Category: The Conversation – USA

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Paul J. Springer, Professor of Comparative Military Studies, Air University

Six weeks of U.S. and Israeli bombardment have served to degrade Iran’s nuclear facilities and cripple parts of its military.

But the Islamic Republic’s offensive capabilities have been built up over nearly 50 years, during which Iran has been either at war or under the threat of conflict.

As an expert in military history and theory, I believe that to understand what may come next in Operation Epic Fury, it’s valuable to grasp the development of Iran’s modern military structure, capabilities and international activities.

Iranian military technology

Prior to the establishment of the Islamic Republic of Iran in 1979, Iran’s military was largely supplied by Western powers, particularly the United States.

It entered the Iran-Iraq war in 1980 with a substantial amount of then-modern equipment. That included nearly 80 F-14 fighter aircraft, over 200 F-4 and F-5 aircraft and thousands of tanks.

But Iran’s military was exhausted when the war ended in 1988. And the government had by then become a world pariah, making resupply all but impossible.

Although Iran imported some military equipment from the Soviet Union and China in 1990, its economy could not support substantial military spending.

Ironically, the arms embargoes that Iran faced during and after its war with Iraq made the regime self-reliant on its weapons stockpiles. And that triggered the development of a substantial domestic arms industry.

Most modern Iranian military equipment consists of reverse-engineered American and Soviet equipment, much of it obsolete. Since 1990, however, Iranian missile technology has substantially improved. That’s due to domestic production and importing expertise from other marginalized states, such as North Korea.

Starting in the 1990s, Iran also innovated a series of one-way attack drones, a relatively inexpensive way to attack distant targets.

The modern Iranian military

The Iranian military is split into the regular military, or “Artesh,” and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. The Artesh plays a domestic defense role akin to a militia, while the Revolutionary Guard serves as the more professional military force.

The Revolutionary Guard projects regional power. During the 2003 U.S.-Iraq war, for instance, it provided improvised explosive devices to insurgents targeting American forces.

The Revolutionary Guard tends to receive the bulk of Iranian military resources, including the best personnel and equipment. Quds Force, the unconventional warfare wing of the Revolutionary Guard, has long played a role in exporting the revolutionary beliefs of the Iranian rulers. The Quds Force provides arms and guidance to proxies throughout the Middle East, primarily by fomenting insurrections against Arab Sunni governments.

Iran has long been the patron of Hezbollah, based in Lebanon, whose primary goal is the eradication of Israel. More recently, Iran has also engaged in substantial support of Hamas in Gaza, despite the fact that Hamas is a Sunni organization, while the rulers of Iran are members of the Shiite branch of Islam.

Iran has constantly sought means of exerting military influence beyond its borders, without risking external attack. It has embraced the use of cyber warfare, a method of attack with a relatively low cost for participation and a potentially outsized influence on the world stage.

Iranian hackers have attacked Western military and government networks, including a hack of FBI Director Kash Patel’s personal emails. Iranian-backed hackers have also launched attacks on infrastructure and cultural institutions, including U.S. wastewater treatment plants and electrical grids.

Iran’s pursuit of atomic weaponry

Iran’s government has relentlessly pursued nuclear weapons since at least the 1980s.

The Iranian government has always maintained that its nuclear program is to provide power for the developing nation, rather than weaponry. But definitive evidence of uranium enrichment far beyond the requirements of power generation have caused Western states to demand an end to the Iranian nuclear program.

In 2010, cybersecurity researcher Sergey Ulasen discovered an incredibly complex malware program, dubbed Stuxnet, that was created to undermine the Iranian nuclear program by disrupting the function of enrichment centrifuges. No nation has ever taken responsibility for the attack, which set back Iranian uranium enrichment efforts by years.

In 2015, after negotiations with the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council and Germany, Iran agreed to halt its uranium enrichment program in exchange for relief from economic sanctions and the release of frozen Iranian assets. The negotiations resulted in the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA.

Although the Trump administration withdrew the U.S. from the JCPOA in 2018, the agreement continued to function, and Iran seemed poised to reenter the global economy.

However, in 2020 the Iranians restarted their nuclear program. They also ramped up production of ballistic missiles and one-way attack drones.

In June 2025, the United States and Israel launched a massive aerial attack on Iranian nuclear facilities, an effort that Trump characterized as having destroyed Iran’s nuclear facilities.

Iran responded by launching a wave of ballistic missiles and drones toward Israel, most of which were intercepted before entering Israeli airspace.

The missile and interceptor war

Prior to Operation Epic Fury, analysts estimated that Iran possessed 3,000 ballistic missiles and tens of thousands of one-way attack drones. They also concluded that Iran had a substantial production capacity to increase its stockpiles.

In the first six weeks of the current conflict, Iran expended at least 650 missiles in attacks on Israel and hundreds more against other targets in the region.

The U.S. has placed a heavy emphasis on attacking missile production and storage facilities. But it’s difficult to ascertain how many missiles and drones the Iranian military might still possess.

Iranian production and transportation has almost certainly sustained substantial losses in capacity. And U.S. and Israeli aircraft prowl the skies over Iran seeking signs of mobile launchers or attempts to transport missiles to firing locations.

The rate of Iranian missile fire has substantially declined since the first days of the conflict, but it has never dropped to zero. That has led some analysts to suspect that Iran maintains a significant cache of long-range weaponry in reserve, while U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth argues that it has lost the capacity to launch major barrages.

Paul J. Springer is a Senior Fellow of the Foreign Policy Research Institute. His comments represent his own opinion and do not reflect the official policy of the United States Government, the U.S. Department of Defense, or the U.S. Air Force.

– ref. Iran’s military forces combine state-of-the-art drones and hackers with out-of-date conventional weapons – https://theconversation.com/irans-military-forces-combine-state-of-the-art-drones-and-hackers-with-out-of-date-conventional-weapons-280547

Source: The Conversation – USA – By John E. Jones III, President, Dickinson College

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth is engaging in “a proselytizing Christian campaign” in his job, according to The Washington Post.

Hegseth hosts prayer services at the Pentagon and virtually crusades as a Christian, praying at the Pentagon for U.S. troops to inflict “overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy in Iran.” Politics editor Naomi Schalit spoke with Dickinson College President John E. Jones III about the legal implications of Hegseth’s actions.

Jones was a longtime federal judge, and his most famous decision, Kitzmiller v. Dover, was a case in which a district school board ordered the teaching of so-called intelligent design – claimed by advocates to be an alternative to the theory of evolution. Jones’ 139-page decision concluded that it was “abundantly clear” that the board’s policy violated the establishment clause of the Constitution, which forbids the government from creating an official religion or favoring one religion over another.

Schalit: What issues do Hegseth’s behavior and statements raise for you, if any?

Jones: From afar, it looks as if he is flirting with a violation of the establishment clause as contained within the First Amendment. The establishment clause mandates that there can’t be a national religion, nor can the government favor one religion over another.

What appears to be happening at the Pentagon are services that basically recognize only a particular religious tradition. And it’s very notable that Americans United for Separation of Church and State filed suit against both the Defense Department and the Labor Department because there are similar activities that are taking place there.

