Category: The Conversation – USA

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) – By Pintu Kumar Mahla, Research Associate at the Water Resources Research Institute, University of Arizona

Farmers in South Asia rely on the summer monsoon’s rainfall, but extreme monsoon rains in recent years have been destructive and deadly.

Since July, flooding during the 2025 summer monsoon has killed more than 700 people in Pakistan as water and mud swept through settlements and ancient towns. Streets in Karachi, a vital port city of about 20 million people, were inundated.

The damage has been reminiscent of 2022, when monsoon flooding stretched for miles across the country and displaced more than 8 million people.

Pakistan has a long history of natural disasters, from lethal heat waves to flash flooding. As global temperatures rise, the risks from powerful downpours, flash floods and melting glaciers are increasing.

I work on issues of water security and grew up in South Asia. I see how climate change is raising the risks and creating an urgent need for a dangerously unprepared region to invest in disaster preparedness.

Why Pakistan gets such extreme floods

The effects of climate change have wide-ranging implications for ecosystems, human communities and the physical environment.

Rising temperatures increase both evaporation and the amount of moisture the atmosphere can hold, leading to powerful downpours.

At the same time, warming in the mountains speeds up the melting of snowpack and glaciers. Melting glaciers increase both runoff into rivers and the risk of glacial lake outburst floods. Glacial lake outburst floods occur when depressions dammed by glacier ice or rock fill with meltwater and overflow or burst through their dams.

A glacial lake outburst in Pakistan’s northern Gilgit-Baltistan region on Aug. 22, 2025, showed the cascading dangers. The resulting flood damaged dozens of houses and pushed up debris that temporarily blocked a river. With the river blocked, water built up, creating a broad lake that threatened more flooding for communities downstream. Dozens of schools were evacuated as a precaution.

Torrential rains in the same region a few weeks earlier had triggered landslides and flooding that stranded 200 people.

Earth’s cryosphere – its glaciers, ice sheets, sea ice and snow cover – is a key part of the planet’s climate system. Snow- and ice-covered surfaces can reflect up to 80% or 90% of sunlight, keeping temperatures cooler. The loss of reflective snow and ice cover as temperatures rise helps to further accelerate warming.

Temperatures have been rising faster in the Himalayan region in recent decades, from increasing at about 0.18 degrees Fahrenheit (0.10 Celsius) per decade in the early 20th century to rising at about 0.58 F (0.32 C) per decade by the early 21st century.

In July, Pakistan saw record-breaking heat, with temperatures in Chilas, in the mountains, reaching 119 F (48.5 C), which may have contributed to the flooding that followed. When heat waves hit, faster melting can trigger major flooding, particularly in the Indus River Basin’s lower reaches, where agriculture fields are common in the flood plains.

Deforestation, homes in flood plains add to risks

Pakistan’s challenges include having a fast-growing population that has more than tripled since 1980 to over 250 million people.

A large part of that population, about 96 million, live along riverbanks and in dried riverbeds. Those areas provide flat, available land but also high flood risks.

More people has also led to more deforestation, removing both a source of cooling and increasing the risk of faster flooding and mudslides. From 2001 to 2024, Pakistan lost about 8% of its tree cover, primarily to logging. Some of that has gone into building large dams for hydropower.

Preparing for future disasters

Pakistan is among the countries hit hardest by weather-related disasters over the past two decades, yet it ranks 150th globally out of 192 countries when it comes to being ready to deal with disasters, according to the Notre Dame Global Adaptation Initiative’s assessments.

The Pakistan National Disaster Management Authority’s recent National Disaster Risk Reduction Strategy (2025-2030) discusses improvement in disaster risk management since 2006. But Pakistan’s disasters preparedness is still limited by poor coordination between institutions, too few early warning systems and not enough financial resources.

People’s vulnerability to disasters is made worse by old infrastructure, often poor drainage and urban planning that, in my view, doesn’t do enough to take disaster risk reduction into account. Political instability in Pakistan can also make disaster responses less effective.

The country could improve safety by designing infrastructure to better withstand disasters, expanding early warning networks, making risk reduction a part of education and policy, and improving community training and awareness programs. Those steps will require better governance and funding.

For long-term protection against natural and human-made disasters, nature-based strategies can also help, such as replanting forests to reduce erosion and mudslide risks and improving land-use planning to avoid building in flood-prone areas or creating new flood risks. The world can help by reducing greenhouse gas emissions that are driving climate change.

Pintu Kumar Mahla is affiliated with the Water Resources Research Center, the University of Arizona. He is also a member of the International Association of Water Law (AIDA). Pintu Kumar Mahla has not received funding related to this article.

– ref. Monsoon flooding has killed hundreds in Pakistan – climate change is pushing the rainy season from blessing to looming catastrophe – https://theconversation.com/monsoon-flooding-has-killed-hundreds-in-pakistan-climate-change-is-pushing-the-rainy-season-from-blessing-to-looming-catastrophe-263610

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) – By Patrick Tutka, Clinical Associate Professor of Health and Kinesiology, Purdue University

Curious Kids is a series for children of all ages. If you have a question you’d like an expert to answer, send it to CuriousKidsUS@theconversation.com.

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Why is the object of golf to play the least amount of golf? – Bryleigh, age 12, Chandler, Arizona

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In most sports, the team or player with the highest score wins, and fans celebrate super-high-scoring games. In golf, it’s the opposite – the lowest score is the champion. And since golf scores are the number of strokes each player needs to get around the course, the object is to do it with as few strokes as possible.

I study sport management, which includes training people to manage golf courses, help run associations that set the rules, and create scoring for golf. When I play golf, I find that it’s a great mental test. If I score poorly on one hole, how do I play the next hole? Will I let frustration cause me to play poorly and score high again, or can I recover?

Skilled players are able to manage each shot, finding the best place to hit the ball so that they leverage the strengths of their game and work with conditions (weather, wind) at the hole they are playing. This allows them to limit the score they get on the hole.

In golf every shot is a stroke, and you play each hole only once. There are no do-overs or second chances, so each move is extremely important for scoring. That’s different from a game like basketball, where you may get a rebound or a second chance to make a particular shot.

Par for the course

Each hole on a golf course is assigned a par score, which is the number of shots the designer believes it will take to play that hole. Almost all golf courses are made up of par 3, par 4 and par 5 shots.

On a par 3, a person is expected to take three shots to put the ball in the hole. That usually begins with a tee shot from the starting point of the hole and then two shots around or on the green area where the hole is cut. Par 4s expect two shots, covering more ground, before they get to the green area; par 5s expect three shots.

Par is designed for each hole and then added up for the course. Most golf courses have 18 holes and a par between 70 and 72.

There also are par 3 courses, where every hole is a par 3, so they can be spaced more closely and players don’t have to hit long drives. And there are short courses with fewer than 18 holes and total pars as low as 27, usually set on smaller properties.

