Category: The Conversation – USA

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Marc Zimmer, Professor of Chemistry, Connecticut College

Despite representing only 4% of the world’s population, the United States accounts for over half of science Nobel Prizes awarded since 2000, hosts seven of The Times Higher Education Top 10 science universities, and incubates firms such as Alphabet (Google), Meta and Pfizer that turn federally funded discoveries into billion-dollar markets.

The domestic STEM talent pool alone cannot sustain this research output. The U.S. is reliant on a steady and strong influx of foreign scientists – a brain gain. In 2021, foreign-born people constituted 43% of doctorate-level scientists and engineers in the U.S. They make up a significant share of America’s elite researchers: Since 2000, 37 of the 104 U.S. Nobel laureates in the hard sciences, more than a third, were born outside the country.

China, the U.S.’s largest competitor in science, technology, engineering and math endeavors, has a population that is 4.1 times larger than that of the U.S. and so has a larger pool of homegrown talent. Each year, three times as many Chinese citizens (77,000) are awarded STEM Ph.D.s as American citizens (23,000).

To remain preeminent, the U.S. will need to keep attracting exceptional foreign graduate students, budding entrepreneurs and established scientific leaders.

Funding and visa policies could flip gain to drain

This scientific brain gain is being threatened by the Trump administration, which is using federal research funding, scholarships and fellowships as leverage against universities, freezing billions of dollars in grants and contracts to force compliance with its ideological agenda. Its ad hoc approach has been described by higher education leaders as “unprecedented and deeply disturbing,” and a Reagan-appointed judge ruled that 400 National Institutes of Health grants be reinstated because their terminations were “bereft of reasoning, virtually in their entirety.”

Experts caution that these moves not only risk immediate harm to scientific progress and academic freedom but also erode the public’s trust in science and education, with long-term implications for the nation’s prosperity and security.

Citing national security concerns, the White House has also targeted visas for Harvard University’s international students and instructed embassies worldwide to halt visa interviews for all international students, citing national security and alleged institutional misconduct. Against a backdrop of court injunctions and legal appeals, the government continues its heightened “national-security” vetting, so thousands of international scholars remain in limbo.

These measures, combined with travel bans, intensified scrutiny and revocations of existing visas, have disrupted research collaborations and threaten the nation’s continued status as a global leader in science and innovation.

What US misses with fewer foreign scientists

The U.S. research brain gain starts with the 281,000 foreign STEM graduate students and 38,000 foreign STEM postdoctoral scholars who annually come to the U.S. I am one of them. After earning my bachelor’s and master’s degrees in South Africa, I left in 1986 to avoid the apartheid‑era military service, completed my chemistry doctorate and postdoc in the U.S., and joined the United States’ brain gain. It’s an opportunity today’s visa climate might have denied me.

Incentives for the best and brightest foreign science students to come to the U.S. are diminishing at the same time its competitors are increasing their efforts to attract the strongest STEM researchers. For instance, the University of Hong Kong is courting stranded Harvard students with dedicated scholarships, housing and credit-transfer help. A French university program, Safe Place for Science, drew so many American job applicants that it had to shut the portal early. And a Portuguese institute reports a tenfold surge in inquiries from U.S.-based junior faculty.

Immigrants import new ways of thinking to their research labs. They come from other cultures and have learned their science in different educational systems, which place different emphases on rote learning, historical understanding and interdisciplinary research. They often bring an alternative perspective that a homogeneous scientific community cannot match.

Immigrants also help move discoveries from the lab to the marketplace. Foreign-born inventors file patents at a higher per‑capita rate than their domestic peers and are 80% more likely to launch a company. Such firms create roughly 50% more jobs than enterprises founded by native-born entrepreneurs and pay wages that are, on average, one percentage point higher.

The economic stakes are high. Growth models suggest that scientific advances now account for a majority of productivity gains in high‑income countries.

L. Rafael Reif, the former president of MIT, called international talent the “oxygen” of U.S. innovation; restricting visas chokes that supply. Ongoing cuts and uncertainties in federal funding and visa policy now jeopardize America’s scientific leadership and with it the nation’s long‑term economic growth.

Marc Zimmer received funding from NIH and NSF.

– ref. Turbulent research landscape imperils US brain gain − and ultimately American prosperity – https://theconversation.com/turbulent-research-landscape-imperils-us-brain-gain-and-ultimately-american-prosperity-258537

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Lisa Schirch, Professor of the Practice of Peace Studies, University of Notre Dame

Every design choice that social media platforms make nudges users toward certain actions, values and emotional states.

It is a design choice to offer a news feed that combines verified news sources with conspiracy blogs – interspersed with photos of a family picnic – with no distinction between these very different types of information. It is a design choice to use algorithms that find the most emotional or outrageous content to show users, hoping it keeps them online. And it is a design choice to send bright red notifications, keeping people in a state of expectation for the next photo or juicy piece of gossip.

Platform design is a silent pilot steering human behavior.

Social media platforms are bringing massive changes to how people get their news and how they communicate and behave. For example, the “endless scroll” is a design feature that aims to keep users scrolling and never reaching the bottom of a page where they might decide to pause.

I’m a political scientist who researches aspects of technology that support democracy and social cohesion, and I’ve observed how the design of social media platforms affects them.

Democracy is in crisis globally, and technology is playing a role. Most large platforms optimize their designs for profit, not community or democracy. Increasingly, Big Tech is siding with autocrats, and the platforms’ designs help keep society under control.

There are alternatives, however. Some companies design online platforms to defend democratic values.

Optimized for profit

A handful of tech billionaires dominate the global information ecosystem. Without public accountability or oversight, they determine what news shows up on your feed and what data they collect and share.

Social media companies say they are in the business of connecting people, but they make most of their money as data brokers and advertising firms. Time spent on platforms translates to profit. The more time you spend online, the more ads you see and the more data they can collect from you.

This ad-based business model demands designs that encourage endless scrolling, social comparison and emotional engagement. Platforms routinely claim they merely reflect user behavior, yet internal documents and whistleblower accounts have shown that toxic content often gets a boost because it captures people’s attention.

Tech companies design platforms based on extensive psychological research. Examples include flashing notifications that make your phone jump and squeak, colorful rewards when others like your posts, and algorithms that push out the most emotional content to stimulate your most base emotions of anger, shame or glee.

Optimizing designs for user engagement undermines mental health and society. Social media sites favor hype and scandal over factual accuracy, and public manipulation over designing for safety, privacy and user agency. The resulting prevalence of polarizing false and deceptive information is corrosive to democracy.

Many analysts identified these problems nearly a decade ago. But now there is a new threat: Some tech executives are looking to capture political power to advance a new era of techno-autocracy.

Optimized for political power

A techno-autocracy is a political system where an authoritarian government uses technology to control its population. Techno-autocrats spread disinformation and propaganda, using fear tactics to demonize others and distract from corruption. They leverage massive amounts of data, artificial intelligence and surveillance to censor opponents.

