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Terrance Ferguson might miss Week 4 game
Los Angeles Rams tight end Terrance Ferguson appears likely to miss the Week 4 game due to an ankle injury
White House says Trump PSA that appears to look like 2024 campaign ad is 'not political'
The Trump administration published a new "PSA" that was paid for by the U.S. government that ran alongside football games, Sunday morning news shows and primetime broadcast shows. The White House defended the advertisements, saying that they were "not political." NBC News' Yamiche Alcindor reports.
Sports media insider: CBS, Prime could tangle over Ian Eagle potentially succeeding Al Michaels on TNF
Ian Eagle to Amazon’s Thursday Night Football is a more complicated succession plan than it appears. Appearing on Puck’s The Varsity podcast with John Ourand, The Athletic’s Andrew Marchand said that while Prime Video has its sights set on Eagle as the eventual replacement for Al Michaels, CBS has no interest in letting him walk,…
Bobby Kotick’s lawyers sent me a bad email (and later apologized)
The message I had received was unsettling—for a moment. Then it was just really confusing. Back on January 20 of this year, at 5:15pm ET, I received an email with the subject line “Legal Correspondence re Bobby Kotick.” It was from the law firm Clare Locke, a firm I’d heard had been emailing reporters in recent years about their coverage of Kotick, the former, longtime CEO of Activision Blizzard. The letter was threatening. A lawyer from the firm introduced themselves as “defamation counsel to Bobby Kotick.” They issued a “demand” that I “correct” a Game File article I’d published a week prior. The article that had irked them had been a scoop of sorts. I’d written about a a 2022 lawsuit brought by a Swedish pension fund, AP7, over Microsoft’s purchase of Activision Blizzard. The suit wasn’t news, but I was first to review and report about Kotick’s extensive pushback to the fund’s claims. The pension fund’s core contention was that the sale had been rushed by Kotick to avoid the consequences of sexual misconduct scandals swirling around the company in 2021. (He’d not been accused of misconduct himself in those suits, to be clear.) As I wrote at the time, Kotick had denied the allegations of the rushed sale. Beyond that, Kotick used a December 2025 reply to the Swedish fund’s lawsuit to assign blame for those workplace scandals, the bad press and even for the AP7 lawsuit. I’d found Kotick’s arguments novel and newsworthy. Across nearly 3,000 words, I explained Kotick’s take: that a Swedish gaming company was behind the Swedish fund’s lawsuit (the Embracer group; they denied it); that the Microsoft-Activision deal was not rushed and was secured at what Kotick felt history had proven to be an optimal price for shareholders; that he believed a conspiracy of people at unions government agencies, PR firms and the media had spun up claims of widespread workplace misconduct at Activision Blizzard in 2021. The article gave context for all of this, letting readers assess the claims and weigh their credibility. As I’d later write to Kotick’s lawyers: I would be surprised if you could point to any news article about Bobby Kotick in the last five years that has spent more of its wordcount articulating his point of view. He is welcome to do an interview with Game File any time. Nonetheless, there they were in my inbox that Tuesday evening: Clare Locke, the law firm that secured a $787.5 million settlement from Fox News over false statements about voting machines. They were emailing me, threatening that failure to comply with their demand could support a claim of “actual malice,” a legal standard for libel. Unless… Unless, they said, I added a key paragraph to my article. This was a paragraph that I already knew Kotick’s lawyers had been emailing reporters about for at least a year, and it was a paragraph that was already in my article. The paragraph they wanted is from a 2023 settlement that California’s Civil Rights Department struck with Activision Blizzard. The settlement had closed a two-year-old lawsuit over alleged sexual discrimination at the game maker. The paragraph basically said that claims of systemic or widespread sexual harassment—or of execs like Kotick tolerating such behavior—had never been proven. I’d already seen proof that Kotick’s lawyers had pushed for the settlement’s language to be added to reports about 2021 sexual discrimination and misconduct lawsuits brought against Activision Blizzard by California and, separately, by the U.S. federal government (both suits were since settled). I knew that Kotick and his lawyers felt that the California settlement language should be mentioned in the same breath as references to an article he hated and denied, a November 2021 Wall Street Journal article claiming Kotick knew “for years” of sexual misconduct at Activision Blizzard. So, in the Game File article that Clare Locke emailed me about, in the interest of ensuring I was being fair and balanced regarding the person I was covering, I had already included the following excerpt from the California settlement [emphasis added in bold]: (Kotick has repeatedly pushed back against that November article in the Wall Street Journal, citing among other things, language from a court-approved consent decree as part of Activision’s 2023 $54 million settlement over the California suit. It states: “no court or any independent investigation has substantiated any allegations that: there has been systemic or widespread sexual harassment at Activision Blizzard [or] that Activision Blizzard senior executives ignored, condoned, or tolerated a culture of systemic harassment, retaliation, or discrimination.”) On the evening of January 20, I was incredulous. How do you write a four page legal threat about a week-old article and miss this? While scrambling to also make my kids dinner, I wrote a lengthy reply to Clare Locke’s lawyers, basically asking them to cool it with the threats and to start making sense. In part, I wrote: I hope you can understand why I am having trouble understanding what you’re asking for, when the statement you’re demanding to see in Game File’s article already appears in Game File’s article. Actual malice, as you know, refers to a reckless disregard for the truth. I’m not sure what your argument is when my article already states your client’s position. Here is where I should remind you, the reader, that I am an independent journalist. I publish on Substack, and have availed myself of the Substack Defender program that provides writers on the platform with legal support. But I’m no Wall Street Journal or New York Times, nor even IGN or GameSpot when it comes to such things as, well, having a legal department. There are more fun things for me to do as an independent journalist than writing back to a powerful law firm representing a very rich person. On the evening of January 20th, I was just trying to cook some pasta, broccoli and chicken nuggets for hungry twins. Nevertheless, I wrote back to them. Two hours later, I got a reply. Summarizing: A lawyer for Clare Locke said they’d “reviewed an incomplete version” of my article and they “apologize for the confusion.” (My guess: Someone didn’t read past the piece’s paywall, even though they’d had a full week to scrounge up the funds to do so. What I’d published above the paywall was balanced, as was what came after.)1 That was almost that, but something about the situation bothered me. The letter had been marked “confidential.” I hadn’t agreed to that, and I disliked the idea that powerful people on the beat that I cover would act like they could unilaterally control what I might tell my readers about. On the morning of the 21st, having already gotten the powerful law firm to back off, I oh-so-wisely re-approached them with just one more thing. I thanked them for clearing things up the night before but noted that I’d never agreed to keep their letter confidential. I’m all for agreeing with a source to keep things off the record, but that’s the thing. We have to agree. You can’t just declare it. I’m not bound by that. I wrote to Clare Locke’s lawyer and said, in part: I trust the matter is resolved. It was disappointing to have to spend less time with my kids last night in order to address your legal letter. Family time’s precious. I will add, for clarity’s sake, that, while your letter stipulated that it was confidential, I did not agree to those terms. In the future, should you wish to communicate with me confidentially, I am happy to agree to classifying our communication as “off the record” prior to the actual communication—as is standard with any professional journalist. The firm’s lawyer replied, not directly addressing the confidentiality issue but asserting that the matter was resolved. Why I didn’t write about this until now In May, I told this story on an episode of Simon Parkin’s podcast My Perfect Console, but I held off on sharing it directly with Game File readers. I held off to avoid stepping on the toes of another reporter, the journalist Mikhail Klimentov. He’d interviewed me in the spring of 2025 about an investigation he was working on regarding Bobby Kotick lawyers pressing the media to add the California settlement language to stories referencing the 2021 lawsuits. And about how some outlets had changed their stories and how some simply deleted them. Initially, I was a third-party source for Klimentov’s reporting, providing on-the-record context about the state of the games media. I’d heard about the letters but hadn’t put the time into pursuing the story. I thought it was interesting, and I was glad he was covering it. When the outlet that Klimentov was going to run his reporting in dropped the story, I began talking to him about potentially publishing his reporting on Game File. This was tentative. Then, in January, when I got my own Clare Locke letter, I told Klimentov that I didn’t think it would make sense for me to publish him, not with me now being part of the story. I had my own version of this situation to tell. But I wished him well and said I’d refrain from telling my tale until he could get his reporting out there. Last Friday, Klimentov finally ran his investigation, in a nearly 48-minute video report for People Make Games. It covers various Clare Locke letters, how media outlets reacted to them and what to make of all this. His video weighs the merits of Kotick’s request and looks at some of the articles that were changed (one of which had a glaring error). I highly recommend watching it: (Note, I did some editorial consulting for a People Make Games video last year but nothing to do with this report.) While many outlets haven’t left any public evidence that they updated their Kotick coverage at Kotick’s counsel’s request, at least one has. Back in October 2025, the mainstream outlet Reuters applied the most transparent article update I’ve seen. On the 3rd of the month, they published an article about the state of the Swedish pension fund’s lawsuit. Days later, they added this: In an October 7 letter sent after publication of this article, Kotick’s defamation counsel disputed claims of widespread harassment at Activision. “Not a single investigation, court finding, verdict, or ruling ever concluded that there was any merit” to the allegations of widespread harassment at Activision, Tom Clare and Nick Brechbill of Clare Locke wrote. I’ve never added a statement to my article on Game File, because none was needed. Not for fairness’ sake, nor to meet any demands of Kotick’s lawyers. I’ve nevertheless wanted to be transparent with Game File readers. If someone powerful is questioning my reporting, is threatening a lawsuit over it… if that threat is part of a pattern involving other games media outlets and if, in my case, the whole thing ran into a ridiculous ditch, I want you to know about it. I also share this as a real example of how I handle threats to Game File. I stand up for my own reporting, even when it’s not comfortable to do so. (In that same category of standing up for the work I do, I’ll point to an incident in late August. Asocial media post I published to X/Twitter regarding reporting I did about Take Two and GTA VI was hit by bogus copyright claim by a firm working for the publisher. I pushed back and got it reversed; even while a bigger games media outlet let themselves be censored. This is the other reason I’m sharing this story: To emphasize that dealing with threats from powerful people is one of the costs of covering the video game industry independently and as fearlessly as possible. This is where you come in. Your support, through free and paid subscriptions (sign up here!), can help me keep doing that. It can ensure that I’ve got the back-up I need. And it can help make fiascoes like this even less of a worry, so I can spend my evenings dealing with more important things, such as making sure I steam the kids’ broccoli just right. 1 That pension fund lawsuit I wrote about in January has all but gone away. In May, the fund and Activision Blizzard owner Microsoft agreed to settle. Lawyers for the fund brokered a $250 million settlement for former Activision Blizzard shareholders. In the settlement, the fund’s lawyers changed their rhetoric. Where once they’d questioned the meaning of the California settlement language, they adopted a version of it for themselves. Several weeks ago, while seeking to get a court to sign off on the terms of the settlement, they proposed their fee for their work in the case: $60 million.
Travis Etienne Injury Update is Key News for Saints
Travis Etienne hasn’t gotten his New Orleans Saints career off to a great start. It might be getting worse in Week 3. He appears to have sustained an injury. While the Saints were in the midst of throwing four touchdowns to tight ends (two to Juwan Johnson, two to Noah Fant), Etienne left the field […] The post Travis Etienne Injury Update is Key News for Saints appeared first on HEAVY.
Bengals’ Dominant Defense Disappears in Loss to Steelers
Aaron Rodgers dismantled Cincinnati’s elite unit as injuries to key starters left the secondary vulnerable, stalling a fierce pass rush and forcing a late Joe Burrow turnover.
Phoenix data center project moves ahead
Another data center development appears to be moving ahead in Phoenix despite new zoning rules that had threatened the project.
Press pool dispute escalates as White House cuts CNN from Air Force One travel
The White House has barred CNN from traveling on Air Force One this weekend. It's another chapter in President Trump's fight with the press, and it appears there will be no TV pool coverage today.
ProTributeBands.com Clarifies Direct Booking Model for Corporate Event Entertainment Planners
SAN RAMON, CA - September 25, 2026 - PRESSADVANTAGE -ProTributeBands.com, the curated booking and lead generation platform for high-end tribute bands, has outlined how its direct-booking structure works for event planners seeking corporate event entertainment. Under the model, bands featured on the platform negotiate terms and close each booking directly with the client, while ProTributeBands follows up to keep the transaction moving smoothly.The structure separates ProTributeBands.com from traditional booking agencies that insert themselves into every contract. Rather than acting as an intermediary that controls the final agreement, the platform connects event planners, performing arts centers, festivals, wedding clients, and private party hosts with pre-screened, national-act-caliber tribute acts, then steps back so the parties can settle details themselves. The platform maintains contact with both sides to ensure momentum is not lost during the process.Founded by David Victor, former guitarist and co-lead vocalist of the multiplatinum band BOSTON, ProTributeBands.com features tribute acts covering artists such as Queen, The Beatles, ABBA, Journey, The Eagles, and Pink Floyd. Selected bands receive optimized profile pages and booking leads generated through the platform."Event planners often assume a booking platform means another layer of negotiation and markup," said David Victor, Founder of ProTributeBands.com. "The approach here is different. The bands negotiate terms and close each booking directly, which keeps the conversation honest and the details accurate. The platform stays involved by following up so nothing stalls between the first inquiry and the signed agreement."The direct-booking method reflects how corporate and private event planning typically operates. Planners frequently need to confirm technical requirements, stage dimensions, scheduling, and performance specifics with the people who will actually be on stage. By allowing those conversations to happen between the client and the band, the model aims to reduce miscommunication that can occur when information passes through a third party.ProTributeBands.com applies a screening process before an act appears on the platform, focusing on production quality, musicianship, and readiness for larger venues. The company ranks tribute bands across categories including Queen, The Beatles, The Eagles, Journey, Pink Floyd, and BOSTON tributes, drawing on performance quality and audience response.The ProTributeBands guide to hiring a tribute band offers additional context for planners weighing these decisions, covering topics such as understanding the audience and event, assessing entertainment value, viewing an act in person before hiring, and reviewing rider and insurance requirements. The guide addresses the practical considerations planners face when selecting an act for a corporate function, festival, or private celebration."A tribute production for a corporate audience has to hold the room the same way a headline act would," Victor said. "The vetting exists so planners can trust that the act they see listed can deliver at that level, and the direct-booking structure lets them confirm every detail with the band before committing."ProTributeBands.com serves clients across the United States and abroad, working with tribute acts that perform at performing arts centers, summer concert series, product launches, corporate parties, private parties, and wedding receptions. The platform also accepts artist submissions from tribute bands seeking consideration for inclusion. The company operates online at protributebands.com.###For more information about ProTributeBands.com, contact the company here:ProTributeBands.comDavid Victor(925) 236-0217hello@protributebands.com11040 Bollinger Canyon Road Suite E-938, San Ramon, CA 94582
UN Declaration On Pandemic Readiness Appears Headed For Approval In December
A High Level Declaration on Pandemic Prevention, Preparedness and Response appeared likely to win approval by the United Nations General Assembly - but only
Man City and the 115 charges
It has taken more than two years, but a judgement finally appears to have been made on the 115 charges levelled against Manchester City. Here's what is means.