Golfers want their score to be at par, or even lower, for each course. A decent golfer would probably shoot around 90 on an 18-hole, par 72 course. Coming in close to par lets people play together and compete against each other. Imagine that they were all trying to use as many shots as possible: They would never finish a hole, let alone a full round of the course.

Each score is given a name in comparison to par for a given hole. A score two strokes under par is called an eagle, and a score of one under par is called a birdie. When players go over par, it’s a bogey for one stroke over, a double bogey for two strokes over, and so on. There also are less-known terms, such as a snowman, which is shooting an 8 on a hole.

Every shot matters

Other sports that reward the lowest scores or the fewest attempts include darts and pool. For example, in 8-ball or 9-ball pool, the winner is the first person who sinks all of their colors and either the 8 or 9 ball into pockets with the fewest shots. Similarly, both swimming and track and field are won with low scores, although these are based on competitors’ times, not strokes or shots.

Golf requires great concentration and a good understanding of how your shot may move in the air. Players also need strategies for getting around objects in front of them on the course, such as trees, ponds and sand traps, which are also known as bunkers.

Good golfers are able to control relatively closely where their ball lands. But one of my favorite statistics is that the very best professional golfers land their ball within 10 feet of the hole just 1 in 4 times when they hit from 100 yards away.

A sense of humor helps. Baseball great Hank Aaron once said, “It took me 17 years to get 3,000 hits in baseball. It took one afternoon on the golf course.”

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Hello, curious kids! Do you have a question you’d like an expert to answer? Ask an adult to send your question to CuriousKidsUS@theconversation.com. Please tell us your name, age and the city where you live.

And since curiosity has no age limit – adults, let us know what you’re wondering, too. We won’t be able to answer every question, but we will do our best.

Patrick Tutka 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 is the object of golf to play as little golf as possible? – https://theconversation.com/why-is-the-object-of-golf-to-play-as-little-golf-as-possible-256170

Source: The Conversation – USA (3) – By Megan Donelson, Lecturer in Health Rhetorics, University of Dayton

The Make America Healthy Again movement has generated a lot of discussion about public health. But the language MAHA proponents use to describe health and disease has also raised concerns among the disability and chronic illness communities.

I’m a researcher studying the rhetoric of health and medicine – and, specifically, the rhetoric of risk. This means I analyze the language used by public officials, institutions, health care providers and other groups in discussing health risks to decode the underlying beliefs and assumptions that can affect both policy and public sentiment about health issues.

As a scholar of rhetoric and the mother of an autistic child, in the language of MAHA I hear a disregard for the humanity of people with disabilities and a shift from supporting them to blaming them for their needs.

Such language goes all the way up to the MAHA movement’s highest-level leader, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. It is clearly evident in the report on children’s health published in May 2025 by the MAHA Commission, which was established by President Donald Trump and is led by Kennedy, as well as in the MAHA Commission’s follow-up draft recommendations, leaked on Aug. 15, 2025.

Like many people, I worry that the MAHA Commission’s rhetoric may signal a coming shift in how the federal government views the needs of people with disabilities – and its responsibilities for meeting them.

Personal choice in health

One key concept for understanding the MAHA movement’s rhetoric, introduced by a prominent sociologist named Ulrich Beck, is what sociologists now call individualization of risk. Beck argued that modern societies and governments frame almost all health risks as being about personal choice and responsibility. That approach obscures how policies made by large institutions – such as governments, for example – constrain the choices that people are able to make.

In other words, governments and other institutions tend to focus on the choices that individuals make to intentionally deflect from their own responsibility for the other risk factors. The consequence, in many cases, is that the institution is off the hook for any responsibility for negative outcomes.

Beck, writing in 1986, pointed to nuclear plants in the Soviet Union as an example. People who lived near them reported health issues that they suspected were caused by radiation. But the government denied the existence of any evidence linking their woes to radiation exposure, implying that lifestyle choices were to blame. Some scholars have identified a similar dynamic in the U.S. today, where the government emphasizes personal responsibility while downplaying the effects of public policy on health outcomes.

A shift in responsibility

Such a shift in responsibility is evident in how MAHA proponents, including Kennedy, discuss chronic illness and disabilities – in particular, autism.

In its May 2025 report on children’s health, the MAHA Commission describes the administration’s views on chronic diseases in children. The report notes that the increased prevalence in “obesity, diabetes, neurodevelopmental disorders, cancer, mental health, autoimmune disorders and allergies” are “preventable trends.” It also frames the “major drivers” of these trends as “the food children are eating, the chemicals they are exposed to, the medications they are taking, and various changes to their lifestyle and behavior, particularly those related to physical activity, sleep and the use of technology.”

Notably, it makes no mention of systemic problems, such as limited access to nutritious food, poor air quality and lack of access to health care, despite strong evidence for the enormous contributions these factors make to children’s health. And regarding neurodevelopmental disorders such as autism, it makes no mention of genetics, even though decades of research has found that genetics accounts for most of the risk of developing autism.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with studying the environmental factors that might contribute to autism or other neurodevelopmental disorders. In fact, many researchers believe that autism is caused by complex interactions between genes and environmental factors. But here’s where Beck’s concept of individualization becomes revealing: While the government is clearly not responsible for the genetic causes of chronic diseases, this narrow focus on lifestyle and environmental factors implies that autism can be prevented if these factors are altered or eliminated.

While this may sound like great news, there are a couple of problems. First, it’s simply not true. Second, the Trump administration and Kennedy have canceled tens of millions of dollars in research funding for autism – including on environmental causes – replacing it with an initiative with an unclear review process. This is an unusual move if the goal is to identify and mitigate environmental risk factors And finally, the government could use this claim to justify removing federally funded support systems that are essential for the well-being of autistic people and their families – and instead focus all its efforts on eliminating processed foods, toxins and vaccines.

People with autism and their families are already carrying a tremendous financial burden, even with the current sources of available support. Cuts to Medicaid and other funding could transfer the responsibility for therapies and other needs to individual families, leaving many of them to struggle with paying their medical bills. But it could also threaten the existence of an entire network of health care providers that people with disabilities rely on.

Even more worrisome is the implication that autism is a kind of damage caused by the environment rather than one of many normal variations in human neurological diversity – framing people with autism as a problem that society must solve.

How language encodes value judgments

Such logic sets off alarm bells for anyone familiar with the history of eugenics, a movement that began with the idea of improving America by making its people healthier and quickly evolved to make judgments about who is and is not fit to participate in society.

Kennedy has espoused this view of autism throughout his career, even recently claiming that people with autism “will never pay taxes. They’ll never hold a job. They’ll never play baseball. They’ll never write a poem.”

Even if organic foods and a toxin-free household were the answer to reducing the prevalence of autism, the leaked MAHA Commission strategy report steers clear of recommending government regulation in industries such as food and agriculture, which would be needed to make these options affordable and widely available.

