Category: The Conversation – USA

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) – By John Haddad, Professor of American Studies, Penn State

Walk into any grocery store to stock up for Halloween and you will discover that, for chocolate treats, you have two basic choices:

Will it be Mars or Hershey?

I often buy both, but that is beside the point. The point is that the two giants compete for market share, but both enjoy robust sales. In other words, a relatively stable duopoly defines the U.S. chocolate candy market.

But it wasn’t always like this.

Before the 1960s, the Hershey Chocolate Corp. reigned supreme as the undisputed chocolate king. It was in that decade that Mars went for Hershey’s jugular. Hershey Chocolate’s response brought lasting change – to its candy business, the local community and Hershey Park, its chocolate-themed amusement park.

As a professor of American studies at Penn State Harrisburg who has recently published a book on Hershey Park, I am astounded by how these changes continue to reverberate today.

Milton Hershey’s paternalistic capitalism

Before the 1960s, change was not a word one associated with either the town of Hershey, Pennsylvania, or its famous chocolate company. Better words would be “stability” and “productivity” – and this was by the founder’s design.

When Milton Hershey entered the confection industry in the 1880s, violent clashes between corporations and labor roiled American society. Hershey imagined a better way: paternalistic capitalism.

In the early 1900s, he built a chocolate factory and planned community out in the farms and pastures of central Pennsylvania. Instead of offering men and women wage-earning jobs and nothing else, he took care of his workers. They owned nice homes and benefited from a generous array of free or subsidized services and amenities: snow removal, garbage collection, trolley lines, good schools, a junior college, zoo, museum, sports arena, library, community center and theater.

They even had their own amusement park.

But this was a reciprocal relationship. In return, employees were expected to work hard, exhibit loyalty, practice clean living and refrain from labor agitation. With the exception of a strike during the Great Depression, the company and town lived in harmony. Milton Hershey called the place an “industrial utopia,” and residents largely agreed.

“Moving to Hershey,” one recalled, “was like moving to paradise.”

Harmony also defined Hershey’s relations with Mars. At the time, Hershey produced only solid chocolate – think of Hershey bars and Kisses. In contrast, Frank Mars’ company specialized in chocolate-covered snacks, suches Snickers or Milky Way, in which milk chocolate is poured over nuts, caramel or nougat.

Where did that chocolate coating come from?

Hershey, of course.

In those days, Mars was a client, not a rival. Without competition, Hershey enjoyed the luxury of not having to worry about market share. Amazingly, the company did not advertise under Milton Hershey and continued this policy after his death in 1945.

Hershey in crisis

Everything changed in 1964. The catalyst for change was Forrest Mars, the founder’s hard-charging son who was a true disrupter.

After seizing control of his father’s company, Forrest Mars set his sights on dethroning Hershey. As reporter and author Joël Glenn Brenner explains, the younger Mars boldly terminated the partnership with Hershey while ordering his engineers to learn how to make Hershey-caliber chocolate in six months. He also modernized the factory and ordered a surge in advertising, all to wrestle market share away from Hershey, the “sleeping giant.”

The strategy worked. By the decade’s end, Mars had caught Hershey in terms of market share and pushed the chocolate colossus into crisis.

The good news for Hershey was that it had at the helm two forward-looking leaders, Harold Mohler and Bill Dearden. Though standard practice had always been to hire locally and from within, Mohler and Dearden recruited outsiders with MBAs from Harvard and Wharton to initiate sweeping reforms aimed at modernizing its archaic business practices.

The company opened a public relations office, conducted market research, installed IBM mainframe computers to crunch numbers, retrained its sales force and created a marketing department. Many employees, a new executive joked, were so behind the times that they had thought marketing was “what their wives did … with a shopping cart.”

This effort culminated with the release of the company’s first TV commercials starting in 1969. The sleeping giant had awoken.

The company’s next move altered the town forever. As a cost-cutting measure, it terminated the free services and amenities at the core of Milton Hershey’s vision. The era of paternalism was over.

As the company liquidated assets, residents howled in protest.

“It was a very traumatic time for the community,” one executive recalled.

For residents, the only consolation was that at least the amusement park would stay the same.

Or would it?

By the late 1960s, Hershey Park had degenerated into what one executive called “an iron park with a bunch of clanging rides.” Leadership faced a pivotal decision: renovate the park or close it forever.

The park had such a “rich heritage,” one executive recalled, that to shutter it would “put a stamp of negative feeling within the community.”

The company elected to renovate.

Hersheypark’s transformation

But how to renovate was another matter.

In the 1960s and 1970s, owners of traditional amusement parks had to think twice before investing in their properties. That was because Disneyland, the nation’s first theme park, had caused a sensation when it debuted in 1955. Its incredible popularity, and the opening of the more spectacular Disney World in 1971, placed pressure on old-fashioned amusement parks everywhere.

After commissioning a feasibility study, Hershey officials decided to gamble: Instead of fixing up the old amusement park, they would convert it into a Disney-style theme park. To pay for the massive overhaul, they redirected capital earned from the dismantling of Milton Hershey’s paternalism. Reborn as “Hersheypark” in 1973, the ever-growing complex has become a mecca for chocolate lovers and thrill-ride seekers from across the Northeast.

Every year, Halloween reminds me of this remarkable transformation. The stores become stocked with Hershey brands, and the theme park comes alive with its spooky “Dark Nights” entertainment.

In the past, workers at the Hershey plant would joke that they had “chocolate syrup in their veins.” These days, they clearly have innovation too, and that creative spirit is largely due to Forrest Mars. By giving Hershey the jolt it needed, he shook up the status quo and changed the chocolate company, town and park forever.

Read more of our stories about Philadelphia and Pennsylvania.

John Haddad 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. How Hershey’s chocolate survived an attack from Mars − and adopted a business strategy alien to its founder – https://theconversation.com/how-hersheys-chocolate-survived-an-attack-from-mars-and-adopted-a-business-strategy-alien-to-its-founder-267722

Source: The Conversation – USA (3) – By Greta Massetti, Professor of Population Health Sciences, Georgia State University

Much has been written about the unprecedented impact that the second Trump administration has had on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, from massive job cuts and entire programs being wiped out to leadership shake-ups and the undermining of science. But behind every headline, countless stories have gone untold about the real-world impacts that these changes will have on everyday people.

I’m a public health expert who spent 18 years as a scientist at the CDC. I see the systematic dismantling of the agency as a significant risk to the country’s ability to keep Americans safe and give medical professionals the data needed to keep them that way.

Most of my time at the CDC was spent in the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, one of the hardest hit of the agency’s programs. The center has lost more than half of its staff through layoffs alone and as many as two-thirds when other reductions are accounted for.

Injuries affect people of all ages

More Americans die from injuries and violence in the first half of life than from any other cause, including cancer, HIV or the flu. These include suicide, overdose, homicide and unintentional injuries.

The mass layoffs that the Trump administration has carried out in 2025 struck at the core of the injury center’s programs on violence prevention and eliminated the work being done to prevent unintentional injuries like drowning, traumatic brain injuries, falls in older adults and motor vehicle crashes.

As of late October, only the CDC programs focused on overdose prevention, suicide and the National Violent Deaths Reporting System remain in the injury center.

Unintentional injuries cost the U.S. $4.5 trillion annually and directly affect workforce and community stability. This includes $323 billion in medical care as well as costs from lost work productivity.

