Category: The Conversation – UK

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Matthew Flinders, Founding Director of the Sir Bernard Crick Centre for the Public Understanding of Politics, University of Sheffield

Conspiratorial narratives have always swirled around the corridors of Number 10. Studies of the British style of government have, for decades, explored the role of unofficial briefings and the leaking of information to embarrass colleagues or put an issue on the agenda.

Recent allegations of a plot by associates of Keir Starmer were designed to smoke out a perceived impending leadership challenge to the prime minister, and focused attention squarely on Wes Streeting who denied being involved in a plot.

It was a pre-emptive strike in the form of a briefing strategy in an attempt to forestall a phantom coup. This odd episode quickly fizzled out. But now the furore has calmed down, a question emerges: what does it tell us about the state of Starmer’s government and British politics more generally?

The answer is that it points to the emergence of a new and increasingly paranoid style in British politics – one which revolves around exaggeration, suspicion and conspiratorial fantasy.

The notion of a paranoid style was first developed by historian Richard Hofstadter in relation to American politics, especially in the context of fears of communist sympathies during the early cold war. Put simply, it describes a model of political reasoning in which everything is seen through a conspiratorial lens.

All prime ministers are paranoid. Such paranoia comes from having to sit and smile around a cabinet table when you know that most of your hyper-competitive colleagues hanker after your job.

John Grigg’s biographies of the first world war prime minister David Lloyd George suggest he was generally convinced his colleagues were always about to oust him. Anthony Eden entered into a paranoid atmosphere over what became the 1956 Suez canal crisis that saw Britain humiliated on the world stage.

Harold Wilson governed with a profound and persistent suspicion about the security services, and in the the late 1960s his levels of paranoia spiked whenever Roy Jenkins received positive reviews for his helmsmanship of the Treasury. Towards the end of her time in No. 10, Margaret Thatcher developed a fortress mentality based on a belief that ministers were “not on her side”.

If this is the traditional or “old” style of paranoia, Starmer is now projecting something very different. His is not a paranoia primarily born of concern for external threats or stalking horses. It reflects a deeper awareness that a vacuum exists at the apex of British government, and at some point this weakness will lead to a challenge.

Being a vanilla politician was good for Starmer in opposition. Being bland, avoiding contentious topics and promoting pragmatism provided very little for opponents to attack. But there is a widespread feeling in Westminster that, in office, the lack of clear ideological conviction has left the government rudderless and notably unable to offer the British public a positive vision about where they want to take the country and why (and at what cost).

It is in this context that Starmer now faces more challenges from backbench Labour MPs, after unveiling an overhaul of the UK’s asylum policies. Not a good position for a prime minister with the worst popularity ratings since polling began.

Systemic conspiracism

For Hofstadter, a paranoid style was characterised by apocalyptic crisis language, conspiratorial explanations of political events and attribution of national decline to hidden forces. It involved moral dualism (“patriots v traitors”) and an existential sense of dispossession (“the country is being stolen”).

See the link to British politics? Think I’m paranoid?

This paranoid style is not linked to an individual politician’s supposed clinical or psychological condition. This is systemic conspiracism, not personal suspicion.

It emerges out of a wider social-psychological pathology and a collapse in trust in the institutions and processes of democratic politics, combined with the social amplification of siege narratives that constantly promote polarisation.

Since Brexit, this paranoid style has become normalised in Britain. A country once famed for its stability, governing competence and broadly balanced civic culture is now dominated by a paranoid culture. Unlike historical instances that were confined to individual leaders, this is is now diffuse, populist-inflected and embedded across the political spectrum.

This is the deeper story that exists behind bungled briefings – and it’s a worrying one. It risks generating permission structures for norm-breaking, accelerating radicalisation and polarisation, weakening policy capacity and fuelling a doom loop cycle of failure – which creates more paranoia.

The climate of British politics has and is therefore changing. It is in recognising this broader shift that we can have a deeper understanding of the slow death of Starmer’s government. The old rules no longer apply, and the “good chaps” don’t know how to govern.

Or maybe I am just paranoid.

Matthew Flinders 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. The growing paranoia of British politics – https://theconversation.com/the-growing-paranoia-of-british-politics-269867

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Karah Dring, Senior Lecturer in Exercise and Health, Nottingham Trent University

Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is the most common disability diagnosis in children globally. It’s estimated to affect around 8% of children aged 3-12 years, and around 6% of teenagers aged 12-18 years.

ADHD can make school difficult for children – affecting their behaviour in class, their attendance and their academic performance. But research my colleagues and I conducted has shown why physical activity may be one way of helping children with ADHD to thrive in school.

To conduct our research, we had 27 children aged 9-11 years (all with ADHD) complete two trials.

The first trial involved a 30-minute exercise circuit that also engaged their brains. The exercise circuit involved several stations. For instance, at one station the children played “Simon Says,” while at another, they did a coordination task where they had to bounce and pass a basketball with alternating hands with a classmate.

The second trial acted as a control, so the children didn’t do any activity but instead rested in their seats in their classroom.

To determine whether the one-off exercise game supported the children with ADHD, they also completed three cognitive tests on a laptop. These were done before the exercise, immediately after the exercise and the morning after the exercise. The tests were also repeated at the same time of day during the rested control period for comparison.

The first cognitive test was the Stroop test, which measures a person’s ability to suppress an impulse. The second test was the Sternberg Paradigm, which measured short-term memory. The third was a visual search test, which measured perception (the process of organising and interpreting information).

Interestingly, the children with ADHD performed better on each of the cognitive tests following the exercise activity when compared with doing no exercise.

But while the children answered the questions accurately, it did take them slightly longer to do so. This is an important finding, given that children with ADHD typically struggle with impulsivity (those hasty acts that occur without thought). Showing that exercise can help these children to slow down and achieve more correct answers feels promising for supporting them in the school environment.