For example, China uses technology to monitor and surveil its population with public cameras. Chinese platforms like WeChat and Weibo automatically scan, block or delete messages and posts for sensitive words like “freedom of speech.” Russia promotes domestic platforms like VK that are closely monitored and partly owned by state-linked entities that use it to promote political propaganda.

Over a decade ago, tech billionaires like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, and now Vice President JD Vance, began aligning with far-right political philosophers like Curtis Yarvin. They argue that democracy impedes innovation, favoring concentrated decision-making in corporate-controlled mini-states governed through surveillance. Embracing this philosophy of techno-autocracy, they moved from funding and designing the internet to reshaping government.

Techno-autocrats weaponize social media platforms as part of their plan to dismantle democratic institutions.

The political capture of both X and Meta also have consequences for global security. At Meta, Mark Zuckerberg removed barriers to right-wing propaganda and openly endorsed President Donald Trump’s agenda. Musk changed X’s algorithm to highlight right-wing content, including Russian propaganda.

Designing tech for democracy

Recognizing the power that platform design has on society, some companies are designing new civic participation platforms that support rather than undermine society’s access to verified information and places for public deliberation. These platforms offer design features that big tech companies could adopt for improving democratic engagement that can help counter techno-autocracy.

In 2014, a group of technologists founded Pol.is, an open-source technology for hosting public deliberation that leverages data science. Pol.is enables participants to propose and vote on policy ideas using what they call “computational democracy.” The Pol.is design avoids personal attacks by having no “reply” button. It offers no flashy newsfeed, and it uses algorithms that identify areas of agreement and disagreement to help people make sense of a diversity of opinions. A prompt question asks for people to offer ideas and vote up or down on other ideas. People participate anonymously, helping to keep the focus on the issues and not the people.

Taiwan used the Pol.is platform to enable mass civic engagement in the 2014 democracy movement. The U.K. government’s Collective Intelligence Lab used the platform to generate public discussion and generate new policy proposals on climate and health care policies. In Finland, a public foundation called Sitra uses Pol.is in its “What do you think, Finland?” public dialogues.

Barcelona, Spain, designed a new participatory democracy platform called Decidim in 2017. Now used throughout Spain and Europe, Decidim enables citizens to collaboratively propose, debate and decide on public policies and budgets through transparent digital processes.

Nobel Peace Laureate Maria Ressa founded Rappler Communities in 2023, a social network in the Philippines that combines journalism, community and technology. It aims to restore trust in institutions by providing safe spaces for exchanging ideas and connecting with neighbors, journalists and civil society groups. Rappler Communities offers the public data privacy and portability, meaning you can take your information – like photos, contacts or messages – from one app or platform and transfer it to another. These design features are not available on the major social media platforms.

Tech designed for improving public dialogue is possible – and can even work in the middle of a war zone. In 2024, the Alliance for Middle East Peace began using Remesh.ai, an AI-based platform, to find areas of common ground between Israelis and Palestinians in order to advance the idea of a public peace process and identify elements of a ceasefire agreement.

Platform designs are a form of social engineering to achieve some sort of goal – because they shape how people behave, think and interact – often invisibly. Designing more and better platforms to support democracy can be an antidote to the wave of global autocracy that is increasingly bolstered by tech platforms that tighten public control.

Lisa Schirch receives funding from the Ford Foundation. I know the founder of Pol.is and Remesh platforms, mentioned in this article, as well as Maria Ressa of Rappler Communities.

I will not benefit in any way from describing their work.

– ref. Social media can support or undermine democracy – it comes down to how it’s designed – https://theconversation.com/social-media-can-support-or-undermine-democracy-it-comes-down-to-how-its-designed-257103

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) – By Susanne Schindler, Research Fellow at the Joint Center for Housing Studies, Harvard Kennedy School

Seattle astounded housing advocates around the country in February 2025, when roughly two-thirds of voters approved a ballot initiative proposing a new 5% payroll tax on salaries in excess of US$1 million.

The expected revenue – estimated to amount to $52 million dollars annually – would go toward funding a public development authority named Seattle Social Housing, which would then build and maintain permanently affordable homes.

The city has experienced record high rents and home prices over the past two decades, attributed in part to the high incomes and relatively low taxes paid by tech firms like Amazon. Prior attempts to make these companies do their part to keep the city affordable have had mixed results.

So despite nationwide, bipartisan skepticism of government and tax increases, Seattle’s voters showed that in light of a severe affordability crisis, a new role for the public sector and a new, dedicated fiscal revenue stream for housing were not only necessary, but possible.

As a trained architect and urban historian, I study how capitalist societies have embraced – or rejected – housing that’s permanently shielded from market forces and what that means for architecture and urban design.

To me, Seattle’s social housing initiative shows that the country’s traditional, “either-or” housing model – of unregulated, market-rate housing versus tightly regulated, income-restricted affordable housing – has reached its limits.

Social housing promises a different path forward.

The rise of the ‘two-tiered’ system

After World War I, amid a similarly dire housing crisis, journalist Catherine Bauer traveled to Europe and learned about the continent’s social housing programs.

She publicized her findings in the 1934 book “Modern Housing,” in which she advocated for housing that would be permanently shielded from the private real estate market. High-quality design was central to her argument. (The book was reissued in 2020, reflecting a renewed hunger for her ideas.)

Early New Deal programs supported “limited-dividend,” or nonprofit, housing sponsored by civic organizations such as labor unions. The Carl Mackley Houses in Philadelphia exemplified this approach: The government provided low-interest loans to the American Federation of Full-Fashioned Hosiery Workers, which then constructed housing for its workers with rents set at affordable rates. The complex was built with community rooms and a swimming pool for its residents.

However, the 1937 U.S. Housing Act omitted this form of middle-income housing. Instead, the federal government chose to support public rental housing for low-income Americans and private homeownership, with little in between.

Historian Gail Radford has aptly termed this a “two-tiered system,” and it was problematic from the start.

Funding for public housing in the U.S. – as well as for its successor, private-sector-built affordable housing – has always been capped in ways that fall far short of demand, with access to the homes largely restricted to households with the lowest incomes. Private-sector-built affordable housing depends on dangling tax credits for private investors, and rent restrictions can expire.

While the U.S. promoted this two-tiered system, cities like Vienna pursued a different path.

In Austria’s culturally vibrant capital, today half of all dwellings are permanently removed from the private market. Roughly 80% of households qualify to live in them. The buildings take a range of forms, are located in all neighborhoods, and are built and operated as rental or cooperative housing either by the city or by nonprofit developers.

Rents do not rise and fall according to household income, but are instead set to cover capital and operation expenses. These are kept low thanks to long-term, low-interest loans. These loans are funded through a nationwide 1% payroll tax, split evenly between employers and employees. Renters also make a down payment, priced in relation to the size and age of the apartment, which keeps monthly rents down. To guarantee access to low-cost land, the municipality has pursued an active land acquisition policy since the 1980s.

Housing shielded from the private market

The inequities created by the two-tiered system – along with the absence of viable options for moderate- and middle-income households – are what social housing advocates in the U.S. are trying to address today.

In 2018, the think tank People’s Policy Project published what was likely the first 21st-century report advocating for social housing in the U.S., citing Vienna as a model.

