That the show is also a master class in teaching has largely escaped notice.
As a critic and scholar who writes about representations of teachers in popular media,
I hadn’t expected to think about teaching when tuning in for a fictional show about Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Hospital.
Popular media: education and escape
Philosopher of education Adam Greteman and K.J. Burke, an expert in teacher education, highlight how popular media serves as an educational space. Lessons about schooling can appear as a pleasurable escape from reality, both reflecting and sometimes distorting the full scope of people’s lived experiences.
Television, film and even children’s picture books shape public perceptions of the teaching profession — and so does The Pitt.
Trailer for ‘The Pitt’
Dr. Michael “Robby” Robinavitch (Noah Wyle) mentors a team of nurses and doctors at a teaching hospital. The ER may not be a formal classroom, but what makes The Pitt so intriguing as a case study about education is its setting outside the classroom. Interns learn on the go in a hands-on setting with real-world consequences and problems.
While I cannot comment specifically about the show’s depictions of what may be needed for best-practice ER infrastructure and education, I’m interested in how the show offers compelling insights around what it means to teach with and through trauma that are relevant for education in schools and at post-secondary levels at large.
The COVID-19 pandemic looms large in The Pitt, and flashbacks to one particularly awful day intrude into Dr. Robby’s mind throughout the episodes. Like doctors and nurses, educators were on the front lines during the pandemic.
A recent study highlights the pandemic’s lingering adverse effect on teacher recruitment and retention. Likewise, in a 2022 study, researchers in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Colorado School of Medicine found that the stressors on K-12 educators led to burnout and other mental health challenges. Attending to the mental health of both students and teachers as part of, rather than outside of, teacher training is a start.
To fully understand Dr. Robby, it is essential to recognize how his character transcends familiar stereotypes of male educators in popular culture. Familiar tropes include the buffoon (Mr. D. in the show of the same name), the burnout (the teacher in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off), the disciplinarian (the assistant principal inThe Breakfast Club), the maverick (Dewey Finn in School of Rock, John Keating in Dead Poet’s Society), the villain (Severus Snape in Harry Potter) and the wise mentor (Albus Dumbledore in Harry Potter).
The Pitt’s Dr. Robby doesn’t fit neatly into any of these categories. Specifically, he embraces vulnerability and compassion that expand previous representations of teaching in popular culture.
Dr. Robby has more in common with characters like the teacher Justine Gandy in the 2025 film Weapons or Dan Dunne in the 2006 Half Nelson; deeply flawed, yet highly empathetic — super feelers who connect with the people they teach.
Dr. Robby leans into trauma on both a social (the pandemic and its aftermath; an epidemic of drug overdoses) and an individual level (the loss of his own mentor to COVID-19 under his watch) as the starting point for instruction.
After 15 years of university teaching, I, too, begin with the assumption that most students are merely holding it together for class as they deal with a range of experiences like personal depression, anxiety, grief and abuse, as well as collective distress about wildfires, war and increasing authoritarianism across the globe.
Not only in the U.S., but also in Canada, educational systems advise lockdown drills. The Aug. 27, 2025, Annunciation Catholic Church shooting in the U.S. is just one example of how teachers in the U.S. live with the reality and fear of threats from guns. Such threats are not as present across Canadian educational spaces, but still a reality.
And in both health care and schools, such stark eruptions point to wider systemic problems that need to be addressed across society, not only when they become crises.
Across disciplines, institutions need to provide supports for educators to shape emergent curricula co-built with and for the students who show up in our classrooms. Students need opportunities in their own communities to work side by side with an experienced mentor, like Dr. Robby, in hands-on, real-world spaces outside of the formal classroom.
The teacher we need
Dr. Robby is no John Keating of Dead Poets Society, and that’s a refreshing break from romanticized ideas about individual teachers saving the day.
The Pitt offers us instead a vulnerable yet compassionate male teacher with fears and flaws like his interns and patients. Dr. Robby is the teacher we all need right now.
Elizabeth A. Marshall does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Charlie Kirk: white nationalist, conservative Christian, right-wing social media personality, shooting victim, and now, a “martyr”. That is, according tohis supporters.
Since Kirk’s death last week, a number of his followers from the Christian right have ascribed him the title of “martyr”. President Donald Trump himself called Kirk a “martyr for truth and freedom”.
Similarly, Rob McCoy, a pastor emeritus from California, said at a Sunday morning church service
Today, we celebrate the life of Charlie Kirk, a 31-year-old God-fearing Christian man, a husband, father of two, a patriot, a civil rights activist, and now a Christian martyr.
Looking back at the history of martyrdom offers insight into what it means for Kirk to be hailed a martyr, both for his memory, and for the future of the United States.
From witness to criminal to witness again
The term martyr emerged in ancient law courts with the Greek word martus, meaning a witness or person who gives testimony.
From their earliest days, Christians appropriated it to refer to those who testified to the gospel of Jesus Christ. The gospel of Luke even concludes with Jesus telling his disciples: “You are witnesses – martyres – of these things” (Luke 24:48).
Early Christians regularly ran afoul of Roman authorities, and were brought to court as criminals. The charges generally revolved around questionable loyalty to the Roman state and religion. Could someone worship Jesus and also offer sacrifice to the traditional gods, including the emperor or his divine spirit (his “genius”)?
Christians and Romans alike thought not. From the 2nd century onward, accounts of these trials centred on a single question: “are you a Christian?”. If the answer was “yes”, execution followed.
For local authorities, the executed person was a criminal. But for fellow Christians, they were witnesses to the truth of the gospel, and their deaths were evidence of the Christian God. They were both witness and testimony – “martyrs” in every sense.
In 2004, scholar of early Christianity, Elizabeth Castelli, argued martyrs are born only after their death. The martyr isn’t a fact, but a figure produced by the stories told about them, and the honour afforded them in ritual commemorations. A person isn’t a martyr until other people within a specific community decide they are.
To understand what makes someone a martyr, we have to ask two questions:
what are they a witness to? As in, what ideal or cause led to their death and how did their death testify to it?
who are they a witness for? Who tells their story and who calls them a martyr?
Boundaries and borderline cases
The history of martyrdom is also a history of debates over what kind of death “counts”, and what role martyrs play in the church.
Questionable cases have accumulated through the decades. Some “martyrs” volunteered eagerly, perhaps too eagerly.
On April 29 304 CE, an archdeacon named Euplus stood outside the city council chamber in Catania, Sicily, shouting: “I want to die; I am a Christian”. After some discussion, the governor sentenced him to torture and he died of his injuries. Was this martyrdom, or suicide?
Under Christian emperors from the 4th century on, soldiers who died fighting Persians (or later Arabs) also came to be called martyrs. A soldier’s death is especially considered martyrdom if they fought against members of a different religion.
However, the soldier-martyr label has also raised anxieties. The most recent example came from the troubling claim by Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kyrill that Russian soldiers who die fighting in Ukraine are martyrs – despite fighting fellow Orthodox Christians. What do these soldiers testify to?
The stories of martyrs define community borders. Those who kill martyrs tend to be treated as enemies of the faith, whether they are Roman authorities, enemy combatants, or even people assumed to be complicit in the event.
The MAGA martyr
Let’s apply the two questions above to Charlie Kirk, who has been dubbed both “martyr” and “patron saint of MAGA”.
What would Kirk be a martyr to? To his supporters and those on the MAGA right, he died for free speech, for Judeo-Christian values, for a commitment to “Western civilisation”, and supposedly for the “truth” itself.
To others, especially those he attacked and denigrated publicly – such as queer and trans people, immigrants, Muslims and feminists – he died for white nationalism, hatred and exclusion.
This takes us back to the second question: who is Charlie Kirk a martyr for? Clearly, the answer to this is Christian nationalists, MAGA supporters and the broader American right.