Another important finding from our study was that the benefits of the cognitively engaging exercise (which was performed in the afternoon) extended into the following morning. This is one of the first studies to show that the benefits of exercise in children with ADHD persist into the next day.

This was a small study and more research is needed. But it again feels promising that these benefits continue into the day after the exercise has taken place supporting both children and their teachers for an extended period.

Our study has also shown that it doesn’t take a lot of intense exercise to help children with ADHD in the classroom. The activity was short, simple and could easily be delivered by teachers during the school day.

Exercise and learning

Importantly, our study does not stand alone in showing that one-off bouts of exercise are beneficial for supporting children with ADHD.

Other studies have shown that games-based activities in particular tend to be more beneficial in improving cognitive outcomes in children with ADHD.

For instance, a review we conducted revealed that physical activity which has a cognitive component has greater cognitive benefits for children with ADHD compared with longer-duration exercises (such as running and cycling).

That said, there are also benefits observed from doing longer bouts of exercise. For instance, research has shown that a one off bout of running or cycling for between 20-45 minutes at a moderate intensity also benefits inhibitory control and cognitive flexibility (defined as switching between thinking patterns and managing multiple concepts simultaneously).

But current evidence suggests that just 20 minutes of endurance exercise is sufficient to boost cognitive benefits in children with ADHD.

A growing body of evidence also suggests that not only can a one-off bout of exercise be useful, but that the benefits of movement can extend across several different domains of cognitive function – all of which tend to be impaired with ADHD. These include attention, inhibitory control (related to impulsivity) and cognitive flexibility.

This may all sound promising, but the physical activity levels of children with ADHD are a major concern. It has recently been reported that children with ADHD are 21% less likely to meet the physical activity guidelines than their peers.

Some of the barriers to physical activity for children with ADHD include low motivation, low self-efficacy (a belief in their ability) and difficulties managing big emotions in an environment that can feel overwhelming.

Much more research is needed to support children with ADHD to engage with exercise. But what is promising is the variety of exercises that can improve cognitive function in children with the condition – from endurance sports to mixed martial arts and games-based activities.

Karah Dring receives funding from The Waterloo Foundation to conduct some of the studies included in this article.

This work was supported by The Waterloo Foundation.

– ref. ADHD: even one bout of physical activity might help kids better learn in school – https://theconversation.com/adhd-even-one-bout-of-physical-activity-might-help-kids-better-learn-in-school-269315

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Lorenza Rossi, Professor in Economics, Lancaster University

UK inflation has dropped to 3.6% but it remains well above the Bank of England’s 2% target. Beyond broader global uncertainties, there are also factors within our own homes that are quietly sustaining this stubborn issue. Namely, automatic annual price uplifts in everyday contracts for things like mobile phones and utilities.

UK inflation is expected to become the highest in the G7 this year and next. In turn, surging costs for fuel, raw materials and transport are putting pressure on businesses.

And these pressures can seriously threaten profits. This is particularly true for fixed-price contracts for anything from telecoms and insurance services to utilities and public procurement agreements.

To safeguard themselves, many suppliers now seek to include automatic price-adjustment provisions (known as indexation clauses) in their agreements. These link contract prices to an external index such as consumer prices or their own costs.

Inflation-linked pricing has already driven above-inflation increases in mobile and broadband bills. Communications regulator Ofcom banned mid-contract price rises linked to inflation from this year. This came after it found that around six in ten broadband and mobile customers faced annual rises linked to inflation plus a fixed 3.9%.

As a result of the move, many companies have switched to fixed annual price rises, stated in pounds and pence, at the time of signing. This change has improved transparency, but the underlying issue remains.

Annual price increases are often set above the actual inflation rate. When prices are automatically adjusted by more than inflation (through inflation-plus clauses, or what has been called “turbo price indexation”) they can create a multiplier effect. Higher prices feed into higher costs and expectations, which in turn push inflation up further.

This self-reinforcing cycle makes it harder for inflation to return to the Bank of England’s 2% target and amplifies cost-of-living pressures.

The problem extends far beyond telecoms. Public-sector and business-to-business contracts often include similar clauses, embedding annual price increases regardless of economic conditions. For instance, one UK catering contract we saw stated: “All prices quoted are subject to a 10% increase as of 1 October annually.”

Government procurement rules acknowledge the practice. The Ministry of Defence’s spending watchdog instructs defence contractors and the MoD to build in an “escalation factor” to reflect expected inflation when determining allowable costs. At least for government contracts, this escalation factor is meant to capture the estimated effects of inflation rather than being fixed at an earlier date or detached from a price index.

Although these clauses were originally meant to protect firms from rising costs, they now risk locking in inflation. This sustains price increases even when cost pressures ease.

It also weakens the effectiveness of monetary policy – in this case, interest rate changes – because when companies automatically increase prices, higher interest rates take longer to slow inflation. And of course, it erodes the purchasing power of households on fixed incomes.

Breaking the inflation loop

New regulation aimed at improving transparency (as with the Ofcom case) is an important precedent. It’s also a model for other regulators in sectors such as energy, insurance and public procurement, where competition remains weak. However, Ofcom’s approach could be refined in three ways.

First, where consumers lack bargaining power (especially in sectors such as utilities, insurance or business services) regulators should act more broadly to limit unfair contract terms and prevent automatic price increases that go beyond inflation. And they should continue to pursue more competition in their sectors as a long-term goal.

Second, regulators could restrict unconditional price increases that are not linked to inflation or clear cost measures. Inflation caps could be introduced instead. For example, price increases could track the Bank of England’s 2% target, with a small margin of adjustment based on the previous year’s average. This would still give suppliers some flexibility to cover real cost changes, while preventing excessive or uneven increases.