Instead, MAHA’s supposed interventions would remain lifestyle choices – and expensive ones, at that – left for individual families to make for themselves.

Just asking questions

Kennedy and other MAHA proponents also employ another powerful rhetorical tactic: raising questions about topics that have already reached a scientific consensus. This tactic frames such questions as pursuits of truth, but their purpose is actually to create doubt. This tactic, too, is evident in the MAHA Commission’s reports.

This practice of “just asking questions” while ignoring already established answers is widely referred to as “sealioning.” The tactic, named for a notorious sea lion in an online comic called Wondermark, is considered a form of harassment. Like much of the rhetoric of the anti-vaccine movement, it
serves to undermine public trust in science and medicine. This is partly due to a widespread misunderstanding of scientific research – for example, understanding that scientific disagreement does not necessarily indicate that science as a process is flawed.

MAHA rhetoric thus continues a troubling trend in the anti-vaccine movement of calling all of science and Western medicine into question in order to further a specific agenda, regardless of the risks to public health.

The MAHA Commission’s goals are almost universally appealing – healthier food, healthier kids and a healthier environment for all Americans. But analyzing what is implied, minimized or left out entirely can illuminate a much more complex political and social agenda.

Megan Donelson 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 federal officials talk about health is shifting in troubling ways – and that change makes me worried for my autistic child – https://theconversation.com/how-federal-officials-talk-about-health-is-shifting-in-troubling-ways-and-that-change-makes-me-worried-for-my-autistic-child-259874

Source: The Conversation – USA (3) – By Timothy Gabrielli, Gudorf Chair in Catholic Intellectual Traditions, University of Dayton

The 1953 Alfred Hitchcock film “I Confess,” based on an earlier play, features a priest suspected of murder. He’s innocent, and has even heard the murderer’s confession – but cannot clear his own name.

The Catholic sacrament of reconciliation, also known as penance or confession, has been a compelling set piece for fiction writers over the ages, from medieval novels to contemporary films. One reason the practice has intrigued both authors and audiences is the dramatic potential of the “seal of the confessional” – that is, the requirement that priests not disclose any identifying information about what they have heard during confession.

Recently, this sacrament has garnered nonfictional attention. Washington state passed a law on reporting child abuse, which was scheduled to go into effect in July 2025. In some circumstances, the law requires clergy to report abuse or neglect, even if it is revealed during confession. On July 18, however, a federal judge put the law on hold, amid a lawsuit alleging the measure would violate First Amendment rights to religious freedom.

But what is the sacrament of reconciliation, and how has the practice developed in the Catholic Church?

‘I have sinned’

Today, the most common form of confession takes place between a penitent and the “minister of the sacrament” – a priest or bishop. There may be a screen between the two, or they may sit across from one another without anonymity.

At the beginning of the rite, the minister greets the penitent “with kindness,” offers a prayer and sometimes reads from the Bible.

The penitent then confesses the sins they believe they have committed since their last visit. In Catholic teaching, a sin is defined as a failure in loving God and others properly.

Christians believe that sin distances humans from God, but that Jesus’ life, death and resurrection repaired that wounded relationship. The confessor – the ordained clergy hearing the confession – reminds the penitent that through the sacrament, they participate in this central mystery of faith.

Following the confession, the priest or bishop proposes an act of penance: a prayer or action by which the penitent might grow in holiness and make amends. Afterward, the penitent offers a prayer of contrition, asking for God’s mercy. The confessor then absolves the penitent in the name of God before exclaiming, “The Lord has forgiven your sins,” and dismissing the penitent to “Go in peace.”

History of the sacrament

Confession is a form of repentance: turning away from wrongdoing and heeding the call of God, a theme long emphasized in the Jewish and Christian traditions. While still an important emphasis today for Jews and Christians, practices around repentance vary.

In the Catholic tradition, baptism – the first sacrament a person receives – washes away sin and brings the baptized into the church. As Jesus’ apostle Peter says in the New Testament, “Repent and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ so that your sins may be forgiven, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.”

Gradually, the church developed communal practices for reconciliation after baptism. Typically, penitents would remain outside church gatherings, demonstrating their repentance by prostrating themselves, and then publicly confess. Though the historical record is complex, communal penance usually could be undertaken only once.

In an important variation, medieval soldiers returning from war regularly spent an extended period of penance in monasteries – a recognition of Catholicism’s teaching that any war is inherently sinful.

During the Middle Ages, the practice of individual confession developed in what is now Ireland. The rite introduced private confession to a priest, who ritually represents both Christ and the wider church. Eventually, this rite became repeatable.

Individual confession was codified into church law at the Fourth Lateran Council, a meeting of bishops in 1215. The council also emphasized the sanctity of the seal of confession – that is, clergy’s requirement not to “betray” a penitent by revealing something confessed to them during the sacrament of reconciliation.

This absolute confidentiality helps give penitents the confidence to approach confession forthrightly, without holding back. The automatic consequence for a confessor who breaks the seal of confession is excommunication – that is, banned, at least temporarily, from the sacraments of the church. In some cases, the offender can be removed from the clergy.

Public and private

Two elements of confession are emphasized throughout Christian history, sometimes in a kind of back-and-forth: interior attitude of repentance, and outward expression of that repentance. Catholicism teaches that speaking aloud one’s sins makes them concrete in a way that private prayer cannot – and makes the forgiveness concrete, as well. As Pope John Paul II wrote, confession “forces sin out of the secret of the heart and thus out of the area of pure individuality, emphasizing its social character as well.”

In the standard form of the Catholic sacrament today, the communal element is reduced but not lost, since the confessor stands in for the presence of Christ and for the presence of the wider Christian community. Other penitential acts bring the communal aspect more to the fore. Indeed, at every Catholic Mass, participants offer a general confession of sins without specifying particular actions. They ask for each other’s prayers, and pray for God’s forgiveness.

The sacrament of reconciliation, however, remains a practice in which Catholics can be specific and concrete about what they understand to be serious sins. Dorothy Day, an American peace and labor activist who is under consideration for sainthood, famously reflected that “confession is hard. … You do not want to make too much of your constant imperfections and venial sins, but you want to drag them out to the light of day as the first step in getting rid of them.”

At its best, the sacrament of reconciliation aims to support this practice and bring about God’s abundant grace upon the penitent.

Timothy Gabrielli 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. From public confession to private penance: How Catholic confession has evolved over centuries – https://theconversation.com/from-public-confession-to-private-penance-how-catholic-confession-has-evolved-over-centuries-262187

Source: The Conversation – USA (3) – By Walter S. DeKeseredy, Professor of Sociology, West Virginia University

I have been teaching a course on rural criminology since 2014, and most of my students are surprised by the information on violence against women presented to them.