He testified in life to their shared beliefs and values, and in death is their “patron saint”. The legacy of Kirk’s death will be to define who is part of this community, and who is excluded. The question then is, will a division framed in such polarising terms come to define American society as a whole?
From revenge to love
Following Kirk’s death, people on the far-right called for violent revenge against the left – even though the shooting suspect’s political motivations are unknown.
Media have reported a surge in radicalisation on right-wing platforms. There was even a website, now removed, dedicated to doxxing anyone who spoke negatively about Kirk and using that information to get them fired.
Against this rhetoric of revenge, the history of martyrdom offers a different way forward. The early theologian, Clement of Alexandria, said someone becomes a martyr not because of their death, but because of their love.
The only true witness, he argued, is love, because God is love. The only honour one can offer the martyrs is to love as they loved. Clement suggests it’s possible to reject vengeance and sectarianism, even if one loves the martyrs.
Jonathan L. Zecher does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Three and a half years after Russia invaded Ukraine, there are few immediate signs of a cessation to the ongoing hostilities. Yet amid the steady toll of front-line fighting and near-daily Russian airstrikes, Ukrainians are already considering how to remember the tens of thousands of lives lost over the course of this conflict.
A spontaneous memorial of flags and photographs already exists and grows daily, having first sprung up in 2022 in Kyiv’s Independence Square. Now, government and civil society groups have begun conversations on how such acts of commemoration can be made more permanent through monuments and memorials across the country.
As a scholar of public memory and how societies remember large-scale violence and mass atrocities, I study and support the work of governments and organizations developing memory sites around the world. As Ukraine negotiates its own related challenges, lessons from research on how memorials have changed and the role they can play in post-violence societies can help guide these processes.
The long history of remembering war dead
The impulse to create public monuments to remember collective death, like war, is millennia old. The first known war memorial dates to over 4,000 years ago in modern-day Syria. Obelisks and triumphal arches that dotted ancient Egypt and ancient Rome have served similar purposes.
As societies have progressed and architectural tastes have changed, so too have war monuments. Still, there are some underlying traits that have remained relatively consistent for thousands of years.
Traditionally, war memorials used monumental architecture to remember those who died during conflict. Typically, they were aimed at honoring soldiers who died fighting for their country. The monuments framed the death of soldiers as a sacrifice for a higher cause, often using larger-than-life architectural elements and materials like marble and granite to convey a sense of both grandeur and memory permanence.
In that traditional vein of glorification, war memorials typically feature recognizable symbols, like sculptures of soldiers and inscriptions with names or information. By honoring the soldiers who died fighting a war, the monuments also legitimize the war and the state that waged it, marking it as a cause worthy of dying for. In this way, such war memorials are not only about revering soldiers but also venerating the nation-state.
That all started to change following World War I, however. The scale of destruction and death was so widespread and total that countries began erecting war memorials depicting soldiers with their faces downcast or their bodies tired. The sacrifices of the soldiers were still framed as valiant, but the monuments also revealed a war weariness not present in earlier memorials.
At the same time, communist countries in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union maintained the tradition of using memorials to celebrate the state. In Soviet-era Ukraine, for instance, the 335-foot-tall Mother Ukraine was erected to tower over Kyiv as a monument to World War II.
Outside of the former Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc, however, the horrors of World War II completely transformed the way societies memorialized collective death. This is largely because the deaths that needed commemoration were not only those of soldiers but of the millions of civilians murdered by the Nazi regime, especially European Jews.
Indeed, the Holocaust changed everything about the way the world memorializes large-scale death. The architectural language of the war memorial was completely insufficient for remembering the victims of genocide. They did not sacrifice themselves to the glory of the nation, but instead were slaughtered by governmental leaders.
As a result and over time, memorials focused far less on monumental forms and realistic imagery glorifying the state and opted for abstract and immersive styles intended to invoke a sense of loss and a commitment to preventing future violence. These memorials to victims of genocides and other atrocities also respond to an increasingly recognized “right to memory,” as victims demand acknowledgment of the trauma they have experienced.
One of the most influential examples of how memorialization has changed is the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin. Designed by American architect Peter Eisenman and inaugurated in 2005, it features over 2,700 concrete columns arranged in a grid over almost 5 acres of land in central Berlin. Visitors are invited to walk through the grid-work of columns, which are meant to evoke an emotional response in visitors.
Echoes of this abstract and immersive space can now be seen in numerous other memorials to collective death globally, including the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama, which memorializes the Black victims of racial terror lynchings in the United States, and the Parque de la Memoria in Buenos Aires, Argentina, which remembers the thousands of people disappeared in the 1970s and 1980s during a military dictatorship.
The morning light illuminates the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, or the Holocaust Memorial, in Berlin. AP Photo/Markus Schreiber
Ukraine and memorializing the present
As Ukrainians begin the process of determining how best to commemorate their own recent losses, they face some notable challenges.
For one, Ukraine has lost both soldiers, who have died fighting for their country, and civilians, killed through the attacks of invading forces from Russia. Can and should these losses be memorialized together? Or should there be separate memorials to those who died on the battlefield and those others who were killed in atrocities, like the massacre in Bucha of March 2022, which saw the death, torture and rape of hundreds of civilians, including children, by Russian forces?
Ukraine is not without experience in memorializing both war and atrocity. Many of its war memorials were constructed during the Soviet period, however, so they tend to utilize the socialist realism style that characterizes most communist-era monuments. But Ukraine has also experienced atrocities, such as the Holodomor, the human-made famine implemented by Josef Stalin in the 1930s that led to the deaths of millions of Ukrainians. The Memorial in Commemoration of the Holodomor-Genocide in Ukraine opened in Kyiv in 2008, 75 years after the Holodomor began.
But determining how to memorialize more recent violence can be a challenge. Memorials serve to literally and figuratively concretize memory. But memory — that is, the story a society tells itself about its past and its impact on the present and future — evolves over time. Communities of victims may desire a memorial as a recognition of the harms that they have suffered, and this can indeed be an important step in symbolicallyrepairing those damages.
But it may be difficult to get a full “picture” of the story a memorial should tell while violence is ongoing. The victim count is increasing every day. And now there is also some pushback within Ukraine against the way President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is governing and approaching issues of internal corruption.
Ukrainians had 75 years to determine how they wanted to relate to and remember the Holodomor. With so much uncertainty, any memorial built now to the current war may need to be reconsidered in the very near future as government officials, victim groups and other stakeholders continue to discuss how they want to remember this violence.
Today, many experts and practitioners advocate for conversations on memorialization to take place alongsideotherprocesses that societies undergo to deal with histories of violence and human rights abuses. Often labeled “transitional justice,” these processes of truth-seeking, justice, reparations and reform can complement processes of memorialization. Engaging actively with all the consequences of past violence can be crucial in developing a consensus on how to remember that violence and educate future generations about it.
Undertaking such tasks while violence is ongoing, however, can be difficult, if not impossible. The underlying instability caused by war, along with the uncertainty around what the future will bring, leaves so many open questions that it may be too soon to start answering them. That said, the groundwork can be laid now so that these processes can begin as quickly as possible once the war finally comes to an end.
Ukrainians are understandably ready to move forward and deal with the repercussions of this horrific violence. But building a memorial will not, in itself, mark the end of the conflict and, as such, may be putting the cart before the horse. Victims have a right to memory, but they first and foremost have a right to peace. The picture of what story should be told through public memorials and monuments will become clearer once it is not so obscured by the fog of war.
Kerry Whigham is affiliated with the Auschwitz Institute for the Prevention of Genocide and Mass Atrocities, an international non-governmental organization that works on atrocity prevention.
The experience has also underscored the importance of social media in Nepal, as well as the consequences of government attempts to control the flow of online information.
Indeed, social media has played a crucial role in this ongoing turmoil in two ways. First, the government’s decision on Sept. 4 to ban social platforms served as the immediate catalyst to the unrest. It provoked anger among a generation for whom digital spaces are central not only to communication, identity and political expression, but also to education and economic opportunities.