Third, transparency is essential. Beyond Ofcom’s ban on inflation-linked price rises in telecoms, regulators could force suppliers to separate the original base price from the uplifted portion that reflects inflation or indexation.

Showing both figures would make it easier for customers to see how the increase has been calculated. This would allow clearer comparisons within a company’s own deals – for example, between flexible and fixed-price contracts – and across producers.

Beyond this, the rules around public bodies’ contracts could be modernised. Automatic annual price increases written into “escalation clauses” should be replaced with adjustments explicitly linked to recent or forecast inflation. This would ensure that public contracts reflect actual economic conditions, rather than guaranteeing price increases by default.

Voluntary codes of practice could also have a place. Industry bodies, for example in telecoms or catering, could adopt clearer and more transparent pricing standards. Requiring firms to publish the formulas they use in consumer and business-to-business contracts would make it easier for customers to compare.

Most recently, the Competition and Markets Authority launched a major consumer-protection drive focused on online pricing practices – a sign that regulators are scrutinising how companies present and justify price increases.

For consumers, it’s worth checking contracts carefully before signing – especially small-print clauses referring to “annual adjustments”, “indexation” or “inflation-linked increases”. These can lock in automatic price hikes that may exceed inflation. Asking providers to explain how these clauses work, or negotiating fixed-price terms, can help avoid unexpected costs later on.

At the end of the day, the government, Bank of England and regulators should be working together to ensure that indexed contracts do not undermine efforts to bring inflation down. Recognising and reviewing inflation-linked pricing practices could help explain why UK inflation remains stubbornly above target – and why monetary policy and interest rate changes alone may not be sufficient to bring it down.

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. How household contracts could be fueling UK inflation – https://theconversation.com/how-household-contracts-could-be-fueling-uk-inflation-269146

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Susan Gourvenec, Royal Academy of Engineering Chair in Emerging Technologies – Intelligent & Resilient Ocean Engineering, University of Southampton

The ocean has long been treated as boundless – a frontier for extraction and a sink for waste. This perception has driven decades of exploitation and neglect, pushing marine systems toward irreversible decline. Yet with urgent, collective action, recovery remains within reach, offering renewed global benefits for people, nature and economies.

The world is at a fork in the road regarding the environmental and economic health of our ocean, and the welfare of those who depend on it. Decisions made now will determine whether we perpetuate an unsustainable “grey” ocean economy (one that is dominated by unsustainable and unjust practices) or take a path to a regenerative and just “blue” economy that supports equitable outcomes for communities, ecosystems and economic systems.

Our team’s recent study captures a snapshot of the current ocean economy, forecasts to the mid-century, and outlines different ways forward.

If the world carries on the “business as usual” path, the ocean economy will remain dominated by fossil fuel extraction, overfishing, unsustainable aquaculture and polluting shipping. Ocean health will be further burdened by the influx of land-based waste.

This raises the risk of environmental collapse and deepens global inequality by disproportionately affecting people who are least responsible for those damaging activities. This destabilises the ocean economy.

Even a probable path shaped by optimistic changes won’t meet mid-century decarbonisation and sustainability targets, and will exacerbate global inequalities. Fossil fuels are still expected to supply over 70% of offshore energy by 2050, while offshore wind growth remains too slow to meet climate targets.

Seafood production will rise through aquaculture as climate change, overfishing and illegal, unregulated and unreported fishing reduce potential for wild catch, with forecasted harvests still exceeding sustainable limits. And shipping emissions remain a major challenge, as International Maritime Organization’s targets face delays due to slow technological progress and adoption.

From grey to blue

But it doesn’t have to be this way. Growing pressure from civil society, non-governmental organisations and grassroot campaigners is prompting corporations, private sector coalitions, financiers and governments to make the bold shifts needed for a blue economy.

Future ocean strategies must address the inequities at the heart of unsustainable ocean-based sectors that create a persistent tension between environmental protection and rising global demands.

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Read more:
The world has finally noticed that the ocean is a finite resource

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The blue economy offers a path forward. Responsible ocean stewardship can drive prosperity, reduce inequality and safeguard ecosystems. Evidence shows that investing in offshore wind, sustainable seafood, cleaner shipping, and mangrove restoration could yield benefits over five times the cost by 2050. Transformative action can break from a legacy of extractivism and shift the grey ocean economy toward a blue economy that benefits all.

Moving towards a blue economy now will be easier, cheaper and fairer than dealing with the consequences later. This involves five key steps: reduce fossil fuels, increase renewables, improve the sustainability of fishing and shipping, plus cut polluting waste from land-based agriculture and coastal cities – which must be planned and implemented inclusively and equitably.

Five key steps

Glimmers of blue already exist in the ocean economy around the globe.

Countries such as Denmark, France, Ireland and Costa Rica have banned fossil fuel exploration and production. This proves that with strong political will, nationwide transformation is possible.

While New Zealand was one of the first to go down this path, the current government recently reversed the ban – demonstrating that without additional legally binding requirements or collective responsibility, governments can always backtrack.

Denmark, once the EU’s largest oil producer, is now the country with the largest proportion of electricity produced from wind power, with nearly half of that capacity offshore. A transformation that took less than two decades.

International policy to eliminate government subsidies that support environmentally destructive fishing practices can drive global action. Communities can also drive initiatives for sustainable food production. For example, hundreds of fishers in Mauritius, are diversifying and growing seaweed as a nutrient-rich food source and sustainably sourced fertiliser.

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Read more:
Mauritius needs stewardship, not leadership, to keep global respect

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Shipping innovations include internationally coordinated green corridors. At a local level, harnessing a natural sandbar at Lekki, Nigeria protects port infrastructure and enhances coastal ecosystems without needing to manufacture a harbour wall made from concrete or steel.

Countries including Pakistan and Madagascar have restored mangroves to reduce flood risk and support sustainable fishing while benefiting biodiversity and storing carbon.

