Category: The Conversation

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Mohamed Shaheen, Lecturer in Structural Engineering, Loughborough University

When structural engineers design a building, they aren’t just stacking floors; they are calculating how to win a complex battle against nature. Every building is built to withstand a specific “budget” of environmental stress – the weight of record snowfalls, the push of powerful winds and the expansion caused by summer heat.

To do this, engineers use hazard maps and safety codes. These are essentially rulebooks based on decades of historical weather data. They include safety margins to ensure that even if a small part of a building fails, the entire structure won’t come crashing down like a house of cards.

The problem is that these rulebooks are becoming obsolete. Most of our iconic high-rises were built in the 1970s and 80s – a world that was cooler, with more predictable tides and less violent storms. Today, that world no longer exists.

Climate change acts as a threat multiplier, making the consequences of environmental stress on buildings much worse. It rarely knocks a building down on its own. Instead, it finds the tiny cracks, rusting support beams and ageing foundations and pushes them toward a breaking point. It raises the intensity of every load and strain a building must weather.

To understand the challenge, I have been studying global hotspots where the environment is winning the battle against engineering.

The 2021 collapse of Champlain Towers South in Miami, Florida, killed 98 people. While the 12-storey building had original design issues, decades of rising sea levels and salty coastal air acted as a catalyst, allowing saltwater to seep into the basement and garage.

When salt reaches the steel rods inside concrete that provide structural strength (known as reinforcement), the metal rusts and expands. This creates massive internal pressure that cracks the concrete from the inside out — a process engineers call spalling. The lesson is clear: in a warming world, coastal basements are becoming corrosion chambers where minor maintenance gaps can escalate into catastrophic structural failure.

While the Miami case affected a single building, the historic coastal city of Alexandria, Egypt, is more widely at risk. Recent research shows that building collapses there have jumped from one per year to nearly 40 per year in the past few years.

Not only is the sea rising, the salt is liquefying the soft ground beneath the city foundations. As the water table rises, saltwater is pushed under the city, raising the groundwater level. This salty water doesn’t just rust the foundations of buildings; it changes the chemical and physical structure of soil. As a result, there are currently 7,000 buildings in Alexandria at high risk of collapse.

In Hong Kong during Super Typhoon Mangkhut in 2018, wind speeds hit a terrifying 180 miles per hour. When strong winds hit a wall of skyscrapers, they squeeze between the buildings and speed up — like water sprayed through a narrow garden hose.

This pressure turned hundreds of offices into wind tunnels, causing glass windows to pop out of their frames and raining broken glass onto the streets below. With 82 deaths and 15,000 homes destroyed across the region, skyscrapers became “debris machines”, even if they didn’t fully collapse.

Supercomputer simulations of Japan’s river systems show that in a world warmed by 2°C, floods of today’s “once in a century” magnitude could recur about every 45 years. With 4°C of warming, they could be every 23 years. These surges in water volume will expand flood zones into areas previously considered safe, potentially overflowing sea walls and flood defences. In a critical region like Osaka Bay, storm surges could rise by nearly 30%.

In the US, a study of 370 million property records from 1945 to 2015 found over half of all structures are in hazard hotspots. Nearly half are facing multiple threats like earthquakes, floods, hurricanes and tornadoes. In the UK, climate-driven weather claims hit £573 million in 2023, a 36% rise from 2022. Annual flood damage to non-residential properties in the UK is also projected to nearly double from £2 billion today to £3.9 billion by the 2080s.

Maintenance is our best defence

Much of the world’s building stock is therefore entering its middle age under environmental conditions it was never designed to face. Instead of panicking or tearing everything down, the solution is to adapt and treat building maintenance as a form of climate resilience – not as an optional extra.

Mid-life building upgrades can help protect our skylines for the next 50 years. Our hazard maps must look at future climate models — not just historical weather — to set new safety standards. Regular structural health monitoring is essential – by using sensors to track invisible stresses in foundations and frames before they become fatal, dangerous situations can be foreseen.

Buildings can stay strong by focusing retrofits on the weakest and most vulnerable parts. This includes glass facades, the underground drainage, the foundation piles and corrosion protection.

Climate change isn’t rewriting the laws of engineering, but it is rapidly eating away at our margins of safety. If we want our cities to remain standing, we must act now – before small, invisible stresses accumulate into irreversible failure.

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Mohamed Shaheen 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.

– ref. City skylines need an upgrade in the face of climate stress – https://theconversation.com/city-skylines-need-an-upgrade-in-the-face-of-climate-stress-267763

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Steffi Colyer, Senior Lecturer in Sports Biomechanics, Centre for Health and Injury and Illness Prevention in Sport,, University of Bath

Skeleton is an exhilarating Winter Olympic sport in which athletes race head-first down an ice track at speeds reaching over 80 miles per hour (130km/h). While the event can look basic at first glance, success relies heavily on highly engineered equipment and extensive wind‑tunnel testing – much like elite Olympic track cycling programmes.

Each run begins with the athlete pushing a sled (also known as a “tea tray”) explosively off the starting block, then sprinting rapidly for about 30 metres downhill. After diving on the sled, they ride the rest of the course with their head just a few inches above the ice. The sleds have no brakes, and riders wear only a thin suit and helmet for protection.