Due to the lack of media attention to rural areas, my students come to class with the impression that all countrysides and small towns are safer than urban and suburban locales. In reality, rates of violent crime are often higher in many rural communities, and at times there’s even more silence around it.

Nearly 50 years of research shows that male violence against women knows no geographical or demographic boundaries. It occurs among all socioeconomic groups and in almost all communities, regardless of their size and location. Yet, crime in rural and remote places is reported to the police at lower rates than in urban areas.

Most criminology scholars do not study violence of any type in rural communities, which partly contributes to the widespread belief that rural women are safer than their urban and suburban counterparts. Media reporting also overlooks brutal forms of violence perpetrated by men in intimate relationships with women.

Hidden in plain sight

Janet, from rural southeast Ohio, whom I interviewed along with sociologist Martin Schwartz in 2003, like some other women in this region we talked to, was beaten by her husband after going through brutal degradation:

“He wanted sex … or with his buddies or made me have sex with a friend of his. … He tied me up so I could watch him have sex with a 13-year-old girl. And then he ended up going to prison for it.”

Janet is by no means an outlier. I analyzed aggregate 1992 to 2005 National Crime Victimization Survey data along with criminologists Callie M. Rennison and Molly Dragiewicz. This data conclusively shows that rural women across the U.S. report physical and sexual violence at higher rates than those in more densely populated areas.

Research also shows that rural women in the U.S. are more likely to be killed by their current or former male partners compared to their urban and suburban counterparts. A study looking at data from 2005 to 2017 across 16 states, for example, found that female homicide rates are higher in rural places.

Another rural Ohio woman told Schwartz and me about the violence she suffered in her relationship: “He’d come home and pull a double barrel and cock both barrels and said he was going to kill me. And it was like, wait a minute here, you know, it was two o’clock in the morning.”

Why are rural women at higher risk?

Research conducted since 1988 has identified several reasons for rural women being at higher risk of violence compared to those living in urban and suburban places. These include geographic and social isolation, widespread acceptance of violence against women, and community norms prohibiting women from seeking social support. What makes it even worse is the absence of effective social support services and the higher rates of gun ownership.

Many social workers, for example, must travel vast distances to reach rural battered women, often at their own expense. What is more, rural abusers “feed off” their female partners’ isolation.

As a woman Schwartz and I interviewed from Meigs County, Ohio, told us, “I didn’t have a car. I wasn’t allowed to go anywhere.” Her husband, however, who had “plenty of cars,” disabled them to stop her from seeking freedom and independence. “He taught me a lot about cars and I knew what parts I need. And there would be no spare. So, I couldn’t leave.”

In rural sections of Ohio and other states, as my research uncovered, there is common acceptance of abuse of women. In many rural areas, community norms often prohibit survivors from publicly talking about their experiences and from seeking help.

As one Appalachian woman put it: “I don’t sit around and share. I keep it to myself. Um, I, I believe that’s part of my mental illness. But I’m not one to sit around and talk about what’s happened.”

Jackie, another rural Ohio woman Schwartz and I interviewed, said that numerous women in her community suffer in silence: “It’s like we see, but we don’t. It’s like three monkeys: don’t see, don’t hear, don’t speak.”

Other women told similar stories of the unwillingness of people in their community to help them.

Gun ownership is a strong correlate of intimate partner violence in rural parts of the U.S.: In rural areas, 46% of adults own guns compared to 19% in urban places. Moreover, firearms are used in 54% of all rural domestic homicides.

What Neil Websdale, director of Arizona State University’s Family Violence Center, stated nearly 30 years ago still holds:

“Rural culture, with its acceptance of firearms for hunting and self-protection, may include a code among certain men that accepts the casual use of firearms to intimidate wives and intimate partners. In urban areas, it is more difficult for abusers to discharge their weapons and go undetected. People in the country are more familiar with the sound of gunshots and often attribute the sound to legitimate uses such as hunting.”

Gun ownership can create safety concerns for social workers, many of whom work alone.

Pathways to prevention

One, albeit highly controversial, prevention strategy is banning the possession, purchase, sale and transfer of handguns, which are the weapons men use the most to kill women regardless of where they live. That would greatly reduce the rate of male-to-female homicide in rural places, as it would in more densely populated areas.

For example, it is estimated that 38% fewer women are shot to death by intimate male partners in states where background checks are required for all handgun owners.

Similarly, the federal Violence Against Women Act includes provisions that, when an order of protection – also referred to as a restraining order – is granted, it leads to the person being restrained losing any gun permits or permission to keep guns at home.

This, in turn, leads to a reduction in intimate femicide. A number of states have gone further than the federal law, extending gun possession bans to people under temporary – not just permanent – restraining orders. Such bans have further reduced intimate partner homicide, by a best estimate of 14%.

Libraries as safe spaces

Rural libraries have proven to be a vital resource in the struggle to end interpersonal forms of abuse of women. They are more accessible in many U.S. rural communities than are shelters, public transportation and other services.

Rural librarians can direct survivors to legal assistance and domestic violence service websites, help find books and pamphlets that are useful for survivors, and provide programming for survivors’ children if survivors need time to think about their options.

The librarian could also help survivors travel from the library to the nearest shelter and work with the police to provide transportation assistance. Moreover, the librarian could help connect survivors with shelter workers via telephone and arrange for the arrival of survivors and their children at a shelter.

We are starting to see attorneys offering survivors legal advice in rural public libraries and providing libraries with information kiosks that include materials on legal issues related to the abuse of women.

A word of caution, though, is necessary. Libraries and other places that offer services to abused rural women require architectural changes that preclude people from hearing survivors talk about their violent experiences.

The chances that people might overhear survivors talking is much greater in smaller communities and hence more likely to jeopardize the safety of survivors and their children.

A multipronged strategy is always necessary. For example, some experts in the field call for setting up women’s police stations and safe houses in rural areas. They also recommend getting rural men to participate in anti-violence and anti-sexist community-based activities, such as holding town hall meetings to raise awareness about violence against women.

All too often, people think of ending violence as an event simple enough to fit on a bumper sticker or the side of a coffee mug. Just leave, and then it will be over.

Unfortunately, for a large number of women and children, particularly in rural areas, leaving and ending up in a safe place is a complex, ongoing process, and for some women and children it is one that never ends.

Walter S. DeKeseredy receives funding from West Virginia University..

– ref. Rural women are at a higher risk of violence − and less likely to get help – https://theconversation.com/rural-women-are-at-a-higher-risk-of-violence-and-less-likely-to-get-help-258976

Source: The Conversation – USA (3) – By Sarah Pessin, Professor of Philosophy, University of Denver

More than 70% of voters in Colorado’s Douglas County, conservative and progressive alike, voted “no” on home rule in June 2025. The ballot measure would have granted the county increased control over certain local matters such as building zoning, parking rules and sewer maintenance.