Across the U.S., social housing is being used to describe a range of programs, from limited equity cooperatives and community land trusts to public housing.

They all share a few underlying principles, however.

First and foremost, social housing calls for permanently shielding homes from the private real estate market, often referred to as “permanent affordability.” This usually means public investment in housing and public ownership of it. Second, unlike the ways in which public housing has traditionally operated in the U.S., most social housing programs aim to serve households across a broader range of incomes. The goal is to create housing that is both financially sustainable and appealing to broad swaths of the electorate. Third, social housing aspires to give residents more control over the governance of their homes.

Social housing doesn’t all look the same. But thoughtful design is key to its success. It’s built to be owned and operated in the long-term, not for short-term financial gain. Construction quality matters, and developers realize it needs to be appealing to a range of tenants with different needs.

Early successes

In recent years, there have been significant wins for the social housing movement at the state and local levels.

In 2023, Atlanta created a new quasi-public entity to co-develop mixed-income housing on city-owned land. In 2024, Rhode Island voters and the Massachusetts legislature funded pilot projects to test public investment in social housing. And 2025 has seen the the passage of Chicago’s Green Social Housing ordinance.

Many of these programs were directly inspired by affordable housing initiatives in Montgomery County, Maryland.

Since 2021, the county’s housing authority has used a $100 million housing fund to invest in new mixed-income developments. Through these investments, the county retains co-ownership and has been able to bring down the cost of development enough to offer 30% of homes at significantly below market rents, in perpetuity. If Vienna is the global paragon for social housing, Montgomery County has become its domestic counterpart.

In Seattle, social housing will mean homes delivered and permanently owned by Seattle Social Housing, which is funded through the payroll tax on high incomes. The initiative envisions developments featuring a range of apartment sizes to meet the needs of different family sizes, built to high energy-efficiency standards. Homes will be available to households earning up to 120% of area median income, with residents paying no more than 30% of their income on rent. In Seattle, that means that a single-person household making up to $120,000 will qualify.

Ongoing debates

Despite these successes, many Americans remain skeptical of social housing.

Sign up for a webinar on the topic, and you’ll hear participants question the term itself. Isn’t it far too “socialist” to be broadly adopted in the U.S.? And isn’t this just “old wine in new bottles”?

Join a housing task force, and established nonprofits will be the ones to push back, arguing that they already know how to build and manage housing, and that all they need is money.

Some housing activists also question whether using scarce public dollars to pay for mixed-income housing will yet again shortchange those who most need governmental assistance – namely, the poor. Others point to the need to provide more ways to build intergenerational wealth, especially for racial minorities, who have historically faced barriers to homeownership.

Urban planner Jonathan Tarleton has highlighted another important issue: the danger of social housing reverting over time to private ownership, as has been the case with some cooperatives in New York City. Tarleton stresses the need for “social maintenance” – the importance of telling and retelling the story of whom social housing is meant to serve.

These debates raise important questions. Social housing may be a confusing term and an aspirational concept. But it is here to stay: It has galvanized organizers and policymakers around a new approach to the design, development and maintenance of housing.

Social housing keeps prices down through long-term public investment, ensuring that future generations will still benefit. Developers can design and provide homes that respond to how people want to live. And in an increasingly polarized country, social housing will allow people of various backgrounds, incomes and ideological persuasions to live together again, rather than apart.

Whether it’s the kind found in Seattle, in Maryland or somewhere in between, I believe social housing is needed more than ever before to address the country’s twin problems of affordability and a lack of political imagination.

This article is part of a series centered on envisioning ways to deal with the housing crisis.

Susanne Schindler receives funding from Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies.

– ref. From Seattle to Atlanta, new social housing programs seek to make homes permanently affordable for a range of incomes – https://theconversation.com/from-seattle-to-atlanta-new-social-housing-programs-seek-to-make-homes-permanently-affordable-for-a-range-of-incomes-255097

Source: The Conversation – USA (3) – By Shaon Lahiri, Assistant Professor of Public Health, College of Charleston

In 2019, a rare and shocking event in the Malaysian peninsula town of Ketereh grabbed international headlines. Nearly 40 girls age 12 to 18 from a religious school had been screaming inconsolably, claiming to have seen a “face of pure evil,” complete with images of blood and gore.

Experts believe that the girls suffered what is known as a mass psychogenic illness, a psychological condition that results in physical symptoms and spreads socially – much like a virus.

I’m a social and behavioral scientist within the field of public health. I study the ways in which individual behavior is influenced by prevailing social norms and social network processes, across a wide range of behaviors and contexts. Part of my work involves figuring out how to combat the spread of harmful content that can shape our behavior for the worse, such as misinformation.

Mass psychogenic illness is not misinformation, but it gives researchers like me some idea about how misinformation spreads. Social connections establish pathways of influence that can facilitate the spread of germs, mental illness and even behaviors. We can be profoundly influenced by others within our social networks, for better or for worse.

The spreading of social norms

Researchers in my field think of social norms as perceptions of how common and how approved a specific behavior is within a specific network of people who matter to us.

These perceptions may not always reflect reality, such as when people overestimate or underestimate how common their viewpoint is within a group. But they can influence our behavior nonetheless. For many, perception is reality.

Social norms and related behaviors can spread through social networks like a virus can, but with one crucial caveat. Viruses often require just one contact with a potential host to spread, whereas behaviors often require multiple contacts to spread. This phenomenon, known as complex contagion, highlights how socially learned behaviors take time to embed.

Fiction spreads faster than fact

Consider a familiar scenario: the return of baggy jeans to the fashion zeitgeist.

For many millennials like me, you may react to a friend engaging in this resurrected trend by cringing and lightly teasing them. Yet, after seeing them don those denim parachutes on multiple occasions, a brazen thought may emerge: “Hmm, maybe they don’t look that bad. I could probably pull those off.” That’s complex contagion at work.

This dynamic is even more evident on social media. One of my former students expressed this succinctly. She was looking at an Instagram post about Astro Boy Boots – red, oversize boots based on those worn by a 1952 Japanese cartoon character. Her initial skepticism quickly faded upon reading the comments. As she put it, “I thought they were ugly at first, but after reading the comments, I guess they’re kind of fire.”

Moving from innocuous examples, consider the spread of misinformation on social media. Misinformation is false information that is spread unintentionally, while disinformation is false information that is intentionally disseminated to deceive or do serious harm.

Research shows that both misinformation and disinformation spread faster and farther than truth online. This means that before people can muster the resources to debunk the false information that has seeped into their social networks, they may have already lost the race. Complex contagion may have taken hold, in a malicious way, and begun spreading falsehood throughout the network at a rapid pace.

People spread false information for various reasons, such as to advance their personal agenda or narrative, which can lead to echo chambers that filter out accurate information contrary to one’s own views. Even when people do not intend to spread false information online, doing so tends to happen because of a lack of attention paid to accuracy or lower levels of digital media literacy.

Inoculation against social contagion

So how much can people do about this?