A powerful start is considered the defining component of skeleton performance. So, developing a skeleton athlete’s strength and power while refining their pushing technique is a central focus in the lead-up to competitions. The biggest of all these, the Winter Olympics, is being held in Milan and Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy, this month. Skeleton events start on February 12.

While Britain does not tend to rank highly in Winter Olympic sports, in skeleton it has won a world-best nine Olympic medals, including three golds. Over the past ten years, my colleagues and I at the University of Bath have worked with Team GB skeleton athletes to help improve their starts, using a form of “markerless” motion capture technology.

But the applications of this technology extend far beyond the Winter Olympics. There is potential for it to replace traditional motion capture systems in the film, TV and gaming industries, and to be used in injury rehabilitation.

How motion analysis began

The origins of motion analysis can be traced back to the pioneering work of English photographer Eadweard Muybridge in the late 19th century. Muybridge developed early techniques for capturing sequences of images, including documenting equine gait.

By manually annotating specific features across successive images, researchers have since been able to build a detailed picture of how a person or animal moves. But while this method was the standard for many decades, it was both time- and labour-intensive.

So, technological advances in cameras and computer processing led to the development of automated methods of motion analysis – notably, marker-based motion capture. This uses reflective markers placed on key parts of the body, which are automatically tracked by infra-red cameras as the person moves around.

In film, animation and gaming, this mean an actor’s body movements and facial expressions can be translated into to realistic CGI characters. Marker-based technology is currently the most widely used 3D motion analysis technique across the film, gaming and health sectors, with an estimated global market value of over US$300 million (£220 million).

However, this advanced technology has limitations too, including the need for specialist equipment, controlled laboratory environments, and lengthy preparation time to attach the markers. These can be problematic in sports and many other fields – particularly during live competitions and public performances.

As a result, the field of motion analysis has come almost full circle. Thanks to major advances in computer vision and artificial intelligence, biomechanists such like me are once again extracting detailed movement information directly from video images – but this time in an automated way.

The markerless motion capture systems we use rely on deep‑learning models that are trained on a huge number of images of people performing everyday activities. When applied to unseen images, the algorithms can then automatically detect the same body landmarks. By fusing multiple camera views, a simplified digital 3D skeleton can be extracted, from which the person’s movement across time can be modelled and analysed.

Analysing the optimum technique

Markerless motion capture makes it possible to unobtrusively measure athletes’ movements outside the lab, in training and even during competitions. Our recent research has demonstrated its value in many different sports, including badminton, tennis and Olympic weightlifting.

In skeleton, the unique, bent-over position at the start of each run, as the athlete sprints alongside the sled with one hand holding it, makes this form of biomechanical analysis particularly important.

Using markerless motion capture, we have explored the differing roles of an athlete’s limbs in the push-start performance, comparing these biomechanics with conventional sprinting. Importantly, we have also validated this markerless approach by comparing it with a traditional marker‑based system.

The optimum starting technique for each skeleton athlete is shaped by their physical characteristics, including factors such as relative limb lengths and flexibility. Analysing each athlete’s pushing technique, how it relates to their performance and how this evolves over time, can help give them a crucial competitive edge during this all-important first phase of each skeleton run.

Medals can be won and lost by hundredths of seconds as athletes sprint away from the starting block. In these first few seconds, we hope Britain’s athletes reap the benefit of our markerless motion capture technology.

Steffi Colyer receives funding via the Centre for the Analysis of Motion, Entertainment Research & Applications (CAMERA) from the UKRI’s Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council.

– ref. Winter Olympics: the new video technology that could help power Britain’s skeleton team to gold – https://theconversation.com/winter-olympics-the-new-video-technology-that-could-help-power-britains-skeleton-team-to-gold-274859

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Justin Stebbing, Professor of Biomedical Sciences, Anglia Ruskin University

NHS England’s new national cancer plan focuses on catching cancer earlier and treating it faster. The government has also promised to meet all cancer waiting-time targets by 2029. This includes a long-missed target, namely that most patients should start treatment within 62 days of being referred by their GP.

Why does the UK lag behind comparable countries?

Cancer survival in England has improved, but it still trails behind countries such as Australia, Canada and Nordic nations for many common cancers.

For some of the deadliest cancers – lung, liver, oesophageal, pancreatic and stomach cancers – the UK ranks near the bottom of the league table among similar wealthy countries. Fewer patients are still alive five years after diagnosis compared to other nations.

No single cause explains this gap. A key factor is that people in the UK are more likely to be diagnosed when their cancer is already advanced. This makes it harder to cure and limits treatment options.

Getting to see a specialist can also be slow. Patients struggle to get GP appointments, symptoms may not seem urgent at first, and people often need multiple visits before getting referred to a specialist.

Once in the system, patients hit more delays. The NHS has fewer CT and MRI scanners per person than many comparable health systems, contributing to waits for imaging and other tests.

There are also longstanding workforce shortages, especially in radiology and oncology. This means fewer specialists to read scans, plan treatment and deliver radiotherapy and chemotherapy. Limited surgical capacity, operating theatre time and radiotherapy machines cause further delay treatment.

How countries record cancer survival accounts for some of the difference. But even when researchers adjust for this, the UK still lags behind the best-performing countries. The result is a system where many individual steps function under strain, and those small delays add up for patients.

What actually happens to a patient during the 62 days?