Every unintentional injury represents a preventable tragedy — a fall, a crash, a drowning — that alters the course of a life. Like me, many Americans are eager for information about keeping their loved ones safe.

Making youth sports safer

One critical injury center program that was cut from CDC in April is its HEADS UP program, which is aimed at preventing and reducing head trauma. The program includes online courses for youth coaches, health care providers, schools, athletic trainers and others that provide information about how to protect kids from concussions and other serious brain injuries.

Traumatic brain injury affects more than 230,000 people in the U.S. A traumatic brain injury is a disruption in the normal function of the brain that can be caused by a bump, blow or jolt to the head, or a penetrating head injury.

People of all ages are at risk of experiencing a traumatic brain injury. For young people, concussions from contact sports account for 45% of all emergency department visits for a traumatic brain injury each year.

HEADS UP specifically aims to create education and awareness around youth traumatic brain injuries. Currently, 45 states recommend or require HEADS UP materials or training to be used by sports programs and schools in their concussion prevention laws.

The elimination of the CDC’s injury prevention team will undoubtedly result in a loss of progress in preventing these avoidable injuries. It will also leave gaps in states whose coaches are unable to fulfill their training requirements.

Preventing drownings

Drowning is the No. 1 cause of death for children ages 1 to 4, and fatal and nonfatal drownings cost the U.S. $56 billion each year. Drowning deaths have been increasing steadily among young children since 2019.

When CDC’s drowning prevention team was eliminated, the injury center was the only federal public health department focused on preventing drowning.

It did so on a shoestring: With only $2 million annually appropriated by Congress, the team stretched every penny to maximize its impact on public health by strengthening data systems and supporting communities in getting access to lifesaving swimming and water safety skills.

Every drowning death of a young child is a preventable, costly tragedy.

The critical work of the CDC’s drowning prevention team brought critical lifesaving work to communities across America by providing water safety skills and training to more than 22,000 children in 2024 alone. At a cost of just $110 per child, teaching a child to swim reduces their risk of drowning by up to 88%.

Keeping older adults safe from falls

Injuries also affect older adults in significant ways.

Falls are the leading cause of injury and death among adults age 65 and over, and 1 of 4 older adults falls each year. Falls result in hospitalizations, hip fractures and traumatic brain injuries, which can be debilitating and deadly for older adults.

A CDC program known as STEADI – short for Stopping Early Accidents, Deaths and Injuries – provides educational materials to make preventing falls a routine part of clinical care that doctors provide. Staff cuts resulted in the elimination of STEADI.

In the U.S. $2 out of every $3 of the $80 billion spent in medical costs on falls are paid by Medicare, representing 9% of the total Medicare spending on older adults.

Strategies aimed at reducing falls in older adults are key to lowering Medicare spending, showing how the critical work of the CDC is essential to reducing health care costs to individuals and taxpayers.

Safer roads for drivers and pedestrians

In the U.S., motor vehicle crashes are a leading cause of death, killing more than 100 people every day and over 40,000 people each year. In 2023, deaths from road crashes resulted in an estimated $457 billion in medical costs and expenses.

Experts at CDC’s injury center developed tools for helping to better track and monitor motor vehicle crash injuries. This work made it possible for states to look at trends in transportation-related injuries within hours instead of waiting for the previous two- to three-year lag in data.

Before this program was eliminated by the Trump administration, CDC’s experts created resources for parents of teen drivers like me to keep their teens safe on the road. They also shared information to improve the safety of child passengers and older adult drivers.

Turning complex data into usable information

When health care providers and others face questions about keeping children and adults safe, they have long turned to the CDC to translate complex information into practical, actionable advice.

For instance, CDC’s clinical guidance helped improve diagnosis of mild traumatic brain injuries in children and teens and has guided doctors in emergency rooms and clinics to provide consistent, high-quality care to their patients. CDC experts also provided data on emergency department visits due to drowning injuries and practical resources for doctors and pharmacists to identify patients at risk of falls.

As a public health expert, I see the deep cuts to CDC’s injury prevention programs as serious threats to public health broadly. As a mother, sister, daughter and neighbor, I worry that my loved ones and their doctors will not have the information and resources they need to stay healthy and injury-free.

Greta Massetti 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. CDC’s ability to prevent injuries like drowning, traumatic brain injury and falls is severely compromised by Trump cuts – https://theconversation.com/cdcs-ability-to-prevent-injuries-like-drowning-traumatic-brain-injury-and-falls-is-severely-compromised-by-trump-cuts-267531

Source: The Conversation – USA (3) – By Joanna Gilmore, Adjunct Professor in Museum Studies and Bioarchaeology, College of Charleston

In the course of construction work in 2013, the remains of 36 individuals of African descent were uncovered in the heart of downtown Charleston, South Carolina. They had lain hidden for some 200 years in an unmarked 18th-century burial ground.

For more than two centuries, such burial grounds, especially those in the former American slave states, have often been erased or obscured – paved over by parking lots, built upon by highways or private development, or simply left unknown and untended. In recent years, descendant communities in places such as Bethesda, Maryland, Richmond, Virginia, St. Petersburg, Florida, and Sugarland, Texas, have called for greater recognition and respect for these long-neglected sites.

As a public archaeologist and educator who has spent over a decade working in Charleston, South Carolina, I co-direct the Anson Street African Burial Ground project – the community-led effort to honor and respectfully lay to rest the 36 African ancestors whose remains were uncovered in 2013.

This Charleston project reflects a growing recognition of African American burial grounds as important historical memory sites and unique sources of genealogical information. Yet there is still limited public understanding about how engaging with these places of sacred rest can promote collective healing, reconciliation and cross-cultural understanding.

Cemeteries obscured by history

Since the British colonial period, racist laws and customs across America prevented enslaved and free people of African descent from using white burial grounds to bury their dead. On plantations, enslavers controlled where and how the enslaved were buried and whether burials could be marked or visited. In cities from Charleston to New York, segregated burial grounds, many now forgotten, were established by local authorities for indigent Black and white people.

Pushed to the margins, people of African descent maintained burial traditions and used impermanent or specific grave markers such as shells, bottles, clocks or ceramics – items that were culturally meaningful but often invisible or unimportant to white observers. As a result, many of these sites were neither recorded in historical documents nor officially recognized as burial grounds.

From the 1770s, African American churches, benevolent societies and funeral homes sought to establish cemeteries where Black communities could honor the dead with dignity. What began regionally – especially in Charleston and Philadelphia – quickly spread nationally during the 19th century across the American South and North.

In the decades after Reconstruction, and especially during the Jim Crow era, nearly 6 million African Americans moved north and west to escape racial violence and seek better opportunities – an event known as the Great Migration. This movement often severed ties between families and ancestral burial grounds in the South. As churches and burial societies lost members, many cemeteries fell into disrepair and were officially labeled “abandoned” by local authorities or developers.

In both rural and urban areas, Black burial grounds were often located on less valuable lands, sites that today are increasingly threatened by gentrification, development and the effects of climate change.

The Gullah Geechee, who descend from enslaved Africans from West Africa and still preserve unique cultural traditions in the southeastern U.S., argue these burial sites were never abandoned and that ancestors are still present. This perspective views the dead as actively connected to the living. For them, lacking formally designated cemetery space doesn’t make the sites any less sacred.

A tradition of sacred spaces

For many African Americans, especially in the South, death during slavery was seen as not merely an ending but a spiritual return — a “homegoing.”