Historically Republican, but home to a growing population of vocal Democrats, the county is a microcosm of American political divides – from book ban debates to COVID mask controversies. Does this divided county’s bipartisan rejection of home rule mean that Coloradans have cracked the polarization problem?

Alas, not really.

It turns out both sides recoiled at the expensive and rushed nature of the election. It was hardly the heartwarming tale of opponents warming up to each other, which is often the civic solution good humans on both sides seem to be wishing for.

You can sense that longing in a public radio headline announcing the “liberal urban gardener breaking bread with a conservative military-family matriarch.” Or in Sarah Silverman’s “I Love You, America,” a TV series in which the comedian set out to high-five her way across a divided country. You see it in The Village Square, a nonprofit civic organization that describes itself as a “nervy bunch of liberals and conservatives” who promise bipartisan dialogue with disagreement but also “a good time.”

But what if this particular kind of trying sets the bar too high – or, at least, too comfy and cozy?

As a philosopher who studies meaning-making, ethics and politics across traditions, I’d like to suggest that Coloradans don’t need to hug it out or high-five their way forward. Rather, they can look to a variety of ethical traditions for insights about protecting each other even when they hate each other’s views and values.

On becoming fussy princesses

For starters, in American democracy some tensions are a feature, not a bug. While most would insist racism and sexism need to go, some disconnects – such as religious differences – are going to stay. So dreaming of full-on harmony with neighbors kind of misses the point.

Furthermore, as I’ve argued elsewhere, the unity dream can put well-meaning neighbors at risk of becoming the civic equivalents of the princess and the pea. from the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale. Just like a royal so pure that even piles of plush mattresses can’t prevent her being awakened by the lumpiness of a single pea, constantly seeking common ground can dispose people to become sameness-seekers who are increasingly allergic to difference.

And this can make everyone’s stomachs churn even more furiously at all of their not-just-like-them neighbors.

The legacy of Hard Hope

When it comes to better civics, embracing each other is not the only alternative to erasing each other. I’ve been developing a different remedy for rancor in American civic life.

It’s based on my decades of studying philosophy and gravitating always to each text’s most precarious and vulnerable insights on human authenticity and ethical response.

I call it “Hard Hope.”

Hard Hope takes its inspiration from the theological and ethical politics of a wide array of thinkers from many different backgrounds.

In a Christmas sermon in 1958, Martin Luther King Jr. reflected on the biblical injunction to “love thy enemy.” Referring to God, he notes: “It’s significant that he does not say, ‘Like your enemy.’ Like is a sentimental something, an affectionate something. There are a lot of people that I find it difficult to like.”

It’s an arresting insight that takes a moment to sink in: He’s saying that real neighborly love has little to do with heart emojis.

Similarly, Emmanuel Levinas, a Jewish philosopher, emphasizes being called upon to serve others not in light of shared ground but in light of their being “the absolutely other which I can not contain.” Levinas was inspired by Exodus 33:20 which says no human can see God’s face. He describes the utter otherness of the neighbor as an unknowable face to which people are nonetheless ethically beholden. People are beholden to others inasmuch as they are other, Levinas argues. Not inasmuch as people feel connected.

And in like spirit, the queer Chicana feminist Gloria Anzaldúa calls for a “spiritual activism” in which justice requires not only interrupting inequity, but also building with opponents. For such radical connection with others, Anzaldúa draws on the Nahuatl term for in between, “nepantla,” and issues a call to “nepantleras” – people who are able to navigate ambiguous thresholds within split perspectives.

“Honoring people’s otherness, las nepantleras advocate a ‘nos/otras’ position — an alliance between ‘us’ and ‘others.’ In nos/otras, the ‘us’ is divided in two, the slash in the middle representing the bridge – the best mutuality we can hope for at the moment,” she writes.

Hard Hope is a call to look out not only for neighbors we like but for neighbors we like least. That’s even as people take to voting booths to reject their opponents’ worst oversteps, and even as they work within and across communities to elevate justice and secure better futures for all. It’s not a call to change a group’s politics, though at times it can mean tempering them. And it always means distinguishing the call to engage politics from the call to engage people – even as it expects everyone to do both.

Hard Hope asks people to take a break from the bubblegum optimism of believing everyone is just moments away from seeing eye to eye and bursting into compassion, friendship and harmony across divides. Instead, Hard Hope invites people to take up the unusual mood of feeling a sense of debt to their neighbors without liking them. It’s a call to dig deep, beyond a sense of “shared humanity” to an even deeper sense of an “unshared otherness” that calls people into service to others.

It’s a radical form of hope that’s more about indebted coexistence than enthusiastic camaraderie.

And not a single loaf of bread needs baking or breaking in the process.

Sarah Pessin 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. Forget the warm fuzzies of finding common ground – to beat polarization, try changing your expectations – https://theconversation.com/forget-the-warm-fuzzies-of-finding-common-ground-to-beat-polarization-try-changing-your-expectations-260890

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Luke Keller, Professor of Physics and Astronomy, Ithaca College

For decades, astronomers have wondered what the very first stars in the universe were like. These stars formed new chemical elements, which enriched the universe and allowed the next generations of stars to form the first planets.

The first stars were initially composed of pure hydrogen and helium, and they were massive – hundreds to thousands of times the mass of the Sun and millions of times more luminous. Their short lives ended in enormous explosions called supernovae, so they had neither the time nor raw materials to form planets, and they should no longer exist for astronomers to observe.

At least that’s what we thought.

Two studies published in the first half of 2025 suggest that collapsing gas clouds in the early universe may have formed lower-mass stars as well. One study uses a new astrophysical computer simulation that models turbulence within the cloud, causing fragmentation into smaller, star-forming clumps. The other study – an independent laboratory experiment – demonstrates how molecular hydrogen, a molecule essential for star formation, may have formed earlier and in larger abundances. The process involves a catalyst that may surprise chemistry teachers.

As an astronomer who studies star and planet formation and their dependence on chemical processes, I am excited at the possibility that chemistry in the first 50 million to 100 million years after the Big Bang may have been more active than we expected.

These findings suggest that the second generation of stars – the oldest stars we can currently observe and possibly the hosts of the first planets – may have formed earlier than astronomers thought.

Primordial star formation

Stars form when massive clouds of hydrogen many light years across collapse under their own gravity. The collapse continues until a luminous sphere surrounds a dense core that is hot enough to sustain nuclear fusion.

Nuclear fusion happens when two or more atoms gain enough energy to fuse together. This process creates a new element and releases an incredible amount of energy, which heats the stellar core. In the first stars, hydrogen atoms fused together to create helium.

The new star shines because its surface is hot, but the energy fueling that luminosity percolates up from its core. The luminosity of a star is its total energy output in the form of light. The star’s brightness is the small fraction of that luminosity that we directly observe.