White House TV pool appears to be back in operation
A judge temporarily struck down the ban of CNN, MS NOW and Politico on Thursday, but his ruling didn’t directly address the pool
White House TV pool appears to be back in operation
A judge temporarily struck down the ban of CNN, MS NOW and Politico on Thursday, but his ruling didn’t directly address the pool
Microsoft Copilot+ Branding Disappears from Latest Surface PCs
Microsoft's recent Snapdragon-powered Surface Laptop and Surface Pro launch was surprisingly absent the usual Copilot+ branding, aside from as a callout to the inclusion of the actual AI assistant on the devices. Apparently, this was an intentional branding change, according to Surface Corporate...
Is 'The Love Hypothesis' worth watching? Lili Reinhart's new rom-com divides critics.
The "Riverdale" star appears opposite Tom Bateman in Prime Video's adaptation of Ali Hazelwood's bestselling romance novel.
Square Integrates Apple Business to Help Local Businesses Stand Out on Apple Maps
DISTRIBUTED-WORKFORCE/OAKLAND, Calif., September 24, 2026--Square today announced a new integration with Apple that enables Square sellers to connect their locations to Apple Business from their Square Dashboard, so they can seamlessly manage and synchronize key business location information that appears on Apple Maps. Rather than managing multiple channels separately, sellers can now maintain their Apple presence alongside the rest of their business in Square. The integration makes it easier fo
White House plan to increase control of NIH grants appears 'dead'
A planned EO that would have greatly enhanced White House influence over grants at the NIH is “looking dead,” a source said.
Beacon Health System appears to have new round of layoffs, according to statement
Beacon Health said it is navigating significant financial pressures, lower reimbursement rates from insurance companies, and rising costs of providing care.
Jamie Foxx talks preparing to welcome 3rd child at age 58
Jamie Foxx appears on 'Jimmy Kimmel Live!' on Sept. 22, 2026. (Randy Holmes/Disney)
Patriots' Drake Maye Earns Worrying Label on 'Gross' Ranking
With four interceptions to start the year, a weekly ranking believes Drake Maye appears "rattled" this season.
GOP appears deeply worried about Senate race in N.C., a once reliable state
Republicans privately say the key battleground for Senate control may be out of reach as nominee Michael Whatley’s ties to the president bog him down.
Aaron Rodgers Ranks Almost Last in Key NFL QB Stat
Aaron Rodgers is not off to a great start in what appears to be his final NFL season. The Pittsburgh Steelers signal-caller does have the team at 1-1 in the standings, but his production has been the problem. That is, the lack of production.Rodgers has one touchdown pass through two games, averaging 204 yards per […] The post Aaron Rodgers Ranks Almost Last in Key NFL QB Stat appeared first on HEAVY.
Childhood trauma linked to risky health behaviors in late adolescence
Experiencing childhood trauma appears to increase a young person's likelihood of smoking, substance use and developing unhealthy eating habits by contributing to behavioral problems during adolescence, such as impulsivity and poor self-control.
Is the priority health care or profit?
My head is spinning. First, finger-pointing and counter-finger-pointing. Now a court ordered receiver — no wait, a sale agreement for West Sub and Weiss has been agreed upon (aka “the check is in the mail”). In the continued shenanigans about these two hospitals and with recriminations flying in both directions, there appears to be no […]
Micron reportedly ends production of 2GB GDDR7 used by GeForce RTX 50
Micron appears to be moving away from 2GB GDDR7 as its catalog shifts toward 3GB devices. The older 16Gb parts were already used on RTX 50 cards.
Samsung has delayed its Android 17 update
Samsung appears to be delaying the rollout of its Android 17 update, at least slightly, with pushback in some regions....
Sony appears to be testing PlayStation Store credit offers when you buy certain games
What looks to be an unannounced PlayStation loyalty programme of some kind has seemingly gone live for some, offering store credit.
Why the CDC is excluding measles deaths in Pennsylvania even as outbreak appears to be ‘accelerating’
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention refuses to count four measles deaths in the state though doctors are ‘seeing new forms’ of disease
How lip-syncing to AI let Forced Entertainment ‘play the game of theatre’
Today we have a fascinating piece by long-time Forced Entertainment fan Ben Kulvichit, speaking to Tim Etchells about their latest show Cold Sweat, how they are integrating lip-sync and AI voices into their work, the question of ‘authenticity’ on stage, and how lip-sync has even opened the door for them to make “something a little bit like drama”. This piece is a paid partnership with the Southbank Centre, where you can see Cold Sweat next month – we’re very grateful to the Southbank Centre for their ongoing support for Exeunt. Holly Williams ‘It was immediately interesting and uncanny’ **By Ben Kulvichit** “Is the microphone on?” So goes one of the opening lines of Signal to Noise, delivered by a human performer lip-syncing to an AI-generated voice. The voice is American, cheery but sluggish, slowed down into a gelatinous drawl. It repeats ad infinitum in a farce of stuckness; an answer never materialises. I find myself asking the same question as I hop on a Google Meet call with Tim Etchells, the artistic director of Forced Entertainment. We spend five or ten minutes frowning at each other, muting and unmuting, me gesticulating in semaphore into my webcam, checking if I am coming through now, restarting the laptop. To Etchells, I appear exaggeratedly mouthing words, my voice missing. In this gloopy purgatory of broken communication, life imitates art imitates life imitates art. We try a Zoom instead. Forced Entertainment, the pioneering British theatre company who have been at the avant-garde of performance since the 1980s, turned an interesting artistic corner with Signal to Noise, created on the occasion of their 40th anniversary. The whole performance employed this lip-sync technique to AI voices; on the face of it a left-field move from a company whose identity has long been grounded in the earthy, immediate presences of its performers and its unassuming, low-tech approach to theatricality. The technique, however, turned out to provide the company with a “rich new seam” of artistic enquiry, and has now spawned a trilogy of works. The second instalment, Cold Sweat, plays at Sheffield Theatres, Southbank Centre, and Lancaster Arts in October, while the third part, Everything Must Go, has been touring in Europe and is slated to come to the UK in 2027. As is often the case with Forced Entertainment shows, the main conceit for this work didn’t arrive until quite late. They were “four or five weeks into rehearsals for Signal to Noise,” Etchells recalls, and getting nowhere. Away from rehearsals, he had been playing around with feeding “weird texts” to AI voices to see how they would cope with them – “basically for my own amusement” – and was compelled by the uniformly “serviceable, benign, good-natured” tone they would read in, no matter how poetic, fractured or experimental the writing. On a hunch, he brought some examples into rehearsals and the performers gave lip-syncing a go. “It was immediately interesting and uncanny,” he recalls, with the performers having to deal in the moment with the problem of mapping themselves onto another artificial ‘performer,’ which itself was dealing with the problem of a very human text. “Almost all the writing for these projects would be useless to us unless it was done in this way,” says Etchells. “We wouldn’t know what to do with it. It’s too poetic. It’s too fictional. It’s too tangled.” But exploring lip-syncing along to the text has opened “an enormous reservoir of ways of thinking about writing and performing.” Subscribe to Exeunt, and get two in-depth pieces on theatre a week, direct to your inbox Subscribe Forced Entertainment have long been sifting through the detritus of popular culture, from daytime TV to end-of-the-pier vaudeville, magic acts and clown shows, to find frameworks for their own unusual entertainments. Lip-syncing, then, makes sense for them to experiment with. As a mode of performance, it’s wired into popular consciousness through pop stars trying to convince stadium audiences of their liveness, or those same voices as channeled through the made-up lips of contestants on RuPaul’s Drag Race, or movie dialogue spreading virally through the host bodies of TikTok users. For Etchells, lip-syncing is often about “approaching real voices and trying to take on their aura,” subsuming that original human presence into yours. “There’s a very basic, elemental sort of theatre magic to it, produced in this very easy way.” This broad approach resonates with instances of lip-syncing within contemporary performance, too. In works like Re-Member Me and Showmanism, performance artist Dickie Beau acts as a kind of spirit medium for archival recordings (this process of re-membering – as in, giving corporeal form to voices – relies on his masterfully precise actor’s technique), while Frankie Thompson is similarly possessed by a host of characters ranging from a nine-year-old Jacob Rees-Mogg to Cliff Richards, all of whom she finds compellingly nauseating, in the exorcism ritual that is her latest show, Horrible Things. What’s different about Forced Entertainment’s use of lip-syncing is that here, there is no original presence to be channeled. The performers are instead taking on what Etchells describes as “the voices of nobody,” or rather the “phantasmic, aggregated echoes” of the many many voices on whose data the AI has been trained, and which are now conjuring into existence words they never actually said. There is a sort of mournful, empty quality to these voices, having “washed up” far away from the people they originally belonged to, to find themselves in stranger’s mouths listing objects, wondering if anyone can hear them and glitching in interminable loops. There is a cold, sad anonymity to it all. Etchells remarks that occasionally the software company he used has notified him that particular people are withdrawing their voices from the platform, instructing him to cease use of those voices. Using these technologies in performance certainly brings up ethical questions around digital rights, consent, identity and ownership, although in the grand scheme of things, Etchells is fairly blasé about it: of all the purposes someone’s voice might be put to without their knowledge, “an avant-garde performance is probably the least of their worries.” [ ](https://exeuntmagazine.substack.com/p/frankie-thompson-horrible-things-essay-mental-health-compulsive-behaviours-pleasance-courtyard-soho-theatre) [ Frankie Thompson: How I manage my own ‘horrible things’ at the Edinburgh Fringe ](https://exeuntmagazine.substack.com/p/frankie-thompson-horrible-things-essay-mental-health-compulsive-behaviours-pleasance-courtyard-soho-theatre) Exeunt · Aug 25 [ Read full story ](https://exeuntmagazine.substack.com/p/frankie-thompson-horrible-things-essay-mental-health-compulsive-behaviours-pleasance-courtyard-soho-theatre) For the performers, though, lip-syncing to these strange, artificial voices is an odd task, requiring them to bend their live, human presence into the shapes produced by machines. Politically, it mirrors processes that are already at play in the continued computational automation of human life. Etchells brings up James Bridle’s writings on new technologies as a reference point: one example Bridle gives is of “chaotic storage”, a logistics technique employed by Amazon fulfilment centres whereby items are stored not according to traditional methods of categorisation or alphabetisation, but in a way that an algorithm determines to produce the most efficient routes for ‘picking’ based on customer purchase patterns. This appears completely random and incomprehensible to humans, with paddling pools sitting next to USB sticks sitting next to blowtorches, and so for the warehouse workers, the process of picking items becomes completely reliant on technology which tells them where to go. Our world is increasingly being designed not with humans in mind, but rather machines. As Etchells puts it, “technology malforms the space, and then you end up having to live in it.” Initially, Forced Entertainment tried their best to live in the world of machines: “I was in the it’s-got-to-be-perfect school of lip-sync,” says Etchells. But with their aesthetic being so tied to the failing act, the slipping mask, the shoddy costume, “it’s no surprise really that that didn’t last.” Instead, the performers got to enjoy being late for a line, or playing games with each other, “stealing” each other’s voices. Etchells compares it to the principles of ventriloquism, in which a free-floating voice unattached to a body is fundamentally discomforting and “sort of traumatic”. That discomfort is equally as alluring to Forced Entertainment as the satisfaction of precision, the pretence of authenticity only interesting if shown to be a pretence. Lip-sync has also opened up new avenues for the company. Having been allergic all their lives to Plays-with-a-capital-P, with Cold Sweat Forced Entertainment find themselves approaching something a little bit like drama. Rather than the presentational arena of Signal to Noise’s open white stage, Cold Sweat places us more decisively in a “fictional locale”: what appears to be “the aftermath of some disastrous party or backyard drinking binge” where three figures – family members, or neighbours, perhaps – are the last ones standing. “It’s all quite acrimonious and accusatory, everyone’s talking over each other.” For Etchells, this more fictional mode is “a door that we’ve never been able to open. We’ve just never really gone there.” Perhaps it is the technique of lip-syncing, an extra buffer of mediation, that allows them to venture away from the here-and-now without feeling that they have to commit to the “psychological claptrap” that comes along with acting; to be able to “play the game of theatre, without getting one’s hands too dirty.” As I wonder how else the impulses behind Forced Entertainment’s work have changed over time, it occurs to me that over the last ten years of new creations, with the exception of If All Else Fails, the company’s performers haven’t ever spoken on stage: there were two shows without any language at all, Out of Order and Under Bright Light, and then this trilogy of lip-sync works. Etchells agrees it’s a shift away from earlier productions, that were so often about “the actual voices of the performers and their actual presences. We had a lot of money, in some ways, on an authentic approach to what it might mean to speak on the stage.” But this sense of authentic presence itself had a fakeness to it; these days, Etchells can’t stand that mode of being onstage where performers “are here to be cheeky and witty versions of themselves. I don’t want to be charmed.” Pulling back into a more anonymous space has resulted in works that feel slightly sharper-edged, more brutal in a way. “All of these shows are post-Brexit, post-Trump, post-truth, post-everything,” Etchells notes. Speech, charisma, authenticity – these things feel politically loaded, and perhaps warmth and openness just don’t feel like the right tools to reflect the world we’re living in. “It feels like the space is closing down, and we’re trying to deal with the fact that the system, the structure that you’re in, is more oppressive and more powerful. It probably always was, but I think we’re just more tuned to it now.” Yet even without their voices, the performers’ distinctive presences – ones that many audiences have followed around for years, if not decades – still, inevitably, shine through as they physically navigate whatever unending task the system of the piece has set for them. They’re still trying to keep up with the onslaught of text, still running about, changing costumes, moving stuff around. The human is always stuck in the teeth of the machine, jamming the smooth, frictionless cheeriness of the not-real, gesticulating silently, trying desperately to communicate. Cold Sweat is at Sheffield Theatres, 2 to 3 October; Southbank Centre, London, 9 to 10 October; Lancaster Arts, 14 October [ ](https://exeuntmagazine.substack.com/p/exeunt-recommends-the-best-autumn-theatre-2026-lives-of-others-standard-of-living-our-friends-in-the-north-lanny-) [ Exeunt recommends... the best autumn theatre ](https://exeuntmagazine.substack.com/p/exeunt-recommends-the-best-autumn-theatre-2026-lives-of-others-standard-of-living-our-friends-in-the-north-lanny-) Exeunt · Sep 16 [ Read full story ](https://exeuntmagazine.substack.com/p/exeunt-recommends-the-best-autumn-theatre-2026-lives-of-others-standard-of-living-our-friends-in-the-north-lanny-) This piece was paid for by the Southbank Centre. Such support helps Exeunt to keep publishing the most interesting writing, about the most exciting theatre. Interested in partnering with Exeunt? Visit our Advertise with Exeunt page, where you can get more information, download an advertising pack, and find our contact details.