Some UN initiatives are tackling ocean pollution from land-based activities such as litter, including plastic pollution, run-off from fertilisers and sewage. For example, farmers in countries including Ecuador, India, Kenya and Vietnam are switching to less polluting fertilisers and reducing agricultural plastic waste. This has prevented over 51,000 tonnes of hazardous pesticides and 20,000 tonnes of plastic waste from being released into the ocean.

Intentional change in policies, laws, and institutions that manage human activities affecting marine environments can curb corporate control and promote equity in ocean governance – helping shape a blue economy. This can include recognising the ocean as a living entity with its own rights, planning ocean use with fairness in mind, and sharing knowledge and money to support nature-based solutions.

Charting a path to a blue economy is essential to prevent severe climate disruption and irreversible harm to marine ecosystems and society. The health of our ocean – and our planet – hinges on the strategies we adopt and the decisions we make now.

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Get a weekly roundup in your inbox instead. Every Wednesday, The Conversation’s environment editor writes Imagine, a short email that goes a little deeper into just one climate issue. Join the 47,000+ readers who’ve subscribed so far.

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Part of the research contributing to this article was funded by the UK Government Development, Concepts and Doctrine Centre to support the Global Strategic Trends Programme https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/global-strategic-trends-out-to-2055. Susan Gourvenec is supported by the Royal Academy of Engineering through the Chairs in Emerging Technologies scheme.

Wassim Dbouk is affiliated with the Green Party

– ref. Five ways to make the ocean economy more sustainable and just – https://theconversation.com/five-ways-to-make-the-ocean-economy-more-sustainable-and-just-268803

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Matilda Brindle, Postdoctoral researcher, University of Oxford

If I asked you to imagine your dream snog, chances are it wouldn’t be with a
Neanderthal; burly and hirsute as they may be. However, my team’s new research
suggests that these squat beefcakes might have been right up your ancestors’
street.

In our new paper, colleagues and I investigated kissing in monkeys and apes, including modern humans and Neanderthals, to reconstruct its evolutionary history for the first time.

Before we could do this, we needed to construct a definition of kissing that was
applicable across a wide variety of animals. This sounds simple, but lots of
behaviour looks like kissing at first glance.

Many primates pre-chew food for their offspring and feed this to them orally (a
behaviour known as premastication). Ants also exchange fluid and food mouth-to-mouth in a process known as trophallaxis. Sometimes they do this mouth-to-anus too, but that is harder to mistake for a kiss. Tropical French grunt fish can also be seen passionately locking lips. However, this behaviour is no French kiss. It is part of a dominance display known as “kiss-fighting”.

We excluded kissing-like behaviour from our definition. We also excluded interactions that might be accidental or occur between members of different species, such as when dogs lick their owners’ mouths (or the time a capuchin monkey tried to snog me, but that’s a different story).

Taking all this into account, we define kissing as non-aggressive, directed, mouth-to-mouth contact between members of the same species, that doesn’t involve food
transfer. By this definition, all sorts of animals kiss, from polar bears enjoying spirited rounds of tonsil-tennis, to prairie dogs softly canoodling.

We used this definition to trawl published scientific papers, searching for observations of kissing in the group of monkeys and apes that evolved in Africa, Asia and Europe. It turns out that a handful of monkeys, and most apes, have been observed to kiss, with the exception of Eastern gorillas and the small apes (gibbons and siamangs).

The type of kiss can vary, both within and between species. Kissing between bonobos tends to be an exclusively sensual affair with “prolonged tongue-tongue interaction”. Other apes have a spicy side too, sometimes kissing as foreplay, or during sex.

Kissing also occurs in affectionate, platonic contexts across most apes, such as when mothers kiss their infants, or during greetings and reconciliation.

We combined this data with information on the evolutionary relationships between different species, in what is known as a phylogenetic comparative analysis. This technique allowed us to model the evolutionary history of kissing, and explore whether it was likely to have been present in the ancestors of different groups of species.

Our results paint early apes in an amorous light, showing that the ancestors of large apes were kissing each other as far back as 21.5 – 16.9 million years ago. Clearly, they were onto a good thing because they’ve been at it ever since, apart from Eastern gorillas, who just don’t seem to be into it.

Our reconstructions also shed light on the proclivities of Neanderthals who, it turns out, were also likely to be partial to a good smooch. Previous research shows that modern humans and Neanderthals shared an oral microbe long after the two species diverged into separate lineages. For this to happen, the microbes had to have been transferred between the two species. In other words, they were swapping saliva.

There could, of course, be an innocent explanation for this. Perhaps the two species were simply sharing food with one another over a friendly campfire. On the
other hand, when you consider that most people of non-African descent have some
Neanderthal ancestry, alongside our finding that kissing was present in Neanderthals, a saucier picture emerges.

So, did humans and Neanderthals get off with each other? Unfortunately, kissing
doesn’t preserve in the fossil record, so we’ll never be able to say for sure, but the evidence certainly points in that direction. One thing I can say for certain is that I’ll never look at a Neanderthal the same way again.

Matilda Brindle has previously received funding from the Natural Environment Research Council and the Leakey Foundation

– ref. When did kissing evolve and did humans and Neanderthals get off with each other? New research – https://theconversation.com/when-did-kissing-evolve-and-did-humans-and-neanderthals-get-off-with-each-other-new-research-269210

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Julian Woolford, Head of Musical Theatre, GSA, University of Surrey

The Wicked Witch of the West is back in part two of the film adaptation, of Wicked. Part one recounted the musical’s first half and with an interval of a year, audiences can now find out what happened to Elphaba (Cynthia Erivo) after she learned to fly and set off on a mission to save the animals of Oz from the Wizard’s (Jeff Goldblum) vilification

The Legally Blonde light-heartedness of Shiz University is in the past and the second part, Wicked: For Good, has moved into more sinister political territory. This story emphasises the Wizard’s oppression of the animals as he makes them second-class citizens. It also charts the slow rise of fascism in Oz.