One way to combat harmful contagion is to draw on an idea first used in the 1960s called pre-bunking. The idea is to train people to practice skills to spot and resist misinformation and disinformation on a smaller scale before they’re exposed to the real thing.

The idea is akin to vaccines that build immunity through exposure to a weakened form of the disease-causing germ. The idea is for someone to be exposed to a limited amount of false information, say through the pre-bunking with Google quiz. They then learn to spot common manipulation tactics used in false information and learn how to resist their influence with evidence-based strategies to counter the falsehoods. This could also be done using a trained facilitator within classrooms, workplaces or other groups, including virtual communities.

Then, the idea is to gradually repeat the process with larger doses of false information and further counterarguments. By role-playing and practicing the counterarguments, this resistance skills training provides a sort of psychological innoculation against misinformation and disinformation, at least temporarily.

Importantly, this approach is intended for someone who has not yet been exposed to false information – hence, pre-bunking rather than debunking. If we want to engage with someone who firmly believes in their stance, particularly when it runs contrary to our own, behavioral scientists recommend leading with empathy and nonjudgmentally exchanging narratives.

Debunking is difficult work, however, and even strong debunking messages can result in the persistence of misinformation. You may not change the other person’s mind, but you may be able to engage in a civil discussion and avoid pushing them further away from your position.

Spreading facts, not fiction

When everyday people apply this with their friends and loved ones, they can train people to recognize the telltale signs of false information. This might be recognizing what’s known as a false dichotomy – for instance, “either you support this bill or you HATE our country.”

Another signal of false information is the common tactic of scapegoating: “Oil industry faces collapse due to rise in electric car ownership.” And another is the slippery slope of logical fallacy. An example is “legalization of marijuana will lead to everyone using heroin.”

All of these are examples of common tactics that spread misinformation and come from a Practical Guide to Pre-Bunking Misinformation, created by a collaborative team from the University of Cambridge, BBC Media Action and Jigsaw, an interdisciplinary think tank within Google.

This approach is not only effective in combating misinformation and disinformation, but also in delaying or preventing the onset of harmful behaviors. My own research suggests that pre-bunking can be used effectively to delay the initiation of tobacco use among adolescents. But it only works with regular “booster shots” of training, or the effect fades away in a matter of months or less.

Many researchers like me who study these social contagion dynamics don’t yet know the best way to keep these “booster shots” going in people’s lives. But there are recent studies showing that it can be done. A promising line of research also suggests that a group-based approach can be effective in maintaining the pre-bunking effects to achieve psychological herd immunity. Personally, I would bet my money on group-based approaches where you, your friends or your family can mutually reinforce each other’s capacity to resist harmful social norms entering your network.

Simply put, if multiple members of your social network have strong resistance skills, then your group has a better chance of resisting the incursion of harmful norms and behaviors into your network than if it’s just you resisting alone. Other people matter.

In the end, whether we’re empowering people to resist the insidious creep of online falsehoods or equipping adolescents to stand firm against peer pressure to smoke or use other substances, the research is clear: Resistance skills training can provide an essential weapon for safeguarding ourselves and young people from harmful behaviors.

Shaon Lahiri 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. Misinformation lends itself to social contagion – here’s how to recognize and combat it – https://theconversation.com/misinformation-lends-itself-to-social-contagion-heres-how-to-recognize-and-combat-it-254298

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) – By Abigail Bishop, Ph.D. Student in Physics, University of Wisconsin-Madison

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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Are people on the South Pole walking upside down from the rest of the world? – Ralph P., U.S.

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When I was standing at the South Pole, I felt the same way I feel anywhere on Earth because my feet were still on the ground and the sky was still overhead.

I’m an astrophysicist from Wisconsin who lived at the South Pole for seven weeks from December 2024 to January 2025 to work on an array of detectors looking for extremely high energy particles from outer space.

I didn’t feel upside down, but there were some differences that still made the South Pole feel flipped over from what I was used to.

As someone who loves looking for the Moon, I noticed that the face of the man on the Moon was flipped over, like he went from 🙂 to 🙃. All the craters that I was used to seeing on the top of the Moon from Wisconsin were now on the bottom – because I was looking at the Moon from the Southern Hemisphere instead of the Northern Hemisphere.

After noticing this difference, I remembered something similar in the night skies of New Zealand, a country near Antarctica where my fellow travelers and I got our big red coats that kept us warm at the South Pole. I had looked for Orion, a constellation that in the Northern Hemisphere is viewed as a hunter holding a bow and drawing an arrow from his quiver. In the night sky of New Zealand, Orion looked like he was doing a handstand.

Everything in the sky felt upside down and opposite, compared with what I was used to. A person who lives in the Southern Hemisphere might feel the same about visiting the Arctic or the North Pole.

An out-of-this-world perspective

To understand what’s happening, and why things are really different but also feel very much the same, it might be useful to back up a bit from Earth’s surface. Like into outer space. On space missions to the Moon, astronauts could see one side of the Earth’s sphere at once.

If they had superhero vision, an astronaut would see the people at the South Pole and North Pole standing upside down from each other. And a person at the equator would look like they were sticking straight out the side of the planet. In fact, even though they might be standing on the equator, people in Colombia and Indonesia would also look like they were upside down from each other, because they would be sticking out from opposite sides of the Earth.

Of course, if you asked each person, they would say, “My feet are on the ground, and the sky is up.”

That’s because Earth is essentially a really big ball whose gravitational pull on every one of us points to the center of the planet. The direction that Earth pulls us in is what people call “down” all over the planet. Think about holding a baseball between your pointer fingers. From the perspective of your fingertips on the ball’s surface, both are pointing “down.” But from the perspective of a friend nearby, your fingers are pointing in different directions – though always toward the center of the ball.

These relationships between people on the Earth’s surface are good for a little bit of fun, though. While I was at the South Pole, I pointed my body in the same direction as my friends in Wisconsin – by doing a handstand. But if you look at the picture the other way around, it looks like I’m holding up the entire planet, like Superman.

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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.

Abigail Bishop receives funding from National Science Foundation Award 2013134 and has received funding from the Belgian American Education Foundation.

– ref. Are people at the South Pole upside down? – https://theconversation.com/are-people-at-the-south-pole-upside-down-256754

Source: The Conversation – USA (3) – By Lauren S. Hughes, State Policy Director, Farley Health Policy Center; Associate Professor of Family Medicine, University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus

The public health provisions in the massive spending package that President Donald Trump signed into law on July 4, 2025, will reduce Medicaid spending by more than US$1 trillion over a decade and result in an estimated 11.8 million people losing health insurance coverage.

As researchers studying rural health and health policy, we anticipate that these reductions in Medicaid spending, along with changes to the Affordable Care Act, will disproportionately affect the 66 million people living in rural America – nearly 1 in 5 Americans.

People who live in rural areas are more likely to have health insurance through Medicaid and are at greater risk of losing that coverage. We expect that the changes brought about by this new law will lead to a rise in unpaid care that hospitals will have to provide. As a result, small, local hospitals will have to make tough decisions that include changing or eliminating services, laying off staff and delaying the purchase of new equipment. Many rural hospitals will have to reduce their services or possibly close their doors altogether.