Rooted in West African spiritual worldviews and carried through other traditions in America, the act of burial was often viewed as a release from bondage, a return to the ancestors and a step toward wholeness.

The Gullah Geechee traditions of coastal South Carolina emphasize ancestral presence, spiritual continuity and the sanctity of the land. In that worldview, with a porous boundary between the living and the dead, proper burial and remembrance are not only cultural imperatives but necessary for community well-being.

It was not until the early 1990s that recognition of rights over ancestral remains and sacred burial grounds began to find a wider audience.

Inspired by the 1990 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act that recognized Indigenous rights over ancestral remains, African American communities increasingly asserted their own rights to ethical research, respectful handling and meaningful memorialization, especially during the 1991 New York African Burial Ground project, which reshaped public memory and archaeological ethics.

Discovered during construction in lower Manhattan, the 18th-century burial ground contained the remains of more than 400 enslaved and free Africans. Community advocacy led to the site’s protection, descendant-led research, ceremonial reburial and the establishment of a national memorial in 2006.

Since this time, across the U.S. and the Atlantic world, descendant-led ceremonies from Portsmouth, New Hampshire, to Key West, Florida, have restored dignity to ancestral remains.

Meanwhile, efforts to preserve African American burial grounds, including by national scholar organizations and federal lawmakers, continue amid political debates over how history should be remembered and taught.

What made the Anson Street project unique

In Charleston, the Anson Street African Burial Ground project stands out for the way Gullah Geechee traditions and descendant collaboration shaped every stage of the process — from scientific study to reinterment.

Launched as a community-led initiative in 2017, the team began by listening. Through regular gatherings, they invited questions about the ancestors’ lives and identities, and about their hopes for the reburial, centering Black community voices at every stage. The team combined scientific investigations of ancestry and health while also creating space for spiritual guidance, ceremony and descendant leadership. In doing so, the project became more than a study of the past; it became a communal act of repair and remembrance, reconnecting Charleston’s present communities with the ancestors whose stories had long been buried.

Over the next two years, the team wove this commitment into every aspect of its work: youth art programs, a college course on memorial design, public exhibitions, and school partnerships. One of the most moving moments came from conversations with schoolchildren, who decided that the ancestors should be given names before they were reburied.

That naming ceremony took place in April 2019. The names were conferred by Natalie Washington-Weik, a Yorùbá-Orisa Ọ̀ṣun priestess, a spiritual leader in a West African tradition and an African historian. She described the ritual as an “important step forward in reclaiming the humanity of the deceased people who were most likely forced to travel across the Atlantic Ocean under the terror of other humans – who saw them merely as animals.”

The ancestors were finally reinterred in a powerful public ceremony that reflected their ancestries and West-Central African spiritual traditions.

When pain is acknowledged, healing can occur

The 2019 naming and reinterment ceremonies were not simply commemorations; they were rituals of remembrance and healing.

Construction for a permanent memorial at the Anson Street site, designed by artist Stephen L. Hayes Jr., has now begun. At its center is a basin fabricated with sacred soil collected from 36 African-descended burial grounds across the Charleston region. From the basin, 36 bronze hands will rise – cast from living community members whose profiles reflect those of the ancestors. Raised in gestures of prayer, resistance and reverence, these hands link past to present.

Throughout the memorialization process, community members reflected on what it meant to participate in such a project. Many spoke of feeling pride, reverence, joy, sadness and peace. “This conversation makes me feel complete,” one participant said.

As Charleston demonstrates, these projects are not only about preserving the past – they are acts of recognition, respect and reconciliation, helping communities nationwide confront and honor the histories long denied to African-descended peoples.

Joanna Gilmore has received funding from the City of Charleston, the National Geographic Society, and the College of Charleston. She previously worked for the Gullah Society, Inc. a not-for-profit organization.

– ref. Rediscovery of African American burial grounds provides long-overdue opportunities for collective healing – https://theconversation.com/rediscovery-of-african-american-burial-grounds-provides-long-overdue-opportunities-for-collective-healing-260394

Source: The Conversation – USA (3) – By Ann M Murphy, Professor of Law, Gonzaga University

For months, a Washington state bill generated controversy over two critical interests: protecting children from abuse and protecting the freedom of religion.

Signed by the governor in May 2025, SB 5375 designated clergy as mandatory reporters, requiring them to report child sexual abuse, physical abuse and neglect – even if they learned of the abuse during a confidential sacred rite.

Some faiths, including the Catholic Church and Eastern Orthodox churches, prohibit clergy from revealing information learned through a confession or sacrament. In the Catholic Church, there are no exceptions – and the penalty for disclosure is excommunication.

In mid-October, however, Washington state announced it would not enforce the mandatory reporting requirement for information learned during confidential rites. On Oct. 14, 2025, a federal court approved the state’s agreements with groups of Catholic and Orthodox clergy who had sued to block that part of the law, arguing it violated their religious freedom. The U.S. Department of Justice had also intervened, claiming the law discriminates against Catholics.

Reporting laws can be complicated by what is known as “legal privilege”: the rights granted to certain people, such as spouses or lawyers of suspects, to keep confidentiality by refusing to cooperate with an investigation. As a law professor, I have written often about clergy privilege, as well as other legal privileges. The attorney-client privilege is the oldest, dating to the 16th century, but the “priest-penitent privilege” has a long history as well.

US landscape

It was not until the 1960s that U.S. states began using mandatory reporting laws to protect children from abuse. Some laws apply to any person who learns of abuse. Others specifically mention categories of people, such as nurses and teachers.

Today, a majority of states require religious personnel to report suspected child abuse to law enforcement. However, most have an exemption for clergy who learn about abuse during a rite or prayer.

Several states do not have such an exemption. However, the text of their laws do not specifically mention religious leaders, which may be why they did not provoke as much controversy as Washington’s bill. For example, North Carolina requires “any person” who suspects abuse to report it.

Before SB 5375, Washington excluded clergy entirely from mandatory reporting requirements that apply to many other professionals, such as medical professionals, therapists and school personnel.

Now, under the October agreements filed in court, clergy are included in the list of mandatory reporters, but they are not required to report anything they learn about during a confession or sacred rite. The Vatican also instructs bishops to report abuse by priests, deacons and prelates to civil authorities.

2 key issues

There are two issues at play in clergy reporting laws.

One is whether clergy must take the initiative to report abuse that they learn about through their professional duties.

The other is whether clergy members have an evidentiary privilege – that is, the right to refuse to testify in court, or to answer questions during investigations, in order to protect their parishioners’ privacy.

Although mandatory reporting and clergy privilege are separate issues, both may apply in particular cases.

In 2021, for example, three children sued officials in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints for its failure to report their father’s abuse to authorities. The children ultimately lost their negligence case against the church because, although Arizona had a mandatory reporting statute, it also has an exception for information learned through confession or other confidential communication.

Washington state recognizes a “priest-penitent privilege.” Therefore, a priest who hears about abuse during confession may refuse to divulge what he’s heard if called into a legal proceeding. Originally, however, Washington’s new law would have required clergy to make an initial report to law enforcement, breaking the “seal of confession” – but they could have refused to cooperate with the resulting investigation.

Now, under the stipulations, clergy do not need to make an initial report if they learn of abuse through a confidential rite such as confession. In contrast, other individuals who have a legal privilege under Washington state law – for example, a spousal privilege or a physician privilege – must still report in the event of child abuse.