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Read more:
Wicked review: a stunning film adaptation that avoids all the usual pitfalls of moving musicals from the stage to the screen

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Elphaba is now mounting a one-woman rebellion against the Wizard and, slowly, raises the consciousness of her frenemy Glinda and Fiyero, Captain of the Guard and Glinda’s betrothed.

Ariana Grande’s Glinda has a considerably clearer arc in this movie than onstage. The live musical focuses on Elphaba’s journey and Glinda makes abrupt hand-break turns of realisation. In the film, however, Grande captures her slow disillusionment with the politics of Oz while growing to understand that she still benefits from it.

Grande’s performance is helped by The Girl in the Bubble, one of the two new songs added to the stage score. In this song Glinda chooses her side in the conflict. Grande’s revelatory performance proves her as an actress of considerable depth and remarkable subtlety.

The other new song, There’s No Place Like Home is Elphaba’s rallying call to the animals to stay and fight for Oz. It has less dramatic impetus but emphasises her reasons for fighting the Wizard when all of Oz is bowing to his will. It could be read as an anthem for refugees and the dispossessed everywhere.

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Read more:
Wicked’s Defying Gravity is a musical theatre anthem – and a battle cry for outsiders

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Erivo, a queer black woman, delivers a powerhouse performance. Director John Chu’s expert use of close-ups allows the actors to convey the delicacy of emotional shifts in a manner that is impossible onstage, and Erivo can break your heart with a single glance.

Unusually for a movie adaptation, the two-part story of Wicked features the complete score of the stage musical. There are changes, like the opening number Thank Goodness and The March of the Witch Hunters, which are both considerably expanded.

They have decided to keep the one number that sits uncomfortably in the stage show, the upbeat Wonderful. In this song the Wizard attempts to woo Elphaba to join him in power. Chu has added Glinda to this number to emphasise Elphaba’s ambivalence, but the light-hearted nature of moment is awkward, especially considering the more serious tone of the movie.

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Read more:
Wicked’s depiction of disability is refreshing – thanks to authentic casting and an accessible set

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Wonderful’s tonal shift also presents certain characters in different lights. Jeff Goldblum’s Wizard is more obviously self-serving than in part one and Michelle Yeoh’s Madame Morrible, now promoted to the Wizard’s right-hand woman is seen as clearly clinging to power. Also, Elphaba’s wheelchair-bound sister Nessarose and the Munchkin, Boq, start to feature more as their part in Dorothy’s tale are revealed.

The engagement with the wider world of The Wizard of Oz is vital to this movie. Part one is concerned with Elphaba and Glinda’s early relationship and establishes the socio-political background, a story that the writer Gregory Maguire entirely imagined in his book, Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West (1995) – the original source of the musical. In this film, however, the events of L. Frank Baum’s 1900 novel The Wizard of Oz (and the subsequent movie) are vital.

However, Maguire smartly keeps Dorothy Gale mostly in the background and the film follows suit. She never speaks, her face is never seen, and no actress is credited in the role.

At some point, there is clearly going to be a fan edit that splices the 1939 The Wizard of Oz starring Judy Garland with both Wicked movies to create a complete journey for both Elphaba and Dorothy. But it is testament to the Wicked creators that, to my eyes, there appear to be no moments where these tales contradict each other, save for the Wicked Witch of the East’s magic slippers.

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Read more:
Wizard of Oz: why this extraordinary movie has been so influential

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In Baum’s original novel the slippers are silver but were changed to ruby by MGM to showcase their new Technicolor process (along with the Wicked Witch’s skin becoming green). But the studio declined to give the Wicked creators the copyright to the change, and so, in both stage musical and movie the slippers remain silver.

Chu and his design team cleverly, and sometimes subtly, reference The Wizard of Oz: Fiyero’s horse is blue, the train changes colour depending on who is travelling and Nessarose’s silver slippers glow ruby as Elphaba enchants her from her wheelchair. While the designs of both the Scarecrow and Tinman echo the 1939 movie, the only major departure is the Cowardly Lion, here rendered in CGI as a realistic anthropomorphic feline, rather than the vaudevillian in a furry suit of Bert Lahr’s performance.

Obviously Wicked and Wicked: For Good should really be considered a single movie, a remarkably successful screen adaptation that manages to respect all the underlying source material to create a truly epic movie musical. I wish I could take Baum to witness the entire five hours.

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Julian Woolford 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. Wicked: For Good – the second part of this reimagining of Oz takes a much darker political turn – https://theconversation.com/wicked-for-good-the-second-part-of-this-reimagining-of-oz-takes-a-much-darker-political-turn-269971

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Tahani Mustafa, Lecturer in International Relations, King’s College London

Over the years, a charge that has repeatedly been levelled at the state of Israel is that is operates an “apartheid state”. And it’s easy to see why Israel’s opponents return to this argument.

The country’s regime of institutionalised separation and discrimination in occupied Palestine appears to meet the definition of apartheid under international law as set out by the United Nations in 1976. The international convention on the suppression and punishment of the crime of apartheid defines the system as “similar policies and practices of racial segregation and discrimination as practised in southern Africa”.

This, it says, amounts to “inhuman acts committed for the purpose of establishing and maintaining domination by one racial group of persons over any other racial group of persons and systematically oppressing them”.

But having spent years as an analyst of Palestinian security and governance, I believe that labelling Israel as an apartheid state is misleading, precisely because of the considerable differences between Israel and apartheid-era South Africa. It does not speak to the lived experience of many of the Palestinians under Israel’s occupation, and its use risks marginalising them in their struggle for their national and human rights.