What they’re seeking under the Freedom of Information Act are certain records, because they likely can’t attend these sessions. Any information they receive could support a separate lawsuit that, in effect, says the government – via the departments of Labor and Defense – is violating the establishment clause.

From my perspective, it sure looks like they are in violation. These activities are hosted on government property. They’re potentially coercive and appear to promote one particular religious viewpoint above others. While they may say they’re not requiring people to attend, you don’t know whether there may be some incentivizing or negative consequence if somebody doesn’t come.

Let me be the casual bystander and say, “Gosh, it’s just really nice. He’s a God-fearing man, and you know, he’s saying things that show his belief, which is a good thing to have.” Why did the authors of the Bill of Rights have a problem with the government establishing a state religion?

They were people of their time. They knew England had the Church of England and thus a national religion that was intertwined with the state. It ultimately caused untoward problems. They wanted everyone to have the freedom to worship, or not, as a personal choice and felt very passionately about that.

What has been long debated is the concept of a wall of separation between church and state. That phrase is not in the Constitution, but it is something that appears in cases, or is at least implied. And I’ve often said that wall is somewhat porous because there are circumstances where courts have allowed a little bit of seepage of religion under certain circumstances into the so-called public square.

What is really interesting is the tilt of the current Supreme Court court towards relaxing what have been generations of jurisprudence holding that the establishment clause should be more strictly enforced.

The Kennedy v. Bremerton School District case of 2022 involved a high school football coach assembling his players for prayer after games. It was pretty remarkable in the fact that the Supreme Court ultimately decided that that was not a violation of the establishment clause.

Some of the reasons were that it was after the game and that it was not a required activity for the players. Those who opposed it claimed that it was a violation of the establishment clause and that it was inherently coercive.

These current activities by the government – assuming that Americans United for Separation of Church and State files a lawsuit, not just an information request – are very likely to get to the Supreme Court.

The other thing the Supreme Court has done is it abandoned the so-called Lemon test, which courts utilized to determine whether a law or practice violated the establishment clause. Particularly in Kitzmiller v. Dover, I found the Lemon test to be a really helpful vehicle to use in measuring whether the policy in that case, which involved a school board mandating the teaching of the so-called alternative to evolution – intelligent design – violated the establishment clause.

How did the Lemon test work?

The Lemon test says that a judge should first measure the purpose of the government’s action, and then the effect on a reasonable person. You can then go to a third point, which is whether it represents an excessive entanglement with religion.

It doesn’t fit every case, but it worked in most establishment clause challenges.

But the Supreme Court, first in Kennedy v. Bremerton School District, pronounced it dead.

They in effect said to judges, “You have to look at historical antecedents and traditions and so forth.” That’s great writing at the Supreme Court level, but it leaves district judges completely unmoored. So whomever the poor judge is who gets this case is likely going to have a difficult time trying to read the tea leaves to determine whether it is, in fact, a violation. And I guarantee you, there won’t be unanimity among jurists and lawyers on that point.

So you’ve got a case where in the old days there was legal scripture that said, “OK, apply these tests and you can tell whether the government has stepped over the line into endorsing religion.” But now the Supreme Court has made it unclear where that line is?

Yes, and the very fact that Americans United for Separation of Church and State is trying to get information under the Freedom of Information Act means that they know that you have to come armed with a lot of salient surrounding facts in order to have this declared unconstitutional.

If this had been 10 or 20 years ago, they probably wouldn’t have filed that action under the Freedom of Information Act. They would have directly challenged the law and in effect said, “Look, it speaks for itself. You have services favoring one religion over others within the Pentagon and Labor departments. It’s inherently unconstitutional and a violation of the establishment clause.”

But we’re in a post-Lemon world today where there is a relaxation of the previously recognized constraints of the establishment clause.

Where does that get the country?

I fear where it goes if the progression continues. The proponents of this kind of behavior ask, “What’s wrong with a little of that good old-time religion in the public square?”

They never appear to contemplate the fact that in generations hence, America could, for example, be a predominately Muslim population. Suppose that became the favored religion in a country, or any religion that may be embraced by some but be disfavored by others became the favored religion. The establishment clause is meant to protect everyone, including, by the way, nonbelievers and atheists.

There’s nothing in the establishment clause that says that you can’t worship – or not – as you see fit. And that’s the beauty of this country. The founders knew that if there was a move towards a favored or national religion in the eyes of the government, that could replicate what took place in Great Britain, where religion and politics mixed with occasionally terrible results.

Failure to adhere to the dictates of the church could render you a second-class citizen, or worse. My hope is that judges will be very, very careful about a systemic creep that totally eviscerates the purpose and intent of the establishment clause.

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

– ref. Why Pete Hegseth’s Pentagon prayer services challenge traditional notions of separation of church and state – but might be blessed by the Roberts Supreme Court – https://theconversation.com/why-pete-hegseths-pentagon-prayer-services-challenge-traditional-notions-of-separation-of-church-and-state-but-might-be-blessed-by-the-roberts-supreme-court-280535

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) – By Allison M. Roth, Assistant Professor of Biological Sciences, University of Missouri-Columbia

The lakes, streams and ponds you’ve visited for years are likely looking more brown than they used to. And people who are fishing those waters are likely catching different species and sizes of fish than in the past.

Our research has identified a link between those two developments, which means that trout, bass, perch and whitefish may become less common in unstocked lakes. But pike and walleye anglers may be in for a trophy-sized surprise.

In the past several decades, across much of northeastern North America and northern Europe, many freshwater ecosystems are getting darker, and they are changing in other ways as a result.

What is freshwater browning?

The specific phenomenon of darkening water, called “freshwater browning,” is driven by a few factors. Among the reasons are climate change, as higher temperatures and increased runoff are combining to increase the amount and types of carbon compounds that move from soil and land into bodies of water.

Similarly, as people have taken steps to reduce acidic emissions coming from smokestacks and other sources, less acid has fallen as precipitation, changing the chemistry of soils. Those chemical changes are also increasing the flow of carbon to bodies of water.

Higher levels of carbon make water look brown because it’s basically dissolved plant matter that stains the water like tea leaves would.

Underwater visibility

It’s harder to see in browner waters, which makes it harder for fish to locate prey, escape from predators and find suitable habitat to live in.

Our recent study combined a review of past research with some new analyses to examine how different kinds of fish do in darker water. Working with a large team of experts, we tallied findings from previous studies that looked at the relationship between the darkness of a body of water and fish growth rates in that same body of water.

We found that in browner waters, fish often grow more slowly. The decreased growth rate in individual fish appears to reduce the population sizes of these fish, which may, in turn, change the quantities and proportions of different kinds of fish in a lake.

But freshwater browning doesn’t affect all species of fish equally.

Unsurprisingly, we found that vision appeared to be quite important for navigating browner waters. When we studied fish communities in 303 Canadian lakes, we found that in lakes with darker water, fish species with larger eyes were more common.