History of privilege

Under English law, the origin of most early American law, the “minister’s privilege,” as it was called, was not recognized after the Protestant Reformation of the 16th century.

In the U.S., a clergy privilege was first recognized in 1813. In People v. Philips, a Catholic priest in New York was summoned to testify about the return of some stolen jewelry – which apparently he required a parishioner to do, after hearing about the theft during confession. The court reasoned that requiring the priest to testify about what the parishioner revealed would violate his religious liberty.

Four years later, in another New York case, People v. Smith, the court found that a minister did not have grounds for a privilege because, as a Protestant, he was not bound by the same “seal of confession” rules as Catholic priests. In 1828, the New York Legislature passed a statute broadening the privilege to include all ministers and priests.

The general theory of all testimonial privileges is that it protects confidential communications that society wishes to foster. Attorney-client privilege, for example, exists so that the client may receive the best advice. The benefit of a privilege – the right to legal representation or the right to the free exercise of religion – is considered more important than society’s quest for truth.

There is a legal maxim that “the public has a right to every man’s evidence.” Privileges are an exception to this rule and thus are narrowly applied by courts.

In the United States, 1 in 4 children experience child abuse or neglect. If society believes that information about child abuse, even if disclosed during a religious rite, is more important than shielding that information, then the clergy privilege should be eliminated or weakened in such cases.

Religious freedom is a core constitutional guarantee. The question is how society should balance these two important interests.

Ann M Murphy 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. Washington state settles controversy over child abuse law that tested the limits of ‘priest-penitent’ privilege – https://theconversation.com/washington-state-settles-controversy-over-child-abuse-law-that-tested-the-limits-of-priest-penitent-privilege-264002

Source: The Conversation – USA – By LaShawn Harris, Associate Professor of History, Michigan State University

When people with mental health problems are in crisis, police often are the first responders. Since many officers have little to no training on how to assess or treat mental illness, these situations can easily become violent.

In 2024, for example, 118 people were killed across the U.S. after police responded to reports of someone having a mental health episode. Such cases can lead to charges of police brutality.

This problem is not new. One of the first cases to receive wide attention and spur reform efforts happened 41 years ago, on Oct. 29, 1984. On that day, a white New York City police officer fatally shot 66-year-old Eleanor Bumpurs, a Black woman. Bumpurs, who lived in public housing and had a history of mental health problems, was killed during an eviction.

Bumpurs’ death ignited one of New York’s most significant social justice campaigns of the 1980s, centering on Black women’s encounters with police. It influenced decades of debate over police response to those with mental illness, which have continued right up to New York City’s current mayoral election.

Bumpurs lived across the street from my childhood home, and I was 10 years old when she was killed. In my new book, “Tell Her Story: Eleanor Bumpurs & the Police Killing That Galvanized New York City,” I explain how the police shooting of a grandmother roiled my neighborhood and sparked citywide action.

The eviction

On the day of the shooting, officers from the New York City Police Department’s Emergency Service Unit and the city housing agency gathered with a city marshal, public housing and welfare workers and medical technicians outside Bumpurs’ apartment. They were there to evict Bumpurs, who was four months behind on her rent and owed the city a little over US$400, equivalent to about $1,240 in today’s dollars. Housing Authority policy required police to accompany city marshals to all evictions.

As I recount in my book, this group believed Bumpurs was violent. Housing officers told the police that she was mentally ill and had a history of throwing lye on strangers.

While Bumpurs had a history of mental illness, she was also an elderly woman in need of medical care. As The New York Times editorial board later pointed out:

“… neither the city’s Housing Authority nor Human Resources Administration seemed able to help. Officials were unable to secure an emergency rent grant, for which she would have easily qualified. A consulting psychiatrist found her unable to function and recommended hospitalization, but no one moved fast enough.”

The officers were tasked with subduing Bumpurs. They had little information about her underlying condition or training to manage it.

Armed with gas masks, plastic shields, a restraining bar and a shotgun, six officers entered Bumpurs’ apartment. Police observed Bumpurs wielding a butcher knife in her right hand. Officer Stephen Sullivan fired two blasts with the shotgun. The first severely damaged Bumpurs’ right hand; the second struck her in the chest. Bumpurs died at a local hospital.

Public outrage

Bumpurs’ killing shocked New Yorkers. City leaders and community activists condemned what they saw as the NYPD’s use of excessive force against Black people and other people of color, particularly those with mental health conditions.

As then-city clerk and future mayor David Dinkins put it, “It is inconceivable to me that deadly force was employed here.” The New York Times called Bumpurs’ death “a grave error of police procedure and judgment.”

Bumpurs’ killing was discussed in Sunday morning sermons, university lecture halls, beauty salons and barbershops. Many New Yorkers denounced the shooting, although others praised Sullivan for protecting the lives of his fellow officers.

Artists took up Bumpurs’ cause. In her 1986 poem “For the Record: In Memory of Eleanor Bumpers,” Audre Lorde wrote:

 Who will count the big fleshy women
 the grandmother weighing 22 stone
 with the rusty braids
 and gap-toothed scowl
 who wasn’t afraid of Armageddon
 . . . . 
 and I am going to keep writing it down
 how they carried her body out of the house
 dress torn up around her waist
 uncovered
 past tenants and the neighborhood children
 a mountain of Black Woman
 and I am going to keep telling this
 if it kills me
 and it might in ways I am
 learning

In 1989, Brooklyn filmmaker Spike Lee dedicated his movie “Do the Right Thing” to Bumpurs and other Black New Yorkers killed by police officers.

Critics argued that Sullivan should be terminated and charged with homicide. They called for holding city workers responsible for mishandling the eviction and pressed Mayor Edward Koch and U.S. Attorney Rudolph Guiliani to investigate it.

Through rallies, grassroots lobbying and letter-writing campaigns, activists demanded legal justice for Bumpurs. They also called for reforms, including new police policies.

Amid activists’ calls for his arrest, Sullivan said he had been justified in shooting Bumpurs. He insisted that he had followed police procedures.

City action

In response to Bumpurs’ death, the NYPD implemented new procedures. Public pressure from activists inspired policy changes.

Officers were instructed not to confront “an emotionally disturbed person believed to be armed or violent. No action will be taken until the Precinct Commander or Duty Captain arrives and evaluates the situation.”

The new policies prioritized nonlethal methods for responding to these emergencies, instructing officers to use nets, Tasers and restraining bars and shields rather than guns.

Bumpurs’ family filed a $10 million lawsuit against the city, which ultimately led to a $200,000 settlement in 1990. In 1985, Sullivan was indicted by a Bronx grand jury on a manslaughter charge, which carried a maximum of 15 years in prison. He was convicted but acquitted on appeal in 1987 and restored to full duty.

Little lasting change

Even as the NYPD has adopted various training programs, people with mental illnesses continue to face excessive and deadly force when they confront the police.

Most recently, then-Mayor Bill de Blasio launched the Crisis Intervention Team in 2015 and the Behavioral Health Emergency Assistance Response Division program in 2021. In 2016, approximately 4,700 NYPD officers out of a force of slightly over 35,000 completed Crisis Intervention Team training, which provided instruction for responding to mental health emergencies.

Nonetheless, New Yorkers continued to confront police violence. On Oct. 18, 2016, police Sgt. Hugh Barry responded to reports that 66-year-old Deborah Danner, who was schizophrenic, had been screaming in the halls of her Bronx apartment building. Barry, who had not received CIT training, fatally shot Danner when she allegedly swung a bat at him. Barry was later indicted and acquitted of murder in 2018.