The 62-day target measures the journey from urgent referral for suspected cancer to starting treatment. In principle, a person referred urgently by their GP, a screening programme or a hospital doctor should have their diagnosis confirmed and their initial treatment underway within just over two months.

That sounds straightforward. But for patients, it’s a complex and emotionally draining experience.

The journey usually starts when someone notices a worrying symptom – a breast lump, unusual bleeding, a persistent cough or a change in their bowels – and gets a GP appointment. If the GP is concerned, they make an urgent referral to a specialist clinic. The patient then waits for their first hospital appointment, where they’ll have further assessment and tests: blood tests, X-rays, endoscopy, CT scans, MRI scans or ultrasound.

If scans show something suspicious, the next step is often a biopsy. This lets a pathologist confirm whether it is cancer and identify the type.

Modern pathology may also include molecular and genetic tests, which help decide which treatments are most likely to be effective.

All of this information is then brought to a multidisciplinary team meeting, where surgeons, oncologists, radiologists, pathologists and specialist nurses discuss the case and agree a plan.

Only after that can the first treatment be scheduled, whether that is surgery, radiotherapy, drug treatment or active monitoring. Delays can happen at every stage: getting the first appointment, accessing scans or endoscopy, receiving pathology results, convening the multidisciplinary team, and finding an operating theatre or radiotherapy slot. And the 62-day clock keeps ticking.

For patients, what appears as a single target number actually represents weeks of waiting, uncertainty and repeated encounters with an overstretched system.

Is early diagnosis always beneficial?

Catching cancer early has become a cornerstone of cancer policy. Cancers caught early are easier to treat and more likely to be cured.

A small, localised tumour can often be removed with surgery or treated effectively with radiotherapy or drugs. But cancers that have spread are harder to control.

This link between early detection and survival drives efforts to encourage people to seek help quickly, expand screening programmes and speed up diagnosis. But early diagnosis isn’t always beneficial for everyone or every type of cancer.

Screening can lead to overdiagnosis. This means detecting very slow-growing cancers or abnormalities that would never have caused symptoms or shortened someone’s life. People in this situation may live for years with a cancer label, alongside the physical and psychological consequences of surgery, radiotherapy or drugs that they might not have needed.

So-called “false positives” are another important issue. Tests sometimes flag abnormalities that aren’t cancer, but still trigger scans, biopsies and procedures, as well as significant anxiety for patients and families.

For some aggressive cancers, finding the disease a little earlier on a scan may not change the eventual outcome if available treatments remain limited. The challenge is to design programmes that catch the right cancers early, using accurate and targeted tests, while clearly explaining both benefits and risks so people can make informed decisions.

What does ‘9.5 million more tests and scans’ really mean?

One of the most eye-catching promises in the new plan is to deliver 9.5 million more tests and scans by 2029. Much of this extra activity is expected to take place in community diagnostic centres, which bring CT and MRI scanners, ultrasound, endoscopy and blood tests closer to where people live.

Extending opening hours into evenings and weekends should give patients more flexibility and, in theory, shorten waiting times for investigations and diagnosis.

But tests and machines are only part of the picture. Every scan needs a professional to interpret it, and every endoscopy list requires trained staff and recovery space.

England already has a shortage of imaging specialists, and increasing the number of scans without increasing the number of people who can report them risks swapping one bottleneck for another.

Laboratories also need enough biomedical scientists and pathologists to process additional blood tests and tissue samples. If staffing does not keep pace, the promise of millions more tests could translate into longer queues for results and less time for doctors to explain findings and discuss options with patients.

New technologies, including artificial intelligence to support image reading and automated laboratory systems, may help to increase efficiency, but they still rely on human oversight and do not remove the need for a well-trained, reasonably staffed diagnostic workforce.

How realistic is the staffing fix?

The success of the plan depends heavily on people, not just equipment. Yet there are already substantial gaps in the cancer workforce, especially among radiologists, oncologists, pathologists, specialist nurses and radiographers.

Professional bodies have warned for several years that the shortfall in key specialties is growing, with services relying on overtime, outsourcing and temporary staff to keep up with demand. These pressures affect not only the speed of diagnosis and treatment, but also the time healthcare professionals can devote to communication, compassion and shared decision-making.

Training more specialists is essential but slow. From entry to medical school to becoming a consultant radiologist or oncologist typically takes well over a decade, meaning that decisions made now will only fully affect services in the 2030s.

Meanwhile, the NHS will keep relying on recruiting from abroad, the private sector, and new ways of working that expand what nurses and other non-doctor professionals can do.

The risk is that without serious attention to burnout, working conditions and retention, new trainees will simply replace experienced staff who leave because of workload and stress. Any realistic staffing fix will therefore need to combine expanded training with measures that make cancer services sustainable places to work: manageable rotas, protected time for training, supportive leadership and a sense that delays and shortages are being addressed rather than normalised.

Who benefits first – and who might miss out?

Cancer care in England is already unequal, and a national plan that ignores this risks making the gap worse. People in poorer areas are more likely to develop certain cancers, get diagnosed late, and die from them.

Access to primary care varies widely. Some communities face long waits for appointments or can’t see the same doctor regularly.

Rural patients may need to travel far for scans, endoscopy or radiotherapy, while some urban communities face language barriers, cultural differences or mistrust that make screening and early diagnosis programmes harder to access.