Hits to rural health

The budget legislation’s biggest effect on rural America comes from changes to the Medicaid program, which represent the largest federal rollback of health insurance coverage in the U.S. to date.

First, the legislation changes how states can finance their share of the Medicaid program by restricting where funds states use to support their Medicaid programs can come from. This bill limits how states can tax and charge fees to hospitals, managed care organizations and other health care providers, and how they can use such taxes and fees in the future to pay higher rates to providers under Medicaid. These limitations will reduce payments to rural hospitals that depend upon Medicaid to keep their doors open.

Second, by 2027, states must institute work requirements that demand most Medicaid enrollees work 80 hours per month or be in school at least half time. Arkansas’ brief experiment with work requirements in 2018 demonstrates that rather than boost employment, the policy increases bureaucracy, hindering access to health care benefits for eligible people. States will also now be required to verify Medicaid eligibility every six months versus annually. That change also increases the risk people will lose coverage due to extra red tape.

The Congressional Budget Office estimates that work requirements instituted through this legislative package will result in nearly 5 million people losing Medicaid coverage. This will decrease the number of paying patients at rural hospitals and increase the unpaid care hospitals must provide, further damaging their ability to stay open.

Additionally, the bill changes how people qualify for the premium tax credits within the Affordable Care Act Marketplace. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that this change, along with other changes to the ACA such as fewer and shorter enrollment periods and additional requirements for documenting income, will reduce the number of people insured through the ACA Marketplace by about 3 million by 2034. Premium tax credits were expanded during the COVID-19 pandemic, helping millions of Americans obtain coverage who previously struggled to do so. This bill lets these expanded tax credits expire, which with may result in an additional 4.2 million people becoming uninsured.

An insufficient stop-gap

Senators from both sides of the aisle have voiced concerns about the legislative package’s potential effects on the financial stability of rural hospitals and frontier hospitals, which are facilities located in remote areas with fewer than six people per square mile. As a result, the Senate voted to set aside $50 billion over the next five years for a newly created Rural Health Transformation Program.

These funds are to be allocated in two ways. Half will be directly distributed equally to states that submit an application that includes a rural health transformation plan detailing how rural hospitals will improve the delivery and quality of health care. The remainder will be distributed to states in varying amounts through a process that is currently unknown.

While additional funding to support rural health facilities is welcome, how it is distributed and how much is available will be critical. Estimates suggest that rural areas will see a reduction of $155 billion in federal spending over 10 years, with much of that concentrated in 12 states that expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act and have large proportions of rural residents.

That means $50 billion is not enough to offset cuts to Medicaid and other programs that will reduce funds flowing to rural health facilities.

Accelerating hospital closures

Rural and frontier hospitals have long faced hardship because of their aging infrastructure, older and sicker patient populations, geographic isolation and greater financial and regulatory burdens. Since 2010, 153 rural hospitals have closed their doors permanently or ceased providing inpatient services. This trend is particularly acute in states that have chosen not to expand Medicaid via the Affordable Care Act, many of which have larger percentages of their residents living in rural areas.

According to an analysis by University of North Carolina researchers, as of June 2025 338 hospitals are at risk of reducing vital services, such as skilled nursing facilities; converting to an alternative type of health care facility, such as a rural emergency hospital; or closing altogether.

Maternity care is especially at risk.

Currently more than half of rural hospitals no longer deliver babies. Rural facilities serve fewer patients than those in more densely populated areas. They also have high fixed costs, and because they serve a high percentage of Medicaid patients, they rely on payments from Medicaid, which tends to pay lower rates than commercial insurance. Because of these pressures, these units will continue to close, forcing women to travel farther to give birth, to deliver before going full term and to deliver outside of traditional hospital settings.

And because hospitals in rural areas serve relatively small populations, they lack negotiating power to obtain fair and adequate payment from private health insurers and affordable equipment and supplies from medical companies. Recruiting and retaining needed physicians and other health care workers is expensive, and acquiring capital to renovate, expand or build new facilities is increasingly out of reach.

Finally, given that rural residents are more likely to have Medicaid than their urban counterparts, the legislation’s cuts to Medicaid will disproportionately reduce the rate at which rural providers and health facilities are paid by Medicaid for services they offer. With many rural hospitals already teetering on closure, this will place already financially fragile hospitals on an accelerated path toward demise.

Far-reaching effects

Rural hospitals are not just sources of local health care. They are also vital economic engines.

Hospital closures result in the loss of local access to health care, causing residents to choose between traveling longer distances to see a doctor or forgoing the services they need.

But hospitals in these regions are also major employers that often pay some of the highest wages in their communities. Their closure can drive a decline in the local tax base, limiting funding available for services such as roads and public schools and making it more difficult to attract and retain businesses that small towns depend on. Declines in rural health care undermine local economies.

Furthermore, the country as a whole relies on rural America for the production of food, fuel and other natural resources. In our view, further weakening rural hospitals may affect not just local economies but the health of the whole U.S. economy.

Lauren S. Hughes has received funding for rural health projects from the Sunflower Foundation, The Colorado Health Foundation, the University of Colorado School of Medicine Rural Program Office, the Caring for Colorado Foundation, and the Zoma Foundation. She currently serves as chair of the Rural Health Redesign Center Organization Board of Directors and is a member of the Rural Primary Care Advisory Council with the Weitzman Institute.

Kevin J. Bennett receives funding from the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention, the Health Resources and Services Administration and the state of South Carolina. He is currently on the Board of Trustees of the National Rural Health Association as immediate past president.

– ref. Rural hospitals will be hit hard by Trump’s signature spending package – https://theconversation.com/rural-hospitals-will-be-hit-hard-by-trumps-signature-spending-package-260164

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) – By Tracy Roof, Associate Professor of Political Science, University of Richmond

The legislative package that President Donald Trump signed into law on July 4, 2025, has several provisions that will shrink the safety net, including the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, long known as food stamps. SNAP spending will decline by an estimated US$186 billion through 2034 as a result of several changes Congress made to the program that today helps roughly 42 million people buy groceries – an almost 20% reduction.

In my research on the history of food stamps, I’ve found that the program was meant to be widely available to most low-income people. The SNAP changes break that tradition in two ways.

The Congressional Budget Office estimates that about 3 million people are likely to be dropped from the program and lose their benefits. This decline will occur in part because more people will face time limits if they don’t meet work requirements. Even those who meet the requirements may lose benefits because of difficulty submitting the necessary documents.

And because states will soon have to take on more of the costs of the program, which totaled over $100 billion in 2024, they may eventually further restrict who gets help due to their own budgetary constraints.

Summing up SNAP’s origins

Inspired by the plight of unemployed coal miners whom John F. Kennedy met in Appalachia when he campaigned for the presidency in 1960, the early food stamps program was not limited to single parents with children, older people and people with disabilities, like many other safety net programs were at the time. It was supposed to help low-income people afford more and better food, regardless of their circumstances.

In response to national attention in the late 1960s to widespread hunger and malnutrition in other areas of the country, such as among tenant farmers in the rural South, a limited food stamps program was expanded. It reached every part of the country by 1974.