Language matters. Ultimately the term apartheid obscures as much as it reveals. It diverts attention from the ongoing and seemingly intractable conflict. It ignores Israel’s justifiable need to ensure security for its people. It also does nothing to further the cause of Palestinian self-determination.

Instead it focuses on largely inconsequential arguments about the extent to which Israel does or does not resemble the former South African regime.

There are clearly parallels to be drawn between Israel’s treatment of Palestinians and the conditions listed above that define apartheid. No Palestinian – anywhere in Israel or occupied Palestine – is equal to an Israeli under the law.

Further, while any Jewish person anywhere in the world can become a citizen of Israel, no Palestinian has the right of return to their homeland. No Palestinian can return to their family’s home in Israel itself, while Palestinians in the diaspora have to get the approval of the Israeli authorities to return to occupied Palestine, an almost impossible task.

Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem face sweeping restrictions on their movements. Large numbers face the confiscation of their land and harsh and discriminatory treatment that has forced people from their homes in what amounts to forcible population transfer. Many cannot live where they want and do not have even the most basic civil rights.

Those living in Gaza have, in effect, been confined to a large prison camp which – even before the current conflict began in October 2023 – has restricted imports of food and goods for decades and subjected inhabitants to regular destructive and lethal assaults.

But the problem with naming Israel as an apartheid state is that the term has become more than a strictly legal description of the situation. And it ignores the fact that the two situations operate under completely different logic.

In South Africa, white people wanted black people for labour. Most Israelis appear to want Palestinians out. A poll taken in May 2025 found overwhelming support among Israelis for the expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza and majority support for the expulsion of Israeli Arabs.

Many Palestinian citizens of Israel have latched on to the term apartheid because it describes their reality as second-class citizens in an ethno-national Jewish state. And many in the Palestinian diaspora have embraced the term because of their lived experience, deprived of their original nationality and unable to return to their family’s homes while any Jewish person can return and claim a citizenship they are denied.

National self-determination

Palestinians who use the term apartheid state often also embrace the solution inherent in the term. The aim is to end the apartheid conditions and live alongside Jews in a single democratic state as equals. This would transform Palestinians’ long struggle for self-determination into something more akin to a civil rights movement.

But not all Palestinians view the term in this way or embrace the one-state solution. This is where calling Israel an apartheid state becomes most problematic. While many of the Palestinians who live in occupied Palestine recognise the legal validity of the term, not all feel that it adequately captures their reality.

Some therefore prefer the term “settler colonialism”. It feels to them like a more appropriate concept in terms of the solutions it suggests. They believe a just two-state solution would allow them to keep their land while reclaiming their rights in that land and even potentially regaining land that has been lost.

Many in occupied Palestine do not want to compromise on their national rights to self-determination. They want separation from Israelis as much as Israelis want it from them.

But in general, Palestinians are realistic about the limitations of both one-state and two-state solutions They could easily be marginalised by either solution. In the former, they risk becoming de facto second-class citizens in a state dominated by Jewish Israelis. In the latter there is the very real prospect that they will end up living in a series of isolated enclaves akin to native reservations, enjoying only the most attenuated sovereignty.

However, many realise they have to compromise. In any one-state solution, they will have to compromise on their national rights, while under a two-state solution they will have to compromise on territory, settling for a state that constitutes 22% or less of the territory of historic Palestine. This willingness to compromise is rooted in realism born out of despair not hope.

The Palestinian national movement is arguably weaker than it has ever been. It is fragmenting along geographic and partisan lines. Palestinians in the diaspora, those who have Israeli citizenship and those in the West Bank and Gaza can hold very different views and there are significant divisions even within those four broad groupings. These divides have become ever more intractable over the past two years of conflict in Gaza.

So, painting Israel as an apartheid state is unrealistic when it comes to the situation faced by Palestinians. It’s a concept that achieves little in terms of a future strategy and, at the same time, undermines Palestinian unity.

Tahani Mustafa 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. Calling Israel an ‘apartheid state’ doesn’t help anyone – https://theconversation.com/calling-israel-an-apartheid-state-doesnt-help-anyone-268949

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Vincent Charles, Reader in AI for Business and Management Science, Queen’s University Belfast

On a sunny morning on October 19 2025, four men allegedly walked into the world’s most-visited museum and left, minutes later, with crown jewels worth €88 million (£76 million). The theft from Paris’s Louvre Museum – one of the world’s most surveilled cultural institutions – took just under eight minutes.

Visitors kept browsing. Security didn’t react (until alarms were triggered). The men disappeared into the city’s traffic before anyone realised what had happened.

Investigators later revealed that the thieves wore hi-vis vests, disguising themselves as construction workers. They arrived with a furniture lift, a common sight in Paris’s narrow streets, and used it to reach a balcony overlooking the Seine. Dressed as workers, they looked as if they belonged.

This strategy worked because we don’t see the world objectively. We see it through categories – through what we expect to see. The thieves understood the social categories that we perceive as “normal” and exploited them to avoid suspicion. Many artificial intelligence (AI) systems work in the same way and are vulnerable to the same kinds of mistakes as a result.

The sociologist Erving Goffman would describe what happened at the Louvre using his concept of the presentation of self: people “perform” social roles by adopting the cues others expect. Here, the performance of normality became the perfect camouflage.

The sociology of sight

Humans carry out mental categorisation all the time to make sense of people and places. When something fits the category of “ordinary”, it slips from notice.

AI systems used for tasks such as facial recognition and detecting suspicious activity in a public area operate in a similar way. For humans, categorisation is cultural. For AI, it is mathematical.

But both systems rely on learned patterns rather than objective reality. Because AI learns from data about who looks “normal” and who looks “suspicious”, it absorbs the categories embedded in its training data. And this makes it susceptible to bias.

The Louvre robbers weren’t seen as dangerous because they fit a trusted category. In AI, the same process can have the opposite effect: people who don’t fit the statistical norm become more visible and over-scrutinised.