Expanding community diagnostic centres, mobile services and workplace partnerships could reduce some barriers – but only if they’re deliberately placed where they are needed most. But if new facilities go to already well-served areas, or if information campaigns and booking systems don’t reach marginalised groups, the extra capacity will mostly benefit people who already navigate the system easily.

Ensuring that the benefits of earlier diagnosis and faster treatment reach everyone will require careful use of data on stage at diagnosis, waiting times and outcomes, broken down by region, ethnicity and deprivation, and a willingness to direct extra resources where need is greatest, not just where uptake is easiest.

What does ‘success’ look like for patients after treatment?

Politically, the headline ambition is framed in terms of five-year survival, and improving that is undeniably important. From a patient’s perspective, though, success is more than being alive at a particular time point.

Many people live with the long-term consequences of treatment, including fatigue, pain, bowel or bladder changes, sexual difficulties, early menopause, cognitive effects and altered body image. These can disrupt work, relationships and everyday activities long after the end of chemotherapy or radiotherapy.

Anxiety about recurrence is common, and routine follow-up appointments can be both reassuring and a source of renewed fear.

A cancer plan that truly serves patients has to focus on how people are living, not just how long. That means investing in rehabilitation, psychological support, specialist nursing, social care and fair access to financial and employment advice.

It also means recognising that some patients will never be “finished” with cancer but will live for many years with incurable disease, requiring ongoing treatment and support to maintain the best possible quality of life.

When we judge whether the new targets have been met, we should therefore look beyond the headline numbers. Success would be a future in which more people are diagnosed early, treated promptly and supported to rebuild their lives, with fewer left waiting in pain or confusion, and fewer feeling abandoned once the last dose of treatment has been given.

Justin Stebbing 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.

– ref. The unanswered questions in the NHS’s new cancer plan – https://theconversation.com/the-unanswered-questions-in-the-nhss-new-cancer-plan-275103

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Alexander Sergeant, Lecturer in Digital Media Production, University of Westminster

A famous expression, often wrongly attributed to Mark Twain, states that comedy is merely tragedy plus time. This theory highlights how our response to films can depend on the context in which we see them.

We tend to think of the genre of a film as something very fixed, decided by a combination of studio producers and marketers. But, in the right context, films can move across many different genres in the span of their lifetime, depending on the audiences that watch them.

To demonstrate this idea, here are five scary films for 2026. The twist, however, is that none of these films were ever intended to be horror films. Most on the list were satire or comedy when they were made. Instead, they have become horrific due to the way they touch on contemporary issues surrounding the global politics of President Donald Trump, impending environmental disaster, ever-accelerating technology and contemporary attitudes towards gender.

1. Duck Soup (1933)

The finest film produced by the famous Marx Brothers comedy troupe, Duck Soup is an anarchic political satire that tells the story of an unserious playboy president named Rufus T. Firefly. Beloved by film enthusiasts, the film showcases a series of mishaps and misdeeds caused by his selfish, erratic behaviour which inadvertently led his country of Freedonia into a war with its neighbours.

Duck Soup is considered a classic of Hollywood slapstick and quick-witted verbal comedy. But, in an era of a genuine unserious president, its central joke might not feel funny any more. Nor indeed is the idea that, nearly 100 years after its release, this biting satire on the politics of rising authoritarianism would be as timely now as it was then.

2. The Apartment (1960)

People often say “they don’t make them like they used to any more” when trying to articulate a nostalgia for the films of the past. That description can be aptly applied to Billy Wilder’s romantic comedy-drama The Apartment. They do not make films like this any more. But in this case, that’s a good thing.

Jack Lemmon’s “Buddy Boy” Baxter is the bachelor who routinely loans his apartment out to his bosses for them to conduct extra-marital affairs. Shirley MacLaine’s Fran is the loveable but down-on-her-luck elevator operator involved in a tawdry situation with Baxter’s boss. Their own romance emerges out of a suicide attempt, workplace harassment and abuses of power. It feels like the film is set not just in the past, but in some creepy alternative world.

To be fair to The Apartment, it hardly treats some of the more problematic behaviour of its characters as virtues we are supposed to admire. But it never quite attacks the deeply unpleasant nature of its central conceit either. Baxter is not just a loveable goof unaware of what he’s got himself mixed up in. He’s a complicit enabler. And Fran is not a ditsy but loveable woman mixed up with the wrong crowd. She’s a victim.

3. Idiocracy (2006)

Idiocracy was something of a box office bomb, given neither the marketing campaign nor the reviews it needed to ensure success. The fact it has since become a cult hit speaks to how startlingly prescient the film is for contemporary audiences now discovering the film in droves 20 years later.

Idiocracy tells the story of a young man put into suspended animation who wakes up 500 years in the future. The average intelligence of the population has severely decreased, to the extent that the world has become increasingly consumerist, vulgar, crass and prejudiced in its thinking. America has even elected a former pro wrestler and porn star, Dwayne “Mountain Dew” Camacho, as its leader.

Made in 2006 during the final year of George W. Bush’s presidency and set against the rise of Barack Obama, the film failed initially as a comedy. It now works perfectly as a terrifying exaggeration of what the world looks like in 2026.

4. Wall-E (2008)

Wall-E is part of a long history of animations with an interest in the environment, from Princess Mononoke (2001) to Ferngully: The Last Rainforest (1992). That part of its dystopic vision still stands up. The film’s vivid opening of Wall-E wandering around a silent world of trash is still its best moment.