The B-Heard program dispatches mental health professionals and fire department paramedics to 911 mental health calls. As of 2024, however, it covered only 31 out of 77 NYPD precincts. Police officers still respond to many mental health calls using Tasers or firearms.

On March 27, 2024, for example, 19-year-old Queens resident Win Rozario called 911 because he was experiencing a mental health episode. Since no B-Heard unit served Rozario’s neighborhood, police were dispatched. Rozario was fatally shot minutes after officers entered his home.

Other U.S. communities have had greater success using civilian response teams. Examples include Denver’s Support Team Assistance Response program and Seattle’s Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion initiative.

Research shows that such initiatives are safer and more effective than relying on law enforcement interventions. They produce better outcomes for people with mental health conditions and help keep communities safer.

In interviews with Bumpurs’ daughter, Mary, I asked what she saw as the legacy of her mother’s case.

She replied, “To keep her spirit moving. To let people know what happened to her.”

More than 40 years after Bumpurs’ death, the public continues to remember her death. Activists and writers have paid tributes and written articles about Bumpurs, signaling the importance of her tragic killing to the current political movement against police violence.

LaShawn Harris 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. More than 40 years after police killed Eleanor Bumpurs in her Bronx apartment, people still #sayhername – https://theconversation.com/more-than-40-years-after-police-killed-eleanor-bumpurs-in-her-bronx-apartment-people-still-sayhername-267609

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) – By Jason Reed, Associate Teaching Professor of Finance, University of Notre Dame

When it comes to setting monetary policy for the world’s largest economy, what data drives decision-making?

In ordinary times, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell and voting members of the Federal Open Market Committee, which usually meets eight times a year, have a wealth of information at their disposal, including key statistics such as monthly employment and extensive inflation data.

But with the federal shutdown that began Oct. 1, 2025, grinding on, government offices that publish such information are shuttered and data has been curtailed. Now, Powell and his Fed colleagues might be considering the price of gas or changes in the cost of coffee as they meet on Oct. 29 to make a judgment on the strength of the U.S. economy and decide where to take interest rates.

The Federal Reserve’s mandate is to implement monetary policy that stabilizes prices and promotes full employment, but there is a delicate balance to strike. Not only do Powell and the Fed have to weigh domestic inflation, jobs and spending, but they must also respond to changes in President Donald Trump’s global tariff policy.

As an economist and finance professor at the University of Notre Dame, I know the Fed has a tough job of guiding the economy under even the most ideal circumstances. Now, imagine creating policy partially blindfolded, without access to key economic data.

But, fortunately, the Fed’s not flying blind – it still has a wide range of private, internal and public data to help it read the pulse of the U.S. economy.

Key data is MIA

The Fed is data-dependent, as Powell likes to remind markets. But the cancellation of reports on employment, job openings and turnover, retail sales and gross domestic product, along with a delay in the September consumer price information, will force the central bank to lean harder on private data to nail down the appropriate path for monetary policy.

Torsten Slok, chief economist for the Apollo asset management firm, recently released his set of “alternative data,” capturing information from a wide range of sources. This includes ISM PMI reports, which measure economic activity in the manufacturing and services sectors, and Bloomberg’s robust data on consumer spending habits.

“Generally, the private data, the alternative data that we look at is better used as a supplement for the underlying governmental data, which is the gold standard,” Powell said in mid-October. “It won’t be as effective as the main course as it would have been as a supplement.”

But at this crucial juncture, the Fed has also abruptly lost one important source of private data. Payroll processor ADP had previously shared private sector payroll information with the central bank, which considered it alongside government employment figures. Now, ADP has suspended the relationship, and Powell has reportedly asked the company to quickly reverse its decision.

Internal research

Fortunately for the Fed, it has its own sources for reliable information.

Even when government agencies are working and producing economic reports, the Federal Reserve utilizes internal research and its nationwide network of contacts to supplement data from the U.S. Census Bureau, the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Bureau of Economic Analysis.

Since the Fed is self-funded, the government shutdown didn’t stop it from publishing its Beige Book, which comes out eight times a year and provides insight into how various aspects of the economy are performing.

Its Oct. 15 report found that consumer spending had inched down, with lower- and middle-income households facing “rising prices and elevated economic uncertainty.” Manufacturing was also hit by challenges linked to higher tariffs.

Leading indicators

And though no data is being released on the unemployment rate, historical data shows that consumer sentiment can act as a leading indicator for joblessness in the U.S.

According to the most recent consumer confidence reports, Americans are significantly more worried about their jobs over the next six months, as compared to this time last year, and expect fewer employment opportunities during that period. This suggests the Fed will likely see an uptick in the unemployment rate, once the data resumes publishing.

And if you did notice an increase in the price of your morning coffee, you’re not mistaken – both private and market-based data suggest inflation is a pressing concern, with expectations that price increases will remain at about the 2% target set by the Fed.

It’s clear that there is no risk-free path for policy, and a wrong move by the Fed could stoke inflation or even send the U.S. economy spiraling into a recession.

Uncertain path ahead

At the Fed’s September monetary policy meeting, members voted to cut benchmark interest rates by 25 basis points, while one member advocated for a 50-point cut.

It was the first interest rate cut since December – one that Trump had been loudly demanding to help spur the U.S. economy and lower the cost of government debt. Markets expect the Fed to cut interest rates by another quarter of a percentage point at its Oct. 28-29 meeting and then again in December. That would lower rates to a range of 3.5% to 3.75%, from 4% to 4.25% currently, giving the labor market a much-needed boost.

After that, the near-certainty ends, as it’s anyone’s guess where interest rates will go from there. At quarterly meetings, members of the Federal Open Market Committee give projections of where they think the Fed’s benchmark interest rate will go over the next three years and beyond to provide forward guidance to financial markets and other observers.

The median projection from the September meeting suggests the benchmark rate will end 2026 a little lower than where it began, at 3.4%, and decline to 3.1% by the end of 2027. With inflation accelerating, Fed officials will continue to weigh the weakening labor market against the threat of inflation from tariffs, immigration reform and their own lower interest rates – not to mention the ongoing impact of the government shutdown.

Unfortunately, I believe these risks will be difficult to mitigate with just Fed intervention, even with perfect foresight into the economy, and will need help from government immigration, tax and spending policy to put the economy on the right path.

Jason Reed 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. Fed struggles to assess state of US economy as government shutdown shuts off key data – https://theconversation.com/fed-struggles-to-assess-state-of-us-economy-as-government-shutdown-shuts-off-key-data-267204

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Jeanne Beatrix Law, Professor of English, Kennesaw State University

Artificial intelligence is fast becoming part of the furniture. A decade after IBM’s Watson triumphed on “Jeopardy!,” generative AI models are in kitchens and home offices. People often talk about AI in science fiction terms, yet the most consequential change in 2025 may be its banal ubiquity.

To appreciate how ordinary AI use has become, it helps to remember that this trend didn’t start with generative chatbots. A 2017 Knowledge at Wharton newsletter documented how deep learning algorithms were already powering chatbots on social media and photo apps’ facial recognition functions. Digital assistants such as Siri and Alexa were performing everyday tasks, and AI-powered image generators could create images that fooled 40% of viewers.