And second, the pervasive use of these platforms primed the nation’s youth for this moment of protest. It heightened Gen Z’s awareness of the country’s entrenched social, economic and political problems. By sharing stories of corruption, privilege and inequality, social media not only informed but also galvanized Nepal’s youth, motivating collective mobilization against the country’s systemic injustice.
The role of social media
As with many other nations, social media is central to daily life and commerce in Nepal, a landlocked nation of 30 million people situated between two Asian giants: China and India.
As of January 2025, just short of half the population had social media accounts. This includes some 13.5 million active Facebook users, 3.6 million Instagram users, 1.5 million LinkedIn users and 466,100 X users.
The move wasn’t completely out of the blue. Nepal’s government has long been concerned over the growth of social media platforms.
In November 2023, the Ministry of Communication and Information Technology introduced new social media regulations, requiring platforms to register with the government, set up a local contact point, appoint a grievance officer and designate an oversight official. Platforms were also obliged to cooperate in criminal investigations, remove illegal content and comply with Nepali law.
Ncell, Nepal’s second-largest telecommunications service provider, noted that shutting down all platforms at once was, in any case, technically difficult and warned that the move would severely impact business. Small business owners, who rely on social media to promote and sell their products, were especially worried with a busy festive season looming.
The ban also had significant implications for education. Many students rely on social media platforms to access online classes, research materials and collaborative learning tools.
More generally, the Nepalese public criticized the government’s measures disproportionate impact on ordinary users.
As such, this deep reliance on social media by Nepalese society turned the ban into a flashpoint for public dissent.
The rise of #NepoKids
Even before the protests began on Sept. 8, the pervasive use of social media, along with exposure to content showcasing inequality and elite privilege, had heightened Gen Z’s awareness of Nepal’s entrenched social, economic and political problems.
The content drew attention to the country’s inequality by contrasting the lives of the children of the country’s elite – with designer clothing and foreign vacations – with images of Nepali migrant workers returning home in coffins from dangerous jobs abroad.
The hashtag campaigns gained traction on TikTok and Reddit, leading to calls for asset investigations, anti-corruption reforms and even transferring the assets of the wealthy to public ownership.
The immediacy and interactivity of social media platforms amplified the outrage, encouraging group mobilization. In this way, social media acted both as a magnifier and accelerator, linking perceived injustice to on-the-ground activism and shaping how the movement unfolded even before the Sept. 8 protests began.
Fire rages through the Singha Durbar, the main administrative building for Nepal’s government, in Kathmandu on Sept. 9, 2025. Prabin Ranabhat/AFP via Getty Images
A deeper story of hardship and corruption
Yet a social media campaign is nothing without a root cause to shine a light on.
Economic insecurity and political corruption have for years left many of Nepal’s youth frustrated, setting the stage for today’s protest movement. While the overall unemployment rate in 2024 was 11%, the youth unemployment rate stood significantly higher at 21%.
But these figures only scratch the surface of Nepal’s deep economic problems, which include pervasive vulnerable employment – informal and insecure work that is prone to poor conditions and pay – and limited opportunities that constrain long-term productivity.
Between 2010 and 2018, fewer than half of new entrants into the workforce secured formal, stable jobs; the remainder were primarily engaged in informal or precarious work, which often lacked consistent income, benefits or legal protections. Most available positions are informal, poorly compensated and offer little stability or room for career growth.
All told, children born in Nepal today face a grim economic reality. By age 18, they are likely to achieve only about 51% of their productivity potential – that is, the maximum economic output they could reach if they had full access to quality health, nutrition and education.
Meanwhile, corruption is widespread. In 2024, Nepal ranked 107th out of 180 countries on Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index, with 84% of people perceiving government corruption to be a major problem.
An upshot of corruption is the growing influence of Nepal’s politically connected business elite, who shape laws and regulations to benefit themselves. In the process, they secure tax breaks, inflate budgets and create monopolies that block competition.
This capture of public policy by an entrenched elite stifles economic growth, crowds out genuine entrepreneurs and exacerbates inequality, while basic public services remain inadequate.
Combined, these economic and political pressures created fertile ground for social mobilization. While persistent hardships helped fuel the rise of the #Nepokids movement, it was social media that gave voice to Nepali youths’ frustration.
When the government attempted to silence them through a ban on social media platforms, it proved to be a step too far.
Nir Kshetri 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.
In October 2024, Canada imposed a 100 per cent tariff on all electric vehicle (EV) imports from China, effectively barring consumers from accessing some of the world’s most innovative, affordable models. These tariffs are deepening the country’s dependence on the United States and undermining its climate goals.
The government justified its “tariff fortress” by pointing to China’s extensive industrial policy, such as subsidies, that artificially lower production costs. The tariffs were claimed to protect domestic producers by offsetting the cost advantage enjoyed by Chinese EV manufacturers.
While this rationale has some basis, it is highly overstated. The European Union’s in-depth investigation into Chinese support for the EV industry revealed company-specific subsidy levels, ranging from 7.8 per cent for Tesla Shanghai to 35.3 per cent for the SAIC Group, which subsequently became the basis for imposing countervailing duties.
A year ago, co-ordinating with the U.S. against China’s growing EV industry might have seemed defensible, but today, it leaves Canada in a weakened position in its ongoing trade war with the U.S.
This policy is misaligned with Canada’s long-term interests. It weakens economic independence, slows decarbonization and forces Canadians to pay more for EVs.
Tariffs are distorting Canada’s EV market
In July 2025, Tesla sales in the EU fell by 40 per cent even as overall EV sales rose by 39 per cent. BYD, China’s biggest EV manufacturer and a rival to Tesla, tripled its sales and moved ahead of Tesla in market share.
In Canada, too, Tesla’s sales are falling. Its market share is now a fraction of what it used to be and General Motors has recently taken first place in Canadian EV sales.
Still, Canadians continue to buy thousands of Teslas each year, while plans to sell BYD and other Chinese EVs have come to a grinding halt.
The reason why BYD has risen to the top in the EU but American automakers dominate in Canada is an outcome of Canada’s trade policy toward China, which has had the unintended effect of propping up U.S. automakers.
Canada’s auto market is already heavily dependent on American manufacturers. Tariffs that deepen this dependence further narrow consumer choice and expose Canadian EV buyers to unpredictable policy shifts in the U.S. It’s clear Canada needs a new approach.
A more nuanced strategy
Canada should adopt a more nuanced strategy that safeguards national priorities without stifling competition or limiting consumer choice. Instead of erecting tariff walls that shut out rivals, Canada should gradually open its market to prepare for the inevitable competition from China and beyond.
At the same time, it should offer targeted incentives for top Chinese EV firms to set up plants locally, transfer advanced technology and share technical know-how.
Such a policy would help stabilize car prices for Canadians, who have been hit hard amid U.S.–Canada trade tensions.
Although Ottawa recently suspended most counter-tariffs ahead of trade talks, levies on autos, steel and aluminum remain in place, keeping costs elevated. These retaliatory measures, while necessary, have burdened Canadian households, for whom vehicle purchases are the third-largest expense.
A freer trade regime with China would substantially broaden the range of affordable EVs available to Canadians, who are currently limited to costly U.S. brands averaging more than US$55,000. By contrast, Chinese manufacturers offer numerous models priced near US$25,000, a factor that would likely spur a substantial increase in EV adoption.
Second, access to Chinese EVs would help Canada meet its ambitious target of 100 per cent zero-emission new vehicle sales by 2035. Since Canada’s electricity grid is largely powered by renewable hydro and nuclear power, a faster uptake of EVs would significantly reduce emissions.
Third, lowering the tariff would support Canada’s pursuit of greater economic autonomy from the U.S.