The film’s vision of the humanity that has left the garbage-strewn world behind, however, has become increasingly concerning over time. Predicting a world of humans who are dumb, obese and screen-obsessed, it is increasingly difficult to watch Wall-E as a nostalgic childhood treat.

5. Her (2013)

The amazing feat pulled off by this absurdist romantic drama was to somehow get an audience to root for the idea of a romantic pairing between a lonely middle-aged man and an AI-enabled operating system. More than a decade later, Her’s open-minded approach to AI seems far more fraught.

As the romance develops between Theodore (Joaquin Phoenix) and Samantha (voiced by Scarlett Johansson), it is difficult not to imagine the fingerprints of powerful but not necessarily benign tech moguls turning the screws tighter, manipulating Theodore further into spurning human contact for his digital desires.

Equally, it is difficult not to wonder whose voice has been stolen to create her warm, affectionate tones, or to ask what the company might do with the recording of their conversations. The dangers in our current technological reality have once again spoilt a perfectly good film.

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Alexander Sergeant 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.

– ref. How politics, technology and the environmental crisis turned these movies into horror films in 2026 – https://theconversation.com/how-politics-technology-and-the-environmental-crisis-turned-these-movies-into-horror-films-in-2026-268679

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Adam Behr, Reader in Music, Politics and Society, Newcastle University

In moments of creeping authoritarianism, culture sometimes reacts faster than institutions. Bruce Springsteen’s rush-released song in the wake of killings of two Minneapolis residents by agents of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) was not just an act of commentary, but a deliberate intervention in public discourse.

Streets of Minneapolis operates as an alarm signal, its directness placing it in the public square, where naming and narration carry political weight. What also distinguishes Streets of Minneapolis is not just its fidelity to the tradition of the protest song, but its mode of circulation as a rapid response in the digital age.

This is Springsteen at his most declarative, operating not in the interior emotional space of the confessional singer-songwriter but in the outward-facing register of public address. His specificity – naming people, streets, organisations and the “winter of ’26” – marks the song as political communication rather than personal reflection.

His framing of the killings involves a shift from individual tragedies towards a shared civic injury. The repeated invocation of “our Minneapolis” performs rhetorical work, translating private loss into a shared collective experience and situating it as a wider public concern that extends beyond the city itself.

That movement from the individual to the collective places Streets of Minneapolis within a wider lineage of protest song, creating narratives out of real events so they can be remembered and acted upon. In this sense, the song does not simply respond to politics, but actively participates in political thought and action. “We’ll take a stand” is not a metaphorical flourish but a direct appeal.

Springsteen makes this lineage explicit through the early acoustic section, replete with insistent harmonica, and a vocal delivery and intonation that consciously signal Bob Dylan’s early protest music. Structurally, too, Springsteen’s call to action echoes Dylan works like The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll – moral force emerging through the accumulation of detail and reportage.

While Dylan’s later career moved away from direct protest toward the personal and allegorical, Springsteen here leans into that more direct mode of storytelling. It follows the protest song logic whereby narration becomes an engine of persuasion, reshaping contemporary events into historical record.

The reference carries added resonance given Dylan’s Minnesota roots, serving as a reminder that place, memory and music have long been intertwined in American protest culture.

Springsteen quotes himself, too, both musically and thematically, with a clear nod in the title to Streets of Philadelphia and a closing musical call-back to Born in the USA, its own tub-thumping aesthetic belying the portrait of a disillusioned Vietnam veteran in the lyrics.

These are not just nostalgic gestures but also markers of continuity. By folding earlier works into this new song, he situates the current moment within a longer trajectory of American struggle, via musical linkages between himself and Dylan – and Woody Guthrie before that.

Digital circulation and rapid response

Where protest songs once depended on live performance, radio play and physical distribution, they now travel through platforms. Within hours of release, Streets of Minneapolis was embedded in news coverage, shared across social media and dissected in comment threads and reaction videos.

Listeners encounter it not only as a song but as a reference point to be reposted, quoted, argued or aligned with. In that process, its energy comes less from a single, fixed message than from how it is used, repeated and spread through ongoing conversations.

This dynamic places protest music alongside other contemporary forms of political communication, particularly those shaped by meme culture and the logic of the online platforms through which much creative work is experienced. Short excerpts, lyrical fragments and recognisable musical cues circulate easily across feeds, videos and posts, where they are paired with captions, visuals and commentary.

In recent election cycles, for instance, music has functioned less as a background soundtrack or simple celebrity endorsement than as material that can be repurposed – looped in clips, used ironically, set against images, or mobilised to signal approval or dissent. In this environment, music functions as a part of the communicative infrastructure, enabling participation as much as persuasion.

This also comes amid growing political conflict around culture itself. While there is a longer history of public disputes between the Trump administrations and the artistic community, these tensions have recently escalated into direct interventions, including the cancellation of shows and the temporary closure of the Kennedy Center, pointing to an environment in which music and performance are increasingly politicised and directly entangled with power.

Seen in this context, Streets of Minneapolis is both traditional and distinctly contemporary. It draws on the narrative starkness and moral framing of folk protest, but gains traction through digital circulation. The killings in Minneapolis of Renée Good and Alex Pretti were the immediate catalyst, but the song’s significance lies in how it carries that moment forward.