When ChatGPT became publicly available on Nov. 30, 2022, the shift felt sudden, but it was built on years of incremental integration. AI’s presence is now so mundane that people consult chatbots for recipes, use them as study partners and rely on them for administrative chores. As a writer and professor who studies ways that generative AI can be an everyday collaborator, I find that recent usage reports show how AI has been woven into everyday life. (Full disclosure: I am a member of OpenAI’s Educator Council, an uncompensated group of higher education faculty who provide feedback to OpenAI on educational use cases.)

Who’s using ChatGPT and why?

Economists at OpenAI and Harvard analyzed 1.5 million ChatGPT conversations from November 2022 through July 2025. Their findings show that adoption has broadened beyond early users: It’s being used all over the world, among all types of people. Adoption has grown fastest in low- and middle-income countries, and growth rates in the lowest-income countries are now more than four times those in the richest nations.

Most interactions revolve around mundane activities. Three-quarters of conversations involve practical guidance, information seeking and writing. These categories are for activities such as getting advice on how to cook an unusual type of food, where to find the nearest pharmacy, and getting feedback on email drafts. More than 70% of ChatGPT use is for nonwork tasks, demonstrating AI’s role in people’s personal lives. The economists found that 73% of messages were not related to work as of June 2025, up from 53% in June 2024.

Claude and the geography of adoption

Anthropic’s economic index paints a similar picture of uneven AI adoption. Researchers at the company tracked users’ conversations with the company’s Claude AI chatbot relative to working-age population. The data shows sharp contrasts between nations. Singapore’s per-capita use is 4.6 times higher than expected based on its population size, and Canada’s is 2.9 times higher. India and Nigeria, meanwhile, use Claude at only a quarter of predicted levels.

In the United States, use reflects local economies, with activity tied to regional strengths: tech in California, finance in Florida and documentation in D.C. In lower-use countries, more than half of Claude’s activity involves programming. In higher-use countries, people apply it across education, science and business. High-use countries favor humans working iteratively with AI, such as refining text, while low-use countries rely more on delegating full tasks, such as finding information.

It’s important to note that OpenAI reports between 400 million and 700 million weekly active users in 2025, while third-party analytics estimate Claude at roughly 30 million monthly active users during a similar time period. For comparison, Gemini had approximately 350 million monthly active users and Microsoft reported in July 2025 more than 100 million monthly active users for its Copilot apps. Perplexity’s CEO reported in an interview that the company’s language AI has a “user base of over 30 million active users.”

While these metrics are from a similar time period, mid-2025, it’s important to note the differences in reporting and metrics, particularly weekly versus monthly active users. By any measure, though, ChatGPT’s user base is by far the largest, making it a commonly used generative AI tool for everyday tasks.

Everyday tool

So, what do mundane uses of AI look like at home? Consider these scenarios:

• Meal planning and recipes: A parent asks ChatGPT for vegan meal ideas that use leftover kale and mushrooms, saving time and reducing waste.
• Personal finance: ChatGPT drafts a budget, suggests savings strategies or explains the fine print of a credit card offer, translating legalese into plain language.
• Writing support: Neurodivergent writers use ChatGPT to organize ideas and scaffold drafts. A writer with ADHD can upload notes and ask the model to group them into themes, then expand each into a paragraph while keeping the writer’s tone and reasoning. This helps reduce cognitive overload and supports focus, while the writer retains their own voice.

These scenarios illustrate that AI can help with mundane decisions, act as a sounding board and support creativity. The help with mundane tasks can be a big lift: By handling routine planning and information retrieval, AI frees people to focus on empathy, judgment and reflection.

From extraordinary to ordinary tool

AI has transitioned from a futuristic curiosity to an everyday co-pilot, with voice assistants and generative models helping people write, cook and plan.

Inviting AI to our kitchen tables not as a mysterious oracle but as a helpful assistant means cultivating AI literacy and learning prompting techniques. It means recognizing AI’s strengths, mitigating its risks and shaping a future where intelligence — human and artificial — works for everyone.

Jeanne Beatrix Law serves on the OpenAI Educator Council, an uncompensated group of higher education faculty who provide feedback to OpenAI on educational use cases and occasionally tests models for those use cases.

– ref. AI chatbots are becoming everyday tools for mundane tasks, use data shows – https://theconversation.com/ai-chatbots-are-becoming-everyday-tools-for-mundane-tasks-use-data-shows-266670

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Dagomar Degroot, Associate Professor of Environmental History, Georgetown University

In May 2024, part of the Sun exploded.

The Sun is an immense ball of superheated gas called plasma. Because the plasma is conductive, magnetic fields loop out of the solar surface. Since different parts of the surface rotate at different speeds, the fields get tangled. Eventually, like rubber bands pulled too tight, they can snap – and that is what they did last year.

These titanic plasma explosions, also known as solar flares, each unleashed the energy of a million hydrogen bombs. Parts of the Sun’s magnetic field also broke free as magnetic bubbles loaded with billions of tons of plasma.

These bubbles, called coronal mass ejections, or CMEs, crashed through space at around 6,000 times the speed of a commercial jetliner. After a few days, they smashed one after another into the magnetic field that envelops Earth. The plasma in each CME surged toward us, creating brilliant auroras and powerful electrical currents that rippled through Earth’s crust.

You might not have noticed. Just like the opposite poles of fridge magnets have to align for them to snap together, the poles of the magnetic field of Earth and the incoming CMEs have to line up just right for the plasma in the CMEs to reach Earth. This time they didn’t, so most of the plasma sailed off into deep space.

Humans have not always been so lucky. I’m an environmental historian and author of the new book “Ripples on the Cosmic Ocean: An Environmental History of Our Place in the Solar System.”

While writing the book, I learned that a series of technological breakthroughs – from telegraphs to satellites – have left modern societies increasingly vulnerable to the influence of solar storms, meaning flares and CMEs.

Since the 19th century, these storms have repeatedly upended life on Earth. Today, there are hints that they threaten the very survival of civilization as we know it.

The telegraph: A first warning

On the morning of Sept. 1, 1859, two young astronomers, Richard Carrington and Richard Hodgson, became the first humans to see a solar flare. To their astonishment, it was so powerful that, for two minutes, it far outshone the rest of the Sun.

About 18 hours later, brilliant, blood-red auroras flickered across the night sky as far south as the equator, while newly built telegraph lines shorted out across Europe and the Americas.

The Carrington Event, as it was later called, revealed that the Sun’s environment could violently change. It also suggested that emerging technologies, such as the electrical telegraph, were beginning to link modern life to the extraordinary violence of the Sun’s most explosive changes.

For more than a century, these connections amounted to little more than inconveniences, like occasional telegraph outages, partly because no solar storm rivaled the power of the Carrington Event. But another part of the reason was that the world’s economies and militaries were only gradually coming to rely more and more on technologies that turned out to be profoundly vulnerable to the Sun’s changes.

A brush with Armageddon

Then came May 1967.

Soviet and American warships collided in the Sea of Japan, American troops crossed into North Vietnam and the Middle East teetered on the brink of the Six-Day War.

It was only a frightening combination of new technologies that kept the United States and Soviet Union from all-out war; nuclear missiles could now destroy a country within minutes, but radar could detect their approach in time for retaliation. A direct attack on either superpower would be suicidal.

Suddenly, on May 23, a series of violent solar flares blasted the Earth with powerful radio waves, knocking out American radar stations in Alaska, Greenland and England.