A moderate tariff, combined with targeted incentives to attract foreign investment from Chinese EV makers, could enhance the global competitiveness of Canada’s auto industry. This also aligns with the country’s long-term strategy of incentivizing leading foreign EV producers to set up local operations.
Canada cannot hope to lead in a vital global industry by shutting itself off from competition. It must dismantle tariff walls, welcome world-class rivals and attract new investment. Only by diversifying its EV supply chain and fostering innovation can Canada secure a key position in the emerging EV economy.
Addisu Lashitew has received funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. He is a Nonresident Fellow at the Brookings Institution.
Valued at more than US$250 billion, the influencer industry is the centre of the digital economy.
Popular haul videos, where influencers display and discuss a recent collection of purchases, and unboxings — videos where content makers open, showcase and review new products — have long been promoting endless streams of consumer goods that can be purchased with an easy click.
But what happens to influencer culture and popular consumption practices when many are worried about their financial futures?
Social media feeds become full of content-makers encouraging us to save our money — influencers telling us not to buy trendy, perhaps unnecessary, goods, like tons of Halloween decor or luxury skincare products.
This comes as American tariffs wreak havoc on the global economy and youth unemployment soars, and points to growing economic uncertainty. Consumption, the social practice that becomes publicly and hotly debated during times of economic uncertainty, is back on our radars.
For the past year, social media users have declared almost everything and anything as “recession indicators.” Influencer Kate O’Brien’s viral TikTok, for example, showing users how to squeeze out the remaining beauty product from its packaging to not waste anything, is one of many examples.
As talk of a recession continues to build, social media trends like deinfluencing help us understand how popular culture navigates economic downturns.
The rise of the recessionista
Economic recessions have always had a major impact on popular culture. The jobs lost during the 2007-08 global financial crisis helped pave the way for today’s influencer industry. Fashion bloggers grew in popularity during this time.
Unemployed media workers and younger creatives wanting to break into the industry turned to web blogging — and eventually, new social media platforms like YouTube and Instagram — to post fashion, beauty and lifestyle content.
Early 2000s pop culture was defined by excess, with shoppers spending on goods like designer “it bags.” When the recession hit, shoppers were blamed for bringing about the economic downturn, mainly for spending beyond their means. In order to pay for these purchases, consumers were taking on more household and mortgage debt, which became contributing factors.
The “recessionista” emerged as a popular trope in fashion blogs. Recessionistas were savvy, mainly female consumers who spent hours shopping at discount chains like TJ Maxx to find good deals on fashionable purchases.
They taught their online followers how to spend money efficiently and avoid overpriced designer goods. Recessionistas became coded as productive consumers. Almost 20 years later, the recessionista has re-emerged, this time as the deinfluencer on TikTok.
Deinfluencing content goes viral
In January 2023, deinfluencing — where social media users encourage their followers to purchase cheaper products rather than more expensive alternatives — became a popular TikTok trend. It quickly went viral, collecting more than one billion views on TikTok.
Deinfluencing content on TikTok was first made buzzworthy within the platform’s beauty community. The trend has since expanded to include other niche areas like fall seasonal shopping and Amazon Prime Days.
Like the recessionista, deinfluencing gained attention during a unique cultural moment. The cost-of-living crisis dominated news headlines. Watching online videos by influencers displaying lavish PR hauls became difficult for people who were struggling to afford basics, like groceries.
Mascaragate and authenticity
In addition to financial anxiety, people’s search for authenticity was a catalyst for deinfluencing content. Enter: Mascaragate, the TikTok scandal surrounding the infamous sponsored TikTok video by beauty influencer Mikayla Nogueira. Nogueira was promoting L’Oréal’s new Telescopic Lift Mascara, but TikTok users noticed that she was wearing false eyelashes.
Early deinfluencing videos condemned Nogueira for unethically promoting mindless consumption. In this way, Nogueira was framed as the same wasteful female consumer of the early 2000s, and the deinfluencer as the more ethical recessionista.
Critics, however, argue that deinfluencing is meaningless because, as a trend, it still encourages users to shop. Whether you promote a $50 foundation from a high-end beauty brand or a cheaper drugstore alternative, you’re still promoting consumption.
But that’s the whole point of the viral trend. Deinfluencing informs social media users how to keep the consumer cycle going by still shopping, only now more efficiently. It’s a trend where social media users are rebranding consumption into an efficient, productive activity for today’s turbulent economy.
What’s ahead for consumer trends?
Deinfluencing certainly makes social media users think harder about how they’re spending their money. And we might all need a little bit of that.
But deinfluencing can also have the unintended effect of making it seem consumers are solely responsible for navigating financial crises. What recession-era consumption trends like deinfluencing can sometimes do is shift focus from the institutional figures responsible for economic stability to individual shoppers.
And it’s frequently purchases made by female consumers, like designer bags and beauty products, that are judged as wasteful or unnecessary. Consumer culture and the influencer industry are both historically female domains. Gendered tropes like the excessive consumer or unethical influencer often get blamed for economic crises, and then recessionistas and deinfluencers — oftentimes women — are then tasked to help address the issue.
As the economy struggles, influencers will continue to post deinfluencing content. Just like the recessionistas before them, they are set on teaching their followers just how to spend their money despite an economy reeling from tariffs — whether it’s their job or not.
Aidan Moir previously received funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
Source: The Conversation – UK – By Alexandra Consterdine, Senior Lecturer in Sociology of Sport, Exercise and Health, Liverpool John Moores University
Olympic swimmer Ben Proud has become the first British athlete to join the Enhanced Games – a controversial new event that allows athletes from all over the world to compete using performance-enhancing drugs. The prize money on offer can hit US$1 million (£730,000). But the swimmer, who won a silver medal at last year’s Paris Olympics, has sparked sharp criticism from sporting bodies after announcing he would be taking part.
In essence, Proud’s decision challenges the core values of fair play and athlete safety. While he frames it as a pursuit of human potential, motivated by financial reward, critics argue it undermines clean sport, poses health risks and is very likely to damage his legacy.
It also leaves him unable to compete in future Olympic Games and raises questions about his suitability to receive public funding.
The Enhanced Games will debut in Las Vegas in May 2026. The event offers prizes of US$250,000 per event and US$1 million for breaking the world record. It was created as an alternative to sport controlled by the International Olympic Committee, with athletes being permitted to use substances approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA). These could include steroids, testosterone and growth hormones.
Athletes will compete in swimming (50m and 100m freestyle, 50m and 100m butterfly), athletic events (100m sprint, 100m/110m hurdles) and weightlifting (snatch, clean and jerk). So far, five elite-level swimmers have signed up, including four-time world champion Megan Romano. She is the first American and the first woman to commit. Australian Olympic swimmer James Magnussen has indicated that he will come out of retirement to compete in the 50m freestyle.
The event has had to look to alternative sources for funding. International venture capitalists and private investors have provided a multimillion-dollar investment into the project – reportedly Peter Thiel (co-founder of PayPal) and German entrepreneur Christian Angermayer are among those backing the project.
But outside the world of venture capitalism, the World Anti-Doping Agency (Wada) has labelled the Enhanced Games “dangerous and irresponsible”. The governing bodies Aquatics GB and UK Sport have condemned Proud’s decision.
As well as his Olympic success, Proud is also a former world and European champion in the 50m freestyle. So you might think he has little left to prove. But in an interview, the swimmer said his goal is to test the limits of human potential, and become the fastest man on the planet.
But, of course, the question of money is looming large. Proud has also admitted that this played a major part in his decision. Elite-level swimming, compared to sports like men’s football, rugby and tennis, does not offer big financial wins for athletes.
Proud claimed that prize money of US$250,000 would take “13 years of winning world championship titles” to earn. A gold medal at the world championships in 2025 would have earned a swimmer US$20,000 at most.