It can mean a facial recognition system disproportionately flags certain racial or gendered groups as potential threats while letting others pass unnoticed.

A sociological lens helps us see that these aren’t separate issues. AI doesn’t invent its categories; it learns ours. When a computer vision system is trained on security footage where “normal” is defined by particular bodies, clothing or behaviour, it reproduces those assumptions.

Just as the museum’s guards looked past the thieves because they appeared to belong, AI can look past certain patterns while overreacting to others.

Categorisation, whether human or algorithmic, is a double-edged sword. It helps us process information quickly, but it also encodes our cultural assumptions. Both people and machines rely on pattern recognition, which is an efficient but imperfect strategy.

A sociological view of AI treats algorithms as mirrors: they reflect back our social categories and hierarchies. In the Louvre case, the mirror is turned toward us. The robbers succeeded not because they were invisible, but because they were seen through the lens of normality. In AI terms, they passed the classification test.

From museum halls to machine learning

This link between perception and categorisation reveals something important about our increasingly algorithmic world. Whether it’s a guard deciding who looks suspicious or an AI deciding who looks like a “shoplifter”, the underlying process is the same: assigning people to categories based on cues that feel objective but are culturally learned.

When an AI system is described as “biased”, this often means that it reflects those social categories too faithfully. The Louvre heist reminds us that these categories don’t just shape our attitudes, they shape what gets noticed at all.

After the theft, France’s culture minister promised new cameras and tighter security. But no matter how advanced those systems become, they will still rely on categorisation. Someone, or something, must decide what counts as “suspicious behaviour”. If that decision rests on assumptions, the same blind spots will persist.

The Louvre robbery will be remembered as one of Europe’s most spectacular museum thefts. The thieves succeeded because they mastered the sociology of appearance: they understood the categories of normality and used them as tools.

And in doing so, they showed how both people and machines can mistake conformity for safety. Their success in broad daylight wasn’t only a triumph of planning. It was a triumph of categorical thinking, the same logic that underlies both human perception and artificial intelligence.

The lesson is clear: before we teach machines to see better, we must first learn to question how we see.

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. How the Louvre thieves exploited human psychology to avoid suspicion – and what it reveals about AI – https://theconversation.com/how-the-louvre-thieves-exploited-human-psychology-to-avoid-suspicion-and-what-it-reveals-about-ai-269842

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Piers Forster, Professor of Physical Climate Change; Director of the Priestley International Centre for Climate, University of Leeds

Despite rapid progress in clean energy and electric vehicles, the world is still warming faster than ever. The good news is that we already have powerful ways to reduce the warming rate – if governments look beyond carbon dioxide and focus on a broader set of pollutants.

We are writing this from the UN’s Cop30 climate summit in Belém, Brazil, where much of the attention is rightly on the carbon dioxide cuts that we need to avoid long-term warming. But we could make faster progress by also tackling a different set of pollutants that heat the planet intensely – but fade rapidly. Cutting emissions of these means cutting the warming quickly.

So-called “short-lived climate pollutants”, or SLCPs, are emitted in various ways and many of them have the same sources as CO₂. The common ground is that they typically don’t stay in the atmosphere for very long – from a few days to a few decades, compared to centuries for carbon dioxide.

If carbon dioxide is the marathon runner of global warming, SLCPs are the sprinters, with a fast and powerful impact on global temperatures. Because cutting their emissions quickly reduces how much of them is in the atmosphere, they offer a real and rapid way to slow warming.

Methane, emitted from leaky gas pipes, belching cows, and rotting organic matter (think municipal solid waste) among other sources, is one of the most prevalent and powerful SLCPs. It only lasts in the atmosphere for about 12 years, but traps heat 80 times more effectively than carbon dioxide in that time. It’s easy to see how methane has accounted for around a third of global warming since the industrial revolution.

Atmospheric methane reached record levels last year, with an increase of over 3% since just 2019. Aggressive cuts could make a big contribution to slowing warming before mid-century – a timeline that really matters for the countries most affected by escalating climate change.

Other potentially game-changing SLCPs include tropospheric ozone, formed when sunlight reacts primarily with methane and nitrogen oxides. Ground level ozone is also a pollutant that damages human health as well as crops and ecosystems. Hydrofluorocarbons, or HFCs, used in air conditioning and refrigeration, are also incredibly powerful greenhouse gases.

Nitrogen oxides themselves, along with ammonia, volatile organic compounds and carbon monoxide, add to this mix, creating a cocktail of gases and other pollutants that aren’t carbon dioxide but are still able to change the climate. Cutting these pollutants helps human health, the climate and ecosystems.

But there is a flip side. One type of SLCPs (tiny airborne particles known as aerosols, emitted by burning fossil fuels and biomass among other sources) can temporarily cool the planet while they remain in the air. Whiter particles reflect sunlight back into space, while darker particles absorb it and warm the atmosphere. Aerosols also affect clouds, winds, and the strength of the monsoon.

This doesn’t mean we should delay reducing aerosols – keeping health-damaging pollutants in the air is hardly a climate strategy to be proud of – but it does mean that we need to accelerate action on other ways to stop the warming fast.

Fast moves

Many policies and technologies that target carbon dioxide can also reduce SLCPs. Shifting to renewable energy or electric vehicles also cuts methane, nitrogen oxides and aerosol emissions. Plans and policies focused on tackling short-lived pollutants, such as capturing methane emitted from landfill sites, disused coal mines, or stopping gas network leaks, also present quick and cost-effective wins.

Governments already know this. The Global Methane Pledge, launched at the Cop26 summit in Glasgow, highlights that cutting methane is our single most effective strategy for keeping 1.5˚C within reach.