This process where stars form heavier elements by nuclear fusion is called stellar nucleosynthesis. It continues in stars after they form as their physical properties slowly change. The more massive stars can produce heavier elements such as carbon, oxygen and nitrogen, all the way up to iron, in a sequence of fusion reactions that end in a supernova explosion.

Supernovae can create even heavier elements, completing the periodic table of elements. Lower-mass stars like the Sun, with their cooler cores, can sustain fusion only up to carbon. As they exhaust the hydrogen and helium in their cores, nuclear fusion stops and the stars slowly evaporate.

High-mass stars have high pressure and temperature in their cores, so they burn bright and use up their gaseous fuel quickly. They last only a few million years, whereas low-mass stars – those less than two times the Sun’s mass – evolve much more slowly, with lifetimes of billions or even trillions of years.

If the earliest stars were all high-mass stars, then they would have exploded long ago. But if low-mass stars also formed in the early universe, they may still exist for us to observe.

Chemistry that cools clouds

The first star-forming gas clouds, called protostellar clouds, were warm – roughly room temperature. Warm gas has internal pressure that pushes outward against the inward force of gravity trying to collapse the cloud. A hot air balloon stays inflated by the same principle. If the flame heating the air at the base of the balloon stops, the air inside cools and the balloon begins to collapse.

Only the most massive protostellar clouds with the most gravity could overcome the thermal pressure and eventually collapse. In this scenario, the first stars were all massive.

The only way to form the lower-mass stars we see today is for the protostellar clouds to cool. Gas in space cools by radiation, which transforms thermal energy into light that carries the energy out of the cloud. Hydrogen and helium atoms are not efficient radiators below several thousand degrees, but molecular hydrogen, H₂, is great at cooling gas at low temperatures.

When energized, H₂ emits infrared light, which cools the gas and lowers the internal pressure. That process would make gravitational collapse more likely in lower-mass clouds.

For decades, astronomers have reasoned that a low abundance of H₂ early on resulted in hotter clouds whose internal pressure would be too hot to easily collapse into stars. They concluded that only clouds with enormous masses, and therefore higher gravity, would collapse – leaving more massive stars.

Helium hydride

In a July 2025 journal article, physicist Florian Grussie and collaborators at the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics demonstrated that the first molecule to form in the universe, helium hydride, HeH⁺, could have been more abundant in the early universe than previously thought. They used a computer model and conducted a laboratory experiment to verify this result.

Helium hydride? In high school science you probably learned that helium is a noble gas, meaning it does not react with other atoms to form molecules or chemical compounds. As it turns out, it does – but only under the extremely sparse and dark conditions of the early universe, before the first stars formed.

HeH⁺ reacts with hydrogen deuteride – HD, which is one normal hydrogen atom bonded to a heavier deuterium atom – to form H₂. In the process, HeH⁺ also acts as a coolant and releases heat in the form of light. So, the high abundance of both molecular coolants earlier on may have allowed smaller clouds to cool faster and collapse to form lower-mass stars.

Gas flow also affects stellar initial masses

In another study, published in July 2025, astrophysicist Ke-Jung Chen led a research group at the Academia Sinica Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics using a detailed computer simulation that modeled how gas in the early universe may have flowed.

The team’s model demonstrated that turbulence, or irregular motion, in giant collapsing gas clouds can form lower-mass cloud fragments from which lower-mass stars condense.

The study concluded that turbulence may have allowed these early gas clouds to form stars either the same size or up to 40 times more massive than the Sun’s mass.

The two new studies both predict that the first population of stars could have included low-mass stars. Now, it is up to us observational astronomers to find them.

This is no easy task. Low-mass stars have low luminosities, so they are extremely faint. Several observational studies have recently reported possible detections, but none are yet confirmed with high confidence. If they are out there, though, we will find them eventually.

Luke Keller 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. The first stars may not have been as uniformly massive as astronomers thought – https://theconversation.com/the-first-stars-may-not-have-been-as-uniformly-massive-as-astronomers-thought-263016

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) – By Emilia Mickevicius, Norton Family Assistant Curator of Photography, University of Arizona

Deadpan is not so much a type of joke as a mode of delivery, a manner of address to an audience that often provokes nervous laughter.

Comedian Nathan Fielder’s persona is marked by deadpan. In his hit HBO comedy series “The Rehearsal,” he maintains a blank facial expression as he listens to contestants fumble their auditions for “Wings of Voice,” his fake reality singing competition. He takes the task of donning the guise of an adult-size infant very seriously, in order to relive the childhood of heroic pilot Sully Sullenberger. His voice is steady and monotone as he converses with a male pilot who cluelessly describes the egregious behavior he’s displayed toward women colleagues.

What makes deadpan feel so off, so destabilizing, so dryly funny?

One reason is that performers – particularly comedians – are expected to be expressive and over the top, or even hint to the audience that they’re supposed to chuckle, similar to a sitcom laugh track.

As I recently organized an exhibition on photography’s relationship to humor, I found myself thinking about how deadpan works in photography. A still, deadpan image might seem like a paradox: Don’t you need a real, live performance? But exploring how photographers have deployed deadpan sheds light on just how powerful and incisive this form of humor can be.

Are you not entertained?

“Pan” was slang for “face” in the 19th century. The genre of deadpan humor was popularized in movies by actor Buster Keaton, whose expressionless, blunt and stilted presence before the camera inspired his nickname, “the Great Stone Face.”

Sprung upon an audience, deadpan can yield a reaction that reveals what philosopher Ted Cohen has described as the “conditional” nature of humor – that it plays into assumptions, expectations and prior knowledge precisely to disrupt them.

Puzzled by the unmet promise of a clear emotion or narrative, the audience laughs uncomfortably at their own bewilderment. The performer’s restraint registers as absurd.

The opposite of postcard perfect

As a medium, photography has historically been burdened by debates over its ability to convey ideas or expression. To early critics, a photograph seemed “mechanical” because it appeared only to reproduce the world, rather than express something new. Compared to drawing or painting, they reasoned, the camera could merely copy.

But I would argue that for these very reasons, photography is a rich lens to explore how deadpan works visually. In photography, deadpan doesn’t even need to involve people.

Take the work of Californian photographer Henry Wessel Jr. Known for his decades-long documentation of everyday life in California, Wessel was one of 10 photographers featured in the watershed 1975 exhibition “New Topographics” at the George Eastman Museum in Rochester, New York, which trained a lens on landscapes altered by humans rather than nature alone – think gas stations, parking lots and tract homes instead of national parks.

Yet the shift Wessel and the other photographers initiated did not simply concern subject matter, but the manner in which they presented it: coolly, at least by the standards of iconic landscape. Previously, photographers such as Ansel Adams had infused their pictures with drama and contrast to provoke the same reverence that they felt toward nature’s beauty. Museumgoers were accustomed to seeing these kinds of landscapes: picturesque and sublime, featuring sprawling mountain ranges and billowing clouds rendered in dramatic tonal ranges.