Jiang Feng: The Unravelling of German & European Politics
A state election in eastern Germany has become a revealing test of the changing political landscapes of Germany and Europe, writes Jiang Feng, Professor and Chairman of the Council of the Shanghai Academy of Global Governance and Area Studies (SAGGAS) at Shanghai International Studies University. His analysis follows the decisive victory of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) (which has been classified as right-wing extremist by German authorities)in the state of Saxony-Anhalt on 6 September, in which it finished far ahead of its mainstream rivals. Jiang previously served as Minister-Counsellor at the Chinese Embassy in Berlin. The following article was published on 8 September 2026 on huanqiu.com, the online platform of the Global Times. On 6 September, the results of the state election in Saxony-Anhalt, Germany, were announced. The Alternative for Germany (AfD), classified as far-right by German authorities, made history by becoming the largest party in the state parliament, winning 43.8 per cent of the vote — twice its share in the previous election. The Christian Democratic Union (CDU), which had governed the state continuously for 24 years, won just 17.2 per cent, its worst result ever in Saxony-Anhalt. On the night the results were announced, the atmosphere at the CDU gathering was unusually calm. There was neither shock nor argument, as if the defeat had long been expected. Several veteran party members who had spent years working in the state government said: “Defeat is not a bad thing. It is time to make changes.” This state election has not only upended Saxony-Anhalt’s political landscape, but also laid bare the deep tensions between Germany’s traditional party structure and model of governance, on the one hand, and an increasingly polarised society on the other. Its repercussions are already being felt at the federal level, making Saxony-Anhalt a useful case study of the broader trend towards political polarisation and realignment in Europe. Governing Difficulties after Electoral Victory The most immediate consequence of the election is a historic setback for the mainstream party order that took shape in post-war Germany. In Saxony-Anhalt, the AfD has leapt from a peripheral party to the largest political force in the state. Its electoral base has expanded beyond the traditional category of “marginal protest voters” to take on the characteristics of a cross-class coalition. The party has not only consolidated its support in rural areas, but also attracted many middle-class voters and even members of the social elite with stable jobs, their own homes, and substantial incomes. It has thus evolved from a “protest party” into one with the potential to govern. Despite its commanding lead in the vote, however, the AfD faces an institutional obstacle to governing the state: the mainstream parties’ long-standing “firewall” against it. Neither of the two potential routes to forming a government appears likely to break the current political deadlock. The first would be a coalition of establishment parties, led by the CDU and bringing together the Social Democratic Party (SPD), the Greens, the Left Party (Die Linke) and the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW) in a cross-camp government. In terms of parliamentary arithmetic, such a coalition could prevent the AfD from forming a government and preserve the outward stability of the traditional political order. Yet these parties are fundamentally divided over key issues including immigration, the energy transition, economic management, and cultural and education policy. Coalition negotiations would therefore be extremely difficult, and even if a government could be formed, it would most likely prove short-lived. More importantly, an alliance of establishment parties aimed at keeping the largest party out of government would play directly into the AfD’s narrative that “political elites are suppressing public opinion”. It could deepen perceptions of political unfairness, further strengthening the AfD’s political capital, and creating a dynamic in which “the more it is suppressed, the more people vote for it”. Ulrich Siegmund, the AfD’s candidate for state premier, has said that if efforts to form a government fail because other parties refuse to cooperate, the AfD will push for a fresh election, which he believes could deliver the party an absolute majority of seats. This points to more intense political battles ahead. The second option would be a coalition between the AfD and the BSW. Together, the two parties would command a simple majority in parliament, making this, on paper, the quickest route to forming a government. The BSW is the only elected party that has not ruled out cooperation with the AfD, and the two parties share some common ground, including on policy towards Russia. There is therefore a degree of political basis for cooperation. Were such a coalition to materialise, Germany would see its first state government jointly formed by a party defined as far-right and one with a far-left background, creating what might be called a “bipolar anti-establishment alliance”. Such an outcome would fundamentally break with the ideological boundaries of post-war German party politics. It is worth noting that even if the AfD ultimately fails to enter the state government, its roughly 47 per cent share of parliamentary seats would give it a powerful blocking minority. Without its consent, major decisions requiring a two-thirds majority — including constitutional amendments, significant budgetary adjustments, and state-level institutional reforms — would be extremely difficult to pass. Therefore, whoever ultimately forms the government, the AfD will be an unavoidable force in Saxony-Anhalt politics, with a direct influence on the state’s legislative process. Systemic Failures in Germany’s Governance Model The Saxony-Anhalt election result reflects a systemic failure of Germany’s post-war mainstream-party model of governance to adapt to rapidly changing socioeconomic conditions. It stems from multiple, mutually reinforcing structural tensions and highlights the existing political system’s difficulty in adapting to “an increasingly polarised society First, collective anxiety has replaced individual material hardship as a central driver of political mobilisation. The rise of the AfD can no longer be explained simply by poverty or social marginalisation. Its increasingly cross-class electoral base suggests that what is driving voters towards the party is, above all, concern about the broader direction of society. This anxiety about the future of the political community goes beyond individual gains and losses. In political discourse, economic anxiety has become closely intertwined with immigration, while immigration and refugee issues are, in essence, questions of social fairness. This perception turns conflicts over the distribution of social resources into negative assessments of governing parties, providing a broad social basis for far-right political narratives. Second, regional disparities and East German identity have undermined the strategy of addressing eastern Germany’s structural challenges at the regional level. More than three decades after German reunification, eastern states such as Saxony-Anhalt have experienced periods of economic growth, but their underlying economic structures remain weak, and household incomes and wealth remain significantly below those in western Germany. At the same time, they continue to face population outflow, an ageing population, labour shortages, and other structural challenges. At a deeper level, historical experiences — including the collapse of the former East German economic system, mass unemployment during the transition, and the westward shift of decision-making power over major issues — have left some residents with a sense of being “second-class citizens” and of being excluded. For years, the German government treated the “syndrome” of reunification as a regional problem to be gradually addressed at the local level. That approach is becoming increasingly unsustainable, as regional development disparities emerge as a core structural factor shaping national politics. Third, the erosion of institutional trust is perhaps the most decisive factor. AfD supporters tend to distrust establishment institutions, including parliament, government, and the mainstream media. Their concerns about economic security, pensions, and social fairness are significantly greater than the social average. Increasingly, their support for the AfD reflects not an expectation that the existing system can be improved, but a search for an alternative to the current political order. Such a systemic deficit of trust will be extremely difficult for the traditional parties to repair in the short term. Fourth, a generational shift in political mobilisation has amplified political polarisation. Unlike traditional parties, which rely heavily on offline rallies and mainstream media coverage, the AfD has developed a social-media mobilisation strategy built around “raising an issue — identifying who is responsible — offering a simplified solution — building a shared identity”. It turns complex social tensions into concise political narratives, rapidly channelling public sentiment into political support. The contrast on the eve of the election was particularly telling. The establishment parties, together with trade unions and churches, organised an offline march attended by more than 10,000 people, but its reach was largely confined to those present and to traditional media coverage. The AfD held a much smaller indoor event, yet livestreaming on TikTok, YouTube, and other platforms, combined with the involvement of online influencers, gave it a reach and mobilising capacity far beyond that of the march. The contrast illustrates how the traditional parties’ methods of political mobilisation are increasingly struggling to keep pace with a political environment transformed by changes in media technology. A Microcosm of Structural Political Change in Europe The shockwaves from the Saxony-Anhalt election quickly travelled beyond the state to the federal level. Calls for political accountability followed immediately after the results were announced. The governing CDU and SPD are now under enormous pressure, while Chancellor Friedrich Merz and Vice Chancellor Lars Klingbeil face an unprecedented test. Political polarisation in Germany is no longer simply a regional phenomenon. The post-war model of multiparty government by establishment parties is breaking down and being reshaped. Viewed in a broader European context, the Saxony-Anhalt election is part of a continent-wide wave of party polarisation, mainstream-party decline, and rising right-wing forces. Far from an isolated phenomenon, it is a microcosm of the structural political changes unfolding across Europe. Weak economic growth, cultural tensions over immigration, and declining trust in institutions are fuelling the rise of right-wing forces in several countries, challenging the liberal internationalist order established in post-war Europe. As a core member state of the European Union, Germany’s ability to adapt its political system and the direction of its politics will have profound implications for both European integration and the evolution of the international order. Subscribe [ Pekingnology China’s Germany watchers take stock of Berlin’s uneasy turn On 7 December 2025, nearly 50 Chinese scholars and policy researchers gathered in Beijing for the 2025年德国形势年终研讨会 “2025 Year-End Seminar on the Situation in Germany… Read more 9 months ago · 31 likes · 1 comment · YIRUI LI and Yuxuan JIA ](https://www.pekingnology.com/p/chinas-germany-watchers-take-stock?utm_source=substack&utm_campaign=post_embed&utm_medium=web&embedding_publication_id=1151841) [ Jiang Feng on Germany's 2025 and beyond: no easy exit ](https://www.eastisread.com/p/jiang-feng-on-germanys-2025-and-beyond) Yirui LI and Yuxuan JIA · Jan 24 The following is an op-ed by Jiang Feng, published on 29 December 2025 at Shanghai Observer 上观新闻, the digital platform of Jiefang Daily, the official newspaper of the Shanghai Municipal Committee of the Communist Party of China (CPC). [ Read full story ](https://www.eastisread.com/p/jiang-feng-on-germanys-2025-and-beyond)
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Science Vs on the 49ers Substation: Anatomy of a Hatchet Job
In August, Pablo Torre Finds Out and Science Vs released an episode about my theory that electromagnetic fields from the electrical substation beside the 49ers facility may be contributing to the team’s run of soft-tissue injuries. As the originator of the theory, I was also a subject of the episode. I sat was interviewed by Wendy Zukerman and Rose Rimler of Sciene Vs. I sent them research, connected them with scientists, and spent hours digging through the City of Santa Clara’s and Silicon Valley Power’s records to help clarify critical details. Both Wendy and Rose came off as affable and professional, showing curiosity during the interviews, with Wendy going out of her way to question the “conspiracy theory” framing itself. Then they titled the episode We Solve the 49ers Viral Conspiracy Theory. I was familiar enough with their catalog that I never expected them to agree with my theory, but I did expect them to give it a fair hearing and to deliver their findings honestly. On both counts they came up short. They were not directly dishonest in anything they said, but rather in what they left out, in how what remained was cut, and in the picture painted by those two things in combination. They asked me to recorded the interview on my phone for better audio quality, and I held on to my copy for reference later. That turned out to be a fortuitous decision. Here is the raw audio of my first interview, unedited*. Only my side was recorded, so their questions aren’t on it, but you can generally infer them from the answers, and every claim I make below about what I said can be checked against my statements in this clip. (Note: Wendy had connection trouble at the beginning of the interview and was cutting in and out, which accounts for the false starts.) 0:00 -1:19:13 Audio playback is not supported on your browser. Please upgrade. Science Vs is a fun show. It is pitched at roughly a high-school understanding of science, for an audience that is skeptical, Snopes-oriented, and worried about misinformation. Take a claim circulating online, interview a supporter of the claim, interview consensus scientists, and then tell people which side of the line it lands on. I have listened to their episodes on raw milk, seed oils, 5G and other contested issues in the wellness space. I have problems with all of them, but each at least made an honest attempt to represent the actual range of scientific opinion by talking to credentialed scientists with differing perspectives. Dissenting researchers were heard from, answered, and often given a chance to respond. This episode did not do that. This article is not a relitigation of the science. I have written extensively about that already. This post is for the record. It is simply an accounting of what was wrong with their episode. Contents Is there a power plant next to the 49ers practice facility? — the clearest single example of getting something objectively wrong For the record — a high-level overview of all of the problems with their investigation Draw your own conclusions — why they had to make this episode at all What they left out about childhood leukemia — the exposure threshold, and playing games with statistics to minimize sick children What they left out about the mechanism — the body of literature they refused to cover, and evidence for the mechanism used against it The scientists Science Vs interviewed and did not air — four credential scientists who support myhe theory, recorded and cut, or not even called How they misrepresented me and my case — an answer severed from its question, and three telling edits How you would actually study the injuries — it doesn’t actually matter which team is the most injured, overall The theory: magnetic fields, oxidative stress, and collagen Since the episode never states my theory, here it is below. Those who are familiar with my work can skip this section. Electrical equipment produces magnetic fields, and those fields induce faint electrical currents in anything that passes through them, including people. My argument goes further than induced current. Mitochondria — the structures that generate a cell’s energy — run on continuous flows of electrons and protons, and those flows carry faint electromagnetic fields of their own. Maxwell’s principle of superposition shows that when two fields share the same space, they add together. An external field does not need to be strong to alter an internal field, it only needs to be present. The electron transport chain inside the mitochondria leaks a small fraction of its electrons by design, and those become reactive oxygen species — free radicals, which healthy cells use as signals. External magnetic fields cause the rate of leakage to change, increasing free radicals. When free radicals accumulate faster than the cell’s antioxidant systems can clear them, the result is oxidative stress. Oxidative stress is a recognized driver of chronic illness, including cardiovascular