When we looked at data on populations of eight economically important fish in 871 lakes across North America and Europe, we found that browning was associated with smaller populations of several species, including lake trout, lake whitefish, yellow perch, largemouth bass and smallmouth bass. Brook trout abundance was not affected by freshwater browning.

Browning was associated with larger populations of northern pike and walleye.

We believe that’s because walleye, for example, have a specialized retina that helps them see in browner waters with poorer visibility.
Similarly, pike have a well-developed lateral-line sensory system that allows them to sense vibration, movement and pressure changes in the water.

A change for anglers

People fishing in browner lakes may consider appealing to the senses of the fish that are likely to be in the water. For example, rather than using colorful or shiny lures to attract their visual attention, when fishing in darker water, consider using vibrating lures that a fish’s lateral line system can detect, or scented lures that trigger an olfactory response.

By examining what’s happening to the water and in it, both scientists and people who enjoy fishing can understand the changes we’re seeing and what they mean in practical terms.

Allison M. Roth received funding to conduct this work from the Groupe de recherche interuniversitaire en limnologie/the Interuniversity Research Group in Limnology (GRIL; https://doi.org/10.69777/341034), which is funded by the Fonds de recherche du Québec Nature et Technologie (FRQNT).

This contribution was made possible by a working group grant, led by A. M. R., from the Groupe de Recherche Interuniversitaire
en Limnologie/the Interuniversity Research Group in Limnology (GRIL; https://doi.org/10.69777/341034), which is funded by the Fonds de recherche du Québec Nature et Technologie (FRQNT).

– ref. Your local fishing hole is getting browner, changing which fish species thrive and which ones struggle – https://theconversation.com/your-local-fishing-hole-is-getting-browner-changing-which-fish-species-thrive-and-which-ones-struggle-279259

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) – By David Hekman, Associate Professor of Organizational Leadership, University of Colorado Boulder

When Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour became the highest-grossing concert tour of all time in 2024, hauling in more than US$2 billion, it was hailed as a breakthrough for women in music.

But Swift’s success, it turns out, didn’t translate into broader gains for female artists. A closer look at the list of top-earning tours shows a clear pattern: Among the top 27 highest-grossing tours ever, there are no all-women ensembles, while 14 are all-male.

The same discrepancy appears in album sales: No all-women groups crack the top 100 bestselling artists of all time, while 41 all-men groups do.

Does Swift’s success stem from her status as a solo artist? As scholars of management who have researched organizational behavior and workplace bias, we argue that it did. And it points to a broader conclusion: Women working in same-gender groups face a “collaboration penalty” that solo women escape. Our work found that this pattern holds across venture capital, professional sports, health care and entertainment.

Why? Our research suggests it’s because all-women groups are seen as more threatening, as they’re more likely to challenge power structures through collective action. Notably, this perception was shared by male and female study participants alike – that is, women applied this bias to all-female groups just as men did.

The venture capital disappearing act

The starkest evidence appears in startup funding.

Despite years of diversity initiatives, all-women founding teams receive just 2.4% of venture capital dollars – a figure that has barely budged in three decades.

What explains this dramatic gap? We designed an experiment in which participants evaluated venture capital pitches that were identical in substance but varied by gender and solo vs. team status. The study’s participants described all-women investor groups as much more likely to engage in “social competition” – that is, challenging existing power structures through collective action. All-men groups faced no such perception, even when making identical investment decisions prioritizing diversity.

This prejudgment mattered. Those perceived as “socially competitive” were judged as less deserving of funding and resources, our research found. The penalty wasn’t about competence or performance, because the pitches were the same. It was about how group composition triggers assumptions about motivation. All-women teams were seen as pushing an agenda; all-men teams were just doing business.

Why women on teams pay a penalty

The music industry tells the same story.

Solo women can reach the pinnacle. Taylor Swift, Beyoncé, Madonna and Pink all rank among the world’s top musical earners. But their success makes the absence of all-women groups even more glaring. If individual women can succeed at the highest levels, why can’t groups of women working together?

Our research on professional sports provides an insight. We analyzed prize money from 1,145 major international competitions across 44 sports from 2014-2021. Solo men and solo women earned similar amounts. But in team sports, a massive gap emerged: All-women teams earned less than half of their male counterparts.

This wasn’t about performance. The all-women teams in our dataset had won their competitions – they were literally champions. The gap also wasn’t about popularity or revenue generation, as we controlled for sport type and governing body. Something about the group composition itself triggered lower compensation.

To test this mechanism, we conducted another experiment. Study participants viewed identical athlete profiles, varying only by gender and whether the athlete competed solo or in a same-gender group. Once again, all-women groups were perceived as more socially competitive than all-men groups, and this perception predicted lower expected compensation – even when performance statistics were identical.

As a consequence, women team athletes pay an expensive penalty. For example, no women at all appear in Forbes’ top 50 highest-paid athletes in 2025. Notably, the highest-paid female athlete, tennis player Coco Gauff, plays an individual sport – but even her $33 million of earnings in 2025 would rank around 150th if compared with men. And only one of the top 15 highest-paid female athletes plays a team sport: basketball star Caitlin Clark, who earned just $119,000 in WNBA salary her rookie year, compared to $16 million in individual endorsements. Even Clark’s success comes from being valued as an individual brand, not for her team play.

It’s not just elite athletes

These patterns don’t apply just to high-profile industries. We found the same effect in a conventional workplace: a large health maintenance organization in the northwestern United States.

We analyzed salary data for 682 medical providers across 18 clinic locations. Among solo practitioners, men and women earned similar salaries. But providers working in same-gender groups showed dramatic pay gaps. Men in all-men groups earned the most ($111,004 on average), while women in all-women groups earned the least ($52,497) – less than half. This held even after controlling for age, experience, credentials, specialty, patient satisfaction scores and clinic location.

These weren’t cherry-picked cases but licensed medical professionals with quantifiable performance metrics, working for an organization with formal human resources policies and pay scales. Yet the gender composition of their immediate work group somehow predicted a $58,000 annual salary difference – despite women’s higher average patient satisfaction scores.

Perhaps the most striking illustration comes from professional sports cheerleading. NFL cheerleaders earn approximately $150-$500 for performing at the Super Bowl, while the minimum NFL player salary is $885,000.

Even players on the losing Super Bowl team who never leave the bench earn $103,000 each – roughly 687 times what cheerleaders make for performing the entire game. Both groups face high injury risk. Both perform at the same event. The difference? One is an all-men team, the other an all-women team.

What can be done?

To counter this deeply entrenched bias, organizations could look at their compensation data not just to detect individual gender gaps but to see whether all-women teams systematically receive smaller bonuses and raises than all-men teams. Likewise, investors and funders could examine whether a team’s gender composition influences the evaluation of proposals, separate from actual team qualifications and business potential. Manager training could also explicitly call out this misconception as inaccurate, unconscious and costly.

Most importantly, it should be understood that employees rarely control their team’s gender composition. Women are being economically penalized for something shaped by organizational demographics, project needs and scheduling – factors entirely outside their control.