Forecasters had warned officers at the North American Air Defense Command, or NORAD, to expect a solar storm. But the scale of the radar blackout convinced Air Force officers that the Soviets were responsible. It was exactly the sort of thing the USSR would do before launching a nuclear attack.

American bombers, loaded with nuclear weapons, prepared to retaliate. The solar storm had so scrambled their wireless communications that it might have been impossible to call them back once they took off. In the nick of time, forecasters used observations of the Sun to convince NORAD officers that a solar storm had jammed their radar. We may be alive today because they succeeded.

Blackouts, transformers and collapse

With that brush with nuclear war, solar storms had become a source of existential risk, meaning a potential threat to humanity’s existence. Yet the magnitude of that risk only came into focus in March 1989, when 11 powerful flares preceded the arrival of back-to-back coronal mass ejections.

For more than two decades, North American utility companies had constructed a sprawling transmission system that relayed electricity from power plants to consumers. In 1989, this system turned out to be vulnerable to the currents that coronal mass ejections channeled through Earth’s crust.

In Quebec, crystalline bedrock under the city does not easily conduct electricity. Rather than flow through the rock, currents instead surged into the world’s biggest hydroelectric transmission system. It collapsed, leaving millions without power in subzero weather.

Repairs revealed something disturbing: The currents had damaged multiple transformers, which are enormous customized devices that transfer electricity between circuits.

Transformers can take many months to replace. Had the 1989 storm been as powerful as the Carrington Event, hundreds of transformers might have been destroyed. It could have taken years to restore electricity across North America.

Solar storms: An existential risk

But was the Carrington Event really the worst storm that the Sun can unleash?

Scientists assumed that it was until, in 2012, a team of Japanese scientists found evidence of an extraordinary burst of high-energy particles in the growth rings of trees dated to the eighth century CE. The leading explanation for them: huge solar storms dwarfing the Carrington Event. Scientists now estimate that these “Miyake Events” happen once every few centuries.

Astronomers have also discovered that, every century, Sun-like stars can explode in super flares up to 10,000 times more powerful than the strongest solar flares ever observed. Because the Sun is older and rotates more slowly than many of these stars, its super flares may be much rarer, occurring perhaps once every 3,000 years.

Nevertheless, the implications are alarming. Powerful solar storms once influenced humanity only by creating brilliant auroras. Today, civilization depends on electrical networks that allow commodities, information and people to move across our world, from sewer systems to satellite constellations.

What would happen if these systems suddenly collapsed on a continental scale for months, even years? Would millions die? And could a single solar storm bring that about?

Researchers are working on answering these questions. For now, one thing is certain: to protect these networks, scientists must monitor the Sun in real time. That way, operators can reduce or reroute the electricity flowing through grids when a CME approaches. A little preparation may prevent a collapse.

Fortunately, satellites and telescopes on Earth today keep the Sun under constant observation. Yet in the United States, recent efforts to reduce NASA’s science budget have cast doubt on plans to replace aging Sun-monitoring satellites. Even the Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope, the world’s premier solar observatory, may soon shut down.

These potential cuts are a reminder of our tendency to discount existential risks – until it’s too late.

Dagomar Degroot has received funding from NASA.

– ref. Solar storms have influenced our history – an environmental historian explains how they could also threaten our future – https://theconversation.com/solar-storms-have-influenced-our-history-an-environmental-historian-explains-how-they-could-also-threaten-our-future-258668

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Daniel J. Sherman, Lineberger Distinguished Professor of Art History and History, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

In early November 1927, the front pages of newspapers all over France featured photographs not of the usual politicians, aviators or sporting events, but of a group of archaeologists engaged in excavation. The slow, painstaking work of archaeology was rarely headline news. But this was no ordinary dig.

The archaeologists pictured were members of an international team assembled to assess the authenticity of a remarkable site in France’s Auvergne region.

Three years before, farmers plowing their land at a place called Glozel had come across what seemed to be a prehistoric tomb. Excavations by Antonin Morlet, an amateur archaeologist from Vichy, the nearest town of any size, yielded all kinds of unexpected objects. Morlet began publishing the finds in late 1925, immediately producing lively debate and controversy.

Certain characteristics of the site placed it in the Neolithic era, approximately 10,000 B.C.E. But Morlet also unearthed artifact types thought to have been invented thousands of years later, notably pottery and, most surprisingly, tablets or bricks with what looked like alphabetic characters. Some scholars cried foul, including experts on the inscriptions of the Phoenicians, the people thought to have invented the Western alphabet no earlier than 2000 B.C.E.

Was Glozel a stunning find with the capacity to rewrite prehistory? Or was it an elaborate hoax? By late 1927, the dispute over Glozel’s authenticity had become so strident that an outside investigation seemed warranted.

The Glozel affair now amounts to little more than a footnote in the history of French archaeology. As a historian, I first came across descriptions of it in some histories of French archaeology. With a bit of investigating, it wasn’t hard to find first-person accounts of the affair.

But it was only when I began studying the private papers of one of the leading contemporary skeptics of Glozel, an archaeologist and expert on Phoenician writing named René Dussaud, that I realized the magnitude and intensity of this controversy. After publishing a short book showing that the so-called Glozel alphabet was a mishmash of previously known early alphabetic writing, in October 1927 Dussaud took out a subscription to a clipping service to track mentions of the Glozel affair; in four months he received over 1,500 clippings, in 10 languages.

The Dussaud clippings became the basis for the account of Glozel in my recent book, “Sensations.” That the contours of the affair first became clear to me in a pile of yellowed newspaper clippings is appropriate, because Glozel embodies a complex relationship between science and the media that persists today.

Serious scientists in the trenches

The international commission’s front-page visit to Glozel marked a watershed in the controversy, even if it did not resolve it entirely.

In a painstaking report published in the scholarly Revue anthropologique just before Christmas 1927, the commission recounted the several days of digging it conducted, provided detailed plans of the site, described the objects it unearthed and carefully explained its conclusion that the site was “not ancient.”

The report emphasized the importance of proper archaeological method. Early on, the commissioners noted that they were “experienced diggers, all with past fieldwork to their credit,” in different chronological subfields of archaeology. In contrast, they noted that the Glozel site showed clear signs of a lack of order and method.

In their initial meeting in Vichy, the assembled archaeologists agreed that they would give no interviews during their visit to Glozel and would not speak to the press afterward. But, aware of “certain tendentious articles published by a few newspapers,” the visitors issued a communiqué stating that they would neither confirm nor deny any press reports. Their scholarly publication would be their final word on the “non-ancientness” of the site.

The distinction between true science – what the archaeologists were practicing – and the media seemed absolute.

Sensationalist coverage, but careful details, too

And yet matters were not so simple.

Many newspapers devoted extensive and careful coverage to Glozel. They offered explanations of archaeological terminology. They explained the larger stakes of the controversy, which, beyond the invention of the alphabet, involved nothing less than the direction of the development of Western civilization itself, whether from Mesopotamia in the east to Europe in the west or the reverse.

Even articles about seemingly trivial matters, such as the work clothes the archaeologists donned to perform their test excavations at Glozel, served to reinforce the larger point the commissioners made in their report. In contrast to the proper suits and ties they wore for formal photographs marking their arrival, the visitors all put on blue overalls, which for one newspaper “gave them the air of apprentice locksmiths or freshly decked-out electricians.”