disease, neurodegeneration, diabetes and cancer, and it is in every medical school curriculum. One of its ordinary effects in connective tissue is that it switches on matrix metalloproteinases — MMPs, the enzymes that break collagen apart — while suppressing new collagen synthesis. Tendons are made of collagen. An athlete loading his soft tissue heavily six days a week is already creating oxidative stress in the tendons, so the addition of magnetic field exposure compounds the damage and inhibits repair, making him more susceptible to injury when enormous force lands on a tendon in a fraction of a second. That is the theory. We know that EMF causes oxidative stress, and we know that oxidative stress degrades collagen. The only thing missing is a study showing that direct connection. I have never claimed certainty that the substation is contributing to the elevated injury rate. I do believe it is likely, and I believe it warrants caution, and that a revenue machine like a major NFL team can easily afford to remove the exposure out of precaution. Is there a power plant next to the 49ers practice facility? Here is the clearest single instance of the problem with this episode. It requires no knowledge of electromagnetic fields at all. This story first came to me through Jon Feliciano, a former 49er, in an interview on Willard & Dibs on 95.7 The Game. Asked about why the 49ers are always injured, he said players used to joke that it was the power plant behind the practice fields. Wendy Zukerman corrects him on air. “It’s important to say that it’s not a power plant near the 49ers site.” Torre then asks her to explain the difference between a substation and a power plant. Her answer: a power plant generates electricity and transmits it to a substation, which converts the voltage into something your house can use and sends it on to your home or your business. There are two problems with that. The first is that there is a power plant on that site. The Gianera Generating Station is a natural-gas-fired peaker plant owned by Silicon Valley Power, and it has been there since 1986. I have published aerial photographs of the location from 1987 in which the gas plant is the only thing standing, before the practice facility was even there. I even mentioned the gas plant in my first interview. (Feliciano has since gone on record about this issue, and it is clear he had the substation in mind rather than the gas plant.) The second is that her definition describes a distribution substation, and the facility beside the 49ers is not that. It is the Northern Receiving Station, which takes in bulk power from outside the city’s grid and delivers it to distribution substations. Silicon Valley Power’s own map distinguishes receiving stations from substations, and Rose Rimler even reads the label out loud in the episode when she walks through that map on air. A few minutes before the map segment, Zukerman tells Torre: “like I said, we fact check everything.” Well, maybe not everything. I made a mistake On the morning of July 6th, at 10:20, I sent Rose and Wendy two studies. During the interview I had been asked which human studies show oxidative stress from electromagnetic fields, and I had not been able to name one on the spot. Rose emailed asking for the studies, I quickly searched for a couple, and I wrote that I thought these were the most relevant from that search. Unfortunately, I was busy and did not read either one closely at first. I picked them because they were topically relevant — one on substation workers, one on power plant workers. Neither were great studies, and their problems go past the ones raised in the episode. That was careless on my part. There is context that did not make the episode, though. Before that email I had been on a Zoom call with Rose talking about EMF and oxidative stress, and I pointed her to Dr. Henry Lai at the University of Washington, who has spent years aggregating the literature on this question. His tallies show that roughly 90% of studies since the late 1990s find oxidative effects from electromagnetic field exposure — hundreds of studies, systematically counted. Rose told me she was already aware of his work. So when she asked for studies, I understood her to have the aggregate view already and that she would report anything within that context. Not reading those two carefully was still a mistake, but the larger mistake was assuming the episode would be based on a thorough review of the actual body of literature, rather than on whatever I happened to send that morning. The second email At 1:49 that same afternoon — three hours and twenty-nine minutes after the first — I sent them a second email that I had been preparing for a while. It was a structured document in six numbered sections, written in response to a request they had made two weeks earlier, laying out my entire argument with citations attached to every link in the chain. The episode aired on August 13th, five weeks later, and not a single item from the second email is in it. Here is how it opens: The full email is included at the bottom of this post in Appendix B. Nearly 1,500 words in total. It contains two named mechanisms with the physics behind them. Occupational studies in humans. The literature on oxidative stress and collagen. A section addressing the strongest counter-evidence against my own theory, which I raised myself. And a closing section stating plainly what the theory cannot yet show. My entire argument, in writing, with detailed citations for every claim, provided to them five weeks before broadcast, and none of it made it into the episode. That is the single largest omission, but it is not an isolated one. The whole episode is riddled with similar problems, and the conclusion they came to is not merely a difference of opinion about the scientific evidence. Through omission and through strategic editing, Science Vs misinformed its audience — about what the evidence shows, about what I argued, and about who they spoke to. That is a notable outcome for a show whose stated purpose is correcting misinformation. For the record I am not going to tell you that Science Vs set out to discredit me, or that they had come to their conclusion before they reported the story, or that they used misleading editing to make me look like a man retreating from his own theory. I cannot know what was in anyone’s head, and I am not going to pretend otherwise, either. What I can tell you is what is on the record. They asked me for evidence and aired the weakest thing I sent. They interviewed three scientists who supported my theory and aired none of them. They discussed childhood leukemia without ever saying the exposure level at which it appears. And they took an answer I gave weeks before Ken Karipidis, the one EMF scientist who was put on air, was interviewed, and placed it directly after his critique, where it comes off as a major concession. A friend of mine who has worked as a journalist for thirty years read that last one and called it sleazy. I agree with her. Those are just the four issues that are impossible to defend as pure editorial decision, but they are not the only issues. The most glaring issues stem from what they left out: The exposure level at which the childhood leukemia association actually appears — three to four milligauss, a number the episode never states despite it being much lower than what I measured. The mechanism itself: The episode gets as far as “oxidative stress could weaken collagen,” which leaves it sounding like speculation, rather than a known pathway. The second email, and all the studies in it. Dr. Paul Héroux at McGill, whose work my proposed mechanism rests on, whose contact details I supplied, and who was never called. Dr. Beatrice Golomb at UC San Diego, who runs a research group on oxidative stress and mitochondrial function and has specific expdertice in collagen, interviewed and not aired. Dr. David Carpenter at Albany, the most prominent academic voice on the harm from magnetic field exposure, interviewed and not aired. Dr. Joel Moskowitz at Berkeley, interviewed and not even credited. The specific, testable condition I put in writing that would make me abandon the theory. My own unprompted statement of the theory’s evidentiary gap. My caveats about my own measurements. My ranking of EMF as one factor among several rather than the only one. The new equipment installed at those facilities between 2010 and 2014, and the sharp rise in system load from 2013 onward. But that is not all. What they kept, they selectively edited to serve a narrative that was not served by the raw transcripts of the interviews. A description of thousands of commercial routers in a workplace, reduced to the Wi-Fi in your house. My own acknowledgment, multiple times, that "I'm not a scientist" clipped in an episode that spends considerable energy pointing out that I am not a scientist. And a qualification I volunteered about my own measurements, cut from my answer and delivered later by their EMF expert as a correction. Together their edit produce a portrait of a wellness guy with Wi-Fi phobia and two bad studies, backing away from his theory the moment a “real” scientist looked at it. A practice facility where nothing changed because no new substation was built. Injuries written off as random because the 49ers were not quite the single most injured team in the league over the period in question. That portrait is false even though almost no individual statement made in the episode is. Draw your own conclusions At the top of the episode, Pablo Torre says his show had been flooded with requests to investigate the substation — that it was the thing they were asked to look into over and over again. Neither show went hunting for this story. It arrived from their own audience, in volume, and it could not be waved off. A thread I posted on X reached twenty-two million people. A guy with a gaussmeter and a brand-new Substack obligated a Pultizer prize winning program to spend an hour on a question about player health, that is considered fringe enough that most media operations won’t touch it. Pablo Torre Finds Out could not ignore it. So Science Vs came in and ran a “debunking” operation instead of an investigation. Everything below is what had to be left on the cutting room floor to deliver the “debunking”. They could not ignore it. So they tried debunked it instead. The demand was strong enough to force an episode, and since the episodes release the 49ers have sustained more injuries, including season ending ones, and interest has only grown. Demand from fans and playets is strong enough to force a better investigation from someone else. An omission is not a lie until you find out what was omitted. What follows is the detailed record so you can see the full picture. Draw your own conclusions. I have drawn mine. I am going to keep publishing. A note about Pablo Torre Finds Out After the episode aired I posted publicly, calling out Pablo Torre Finds Out for concerns I had about the integrity of their investigation, and about an interview directly with Pablo Torre which had been offered but never happened. I have since spoken with a producer at PTFO. The offer had rested on a misunderstanding about where things stood between us, and it fell away as the Science Vs part of the production widened past the science. He apologized for the miscommunication and I accepted. The producer also confirmed to me that they did essentially hand off the entire investigation to Science Vs for narrative purposes — so Pablo would be genuinely curious or potentially surprised by their findings — while still taking responsibility for what went out under their name. I appreciated the candor and the accountability, and I am comfortable with where we left things. So this post is not about PTFO. My disagreement is with Science Vs. What they left out about childhood leukemia Childhood leukemia appears at three milligauss. They gave no number at all. 1. They built an EMF ruler, then discussed childhood cancer without it. The sequence on air went like this: First I measured almost 9 mG, then I measured up to 50 milligauss. Torre reacts with concern — “that sounds high.” Cut to Karipidis: the public limit is 2,000 milligauss. Torre reacts again — “What happens at 2,000?” Karipidis explains that nothing happens at 2,000, that safety factors are built in. Then: at more than 50,000 milligauss you get flickers of light in the retina, and higher still, nerve stimulation. The listener now has a ruler (their ruler) to measure these numbers with. Fifty is nothing by their ruler. Then the episode turns to childhood leukemia and states, accurately, that there is a real association — but tellingly, they never give the exposure level at which that association appears. Childhood leukemia appears at three milligauss. They conveniently left that out. The pooled analyses that produced the World Health Organization’s carcinogen classification found roughly a doubling of childhood leukemia risk above three to four milligauss. That is the number that belongs in that segment, and it is more than ten times below the reading that had just been dismissed as trivial. I gave them that number myself, on tape, in the interview. Describing my own threshold, I said my comfort level for long-term chronic exposure is three to four milligauss, but preferably one. 2. Six children in thirteen million. The episode reports that these fields might explain one to four percent of childhood leukemias, then reframes it as a German estimate of perhaps six cases among thirteen million children. Torre, to his credit, is uncomfortable. What never gets explained is why that number is small. Almost no children lives above three milligauss in Europe. Fewer than two children in a hundred, in the Italian data. So even if the risk to those children doubles, the number of additional cases across an entire country stays small — not because the hazard is small, but because hardly anyone is exposed to it. Count the whole population and the few who are exposed disappear. And the reason hardly anyone is exposed is that siting rules keep housing away from transmission lines. In Europe, at least. The Dutch government has a standing precautionary policy against building new homes in any zone where the annual average magnetic field exceeds 4 milligauss — the same number the episode never mentioned. Denmark and Norway treat 4 milligauss as the level that triggers a look at mitigation. That is five hundred times below the ICNIRP figure quoted on air. The United States has no federal equivalent. That is evidence of infrastructure siting policy working. It is not evidence that there is no hazard. It is evidence that we already act as though there is one. If you listen to the raw audio you will hear that my proposed solution is EMF exposure is to build better infrastructure. What they left out about the mechanism 3. They accused me of cherry-picking, and then cherry-picked themselves. On air, Zukerman tells Torre that people who worry about electromagnetic fields dismiss the studies showing null results and collect the ones showing harm, and that this is why you have to be careful not to cherry-pick. They had two papers I had rattled off in a hurry, and a second email containing a carefully chosen set. They ran the two weakest, graded them on air, and presented the result as the state of the evidence for not only my theory, but the whole question of oxidative stress from magnetic fields. That is cherry-picking from my emails. The bigger picture is what they did with the literature as a whole. Zukerman acknowledges it exists, dismisses it, and disposes of it in a single stroke. You can go online right now, she tells Torre, and find scores of studies showing these fields increase oxidative stress. The issue, she says, is that they are not studies in people. Many of them are in people. The occupational studies in my second email are in people. That email had been in her inbox for five weeks. She waved off the literature on a factual claim that the documents in her possession contradict. (I have written separately about the evidentiary standard at work here). The effect was that they essentially baited me: ask the subject to supply the evidence, take the weakest thing he sends, and let that stand as a proxy for the whole argument. Wendy has been doing this show for ten years and clearly knows how to extract what she needs for her desired narrative. 