Women can succeed alone. Taylor Swift, Beyoncé and Coco Gauff prove that. But until all-women groups receive the same legitimacy, funding and compensation as all-men groups, enormous talent and economic potential will be left on the table. As our research shows, the collaboration penalty isn’t just unfair – it’s economically irrational.

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

– ref. Why women in groups face a ‘collaboration penalty’ that solo female stars like Taylor Swift and Coco Gauff escape – https://theconversation.com/why-women-in-groups-face-a-collaboration-penalty-that-solo-female-stars-like-taylor-swift-and-coco-gauff-escape-280317

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) – By Laura Beers, Professor of History, American University

At some point in the next several months, I am hoping to receive a modest check as a member of the class covered in the class-action settlement Bartz v. Anthropic.

In 2025, the artificial intelligence company Anthropic, best known for creating the chatbot Claude, agreed to pay up to US$1.5 billion to thousands of authors after a judge ruled that the company had infringed upon their copyrights.

When I first learned about the settlement, I assumed that Anthropic was primarily interested in teaching Claude about the subject of my stolen work, former socialist activist, British Labour politician and feminist Ellen Wilkinson.

It did not initially occur to me that Claude might also be learning about how I, Laura Beers, political historian, craft my sentences and translate my voice to the page.

Yet there is increasing evidence that chatbots like Claude can be trained not only to regurgitate an author’s content, but also to mimic their voice. In March 2026, journalist Julia Angwin filed a class action suit against the owners of Grammarly, alleging that the company misappropriated her and other writers’ identities to build its “Expert Review” AI tool, which offers to give editorial feedback in the voices of various authors, living and dead.

That a machine might use my writing not only to learn about my subject matter, but also to analyze and ultimately mimic my authorial voice, points to a future that George Orwell envisioned with eerie prescience. In his 1949 dystopian novel “1984,” Orwell imagined “novel-writing machines” capable of mass-producing literature, employing programmed mechanical “kaleidoscopes” as substitutes for individual artistic process.

‘In place of a human mind, a statistical average’

To what extent, I wondered, could Claude mimic my own voice?

I prompted the chatbot to write an essay “in the style of Laura Beers” about an early 20th-century politician. I struggled to recognize myself in the resulting prose. But maybe Claude, having only consumed one of my books, didn’t have enough to go on to really nail my tone.

I decided to try again. This time, I would ask it to write a brief essay in the style of Orwell. The subject of my book “Orwell’s Ghosts: Wisdom and Warnings for the Twenty-First Century,” Orwell is one of the most distinctive literary essayists and prose stylists of the 20th century.

Most of Orwell’s work is in the public domain, meaning it could have legally been used to train Claude.

I prompted Claude to write an essay “in the style of George Orwell about the threat to individual identity and freedom of thought posed by AI and particularly by the ability of ‘novel writing machines’ to produce literature.”

Primed with ample source material, the AI did a passable job:

“Here is a type of comfort, familiar to anyone who has ever been slowly dispossessed of something, that consists not in denying the loss but in not yet noticing it. The frog does not leap from the gradually heated water. The citizen does not protest the gradual narrowing of the permitted thought. And the reader, it seems, does not mourn the novel until the novel has already been replaced by something that resembles it in every outward particular – same chapters, same characters, same approximate sequence of feeling – yet contains, in place of a human mind, a statistical average of all the human minds that came before it.”

The final sentence about the statistical average rings false. But Orwell would, I suspect, have liked the image of the slowly boiling frog. “Here is a type of comfort” is also a phrase that Orwell might well have written.

I am skeptical that anyone would classify Claude’s efforts as indistinguishable from Orwell’s prose. But when it comes to machine-produced “literature,” perhaps it doesn’t really matter whether it can fully approximate original art, as long as it’s good enough to function as entertainment and distraction for the masses.

Jam, bootlaces and books

This was Orwell’s own dispirited suggestion in “1984.

With the help of “novel-writing machines,” the employees of the Ministry of Truth – the government department responsible for controlling information and rewriting history – are able to mass-produce not only novels, but also “newspapers, films, textbooks, telescreen programmes [and] plays.” They churn out “rubbishy newspapers containing almost nothing except sport, crime and astrology, sensational five-cent novelettes” and “films oozing with sex,” along with cheap pornography intended for the “proles,” as the uneducated working classes of Big Brother’s Oceania were known.

The technology disgusts Orwell’s protagonist, Winston Smith, who pointedly decides to purchase a diary and pen to write down his own independent thoughts. But to Julia, Winston’s nymphomaniac, anti-intellectual lover who works as a mechanic servicing the machines, “Books were just a commodity that had to be produced, like jam or bootlaces.”

‘Full-Length Novels in Seconds’

According to estimates, thousands of books for sale on Amazon have been written in whole or in part using AI.

In other words, today’s AI is also being used to mass-produce literature like jam or bootlaces.

Many of these works are not fully machine-written. Instead, they’ve been, as the AI writing tool Sudowrite advertises, “polished by AI.” With its “Rewrite” function, the company promises to give users an opportunity to “refine your prose while staying true to your style, with multiple AI-suggested revisions to choose from.” The service is akin to the “touching up” provided by the Ministry of Truth’s Rewrite Squad in “1984.”

Other books for sale on Amazon are, however, entirely machine-generated. The AI writing tool Squibler promises that if you give it an overarching prompt, it can produce “Full-Length Novels in Seconds.”

The potential of AI-generated “literature” to turn a quick-and-easy profit ensures that readers will continue to encounter more of this content in the future, especially as AI’s large language models become more refined. Already, studies have shown that readers cannot easily distinguish AI-generated forgeries from original prose.

Last year, I had lunch with a screenwriter friend in Los Angeles. He told me that his colleagues are particularly nervous about the use of AI to produce sequels. Once you have an established cast of characters for a movie franchise like, say, “Fast & Furious,” audiences will likely see the next installment whether it’s written by man or machine.

Yet my own brief experiments with Claude give me at least some hope for the future of literary art. A chatbot like Claude might be able to absorb and analyze “a statistical average of all the human minds that came before it,” but without the input of actual human experience and sensibility, it is hard to envisage them ever producing true art.

Whether AI can produce the next George Orwell novel or essay remains to be seen. That it can and will churn out an increasing volume of popular fiction and screenplays like “Fast & Furious 25” seems less in doubt.

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

– ref. Thousands of AI-written, edited or ‘polished’ books are being sold – an eerie echo of Orwell’s ‘novel-writing machines’ – https://theconversation.com/thousands-of-ai-written-edited-or-polished-books-are-being-sold-an-eerie-echo-of-orwells-novel-writing-machines-276008

Source: The Conversation – USA (3) – By Rajiv Chowdhury, Professor of Global Health, Florida International University

When people consider what causes high blood pressure, they often think of lifestyle factors, such as eating salty foods, lack of exercise or smoking. However, an unexpected source of salt might also be raising blood pressure for millions of people: the water they drink.

As sea levels rise, more and more salt water tends to infiltrate global freshwater sources. I’m a public health researcher, and this raised a question for my team: Could saltwater intrusion be increasing the risk of high blood pressure worldwide?