The risk, apparent in this jocular reference, of losing the social standing afforded them by their professional degrees and education was worth taking because it drove home these archaeologists’ devotion to their discipline, which their report described as “a daily moral obligation.”

Skeptical scientists did rely on journalism

If archaeologists continued to mistrust the many newspapers that sensationalized Glozel, its stakes and their work in general, they could not escape the popular media entirely, so they confided in a few journalists at papers they considered responsible.

Shortly after the publication of the report, which was summarized and excerpted in the daily press, original excavator Morlet accused Dorothy Garrod, the only woman on the commission, of having tampered with the site. A group of archaeologists responded on her behalf, explaining what she had actually been doing and defending her professionalism – in the press.

At the most basic level, media coverage recorded the standard operating procedures of archaeology and its openness to outside scrutiny. This was in contrast to Morlet’s excavations, which limited access only to believers in the authenticity of Glozel.

Under the watchful eyes of reporters and photographers, the outside archaeologists investigating Glozel knew quite well that they were engaged in a kind of performance, one in which their discipline, as much as this particular discovery, was on trial.

Like the signs in my neighborhood proclaiming that “science is real,” the international commission depended on and sought to fortify the public’s confidence in the integrity of scientific inquiry. To do that, it needed the media even while expressing a healthy skepticism about it. It’s a balancing act that persists in today’s era of “trusting science.”

This article draws on research funded by the Institut d’Études Avancées (Paris), the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton), and the National Endowment for the Humanities, as well as Daniel Sherman’s employer, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

– ref. The Glozel affair: A sensational archaeological hoax made science front-page news in 1920s France – https://theconversation.com/the-glozel-affair-a-sensational-archaeological-hoax-made-science-front-page-news-in-1920s-france-260967

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Manuel Domínguez-Rodrigo, Professor of Anthropology, Rice University

Almost 2 million years ago, a young ancient human died beside a spring near a lake in what is now Tanzania, in eastern Africa. After archaeologists uncovered his fossilized bones in 1960, they used them to define Homo habilis – the earliest known member of our own genus.

Paleoanthropologists define the first examples of the genus Homo based largely on their bigger brains – and, sometimes, smaller teeth – compared with other, earlier ancestors such as the australopithecines – the most famous of these being Lucy. There were at least three types of early humans: Homo habilis, Homo rudolfensis and the best documented species, Homo erectus. At least one of them created sites now in the archaeological record, where they brought and shared food, and made and used some of the earliest stone tools.

These archaeological sites date to between 2.6 to 1.8 million years ago. The artifacts within them suggest greater cognitive complexity in early Homo than documented among any nonhuman primate. For example, at Nyayanga, a site in Kenya, anthropologists recently found that early humans were using tools they transported over distances of up to 8 miles (13 kilometers). This action indicates forethought and planning.

Traditionally, paleoanthropologists believed that Homo habilis, as the earliest big-brained humans, was responsible for the earliest sites with tools. The idea has been that Homo habilis was the ancestor of later and even bigger-brained Homo erectus, whose descendants eventually led to us.

This narrative made sense when the oldest known Homo erectus remains were younger than 1.6 million years old. But given recent discoveries, this seems like a shaky foundation.

In 2015, my team discovered a 1.85 million-year-old hand bone at Olduvai Gorge, the same place the original Homo habilis had been found. But unlike the hand of that Homo habilis juvenile, this fossil looked like it belonged to a larger, more modern, fully land-based rather than tree-based human species: Homo erectus.

Over the past decade, new finds have continued to push back the earliest dates for Homo erectus: about 2 million years ago in South Africa, Kenya and Ethiopia. Taken together, these discoveries reveal that H. erectus is slightly older than the known H. habilis fossils. We cannot simply assume that H. habilis gave rise to H. erectus. Instead, the human family tree looks far bushier than we once thought.

What do all these finds suggest? Only one Homo species is our likely ancestor, and probably only one can be responsible for the complex behaviors revealed at the Olduvai Gorge sites. My colleagues and I hit on a way to test whether Homo habilis was top dog at Olduvai Gorge, so to speak, based on whether they were the hunters or the hunted.

Who was hunting who?

At Olduvai Gorge, there is overwhelming evidence that early humans were consuming animals as big as a gazelle or even a zebra. Not only did they hunt, but they repeatedly brought these animals back to the same location for communal consumption. This is the concept of a “central provisioning place,” much like a campsite or home today. Dating to 1.85 million years ago, this is the oldest evidence of frequent meat-eating – and of early humans regularly acting as predators rather than prey.

All animals occupy a position on a food web, from top to lower ranks. Top-ranking predators, such as lions, are usually not preyed upon by lower ranking carnivores, such as hyenas.

If Homo habilis was acquiring large animal carcasses, either by hunting or by chasing lions away from their own kills, it seems logical that these hominids could effectively cope with predation risks. That is, a hunter usually isn’t hunted.

In African savannas, apex predators like lions do not usually die from other predator attacks. Humans today also occupy a top predatory niche: For example, Hadza hunter-gatherers in Tanzania not only hunt game, but also fend off lions from their kills, and successfully defend themselves from attacks by other predators, such as leopards.

But, if Homo habilis was not yet a top predator, then you would expect them to have occasionally been prey to lower-on-the-food-chain carnivorous cats – such as leopards – who often hunt primates.

Most known human fossils at this stage of evolution do bear traces of carnivore damage, including the two best preserved H. habilis fossils from Olduvai Gorge. Was it caused after death, by a scavenging carnivore? Or did a big cat at the top of the food chain kill these early humans?

My colleagues and I set out to address the question of which predators were getting their teeth on H. habilis and presumably whether before or after the ancient humans died.

AI suggests H. habilis wasn’t an apex predator

Here’s where artificial intelligence comes in. Using computer vision, we trained AI on hundreds of microscopic images showing tooth marks left by the main carnivores in Africa today: lions, leopards, hyenas and crocodiles. The AI learned to recognize the subtle differences between the marks made by the different predators and was able to classify the marks with high accuracy.

When we combined different AI approaches, they all pointed to the same result: The tooth marks on the Homo habilis bones matched those made by leopards. The size and shape of the marks on the fossils from those two early Homo habilis individuals line up with what leopards leave today when feeding on prey.

Our discovery challenges the long-standing view of Homo habilis as the first skilled toolmaker, hunter and meat-eater.

But maybe it shouldn’t be too surprising. The only complete skeleton of this species found at Olduvai Gorge belonged to a very small individual – just about 3 feet tall (less than 1 meter) – with a body that still showed features suited for climbing trees. That hardly matches the image of a hunter able to bring down large animals or steal carcasses from lions.

If it wasn’t Homo habilis performing these feats, maybe it was Homo erectus, a species with a larger body and more modern anatomy. But that opens up other mysteries for future researchers: What was Homo habilis doing at the archaeological sites of Olduvai Gorge if it was not responsible for the tools and signs of hunting we find there? Where exactly did Homo erectus come from, and how did it evolve?

My team and others will be returning to places like Olduvai Gorge to ask these questions in the years to come.

Manuel Domínguez-Rodrigo receives funding from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Universities

– ref. AI reveals which predators chewed ancient humans’ bones – challenging ideas on which ‘Homo’ species was the first tool-using hunter – https://theconversation.com/ai-reveals-which-predators-chewed-ancient-humans-bones-challenging-ideas-on-which-homo-species-was-the-first-tool-using-hunter-266561