As authoritarian power shifts gear, from creeping practice to open and violent assertion, the protest song adjusts its form and reach. Streets of Minneapolis reflects that transition, drawing on Springsteen’s longstanding role as a public narrator of American life. It can’t halt state action, but it can help to prevent it from going unnoticed and unrecorded.

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Adam Behr has received funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the British Academy.

– ref. Bruce Springsteen’s Streets of Minneapolis: how digital circulation boosts the impact of a protest song – https://theconversation.com/bruce-springsteens-streets-of-minneapolis-how-digital-circulation-boosts-the-impact-of-a-protest-song-275004

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Naomi Braithwaite, Associate Professor in Fashion and Material Culture, Nottingham Trent University

The UK heritage shoemaker Russell & Bromley has been bought by high-street clothing giant Next. Despite the brand’s rescue from administration, dozens of jobs will be lost in initial redundancies, and there are rumours that more than 30 shops could close. As one of the few independently owned footwear brands left in the UK, the sale spells another loss to the industrial heritage of the British footwear industry.

The closure of fashion stores is nothing new, and the gradual demise of the British high street has been well documented. In fact, research in 2021 revealed that the fastest-declining sector on the UK high street was fashion retail. Shifts in consumer behaviour driven by online shopping, alongside fast fashion, placed inevitable pressure on independent, mid- to high-end stores like Russell & Bromley.

With so much competition (particularly in the context of footwear, where many clothing retailers and supermarkets have added shoe lines), staying relevant has become even more challenging.

What set Russell & Bromley apart was its long history. It was founded in 1880 in Sussex and continued under the leadership of five generations of the same family. It has a strongly defined heritage as a British independent brand, with a focus on craftsmanship and understated luxury.

It has also been a favourite of the Princess of Wales, which guaranteed the brand further endorsement. More recently, another brand linked to the princess, LK Bennett, was sold to the owner of Poundland. LK Bennett was founded in 1990, also as a high-end shoe retailer, later branching out into clothing as well.

The Russell & Bromley sale followed the announcement that heritage sports shoe brand Gola had been acquired by Japanese conglomerate Marubeni – a response to booming sales in retro trainers. Gola, too, has a long history. It was founded in Leicester, once a centre for British shoemaking in 1905, making it one of Britain’s oldest sportswear brands.

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Read more:
The history of sneakers: from commodity to cultural icon

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Its origins were in making football boots, but in the 1960s the brand took off with its Harrier style being favoured by football fans, and its later endorsement by celebrities including Liam Gallagher and Paul Weller. But in recent years, Gola struggled to compete with the powerhouses of Nike and Adidas.

The cases of Russell & Bromley and Gola exemplify the challenges of maintaining independence in the complex global footwear industry where conglomerates are taking a dominant stance. The brands’ change in ownership highlights the transformation of what was once a flourishing footwear manufacturing and retail industry.

Dominance and decline

The 1960s was the heyday of fashion retail on the British high street with the emergence of boutiques like Mary Quant’s Bazaar and the advent of Topshop in 1964, which brought a new, younger consumer.

Footwear retailers were always a staple on the high street, with brands like Dolcis, and Lilley and Skinner. Both were part of the Leicester-based conglomerate the British Shoe Corporation, and alongside Clarks and Russell & Bromley they captured the footwear retail market.

But the UK’s fashion footwear retail industry started to decline in the 1990s with the closure of the British Shoe Corporation and its huge portfolio of stores.

This decline in shoe retail followed a significant change in the UK’s footwear manufacturing industry. While Northampton remains a centre of excellence for men’s footwear manufacturing, shoe factories in Leicester started to close from the 1980s. They could no longer compete with the prices and volumes of manufacturers in Brazil, India and China.

Recently, China has taken the lead in global shoe manufacturing, adapting the traditional skills and craftsmanship with technical advances and the ability to produce high volumes.

So where does Next fit into this picture? In 1982, the Midlands-based clothing company opened its first womenswear store and by 1988 had launched the Next Directory, which introduced home delivery. Consumers no longer had to go to separate shops to find shoes to match their outfits – suddenly it was all available in one place.

It was not just Leicester that suffered the decline of its footwear industry. London also had a long history in shoemaking, but failed to weather the competitive landscape. The 1990s saw an increase in international brands and retailers entering the UK retail space, placing further competition on domestic brands.

Despite this uncertainty and change in UK footwear and retail, Russell & Bromley continued to thrive well into the 21st century. This is testament to its position as a high-end retailer that sold its own well-crafted shoes and bags with the desirable Made in Italy label. Investments in a refresh in 2025 may have proved too costly, as the market became increasingly difficult.

While there is plenty of choice for consumers at the lower and designer ends of the footwear market, the mid to high-price points where Russell & Bromley sits could perhaps be at risk of becoming squeezed out.

Italy, Spain and Portugal have maintained their rich shoemaking heritage. While this has much to do with legacy, it may also be the result of these countries’ continued endorsement by luxury brands, where the allure of artisanal shoes resonates with higher price points.

Despite the sales, the Russell & Bromley and Gola brands are not being lost. Under their new owners, they will be able to go on representing the legacy of the British footwear industry, which has been defined by heritage, fashion and craftsmanship.

Naomi Braithwaite 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.