4. They presented the collagen-improvement research as a gotcha, but I had already addressed it. The episode treats the existence of studies showing that EMF can improve collagen as a surprise that undercuts me, but I had pre-emptively addressed that five weeks earlier in the email they ignored. Those studies use measured, high-intensity pulsed dosing. The mechanism by which they work is oxidative signalling. The cell reads a controlled rise in reactive oxygen species as a warning, upregulates its antioxidant defenses, mounts a repair response, and the therapy stops before the system is overwhelmed. The key point is that it induces an oxidative response, which means those studies are actually evidence for my proposed mechanism, not against it. A field that produces a therapeutic effect cannot be biologically inert (which is the implication when they say “Nothing happens at 2,000 milligauss). Chronic ambient exposure is the same pathway with no off switch, and it is most consequential during the evening and while sleeping, when the body is in repair mode and the exposure does not stop. Section 5 of my email is titled What about the study showing improved collagen synthesis. I raised the counter-evidence myself, explained why I did not think it refuted the theory, and wrote that I was disappointed the question had not come up in the interview. That is worth holding against the cherry-picking charge in the item above: the studies they presented as inconvenient for me were studies I had gone out of my way to put in front of them. 5. Section 1 of my email stated a critical argument that was never put to the expert directly responsible for it. My email says the exposure limits exist to prevent acute effects and do not address chronic exposure at all, and that my dispute is with the entire framework. Zukerman gestures at this once. After Karipidis gives the 2,000 milligauss figure, she tells Torre that I would object because those levels do not capture “more subtle effects.” That is not my argument, and “subtle” is doing a lot of work here. My argument is that the limits are built to prevent acute effects — nerves firing, muscles twitching, etc — and were not designed to address chronic exposure at all. In fact, ICNIRP’s own documents state as much themselves. Mine is a structural objection to what the standard measures, reduced as a concern about subtlety, it becomes a matter of degree, rather than a categorical difference. They interviewed Ken Karipidis, vice chair of ICNIRP — the body that writes those limits. He was asked what the limit is, but he was never asked how it applies to chronic exposure. The scientists Science Vs interviewed and did not air 6. They interviewed four officials of the standards body. The episode credits roughly a dozen researchers. Four of them are associated with ICNIRP. Ken Karipidis is the vice chair. Rodney Croft chaired ICNIRP from 2020 to 2024 and led the development of its current guidelines. Dan Baaken is ICNIRP’s scientific secretary. Frank de Vocht sits on the Main Commission. One of them speaks in the episode. Their institution’s position is more than adequately represented — the 2,000 milligauss figure, the safety factors, the assurance that nothing happens below the line. 7. The four who were left out. Dr. Beatrice Golomb is Professor of Medicine at UC San Diego — a physics undergraduate degree, a PhD in biology, an MD. She directs a research group whose stated focus is the relationship between oxidative stress, mitochondrial function and health. That is the mechanism the episode spent its first half dismissing. Her published work includes the fluoroquinolone case series behind the FDA’s black box warning on an antibiotic class that ruptures tendons, where the accepted mechanism is oxidative stress and mitochondrial toxicity — the back half of my chain, already on a drug label. She is in the credits. She is not in the episode. She has told me she finds my theory biologically plausible, and that she has a recording of her interview. Dr. David Carpenter directed the Institute for Health and the Environment at the University at Albany for decades and is the most prominent academic voice arguing these fields cause harm. Childhood leukemia is the reason these fields carry a WHO classification at all, and Carpenter is the person you call if you want that case made by someone who has spent a career on it. He is in the credits. He is not in the episode. He has told me that when he was interviewed they could not have been less interested in what he had to say. Dr. Joel Moskowitz directs the Center for Family and Community Health at UC Berkeley’s School of Public Health. He told me directly that they interviewed him and that he thought it went well. He does not appear in the episode, and unlike Golomb and Carpenter, he does not even appear in the credits. Dr. Paul Héroux at McGill is the researcher whose work provides the foundation for the oxidative stress mechanism my theory rests on. I gave Rose his email address and phone number. He was never interviewed. They never even called him. 8. “He’s not a scientist.” The episode leans hard on the fact that I am not a credentialed scientist. Zukerman says it. Torre repeats it. “At all.” Having built a segment on that, they then left out the physicist-biologist-physician, the professor of public health, the director of a university environmental health institute, and the McGill researcher whose work the primary mechanism comes from. They spent the episode telling their audience I am not a scientist, and then kept four actual scientists who support the theory off because their argument does not survive otherwise. How they misrepresented me and my case 9. They played my words as a response to an interview I had never heard. Near the end of the hour, Zukerman says she went to me and told me the evidence was lacking. Then she plays me saying I am not wedded to it being an EMF, that I have staked my reputation on it needing more study, and that I am not certain of anything. That segment was placed immediately after Karipidis had finished taking the cherry-picked papers apart. It plays as a man folding under expert scrutiny. Commenters have used it against me since, but it is incorrect. Here is the sequence as it happened. I was interviewed. Karipidis was interviewed weeks later. I was never told what he said, or even who he was. I was never asked to respond to it. I did not know his name until the episode aired. That is not a simple editing decision. That is a quote from one interview, moved to follow a critique from a different interview it was not a response to, so that it would land as a concession. A friend of mine who has spent thirty years as a journalist read that sequence and called it sleazy. She is right. The full passage is reproduced in Appendix A, and it is worth reading. What airs is the preamble. Four paragraphs later I say “to directly answer your question” — and that answer, about what would change my mind if the team relocated, is not in the episode. Neither is the sentence two paragraphs on, where I say the EMF might turn out to be ten percent of the problem. I will say the underlying point again, though, because I meant it and I still do. I am not wedded to my theory that magnetic fields from the substation are contributing to the 49ers injuries. I could be wrong. What I am wedded to is the process of scientific inquiry, and the fact that we should be cautious around these exposures and we need more independently funded studies. 10. Three telling edits. They cut “I’m not a scientist” mid-sentence. What I said: “...and I am not certain of anything. I’m not a scientist. To me, I find the mechanisms compelling. I will go back to the fact that I got into this not because of the 49ers, but because of clients I was working with who suffer from EDS...” What aired: “...and that I am not certain of anything. I’m not.” The clip ends on the first two words of the sentence in which I say I am not a scientist, in an episode that spends considerable energy establishing that I am not a scientist. The full sequence is in Appendix A. They cut my own description of my work. Asked what I do, I said I run a wellness business, that I am focused on writing software to help people navigate environmental stressors, that environmental health is my focus, and that I also do independent journalism and research. What aired is the wellness business and the environmental health, with the software and the journalism removed from my own answer. The software engineering does come up later — narrated by them, as a hacker who grew up to write firmware — but my current work, in my own words, arrives as “wellness guy.” Thousands of commercial routers became home Wi-Fi. What I described: working at a wireless networking company surrounded by thousands of Wi-Fi routers, and a stress-induced health collapse afterward that working in that environment contributed to. What aired: Wi-Fi, the kind you have at home — reinforced by a clip of Christian McCaffrey talking about turning his router off at night. Three cuts, and every one of them makes me seem less credible. That is not a coincidence. 11. I gave them my own caveats and the test that would disprove me. In the first email I wrote that a well-designed chronic, ambient-level exposure study in tendon showing no collagen degradation, run over many months, would undercut my confidence in the theory. That is a specific, testable condition, stated in advance and in writing. There was a second interview, weeks later, which was not used in the episode, but in that I asked again for the falsification criterion to be included. What the episode presents instead is a man saying “we need more study,” which reads as a hedge, an open-ended request for the benefit of the doubt. It is the opposite of a hedge. Section 6 of my second email says, unprompted, that as far as I am aware there is not a single study showing EMF-driven oxidative stress degrading collagen in a human in vivo or in human tendon in a lab. I wrote that because it is true and because it is the first thing anyone should check. Under their standard it becomes the hinge of the entire first half, framed as something they had to surface without my cooperation. I had handed it to them five weeks earlier. And in the interview I said that my 25 to 50 milligauss readings were taken at knee level, and that these fields attenuate quickly, so by the time it reaches your head it is not that high anymore. That did not air either. The qualification arrives later, from Karipidis, as a correction. How you would actually study the injuries 12. They measured the wrong thing. The episode spends its final act on whether the 49ers are the most injured team in the NFL, finds no clean ranking, and lands on “injuries are random”. That is the wrong test. You would define the exposure — measured field levels at the facility — and the outcome narrowly: soft-tissue injuries, not a single MSK injury count that a broken finger and a ruptured Achilles both land in. Then you would compare the 49ers to themselves before and after the exposure changed, and compare that change against every other team over the same window. That controls for league-wide shifts in rules, turf and training load. It is a difference-in-differences design, and it is standard. I sent them that argument on July 28th, in writing, along with the fact that in eleven of the past twelve seasons the 49ers had finished top ten in Adjusted Games Lost. And by the episode’s own reporting, the 49ers are second in games lost to injury over the past decade, with FTN’s Aaron Schatz confirming that once you adjust for starters they come out second worst in the league — after having been one of the healthiest teams for years before that. A finding like that is where an investigation starts, not where it stops. 13. I did a lot of substation research for the episode that was never aired. I had reported that the substation next to the facility was expanded in 2014. That was wrong, and Rose Rimler and I sorted it out together. They gave me credit on air, which I appreciated, but framed it as a concession on my part to something they had found. In fact I had been investigating it myself, was uncertain before they asked, but was waiting for clarification from Silicon Valley Power. The uncertainty centered around a substation named “Esparanca” that was proposed right behind the facilities as part of the stadium construction, but now appears to never have been built. I spent days in Silicon Valley Power’s records, and did eventually reach Silicon Valley Power for confirmation and indentified the mistake myself. I also gave them highly detailed documents on what we do know about those facilities: new equipment installed between 2010 and 2014, and load growth across the system with an inflection around 2013–2014, with the Northern Receiving Station carrying the highest capacity in the system and sitting closest to the data center corridor. None of that is in the episode. I have a separate piece about it coming out soon. *I cut 2 seconds from the raw audio to remove personal information that had no connection to anything in the episode. Appendix A: the passage the clip was taken from This is the sequence from my first interview, in full. The episode uses one fragment of it. It’s tricky because my understanding is that there’s something like a 15-year half-life on collagen remodeling issues. They’re going to get a new crop of players. What I really need, though, is for the injuries to be broken down so we can see the soft tissue injuries. Right now, they’re categorized as MSK injuries, but let’s say we can actually identify them more specifically. Is that right? He was able to do that? Oh, cool. I wasn’t able to find that information. Interesting — I didn’t know that data existed. I tried so hard to get it, and I didn’t know it was available. Maybe you could connect me with that person. That would be amazing. I’m not wedded to it being an EMF, honestly. I’m not. I would say that, to a certain extent, I’ve staked my reputation on the fact that it needs more study. It’s important to look into it, and I am not certain of anything. I’m not a scientist. To me, I find the mechanisms compelling. I will go back to the fact that I got into this not because of the 49ers, but because of clients I was working with who suffer from EDS, Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, a tendon hypermobility issue. This condition is documented to be partially caused by oxidative stress. I’ve worked with them to mitigate their EMF exposure and have seen people improve. I think it’s a bigger story. In a way, the 49ers represent an occupational cluster with specific exposure risks. If someone would conduct a study on this, I believe we could learn a lot. Perhaps we would discover that it’s like, okay, maybe it’s 10% of the problem. I don’t know the exact number, but I think either way, conducting the study would provide valuable insights. To directly answer your question, it’s challenging for me because it’s part of a bigger story. If the 49ers move and stop having injuries, I might conclude that it was related to the substation. However, if they move and still experience injuries, I would want to analyze the nature of those injuries. Are they primarily soft tissue injuries? I don’t think it’s necessarily a case closed, but the story might lose traction at that point regardless. Three things are worth noting. The aired fragment stops immediately before the sentence in which I say I am not a scientist — the cut described in item 10. It also stops four paragraphs before the words “to directly answer your question.” What the episode plays is the throat-clearing. The actual answer, about what would change my mind, never airs. And two paragraphs in, I say the EMF might turn out to be ten percent of the problem. That is the ranking the episode says I never gave. Appendix B: the full email, July 6th, 1:39 PM Hi Rose, You asked me to send you some studies a couple of weeks ago. I apologize for the delay. I have been incredibly busy. I also wanted to give you a chance to dig in yourself, and get your own perspective before I influenced you too much with mine. That said, I do want to make sure that the actual argument is abundantly clear, so here it is! One note before I begin, there are really two separate questions here: Does the substation cause the soft-tissue injuries? That was my specific claim, and what the podcast is about. Is the theory biologically sound? Can 50/60 Hz fields at these levels do anything biological below the safety limits? Question two is why people have been calling me a conspiracy theorist. The regulatory and advisory bodies (ICNIRP, etc) maintain that anything below their exposure limits is biologically inert, and that position is broadly accepted within the mainstream, but the actual science paints a different picture. To defend my theory I’ve had to defend a much larger claim: that the advisory bodies have the biology wrong. I can’t honestly answer question 1 without first addressing that. Here’s is a simplified outline of my theory, with links to studies: 1. Advisory body thresholds for biological effects The ELF magnetic-field limits (ICNIRP’s ~2,000 mG public / 10,000 mG occupational) exist to prevent acute effects from exposure. If a magnetic field is strong enough, it makes nerves fire and muscles contract. Muscles twitch. You can see faint flashes of light in your vision. People can even feel tingling or even a shock. That happens due to Faraday’s law, which states that a time-varying magnetic field induces an electric field inside the body via the creation of Eddy currents.The standards assume that those currents do nothing below the twitch threshold. They do not consider chronic effects at all. My argument is that they are biologically active and do have chronic effects. 