In our analysis of existing research, we found that people exposed to saltier drinking water tend to have significantly higher blood pressure and a greater risk of hypertension. This link, as expected, appears strongest in coastal areas where seawater is increasingly contaminating freshwater supplies.

Our findings highlight an often overlooked environmental factor in cardiovascular disease that could become more problematic as climate change accelerates.

Environmental health and hypertension

Hypertension – persistent elevated blood pressure – affects over a billion people worldwide and remains a leading cause of heart disease and stroke. However, global prevention efforts mainly focus on lifestyle – environmental factors generally receive much less attention.

One such factor is drinking water salinity, defined as the concentration of dissolved salts – primarily sodium – in water. In many coastal areas, groundwater is becoming saltier as rising sea levels push sea water into freshwater aquifers.

This is particularly problematic, since over 3 billion people live in coastal or near-coastal regions globally, many in low- and middle-income countries where groundwater is their main source for drinking water. In these coastal communities, people might inadvertently ingest large amounts of sodium just from drinking and cooking with saline water they cannot taste.

Water salinity is as risky as being sedentary

Researchers have long suspected that exposure to high salinity drinking water could affect people’s blood pressure and cardiovascular disease risk. However, previous research on this topic has often been limited by variable study designs, mixed results, inconsistent and imprecise methods to measure salinity, and small sample sizes. It’s also unclear whether this risk, if it exists, varies by population.

To address this uncertainty, my team and I conducted a systematic review and meta-analysis that pooled data from 27 population-based studies involving more than 74,000 participants in the U.S., Australia, Israel, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Kenya and several European countries. Combining data across studies can address some of the core limitations of individual studies by enabling detection of relevant effects. Synthesizing evidence across diverse populations, settings and study designs can also improve generalizability by providing a more comprehensive picture.

The studies we examined focused on the association between sodium levels in drinking water and cardiovascular outcomes, including blood pressure, hypertension and other heart-related conditions. When we compared the health outcomes of people exposed to higher levels of drinking water salinity with those exposed to lower levels, we found a consistent pattern.

Those drinking saltier water experienced about 3.22 mmHg higher systolic blood pressure and about 2.82 mmHg higher diastolic blood pressure, on average. Overall, exposure to high salinity water was linked to a 26% increased risk of developing hypertension. These associations were strongest among coastal populations.

While these are modest increases at the individual level, even small shifts in blood pressure among large populations can have significant public health effects. To put it in perspective, the risk that higher water salinity levels poses to hypertension is similar to that of other cardiovascular risk factors, such as low physical activity, which increases hypertension risk by approximately 15% to 25%.

Studying sodium levels

Our findings highlight the importance of considering environmental exposures alongside individual behaviors when addressing risk factors for high blood pressure.

Despite increasing evidence linking drinking water salinity to blood pressure, researchers still know relatively little about its effects on long-term cardiovascular diseases, such as heart attacks or strokes. My team and I identified very few studies examining these outcomes. Future research could explore how drinking saline water influences cardiovascular disease risk and what salinity levels are harmful to health.

Interestingly, current World Health Organization guidelines do not set any health-based standard for sodium levels in drinking water. This further highlights the need for stronger scientific evidence.

For most people, food remains their primary source of sodium. But when water salinity is elevated, drinking sources may add to a person’s total intake. Checking local water quality reports, if available, and focusing on overall dietary sodium could help people manage their blood pressure.

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

– ref. Salty drinking water could be increasing your blood pressure – people living in coastal areas are most at risk – https://theconversation.com/salty-drinking-water-could-be-increasing-your-blood-pressure-people-living-in-coastal-areas-are-most-at-risk-277820

Source: The Conversation – USA (3) – By Sujith Ramachandran, Associate Professor of Pharmacy Administration, University of Mississippi

If you watched the Super Bowl in 2026, you likely saw Serena Williams share her weight loss journey on GLP-1 medications in a commercial.

Like millions of others around the country, if you’ve ever considered taking one of these drugs, you probably went online to learn more about where you can get them and how much they cost.

Online searches for GLP-1 medications like Ozempic and Wegovy have risen dramatically since 2022. Advertisements like Williams’ Super Bowl commercial both reflect and help drive that growing demand.

More and more advertisements for weight loss medications are appearing in people’s daily lives. These ads can be appealing, intrusive, confusing or even misleading, and have sparked widespread concerns about inappropriate use and adverse events. But the high cost of GLP-1 medications, combined with the lack of adequate coverage by insurance plans, has helped fuel a booming online market for cheaper alternatives.

As health services researchers studying prescription medication safety, we are highly concerned about the risks of online advertisements selling alternative versions of GLP-1 weight loss medications.

Not all GLP-1 medications are the same

As of April 2026, the most popular GLP-1 medications approved by the Food and Drug Administration include semaglutide, sold under the brand names Wegovy, Ozempic and Rybelsus; tirzepatide, sold as Mounjaro or Zepbound; and orforglipron, sold as Foundayo.

These brand-name medications have undergone rigorous clinical trials and extensive FDA evaluation, including review of clinical data, manufacturing processes and facility inspections, to ensure safety, quality and effectiveness.

Many of the GLP-1 drugs advertised on the internet are not the FDA-approved medications but rather “compounded” GLP-1 products made in compounding pharmacies. They contain the same active ingredient – semaglutide, tirzepatide or orforglipron – but add minor but clinically important modifications such as using a different salt form, adding different inactive ingredients and varying drug concentrations or dosages. In addition, they may be often produced and stored under inconsistent quality standards.

Compounding pharmacies are intended to create personalized versions of FDA-approved medications to meet unique patient needs that cannot be met through the mass-produced brand-name medications. However, there is no evidence to suggest that the modifications being made to GLP-1 medications sold by compounding pharmacies meet those criteria. Instead, companies are using compounding pharmacies to bypass the FDA-approved manufacturers and generate profit.

In February 2026, the FDA released a report alerting patients and providers about the risks of compounded GLP-1 medications.

The report notes the presence of counterfeit Ozempic, the use of non-FDA-approved ingredients such as retatrutide or cagrilintide, and products bypassing regulations by being labeled as “not for human consumption.”

As of July 2024 – the most recently issued report – the FDA had received over 1,000 reports of adverse events related to compounded semaglutide and compounded tirzepatide. These include gastrointestinal effects like nausea, vomiting and abdominal pain, as well as fainting, headache, migraine, dehydration, acute pancreatitis and gallstones. These effects occur because drug concentrations in compounded medications can vary significantly, leading to serious dosing errors.

Steps to safely obtain GLP-1 medications online

First, if you or someone you know is considering GLP-1 medications for weight management, it’s important to know that leading medical organizations have specific recommendations for the use of these drugs. For instance, the American Diabetes Association only recommends the use of GLP-1 drugs for weight loss for those with a body mass index, or BMI, of at least 30, or among those with a BMI of 27 or greater if they have at least one other condition such as type 2 diabetes, hypertension or high cholesterol. People with a BMI below 27 need further clinical evaluation to determine if a GLP-1 medication is appropriate for them.

If you and your doctor determine that it is appropriate to seek GLP-1 medications for weight management, it is important to avoid compounded versions of GLP-1 drugs unless your health care provider specifically recommends them.