By contrast, Wessel photographed suburbia in the American West – and with irreverent affection. He composed his images with mock casualness and printed in a narrow tonal range, as if yielding to the leveling quality of the bright sunlight on the stucco and concrete.

This was puzzling; Wessel’s pictures seemed worlds away from fine art landscape photography. They resisted awe and transcendence in favor of dry bemusement. By 1970s standards, his subject matter and aesthetic were equivalents of deadpan’s monotone. Who in their right mind would make the effort to take such a plain picture of a humdrum house?

Yet by adopting this style, Wessel encouraged audiences to pay greater attention to their immediate surroundings: to read front porches, carports and landscaping as evidence of people’s lifestyles and values. His photographs demonstrate the wealth of information that lurks in the mundane.

Why so serious?

Other photographers have marshaled deadpan to explore themes of identity and belonging.

Tseng Kwong Chi was a prominent personality in the East Village art scene in the 1980s and a friend of pop artist Keith Haring. In his landmark series of proto-selfies, “East Meets West,” the Hong Kong-born artist used a funny personal experience as the point of departure.

Dining at Windows on the World, the restaurant atop the North Tower of the World Trade Center, Tseng decided to wear a Zhongshan suit, or “Mao suit,” as it was known in the West, due to its association with the former Chinese leader Mao Zedong.

The restaurant’s staff treated him as a dignitary, inspiring Tseng to embark upon what ultimately became over 100 self-portraits in which he appeared in this guise of an “ambiguous ambassador.” In the series, Tseng appears in front of popular tourist destinations – Disneyland, Mount Rushmore, Cape Canaveral, Paramount Studios – but never cracks a smile. Goofy hams it up for the camera as Tseng’s suit and serious expression subvert the conventions of tourist snapshots.

In doing so, “East Meets West” deploys deadpan to tell a broader story about the search for belonging as an immigrant and a queer person of color.

Similarly, in his series “Entering Zig’s Indian Reservation,” Zig Jackson adopts a caricature-like persona to both mock and resist Native American stereotypes.

Jackson was the first member of his family to leave their reservation in North Dakota. He spent time in various western states before enrolling as a photography student at the San Francisco Art Institute in the early 1990s.

Early in his time there, as he went for a jog in the city’s sprawling Golden Gate Park, he heard grunting bison from the nearby paddock, a beloved San Francisco landmark since 1892. Jackson felt simultaneously at home and homesick, like he was “among relatives.”

Wearing a war bonnet, or feathered headdress – an item of regalia that is often appropriated by white people “playing Indian” – he returned to the site to “claim the buffalo as my own,” as he explained to me in an email.

In the image, Jackson meets the camera with an expressionless gaze, sitting next to a sign he made to mark his fictive reservation. This and other works from this series are deadpan: Jackson’s headdress registers as jarring with his street clothes, and the rules spelled out on the sign – including “NO PICTURE TAKING” and “NEW AGERS PROHIBITED” – read as tongue in cheek. But the photographs are also melancholy visualizations of feeling out of place.

The matter with fact

Sometimes I find myself wondering whether photography itself is inherently deadpan. It possesses a built-in bluntness that registers as absurd or confusing in certain contexts.

For her series “Skirts,” British conceptual artist Clare Strand rented banquet tables from a commercial catering company, covered them with linens and photographed them one by one. She then presented the images as a grid, as if they were specimens.

The viewer might initially assume that there is some sort of overarching narrative: Are they for a party? An award ceremony?

But Strand provides no answers. All dressed up with nowhere to go, the tables show that to photograph something is to transform it: In anointing an object, person or scene as worthy of being singled out, the photographer confers importance on it. From there, the viewer is left to fill in the blanks.

Scholar Heather Diack has argued that conceptual artists have subverted photography’s purported straightforwardness by making photographs that don’t simply copy or “capture” reality. Their work shows how photographs are anything but natural, literal or transparent.

Yet because people tend to associate photography with objectivity, it renders the medium ripe for deadpan humor – for crafting the appearance of a “straight face,” but with a wink.

Emilia Mickevicius 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. A straight face, with a wink – the subtle humor of deadpan photography – https://theconversation.com/a-straight-face-with-a-wink-the-subtle-humor-of-deadpan-photography-258454

Source: The Conversation – USA (3) – By Roy Scranton, Associate Professor of English, University of Notre Dame

No one uses “Malthusian” as a compliment. Since 1798, when the economist and cleric Thomas Malthus first published “An Essay on the Principles of Population,” the “Malthusian” position – the idea that humans are subject to natural limits – has been vilified and scorned. Today, the term is lobbed at anyone who dares question the optimism of infinite progress.

Unfortunately, almost everything most people think they know about Malthus is wrong.

The story goes like this: Once upon a time, an English country parson came up with the idea that population increases at a “geometrical” rate, while food production increases at an “arithmetical” rate. That is, population doubles every 25 years, while crop yields increase much more slowly. Over time, such divergence must lead to catastrophe.

But Malthus identified two factors that reduced reproduction and held off disaster: moral codes, or what he called “preventative checks,” and “positive checks,” such as extreme poverty, pollution, war, disease and misogyny. In the all-too-common caricature, Malthus was a narrow-minded clergyman who was bad at math and thought the only solution to hunger was to keep poor people poor so they had fewer babies.

Understanding Malthus in a broader context reveals a very different character. As I discuss in my 2025 book “Impasse: Climate Change and the Limits of Progress,” Malthus was an innovative and insightful thinker. Not only was he one of the founding figures of environmental economics, but he also turned out to be a prophetic critic of the belief that history tends toward human improvement, which we call progress.

God and science

On the topic of progress, Malthus knew what he was talking about.

He was raised and educated by dissenters: progressivist English Protestants who advocated the separation of church and state. He was taught by the radical abolitionist Gilbert Wakefield, and his father was a friend and admirer of the Enlightenment philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose ideas helped inspire the French Revolution.

Despite struggling with a cleft palate, Malthus distinguished himself at Cambridge, where he studied applied math, history and geography. Going into the clergy was a common choice for educated young men of middling means, and Malthus was able to secure a parsonage in Wotton, Surrey. But that didn’t mean giving up his interest in social science.

“An Essay on the Principle of Population” was shaped by Malthus’ theological views, but it is also a deeply empirical work and became more so as he revised it in later editions. His argument about geometrical and arithmetical growth rates, for instance, was based on the rapid population growth witnessed in the American Colonies.

It was also based on what he saw happening around him in Britain. Over the final decades of the 18th century, Britain was wracked by repeated food shortages and riots. The population rose from 5.9 million to 8.7 million, an increase of almost 50%, while agricultural production lagged. In 1795, hungry Londoners mobbed King George III’s coach demanding bread.