2. There are multipe ELF-EMF mechanisms for inducing oxidative stress. This is basic biophysics. Below are the two primary mechanisms. Simplest first. Dr. Paul Héroux of McGill has the most intuitive explanation, which rests on Maxwell’s principle of superposition: because Maxwell’s equations are linear, two sets of electromagnetic waves sharing the same space simply add together. In the interview I pictured a pebble dropped into a pond, sending out clean ripples. Then a boat motors past at distance, sending larger waves, and where they meet the ripples, the two add together and the original pattern gets distorted. In our cells, the mitochondria run on continuous currents of electrons and protons that carry their own faint electromagnetic fields. An external field from a substation, by the principle of superposition, adds to those internal currents and shifts the pattern. The electron transport chain in the mitochondria leaks a fraction of its electrons by design as reactive oxygen species (ROS), which act as signalling molecules in a healthy cell. Distorting that field increases that electron leakage, creating oxidative stress. A tiny electromagnetic interference results in a large downstream effect. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2405844025006474 The more complex pathway is Dimitris Panagopoulos’s Ion Forced-Oscillation / Voltage-Gated Ion Channel (IFO-VGIC) mechanism. Weak, polarized, low-frequency fields force the ions (calcium, potassium, sodium) next to an ion channel’s voltage sensor to oscillate; because that force scales with the inverse cube of the distance involved, fields far below the stimulation threshold can still force the channel open, disrupting the cell’s ion balance and driving ROS overproduction (Nitric oxide and superoxide interact and produce peroxynitrite, a highly unstable cytotoxin that breaks down into free radicals). https://www.researchgate.net/publication/366088934 https://www.spandidos-publications.com/ijo/59/5/92 https://www.mdpi.com/1422-0067/22/18/10041 https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/public-health/articles/10.3389/fpubh.2025.1585441/full https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3772193/ 3. Evidence of oxidative stress, in vivo, in humans from ELF-EMF There are many studies, and the strongest are occupational, which applies to the 49ers situation. 115 power-plant workers vs. 145 office controls. Serum malondialdehyde (MDA, the standard lipid-peroxidation marker), superoxide dismutase, and catalase were all significantly higher in the exposed group, and the markers rose with increasing field exposure. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.3233/WOR-203244 A follow-up where they reversed the oxidative stress in power plant workers. A double-blind randomized controlled trial: 91 power-plant workers given vitamin E, vitamin C, both, or placebo for 90 days. The antioxidant groups showed reduced lipid peroxidation and raised antioxidant capacity versus controls. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32191586/ A spot-welder study: 46 welders occupationally exposed at 50 Hz, showed significantly altered red-blood-cell antioxidant enzyme activity and concluded ELF-MF “might act as an oxidative stressor… even at the recommended levels of exposure.” https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18504600/ A substation-specific study found oxidative stress and DNA damage https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24460415/ 4. Oxidative stress degrades collagen This half isn’t controversial at all. Oxidative stress activates the matrix metalloproteinases (MMPs) that break collagen down and suppresses its synthesis. Here are three example studies: Siwik et al. 2001: Oxidative stress raises MMPs and lowers collagen synthesis in cardiac fibroblasts. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11121376/ Fisher et al. 2009: Collagen fragmentation drives oxidative stress and elevates MMP-1 in aged human skin. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2631323/ Varani et al. 2006: Decreased collagen production in oxidatively aged skin. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16723701/ 5. What about the study showing improved collagen synthesis I’m glad you asked this question, and I’m bummed we didn’t get to it in the interview because it is a great question, and very important to understand. Superficially it may appear to be a refutation of my theory, but I would argue that it actually supports the underlying argument. That study used a short, high-intensity pulsed dose: therapeutic-PEMF, the same type of field used clinically to stimulate bone and tissue healing. The reason this works is because it triggers the very same biological pathways that can lead to oxidative stress. The exposure still stimulates ROS production, but done at a controlled dosage, for a limited duration it has a different effect. The cell reads the ROS as a warning signal and it upregulates its antioxidant defenses, and mounts a repair/proliferation response. The therapy is then stopped before the cell gets overwhelmed. That is essentially a hormetic response: a small dose of a stressor producing a beneficial adaptation. Two things follow: At the very least, this means the field is biologically active, which by itself undercuts the regulatory claim that these fields are inert below their thresholds. There is a wealth of literature on PEMF (pulsed EMF) bone regeneration and calcium channel signalling (which is the second mechanims in section one). Here is one. https://www.nature.com/articles/srep13856 At best, it leads us straight to my actual concern, which is that under chronic, chaotic and unregulated exposure, the cell’s antioxidant capacity gets overwhelmed, resulting in oxidative stress. There are plentiful examples of things that are beneficial at controlled doses, but harmful at uncontrolled doses. Excecise is one obvious, uncontroversial example. Botox is perhaps a more interesting example. 6. What about a study that shows EMF causing collagen degradation in humans? As far as I am aware there is not a single study showing EMF-driven oxidative stress degrading collagen in a human, in vivo, or in human tendon in a lab. There are studies involving isolated fibroblasts though, which secrete collagen. The most relevant one showed that human fetal scleral fibroblasts exposed to 50 Hz ELF-EMF showed a significant decrease in collagen synthesis and that MMP-2 expression was upregulated, which is the exact mechanism I described in section 2. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3626379/ That’s it! Thanks again for the interview. Best, Peter Anthony Cowan Environmental Health · Wellness Tech · Researcher & Journalist Publisher & Editor, Living Energy Bio: petercowan.comSocial: X · Instagram · TikTokApp: sunlightis.lifePhone: [redacted]
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Truth and Politics in the Age of Post-Truth
Get E-International Relations delivered to your inbox, free of charge. As you sign up, consider becoming a paid subscriber, or make a donation, to support our work. Subscribe This is an excerpt from Global Politics in a Post-Truth Era. You can download the book free of charge from E-International Relations. The term post-truth is by now so ubiquitous in describing the state of politics in the Western world and even beyond that the most pressing issue of the day appears to be about making democracy work in the era of post-truth rather than questioning the normalisation of the term itself in the first place. The critical turning point appeared to have occurred in 2016 when the term was chosen by the Oxford English Dictionary as ‘The Word of the Year.’ On its website, the Dictionary notes the transformation of post-truth from ‘being a peripheral term to being a mainstay in political commentary and connects ‘the spike in frequency’ directly with the Brexit referendum in the United Kingdom and the election of Donald J. Trump in the United States – both occurring in 2016. Paired with the noun ‘politics,’ post-truth is defined as an adjective ‘relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.’ The Oxford English Dictionary traces the first use of the term to a 1992 essay in The Nation by the playwright Steve Tesich as he reflected on the 1980s Iran-Contra scandal and the 1990–91 Gulf War: We are rapidly becoming prototypes of a people that totalitarian monsters could only drool about in their dreams. All the dictators up to now have had to work hard at suppressing the truth. We, by our actions, are saying that this is no longer necessary, that we have acquired a spiritual mechanism that can denude truth of any significance. In a very fundamental way we, as a free people, have freely decided that we want to live in some post-truth world (Tesich 1992, 13; emphasis added). He then continued, The Gulf War is over but the war at home goes on. The gulf between rich and destitute widens – between those of us who live in a modern post-industrial nation and those of us who live in the Third World countries of our inner cities. The present administration’s response to this internal crisis has shifted from benign to malignant neglect. The current levels of misery and decomposition of our cities and the economic gulags of our ghettos are acceptable. Since there is only so much hope to go around, there is a freeze on hope. The have-nots have now been reclassified as never-will-haves (Tesich 1992, 13). In the context of Tesich’s essay, truth includes both facts, as in what happens, and ‘moral absolutes,’ as in the ‘self-evident truths mentioned in our Constitution’ (Tesich 1992, 14). Together, these two notions of truth entail the obligation to both act and react. The two passages cited above show that even in the early post-Cold War years, Tesich was already deeply concerned that the American people are neither prepared to act on truth nor react to truth that is disconcerting, or what he calls ‘bad news’ (Tesich 1992, 12). Accordingly, Tesich’s insight as captured by the term post-truth is not that truth is irrelevant to what we know, but rather it is irrelevant to how we act. In contrast, ‘post-truth politics,’ as defined by Oxford as a term that pitches ‘objective facts’ against ‘emotion and personal belief’ such that the latter appears to have overtaken the former in shaping ‘public opinion’ and thereby, democratic politics. When Tesich’s post-truth politics and its current usage are juxtaposed, the two are in fact not identical in terms of what truth is and how it relates to politics. Against such consideration, this chapter provides a critical survey of selected historical events and theoretical considerations for the purpose of gaining a more nuanced understanding of the relation between truth and politics. Truth and Language One notable impact of post-truth politics is that language is being overtly deployed as a political weapon not only by politicians and those in power, but among the general population. It seems that once facts are irrelevant to the validity of what is being said, language becomes the platform for an all-out political contest in which what is said is no more than an act of will expressed as an assertion of power and/or an exercise in defiance. As early as in the writings of Thucydides (460–400 BCE), the vulnerability of logos – which is the human capacity for rational discourse in tumultuous times – was already noted. Thucydides belonged to a school of Greek thought which maintained that language is conventional and that the association between name and things is a result of ‘human use and habit’ rather than ‘nature or divine dispensation’ (Connor 1984, 99). The conventional nature of language means that it is incapable of providing its users with any independent criteria for judgement. In Thucydides’ study of the Peloponnesian War (431–405 BCE), the subversion of logos as seen in the manipulation of language was introduced through his account of the civil war in Corcyra (Thucydides 1972, 236-245). The war first broke out in 427 BCE between the pro-Athenian democratic faction and the pro-Spartan oligarchic faction before it spread to the rest of the Greek world. There was a general breakdown of law and order, resulting in extreme violence and death. Language underwent changes that were reflective of the events of the time. The English philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) translated Thucydides’ description of the situation as follows: The received value of names imposed for signification of things, was changed into arbitrary. For inconsiderate boldness, was counted true-hearted manliness: provident deliberation, a handsome fear: modesty, the cloak of cowardice: to be wise in everything, to be lazy in everything... he that had been so provident as not to need to do the one or the other, was said to be a dissolver of society, and one that stood in fear of his adversary. In brief, he that could outstrip another in the doing of an evil act, or that could persuade another thereto that never meant it, was commended (Hobbes 1839–1845, 8: 348; Thucydides 1972, 242-243). What concerned Thucydides most was that the meanings of words are no more than linguistic conventions that require logos to support them. The Corcyrean civil war was a reminder that such capacity cannot be assumed. This is why history understood as an authentic account of what happens matters. Guided by logos, the historian’s task is ‘the search after truth’, which is established through ‘the absence of the fabulous,’ including ‘the rejection of myth and unverifiable stories’ (de Jonge 2017, 2). Thus, history plays an important role in facilitating the stability of language – without which distinctions and judgements cannot be rendered communicable. Just like Thucydides, Hobbes was a nominalist who subscribed to the view that there is no inherent meaning to words. Hobbes’ state of nature, where there is no common authority, is precisely one in which distinctions cannot be made. As Hobbes put it, there is ‘no Mine and Thine distinct’ nor is there distinction between ‘the notions of Right and Wrong, Justice and Injustice’ (1968, 188; emphasis in original). This is clearly an unsustainable condition for everyone. Behind Hobbes’ famous words that life in the state of nature is ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short’ is his uncompromising argument for the ‘Leviathan’, which is described by the late American political theorist, Sheldon Wolin (1922–2015), as the ‘sovereign definer’ (Hobbes 1968, 186; Wolin 2004, 238–243). Accordingly, the social contract is importantly a ‘linguistic contract’ that binds all parties to ‘general names agreed upon’ (Peters 1979, 125; Hobbes 1968, 111). Through Thucydides and Hobbes, we can identify a line of thinking that sees politics as a contestation over the use of language, which is based on shared conventions and norms. Thus understood, politics is not a collective quest for the true nature of our being or an epistemological exercise in pursuit of true knowledge. Rather, politics is about humans living with one another by finding a shared language to communicate with one another on matters that affect them all. Truth is in that sense contingent on what is being said as opposed to setting the standard for it. In other words, truth is the embodiment of shareability among us. While truth as such ensures the viability of a political entity, truth by no means represents a normative standard to adjudicate among contesting actors in what they say, let alone in what they do. During Thucydides’ times, ancient China was also experiencing a tumultuous time as the ruling Zhou dynasty deteriorated into the period of the Warring States (481–221 BCE). This was when the rulers of Zhou no longer presided over the territories brought under its control through conquest. Instead of professing allegiance to the Zhou royalty, the lords of these territories became kings themselves to rule over their own land. The period was one marked by endless military campaigns as each of the seven major states aimed to conquer the rest (Lewis 1999). Yet, the period was also known for its intellectual vibrancy as different thinkers challenged the restoring of order among these warring states – including offering ideas and advice to rulers on good governance. Among these thinkers was Confucius (551–479 BCE). His thought, which came to be known as Confucianism, went on to become the state ideology of China from the Han dynasty (206 BCE–222 CE) until the end of the Qing dynasty in 1911 when China became a republic. The founding text of Confucianism was the Analects, which is a collection of dialogues between Confucius and his students as recorded by them. One key concept Confucius advanced is the ‘rectification of names’. Though the term only appears in one exchange in the Analects, it is considered a major aspect of Confucius’ thought. Generations of Confucian scholars from past and present, including Western academics, have debated over its interpretation (Makeham 2003). The passage in question reads as follows: Zi Lu said: ‘The monarch of the state of Wei wants you to govern the country, what is the first thing you plan on doing?’ Confucius said: ‘First it is necessary to rectify the names.’Zi Lu said: ‘Is that really what has to be done? You are being too pedantic, aren’t you now? How will you rectify these names?’Confucius said: ‘Zhong You, you are too unrefined. A gentleman, faced with a matter that he does not understand, takes a skeptical attitude. If names are not correct, one cannot speak smoothly and reasonably, and if one cannot speak smoothly and reasonably, affairs cannot be managed successfully. If affairs cannot be managed successfully, rites and music will not be conducted. If rites and music are not conducted, punishments will not be suitable. And if punishments are not suitable, the common people will not know what to do. So, when the gentleman uses names, it is necessary to be able to speak so that people understand. If one can say it, one can definitely do it. A gentleman should not be careless with words’ (Analects 13:3 in Cao 2016, 148). This translation is offered by the contemporary philosopher Cao Feng. As Cao notes, the passage is what started the whole debate over ‘exactly what kind of names did Confucius... wish to rectify’ (Cao 2016, 148). Of the three major groups of interpretation examined by Cao, beginning with classical Confucian scholarship, one is arguably the most influential and certainly most pertinent to the issue of language and politics. This is the interpretation that was first associated with the Neo-Confucian master, Zhu Xi (1130–1200), who argued that the ‘rectification of names is simply the rectification of politics’ (Cao 2016, 149). Within this interpretive framework, rectification has the dual functions of correction and prescription by ensuring that predetermined hierarchical roles are strictly adhered to through following ‘the system of rites and propriety’ (Cao 2016, 151). In addition, the rectification of names entails ‘using names to rectify actuality’ (Cao 2016, 151). Yet Cao rejects this whole body of interpretive works by arguing that these were ideas developed later. Instead, Cao suggests the following: The original meaning of Confucius’ rectification of names may, then, be quite simple. Confucius did not mean to establish a concrete, normative system of “names”; rather, Confucius was simply the first person in history to realize or remark upon the importance of language in politics. As a politician, he noticed and foresaw the impact that the indeterminacy, ambiguity, and arbitrariness of names would have on politics. Confucius recognized the political consequences of language’s not accurately expressing meaning or not being accurately received by people. He realized the great role that names, as a means of distinguishing right and wrong and establishing norms, could play in society and politics (Cao 2016, 168). Scholarly debates aside, Cao’s view has the advantage of identifying an interpretation of this controversial exchange in the Analects that enables its readers to extrapolate from it the observation that the meaning of words depends as much on their users as on their interpreters; neither of which can be predetermined. Accordingly, a good ruler is someone who can speak without ambiguity to his subjects and make good his words through actions. Stated differently, Cao’s view on what concerned Confucius then, who was living through times of protracted political upheaval, is that language is an indispensable political tool for those in power and can be deployed by both good and bad rulers alike. To sum up, this historical survey shows that politics as a war of words is by no means a distinctive marker of contemporary politics nor the Western world. Be it ancient or current, east or west, language is subject to manipulation to serve political purposes and when there is an outright war of words that defies existing norms, it is indicative of a political situation in which people no longer share a language and truth becomes irrelevant. Accordingly, political order entails stability in language use. Truth and Politics As previously noted, current use of the term post-truth as an adjective to the term ‘politics’ suggests that once there was a time when politics aligned with truth. Indeed, if we start with Plato’s Republic as the key founding text of Western political thought, we see that the ideal polis (city-state of ancient Greece) is where truth and politics converge, and justice is achieved. Written around 380 BCE when Athens was still coping with its defeat by the Spartans in the Peloponnesian War, the Republic is a defence of the rule of the ‘philosopher king’, defined as someone who is ‘guided by the truth’ and is ‘always and in every way’ in pursuit of the truth (Plato 1974, 490a). For Plato, truth converges with virtues and hence, letting the philosopher take charge of politics is to let the wisest and the most virtuous lead the less wise and the less virtuous even if it requires compulsion (Plato 1974, 499b). In Plato’s words, ‘…until the philosophers attain power in a city there will be no respite from evil for either city or citizens…’ (Plato 1974, 501e). The uncompromising rule of philosopher-kings is made palatable by the claim that we are all ‘earth- born brothers’ with random mixtures of gold, silver, bronze and iron, but only the gold can rule (Plato 1974, 414–415). Understandably, academic debates over the interpretation of Plato’s Republic revolve around the question of whether truth as attained in philosophy can be realised in politics as action and whether such a connection is even desirable. Without getting into the details of these scholarly exchanges, I suggest that they all share the concern that truth acquired through the rigorous process of philosophical reasoning is not without problem when applied to the real world of living humans. This is because not all humans are philosophers – and indeed, in Plato’s view, not everyone is capable of becoming a philosopher given the protracted and arduous training that one needs to endure to become one. Hannah Arendt (1906–1975), a highly influential political philosopher of the twentieth century, notes that ‘Plato was the first to introduce the division between those who know and do not act and those who act and do not know’ and that such a separation has remained ‘at the root of all theories of domination’ (Arendt 1958, 223, 225). What Arendt points out in this remark is not the gap between theory and practice, but rather that Plato provides the normative ground for those who know the truth to tell those who do not know what to do. Arendt herself took on the challenge of understanding the relationship between truth and politics through her analysis of Nazism and Stalinism. Arendt’s insight, which was controversial when The Origins of Totalitarianism was published in 1951, was to identify Nazism and Stalinism as representative of a new form of political rule – totalitarianism – making it distinct from ‘other forms of political oppression... such as despotism, tyranny and dictatorship’ (Arendt 1973, 460). Arendt defines totalitarianism as a self- contained system of ideas driven by their ‘logic’ and marked by a mode of reasoning called ‘ideological thinking.’ Ideological thinking as such is a distinctive form of political reasoning defined by three characteristics. First, ideological thinking claims to provide a ‘total explanation’ of all historical happenings, encompassing the past, the present, and the future. Second, while ideological thinking is an attempt to account for ‘factual reality’ in its totality, this mode of thinking is paradoxically divorced from reality and experience. This is because experience, being rooted in specificity, is clearly limited in its claim to totality. It follows that as its third characteristic, ideological thinking aims to emancipate thought from the limitation imposed by experience through a ‘specific method of demonstration.’ The method involves arranging facts into an ‘absolutely logical procedure’ that starts from an ‘axiomatically accepted premise’. It is, in short, a ‘process of deduction from a premise’ – which is the only possible movement in the realm of logic that leads to one definitive conclusion. This is how the ‘logicality of ideological thinking’ provides the basis for total explanation and the ‘principle of action’ for totalitarian movement (Arendt 1973, 468–474). Stated differently, totalitarianism is a form of uncompromising idealism that exists in one’s head irrespective of shared reality as experienced. It is the perverse form of what Arendt later refers to as ‘rational truth’, which is the product of the ‘speculative mind’ that belongs to philosophy, mathematics and the sciences. The ‘speculative mind’ is the mind working on its way to generate axioms and theories by relying on the cognitive capacity of the human brain (Arendt 1977, 231). The presence of others has no bearing whatsoever on rational truth. In contrast, ‘factual truth’ is what happens when humans are ‘living and acting together’ (Arendt 1977, 231). Factual truth is therefore particular and temporal by definition. But more importantly, factual truth is ‘political by nature’ because it can only be validated in the context of the human community (Arendt 1977, 238). In other words, factual truth is about humans in their plurality rather than in their singularity. For factual truth to be sustainable, we need what Arendt calls ‘common sense’ – understood as ‘community sense’ (Arendt 1982, 72). There is also another distinction about truth that Arendt makes which is pertinent to understanding how totalitarianism works. The issue is whether the so-called totalitarian ideology is simply an unnecessarily cumbersome way of saying that it is an all-round and polished lie. Here, Arendt calls totalitarian ideology the ‘modern lie’ – in contrast to the ‘traditional lie’. The latter is restricted by two conditions: that it is a lie about the ‘particulars’ and that it deceives only the ‘enemy’ – which means that the liar is not engaged in self- deception. The modern lie, however, involves a ‘complete rearrangement of the whole factual texture’. It also intends to deceive everyone alike, to the extent that those who initiate the lie eventually ‘fall victims to their own falsehood’ (Arendt 1977, 249–254). This distinction between the traditional and modern lie is important. It indicates that not only is totalitarianism a lie, but the lie is in fact too big to fit into the standard meaning of the word. To tell a lie from truth, we need a common standard. In the case of a traditional lie, the common standard is precisely ‘the fabric of factuality’. As such, a lie always appears as a ‘tear’ to that fabric. Yet, modern lies require making a surrogate reality with a completely different context for facts to fit ‘without seam, crack, or fissure, exactly as the facts fitted into their original context’. Arendt notes that as long as those who concoct the surrogate reality are prepared to engage in self- deception to ‘create a semblance of truthfulness’, there is nothing to prevent ‘these new stories, images, and non-facts from becoming an adequate substitute for reality and factuality’ (Arendt 1977, 253–254). Totalitarianism therefore requires a person to stand outside of the system itself in order to make sense of it. Arendt points out that it is futile for us to argue with (for example) a Nazi or a Stalinist on race or class. To confront totalitarianism requires more than just a confrontation with specific facts. It is a more fundamental confrontation between reality as experienced and its total rejection. This means that Nazism and Stalinism are more than radical ways of conducting racial conflict or class struggle. Rather: Totalitarian politics – far from being simply antisemitic or racist or imperialist or communist – use and abuse their own ideological and political elements until the basis of factual reality, from which the ideologies originally derived their propaganda value– the value of struggle, for instance, or the interest conflicts between Jews and their neighbours – have all but disappeared (Arendt 1973, xv). Accordingly: The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (that is, the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (that is, the standards of thought) no longer exist (Arendt 1973, 474). Who then is the ‘ideal subject’ of totalitarianism? Although there is a revival of interest in Arendt’s observation on truth and politics since the onset of post- truth politics, not enough has been said about her reply to the question (Hyvönen 2018; Klinkler 2018; Lee 2019; Zerilli 2020). Yet if we take a look at Arendt’s portrait of this ideal subject, her view is even more pertinent to our current challenge. As a self-contained system of ideas that is detached from experience, totalitarian thinking offers consistency in ways that reality cannot. Arendt notes that this kind of consistency is especially appealing to those who have lost a sense of bearing in the world (Arendt 1973, 353). They constitute what she calls the ‘masses’. The ‘mass man’ is thus a highly isolated and atomised individual, who is ‘obsessed by a desire to escape from reality’ (Arendt 1973, 318, 352). In his ‘essential homelessness’ the mass man can ‘no longer bear its accidental, incomprehensible aspects’ (Arendt 1973, 352). This longing for escape from reality is a ‘verdict against the world’ in which one is ‘forced to live’ but ‘cannot exist’ (Arendt 1973, 352). Such a situation is ripe for the ‘revolt of the masses’ against ‘common sense,’ which is ‘the result of their atomisation, of their loss of social status’ and with it, the ‘whole sector of communal relationships in whose framework common sense makes sense’ (Arendt 1973, 352). In short, the masses are people who are considered to be ‘superfluous or can be spared … [who] cannot be integrated into any organisation based on common interest’ (Arendt 1973, 311). Whether one agrees with Arendt’s analysis of the social conditions in the interwar years that led to the formation of the ‘masses’, her portrait of the ‘mass man’ is a powerful account of what can happen to an individual who has become disposable to the society that they used to belong to. Hand in hand with this phenomenon is indeed the collapse of ‘common sense’ that leaves the dislodged individual scrambling for reconnection. By offering the masses a substitute reality validated by the ‘logic of an idea’ rather than by experience, totalitarianism makes it possible for them to live in a world where there is no condition of plurality. Between ‘facing the anarchic growth and total arbitrariness of decay’ and ‘bowing down before the most rigid, fantastically fictitious consistency of an ideology’, the masses will likely ‘choose the latter’ (Arendt 1973, 352). A world created by ideology, then, is more attractive to the masses not because ‘they are stupid and wicked, but because in the general disaster this escape grants them a minimum of self- respect’ by conjuring up ‘a lying world of consistency which is more adequate to the needs of the human mind than reality itself’ (Arendt 1973, 353). Moreover, it is precisely this ability to guarantee consistency that makes it possible for the leaders of totalitarian movements to demand ‘total, unrestricted, unconditional and unalterable loyalty of the individual member’ (Arendt 1973, 323). While this chapter is not a study of the social factors that led to specific contemporary developments such as the result of the Brexit referendum or the election of Donald Trump in 2016, Arendt’s ‘mass man’ seem to have found their counterparts among the supporters of Brexit and Trumpism. Studies of voters’ profiles in both events point to a disproportionate share of supporters from white male lower income backgrounds without university educations. These are individuals who have either already lost their jobs to globalisation or who are at high risk of losing their job with very little capacity to be retrained for the twenty-first century market economy of advanced industrialised states (BBC 2016; Pew Research Center 2018). In short, these displaced workers are part of the tapestry forming the modern equivalent of Arendt’s ‘mass man’ – ready to be the recruits of totalitarianism. Conclusion If we step back to take a more comprehensive approach to the relationship between truth and politics, both historically and theoretically, it is not so obvious that 2016 is a defining moment. From ancient China and ancient Greece to our so-called post-truth age, the indeterminacy of language appears to be a persistent political challenge. Language is always open to manipulation by its users to serve power. Nonetheless, the tendency these days is to single out the ubiquity of social media and the proliferation of Internet platforms as the incubator for the countless cyberwars of words that in turn fuel the real world of politics. In this context, language is no longer the conveyor of objective facts and accurate information, but rather the medium for expressing subjective opinions and feelings, as captured by the Oxford Dictionary’s definition of the term ‘post-truth politics’. In contrast, the historical approach used in this chapter shows that it is in fact too easy to point the figure at the Internet and digital communication for the political challenge that we face today. What is being suggested here is that with or without the Internet, language, be it used to convey facts or emotions, is simply a tool for communication that humans have invented. While language per se cannot adjudicate what is true or not true, what is right or wrong, it embodies such capacity when language is a shared norm. That shared norm cannot be sustained without some semblance of cohesion in any given community. Any war of words, irrespective of its platform, is indicative of the breakdown of such cohesiveness. Returning to the original context in which the term post-truth politics was first used by Steve Tesich helps to identify the important distinction between truth as the standard for knowledge and truth as the standard for action. The two do not necessarily coincide. Placed in the context of the history of political thought, this distinction is in fact at the heart of Plato’s Republic. Yet when the philosopher as the quintessential bearer of truth becomes king, the polis that he rules over is far from the ideal of a just state that it purports to be. Instead, it is one that is held together by lies and coercion. What Arendt reveals through her study of Nazism and Stalinism is that it is dangerous for the kind of truth that philosophy generates – ‘rational truth’ – to become the guide to politics. Politics guided by rational truth can only be uncompromising and follows a logic of its own that cannot afford the ambiguity and indeterminacy of reality as lived experiences of humans. A world of post-truth politics can be an opportunity for a new kind of politics if it is indeed about dismantling the idea that truth is the ideal that politics should strive for. But as it stands, the post-truth politics of today is more about invoking a past that never exists to judge the presence as a crisis in naming when the real crisis is about rebuilding a shared space that has room for all – be they of the left, right or centre; cosmopolitan or parochial; civic-minded or self-centred; liberal-minded or bigoted. Politics is and always will be about striving for that space, without which no human can thrive. References Arendt, Hannah. 