But identifying which GLP-1 medications are compounded can be challenging. It is important to carefully examine how the medication is labeled on the website.

Websites selling compounded versions of GLP-1 drugs are not allowed to use the FDA-approved brand names of products like Ozempic, Wegovy and Zepbound.

If a product description includes spelling errors or terms such as “compounded,” “generic version” or “same active ingredient as [brand name],” it often indicates that the product is a compounded formulation. When in doubt, try contacting the online retailer and ask if the product is a compounded drug.

If you decide to obtain GLP-1 medications online, it is important to choose reliable and transparent sources. The manufacturers of several FDA-approved GLP-1 medications provide official online platforms such as Novocare and LillyDirect.

These allow people to get medication information and transparent pricing and to get the drugs delivered to them at home or to pick them up at a pharmacy. When possible, using these official sources can reduce the risk of encountering misleading advertisements or unverified products.

Red flags

Online retailers that offer GLP-1 drugs without requiring a prescription or medical evaluation are illegal and unsafe. Advertising the ease of getting a prescription or only requiring an online form to obtain a prescription is a red flag. As a rule of thumb, patients should always begin their treatment by consulting with their local primary care provider who can evaluate their complete medical history.

It is also important to verify whether the pharmacy associated with the website is properly licensed and compliant with regulatory standards, since many online sellers rely on compounding pharmacies that are based outside the U.S. or are not appropriately licensed. Therefore, patients should check whether the pharmacy that will ship their medication has a physical address and a telephone number based in the U.S.

Patients should verify whether the pharmacy is registered on the official FDA database of approved compounded pharmacies and licensed as per the board of pharmacy of the state where the pharmacy is physically located.

Using pharmacies that are not registered or licensed is highly unsafe and can result in serious adverse effects. If the online retailer does not clearly disclose which pharmacy they are using, you should contact the retailer to confirm this information.

Finally, even after you receive your medications, you will need to carefully review the product and its label. This can help determine whether the medication being offered corresponds to an FDA-approved product or a compounded formulation. Products that arrive without proper packaging, labeling or an expiration date, or have a foreign language on the packaging, may be unsafe or unverified products.

Sujith Ramachandran receives funding from the National Community Pharmacy Association.

Liang-Yuan (Claire) Lin does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Ads for GLP-1 drugs are flooding the internet – here’s how to know if it’s safe to buy them online – https://theconversation.com/ads-for-glp-1-drugs-are-flooding-the-internet-heres-how-to-know-if-its-safe-to-buy-them-online-277369

Source: The Conversation – USA (3) – By Joëlle Rollo-Koster, Professor of Medieval History, University of Rhode Island

Alarm over the war of words between President Donald Trump and Pope Leo XIV has escalated with remarkable speed, from The New York Times to the Daily Beast and local television.

The pope has repeatedly called for peace in the Middle East since the start of the Iran war, insisting that “God does not bless any conflict” and warning against the “delusion of omnipotence.”

On April 12, in a lengthy social media post, Trump derided Leo as “WEAK on Crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy,” telling him to “focus on being a Great Pope, not a Politician.” His Truth Social account posted, then deleted, a Christ-like image of Trump appearing to heal a man.

At stake in this public feud is an old question: Can a religious leader challenge political power, especially a ruler of one of the most powerful countries in the world?

As a medieval historian and lead editor of “The Cambridge History of the Papacy,” I cannot help but see a familiar pattern.

For many people, Trump’s rant against the pope was shocking. But conflicts between popes and rulers are not an aberration; they’re a durable feature of Western history. Whenever political leaders cloak power in sacred language, or religious leaders publicly denounce political violence, they reenact debates that stretch back more than a millennium. These struggles are not symbolic: They concern who holds ultimate authority over people, souls – and in the end, history itself.

Two powers, intertwined

From its earliest centuries, Christianity was bound up with politics. Roman Emperor Constantine legalized the religion in 313. He later presided over the Council of Nicaea, an important theological assembly, blurring the line between political rule and spiritual authority.

In the fifth century, Pope Gelasius I articulated a rival vision: that the world was governed by two powers, priestly and royal. Ultimately, he argued, spiritual authority outweighed political power, because it promised eternal salvation. Gelasius’ theory did not resolve the tension between the two, but it established a lasting framework for Christian political thought.

The relationship between these two powers shifted decisively in the year 800, when Pope Leo III crowned Charlemagne, a Frankish king, emperor on Christmas Day. This act was not merely ceremonial. It implied that imperial authority in the West came from the church and that political legitimacy required papal sanction.

The coronation followed years of political instability in Rome and the papacy’s increasing reliance on the Franks for military protection. After Leo was elected pope in 795, opponents attacked him, and he found shelter at the court of Charlemagne. The king returned to Rome with Leo and asserted his legitimacy. In turn, Leo crowned Charlemagne. Doing so asserted his own role as a maker of emperors, while Charlemagne gained a sacred aura.

This moment reshaped medieval political theology. It encouraged rulers to see themselves as guardians of both political order and religious orthodoxy, while popes moved from spiritual counselors to active participants in secular governance. The result was a paradox: Kings invoked God to sanctify conquest, as Charlemagne did in his brutal wars against the Saxons. Meanwhile, churchmen claimed the authority to restrain violence, encouraged just wars and threatened violent behaviors with spiritual sanctions.

Battle over bishops

By the 11th century, however, the papacy increasingly sought to free itself from secular dominance. In particular, popes wanted to select the church’s bishops rather than allowing nobility or a king to do so.

That struggle exploded into the Investiture Controversy, one of the most consequential conflicts of the Middle Ages, and lay crucial groundwork for the Magna Carta, the first document to hold royalty subject to the law. Both events addressed the same fundamental question: Who has the right to grant authority, and what limits exist on political power?

At stake was not merely church administration but sovereignty itself. Bishops were major landholders and political figures; controlling their selection meant controlling wealth, loyalty and governance.

In the push to appoint bishops, popes were insisting that spiritual authority came from the church alone, challenging the idea that kings ruled by unchecked power. It was a decisive attempt to separate spiritual legitimacy from royal control and to place moral constraints on rulers who claimed divine authority.

The Investiture Controversy dragged on for several decades. Finally, in 1122, Pope Calixtus II and Emperor Henry V signed the Concordat of Worms. The agreement granted the pope the right to name bishops and to install their spiritual authority. The emperor, meanwhile, would “invest” them with their “temporalities”: that is, the worldly powers attached to their office, such as land, revenue, jurisdiction and coercion.

Reining in the king

A century later, the Magna Carta pursued a parallel objective.

Its immediate background lay in the conflict over the new archbishop of Canterbury, whom Pope Innocent III had appointed in 1207. King John opposed his choice, prompting Innocent to excommunicate the king and place England under interdict, meaning the English could not participate in church sacraments.

To appease tensions, John surrendered England to the pope in 1213, turning the kingdom into a papal fief. In return, he received Innocent’s approval for a war against France.

