and the Ballets Jooss made appearances. The troupes benefited from modest fees, exposure and association with modernity’s latest marvel, while television gained cheap access to the best classical dancers of the day as well as cultural credibility.

In so many ways the end of television as we have known it – when YouTube has topped the BBC in viewing share for the first time – could hardly be more different from its pre-war beginnings. But there are also clear continuities across more than half a century, even if early ballroom dancing lessons have morphed into Strictly, and EastEnders is the soap du jour rather than the sedate five-part romance Ann and Harold. One of television’s left behinds, however, is a close relationship with the arts.

The arts on the BBC today

Writing in The Stage in January 2026, critic Lyn Gardner lamented the limitations of television’s coverage of theatre, arguing that “the BBC remains more interested in Glastonbury than the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, the world’s biggest arts festival” and that the corporation is “more interested in sport rather than culture”.

She also recalled director general Tim Davie’s words from a speech at the Royal Academy in autumn 2024: “The arts remain utterly central to the BBC’s mission. We want to send out a strong signal, that arts and culture matter, they matter for everyone, and they matter even more when times are tough.”

Yet there is no sense that Davie’s words are borne out by the current television schedules. There is no regular slot for imaginative and creative arts documentaries, such as Omnibus which lasted from 1967 to 2003, nor space for reviews and debate, like The Late Show, a nightly arts magazine show that ran throughout the early 1990s. Today’s and tomorrow’s visual artists and performers have only the most minimal presence.

The vanishingly rare presentations of stage work, whether dance, opera or theatre, are invariably acquisitions from cultural organisations that provided most of the funding and all of the production expertise. Complexity and challenging contemporary creativity are almost entirely absent. Far from being “utterly central”, the arts are today utterly marginal to BBC television.

Times are tough, of course, and the BBC faces numerous problems, many of which are the result of a precipitous fall in available funds. Streamers are cannibalising audiences and the licence fee is threatened. The BBC’s response has been to funnel what monies there are to news and current affairs and to high-end drama, which increasingly has to rely on co-production deals.

Television in the pre-war years faced a comparable funding crisis, and yet its producers and executives had confidence and belief in the arts, and were prepared to work collaboratively in partnerships with the cultural institutions of the day. Today, that vision is absent, with little sense of a deep commitment to, or passion for, the arts.

Last year, the BBC sought the views of its audiences with an online questionnaire, and in October a collated report of responses was released as Our BBC, Our Future. In neither the questionnaire nor the report was discussion of the arts “utterly central”.

The arts had next-to-no presence, and as I noted at the time only deep into the report was it acknowledged that: “Among the bigger areas [for which respondents asked] for ‘more’ were: educational content, films and then science and technology, arts and culture and history.”

Fortunately, there is currently a much more substantive and less biased consultation underway. In December, the Department of Culture, Media and Sport published Britain’s Story: The Next Chapter – BBC Royal Charter Review, Green Paper and public consultation, which invites us all to “begin the conversation about how to ensure [the BBC] remains the beating heart of our nation for decades to come”.

In this centenary year for television, this is an important opportunity to express a desire to see the arts returned to the “utterly central” place they occupied in the early years of BBC television.

John Wyver has received funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

– ref. The BBC once made the arts ‘utterly central’ to television – 100 years later they’re almost invisible – https://theconversation.com/the-bbc-once-made-the-arts-utterly-central-to-television-100-years-later-theyre-almost-invisible-274162

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Sophus zu Ermgassen, Postdoctoral Researcher, Nature Finance, University of Oxford

Global leaders have committed to halting and reversing the ongoing degradation of nature within the next few decades. But with tight public budgets, governments around the world are looking towards nature markets as one way to attract more private investment into nature.

Nature markets are systems for measuring an ecological improvement on some land, then creating a representation of that improvement as a credit, which can then be bought and sold. In theory, they allow governments to attract more private investment and diversify funds that help restore nature. The reality is much more complicated.