From the start, the states administered the program and covered some of its administrative costs and the federal government paid for the benefits in full. This arrangement encouraged states to enroll everyone who needed help without fearing the budgetary consequences.

Who could qualify and how much help they could get were set by uniform national standards, so that even the residents of the poorest states would be able to afford a budget-conscious but nutritionally adequate diet.

The federal government’s responsibility for the cost of benefits also allowed spending to automatically grow during economic downturns, when more people need assistance. These federal dollars helped families, retailers and local economies weather tough times.

The changes to the SNAP program included in the legislative package that Congress approved by narrow margins and Trump signed into law, however, will make it harder for the program to serve its original goals.

Restricting benefits

Since the early 1970s, most so-called able-bodied adults who were not caring for a child or an adult with disabilities had to meet a work requirement to get food stamps. Welfare reform legislation in 1996 made that requirement stricter for such adults between the ages of 18 and 50 by imposing a three-month time limit if they didn’t log 20 hours or more of employment or another approved activity, such as verified volunteering.

Budget legislation passed in 2023 expanded this rule to adults up to age 54. The 2025 law will further expand the time limit to adults up to age 64 and parents of children age 14 or over.

States can currently get permission from the federal government to waive work requirements in areas with insufficient jobs or unemployment above the national average. This flexibility to waive work requirements will now be significantly limited and available only where at least 1 in 10 workers are unemployed.

Concerned senators secured an exemption from the work requirements for most Native Americans and Native Alaskans, who are more likely to live in areas with limited job opportunities.

A 2023 budget deal exempted veterans, the homeless and young adults exiting the foster care system from work requirements because they can experience special challenges getting jobs. The 2025 law does not exempt them.

The new changes to SNAP policies will also deny benefits to many immigrants with authorization to be in the U.S., such as people granted political asylum or official refugee status. Immigrants without authorization to reside in the U.S. will continue to be ineligible for SNAP benefits.

Tracking ‘error rates’

Critics of food stamps have long argued that states lack incentives to carefully administer the program because the federal government is on the hook for the cost of benefits.

In the 1970s, as the number of Americans on the food stamp rolls soared, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which oversees the program, developed a system for assessing if states were accurately determining whether applicants were eligible for benefits and how much they could get.

A state’s “payment error rate” estimates the share of benefits paid out that were more or less than an applicant was actually eligible for. The error rate was not then and is not today a measure of fraud. Typically, it just indicates the share of families who get a higher – or lower – amount of benefits than they are eligible for because of mistakes or confusion on the part of the applicant or the case worker who handles the application.

Congress tried to penalize states with error rates over 5% in the 1980s but ultimately suspended the effort under state pressure. After years of political wrangling, the USDA started to consistently enforce financial penalties on states with high error rates in the mid-1990s.

States responded by increasing their red tape. For example, they asked applicants to submit more documentation and made them go through more bureaucratic hoops, like having more frequent in-person interviews, to get – and continue receiving – SNAP benefits.

These demands hit low-wage workers hardest because their applications were more prone to mistakes. Low-income workers often don’t have consistent work hours and their pay can vary from week to week and month to month. The number of families getting benefits fell steeply.

The USDA tried to reverse this decline by offering states options to simplify the process for applying for and continuing to get SNAP benefits over the course of the presidencies of Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama. Enrollment grew steadily.

Penalizing high rates

Since 2008, states with error rates over 6% have had to develop a detailed plan to lower them.

Despite this requirement, the national average error rate jumped from 7.4% before the pandemic, to a record high of 11.7% in 2023. Rates rose as states struggled with a surge of people applying for benefits, a shortage of staff in state welfare agencies and procedural changes.

Republican leaders in Congress have responded to that increase by calling for more accountability.

Making states pay more

The big legislative package will increase states’ expenses in two ways.

It will reduce the federal government’s responsibility for half of the cost of administering the program to 25% beginning in the 2027 fiscal year.

And some states will have to pay a share of benefit costs for the first time in the program’s history, depending on their payment error rates. Beginning in the 2028 fiscal year, states with an error rate between 6-8% would be responsible for 5% of the cost of benefits. Those with an error rate between 8-10% would have to pay 10%, and states with an error rate over 10% would have to pay 15%. The federal government would continue to pay all benefits in states with error rates below 6%.

Republicans argue the changes will give states more “skin in the game” and ensure better administration of the program.

While the national payment error rate fell from 11.68% in the 2023 fiscal year to 10.93% a year later, 42 states still had rates in excess of 6% in 2024. Twenty states plus the District of Columbia had rates of 10% or higher.

At nearly 25%, Alaska has the highest payment error rate in the country. But Alaska won’t be in trouble right away. To ease passage in the Senate, where the vote of Sen. Lisa Murkowski, an Alaska Republican, was in doubt, a provision was added to the bill allowing several states with the highest error rates to avoid cost sharing for up to two years after it begins.

Democrats argue this may encourage states to actually increase their error rates in the short term.

The effect of the new law on the amount of help an eligible household gets is expected to be limited.

About 600,000 individuals and families will lose an average of $100 a month in benefits because of a change in the way utility costs are treated. The law also prevents future administrations from increasing benefits beyond the cost of living, as the Biden Administration did.

States cannot cut benefits below the national standards set in federal law.

But the shift of costs to financially strapped states will force them to make tough choices. They will either have to cut back spending on other programs, increase taxes, discourage people from getting SNAP benefits or drop the program altogether.

The changes will, in the end, make it even harder for Americans who can’t afford the bare necessities to get enough nutritious food to feed their families.

Tracy Roof 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. ‘Big’ legislative package shifts more of SNAP’s costs to states, saving federal dollars but causing fewer Americans to get help paying for food – https://theconversation.com/big-legislative-package-shifts-more-of-snaps-costs-to-states-saving-federal-dollars-but-causing-fewer-americans-to-get-help-paying-for-food-260166

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) – By Hatim Sharif, Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, The University of Texas at San Antonio

Texas Hill Country is known for its landscapes, with shallow rivers winding among hills and through rugged valleys. But that geography also makes it one of the deadliest places in the U.S. for flash flooding.

In the early hours of July 4, 2025, a rush of flood water swept through an area dotted with summer camps and small towns about 70 miles west of San Antonio. At least 27 people died, and about two dozen girls from one camp and other people in the area were still unaccounted for the following morning, officials said. More than 200 people had to be rescued.

The flooding began as many flash floods in this region do, with a heavy downpour that sent water sheeting off the hillsides into creeks. The creeks poured into the Guadalupe River. Around 3 a.m. on July 4, National Weather Service data shows the river was rising about 1 foot every 5 minutes near the camp. By 4:30 a.m., the water had risen more than 20 feet.

Flood expert Hatim Sharif, a hydrologist and civil engineer at the University of Texas at San Antonio, explains what makes this part of the country, known as Flash Flood Alley, so dangerous.

What makes Hill Country so prone to flooding?

Texas as a whole leads the nation in flood deaths, and by a wide margin. A colleague and I analyzed data from 1959 to 2019 and found 1,069 people had died in flooding in Texas over those six decades. The next highest total was in Louisiana, with 693.