But the arrangement deeply angered English barons, who now found themselves subject not only to their king but also to papal authority. After England’s decisive defeat, John was forced to confront rebellious barons at home.

The result was the Magna Carta, the “Great Charter.” Forced on the king by armed resistance, the document asserted that the king himself was subject to law. It limited royal authority over taxation, justice and punishment, and it famously declared that no free person could be imprisoned or deprived of rights without lawful judgment.

John appealed to the pope, however, who annulled the charter shortly after its issue. Despite this setback, the Magna Carta survived: John’s son Henry III reissued it several times, with its definitive version implemented in 1225.

Taking the long view

Seen in this long perspective, the Trump–Leo confrontation appears less surprising. When a president invokes sacred language or imagery to justify violence, and a pope replies by denying divine sanction, they are reenacting a struggle as old as medieval Christendom: who may speak in God’s name, and who may set limits on power.

The medieval world did not resolve this tension, but it learned to live with it by fracturing authority: first between church and crown, later between rulers and law. What is unsettling today is how easily modern leaders still reach for religious language to evade restraint, and how fragile the institutions meant to check them can appear.

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

– ref. Trump’s clash with the pope reenacts a 1,000-year-old question: What happens when sacred and secular power collide? – https://theconversation.com/trumps-clash-with-the-pope-reenacts-a-1-000-year-old-question-what-happens-when-sacred-and-secular-power-collide-280548

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) – By Diana Hernández, Associate Professor of Sociomedical Sciences, Columbia University

Americans’ concerns about being able to afford electricity and home heating fuel are elevated since the beginning of the Iran war. But newly released nationwide data shows that even before the war began, these concerns were widespread, long-standing and getting worse faster than the data can reflect.

The new information is from preliminary reports based on the Residential Energy Consumption Survey, a representative survey of U.S. households conducted every four to five years by the U.S. Energy Information Administration. These early results show that energy insecurity, a hidden hardship defined as the inability to adequately meet household energy needs, affects millions of American households and is worsening quickly.

As a scholar who has spent years sitting in hundreds of homes around the country, hearing firsthand accounts about energy insecurity, I turn to this survey data to quantify the suffering I have witnessed up close.

The latest tranche of data was collected in 2024 and released in March 2026, but full results won’t be available for some time. The preceding survey was taken in 2020, but results weren’t finalized until August 2025.

Though that data is incomplete and slow to emerge, the picture is unambiguous: Even households once confident they could afford energy costs are at risk of falling behind on bills, making hard trade-offs to keep the lights on and living in homes they can’t afford to properly heat and cool.

A pandemic success story

The survey asks respondents whether, in the prior 12 months, they received a disconnection notice threatening to terminate their home’s electricity, gas or other fuel service because they hadn’t paid the bills. It also asks whether any of those services were in fact disconnected; whether they bought less food or skipped taking medication to be able to afford their energy bills; or whether they left their home at an unhealthy temperature because running or repairing the heating or cooling equipment would be too expensive.

The result is a portrait of a significant swath of the population that has a hard time affording housing and energy, and who adopt various coping strategies to get through.

A closer look at the data over time reveals that more Americans live with energy insecurity now than in years past. In 2024, 43.6 million American households – 32.9% of all homes – reported experiencing some form of energy insecurity. In 2015, that figure was 31.3%, and in 2020 it was 27.2%.

The lower rate in 2020 confirms that pandemic-era government policies, including cash relief payments and bans on utility shutoffs, were effective, though they were too short-lived to last through the 2024 survey data.

Recent surge hits new households

Middle-income households, those earning between $60,000 and $200,000 a year, were hit hardest by post-pandemic inflation of housing costs, food prices and interest rates on loans and mortgages. The new survey data shows that energy costs added to the squeeze.

In 2020, 20.1% of households earning between $60,000 and $100,000 reported experiencing problems affording their energy. In 2024, 32.1% of those households did – a 12 percentage point increase, more than double the overall national increase of 5.7 percentage points.

There were also racial differences. Historically, Black, Hispanic and American Indian households have been disproportionately likely to have trouble affording energy bills. And between 2020 and 2024, those households’ risk grew.

But white households’ risk climbed even more steeply: In 2020, 20.1% of white households reported trouble with energy costs. By 2024, 26.4% of them did.

Working-age adults and seniors are increasingly insecure

In 2024, higher proportions of householders under 60, and of householders with children, reported struggling to meet their home energy needs than in 2020. The similarities in these increases verify that younger, working-age households are more strained.

Yet working-age adults without children, particularly moderate-income renters, don’t have as much potential support as seniors when they fall behind on utility bills. That’s because energy assistance programs direct support toward those who have historically been the most vulnerable.

Seniors have historically been among the most protected, partly by the designs of government and corporate programs to assist with energy costs and partly because wealth usually peaks in later life. Even so, the share of older Americans experiencing energy insecurity climbed to 1 in 4 in 2024 from roughly 1 in 5 in 2020 – a sign that long-standing safeguards for older Americans are no longer making as much of a difference as they used to.

Housing in good repair is no longer enough protection

An efficient home has long been considered a solution to high energy bills. But the data shows that’s not enough anymore. People who live in well-insulated homes and those with double-pane windows saw their likelihood of energy insecurity rise by a similar amount as those who live in poorly insulated homes.

People in uninsulated homes still have the highest risk of being unable to afford their energy costs, though their risk grew more slowly than those in homes with better insulation.

And people with single-pane windows, already in a tenuous position, saw their risk of being unable to afford their energy costs rise by 7 percentage points.

Where need is greatest, help is least available

Geographically, the steepest increases in energy insecurity were found in warm-weather regions. The Southwest experienced the largest increase of any climate category – 10 percentage points – followed by the Southeast and Gulf Coast, which rose from 30.1% to 35.6%.

Though rising temperatures are increasing the need for cooling in warm-weather climates, most attention and government assistance for energy costs continue to be concentrated on the need for home heating in cold-weather states.

But even in the Northeast, where federal assistance with energy costs helps large proportions of the population, higher percentages of households had trouble affording energy costs.

A problem that has outgrown its framing

The severity of energy insecurity remains highest among the most disadvantaged Americans, which includes low-income people, renters and Black, Hispanic and American Indian households.

But the trend lines show that energy insecurity is now spreading into middle-income, white, working-age families in efficient homes in warm-weather climates – families that previously had relatively little trouble meeting their household energy needs.

The 2024 RECS data indicates that the safety net designed to address energy affordability is insufficient and does not match the regions or populations where energy insecurity is actually growing.

The Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program, which provides money to help families pay their utility bills, was created in response to the oil crisis of the 1970s. It was built to prioritize home heating assistance – not cooling – and help for people in immediate danger of having life-preserving utilities shut off. Little has changed in its focus or funding level since its inception.

Meanwhile, the economics of household energy costs have shifted dramatically and are quickly evolving.

New wars are sustaining old energy regimes, driving price volatility through the same fossil-fuel supply chains the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program was designed to buffer against half a century ago. On the domestic front, meanwhile, data centers are increasing residential electricity rates. Clean energy developments that might have shielded households from price shocks have been politicized and curtailed, harming both affordability and public health.