Boundless optimism

But why was Malthus talking about population in the first place? As Malthus himself explains, his essay was inspired by an argument with a friend about the journalist and novelist William Godwin – best known today as the father of Mary Shelley, author of “Frankenstein.”

Malthus and Godwin had similar backgrounds. Both came from dissenting middle-class families, were educated in progressive schools and began their careers as ministers. But Godwin’s extreme radicalism put him at odds even with his fellow dissenters, and he soon left the pulpit to take up the pen.

The book that made Godwin’s name and provoked Malthus was “An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice,” published in 1793. Today, it is considered a founding text of philosophical anarchism. Originally, however, Godwin’s “Enquiry” was seen as a thunderous articulation of Enlightenment progressivism.

Godwin argued that all social problems could be eliminated by reason’s proper application. He advocated abolishing marriage, redistributing property and eliminating government. What’s more, he asserted that progress led inevitably to a utopian world, where humans will no longer have to reproduce because we’ll be immortal:

“There will be no war, no crimes, no administration of justice as it is called, and no government. … But beside this, there will be no disease, no anguish, no melancholy and no resentment. Every man will seek with ineffable ardour the good of all.”

Such things would come about in due time, Godwin assured his readers, solely through the spread of rational discussion.

From his poverty-stricken parsonage in Wotton, Malthus saw things differently. Historian Robert Mayhew describes Wotton at the time as an industrial wasteland afflicted by “agrarian poverty … high birth rates and short life spans.” Studying history led Malthus to conclude that societies moved not in an ever-ascending line of progress but in cycles of expansion and decline. Godwin’s utopian story didn’t seem to match the evidence.

Reform – within reason

Malthus aimed to puncture Godwin’s grandiloquent progressivism. But he wasn’t saying positive change was impossible, only that it was limited by the laws of nature.

“An Essay on the Principles of Population” was his attempt to ascertain where some of those limits might lie, so that policy could respond to social problems effectively, rather than exacerbating them by trying to achieve the impossible. As a writer and active member of the Whig Party, Malthus was a reformer who advocated free national education, the extension of suffrage, the abolition of slavery and free medical care for the poor, among other programs.

Since then, science and industry have made incredible advances, leading to changes Malthus would have scarcely found credible. When his essay was published, the global human population was around 800 million. Today it is over 8 billion, a tenfold increase in little more than two centuries.

Over that time, proponents of progress have scorned the idea that humans are subject to natural limits and denigrated anyone who questioned the fantasy of infinite growth
as “Malthusian.” Yet Malthus remains important because his pessimistic account of society so clearly articulates an insight that refuses to be repressed: The laws of nature apply to human society.

Indeed, “the Great Acceleration” in human development and impact over the past 80 years may have pushed society to the breaking point. Scientists warn that we’ve exceeded six of the nine boundary conditions for sustainable human life on Earth and are close to exceeding a seventh.

One of those conditions is a stable climate. Global warming threatens to not only raise sea levels, increase wildfires and supercharge storms, but also amplify drought and disrupt global agriculture.

Malthus may not have foreseen the developments that fueled human growth over the past two centuries. But his fundamental insight into the limits of growth has only become more relevant. As we face accelerating global ecological crisis, it may be time to revisit the pessimistic idea that we live in a world with limits. Reconsidering what we mean by “Malthusian” might be a good place to start.

Roy Scranton received funding from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

– ref. Misunderstood Malthus: The English thinker whose name is synonymous with doom and gloom has lessons for today – https://theconversation.com/misunderstood-malthus-the-english-thinker-whose-name-is-synonymous-with-doom-and-gloom-has-lessons-for-today-263101

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Tatishe Nteta, Provost Professor of Political Science and Director of the UMass Amherst Poll, UMass Amherst

Has President Donald Trump survived the latest and most serious firestorm of controversy over the Epstein scandal? Or has the Trump administration’s handling of the release of information concerning the prosecution of Jeffrey Epstein, a convicted child sex trafficker and Trump’s former friend, hurt the president?

A number of journalists, pointing to recent public opinion polls, have claimed that the scandal has hurt Trump. Others have argued that the public has largely moved on and the Epstein controversy no longer presents a political liability for Trump.

But both of these conclusions are based on limited polling about the Epstein controversy and thus may be premature.

Our recent University of Massachusetts Amherst national poll includes particularly detailed questions about the Epstein controversy and attitudes toward Trump, and thus provides fresh insights on how the controversy has affected public support for Trump.

We find that Trump’s handling of the Epstein controversy has done significant damage to his standing, particularly among his core supporters.

Trump ‘fumbling the matter’

Americans are paying close attention to the prolonged Epstein controversy. Our polling finds that 3 in 4 respondents have heard, read or seen “a lot” or “some” about Epstein.

Moreover, most believe that Trump is fumbling the matter.

Seven in 10 Americans believe that Trump is handling the matter “not well.” This includes pluralities of Trump’s most loyal supporters, 43% of Republicans, 43% of conservatives, and 47% of those who voted for him in 2024.

When we drill down on the 47% of 2024 Trump voters who disapprove of Trump’s handling of the Epstein controversy, we find significant cracks in the MAGA facade. Among members of this group, 28% now disapprove of Trump as president.

When we take demographics, ideology, partisanship and assessments of the economy into account, disapproval of Trump’s handling of the release of the Epstein files is still associated with an increase in disapproval of Trump.

Voter regret

Even more significantly, we find that among 2024 Trump voters, negative views of Trump’s handling of the Epstein files are associated with an increased desire to make a different choice if the 2024 election could be rerun.

More specifically, among Trump voters who believe that the president has mishandled the release of the Epstein files, more than one quarter – 26% – indicate that they would not vote for Trump if they had the opportunity to vote again in the 2024 election.

While there are no election do-overs, it is clear that the Epstein scandal has hurt Trump among his base of voters.

Much can happen between now and the midterm elections in November 2026, of course.

But if Trump fails to satisfy his political base, perceptions among Trump voters that he has mishandled the controversy could reduce enthusiasm and participation in the elections. Even if the share of Republicans alienated by the Epstein controversy is relatively small, this could hurt Republicans in close contests.

With over a year to go, the facts on the ground will likely change. But as of today, the controversy over the release of the Epstein files remains relevant. Whether the president responds in a manner that satisfies his voters is a question that could have important political consequences.

Jesse Rhodes receives funding from the National Science Foundation, the Spencer Foundation, and Demos. He is a member of the American Civil Liberties Union.

Adam Eichen, Alexander Theodoridis, Raymond La Raja, and Tatishe Nteta 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. Trump’s Epstein problem is real: New poll shows many in his base disapprove of his handling of the files, and some supporters are having second thoughts about electing him – https://theconversation.com/trumps-epstein-problem-is-real-new-poll-shows-many-in-his-base-disapprove-of-his-handling-of-the-files-and-some-supporters-are-having-second-thoughts-about-electing-him-263662