Many of those flood deaths have been in Hill County, an area known as Flash Flood Alley. It’s a crescent of land that curves from near Dallas down to San Antonio and then westward.

The hills are steep, and the water moves quickly when it floods. This is a semi-arid area with soils that don’t soak up much water, so the water sheets off quickly and the shallow creeks can rise fast.

When those creeks converge on a river, they can create a wall of water that wipes out homes and washes away cars and, unfortunately, anyone in its path.

Hill Country has seen some devastating flash floods. In 1987, heavy rain in western Kerr County quickly flooded the Guadalupe River, triggering a flash flood similar to the one in 2025. Ten teenagers being evacuated from a camp died in the rushing water.

San Antonio, considered the gateway to Hill Country, was hit with another flash flood on June 12, 2025, that killed 13 people whose cars were swept away when they drove into high water from a flooding creek near an interstate ramp in the early morning.

Why does the region get such strong downpours?

One reason Hill Country gets powerful downpours is the Balcones Escarpment.

The escarpment is a line of cliffs and steep hills created by a geologic fault. When warm air from the Gulf rushes up the escarpment, it condenses and can dump a lot of moisture. That water flows down the hills quickly, from many different directions, filling streams and rivers below.

As temperature rise, the warmer atmosphere can hold more moisture, increasing the downpour and flood risk.

The same effect can contribute to flash flooding in San Antonio, where the large amount of paved land and lack of updated drainage to control runoff adds to the risk.

What can be done to improve flash flood safety?

First, it’s important for people to understand why flash flooding happens and just how fast the water can rise and flow. In many arid areas, dry or shallow creeks can quickly fill up with fast-moving water and become deadly. So people should be aware of the risks and pay attention to the weather.

Improving flood forecasting, with more detailed models of the physics and water velocity at different locations, can also help.

Probabilistic forecasting, for example, can provide a range of rainfall scenarios, enabling authorities to prepare for worst-case scenarios. A scientific framework linking rainfall forecasts to the local impacts, such as streamflow, flood depth and water velocity, could also help decision-makers implement timely evacuations or road closures.

Education is particularly essential for drivers. One to two feet of moving water can wash away a car. People may think their trucks and SUVs can go through anything, but fast-moving water can flip a truck and carry it away.

Officials can also do more to barricade roads when the flood risk is high to prevent people from driving into harm’s way. We found that 58% of the flood deaths in Texas over the past six decades involved vehicles.

The storm on June 12 in San Antonio was an example. It was early morning, and drivers has poor visibility. Cars drove into floodwater without seeing the risk until it was too late.

Hatim Sharif 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 Texas Hill Country, where a devastating flood killed dozens, is one of the deadliest places in the US for flash flooding – https://theconversation.com/why-texas-hill-country-where-a-devastating-flood-killed-dozens-is-one-of-the-deadliest-places-in-the-us-for-flash-flooding-260555

Source: The Conversation – USA (3) – By Sumit Agarwal, Assistant Professor of Internal Medicine, University of Michigan

The Congressional Budget Office estimates that 7.8 million Americans across the U.S. will lose their coverage through Medicaid – the public program that provides health insurance to low-income families and individuals – under the multitrillion-dollar domestic policy package that President Donald Trump signed into law on July 4, 2025.

That includes 247,000 to 412,000 of my fellow residents of Michigan based on the House Reconciliation Bill in early June. There are similarly deep projected cuts within the Senate version of the legislation, which Trump signed.
Many of these people are working Americans who will lose Medicaid because of the onerous paperwork involved with the proposed work requirements.

They won’t be able to get coverage in the Affordable Care Act Marketplaces after losing Medicaid. Premiums and out-of-pocket costs are likely to be too high for those making less than 100% to 138% of the federal poverty level who do not qualify for health insurance marketplace subsidies. Funding for this program is also under threat.

And despite being employed, they also won’t be able to get health insurance through their employers because it is either too expensive or not offered to them. Researchers estimate that coverage losses will lead to thousands of medically preventable deaths across the country because people will be unable to access health care without insurance.

I am a physician, health economist and policy researcher who has cared for patients on Medicaid and written about health care in the U.S. for over eight years. I think it’s important to understand the role of Medicaid within the broader insurance landscape. Medicaid has become a crucial source of health coverage for low-wage workers.

Michigan removed work requirements from Medicaid

A few years ago, Michigan was slated to institute Medicaid work requirements, but the courts blocked the implementation of that policy in 2020. It would have cost upward of US$70 million due to software upgrades, staff training, and outreach to Michigan residents enrolled in the Medicaid program, according to the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services.

Had it gone into effect, 100,000 state residents were expected to lose coverage within the first year.

The state took the formal step of eliminating work requirements from its statutes earlier this year in recognition of implementation costs being too high and mounting evidence against the policy’s effectiveness.

When Arkansas instituted Medicaid work requirements in 2018, there was no increase in employment, but within months, thousands of people enrolled in the program lost their coverage. The reason? Many people were subjected to paperwork and red tape, but there weren’t actually that many people who would fail to meet the criteria of the work requirements. It is a recipe for widespread coverage losses without meeting any of the policy’s purported goals.

Work requirements, far from incentivizing work, paradoxically remove working people from Medicaid with nowhere else to go for insurance.

Shortcomings of employer-sponsored insurance

Nearly half of Americans get their health insurance through their employers.

In contrast to a universal system that covers everyone from cradle to grave, an employer-first system leaves huge swaths of the population uninsured. This includes tens of millions of working Americans who are unable to get health insurance through their employers, especially low-income workers who are less likely to even get the choice of coverage from their employers.

Over 80% of managers and professionals have employer-sponsored health coverage, but only 50% to 70% of blue-collar workers in service jobs, farming, construction, manufacturing and transportation can say the same.

There are some legal requirements mandating employers to provide health insurance to their employees, but the reality of low-wage work means many do not fall under these legal protections.

For example, employers are allowed to incorporate a waiting period of up to 90 days before health coverage begins. The legal requirement also applies only to full-time workers. Health coverage can thus remain out of reach for seasonal and temporary workers, part-time employees and gig workers.

Even if an employer offers health insurance to their low-wage employees, those workers may forego it because the premiums and deductibles are too high to make it worth earning less take-home pay.

To make matters worse, layoffs are more common for low-wage workers, leaving them with limited options for health insurance during job transitions. And many employers have increasingly shed low-wage staff, such as drivers and cleaning staff, from their employment rolls and contracted that work out. Known as the fissuring of the workplace, it allows employers of predominately high-income employees to continue offering generous benefits while leaving no such commitment to low-wage workers employed as contractors.

Medicaid fills in gaps

Low-income workers without access to employer-sponsored insurance had virtually no options for health insurance in the years before key parts of the Affordable Care Act went into effect in 2014.

Research my coauthors and I conducted showed that blue-collar workers have since gained health insurance coverage, cutting the uninsured rate by a third thanks to the expansion of Medicaid eligibility and subsidies in the health insurance marketplaces. This means low-income workers can more consistently see doctors, get preventive care and fill prescriptions.