1958. The Human Condition. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Arendt, Hannah. 1973. The Origins of Totalitarianism. Rev. ed. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Arendt, Hannah. 1977. “Truth and Politics.” In Between Past and Future, 227–264. New York: Penguin Books. Arendt, Hannah. 1982. Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, edited by Ronald Beiner. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. British Broadcasting Corporation. 2016. “Brexit vote: The breakdown.” BBC News, December 7, 2016. https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-38227674 Cao, Feng. 2016. “A New Examination of Confucius’ Rectification of Names.” Journal of Chinese Humanities 2: 147–171. https://doi-org.subzero.lib. uoguelph.ca/ doi/ 10.1163/23521341-12340032. Connor, W. Robert. 1984. Thucydides. Princeton: Princeton University Press. de Jonge, Casper C. 2017. “Dionysius of Halicarnassus on Thucydides.” in The Oxford Handbook of Thucydides, edited by Sara Forsdyke, Edith Foster, and Ryan Balot. Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/ oxfordhb/9780199340385.013.17 https://www-oxfordhandbooks-com.subzero. lib.uoguelph.ca/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199340385.001.0001/oxfordhb-9780199340385 Hyvönen, Ari-Elmeri. 2018. “Careless Speech: Conceptualizing Post-Truth Politics.” New Perspectives 26 (3): 31–55. https://www.proquest.com/ scholarly-journals/careless-speech-conceptualizing-post-truth/ docview/2204515132/se-2?accountid=11233. Hobbes, Thomas. 1839–1845. The English Works of Thomas Hobbes, edited by Sir William Molesworth. London: John Bohn. Vol. 8. Klinkner, Melanie. 2018. “Reasonable Truth.” International Journal of Media & Cultural Politics 14 (3): 393–99. doi:10.1386/macp.14.3.393_7. Lee, Haiyan. 2019. “When Nothing Is True, Everything Is Possible: On Truth and Power by Way of Socialist Realism.” PMLA/Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 134 (5). Cambridge University Press: 1157–64. https://doi.org/10.1632/pmla.2019.134.5.1157 Lewis, Mark E. 1999. “Warring States Political History.” In The Cambridge History of Ancient China: From the Origins of Civilization to 221 BC, edited by Michael Loewe and Edward Shaughnessy, 587–650. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Makeham, John. 2003. “Zheng ming (Rectification of names).” In RoutledgeCurzon Encyclopedia of Confucianism, edited by Xinzhong Yao. Vol. 2: 813-814. New York: Routledge. Oxford Languages, n. d. “Word of the Year 2016.” Accessed 19 August 2017. https://languages.oup.com/word-of-the-year/2016/ Peters, Richard. 1979. Hobbes. Westport: Greenwood Press. Pew Research Center. 2018. “An examination of the 2016 electorate, based on validated voters.” Report, August 9, 2018. https://www.pewresearch.org/ politics/2018/08/09/an-examination-of-the-2016-electorate-based-on- validated-voters/ Plato. 1974. Republic. Translated by G. M. A. Grube. Indianapolis: Hackett. Tesich, Steve. 1992. “Watergate Syndrome: A Government of Lies.” The Nation: 12-14. January 6/13, 1992. Thucydides. 1972. The Peloponnesian War. Translated by Rex Warner. Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books. Wolin, Sheldon. 2004. Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Westen Political Thought. Expanded Edition. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Zerilli, Linda M. G. 2020. ‘Fact-Checking and Truth-Telling in an Age of Alternative Facts.’ Le foucaldien 6, no. 1: 2, 1–22. Theresa Man Ling Lee is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Guelph (Canada). Lee is a political theorist who specializes in contemporary political thought. Her research and teaching areas include continental philosophy, Marxism and critical theory, feminism, postmodernism, philosophy of social science, psychoanalysis, multiculturalism, human rights, disability studies, modern Chinese political thought and comparative political theory. Lee has published on a wide range of subjects in these areas, including intercultural pedagogy and the challenges of teaching as a person with multiple minority designations in a Canadian university classroom.
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Researchers have measured how worsening geopolitical relations hobble scientific collaboration, at last quantifying the impact of rifts between governments on cooperation between labs. Over the last decade, a tenser world has thrown up new barriers to cross-border science. Collaboration between the US and China has dimmed as the two countries have sunk into an ever-deeper rivalry. Links between Russia and Europe have collapsed following Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. But while a concern, the magnitude of the damage is less than might be expected. For all the geopolitical turmoil of the last decade, international scientific collaborations are near a record high. “Some part of the story is positive,” said Shreyas Gadgin Matha, a social scientist at Harvard University and an author of the new study. “Research collaborations are largely resilient.” Matha and colleagues looked at data on cross-border research papers and patents in the period 2000-23, and analysed how they were impacted by countries’ political relations, as measured by how often states voted together in the United Nations. They found that when states drift apart at the UN by the median difference in votes between all countries, joint scientific papers decline by 3.1% over the next three-year period. To put that in context, over the last decade, the US and China have diverged by around a third of that difference in votes every three years. In other words, on average, it takes quite a significant diplomatic rift even to trigger a small single-digit percentage drop in joint papers. “In the short term, even something like a 3% reduction [in joint papers] is, in some ways, not that big of a number,” said Matha. Research remains more international than ever, according to an analysis extending to 2023 released by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in 2025. We’re still living in an era of unprecedented scientific globalisation, the analysis says, with 27% of papers in OECD countries written across borders. In 1970, just 2% of articles had authors from different countries. Longer-term damage?However, this trend towards increasing international collaboration “has lost momentum and might be partly breaking down,” the OECD analysis says, largely due to a fall in the intensity of US-China joint papers since 2018. Matha and his colleagues stressed they are not complacent about the global science system. For now, “it's pretty resilient,” said co-author Muhammed Yildirim, director of academic research at Harvard’s Growth Lab. But if links are weakened, through the denial of study visas, for example, then this could have a much longer-term effect, cascading through generations of scientists, he added. Related articlesChina becomes Russia’s biggest collaborator after war decimates science ties with the west US scientists prefer German to Chinese collaborators, study finds Horizon Europe is now truly global. But what comes next? Another finding of the study, Burning bridges or bridging divides: Geopolitics and collaboration in research and innovation, is that trust appears easier to destroy than create.The hit to scientific collaboration when countries drift apart is around three times as big as the growth in joint papers when they move closer, the paper finds. “It's far easier to break these ties than to mend them, and that that also perhaps has some larger policy lesson,” said Matha.PatentsThe results around patents were less clear cut. Some methods of analysis found a statistically significant link between a diplomatic rift and a drop in co-patenting, but others did not. According to Yildirim, patents with cross-border inventors are often developed by multinational companies, which may have invested heavily in global R&D facilities, so are less likely to change how they operate simply due to a change in the geopolitical weather. “That's why we might not be seeing the effect immediately in technology,” he said.By contrast, researchers might be more sensitive to geopolitics, because visa policies can quickly affect who meets who at academic conferences, he went on. International collaboration on patents is much lower than for academic articles, the study shows. It peaked at around 10% in 2010, and has since fallen back to around 8%. This could be because China dramatically ramped up domestic patents in the 2010s, said Yildirim, squeezing the international share.
How geopolitical rifts cut scientific collaboration
Researchers have measured how worsening geopolitical relations hobble scientific collaboration, at last quantifying the impact of rifts between governments on cooperation between labs. Over the last decade, a tenser world has thrown up new barriers to cross-border science. Collaboration between the US and China has dimmed as the two countries have sunk into an ever-deeper rivalry. Links between Russia and Europe have collapsed following Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. But while a concern, the magnitude of the damage is less than might be expected. For all the geopolitical turmoil of the last decade, international scientific collaborations are near a record high. “Some part of the story is positive,” said Shreyas Gadgin Matha, a social scientist at Harvard University and an author of the new study. “Research collaborations are largely resilient.” Matha and colleagues looked at data on cross-border research papers and patents in the period 2000-23, and analysed how they were impacted by countries’ political relations, as measured by how often states voted together in the United Nations. They found that when states drift apart at the UN by the median difference in votes between all countries, joint scientific papers decline by 3.1% over the next three-year period. To put that in context, over the last decade, the US and China have diverged by around a third of that difference in votes every three years. In other words, on average, it takes quite a significant diplomatic rift even to trigger a small single-digit percentage drop in joint papers. “In the short term, even something like a 3% reduction [in joint papers] is, in some ways, not that big of a number,” said Matha. Research remains more international than ever, according to an analysis extending to 2023 released by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in 2025. We’re still living in an era of unprecedented scientific globalisation, the analysis says, with 27% of papers in OECD countries written across borders. In 1970, just 2% of articles had authors from different countries. Longer-term damage?However, this trend towards increasing international collaboration “has lost momentum and might be partly breaking down,” the OECD analysis says, largely due to a fall in the intensity of US-China joint papers since 2018. Matha and his colleagues stressed they are not complacent about the global science system. For now, “it's pretty resilient,” said co-author Muhammed Yildirim, director of academic research at Harvard’s Growth Lab. But if links are weakened, through the denial of study visas, for example, then this could have a much longer-term effect, cascading through generations of scientists, he added. Related articlesChina becomes Russia’s biggest collaborator after war decimates science ties with the west US scientists prefer German to Chinese collaborators, study finds Horizon Europe is now truly global. But what comes next? Another finding of the study, Burning bridges or bridging divides: Geopolitics and collaboration in research and innovation, is that trust appears easier to destroy than create.The hit to scientific collaboration when countries drift apart is around three times as big as the growth in joint papers when they move closer, the paper finds. “It's far easier to break these ties than to mend them, and that that also perhaps has some larger policy lesson,” said Matha.PatentsThe results around patents were less clear cut. Some methods of analysis found a statistically significant link between a diplomatic rift and a drop in co-patenting, but others did not. According to Yildirim, patents with cross-border inventors are often developed by multinational companies, which may have invested heavily in global R&D facilities, so are less likely to change how they operate simply due to a change in the geopolitical weather. “That's why we might not be seeing the effect immediately in technology,” he said.By contrast, researchers might be more sensitive to geopolitics, because visa policies can quickly affect who meets who at academic conferences, he went on. International collaboration on patents is much lower than for academic articles, the study shows. It peaked at around 10% in 2010, and has since fallen back to around 8%. This could be because China dramatically ramped up domestic patents in the 2010s, said Yildirim, squeezing the international share.
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The BriefThe Port of Grandview is actively marketing the community to attract new business development, with efforts including attendance at trade shows and conventions like Food Northwest in Portland.The Port reports strong demand for business property, with several prospective clients currently seeking space to build in Grandview.The Port recently acquired 45 acres for its new Woodworth Road Business Park, with planning underway to support the community's continued growth.GRANDVIEW — The Port of Grandview is capitalizing on strong interest in the community by actively marketing Grandview to businesses seeking locations for expansion and growth. The Port's efforts are paying off, with increased development activity and growing demand for available business property.Grandview's appeal stems from multiple factors. The community's available land and central location between the Tri-Cities and Yakima make it an attractive option for businesses looking to establish or expand operations. The Port has recognized these advantages and is taking a proactive approach to market the community directly to potential clients.Port Executive Director Randy Tucker says the Port has been actively attending trade shows and conventions to promote Grandview as a business destination. These events, including Food Northwest in Portland, provide opportunities to connect with companies actively seeking new locations."Say, hey, locate your business here and bring your customers here. And it's worked out pretty good for us," Tucker said.The Port's marketing strategy is generating results. The Port reports strong demand for business property, with several prospective clients currently looking for space to build in Grandview. This interest reflects the effectiveness of the Port's outreach efforts and the community's appeal to businesses in various industries.To support this growth, the Port recently acquired 45 acres for its new Woodworth Road Business Park. Planning is underway to determine how the property can best support Grandview's continued development and attract additional businesses to the area.The combination of available land, strategic location, and active marketing positions Grandview as an increasingly attractive option for businesses seeking to relocate or expand. As the Port continues its efforts to promote the community, Grandview appears poised for continued economic growth and development. News Three Queens Fire approaching 10,000 acres, now 11% contained Robert Desaulniers, Josh Culbreth News Two injured after rear-end crash leads to rollover near Grandview Robert Desaulniers News Grandview High School temporarily enters secure and teach for possible altercation between students Robert Desaulniers News Port of Grandview pursues economic growth with new business park development William Albert, Apple Valley News Now News Driver dies in fiery crash in Columbia Park Friday Erin Wencl COPYRIGHT 2026 BY APPLE VALLEY NEWS NOW. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. THIS MATERIAL MAY NOT BE PUBLISHED, BROADCAST, REWRITTEN OR REDISTRIBUTED.
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