The 2024 data – high-quality and reliable as it is – is already behind in an escalating energy affordability crisis. Many more Americans are having trouble keeping the lights, heating and cooling on in recent years, and it’s a trend that may already be worse than what the most recent data shows.

Some of Diana Hernández’ funding at Columbia University includes a service agreement with a regulated utility company in New York that supports compliance with state laws regarding disadvantaged communities and community-centered capital planning efforts.

– ref. New federal figures reveal 1 in 3 US households struggle to pay energy bills, but the reality is likely even worse – https://theconversation.com/new-federal-figures-reveal-1-in-3-us-households-struggle-to-pay-energy-bills-but-the-reality-is-likely-even-worse-279627

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) – By James R. Elliott, Professor of Sociology, Rice University

Ten years ago, the infamous Tax Day storm swamped the Houston area with off-the-charts rainfall. Nearly 2 feet of rain fell in less than 15 hours in parts of the region, starting on April 17, 2016. The rain flooded thousands of homes and exceeded a 10,000-year event at some gauges.

But the storm’s damage could have been much worse.

The brunt of the deluge hit Waller County, west of Houston, where the impact was largely on farms and ranches. Had the same volume of water fallen just a few miles to the east, over Houston’s dense urban core, the tragedy would have been far worse.

What made the Tax Day flood so devastating was its speed. It was a flash event that struck overnight, without warning.

At Rice University’s Center for Coastal Futures and Adaptive Resilience, we used state-of-the-art hydrological modeling to see what would happen if a similar storm struck more populated parts of the city today.

The results suggest that current flood planning strategies in Houston – and similar strategies used in communities across the U.S. – are dangerously narrow in how they consider what’s at risk. In today’s world of increasingly extreme downpours, preparing for flood disasters means preparing for more than just what’s probable – it means also preparing for extreme situations that are less likely but could be far more dangerous.

The perils of relying on probability

In the United States, flood risk is publicly defined by maps produced by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. These maps, suggesting which properties face flood risks, guide everything from emergency planning to decisions related to the National Flood Insurance Program.

However, FEMA’s risk maps are based on probabilistic modeling that typically stops at the 500-year flood risk level, meaning a property has 0.2% odds – a 1 in 500 chance – of being flooded in any given year. There is a mathematical reason for doing this: There are simply too few cases to reliably estimate probabilities below that threshold.

Consequently, “off the charts” events like the Tax Day flood are effectively ignored in official planning. Authorities often prefer to view them as unrealistic until more data is collected – a process that can take decades. Yet, parts of Houston suffered another 1,000-year event the following year when remnants of Hurricane Harvey stalled over the city in 2017, and Houston has seen other 500-year floods in recent years.

The Dutch, who are global leaders in flood science by necessity, since more than half their country is at risk of flooding, use a different approach. They take what they consider “worst credible floods” seriously. These are events that extend beyond standard probability models but are still considered by experts to be realistic, or credible, possibilities.

If the Tax Day storm hit today

To get a clearer picture of the Houston area’s credible risks, we simulated the impact of the Tax Day flood from rainfall alone if the storm had centered over two different watersheds in Houston’s Harris County.

The suburban risk: Clear Creek runs through a middle-class suburban area near NASA’s Johnson Space Center. Vast stretches of suburban concrete block its natural drainage, and thousands of homes have been built along its winding, sluggish tributaries.

Even moderate rainfall can quickly transform these waterways into destructive torrents that overflow into nearby townships, including Friendswood and League City.

Our simulations show that if the Tax Day storm had centered over the Clear Creek area, more than 13,500 properties with homes would have quickly flooded with at least 6 inches of water. Above 6 inches is the danger zone where roads become unsafe for most passenger vehicles. In a home, when drywall gets wet it begins to wick water upward, requiring tear-outs. Even in elevated homes, that much water can damage equipment and contaminate water systems. In some areas, our simulations indicate the water depths would have exceeded 3 feet within hours.

The financial “what if” is even more staggering. Our analysis of publicly available data indicates that 92% of homes in Clear Creek’s flood zone likely have no flood insurance, and 52% fall outside the 100-year flood plain in FEMA’s latest proposed maps. Even with FEMA’s latest map updates, most mortgage holders would not be required to carry flood insurance on homes in the area that would have flooded.

The equity gap: When we moved the storm over Hunting Bayou, a working-class area in inner Houston populated largely by residents of color, the results were even more severe. Here, flooding represents the legacy risk of midcentury urbanism, where a naturally shallow, sluggish stream was penned in by industrial warehouses and tightly packed residential streets long before modern drainage standards existed, restricting the waterway’s ability to expand and meander gracefully.

Because much of the area has flat, poorly draining soils, this watershed has become a bottleneck that can rapidly overflow during heavy rains. We found the Tax Day storm would have flooded more than half of all residential lots there with at least 6 inches of water, compared to 16% of residential lots in the Clear Creek area. And flood insurance in the Hunting Bayou area is nearly nonexistent.

Both simulations, viewable through our interactive online tool at the Center for Coastal Resilience and Adaptive Futures, reveal a sobering reality: Devastation that local, state and federal government planning dismisses as improbable is, in fact, entirely possible.

When FEMA or state planners prioritize probabilistic mapping over “worst-case” modeling like we conducted, they treat historic deluges like the Tax Day flood as improbable anomalies rather than predictable consequences of a changing climate and rapid urban expansion. Moreover, unlike hurricanes, which typically arrive with several days’ notice, the sudden destructive force of “normal” storm systems like the Tax Day storm is discounted.

Learning from ‘worst cases’

The levels of destruction we simulated could easily occur in the coming years as global temperatures rise and storm intensity increases.

To prepare, U.S. emergency planners and flood authorities can look to three lessons from the Dutch planners’ possibilistic playbook.

Embrace flexible planning: Overly detailed plans can create a false sense of control and end up paying less attention to neighborhoods considered to be outside the flood plain. Simple and flexible plans that empower local officials to repurpose everyday assets in real time work best. That might include preemptively mobilizing high-water rescue vehicles into geographically vulnerable areas.

Map potential disruption, not just probability: Extending flood planning beyond who is in or out of the 100-year flood zone can also help identify where road networks and critical infrastructure are likely to fail during extreme events. This approach also helps identify infrastructure such as public parks that can double as temporary water retention basins.

Raise public risk perception: Residents can respond more effectively when local flood authorities share plans for “what if” scenarios with the public, along with guidance on how best to prepare.

The 10th anniversary of the Tax Day flood is a reminder of why it’s crucial to stop ignoring improbable events and start scientifically leveraging the possible to make all cities safer in an age of worsening climate change.

Dominic Boyer receives funding from the National Science Foundation and the John S. Guggenheim Foundation.

James R. Elliott and Yilei Yu do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. What if Texas’ destructive Tax Day flood had centered on inner Houston instead? It’s why cities should plan for the improbable – https://theconversation.com/what-if-texas-destructive-tax-day-flood-had-centered-on-inner-houston-instead-its-why-cities-should-plan-for-the-improbable-279964