But a rapid acceleration is needed to meet its goal of reducing emissions by 30% by 2030, and at the moment too many countries, including key emitters who have signed the pledge (the EU and US) are not taking it seriously enough. Other major emitters like China and India haven’t signed up to the pledge, though backsliding from the west means that they have a chance to take the lead.

Other short-term pollutants may prove trickier. For example, HFCs are targeted by the 2016 Kigali amendment to the ozone layer-protecting Montreal Protocol.

This aims to phase them down by over 80% by 2050, but barriers to action include the costs of alternative technologies for developing countries and a black-market trade in HFCs. Global cooperation is needed to find solutions to these and other challenges.

What can Cop30 do?

SLCPs are clearly being discussed at Cop30, with influential non-state organisations like the Global Methane Hub, Clean Air Fund and Climate and Clean Air Coalition raising these issues. New initiatives like the Super Pollutant Country Action Accelerator, directly support developing countries in reducing methane and other non-carbon dioxide emissions.

But such ambitious action also needs to be taken at the highest level, by the governments negotiating the climate summit’s core outcomes, if we are to make use of this “emergency brake” on global warming.

The IPCC is set to publish a report on short-lived pollutants in 2027. This will not only raise the issue up the agenda but also provide governments with a sound basis on which to build policies and plans that tackle climate change and air pollution simultaneously.

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Piers Forster receives funding from UK and EU funding councils and he sits on the UK Climate Change Committee

Jessica Seddon is a co-chair of the Global Air Quality Forecasting and Information Services initiative of the WMO Global Atmosphere Watch. She is on the board of Radiant Earth and is a consultant/advisor to the Clean Air Fund.

– ref. The fast-fix for global warming that the UN climate summit can’t ignore – https://theconversation.com/the-fast-fix-for-global-warming-that-the-un-climate-summit-cant-ignore-269764

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

The global investment frenzy around AI has seen companies valued at trillions of dollars and eye-watering projections of how it will boost economic productivity.

But in recent weeks the mood has begun to shift. Investors and CEOs are now openly questioning whether the enormous costs of building and running AI systems can really be justified by future revenues.

Google’s CEO, Sundar Pichai, has spoken of “irrationality” in AI’s growth, while others have said some projects are proving to be more complex and expensive than expected.

Meanwhile, global stock markets have declined, with tech shares taking a particular hit, and the value of cryptocurrencies has dipped as investors appear increasingly nervous.

So how should we view the health of the AI sector?

Well, bubbles in technology are not new. There have been great rises and great falls in the dot-com world, and surges in popularity for certain tech platforms (during COVID for example) which have then flattened out.

Each of these technological shifts was real, but they became bubbles when excitement about their potential ran far ahead of companies’ ability to turn popularity into lasting profits.

The surge in AI enthusiasm has a similar feel to it. Today’s systems are genuinely impressive, and it’s easy to imagine them generating significant economic value. The bigger challenge comes with how much of that value companies can actually keep hold of.

Investors are assuming rapid and widespread AI adoption along with high-margin revenue. Yet the business models needed to deliver that outcome are still uncertain and often very expensive to operate.

This creates a familiar gap between what the technology could do in theory, and what firms can profitably deliver in practice. Previous booms show how quickly things wobble when those ideas don’t work out as planned.

AI may well reshape entire sectors, but if the dazzling potential doesn’t translate quickly into steady, profitable demand, the excitement can slip away surprisingly fast.

Fit to burst?

Investment bubbles rarely deflate on their own. They are usually popped by outside forces, which often involve the US Federal Reserve (the US’s central bank) making moves to slow the economy by raising interest rates or limiting the supply of money, or a wider economic downturn suddenly draining confidence.

For much of the 20th century, these were the classic triggers that ended long stretches of rising markets.

But financial markets today are larger, more complex, and less tightly tied to any single lever such as interest rates. The current AI boom has unfolded despite the US keeping rates at their highest level in decades, suggesting that external pressures alone may not be enough to halt it.

Instead, this cycle is more likely to end from within. A disappointment at one of the big AI players – such as weaker than expected earnings at Nvidia or Intel – could puncture the sense that growth is guaranteed.

Alternatively, a mismatch between chip supply and demand could lead to falling prices. Or investors’ expectations could quickly shift if progress in training ever larger models begins to slow, or if new AI models offer only modest improvements.

Overall then, perhaps the most plausible end to this bubble is not a traditional external shock, but a realisation that the underlying economics are no longer keeping up with the hype, prompting a sharp revaluation across related stocks.

Artificial maturity

If the bubble did burst, the most visible shift would be a sharp correction in the valuations of chipmakers and the large cloud companies driving the current boom.

These firms have been priced as if AI demand will rise almost without limit. So any sign that the market is smaller or slower than expected would hit financial markets hard.

This kind of correction wouldn’t mean AI disappears, but it would almost certainly push the industry into a more cautious, less speculative phase.

The deepest consequence would be on investment. Goldman Sachs estimates that global spending on AI-related infrastructure could reach US$4 trillion by 2030. In 2025 alone, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta and Google’s owner Alphabet have poured almost US$350 billion into data centres, hardware and model development. If confidence faltered, much of this planned expansion could be scaled back or delayed.

That would ripple through the wider economy, slowing construction, dampening demand for specialised equipment, and dragging on growth at a time when inflation remains high.

But a bursting AI bubble would not erase the technology’s long-term importance. Instead, it would force a shift away from the “build it now, profits will follow” mindset which is driving much of the current exuberance.

Companies would focus more on practical uses that genuinely save money or raise productivity, rather than speculative bets on transformative breakthroughs. The sector would mature. But it would probably do so only after a painful period of adjustment for investors, suppliers and governments who have tied their growth expectations to an uninterrupted AI boom.

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. Is the AI bubble about to burst? What to watch for as the markets wobble – https://theconversation.com/is-the-ai-bubble-about-to-burst-what-to-watch-for-as-the-markets-wobble-270113