– ref. The sale of Russell & Bromley is a symbol of the challenges facing independent heritage brands – https://theconversation.com/the-sale-of-russell-and-bromley-is-a-symbol-of-the-challenges-facing-independent-heritage-brands-274444

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Paul van Hooft, Research Leader, Defence and Security, RAND Europe

The New Start nuclear arms control treaty expires on February 4, opening up the way for a period of great power uncertainty and the possibility of a new arms race.

The US-Russian agreement, negotiated in 2010 and extended in 2021, limited the number of deployed nuclear warheads to 1,550, with roughly 3,500 non-deployed warheads in reserve. It was the last of the arms control agreements that were rooted in the legacy of the cold war negotiations between the US and the Soviet Union, and the era of relative optimism that followed it.

The current US administration has shown little appetite for extending Start on a purely bilateral basis, as it hopes to include China in any new agreement. China’s nuclear arsenal has more than doubled in size in the past five years to an estimated 600 warheads with the expectations of further increases over the next decade.

The emphasis on China is not recent. Even before the latest Trump administration took office in January 2025, a 2023 bipartisan committee concluded that the US nuclear force posture was insufficient for a modern “Two Peer Plus” environment. Two Peer Plus means the US needs to be able to jointly confront two major nuclear-armed powers – Russia and China – while having the capacity to face threats from other lesser adversaries, mainly North Korea.

The Trump administration would prefer a treaty that would address this new reality. However, Chinese officials are reluctant to discuss joining such an agreement. They argue their arsenal is still far smaller than that of either the US or Russia and that it is unfair to ask China to restrain itself.

Allowing New Start to lapse is a negative signal but it is unlikely to immediately trigger a cold war–style arms race. Washington and Moscow seem more confident in their assured second-strike capabilities than they were then, with fewer concerns about a disarming first strike. And, no matter the rhetoric, both will probably want to avoid rocking the boat too much or too soon.

More likely is that the US will invest in further modernising its delivery systems to improve accuracy against mobile targets and penetration against hardened Russian bases and missile silos.

Russia, meanwhile, has recently displayed some exotic new delivery systems, including the Poseidon nuclear torpedo and the Burevestnik nuclear cruise missile.

But it is unclear whether the country could produce these systems at a scale to make a difference. Or even whether such systems truly change anything about the overall US-Russia calculus, given the large numbers of land- and submarine-based ballistic missiles that Russia already has.

Russia may therefore be incentivised to deploy more warheads with existing missile systems This would be faster and cheaper than developing and producing new delivery methods.

End of the peace dividend?

Perhaps more importantly, the consequences of New Start’s expiration extend far beyond gradual shifts in nuclear force posture. Its demise marks the collapse of yet another pillar of the post–cold war international order. With the end of the intermediate nuclear forces (INF) treaty in 2019, the conventional force in Europe treaty in 2023, and others, the arms control architecture is already on its last legs,

The demise of the INF treaty was also partly triggered by Sino-American competition. The US wanted to be less restrained in the Indo-Pacific, where China had built a formidable arsenal of short- and medium-range ballistic and cruise missiles.

The broader system of negotiations and institutionalised diplomatic exchanges is equally important. They facilitated understanding of the other’s interests and red lines, not out of sympathy but to allow states to manage the inherent uncertainty and mistrust present in strategic competition.

The decline of this kind of diplomacy may not have immediately noticeable effects on international security, but it makes misperceptions and misjudgements during peacetime and during crises likelier. Personalised diplomacy is ill suited to managing long-term rivalry between nuclear-armed states. They are less likely to address deeper structural conflicts of interest or build deep knowledge of the other side.

Even if New Start were extended once more, it would not resolve the underlying structural challenges. China’s unlikely participation remains a central obstacle. So does the broader Two Peer Plus problem, where the US perceives the risks of Russia and China together.

At the same time, US strategic priorities have shifted. The Trump administration’s new national security strategy and national defense strategy made clear that Europe and Russia are no longer central concerns, eclipsed by the western hemisphere and the Indo-Pacific.

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Read more:
What the US national security strategy tells us about how Trump views the world

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Where does this leave Europe?

Europe has limited leverage to prevent the drift away from arms control. French and British nuclear forces are deliberately small and geared toward existential deterrence, leaving little scope for negotiated reductions. If anything, given the growing pressures on these states to take a greater role in European deterrence, the incentive is to expand their nuclear options, not to limit themselves.

Over the long term, Europe’s most viable path may therefore be to first invest significantly in conventional capabilities to generate pressure on Russia and then to consider building up the existing European nuclear arsenals. Such an asymmetric approach to arms control would be difficult. It would depend on Russia reaching exhaustion in its war on Ukraine, leaving it unable and unwilling to compete with both the US and Europe.

The end of New Start will leave the strategic environment more uncertain and thus more dangerous for everyone. It would not trigger an immediate arms race, but it would further erode the norms, transparency and institutionalised dialogue that have helped manage nuclear competition for decades.

It may well further incentivise non-nuclear states to reconsider their non-proliferation commitments, already under pressure due to the uncertainty surrounding the US security guarantees. In a more multipolar nuclear world marked by mistrust, technological rivalry and diverging priorities, deterrence without arms control becomes more brittle, not more stable.

Paul van Hooft receives funding from RAND Europe to work on deterrence and arms control related issues.