Inequality in sport
Within sport, there are deep divisions in terms of how it is financed and supported, with variations in sponsorship, commercial investment and viewing figures. At the high-performance level, this inequality is most keenly felt in minority sports such as swimming, where even highly successful athletes struggle for financial rewards.
In fact, the British Elite Athletes Association (the independent representative body) has warned that the majority of athletes funded by the World Class Programme from UK Sport will not be able to afford to stay in their sport until the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics without a funding increase.
According to a survey done by the association last year, two thirds of the 87 respondents who travelled to Paris in 2024 said they would be forced to quit before 2028. This could put British sport in a precarious situation with potentially serious ramifications.
It would mean that the number of athletes representing the UK would fall, with consequences for the longevity of sports programmes, community initiatives and grassroots schemes to get people more active. At a time of rising obesity levels, sedentary lives and declining health, the UK cannot ignore the positive effects of getting more exercise, bolstered by sporting role models.
So while it could earn him serious prize money, Proud’s decision is a direct challenge to clean sport values. And it risks normalising drug use in sport, undermining decades of anti-doping efforts. Experts have defined clean sport as being free of “drugs and other forms of artificial enhancements”.
What’s more, it pits athlete autonomy against their responsibility to the public. There is a tension between Proud’s decision to test his limits and the responsibilities he has as a role model – and a recipient of public funding.
And the health risks of performance-enhancing drugs is a problem. Even if FDA-approved, the use of otherwise-banned substances in competitive sport introduces unknown long-term health consequences, especially when used in extreme training environments.
This highlights the inherent contradiction of sport as a desirable, healthy activity, while at the same time promoting potentially dangerous practices.
And the impact on an athlete’s legacy and reputation cannot be overstated. Proud’s Olympic achievements are now likely to be overshadowed by his association with a movement widely condemned by sporting bodies. Regardless of his success at the Enhanced Games, his presence there could shut him out of the many opportunities that sporting heroes can enjoy long after they’ve retired.
Alexandra Consterdine does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Source: The Conversation – UK – By Siobhan Keenan, Professor of Shakespeare and Renaissance Literature, De Montfort University
How did Shakespeare become the world’s greatest playwright? It’s a question that has long fascinated scholars and fans alike. My latest research suggests that one answer lies in the Bard’s close collaboration with his leading man, Richard Burbage.
Their partnership lasted more than 25 years, and as my new book, Richard Burbage and the Shakespearean Stage, reveals, the creative chemistry between writer and actor transformed their art and elevated their respective profiles – a bit like an Elizabethan Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro.
Shakespeare and Burbage’s careers likely started in the 1580s. But the first time we hear of them being members of the same acting company is in 1595.
In March that year, the pair was paid £20 (about £8k today) alongside the famous Elizabethan clown, Will Kemp, for performing two plays at court before Queen Elizabeth I with a troupe known as the Lord Chamberlain’s Men (named after the lord chamberlain, Henry Carey). At this stage, Shakespeare and Burbage were newcomers on the flourishing Elizabethan theatrical scene. But they soon made their mark.
By the turn of the century the Lord Chamberlain’s Men had moved to the legendary Globe theatre, and the pair had become famous. Shakespeare was being praised by contemporaries as “the most excellent” writer of comedies and tragedies in English, while Burbage had become the Elizabethan stage’s newest star, with a breakout performance as Shakespeare’s witty and wicked tragic hero, Richard III.
One fan apparently admired Burbage’s Richard III so much that she even arranged a secret off-stage rendezvous with him, only for Shakespeare to get there first, sending word to Burbage that William the Conqueror was before Richard III – or so claimed gossipy lawyer John Manningham in 1602.
There aren’t any contemporary reviews of Burbage’s Richard III, or his other early performances, but we know that he was especially admired for his versatility and the authenticity of his acting.
This included an ability to portray powerful emotions convincingly and to immerse himself in his roles completely, “putting off himself with his Clothes” as contemporary Richard Flecknoe put it in 1664 – like an early modern Daniel Day-Lewis. These qualities were to prove a source of powerful inspiration to Burbage’s fellow actor and company playwright, Shakespeare.
Writing for Burbage
When Shakespeare became a member of the Lord Chamberlain’s players, it marked a significant new phase in his career as an actor and writer. For perhaps the first time, he found himself writing regularly for the same group of players – a position he would enjoy for the rest of his career.
It’s not surprising that he started to tailor his plays for the men and boys he knew would act in them. Sometimes he even mistakenly wrote their names instead of their characters’ names in his scripts.
But in Burbage’s case the collaboration proved an especially rich and enduring one, the mutual talents of writer and actor inspiring the creation of a series of memorably complex and believable tragic heroes of a kind not seen not known before on the English stage.
These range from tragic kings, such as King Lear and Macbeth, to murderously jealous husbands, such as Othello and Leontes (A Winter’s Tale). They also include roles shaped by another of Burbage’s talents – the ability to feign madness convincingly. The most famous example of this is Hamlet.
The story was not new when Shakespeare created his updated Hamlet play around 1601, probably a star vehicle for Burbage. The role is famously demanding in length – 1,338 lines in the edition published in 1604. It also requires incredible versatility in its performer, who must play several roles in one: grieving son, bereft lover and revenger.
Perhaps most memorably of all, Hamlet must put on an “antic” or mad disposition, as he seeks to conceal his plans of revenge from Claudius, the uncle who murdered his father and married his mother.
Hamlet’s feigned madness can be found in Shakespeare’s source, but Shakespeare’s late Elizabethan reworking of the play gives more room to Hamlet’s performance of madness – including his sudden changes in speech and behaviour – and it creates more uncertainty about whether the madness remains a performance or becomes the real thing in the character.
Implicitly, Shakespeare made these changes influenced by his experience of working with Burbage and to give his star more room to show off his versatility and his aptitude for playing men who had gone mad. The result was a hit for both: Hamlet became one of Shakespeare’s most famous plays and its hero one of Burbage’s most memorable roles.
For many years, the conversation about Shakespeare’s authorship has focused on his work with other playwrights. But Burbage also helped shape Shakespeare’s plays, and his role in the Bard’s creative process deserves more recognition.
Siobhan Keenan received funding from the Society for Theatre Research.
The Middle East is experiencing a period of intense political and economic turbulence, with several countries in the region embroiled in conflict. These conflicts are taking place against the backdrop of an escalating climate crisis.
In 2023, global thinktank the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace concluded that Middle Eastern countries “are among the world’s most exposed states to the accelerating impacts of human-caused climate change – including soaring heatwaves, declining precipitation, extended droughts, more intense sandstorms and floods, and rising sea levels”.
The capacity of a society to receive, process and act upon climate-related information is at the heart of an effective climate change response. Media plays an important role: it is central to advancing public understanding of climate change and its connection to individual, communal and national security.
Yet over the past two decades or so, media coverage of climate change in the Middle East has been among the lowest in the world. According to the University of Colorado Boulder’s Media and Climate Change Observatory, media organisations in the Middle East each produced an average of around one article about climate change in August 2025 – compared with 66 articles for North American media in the same month.
Wars and climate change are inextricably linked. Climate change can increase the likelihood of violent conflict by intensifying resource scarcity and displacement, while conflict itself accelerates environmental damage. This article is part of a series, War on climate, which explores the relationship between climate issues and global conflicts.
The lack of climate coverage in the Middle East is because media outlets there face a number of structural problems. How does one talk about climate change when armed conflicts are spiralling out of control, or when public discourse is monopolised by what are perceived to be more pressing issues?
Jordan presents a useful example to help us understand these challenges and how to overcome them.
Media in Jordan
Jordan has long played a stabilising role in the Middle East. It has accepted large numbers of refugees from neighbouring conflicts and has acted as a mediator and peace broker between Middle Eastern rivals. However, climate change is threatening Jordan’s stability.