Further evidence from Michigan’s experience has shown that Medicaid can help the people it covers do a better job at work by addressing health impairments. It can also improve their financial well-being, including fewer problems with debt, fewer bankruptcies, higher credit scores and fewer evictions.

Premiums and cost sharing in Medicaid are minimal compared with employer-sponsored insurance, making it a more realistic and accessible option for low-income workers. And because Medicaid is not tied directly to employment, it can promote job mobility, allowing workers to maintain coverage within or between jobs without having to go through the bureaucratic complexity of certifying work.

Of course, Medicaid has its own shortcomings. Payment rates to providers are low relative to other insurers, access to doctors can be limited, and the program varies significantly by state. But these weaknesses stem largely from underfunding and political hostility – not from any intrinsic flaw in the model. If anything, Medicaid’s success in covering low-income workers and containing per-enrollee costs points to its potential as a broader foundation for health coverage.

The current employer-based system, which is propped up by an enormous and regressive tax break for employer-sponsored insurance premiums, favors high-income earners and contributes to wage stagnation. In my view, which is shared by other health economists, a more public, universal model could better cover Americans regardless of how someone earns a living.

Over the past six decades, Medicaid has quietly stepped into the breach left by employer-sponsored insurance. Medicaid started as a welfare program for the needy in the 1960s, but it has evolved and adapted to fill the needs of a country whose health care system leaves far too many uninsured.

This article was updated on July 4, 2025, to reflect Trump signing the bill into law.

Sumit Agarwal 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. Employers are failing to insure the working class – Medicaid cuts will leave them even more vulnerable – https://theconversation.com/employers-are-failing-to-insure-the-working-class-medicaid-cuts-will-leave-them-even-more-vulnerable-259256

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) – By Jeanne Beatrix Law, Professor of English, Kennesaw State University

I’m a writing professor who sees artificial intelligence as more of an opportunity for students, rather than a threat.

That sets me apart from some of my colleagues, who fear that AI is accelerating a glut of superficial content, impeding critical thinking and hindering creative expression. They worry that students are simply using it out of sheer laziness or, worse, to cheat.

Perhaps that’s why so many students are afraid to admit that they use ChatGPT.

In The New Yorker magazine, historian D. Graham Burnett recounts asking his undergraduate and graduate students at Princeton whether they’d ever used ChatGPT. No one raised their hand.

“It’s not that they’re dishonest,” he writes. “It’s that they’re paralyzed.”

Students seem to have internalized the belief that using AI for their coursework is somehow wrong. Yet, whether my colleagues like it or not, most college students are using it.

A February 2025 report from the Higher Education Policy Institute in the U.K. found that 92% of university students are using AI in some form. As early as August 2023 – a mere nine months after ChatGPT’s public release – more than half of first-year students at Kennesaw State University, the public research institution where I teach, reported that they believed that AI is the future of writing.

It’s clear that students aren’t going to magically stop using AI. So I think it’s important to point out some ways in which AI can actually be a useful tool that enhances, rather than hampers, the writing process.

Helping with the busywork

A February 2025 OpenAI report on ChatGPT use among college-aged users found that more than one-quarter of their ChatGPT conversations were education-related.

The report also revealed that the top five uses for students were writing-centered: starting papers and projects (49%); summarizing long texts (48%); brainstorming creative projects (45%); exploring new topics (44%); and revising writing (44%).

These figures challenge the assumption that students use AI merely to cheat or write entire papers.

Instead, it suggests they are leveraging AI to free up more time to engage in deeper processes and metacognitive behaviors – deliberately organizing ideas, honing arguments and refining style.

If AI allows students to automate routine cognitive tasks – like information retrieval or ensuring that verb tenses are consistent – it doesn’t mean they’re thinking less. It means their thinking is changing.

Of course, students can misuse AI if they use the technology passively, reflexively accepting its outputs and ideas. And overreliance on ChatGPT can erode a student’s unique voice or style.

However, as long as students learn how to use AI intentionally, this shift can be seen as an opportunity, rather than a loss.

Clarifying the creative vision

It has also become clear that AI, when used responsibly, can augment human creativity.

For example, science comedy writer Sarah Rose Siskind recently gave a talk to Harvard students about her creative process. She spoke about how she uses ChatGPT to brainstorm joke setups and explore various comedic scenarios, which allows her to focus on crafting punchlines and refining her comedic timing.

Note how Siskin used AI in ways that didn’t supplant the human touch. Instead of replacing her creativity, AI amplified it by providing structured and consistent feedback, giving her more time to polish her jokes.

Another example is the Rhetorical Prompting Method, which I developed alongside fellow Kennesaw State University researchers. Designed for university students and adult learners, it’s a framework for conversing with an AI chatbot, one that emphasizes the importance of agency in guiding AI outputs.

When writers use precise language to prompt, critical thinking to reflect, and intentional revision to sculpt inputs and outputs, they direct AI to help them generate content that aligns with their vision.

There’s still a process

The Rhetorical Prompting Method mirrors best practices in process writing, which encourages writers to revisit, refine and revise their drafts.

When using ChatGPT, though, it’s all about thoughtfully revisiting and revising prompts and outputs.

For instance, say a student wants to create a compelling PSA for social media to encourage campus composting. She considers her audience. She prompts ChatGPT to draft a short, upbeat message in under 50 words that’s geared to college students.

Reading the first output, she notices it lacks urgency. So she revises the prompt to emphasize immediate impact. She also adds some additional specifics that are important to her message, such as the location of an information session. The final PSA reads:

“Every scrap counts! Join campus composting today at the Commons. Your leftovers aren’t trash – they’re tomorrow’s gardens. Help our university bloom brighter, one compost bin at a time.”

The Rhetorical Prompting Method isn’t groundbreaking; it’s riffing on a process that’s been tested in the writing studies discipline for decades. But I’ve found that it works by directing writers how to intentionally prompt.

I know this because we asked users about their experiences. In an ongoing study, my colleagues and I polled 133 people who used the Rhetorical Prompting Method for their academic and professional writing:

• 92% reported that it helped them evaluate writing choices before and during their process.

• 75% said that they were able to maintain their authentic voice while using AI assistance.

• 89% responded that it helped them think critically about their writing.

The data suggests that learners take their writing seriously. Their responses reveal that they are thinking carefully about their writing styles and strategies. While this data is preliminary, we continue to gather responses in different courses, disciplines and learning environments.

All of this is to say that, while there are divergent points of view over when and where it’s appropriate to use AI, students are certainly using it. And being provided with a framework can help them think more deeply about their writing.

AI, then, is not just a tool that’s useful for trivial tasks. It can be an asset for creativity. If today’s students – who are actively using AI to write, revise and explore ideas – see AI as a writing partner, I think it’s a good idea for professors to start thinking about helping them learn the best ways to work with it.

Jeanne Beatrix Law 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. AI isn’t replacing student writing – but it is reshaping it – https://theconversation.com/ai-isnt-replacing-student-writing-but-it-is-reshaping-it-254878