– ref. New Start’s expiration will make the world less safe – even if it doesn’t spark another nuclear arms race – https://theconversation.com/new-starts-expiration-will-make-the-world-less-safe-even-if-it-doesnt-spark-another-nuclear-arms-race-275116

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Timothy J. Dixon, Emeritus Professor in the School of the Built Environment, University of Reading; University of Oxford

Following a visit to Gaza in January, the UN undersecretary general, Jorge Moreira da Silva, called the level of destruction there “overwhelming”. He estimated that, on average, every person in the densely populated territory is now “surrounded by 30 tonnes of rubble”.

This staggering level of destruction raises urgent questions about how, and by whom, Gaza should be rebuilt. Since 2023, a variety of reconstruction plans and other initiatives have tried to imagine what Gaza could look like when the conflict ends for good. But which of these visions will shape Gaza’s future?

The Israeli government’s Gaza 2035 plan, which was unveiled in 2024, lays out a three-stage programme to integrate the Gaza Strip into a free-trade zone with Egypt’s El-Arish Port and the Israeli city of Sderot.

AI renderings show futuristic skyscrapers, solar farms and water desalination plants in the Sinai peninsula. The plan also shows offshore oil rigs and a new high-speed rail corridor along Salah al-Din Road, Gaza’s main highway that connects Gaza City and Rafah.

The US government has proposed a similar futuristic vision for Gaza. Its August 2025 Gaza Reconstitution, Economic Acceleration and Transformation Trust plan shows a phased series of modern, AI-powered smart cities developed over a ten-year time frame. The plan, which would place Gaza under a US-run trusteeship, suggested that poor urban design lies at the heart of “Gaza’s ongoing insurgency”.

The latest iteration of this vision was unveiled by Donald Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, at the recent World Economic Forum in Davos.

He presented slides showing Gaza reconstructed as a “Riviera” of the Middle East, with luxury beachfront resorts, gleaming tower blocks, residential zones and modern transport hubs. Kushner suggested it was “doable” to complete the construction of a “new” Rafah city in “two to three years”.

It has been reported that the US and Israeli visions are heavily influenced by US-based economics professor Joseph Pelzman’s economic plan for Gaza. This plan, Pelzman said on a podcast in 2024, would involve destroying Gaza and restarting from scratch.

In contrast to the US and Israeli visions, the February 2025 Gaza “Phoenix” plan includes input from the people of Gaza. It has a much stronger focus on maintaining and reconstructing the existing buildings, culture and social fabric of the enclave.

The plan was developed by a consortium of international experts together with professionals and academics from Gaza, the West Bank and the Palestinian diaspora, and suggests a reconstruction and development phase of at least five years.

Other plans from the Arab world take a more technocratic view of reconstruction, but still have a short timescale for reconstruction. These include a five-year plan by the United Arab Emirates-based Al Habtoor Group, which promises to grant 70% of ownership in the holding company that will manage Gaza’s reconstruction to the Palestinians.

Feasibility of rebuilding Gaza

So, how feasible are these different visions and how inclusive are they for the people of Gaza? Rebuilding cities after war takes time and money, and also requires local resources. Even in China, a country with plentiful resources and abundant skilled labour, major new cities are rarely completed in less than 20 years.

And in Gaza rebuilding will be complicated by the fact that there are now 61 million tonnes of rubble there, as well as other hazardous debris such as unexploded munitions and human remains. This will need to be removed before any reconstruction can commence, with the UN estimating that clearing the rubble alone could take as long as 20 years.

For comparison, the Polish capital of Warsaw experienced a similar level of destruction during the second world war and it took four decades to rebuild and reconstruct the city’s historic centre. The time frames for reconstruction outlined in all of the plans for Gaza are far shorter than this and, even with modern construction methods, are unlikely to be feasible.

The US and Israeli visions also fail to include Palestinians in the planning of Gaza’s future, overlooking any need to consult with Gazan residents and community groups. This has led critics to argue that the plans amount to “urbicide”, the obliteration of existing cultures through war and reconstruction.

Reports that suggest Gazan residents will be offered cash payments of US$5,000 (£3,650) to leave Gaza “voluntarily” under the US plan, as well as subsidies covering four years of rent outside Gaza, will not have alleviated these concerns.

At the same time, the US plan does not propose a conventional land compensation programme for Gazan residents who lost their homes and businesses during the war. These people will instead be offered digital tokens in exchange for the rights to redevelop their land.

The tokens could eventually be redeemed for an apartment in one of Gaza’s new cities. But the plan also envisages the sale of tokens to investors being used to fund reconstruction. The Council on American-Islamic Relations, the largest Muslim civil rights and advocacy organisation in the US, says the “mass theft” of Palestinian land through the token scheme would amount to a war crime.

With their emphasis on community engagement and the repair and renewal of existing structures, the Phoenix plan and the other Arab-led visions are at least a step forward. But without a fully democratic consensus on how to rebuild Gaza, it is difficult to see how the voices of the Gazan people can be heard.

Whichever vision wins out, history shows that post-war reconstruction succeeds when it involves those whose lives have been destroyed. This is evidenced somewhat ironically by the US Marshall Plan, which funded the reconstruction of many European economies and cities after the second world war, and involved close engagement with civil society and local communities to achieve success.

Timothy J. Dixon 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.

– ref. What will a rebuilt Gaza look like? The competing visions for the Strip’s future – https://theconversation.com/what-will-a-rebuilt-gaza-look-like-the-competing-visions-for-the-strips-future-274591