Raed Abu Soud, Jordan’s minister of water and irrigation, said in May 2025: “Jordan is grappling with one of the most severe water crises in the world, with per-capita water availability dropping to just 60 cubic metres per year.”
A host of other factors are worsening the situation. Economic underdevelopment in Jordan is leading to persistent unemployment and public unrest, while regional conflicts are undermining social cohesion.
How Jordan responds to the risks presented by climate change, and preserves its stability, is extremely important for the Middle East and beyond. Public understanding of this challenge is going to be pivotal to an effective response. And here enters the role of media.
Our research on climate change in Jordan has involved analysing more than 2,500 news articles in the country’s major print media and carrying out extensive interviews with local people. We have found that, while climate change is becoming a more important topic in the country, there are still many barriers preventing a coherent climate change discussion there.
It is common in Jordan, as in many other countries affected by conflict, for conversations related to climate change to be pushed to the background when other crises emerge. Since 2023, when the war in Gaza began, Jordanian media outlets have understandably been drawn to covering the humanitarian crisis there at the expense of climate change.
This has been exacerbated by the fact there are very few journalists in Jordan who work consistently on climate-related issues and can offer accurate and timely coverage. The shortage of climate journalists is a common problem across the Middle East.
When climate change is covered by Jordanian media, it is often discussed as a secondary consideration relative to geopolitical threats – not as a challenge in its own right. Due to the country’s policy of hosting refugees, Jordanian media outlets have often portrayed their country as a “second victim” of the civil war in Syria and the intractable Israel-Palestine conflict. Refugees are depicted as another strain on scarce resources.
Climate change discourse in Jordan tends to be heavily influenced by international partners including foreign governments, charities and funding bodies.
There are numerous externally funded educational and vocational courses focused on climate change available in Jordan for various audiences, including media professionals. While this facilitates the advancement of climate change discussions, it can distance climate coverage from the local context and knowledge. This is particularly true if external partners merely “teach” Jordanians what they believe is necessary, without fully understanding the specific challenges Jordan faces.
It can also erode trust between Jordanians and these foreign partners. In some of the cases we studied, journalists in Jordan saw climate change as part of a western-imposed agenda aimed at controlling developing countries.
Jordan is highly important for the Middle East, Europe and beyond. Without effective climate adaptation, it risks losing its role as a refugee haven and regional stabiliser.
Media can play a vital role in advancing climate change discourse in the Middle East, both by holding governments to account and raising awareness of climate issues. Some studies suggest that public concern correlates with the volume of media coverage, and attention can fade when other issues dominate the media space.
Sustained, inclusive coverage is essential to ensure long-term engagement and informed public participation in climate action, even during times of political and economic turbulence.
Marianna Poberezhskaya received funding for the associated research project from the Climate Social Science Network.
Imad El-Anis receives funding from the Council for British Research in the Levant and the Climate Social Science Network.
Marwa Mustafa received funding from Climate Social Science Network.
At the end of our conversation, Nathan (a pseudonym) kept repeating, almost to himself: “Perhaps we should have done more. Perhaps we could have done more. Perhaps there was something we could have done about the camp itself. About the dogs. We kept on hearing the dogs. Every night.”
Nathan, a senior surgeon in one of Israel’s bigger hospitals, was talking about the Sde Teiman camp, an army camp in the Negev desert in southern Israel which, following the October 7 2023 attack on Israel, was turned into a holding facility for detainees from Gaza.
Initially, this camp served to imprison members of the Nukhba force, the Hamas unit which led the massacre in southern Israel. But since then, and throughout Israel’s subsequent assault on Gaza, Sde Teiman has been a “black site” in which Palestinians captured by the Israeli army inside Gaza were held, including many who say they were not involved in the fighting.
Nathan never stepped foot in the camp. But he was one of a small number of Israeli doctors who volunteered to work in a medical facility which operated next to it, where some of the most badly injured detainees from Sde Teiman received medical treatment. This facility was set up after many Israeli hospitals refused to admit anyone suspected of taking part in the October 7 massacre, many of whom were severely injured.
Nathan’s decision to serve in this facility was not a simple one, he explained to us. While he had no reservations about treating detainees from the camp, and saw it as his duty as a doctor to treat patients no matter who they were (especially if no one else would treat them), his work at Sde Teiman’s medical facility – which he has kept secret from family and colleagues – continues to haunt him. “Ultimately,” he said, “it made me into a war criminal.”
The Insights section is committed to high-quality longform journalism. Our editors work with academics from many different backgrounds who are tackling a wide range of societal and scientific challenges.
We interviewed Nathan for a book we have been writing on torture in Israel. In our research, conducted over the past five years with the Israeli human rights organisation, the Public Committee against Torture in Israel (Pcati), we investigated the extent to which healthcare systems and other civic institutions have become complicit in the processes of torture that have become more widespread and brutal since the October 7 attacks.
After harrowing accounts also began to emerge from the medical facility, we set out to investigate it. Stories from this facility told of patients held in humiliating and degrading conditions, of sub-standard medical care leading to medical complications (including unnecessary amputations due to constant handcuffing), and of patients dying due to neglect.
Nathan, and two other doctors we interviewed who worked there, provide new insights into the conditions inside the medical facility – and more generally, the conduct of the Israeli healthcare system in the wake of the October 7 attacks. Their stories allow us to see, as they all made clear in various ways, how even people with the best intentions can become complicit in war crimes.
‘They were all in unbearable pain’
Shortly after the October 7 2023 attacks, Nathan got a call from the Israeli Ministry of Health asking him if he would be willing to treat some of those who had committed the atrocities. The ministry approached a small number of doctors after many Israeli hospitals and some doctors had refused to treat people widely regarded in Israel as savage terrorists.
Doctors have an ethical obligation to care for all patients, regardless of who they are or what they have done. Indeed, the Israeli healthcare system had prided itself on its long record of treating all patients equally, including enemycombatants, suicide bombers and Hamas leaders. But after the October 7 attacks, for reasons we explore below, hospitals started turning such patients away.
The medical facility at Sde Teiman was set up so detainees held in the main camp could receive medical treatment without having to be admitted to public hospitals. Recalling the first time he visited the facility, Nathan told us: “I had no idea where I was going or what to expect.” He did not expect it to be anything but a temporary fix – and certainly did not imagine himself working there for many months.
BBC News report on treatment of prisoners in the Sde Teiman detention centre, August 2024.
In the first few weeks, without adequate equipment, suitable medications, a functioning logistical apparatus and even a proper institutional affiliation, the doctors had to improvise and rely on their resourcefulness. “By the end, this facility was well-equipped compared to a field hospital … But the point is,” Nathan insisted, “a field hospital should be temporary; you cannot really perform operations in a tent in the middle of the desert.”
When we met at the end of 2024, Nathan was not at ease and seemed very worried. Several times during our conversation, he told us that “no one can know who Nathan is”. Seeing how concerned he was at being exposed, we were surprised he had agreed to be interviewed at all. But unknown to us, a few days before we contacted him, he had attended a public talk we gave about our research on torture being conducted by Israel. This is probably why, when we reached out, he immediately agreed to meet us.
In addition to Nathan and the two other doctors who worked in the facility, we also interviewed others who were involved in its operation in some way: two members of the Israel Medical Association’s ethics board, a medical ethics expert who advised doctors working in the Sde Teiman facility, and human rights practitioners who investigated it. We also interviewed medical staff and healthcare professionals from seven of Israel’s largest hospitals, as well as several Israeli government officials working in the healthcare system and Ministry of Justice.
While most interviewees spoke under condition of anonymity, Nathan was particularly guarded. He was mostly scared that he or his family would be targeted by rightwing Israeli activists if they knew he had treated “terrorists”. But he was also concerned about his colleagues’ reactions – even his direct line manager had no idea what he had been doing, beyond that he had been called up for military reserve duty.