My colleagues and I recently published a paper that outlines a checklist that can be used to sense-check whether a nature or nature-based carbon credit is likely to be real – and to make sure you really do get what you’re paying for.

Nature markets include both voluntary and mandatory nature-based carbon and biodiversity markets. Examples include the EU’s nature credits roadmap, England’s biodiversity net gain policy and the international voluntary carbon market.

Most of these are offset markets – the buyers of credits use them to claim they have achieved an overall net neutral outcome from their damaging activities; such as improving grasslands in one place to compensate for the conversion of grassland to buildings in another.

These types of nature credit markets are not new. They have been used around the world for more than 30 years and there’s plenty of research that tries to quantify what makes them effective or ineffective.

Some nature markets, like the US wetland mitigation markets, have attracted a lot of investment and now create nearly as much new wetland as gets destroyed each year. Other nature markets, such as Australia’s human-induced regeneration carbon credits, have delivered limited ecological outcomes and has involved awarding credits to projects claiming to regenerate trees in the Australian desert.

So how can citizens, the commercial buyers of these credits and the governments that oversee some of these systems, ensure that a nature-based carbon or nature credit represents a real improvement in nature?

Our study evaluates lessons from seven major nature markets around the world. It summarises several key elements that are crucial for establishing scientifically credible nature markets.

Ensuring integrity

The environmental feature that the nature market measures and trades needs to actually correlate with the environmental improvement that you want. So if you want to capture more carbon, it often makes sense to have a credit that measures changes in tree cover or biomass, because there’s plenty of evidence that trees in a forest store atmospheric carbon.

Some nature markets use proxies that are based on assumptions that are not always true. For example, England’s biodiversity net gain system aims to deliver a 10% improvement in biodiversity, but the specific metric that it used measures the extent and quality of habitats such as wildflower meadows. Subsequent work found that this does not necessarily lead to more diverse insect life, for example because the land might be affected by pesticides.

For nature markets to deliver scientifically credible improvements, it’s necessary to make sure they’re not paying people to deliver ecological improvements that they would have been delivering anyway. This has been the fundamental problem with carbon credits based on the premise of preventing deforestation that would otherwise have occurred – they have mostly paid for the protection of forest that wouldn’t have been cleared.

Over the last few decades, there has been immense research effort into studying so-called “additionality” in carbon credits (this means a project’s emissions reductions or removals wouldn’t happen without revenue from selling carbon credits). Academics have created new methods that allow us to rigorously estimate the additionality of many land management interventions using satellite data.

Evaluations of nature markets consistently show that, in all nature markets, some projects are highly successful while some are unsuccessful. By only issuing credits once they’ve been proven to work (using advanced statistical techniques such as ‘matching’ and carefully designed regression analysis), credits are much more likely to represent something additional and this would enable only successful projects to generate credits, giving buyers confidence in the product.

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Read more:
A gold rush for ‘green finance’ risks changing our relationship to nature

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The next consideration is public data availability. Every single evaluation of a nature market that has ever been conducted was enabled by public data availability. And every single nature market that has been evaluated to date has been found to not have achieved its full environmental objectives. Without public data, there’s no way of checking whether things are working. Public transparency of data is essential for improving nature markets.

Nature credits often aim to improve nature over relatively long timescales, say 30 years. So laws and regulations that hold people, businesses and markets accountable are essential to avoid the reversal of nature credits in the future. With forward planning and legally binding accountability, the system can maintain its scientific integrity and live up to its promise of attracting more high-quality investment into nature.

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Sophus zu Ermgassen receives funding from NERC and the EU Horizon 2020 programme. He is on the EU Commission’s expert group for the EU Nature Credits Roadmap.

– ref. How to make sure the nature credits you buy are real – new research – https://theconversation.com/how-to-make-sure-the-nature-credits-you-buy-are-real-new-research-273090

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.

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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.

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

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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.

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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.

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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