Furthermore, Nathan wanted to protect himself from criticism from members of the leftwing community who saw anyone involved with the Sde Teiman facility as a war criminal. Yet it was clear that he too saw the very existence of the medical facility as a crime – even though he always tried to provide the patients there with the best possible care.
Indeed, Nathan told us that while working there, he had tried repeatedly to get the medical facility shut down. “The patients there could not receive the treatment they needed. They all needed to be admitted to a normal hospital.”
After many months, once “it was no longer an emergency situation” – and when Nathan realised his efforts to shut the facility down were futile – he felt he could not “be there any longer”, and quit.
Cuffed, blindfolded and wearing diapers
We approached Ben (also a pseudonym) for an interview because of his involvement with another human rights organisation, to ask about the medical treatment of Palestinians in Israeli prisons after the October 7 attacks. It was only during our conversation, when he heard that we were writing about the medical facility at Sde Teiman, that he told us he, too, had been called late in 2023 to serve there.
Ben, a much more junior doctor than the other doctors we interviewed, works in one of Israel’s public hospitals. He recalled being asked by a colleague if he would help perform a procedure on a patient from Gaza he had previously treated. He immediately got in his car and drove to Sde Teiman, following the directions he’d been given over the phone – not knowing exactly where he was going.
Once he got to the medical facility, Ben said he was astonished by what he saw. Even though this was late December and the place had been operational for more than two months, “patients were still wearing nothing but diapers”. He told us they were still cuffed to their beds and blindfolded at all times, including while receiving medical treatment. They were not allowed to get out of bed, so had to defecate in bed when they needed to relieve themselves.
Ben carried out the procedure he was called to perform. But once he got home, the reality of what he’d witnessed dawned on him: “I decided not to step into that facility ever again.”
Because they were cuffed, the nursing staff had to do everything for the patients. They washed them, changed their diapers, and even had to feed some of them liquid food through straws. These accounts were confirmed by the other two doctors we interviewed who had worked in the facility.
Doctors describe conditions inside the Sde Teiman medical facility: BBC News, May 2024.
Nathan told us several times: “You must emphasise the care and dedication of the nurses” who bathed, fed and cared for people few others were willing to care for. Yet while this was undoubtedly noteworthy, especially under those circumstances, most of these patients would have been able to go to the toilet, shower and feed themselves had they not been restrained to their beds 24 hours a day. Using such restraints indiscriminately on patients violates Israeli law, and is considered a form of torture according to ethical codes both in Israel and internationally.
“At first, [the cuffing] may have been necessary because we treated very dangerous people” who had just carried out a brutal massacre, Nathan explained. He described a severe attack on one female staff member which he witnessed, confirming: “We had several instances in which patients assaulted staff.”
But, he continued: “They had no justification after the first few weeks. By then, other precautions could have been introduced, and assessments could have been conducted to determine who might pose a danger to staff and still needed to be cuffed.”
Nathan said that eventually, many of the patients seen by the doctors and nurses were not dangerous. “Arrangements should have been made so those patients could be cared for in a general hospital in Israel.”
After visiting the Sde Teiman medical facility in late February 2024, members of the Israeli Ministry of Health’s ethical committee reported that all patients were still chained to their beds by all four limbs – despite the fact that, by the Israeli army’s own admission in December 2023, many Sde Teiman detainees were by then not suspected of being related to Hamas or other militant factions. Many of those incarcerated in Sde Teiman, including some who had been held for many months and were chained to their beds, would eventually be released without charge.
‘We did everything we could’
Nathan’s account was supported by our third interviewee, Yoel Donchin – a senior anaesthesiologist who also served in the medical facility for many months. Donchin described some of the patients he treated to the New York Times in June 2024, explaining that one was paraplegic, another severely obese, and a third had needed to use a breathing tube since childhood. Donchin concluded it was “highly unlikely” that any of them were involved in the fighting. “They take everyone,” he said, referring to the Israeli army’s actions in Gaza.
Since he had already spokenpubliclyabout his experiences in the facility, Donchin was easy to locate. Unlike Nathan and Ben, he was happy for us to use his real name, and had no reservations about his involvement there.
After he publicly defended his decision to serve in the facility, Donchin and the rest of the medical team working there was criticised by human rights organisations including members of Pcati’s board. Treating patients there, they claimed, was “a moral disgrace and a violation of every ethical principle” to which doctors must commit.
But, a couple of hours into our long conversation in his quiet home in a suburb of Tel Aviv, we began to reconcile the facts we knew about Sde Teiman with Donchin’s account of his time working in the medical facility. He equated the situation in Israel immediately after October 7 to “a multi-casualty event”, explaining that in such conditions, “medical ethics is different”. In the chaos of the first few weeks after the attacks, he told us, “no one knew what they were doing. The hospitals were swamped with patients and the system was overwhelmed.”
Donchin said that even some Israeli soldiers wounded in the Hamas attack could not get the full care they needed. In the aftermath of October 7, he told us: “The entire [Israeli] healthcare system was in complete disarray. In the first month, there was no state to speak about whatsoever.”
Within this chaos, Donchin told us: “We did everything we could.” He explained that when the nutrition patients needed was not supplied, staff would buy it themselves. When a patient needed to be seen by a specialist, they would use their personal networks to bring in colleagues with the needed expertise – either having them come to the facility or, when that was impossible, having them provide advice over a video call.
Yet while these may have been effective emergency measures, “they should not have been the solution”. Ultimately, Donchin said, these “compromises and improvisations” meant the doctors were operating under “a black flag of illegality”.
According to the medical ethics expert who advised doctors working in Sde Teiman: “In this first month, treating those who’d just taken part in the massacre posed particular challenges”, because some were very dangerous and aggressive. “General hospitals are not set up to treat patients who pose such risks to staff.”
However, he also said that “Israel had detailed contingency plans in place for such a scenario, which included preparing a dedicated ward for enemy combatants in one of the main hospitals. But those were never implemented.”
‘He should be left to rot’
Many of the nearly 200 Hamas militants who took part in the October 7 attacks and were captured inside Israel were wounded in the fighting. At first they were taken to general hospitals, but word quickly got out – leading to widespread reports of mobs raiding hospital wards, attacking staff and patients they suspected of being Palestinian.
To protect the safety of both patients and staff, Israeli hospitals began refusing to admit these patients. But some medical staff also expressed their “difficulties” with treating those whom they suspected of having committed the October 7 atrocities.
On October 11 2023, Moshe Arbel, Israel’s health minister at the time, officially endorsed this reluctance by issuing an ordinance stating that general hospitals should not treat “terrorists from Gaza”. This guidance also enabled Israeli hospitals to refuse treatment to any Palestinian arriving from any incarceration facility.
Staff working in some of these hospitals told us in the aftermath that they had regularly heard colleagues making statements such as “Gaza should be erased” or “as far as I am concerned, all babies in Gaza are terrorists and can die” – sometimes in formal staff meetings and in front of Palestinian colleagues.
We also heard stories of medical staff demonstrating explicit disregard to the injuries and wellbeing of those they suspected were part of Hamas’s Nukhba force – and in some cases, Palestinian detainees from Gaza more generally.
For example, Nathan described calling a senior specialist when he needed urgent advice about treating one of the detainees in Sde Teiman, only to be told: “As far as I am concerned, he should be left to rot.” And according to Ben: “On October 8, I witnessed a doctor inserting a tube into the lungs of a patient from the Nukhba force without anaesthetising him. There were likely other such cases.”
“Paradoxically,” Ben told us, “the doctors in Sde Teiman’s medical facility had a much deeper commitment and understanding of their responsibility to provide care to these patients.” It was in the general hospitals, he said, that he had found more “verbal violence, less care” – and some cases of physical abuse.
As an underequipped and understaffed makeshift facility, according to those who worked at Sde Teiman, if a patient needed urgent treatment that could not be provided on site, they would sometimes be taken to one of Israel’s general hospitals. Nathan described spending long hours on the phone each time, calling different hospitals until he could find one willing to admit a patient. But it was the very existence of the Sde Teiman medical facility that allowed many hospitals to shirk their responsibilities, since these patients were apparently already receiving treatment.
And when a hospital procedure was performed, the patients were quickly sent back to the Sde Teiman medical facility, as described in this leaked letter to Israel’s Ministry of Health from a doctor working in the facility:
Patients after major operations, such as abdominal surgeries for intestinal resections, are brought back after about an hour of post-op observation to the Sde Teiman medical facility, which is staffed most of the day by a single doctor, accompanied by a nursing team, some with no more than medic training.
Eventually, staff at the Sde Teiman medical facility managed to get some patients released from being handcuffed to their beds by all four limbs, and to enable them to wear hospital robes rather than diapers. But regardless of their effort to provide better care, and regardless of their important struggles and partial successes, to treat people in the Sde Teiman medical facility was, in the view of many observers as well as some of the doctors themselves, to become complicit in violations of international and Israeli law.
The anonymous letter submitted to Israel’s Ministry of Health claimed conditions in the facility often resulted “in complications, and sometimes even in the patient’s death”:
This makes all of us – the medical teams and … those in charge of us in the health and defense ministries – complicit in the violation of Israeli law, and perhaps worse for me as a doctor, in the violation of my basic commitment to patients, wherever they are – as I swore when I graduated 20 years ago.
The doctors’ dilemma
Ben only visited the Sde Teiman medical facility once, yet the regret stayed with him. “I should have turned around the moment I saw the patients were treated while naked and cuffed to their beds,” he told us. “To treat patients there was not only a violation of our ethical codes as doctors – it was to take part in war crimes, if not crimes against humanity. This was not something I was willing to consider.”
He continued: “To serve there effectively mediated the crisis that would have been caused had no doctor agreed to do so. The medical staff allowed the facility in Sde Teiman to continue operating, and the existence of the facility allowed the hospitals to refuse treating those patients.”
While the Sde Teiman detention camp held many hundreds of detainees over long periods, its medical facility could treat no more than 15 patients at a time. Usually, only detainees identified with acute injuries were received – often only after their condition had already deteriorated. This meant lesions would frequently get infected, according to our interviewees, leading to amputations of limbs that could have easily been prevented.
In the main detention camp, untreated illnesses led to complications, debilitation and, in some cases, death. The most recent public data shows that between October 2023 and July 2024, at least 36 detainees died inside Sde Teiman. To a slightly lesser extent, the withdrawal of care has also become the standard in other prisons and detention facilities where Palestinians are held. According to the most recent (still unpublished) data we have received from Physicians for Human Rights (Israel), from October 2023 to July 2025, 52 Palestinians have died within military facilities and 41 inside Israeli prisons.
Denying medical care to an imprisoned person may itself amount to torture. While commonly imagined as breaking someone’s bones, pulling out their fingernails or applying electric shocks, torture can take many other forms. When someone is sick or injured, denying them the treatment they need and preventing them from getting any pain relief can be a way of causing unbearable pain and unnecessary suffering.
For Donchin, to refuse to treat patients would have meant becoming an accomplice in this crime. “For me, the alternative – to provide no care at all, to show no compassion – was impossible,” he said, adding that it is one thing to think about these questions in theory, a completely different thing when you see a person suffering right in front of you.
In contrast, for Ben, the only right thing to do was to refuse to work inside Sde Teiman’s temporary medical facility – especially when state-of-the-art hospitals were only a short car drive away. “Treating patients there doesn’t save them, since it leaves them outside the healthcare system that could have given them the lifesaving treatment they so needed,” he told us.
But as we were concluding our conversation, he added: “There are no right answers here. It is a huge tragedy, no matter which way you look at it.”
The Sde Teiman medical facility was finally shut down in October 2024 when, following a petition to Israel’s High Court of Justice by several human rights organisations including Pcati and Physicians for Human Rights, the population of the main detention camp was significantly reduced.
By the time Nathan sat down to talk to us, the medical facility had been shut for a good few months. But the man we met was still utterly defeated, visibly broken. He kept asking himself if he had done enough – or if he should or could have done more. This is when he concluded: “Perhaps there was something we could have done about the camp itself.”
While he never stepped foot inside the main camp, he told us he could hear very clearly the yelling and the barking of the dogs. “Maybe we could have done more about the camp itself.”
Whereas Ben and Donchin seemed to draw some comfort from their belief that they had done the right thing (despite reaching opposite conclusions), Nathan did not share that conviction. On the one hand, it was clear to him that he had become complicit in crimes. The conditions in the medical facility failed even to comply with what he called the “stripped-down law” that Israel had adapted to treat these people – let alone international human rights law and all medical codes of ethics.
Yet at the same time, Nathan felt he could not abandon these patients. When we met him, he was still torn about what he had done, still wondering whether he had made the right decisions.
Comparing our findings with testimonies that have emerged over the last two years, we can say with confidence that the use of torture by the Israeli security forces has increased both in scale and severity since then – though this has been denied by the Israeli government and military.
According to numerousverifiedreports, many of the detainees in Sde Teiman were subjected to sexual violence ranging from forced nudity and humiliation to rape; constant cuffing that led to injuries and in some cases the amputation of limbs; and beatings using batons, metal bars and the butts of guns and boots, sometimes until detainees lost consciousness.
Similar practices were reported in almost all Israeli prisons and detention facilities where Palestinians were held after the October 7 attacks.
The stories of the doctors working at Sde Teiman should not distract from the gravity of this wider story of abuse and torture. But the dilemmas the doctors faced, and the impact it has had on their lives, show the complexities, if not impossibilities, faced by Israelis who are trying to resist the atrocities Israel has been committing in Gaza (and the West Bank) in the aftermath of the October 7 attacks.
A Palestinian hospital worker inspects damage to a bombed pharmaceutical warehouse in Khan Yunis, southern Gaza, May 2025. Anas Mohammed/Shutterstock
In its July 2025 report, Physicians for Human Rights Israel claimed that the “broader targeting of Gaza’s healthcare system” amounts to a dismantling of the “existing conditions of life with effects into the future”, and should therefore be seen as a violation of the UN’s 1948 Convention On Genocide.
The doctors we met, alongside the other medical staff in the Sde Teiman facility, attempted to counteract the dehumanisation and abandonment of life that allows genocides to happen. In different ways, they tried to stop the atrocity that was evolving in front of them and to remedy the conditions that made it possible. Yet they still, in their view, found themselves complicit in the very crimes they tried to prevent.
As much as their story is a story of the impossible dilemmas these doctors faced, it is also a story of people who at least did what they could to counter this almost-inevitable complicity. Not only by insisting on the humanity of the people in front of them, and therefore also of their own, but also by refusing to remain silent.
Response to this article
The Israeli Medical Association (IMA) was contacted by The Conversation during the editing of this article. Its response, which is reflected in the final article, included the following comments:
According to Israeli Ministry of Health guidelines, all patients in the Sde Teiman medical facility were treated according to conventional Israeli medical standards, meaning the level of care there was higher than what they would have received in Gaza.
The IMA has continuously spoken out on humanitarian issues throughout this war and will continue to do so. On August 5 2025, we reaffirmed our long-standing policy on the assurance of medical care during armed conflict.
The destruction of Gaza’s healthcare is tragic, but there is no “mass killing, detention, torture and abuse of medical personnel” [as was stated in the Physicians for Human Rights Israel report, July 2025]. There have been some medical personnel that were suspected or proven terrorists. The IMA has made it very clear that all patients are to be treated equally.
The Israeli military was contacted by The Conversation about the findings in this article, but did not provide a response. When previously contacted by the BBC about allegations of abuse and torture in the Sde Teiman medical facility, it said it “completely rejects accusations of systematic abuse of detainees”.
